Month: May 2004

This guy is not representative of what we are really like up here in Buffalo. Really. Don’t turn us over to Canada yet.

(via The Man of Much Modulation)

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Something I’ve noticed about Instapundit is his careful construction of his posts to reflect the fact that not that many people are actually going to follow all of his links to see if he’s actually being accurate. A case in point: following a link in this Matthew Yglesias post to this Insty one, I see that Reynolds says this:

“Yglesias omits any mention of journalistic admissions (some collected or linked here) of delight at problems in Iraq, or even hope for a U.S. defeat.”

Even though I very rarely read Insty, I figured, Hey, why not follow the links? That link leads to a second Insty post, which in turn presents a lengthy quote from a London Spectator article (that I couldn’t in turn read, because I’m not registered with them), in which the correspondent reports a discussion with an unnamed “American magazine journalist of serious accomplishment and impeccable liberal credentials”. Well, OK, I’m no journalist myself, but I realized in seventh grade that “someone said something mean about you but I can’t tell you who said it” is pretty much a waste of time.

But anyway, soldiering on in that same Insty post, I see that he provides yet another link to yet another older post in which he promises “other admissions of that sort” — i.e., journalists hoping that the US gets defeated in Iraq. Finally, we get some actual quotes, first one by Salon editor Gary Kamiya, whose article really isn’t the type of “I hope we lose!” thing that Reynolds is trying to decry in all this linking. (Reynolds actually admits as much, so as to make me wonder why he bothered linking it in the first place.) But notice! In the paragraph in which Reynolds leads into his already cherry-picked Kamiya quote, he derides ANSWER as “the essential core of the anti-war movement” — a claim which is not only false, but also clearly intended by its placement here as to imply that Kamiya has some connection with ANSWER. (Maybe he is, but a Google search of the ANSWER site turned up nothing with Kamiya’s name on it.)

Then Reynolds provides links to an article written by everybody’s favorite left-winger, Ted Rall; some article that novelist Tom Robbins wrote (and not even an article, just a short statement); and to something that rock singer Chrissie Hynde said. (Oh, wait, he doesn’t even link the Hynde quote, he just presents someone’s account of it.) So, what started out above referring to “journalistic admissions of delight in problems in Iraq” boils down to not much at all, really.

All that link following, and so little payoff. Which is why I’ve never bothered with Instapundit.

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I mean to say, my taking of the quiz is what’s intermittent. Not that the quiz itself is intermittent. Or something.

You’re a Dialogue/Character Writer!

What kind of writer are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

I don’t know that I agree with that, but there it is. I guess I’m not a “plot” writer in the sense that I rarely have much of the plotline worked out before I dig into a project. My attitude on outlines is, “Sure, I outline: but only once, and in such detail that the finished book/story is the outline.” I also don’t generate extensive character sketches for the main characters, because it seems to me that I’d rather get to know them in the course of the book the same way the reader would.

I also don’t want to give the idea that I prize dialogue above all other facets of writing. I love good dialogue, and I would rather listen to good dialogue than bad or indifferent dialogue (as much as I love Star Wars, that love sure ain’t focused on the dialogue, which is usually indifferent and occasionally downright bad), I’ve always found that a story can still captivate me even if its dialogue isn’t all that great.

So what’s my point here? That I guess I’m a writer who tries to pay as little attention to process as possible. Of course, this may well explain why I’m unpublished and just now trying to emerge from a lengthy stalled period. Go figure.

(quiz via Jay Blalock)

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Harry Knowles of AICN wrote a review of the new Harry Potter movie the other day. I was skimming along, until I got to the graf in which he talks a bit about John Williams’s score for the film, a graf which closes with this sentence:

“This is the source inspiration for some great Williams’ phrasings and my favorite score of his since Catch Me If You Can.”

This would be high praise were it not for the fact that Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is Williams’s first score since Catch Me If You Can. Way to go, Harry.

(edited to repair some broken grammar)

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I’ve been doing some rethinking of some priorities lately, and I’ve reluctantly concluded that blogging has been ranked a bit higher than it should be. So that’s about to change.

Firstly, I am not closing up shop here. I’ve invested a lot of time doing this, and I’m pleased with a lot of what has resulted. I’ve met people, made friendships, and deepened others; I’ve read books, heard music, and seen films I’d likely have not encountered otherwise. I don’t want to lose that by shutting down Byzantium’s Shores, and more to the point, I know myself well enough to know that I’m simply too accustomed to having my very own forum to say what I want to say, whether anyone cares or not. That’s why I started this blog, and that’s why I’ll keep it.

But I’ve noticed — only gradually — that blogging has, since I started working at The Store, taken up time that I should be dedicating to the writing that used to be my reason for being but has since been on the back burner for far too long. While I was unemployed (and, before that, working at a job that I couldn’t stand), blogging was a tonic of sorts for other issues in my life. Those issues no longer apply, though, and thus where blogging used to be something fun I did to take a breather from cranking out chapters in The Promised King or short stories or the all-too-infrequent essay, since I’ve returned to work blogging has become the Unquenchable Beast. And almost as bad as my loss of writing time has been the concurrent disappearance of reading time, which is totally unacceptable. The time has come to push the Unquenchable Beast into a cage and impose upon it a strict feeding regimen.

Of course, my longtime readers (and, perhaps, even the newer ones) will know that for me, the highest level of strictness is something along the lines of “kinda-sorta”. Basically, I’ll be posting here when I feel like it. I assume that I am still likely to “feel like it” fairly often (maybe four or five days a week), but I’m not going to force anything, nor will I allow myself any feelings of guilt if I miss consecutive days. I expect that my posting habits will shift toward the weekends a bit, with Saturdays and Sundays becoming the best days to find me in old form. But no promises there, either.

Do I think that blogging has value? Yes I do, even if I never come close to being the kind of blogger who can have a “pledge week” and pull in donations roughly equal to six times what I currently make at The Store, and even if I do this for three years without ever once receiving a link from Atrios. (Going on two years now, on that score. I’ve long-since conceded that I am probably not on the side of the political spectrum that is coducive to Instalanches.) Value doesn’t exist in nature; something is valuable because someone values it, and I value blogging and what I’ve done here. My more recent problem is that there are other things I value as well, and it’s time to move them up.

UPDATE: Move Over Britney! is not ending, by the way. Just in case anyone is worried on that score.

UPDATE THE SECOND: In what is becoming a weird, and not a little depressing, bit of ritual, I write something clunky that grapples with something only to see Michael Blowhard say it better just minutes later. (Unless he said it first. I only read his post after I wrote the above.) Anyway, here’s how he describes his approach to blogging (and, more generally, to life):

Blogging has primarily become a place to meet and swap notes with other people, and thank heavens for that. More selfishly, though, it also gives me a chance to sort out a bit of what I’ve lived through, and to pass along some observations and stories, and maybe even a few scraps of knowledge. How amazing that a handful of people occasionally seem willing to pay a little attention…I do my best to slip what oddball personal reflections I happen to be gnawing on into what I hope are amusing and informative discussions about what’s happening in the culture world generally…Underneath it all, though, is my real drive, the one small bit of good I feel I may still have it in me to do in the world. What I really want to do is seize passersby — the nice people, the people like the crowd I grew up with, and emphatically not the egomaniacs who inhabit the world I continue to spend most of my life in — and scream a little something at them.

Yup, what he said.

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Well, unless you’re living under a rock, you know that Fantasia Barrino has won this year’s incarnation of American Idol. I occasionally take some flak for my enjoyment of this show, and not undeservedly, since it is something of a monument to the mass-production of pop culture.

But as I noted a year ago, I like the show because alone of all these “Reality” shows, it is not cynical at heart, designed to force people into mean-spirited competition with one another. American Idol showcases talent, like it or not, and it also showcases the incredible amount of hard work required to make talent flower.

Put another way, I think that the winners of American Idol (and I consider a winner to be anyone who reaches the final two) have actually earned something, which is a claim I would never advance on behalf of a winner of Survivor or The Bachelor or whatever. I see winning American Idol as an accomplishment. Fantasia Barrino, Ruben Studdard and Kelly Clarkson (and yes, Clay Aiken) have accomplished something in a fundamental way that Richard Hatch never did.

Now, as for this year’s specific result, I think it’s just about perfect. It took me a while to warm up to Fantasia, since she chose a string of songs at the start of the season that I don’t like. But week in and week out, I found her stage charisma infectious, and I grew to admire her voice a great deal. She always seened authentic to me, whereas runner-up Diana Degarmo always struck me as more of an emulator of more famed singers.

Anyway, yes, I like American Idol. And I’m not embarrassed to say so. So there.

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Apparently, if you stick a “www” prefix on the front of the URL for a BlogSpot blog, the URL may not work. So if you have BlogSpot blogs on your bookmarks or blogrolls, make sure to check that the “www” prefix isn’t there.

(Kevin Drum pointed this out the other day, and I immediately thought, “A-ha! I wonder if that is why I haven’t been able to load Highered Intelligence lately. Sure enough….)

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The former home of Nefarious Neddie has given way to the new home of Nefarious Neddie. Now he’ll have an all-new URL for his once-a-month blogging habit. Zowie!

Anyhoo, Matt (that’s his real name — there’s no way I’d associate with anyone actually called “Neddie”) proceeds to write about how he hates musicals. I, of course, adore them as any long-time reader will know. And I’m a liberal, too, while Matt/Neddie is a conservative (or some simulacrum thereof). So what’s the deal with the fact that I’ve known him longer than anyone in my life except my immediate family?

Star Wars bridges anything, man.

(UPDATE: It suddenly occurs to me the fundamental difference between Matt and myself. He seriously dislikes musicals and can’t even begin to grok them, whereas I don’t just love them but I wish I lived in one. I’ve just listened to “The Heather on the Hill” from the 1992 Angel/EMI re-recording of Brigadoon, and I thought, “Dammit, I really wish I could court a woman the way Tommy does in that show.” But of course, I’m the loon who walks the aisles of The Store singing showtunes to myself while I sweep.)

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I haven’t posted a writing update in some time, because the novel-in-progress has pretty much stalled. It’s not that I don’t know what happens next; instead I’ve got the story exactly where it needs to be, but I started suspecting a while back that even so, I had made a serious error someplace. Something just didn’t seem right with the most recent transition material, and I couldn’t put my finger on it, for the life of me.

I finally hit on what I think may be the solution. Basically, what I need to do is an inversion of the old “Refusal of the Call” step in the Campbellian plot structure. I know that this makes no sense without the context, but basically the idea is that King Arthur must send my heroine on another quest, this one being for “all the marbles”, but instead of the heroine refusing the call, it is Arthur who refuses to send her. Or something like that.

Tomorrow I get the fun job of seeing just how much of my manuscript I get to file in the circular drawer. But this time I have an answer in mind. I hope.

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Everybody’s linking this in Left Blogistan, and I don’t want to be left out, so go check it out if you’re in the mood for some parody aimed at the biggies of Right Blogistan. I particularly liked the bit about SDB’s “bait-and-switch” blogging.

Of course, this makes me wonder if I should resurrect “Chickens In the Mist”….

(via Il Modulatorre)

(EDIT: This time I actually included the link. Dammit.)

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