The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Here we go now!
:: I can’t wait for THE NEW SPACE OPERA, edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan, which we’ll publish in June. (I can’t either, dammit!)
All for this week. Clear ether! (Wow, I wish I knew some E.E. “Doc” Smith fans in real life — I’d love to be able to walk around telling people to “Clear ether”.)
Every so often, in tooling around the Interweb I encounter something that makes my brain nearly shut off in its attempt to wrap itself around the idea that someone may be arguing a certain position. I just had one such moment, over on rec.music.movies, where in response to my oft-stated position that “Good film music must be good music first, and good music by definition can stand alone” — i.e., that hearing a film score in its cinematic context isn’t completely necessary to assessing the worth of a score — a person stated this:
The idea of music isolated from visual experience is STUPID. Why do you think composers wrote for visual elements…and even music qua music has the visuals of orchestra and conductor. Get real…isolated music tracks on CDs are the absolute worst representation of music….MUSIC IS VISUAL.
This is wrongheaded to such a vast degree that it staggers the imagination. It’s not uncommon to encounter people who believe that one should only judge a filmscore by how it functions in a film (although how one makes this judgment is less than clear; if a piece of music can be moving when coupled with a film but not moving outside of it, I’d argue that it’s the film amplifying the quality of the score, and not the other way around), but I’ve never met anyone who believes that all music has some essential visual component that renders the act of recording a bad one.
My response on thread was as follows:
So, a blind person attending a concert of the New York Philharmonic performing, say, Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is somehow missing some unimaginably vital part of the performance? For that matter, is a *sighted* person attending that same performance somehow missing something vital from what Beethoven intended, since the hall isn’t lit with candles and the performers aren’t wearing powdered wigs? How
about the many musicians who often close their eyes while performing? What are they doing wrong?
Another rejoinder that just occurred to me: Two people attend a concert of a Mozart piano concerto and a Mahler symphony. One person is blind, but has full hearing. The other is sighted, but has been deaf since birth. Who do we suppose gets more out of that concert? Transpose these same two people to a room with all the lights turned out, and now put Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band on the CD player. Who gets more out of that experience?
What a weird conversation to find myself in.
The language in the commentary gets a bit salty at times, but check out the stunning photos of what is apparently the Cuyahoga County Courthouse in Cleveland, OH. What a gorgeous building.
(via)
Yesterday The Wife and I spent a bit of time at the mall (the Galleria, for you Buffalo readers). Not much excitement there — my days of happy mall-shopping are now long over, and I’m content to visit the mall two or three times a year just to see what’s up — but I did note at one point, while we were standing in line at Sears (The Wife was buying a new spring jacket), a family behind us was conversing away in a language other than English.
I notice this more and more these days around the area, and I’m wondering if the Buffalo region is becoming more international in character or if it’s mainly people from other cultures living in Canada and then coming over here to do some shopping.
But I thought back to conversations I’ve had with people who are insistent that “If you’re gonna live here, you’d better speak English”, and frankly, I’ve heard nothing to change my opinion that it’s a free country and that means you should be able to conduct your lives in whatever damn language you want.
One guy I knew once insisted that it’s rude to converse in another language — Spanish, say — when you’re in a primarily English-speaking country, and I always wondered, “Why?” Of what possible use is it to me that some family of complete strangers speak English as opposed to Arabic or Italian or Hindi or whatever? What they’re talking about is still none of my business.
It seems to me that the “They should speak English!” impulse springs from one of two mindsets: either “Everybody’s conversations are my business and I should be able to listen to them”, or “I don’t trust those swarthy people to have their own conversations”. I find either mindset ugly and disrespectful.
So, as far as I’m concerned, go ahead and speak whatever language you want. It’s all part of the price of maintaining a free country: we don’t get to assume any longer that the people around us are all white, English-speaking Christians. And personally, I think we’re all the better for that.
Possibly more snark than weirdness, but hey, I’m feeling snarky today.
:: The Right Wing has begun its latest project: taking Gandhi down a peg or two. Gandhi. Oy.
Oddly, the people who hold Gandhi as “the most overrated man of the 20th century” (I’d pick Reagan, personally) are probably people who claim that the teachings of Jesus should be universally followed. But not the Jesus stuff about loving your neighbors, forgiveness, charity to the poor, and all that. Rather, the Jesus stuff about shunning gays and Spreading Love Through Widespread Use of Incendiary Devices. You know, “Action Figure” Jesus. The one who conveniently fits into the cockpit of their toy bombers (sold separately, of course) with the crosses painted on the fuselage.
:: Apparently there are a number of words which, when encrypted using Rot-13, turn into other words. That’s pretty cool. I especially like that the Rot-13 of tang is gnat, or tang spelled backwards!
:: OK, I’m going to assume that the Garrison Keillor article that occasioned this vehement response is an example of a satiric joke that was so poorly executed that it wasn’t recognized as a joke at all. I’m not the world’s biggest Keillor fan, but I have to think he’s more enlightened than that. Hoo-boy.
:: A three-way tie on Jeopardy!. That’s interesting. Which brings to mind that I always find it kind of funny when an episode of The Price is Right ends in a double overbid at the showcases, in which case nobody wins anything. Whenever that happens, you can just feel the show deflate on the air.
:: OK, everybody’s probably already seen this, but I just saw it the first time the other day: ROFLCAT. We had a good time with this one in our household (skipping past the non-PG ones).
I see via several different Buffalo blogs that Kevin of BfloBlog lost his father yesterday. Deepest condolences to him and his family. A poetical offering, if I may, by way of Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894):
Does the road wind uphill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow, dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you waiting at that door.Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.
Scalzi for President of the SFWA.
He’s our last, best hope for a John Deere cap for every published SF writer!
(Kidding aside, his platform seems sensible. I confess I haven’t given a great deal of thought to these issues.)
This week has been a blend of busy and not-feeling-like-posting. So I haven’t been posting. Will that continue? Who knows?
Anyway, a few thoughts on various stuff:
:: Watched Raines last night, and I had one of those cases where I read a lot of middling-to-negative reviews of a thing, watch it, and wonder if they watched the same thing I did. I found Raines very enjoyable; Jeff Goldblum delivered a fairly understated performance (as compared to, say, Jurassic Park, in which he hammed it up) as Detective Raines, who has conversations with the murder victims whose murders he is investigating.
The commercials made this all sound rather Sixth Sense-ish, but it’s not — the show makes clear that Raines isn’t really talking to the dead, but hallucinating them, which makes the conversations with them interesting in that the dead can’t give him hints, seeing as how as they have no more information than he has at any given point in the investigation.
Anyway, I found the pilot nicely written, with a story that moved right along, and some good and snappy dialogue. Sure, the murder mystery is fairly pedestrian — nothing there that you wouldn’t have seen on any episode of, say, Rockford Files or Magnum PI, but I enjoyed the show anyway.
:: Lance Mannion asks who our favorite TV detectives are. Mine is Andy Sipowicz from NYPDBlue, whose character growth over the show’s run was always fascinating to behold. The show creaked quite a bit with age as it got older, but even so, I always loved ol’Andy.
:: My “guilty pleasure” TV cop? Why, Don Johnson’s Nash Bridges, of course! I just found that show ridiculously entertaining a lot of the time. The show went on probably at least a season too long, but it was a lot of fun for a while. (In fact, with its Friday 10:00 timeslot, it made a wonderful partner with Millennium.)
Of course, watching Jodi Lyn O’Keefe blossom on the show was always pleasant:
:: I will buy this. Shut up. Those movies had nice music, aside from all the pop stuff.
:: “But Bill Clinton did it too!” Yeah, right.
:: I’m often the one on various Interweb fora to interject into long threads devoted to complaining about some TV show or book or whatever along the lines of, “Geez, if you hate it so much, why do you watch it so much?” A grand example can often be found over at the FSM message boards, where one regular member is a religious fan (and I mean “religious” quite literally) of the original incarnation of Battlestar Galactica, so much so that he’ll denounce with appropriate fleckling of the monitor with spittle the various plot machinations of the current version of the show. I once asked, “Why the hell are you watching something you loathe so completely?”, and he replied, “So I can discuss it.” I just don’t get the impulse to keep dwelling on something that brings you displeasure.
So why do I keep reading For Better or For Worse, then? Hell, I dunno — but I guess it’s fun to see that plenty of folks are annoyed by it in the same way that I am. Here’s a perceptive comment as to the way April is being treated in the strip:
But April is the only one of them who has a valid excuse for acting like an adolescent.
Liz had a pretty good independent life going for herself, until she suddenly and mysteriously decided that she was homesick and couldn’t take it anymore. So she quit her job and asked her boyfriend — who had already moved for her once — to move again, and then she fled south like a scared rabbit and moved in with Mommy and Daddy at the first opportunity. And then she was surprised when her boyfriend turned out not to be so excited about the “follow Liz wherever her whim takes her” plan as she’d thought he would be.
Mike and his family had the fire, so they had a pretty good reason for moving in… but why are they still there? They’ve got plenty of money to find another apartment, even if they do decide that they want to start looking for a house sometime soon. But no, Mike complains that every apartment they see is too small, too far away, too expensive, too something; and he’s completely terrified of the idea of buying a house. So they stay on in his parents’ house, and stay, and stay…
In the meantime, April has been evicted from her room and is sleeping in the rec room — which is also the storage space for Mike and Dee’s extra stuff. Too many people are using too few showers in the house, and apparently the people who can drive — which is pretty much everyone except April and the little kids — can’t be bothered to go grocery shopping often enough. April has been shunted off to a corner while her theoretically-adult siblings clamor for their parents’ attention.
Meanwhile, their grandfather has had a stroke and April is the only one of the family who seems to visit him consistently and still treats him like a person and not a fixture.
As James notes, on the scale of things all of this isn’t that huge a problem… but it is hard for a sixteen-year-old girl. What I find disgusting about the situation is that consistently, every time that April tries to suggest that this is hard for her — every single time — she’s smacked down and told that other people have it worse than her, so shut the hell up. Mike the Literary Genius and Liz the Broken-Hearted are treated with kid gloves, because of course their problems are serious and weighty — but April? April’s problems aren’t worth worrying about. Go back and hide in the rec room, April; the grown-ups are talking.
It’s incredibly dismissive of her feelings, which justified or not are still her feelings. This is how you teach people that they are worthless and insignificant and that nothing they do matters. April may be a fictional character, but I’d still rather that she not learn that lesson.
And here’s a great post on why Anthony is evil and must be destroyed.
:: Tomorrow morning: pancakes, bitches! We weren’t successful last year, but we did get a nice consolation prize: Charlie’s Diner in East Aurora, which is just a great little breakfast joint in the classic tradition.
:: The NCAA Tournament: as always, “Meh.”
And so it goes.
I didn’t blog this the other night, but I was surprised to see Rob-and-Amber depart The Amazing Race. I didn’t like them and was glad to see them go, but I liked the fact that the first time the detour involved brains, they promptly tanked it.
So, who are my remaining favorites? I don’t know. Dustin-and-Kandice are kinda winning me over, since they’re always fairly positive and since they have to figure things out themselves this year. (Was there a rule change to disallow having natives get in the car with the racers to show them where exactly to go? That was infuriating in TAR 10, when D&K would bat their shiny blondie eyes at some local dude, and have him drive them right to the location, while everyone else was trying to find someone who spoke any English at all.) Uchenna-and-Joyce are kind of cool, although it annoyed me that they kept trying to assign Guam as the place Magellan began his voyage (hey, guys, how do you suppose Magellan got to Guam in the first place?). And Charla-and-Mirna (or is it Marla-and-Chirna?) are oddly compelling. I’m not rooting for them to win (making the dwarf lug the giant sign pole up the hill? Huh-whuh?), but I hope they stick around a while, because their exploits are just comical.
And I had no idea that Chile was that beautiful a country.
I finished Guy Gavriel Kay’s newest novel over a week ago; since then I’ve been trying to figure out what I thought of it.
Spoilers for Ysabel follow!
GGK’s career path led many to expect a far different novel this time out. He started out with his epic fantasy trilogy The Fionavar Tapestry, in which he delved deeply into that genre and pretty much wallowed in all its tropes before coming out clean on the other side; then he moved on to a subgenre he kinda-sorta invented, which I call “historical fantasy”. His main aim was to explore themes and events from history, by transposing them into fantasy realms of his own creation; thus we had Tigana, set in a faux-Italy, A Song for Arbonne, set in a faux-medieval Provence, the great Lions of Al-Rassan set in a fantastical Moorish Spain, the Sarantine Mosaic, a duology set in a faux-Byzantium, and most recently, The Last Light of the Sun, set in a faux-medieval Celtic Britain.
From all this, many wondered where he’d go next — historical Russia, perhaps? Or the Holy Roman Empire? I myself hoped he’d venture into the Orient. What I did not expect was for him to go in a Charles de Lint-type direction. Ysabel is set in modern-day Provence, and that’s where it stays. It’s pure real-world fantasy, all the way through.
Which isn’t to say that GGK avoids his traditional historical themes entirely, because he doesn’t. Instead, he seems more interested here in directly exploring how the tales from centuries ago still ripple through to our time and shape us and who we are today.
Ned Marriner is a fifteen-year-old kid, traveling with his photographer father who is on assignment in Provence. While his father is off taking photos, Ned goes wandering through a centuries-old cathedral, where he meets a girl his age named Kate. They then meet someone else, someone quite mysterious. And they find things in the tunnels beneath the cathedral that are equally mysterious. Ned goes with his father’s crew to scout out a location for a shoot, and suffers from migraines and visions of blood when he reaches the place of an old battlefield. He and Kate meet more mysterious people — and then they find themselves smack in the middle of a drama that apparently plays out repeatedly, over and over and over through history. It is a love triangle between a woman and two men. In this iteration, the woman takes the name “Ysabel” — and takes the body of Ned’s father’s aide, Melanie.
This was all very interesting, and Ysabel has a type of momentum that isn’t usually the kind of thing one experiences in a GGK book. I’m long accustomed to reading GGK’s historical novels (set in lands that never were, of course), and it was an odd sensation to read him in a more contemporary, “supernatural suspense story” mode. The book’s focus is also more intimate than GGK has written before; the cast of characters is small and the stakes do not revolve around entire realms but on a small set of individual lives.
Something strange happens a ways into the book, though, that took me a little off-guard. The two characters from The Fionavar Tapestry who returned to Earth at that tale’s conclusion show up. Kim Ford and Dave Martyniuk are Ned’s aunt and uncle, and they are summoned to give Ned aid in saving Melanie from the fate of being displaced from her own body.
The central conceit of Fionavar is that all worlds, including our own, are mere reflections of Fionavar, the “first of all worlds”. Thus, by directly bringing Kim and Dave into play here, GGK seems to indicate that the love triangle herein is also reflective of something deep that happened in Fionavar, and sure enough, that series had a couple of ill-fated love triangles at its heart (Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot, Amairgen-Lisen-Galadan). The problem, though, lies in the execution: I’m not sure that a reader coming to Ysabel without having read Fionavar is going to understand it all. The events of that series are referenced a number of times, but always obliquely.
I found Ysabel to be an engaging read, and yet, somehow I felt disconnected with it at the same time. A big part of that is the presence of Kim and Dave: frankly, I’m not certain that I ever wanted to know what happened to them after The Darkest Road ended. That series, whenever I read it, always feels so complete, that the re-emergence of those characters felt strange to me, almost overpoweringly so. I think of GGK’s oft-stated insistence that he’ll never reveal just what befell the three women who saw a riselka at the end of Tigana; I feel as though now he’s done just that. (I did, however, get a fanboy thrill when I learned what false surname Dave’s been using in Africa.)
Of course, first impressions of a GGK novel are often unreliable. I can think of few authors whose books more lend themselves to re-reading than GGK, and this may well be another in a long line of such examples. Now, to schedule a re-read sometime in the future….
