Month: February 2009

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Seven, into Eight

A couple of weeks ago, this blog’s official Blogiversary came and went. I didn’t mark the occasion at the time, but this whole month has partly been for me about seven years in Blogistan (minus a three month holiday last year). That’s a lot of insightful content blather and drivel to produce and a lot of time to produce it in, and I’m gratified to find that I have any audience at all, even a small one. Thanks to one and all my readers! It’s been an interesting seven years, marked by politics and war and Star Wars movies and poetry and music and Tolkien and Spiderman and Berlioz and Rachmaninov and pizza and chicken wings and coconut cream pie…and always a long-haired goof in overalls sitting back and looking at it all with a fairly jaded eye. Or, maybe, not so jaded.

So how long can it go on? Who knows, really. As in all things, we’ll see. Excelsior!

(And don’t forget Ask Me Anything!, for which I will definitively cease taking queries after tomorrow.)

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Brightly Weaving

After clearing the decks of some earlier reading I wanted to get out of the way, I’m finally embarking on something I’ve intended to do for a couple of years now: I am re-reading every word Guy Gavriel Kay has written, in the order that he wrote them. Why? Because he’s my favorite living author, and it’s been a while since I’ve gone through his work. Here’s how it breaks down:

:: My last re-read of The Fionavar Tapestry was almost exactly three years ago. This will be, by my count, my fifth complete re-reading of the trilogy, although I have dipped into it to read favorite passages too many times to count.

:: Then comes Tigana, viewed by many as GGK’s finest work. It’s not my favorite of his, but it is wonderful. It is also the first of GGK’s books that I ever read in its entirety. The last time I read it was, I believe, in 2000. That’s far too long.

:: After that is A Song for Arbonne, which seems to be held in less regard than GGK’s other works. It was the first time I ever encountered his writing, when I saw the book at the Olean Library and was intrigued enough by its cover to check it out, but for some reason I didn’t finish it at that time. I think school got in the way or something…I’m not sure. This was in 1992 or 1993. My last re-read of Arbonne was in 2001; that I remember because I recall the apartment we lived in at the time. This will be the third time I’ve read it.

:: In 2005 I re-read The Lions of Al-Rassan for the third time, so this will be my fourth trip through what is my favorite of all of GGK’s books. This book, with its tragic love stories and its wonderful characters and gorgeous setting just hits on every level for me.

:: Of the two volumes that make up The Sarantine Mosaic, I have only re-read the first, Sailing to Sarantium, a single time, and that was in preparation for the release in 2000 of the second book, Lord of Emperors. I have never re-read Lord. This may be the one I’m looking forward to the most, at this point.

:: GGK’s book of poetry, Beyond This Dark House, came out in 2003. I read it, and since have dipped back into it a bit, but now I’ll re-read it in its entirety.

:: I reviewed 2004’s The Last Light of the Sun for GMR, and since then I have not re-read it. I remember this book very favorably and look forward to seeing if it measures up to my memories of it.

:: And finally, 2007’s Ysabel, which I blogged about when I read it. This will end up being the shortest period of time I’ve ever gone between full re-reads on a GGK book.

All this means that if GGK has a new book out next year, which seems a reasonable expectation (he seems to go about three years between books), I’ll be totally up to speed on his oeuvre. And that’s a good thing.

Even though I already own every one of his books, for the sake of this project I spent some time on eBay last December searching out new copies of each, in different editions. I’ve sometimes found that when you re-read a book that’s very familiar to you, but you read it in a different edition than the one you’re used to, with a different typeface and different cover art and so on, some details in the story stick out more than they otherwise would. I’m already noticing this in Fionavar. I already owned two editions, one a mass-market paperback edition that was my first copy and a trade paperback edition with new cover art; but both editions were done by ROC Books, and both used identical type-settings. This edition I’m reading now uses a totally different font, even, so I’m finding the experience of re-reading just slightly different. This may sound goofy, but we’re talking about books I’m sufficiently familiar with that with some passages, I know where they physically appear on the page. Now those passages will have, well, shifted.

(Besides, my original copy of Last Light of the Sun is actually an advance reading copy; the thing doesn’t even have cover art. I’ve rectified that with a hardcover version, albeit a book club edition. Nothing’s perfect.)

I’ll blog my way through these, obviously. I’m not sure if I’ll be reading them all back-to-back-to-back, or if I’ll read something else in between once or twice, just to cleanse the palate a little, but I’m hoping to be done with this at least by the end of summer, if not sooner. We’ll see…but for now, I’m off to Fionavar!

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Happy Birthday, My Love

UPDATE: An annotated version of this photo appears on my Flickr stream, here.

Today is The Wife’s birthday, a day which will be filled with much celebration and joy. And, later on tonight when she gets home from work, cake. And maybe some rum. And then…well, that’s none of your business.

She and I actually had our first date just four days before her birthday, on February 21, back in 1991, so each time her birthday rolls around, it also means that we’ve been together in some fashion for another year. She has now been in my life for eighteen years. That is longer than anyone else in my life, save a few college friends who were around a year earlier (we started dating when I was a sophomore), Matt Jones, and my family members. Next year, we’ll reach the point where she will have been in my life for more than half of it. And after what feels like more than our fair share – way more than double – of toil and trouble, we’re still going strong.

Here, now, is the official Byzantium’s Shores celebration of The Wife, in my typical form: a list. One hundred things about the woman I married: memories, observations, things I love about her. In truth, I could probably write ten of these lists and still be less than half done.

1. Her hand fits perfectly into mine, as though our hands were fit for each other.

2. The first time she saw Star Wars was with me. And ET.

3. She used to keep an aquarium before a bunch of moves made us give up the fish. Maybe we’ll do that again someday. But when we started dating, she had two fish, named Ken and Wanda, named after two memorable characters from A Fish Called Wanda. When Ken went belly-up, she called a friend and solemnly informed her, “K-k-k-ken d-d-d-died.” (One of the movie’s running gags is Ken’s stuttering.)

4. I don’t remember exactly when it happened, but I’ve converted her from someone who hated coffee into a regular coffee drinker.

5. For reasons passing understanding, she has always found Erik Estrada attractive. She and I used to have arguments over who could best the other in a fight: Agent Mulder from The X-Files or Ponch from Chips. (I think Mulder would have blinded Ponch with the beam from those giant blue-beamed flashlights he and Scully were always toting, and then beaten him into submission with his eternally-able-to-get-a-signal cell phone.)

6. One of the first things we cooked together was Spanish rice, which is to this day a comfort dish of ours. The first time we made it together was also the first time she’d ever cooked with actual bulb garlic, as opposed to garlic powder. The recipe called for a clove, but she thought the entire head was a clove, so into the rice the entire head of garlic went. That was the best Spanish rice ever.

7. A few years ago she baked a Bundt cake for The Daughter’s birthday, but the damned thing stuck in the pan, resulting not in a ring but a mound. So she just mounded it up, glopped the frosting right over the top, and called it a “Volcano Cake”. Now, every year at her birthday, The Daughter says, “Remember the Volcano Cake?”

8. Our first date was to see Edward Scissorhands. So, Johnny Depp’s been there since the beginning, from Edward all the way to Captain Jack Sparrow and beyond.

9. We used to go out for chicken wings and beer every Thursday night. We didn’t even miss our Thursday night wing night when The Daughter was born: her birth was on a Saturday, and we left the hospital on Tuesday, so at the tender age of five days, The Daughter entered a bar for the first time. This may have made us bad parents, but I don’t think so. A girl’s got to know how to handle herself in a bar, right?

10. She insisted on breastfeeding both The Daughter and Little Quinn, which in both cases required lots of pumping. Especially in Little Quinn’s case, since he was never able to eat by mouth. Every drop of breastmilk that entered his body went in via the G-tube, so for as long as her production held up, she pumped six times a day.

11. I’ll probably never completely understand how much of herself she sacrificed in fourteen months to keep Little Quinn alive and progressing. It seems, in retrospect, that every free day she had was given to him.

12. That same instinct in her kicked in again when Fiona was in danger. She didn’t question the necessity or possibility of spending months flat on her back with her feet inclined, if that was what it took. If commitment was all that was needed, Fiona would be here today. (Of course, if commitment was all that was needed, Little Quinn would be here and Fiona wouldn’t have happened.)

13. We used to associate certain teevee shows with the snack foods we’d eat while watching them. NYPDBlue was always chips-and-salsa. ER, when we still watched it, was often good ice cream. Now, good ice cream has been transposed to Grey’s Anatomy.

14. “Our” first teevee show was LA Law.

15. Subsequent teevee shows of “ours” included ER, Mad About You, The Pretender, Profiler, CSI, Firefly, and more.

16. On our first Internet account, we set up our combined e-mail identity after the two main characers on The Pretender. We were “Jarod and Miss Parker”. People familiar with the show wondered what that said about our relationship, since Jarod and Miss Parker aren’t allies. In fact, Miss Parker was initially a villain but as the show went on her character became much more complex.

17. She started roller blading, got me hooked, and then promptly stopped roller blading. Now she prefers biking.

18. It was almost without warning that I met her parents for the first time. We started dating late February 1991; a couple of weeks later was spring break, for a week, so I came home to Buffalo. At the end of that week I tried calling her, only to learn from the old lady she was renting a room from that she wasn’t home because of a death in her family. I remembered her saying something about a sick grandfather, and that’s what turned out to have happened; her grandfather had passed away from Lou Gehrig’s Disease. When I got back out to school, her entire family was there. So I met the future in-laws on the spot. Luckily, I seem to have made some kind of decent impression.

19. Our first long trip together was from Iowa to Idaho, to visit her family, a couple of weeks before school began in August of 1992. She had already graduated college, but I was in my senior year. While we were out there, the infamous Ruby Ridge Incident was taking place twenty miles down the road, so all week there were National Guard vehicles on the roads and helicopters overhead.

20. I am forever amazed at her ability to take some fabric and create a garment. This skill of hers looks like magic to me.

21. Her first pair of overalls were a gift from me. She thought the whole thing was goofy – maybe she still does! – but she wore them for years until at one point they became too small for her, and then a short while later they became too big for her. We didn’t start wearing overalls together until we’d been dating for about a year.

22. Back in the 90s, on two different occasions, we picked out Persian kittens. Both were wonderful cats, both are gone now, and we miss them both dearly. The first was a beautiful tortoiseshell Persian named Jasmine; the second was a red Persian named Simba. Both died in the year preceding this blog’s launch.

23. Adopting Lester and Julio was The Wife’s idea. I’m still unsold on these two giant lummox goofballs.

24. The Wife also took The Daughter to adopt Comet, when The Daughter was only two.

25. Shortly after The Wife moved to Western New York to be near me, she adopted a cat from the shelter she named Lilac. That cat never really liked me all that much. Lilac died a few months after Little Quinn passed.

26. She loves to laugh, particularly at my expense. She is convinced I don’t think she’s funny, but that’s just not the case.

27. Things with which she has a deft touch include: a pair of scissors, a needle and thread, a kitchen knife, the mixer, bread dough, a screwdriver, a lug wrench, and a shot glass.

28. It irritates her that The Daughter has inherited my tolerance for sunlight — I tan, whereas The Wife burns.

29. The Wife likes to read, albeit not quite as much as I do. She always has a book going, and she reads every day.

30. She never used to use a bookmark, until I finally decided I was tired of watching her flip through a book looking for a passage that was familiar to her so she could find her place. I bought her a bookmark.

31. She loves nuts – except for walnuts and pecans, which I love. This makes it occasionally difficult find good brownies and similar items in bakeries, since many people default to putting pecans or walnuts in their brownies or other chocolate cookies.

32. When I first met her, she was a huge Anne Rice fan and read most of what Rice wrote until she decided that Rice’s output wasn’t interesting her much anymore. Since then she’s read a lot of other authors, including a lot of unfamiliar names whose books I’ve plucked from the stacks of offerings at library book sales over the years. Interesting how obscure even the bestsellers of yesteryear eventually become, huh? Currently she really loves Gregory Maguire, the Wicked guy.

33. When we first met, she was a Washington Redskins fan. So of course, the first Super Bowl we were together was the one where the Redskins knocked the Bills on their collective arse. Oh well, at least she hated the Cowboys.

34. She prefers her KFC “extra crispy”, where I’m an “Original Recipe” guy.

35. Movies that are particularly meaningful or nostalgic to us, in addition to Edward Scissorhands and Star Wars are Dances With Wolves, Titanic, The Lord of the Rings, Singin’ in the Rain, and the James Bond movies.

36. For some reason we didn’t take any pictures when we were on our honeymoon or when we were on our vacation to Disney a year later. I think we were between working cameras at those points…but lately I really wish we’d have addressed that at the time.

37. Things we did on our honeymoon to Cape Cod, Boston, and New Hampshire: road a boat out to sea to watch the whales; visited the New England Aquarium; ate dim sum in Boston’s Chinatown; bought lots of kitchenware at an outlet strip (don’t laugh, we still have some of that stuff); visited the Boston Science Museum. While doing two days in Boston we stayed at a hotel about forty miles out and road the train into town; on the second day, on the way back, we fell asleep on each other’s shoulders.

38. Our first argument as a couple resulted from a common misunderstanding between people when one is from Iowa and one is just living in Iowa for a while. I told her we’d meet for dinner, so she showed up at noon and got annoyed because I wasn’t there. Well, duh! I said “dinner”, not “lunch”. Except, remember, she’s a native Iowan, which means instead of eating breakfast, lunch and dinner like most (ahem) normal folks, she ate breakfast, dinner and supper. Thankfully, I’ve converted her since then. Whew!

39. Our first wedding anniversary saw us spending a week at Walt Disney World. What a wonderful time that was! Even if she managed to rip her toenail out two days into the trip, thus requiring me to push her around in a wheelchair the whole time after that.

40. She had long hair when we started dating, and I had short hair. Now we’ve reversed that.

41. Before we started dating, I had a beard. When I became interested in her, I shaved it so I’d look better. Then, I learned that she likes facial hair. So I grew the beard back a while later.

42. Foods I’ve tried because of her: asparagus, squash, rhubarb, grapefruit, and more that I don’t recall.

43. She loves George Carlin.

44. She bought me my first cell phone, and my second cell phone.

45. When we were at the Erie County Fair in 2001, she wandered off to look at the Bernina sewing machines. When I came by ten minutes or so later, she was in the process of buying a Bernina sewing machine. I didn’t complain; I just stood there, kind of looking shell-shocked.

46. Leading up to our wedding, she rigidly adhered to the notion that the groom should not see the bride in her wedding dress until she comes round the corner to walk down the aisle. So I didn’t see her until she came round the corner to walk down the aisle.

47. Starting a family was her idea. Not that I was against it; I figured we’d get there eventually. She just picked the “eventually”.

48. She picked The Daughter’s first name, so I got to pick her middle name.

49. Since Thanksgiving Break at college was only a four day weekend, I didn’t go home for T-giving my junior year; instead, I spent the weekend with her. We went to see her extended family out in Storm Lake, Iowa, which is on the other side of the state. Since she has family over there on both sides of the family, we ended up having two Thanksgiving dinners that day. Some part of me is still full from those two meals.

50. Iowa delicacies that The Wife and I share are pork tenderloin sandwiches and broasted chicken.

51. Some of our early dates were sufficiently cheap that we had to look for ATM machines that would dispense cash in five dollar denominations.

52. She bought Simba, the above-mentioned red Persian kitten, while we were on a shopping trip to Erie, PA. She fell in love with the kitten as soon as she saw him in the pet store; we then spent the rest of the day walking around the mall with me listening to her as she tried to talk herself out of buying him. (Persian kittens are pricey little buggers.) Finally, while we were at dinner at Red Lobster, she decided to pull the trigger.

53. Before Little Quinn, the most heartbroken I ever saw The Wife was the day we finally had to end Simba’s life. His kidneys were in failure.

54. Great gifts she’s bought me through the years: my current winter coat, a cupboard-full of drinking vessels of all types, candles, incense burners, the Star Wars original trilogy on DVD, my anniversary edition of The Lord of the Rings with paintings by Alan Lee, my star sapphire ring, my current wristwatch, and many more.

55. The first thing she ever gave me: a stuffed bear, around whose neck she tied a lavender ribbon. I think she doused it with perfume. I named that bear “Bertrand”, after philosopher Bertrand Russell.

56. The first thing I bought her: a little two-inch high figurine of a laughing Buddha. I think this confused her a bit.

57. Despite my best efforts for a while, she’s never much warmed to baseball. That used to bother me, but these days that doesn’t bug me much at all. I’m pretty cool to baseball myself now.

58. For a few years we went to Cedar Point each fall. We haven’t been there in a long time, but I always found being there with her in the fall, in the cool air, pretty romantic. I loved riding the Giant Wheel after dark, sitting up there with her hand in mine, looking out over Lake Erie.

59. At Cedar Point, she decided that she liked this one coaster that does loops, so I stayed on the ground while she rode it. I’m terrified of those things.

60. Why don’t we play mini golf more often? We both love mini golf. The Daughter loves mini golf. What gives?

61. One day in 1996, we were eating lunch in Buffalo when we had “The Discussion”. Any guy who’s ever been dating the same girl for a period of time measurable in years will know what “The Discussion” is. So I agreed, it was time for us to take the “next step”. Later on, while she was having her eyes examined at LensCrafters, I bopped over to Penney’s to buy her a ring. I chose a nice emerald one that looked really pretty. Sadly, they didn’t have it in her size, so they had to order it, which would take three weeks. So I figured, OK, I’ll get the ring in three weeks and make this thing official. Yay, Me!

62. The next day, she proposed to me.

63. Three weeks later I showed up to get the ring. They had it, but they couldn’t find the paperwork, so some poor guy at the pickup counter at Penney’s spent his entire lunch hour trying to find the paperwork so I could give my already-fiancee her engagement ring.

64. I don’t remember exactly when we picked out her wedding rings, but we each have an Irish wedding band, and each ring is set with the other person’s birthstone. So my ring is set with four amethysts, which is her birthstone; hers is set with four sapphires, which is mine.

65. For years I wore my ring incorrectly. Apparently there’s one way to wear an Irish wedding band that signifies being married, and another that signifies being single. I was wearing mine the “single” way. I was alerted to this by a guy I worked with at The Store; he said, “Yeah, you’re telling all the women that you’re available.” I replied, “Yeah, and I’m beating them off with a stick.”

66. On our honeymoon, it was important to her that she at least get to dip her toes in the Atlantic Ocean. So she did. The water was very cold, though.

67. It always bugged her mother that she saw Niagara Falls before her mother did. Later we took her mother to Niagara when she was out for a visit.

68. During the summer of 1991, when I was at home and she was still in Iowa, she came to spend a week with me. I took her to Buffalo and to Toronto, on the way to which we stopped to see Niagara Falls for her first time.

69. She was really confused the first time a Japanese tourist asked her to take his picture in front of the Falls.

70. At the time our beer of choice was Labatt’s. It’s pronounced “la-BATS”, but we had a family friend at the time who liked to say it “LAB-uhts”, which is how I said it at college just for fun and habit. So when she visited me that summer, we went to the bar where this friend hung out, and he was so impressed when she ordered a “LAB-uhts”.

71. Our favorite mixed drink in college was the sloe gin fizz. A few years ago I tried making these again, discovering that her tastes had changed and she now found them sickeningly sweet. I like them still, but yeah, they’re sugary. (And pink. When I told a friend at work who knows everything about liquor that I’d bought some sloe gin, he laughed and said, “Oh good! Now you can make pink drinks!”)

72. She taught me the right way to do laundry.

73. I taught her the right way to crack open crab legs so as to not mangle the meat.

74. Our first major mistake of parenting was taking The Daughter to a fireworks display on the Fourth of July in 1999. The Daughter was all of fifteen days old. This was the big display in Lakewood, NY, which is right on the banks of Lake Chautauqua. The Daughter did not respond well to the fireworks detonating right over our heads; the sounds were bad and for years afterwards The Daughter was very scared of loud sounds.

75. We always say that we should go camping. We never actually do go camping. We need to do more camping.

76. Once for dinner I made some frozen cheese ravioli with sauce, a favorite meal of ours that we hadn’t had in a long time. She said that she was looking forward to “eating some cheesy goodness”. Unfortunately, the raviolis were a bit on the old and tough side, and the cheese never got nice and melty, so after the meal, she commented, “That wasn’t really cheesy goodness.”

77. She likes eggs over-easy. I’m not a big fan of those, but I try to make them for her when she’s getting over being sick.

78. She makes fun of my over-reliance on boxed mixes in the kitchen.

79. In 1993, when Cheers aired its final episode, she bought pizza for my roommate and I.

80. She only swears when she’s really annoyed.

81. She is not happy that her nine-year-old, fourth-grade daughter is now the same shoe size as she is.

82. A while back she had her hair colored a brighter shade of blond than is her natural color. It was awesome.

83. Before that she experimented with red. I’ve tried talking her into doing that again, but no dice.

84. When my aunt met her the night before our wedding, she made a comment to the effect that I was to be commended for adding blond hair and blue eyes to our gene pool.

85. The Daughter has blond hair and blue eyes. So did Little Quinn.

86. I’m not sure there’s a variety of seafood she dislikes.

87. I love the way she looks when she’s just come home from work and changed into her PJ’s.

88. Adopting Lester and Julio was her idea, but she claims the upper hand on that anyway because she was helping out my mother.

89. For some reason, The Daughter and I like to bring up at the dinner table the fact that The Wife, as a kid, had to help the family out on Chicken Butchering Day. I don’t know why.

90. She thinks Orlando Bloom is really attractive. I don’t see it, myself, but you can’t argue these things.

91. For my birthday in 1992 she drove me to Dyersville, IA so I could see the Field of Dreams.

92. If I want to spoil her, all I have to do is buy her blush wine, cashews, olives and chocolate. Cake helps, too.

93. She spoils me by looking the other way when I go to Borders; by making me waffles or French toast or Spanish rice; by cleaning the kitchen after I’ve messed it up; by indulging my love of pie; and a thousand other ways.

94. She doesn’t think it’s too weird that I love it when she hits me in the face with a pie. And if I’d known how good she is at it, I’d have asked her to do it to me a heck of a lot sooner.

95. I know I’ve found the perfect girl for me when she describes our Thanksgiving in 2006 as being perfect because, after dinner, we went to see Casino Royale. In her words: “We had a big turkey dinner, and then we watched James Bond kill people.”

96. We both love laughing at David Caruso on CSI Miami.

97. One time last year we were at the Y, and she got so engrossed in what she was doing that when I approached her, she didn’t recognize me at first.

98. Maybe this is a personal failing on my part, but I can’t bear it when she cries. It kills me inside. But I’m trying to get better at this, since as Gandalf said, “Not all tears are an evil.”

99. I wish we were living lives that didn’t include so many tears.

100. I love her more than I did last week at this time.

101. Number 100 on this list will be equally true next week at this time. And the week after. And so on.

102. She makes me happier than I thought possible.

103. She…oh, I guess that’s where I need to stop. I love you, honey!

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NOW they tell us….

According to released text, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is going to say this tonight in his response to President Obama’s address to Congress:

Who among us would ask our children for a loan, so we could spend money we do not have, on things we do not need? That is precisely what the Democrats in Congress just did. It’s irresponsible. And it’s no way to strengthen our economy, create jobs, or build a prosperous future for our children.

I can’t believe any Republican has the audacity to stand up before the country and say this, after they cheer-led George Bush’s Bogus Fiscal Adventure for eight years. Or as John Cole put it, “Having the party of Bush lecture you about out of control spending is like having a heroin addict chide you for putting too much sugar in your coffee.”

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Final extension on Ask Me Anything! (Seriously, this time!)

I know, I’ve made the “final” extension announcement several times already, but I figure, what’s one more? What I’ll do is run it right up to the end of this month, and then start answering the questions next month, which starts on Saturday. Or Sunday. Whatever. One of those is the first, so next week, I’ll start answering.

So, go ahead, folks, Ask Me Anything! Just put queries in comments to this post. (This is just so they’re all in one place. Easier for me to keep track that way; two years ago I had Ask Me Anything! queries all over, in comments to three or four different posts, which resulted in me missing several questions until a month later.) As always, anonymous questions are fine, just as long as they’re not mean.

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“Most people are, when you finally see them.”

After the Twilight debacle, I needed something good to read. I’ve been hankering to do a complete re-read of Guy Gavriel Kay’s entire corpus, but I spied something on my stacks that I’ve been meaning to get to for a long time, so I figured, now’s the time. Enter To Kill a Mockingbird.

I read Mockingbird back in high school, in tenth grade. (That being the case, I should admit that I’ve been a bit mean, perhaps, in previous mentions of my English teacher that year. She wasn’t my favorite teacher by any means, and she did us the disservice of making my class read Ordinary People while the other classes were reading Mark Twain, but she did make us read Mockingbird, as well as Julius Caesar, which is when I first started to realize that maybe this Shakespeare fellow was highly regarded for a reason.

But anyway, back to Mockingbird. I assume the story is sufficiently well known that I don’t need to summarize it, right? I loved it in high school, and we also watched the movie, which is also amazing. I’ve seen the movie several times since then, but I’ve never gone back to the book until just now. What an amazing piece of work it is, too! I know, this comes as no revelation to anyone who’s read it, so I just have a couple of observations:

:: The book is a lot funnier than I remember it being. Aaron Sorkin once referred to his typical script structure as front-loading all the funny stuff and reserving the emotional hit for the last act; he called this “leaving the emotional hit in the tall grass”. Mockingbird does this amazingly well. It interests me that more than half the book is gone before we even start to learn the details of the big case Atticus is working on. Meantime, there is a lot of humor in the first part of the book.

:: One thing I’ve never had the guts to try in my own writing is writing my characters’ dialog in any kind of dialect, because I’m always afraid it’s going to sound like an affected mess. Harper Lee gets it so totally, totally right. Example: her lower-class characters are always answering questions posed by women in the negative with the word “Nome”. Of course this is what “No, ma’am” would sound like pronounced by someone with a Deep South drawl who doesn’t enunciate terribly well. It’s a brilliant effect, and everyone in the book has their own voice.

:: The story’s ending is just so…right. I mean, there are good endings, there are happy endings, there are sad endings that feel hopeful and there are sad endings that are just terribly sad, but rarest of all are those endings that feel like this is the only way this story could have turned out, and it’s satisfying in a way that most endings aren’t. The only other story ending that leaps to my mind by comparison is that of The Shawshank Redemption.

:: I finished the book while I was on my break at work. Luckily I was in the back room, by myself, so nobody could see me start to cry when Scout says, “It would be like shootin’ a mockingbird, wouldn’t it?” What a beautiful line, what a perfect place for it! The “killing a mockingbird” metaphor had already been explained, much earlier in the book, and Lee saved it for its second mention at the most perfect place to use it. I’m in awe of Lee’s sheer skill in terms of storytelling.

:: To Kill a Mockingbird seems to me to partly be about the falling of boundaries between worlds: the black and the white world, the poor and the not-so-poor world, the child and the adult world. Early on, Scout describes the world of hers and Jem’s childhoods being bounded at one end by the house of Mrs. Dubose, and at the other by the house of Boo Radley. And through the book, both boundaries fall, don’t they? First, Mrs. Dubose’s, and then, the great mystery of the book, Boo Radley at the end. All through the book, the world gets bigger for these two children, first Jem and then Scout. It’s not easy for them, and sometimes it’s downright painful, but it can’t be stopped.

:: Atticus Finch on courage: “It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.”

:: Jem Finch on people: “If there’s just one kind of folks, why can’t they get along with each other? If they’re all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other? Scout, I think I’m beginning to understand something. I think I’m beginning to understand why Boo Radley’s stayed shut up in the house all this time…it’s because he wants to stay inside.”

:: Scout Finch, greeting the most mysterious person in the world: “Hey, Boo.”

I rather hope that Harper Lee has a closet full of manuscripts for after her passing, if she is so dead-set against appearing in print again while she’s alive.

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Good morning, Mr. Phelps


Vigil 192ab, originally uploaded by ny_lucy.

Alan posted about the reception received the other day that greeted the representatives of the Westboro Baptist Church when they showed up to protest the services for the victims of the Continental Airlines plane crash. Nice to see that these nitwits got nowhere with their shenanigans, thanks to lots of local people who showed up to basically marginalize them and make them invisible. Kind of like the people in the photo above, which includes…my parents!

There they are, at far right. Mom’s in the red overcoat, and Dad’s beside her, with the ballcap, looking off down the street at something. Cool!

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Stick a fork in it?

I linked it in yesterday’s Sentential Links, but I wanted to flesh out my response to George RR Martin’s irritation at people who are irritated with him that A Dance with Dragons, the fifth book in his Song of Ice and Fire series, isn’t done yet. John Scalzi posts about this:

Some fans do have a tendency to forget that the creative folks they love are not simply black boxes, who produce desired product at regular intervals. They’re actually real people who do other things than just what the fans want them to do, because humans from time to time want to do the things they want to do, not the things other people want them to do. Yes, some fans don’t like that, but you know what, screw the type of fan who thinks a writer (or musician, or actor, or whatever) exists only to provide them with the entertainment of their choosing.

I’ll go personal here and talk about my own experience. As most of you know, the books in my Old Man’s War series are my most popular ones; each of the four novels have done very well and even the shorter works are pretty popular. There are people who would be delighted if all I did was write OMW universe books from now until the hopefully long-future date at which I drop. But thing is, at the moment, I have no plans to write any more OMW books. It’s not to say I never will, if I figure out what I want to do with that universe from here. I expect I may. But at the moment: Nope. I’ve got other things I’m working on which at the moment interest me more.

Now, I know this annoys some people — my matrix of ego-surfing search engines alerts me to many incidents of fan entitlement, particularly as regards the OMW universe — but I don’t think they understand what they’re asking for. Yes, I could write OMW #5 at the moment, but I guarantee it would suck, because at the moment I don’t know what I would write about, and thus OMW #5 would simply be a bit of commercial hackery, and it would show. And these same fans would say “Yeah, the series used to be good, but then he started phoning it in around book five.” You know, if I’m going to annoy a fan, I’d prefer to annoy a fan by not writing a book that sucks, than by writing one that does.

These are all points well taken. I’d only have a couple of rejoinders: first, I’m not sure the OMW books of Scalzi’s are a great counterexample, since they’re self-contained books; if he never writes another, he’s not leaving anyone clamoring for the end of the story. Second, I do think that Martin has himself set up a lot of the bad feelings by periodically making overly optimistic appraisals of his progress on Dance, and by setting up the structure of Feast so as to imply that Dance would come along in pretty short order. Fans no doubt fear that the next book after Dance will take an equivalently long time, and there’s no telling how long this series will become when all is said and done. I have a feeling that this series may end up going unfinished, and that would be a shame, even if I was disappointed a bit with Feast.

But this sort of thing is hardly new in the art world. Here is Richard Wagner, writing a letter in 1851 about his new project, an opera based on the legends of the Nibelungs:

With this new concept, I sever all connection with our present-day theatre and its audience: I make a definite and permanent break with present-day forms. Would you like to know what my intention are regarding my plan? In the first place, to carry it out, so far as lies within my power as poet and composer. This will take me at least three full years.

So, in 1851, Wagner was figuring on three years to write his Ring Cycle. When did he actually finish Gotterdammerung, the final opera in the cycle? Not until 1874, twenty-three years later. Of course, Wagner didn’t have legions of fans on the Internet clamoring as to his progress, which is the only thing that’s different, I suppose.

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