Will you be reading To Kill A Mockingbird II: The Mockingbird Strikes Back (not the actual title)?
A snowy field in Clear Lake
Today is the anniversary of The Day the Music Died, as it’s come to be known: the day that a small plane carrying Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper crashed shortly after takeoff, killing all three musicians. Sheila O’Malley has an excellent post on the subject; check it out.
I went to college in that area, actually: Wartburg College is in Waverly, IA, which is roughly an hour’s drive away from the Mason City and Clear Lake area. For people in that part of Iowa, The Day the Music Died isn’t just a tragic day in the history of rock-n-roll, but rather an important and sad part of local folklore. I drove through Clear Lake a number of times, with various friends on a number of road trips, and though we never went out to the field where the plane went down, we did drive by the Surf Ballroom once or twice.
I also remember watching American Graffiti when I was in college, and there’s a line in that movie — I think the Paul LeMat character, the hot-rod race driving guy, says it — to the effect that “music’s been going downhill ever since Buddy Holly died”. This in reply to someone’s positive opinion of the Beach Boys. The movie was set in the early 1960s, of course, but even though it was made in 1973 or so, the passing of Holly, Valens, and the Big Bopper was still a reasonably fresh memory, only 14 years gone. That sounds longish, but this year, 9-11 will be as far in the past. I’m not sure what my point here is, other than to note that memories of events that are history to us were once fresh wounds and became scars, in time.
Anyway, it’s always worth reflecting on the stars that pass before they really got a chance to shine with their full brilliance.
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A kitty
Gummint Bad. Oogh.
Politics below the fold.
As I tweeted earlier:
I will under no circumstances vote for you, or even listen to a single thing you have to say, if you are in any way anti-vaccine.
— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) February 3, 2015
Being anti-vaccine is for me equivalent to global-warming denialism. It automatically disqualifies you from serious consideration.
— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) February 3, 2015
What brought this on? Here’s Rand Paul saying that vaccinations should be voluntary because of freedom, some other GOP lackwit saying that we shouldn’t have an “oppressive government” enforcing vaccination, and that as a hypothetical example against “regulation”, restaurants should be able to opt out of mandated handwashing, because “the Market will sort it out.“
I always love stuff like that last one. The libertarian/rightwing types always make the Market’s sorting-process sound like the most benign of forces, as if everyone considering attending the no-handwashing restaurant will find out about it beforehand and choose accordingly. Those of us in the real world know that in a case like this, “the Market sorting it out” would involve a bunch of people with shigellosis, but as ever, the Market is an inherent good that must be preserved even in the face of avoidable and unnecessary human suffering.
And yes, vaccinations should be required by law, with all that entails.
No candidate who thinks otherwise will ever get my vote, or even a hearing, on any issue. Period.
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Ask Me Anything!!!
It’s February! That means, by long-standing tradition ’round these parts, that it’s time for my twice-yearly game of Ask Me Anything!. The rules are simple: you are to, well, ask me anything. Anything at all. Questions can be serious or silly, profound or poofy. (However, the seriousness of the question does not have any bearing on the seriousness of the answer. I may give a silly answer to a deeply profound question, and I may pen a long and detailed essay in response to a silly question. You never know with me!)
Questions can be posed in any of the usual ways: in comments to this post, or via Twitter, or on Instagram, or Facebook, or e-mailed directly to jaquandor@gmail.com. No limit on questions, and every question will receive an answer of some sort! I will start providing answers in two (2) weeks, and I’ll post the occasional reminder. Until then: Ask Me Anything!
REMINDER: I do honor requests to keep things anonymous, if that is desired.
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Sunday Burst o’stuff
Stuff!
:: Apparently Russell Crowe is one of those people who likes to tweet the results of his workouts. Well, some dude decided that he’d start responding, with increasingly hilarious effects. Also, apparently Russell Crowe’s sense of humor is easily exhausted.
:: I only learned a few years ago that Lake Baikal in Siberia is the world’s largest fresh-water lake by volume. I always figured that would be Lake Superior, but that’s wrong: Lake Superior has the largest surface area by quite a bit (over twice the surface area of Baikal), but Baikal’s got the depths: its average depth is 260 meters greater than Superior’s.
Baikal is also apparently a very, very clear lake, which makes for stunning ice formations. Make sure to play the video at the end, when some people demonstrate some fascinating sonic properties of the Baikal ice.
:: Want to watch a surprisingly effective horror movie that only takes two minutes from beginning to end? Sure you do! (As with all such scares, it’s less effective when you’ve already seen it and know what’s coming.)
More next week, perhaps!
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Something for Thursday
Punnery is afoot
There was a thing on Twitter where Bell.ca decided to raise money for mental health awareness by donating five cents for every use of the hashtag “BellLetsTalk”. Author Guy Gavriel Kay turned this into an excuse for puns, since he has a long-standing love of punnery. He solicited puns on the hashtag, and he got a lot of fun, creative ones in return.
This was mine:
.@guygavrielkay Said the kid with the apple on his head: "Tell, let's balk." #BellLetsTalk
— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) January 28, 2015
And a few minutes later, Mr. Kay responded (which I then retweeted with added exclamation at the front):
WOO HOO! RT @guygavrielkay @Jaquandor Oh, yes! Legend + baseball + linguistic inversion + pun? Let's hear it for Mr Sedinger! #BellLetsTalk
— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) January 28, 2015
Yup. I retire tonight with the warm glow of accomplishment!
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A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter
So here’s a question that I posed the other day on The Twitters, after seeing it discussed by a few other folks. There’s an awful lot of writing advice that counsels writers to “grab the reader on Page One!”. You have to hook your reader immediately, and if you can do it with a great opening line, so much the better.
Here’s my problem with that: My own experience as a reader runs deeply contrary to this. I honestly can remember very few books I’ve read where I knew on the first page that I didn’t like the book. This seems to me the equivalent of walking out of a movie after the first ninety seconds. Now, I don’t really have a hard-and-fast rule as to how long to give a book. Some readers I know say “Six chapters”, while others have said “One hundred pages”. I tend to keep going until I find myself realizing that I simply am not invested at all in the events of the book or its characters, and not only does it seem unfair to me to conclude that I don’t have that investment on Page One, but it also generally takes me a while to get to that level of investment. Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Fionavar Tapestry trilogy is as beloved a book to me as any, but I distinctly remember not really getting into it until quite literally halfway through the first installment, at which point something shattering happens. (By construction, one of his characters is a fellow who initially seems a bit on the “soul-dead” side, and then you get the explanation for why he’s that way, and that’s when GGK has you. But that’s for another time.)
I’ve also had any number of times the experience of starting a book, abandoning it because it wasn’t “grabbing” me, and then giving it another go a while later and loving it.
Ditto first lines. A great first line is a wonderful thing indeed, and even when I write I try to come up with a first line that hints of amazing things to come. But to insist on a “great” first line from a novel always seems to me an awful lot of pressure to put on just a few words. There are many great first lines, but I’m not convinced that every great novel has a great first line. I certainly don’t recall the first lines of many of my most beloved books — the afore-mentioned Fionavar Tapestry, or GGK’s The Lions of Al-Rassan, which might well be my favorite book ever. I know the first line of The Hobbit (“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”), but I couldn’t tell you the first line of The Lord of the Rings. Everybody knows “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” from A Tale of Two Cities, but that’s not even the entire first line; who can recite that entire amazing opening paragraph? I certainly can’t. Lather, rinse, repeat, across my entire library.
What say you, readers? How much do you expect from first lines or first pages? Do you have general rules for when to abandon a book that’s not getting the job done at that point in time?
