So, back when you were eleven or twelve, what word for an icky bodily function or substance would invariably send you into hysterics when you heard it? Come on, we all had one!
Return to Kitai
Those who have have followed the career of Guy Gavriel Kay long enough know that, since his last book came out just about two years ago, this is roughly when drips and drabs of information about his next book should start showing up. And, right on cue, we get some details. GGK is returning to Kitai, the fantastical medieval China which was the setting of the brilliant Under Heaven!
Guy Gavriel Kay’s new novel is once more inspired by Chinese history, this time during the Song Dynasty, almost four centuries after the story told in his bestselling Under Heaven. The dazzling elements of the Song – cultural brilliance, vicious political rivalries, warfare against nomadic peoples, court mandarins versus the military – are rich ground for Kay’s unique blending of fantasy and themes of history. Vivid among a large cast, a young man with a dream of regaining the empire’s lost ‘rivers and mountains’ and a brilliant woman trying to shape a space for herself outside the ‘inner quarters’, where women are expected to live out their lives, confront the challenges and dangers of a world in turmoil. The Song Dynasty’s legacy is prominent in the way Westerners imagine Chinese history to this day and Kay weaves a story that captivates on both an epic scale and within the intimate lives of his characters.
Apparently this book is due in 2013. It’ll be a long year! (But that will give me time to re-read the GGK books I have, as yet, not re-read: Last Light of the Sun, Ysabel, and Under Heaven.)
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What if winter came, and nobody knew?
I find it kind of ironic that I’m re-reading George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire right now, given that one of the book’s main plot points is that winter is coming to the world in the books, and in that world, each season lasts for years. This is ironic because this winter in Buffalo is the mildest I can remember — we’ve had less than three feet of snowfall for the entire season, which is unheard of. We never made it sledding in Chestnut Ridge park because there simply was never enough snow up there to do it. There were, maybe, one or two storms that came through which dumped more than a few inches, and that was it. Ho hum.
What caused the mild winter? One hypothesis that interests me is the temporary effect of a volcano that erupted in Iceland last year. I think that the winter is too atypical to be chalked up to global warming, which may make winters such as this more common for Buffalo over the next century, but to have one winter like this suddenly appear seems too sudden to me to be blamed on a worldwide change in climate. However, I do once again notice that whenever we get a big snowstorm, I can count on hearing all kinds of people saying things like “Ha! It’s snowing! Global warming, my ass!”, but when an abnormally warm weather pattern comes along, I don’t hear anybody saying things like, “Hey, that Al Gore must know what he’s talking about!” That always amuses me.
Anyway, while I like winter, I do find myself a bit excited at the prospect of spring being actually pleasant around here, and maybe coming a bit early. Generally speaking, trees in Western New York aren’t fully green until late May, and March and April are generally wet and muddy and pretty depressing, to be honest. Spring here sucks, and I think that’s a big part of why winter around here gets such a bad rap: a hard season is followed by two months of yuck. Here’s hoping!
As I write this, I have windows open at twenty minutes to midnight, and a nice cool breeze is sweeping through Casa Jaquandor. The first real airing-out of the homespace after several months of winter is always a nice feeling, isn’t it?
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All I have to say about Daylight Savings Time
Fifty most hated movies???
SamuraiFrog posted this list of “Fifty Most Hated Movies”, with comment, and damned if I’m not going to do the same. I’ll only bold the ones that I’ve actually seen, though.
50. Daredevil
49. Superman Returns
I didn’t hate this movie, but it deserves quite a bit of its bad press. I actually liked the cast, but the movie was a bit too open about its reverence for the first Superman movie, and yet, it somehow seemed to take place in an alternate universe, at the same time, by seeming to refer to the original without actually doing so, by giving us a Metropolis that was a generic cityscape instead of being clearly New York with the names filed off, and so on. I remember someone on Aint It Cool News or someplace like that writing, “This movie doesn’t just pay homage to the original Superman — it calls the older movie up and breathes heavily into the phone when it answers.”
48. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)
47. Terminator: Salvation
For me, the Terminator story begins with the first movie and ends with the second. Never saw this one.
46. Exorcist II: The Heretic
45. Halloween (2007)
44. Fantastic Four (2005)
Didn’t bother, because the trailers looked awful. But then, I was never a FF fan even when I read comics regularly.
43. Resident Evil
42. Jersey Girl (2004)
One of these years I’ll get myself caught up on Kevin Smith’s movies.
41. Constantine
40. Swept Away (2002)
39. Epic Movie
38. Clash of the Titans (2010)
37. A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
36. The Matrix Reloaded/The Matrix Revolutions
I know, I’m bolding it, but I’ve only seen the first half hour or forty minutes of Reloaded. I’ve mentioned it in the past, but the movie literally bored me to the point that I dosed off. So when I awoke I turned it off and never went back to the Matrix franchise. I loved the first one when I saw it, but each viewing after that made me like it a little bit less.
35. Godzilla (1998)
I thought this might be epically fun…and instead it was bad, bad, bad, with a Godzilla whose size seems to change from scene to scene, with making Jean Reno play second fiddle to Matthew F***ing Broderick (sorry, but I can’t stand the guy), and the supreme idiocy of Devlin and Emmerich using this film to strike back at Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. This movie is terrible.
34. Van Helsing
33. The Spirit
32. Crash (2005)
I can’t even imagine myself wanting to see this movie.
31. Sucker Punch
30. Alien Resurrection
Never bothered, having hated the first Alien movie (and still do — sorry, fans, but the Freudian horror for me basically boils down to Attack of the Killer Space Vaginas), not much liking the second movie (slickly made, but predictable as hell), and loathing the third, from the opening moments of “Hey, remember all the crap those people went through to survive the last one? They all died anyway. Sorry.” And now they’re making Alien prequels or some such? Count me out. I hate this franchise.
29. Spider-Man 3
I do not hate this movie; in fact, I find it highly watchable and even entertaining, despite the fact that it makes one wrong turn after another and starts to commit the crime of betraying its source material. I hate that a much better movie was going to be made before some asshole exec stuck his nose in and forced changes that harmed the film, and I really hate that the result was so much a mishmash that it doomed the existing efforts and triggered a pointless reboot movie that, when I finally do see it (almost certainly on DVD), I’ll watch it with an enormous chip on my shoulder because it’s so unnecessary. Ugh. I don’t hate Spidey 3, but I feel like I should.
28. Sex and the City 2
27. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
I love this movie and despite some of its meandering and plot holes, I think it’s terribly underrated. I’m a big fan of the whole franchise.
26. Planet of the Apes (2001)
25. The Avengers
24. Pearl Harbor
I’ve seen parts of it. I don’t hate it, but man, is it bad.
23. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
22. Battlefield Earth
21. The Wicker Man (2006)
20. X-Men: The Last Stand
I refuse to watch this.
19. Aliens vs Predator
Never bothered. See above: F*** Alien.
18. Highlander 2: The Quickening
Oddly, I did not hate this one, because I expected it to utterly, completely suck, so I cheerfully munched my popcorn and laughed at it. I’d already hated the first one — one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen, a movie whose popularity eternally mystifies me — so I expected nothing from this one. And hey, Michael Ironside. I paid to see H2 in a theater and had a good time, which is a lot more than I can say for the original, which I watched for free and hated.
17. Love Actually
People who hate this movie are like people who hate kittens: I know they’re out there, but they are almost certainly a mutation of some sort.
16. Hulk
15. Catwoman
14. Avatar
I love this one! No, I don’t think it’s got one original thing in it, but so what? I liked the cast, I loved the effects, I love the pace at which Cameron allows the story to unfold. It’s beautiful and I found it fun.
13. Lady in the Water
12. The Happening
11. The Last Airbender
I haven’t seen a Shyamalan movie since Signs, which I liked. From what I hear, I have missed nothing.
10. Die Another Day
This movie actually has an awful lot of good stuff in it, but that all ends with the arrival at the villain’s Giant Ice Cave or whatever. Don’t hate it…but on balance, it’s pretty weak.
9. House of the Dead
8. Titanic (1997)
I still love this movie, and I find the backlash against it really reflective of a cultural mean-spiritedness that always saddens me when I see it in action.
7. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)
I refuse to watch any of these.
6. Batman and Robin
It stinks, but I still found it fun to watch. Oh well.
5. Psycho (1998)
I can’t imagine why this movie got made in the first place.
4. Twilight
I refuse to see this movie. I want nothing to do with this whole awful, stinking, fetid excuse for a story franchise. The book was so achingly bad that any notion that I should go see the movie makes me wretch. (And as to that, again let me raise my objection to anyone who tries telling me that well, I can’t really understand the book since I was never a teenage girl with raging hormones. It’s the writer’s job to make me understand things I’ve never done. I’m not going to do the writer’s homework for her. I have no idea what it was like to experience love and loss in the backdrop of the French Revolution, but Charles Dickens did the heavy lifting for me.)
3. Forrest Gump
I don’t hate it. I’ve never hated it. In fact, I still like it. But I do find its messages confounding, even if I don’t totally buy the usual criticism that it’s “Right wing values good, counterculture bad”.
2. Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
Yeah, right. Defending this movie, and its two follow-ups, may well be my main reason for living. I still love it, to this day. (All together now, class: F*** Red Letter Media!)
1. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Nope, don’t hate this one, either…although it really could have used one more pass through the rewrite phase. I’m not bothered in the least by the “Aliens” thing. The first three were based on the serial adventure flicks of the 1930s; seems perfectly reasonable to me that if we’re going to move Indy into the 1950s, then paranoid science fiction needs to be the order of the day. If anything, I don’t think the movie played this angle up nearly as well as it should have.
Here are some movies that I genuinely cannot stand, that didn’t make the list:
Live and Let Die
The Usual Suspects
City of Angels
Wedding Crashers
Scream
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Sentential Links
Linkage…but first, stinkage!
:: Kudos to SMG for the most definitive world map of the setting so far, and possibly the last major one before we get the official maps later this year. (Amen to that! I love this map. And there’s a book of Ice and Fire maps coming out later this year? Cool!)
:: Table readings are a necessary part of the production process.
That’s about it. More next week!
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Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome!
Oddities and Awesome abound!…but not so much this past week, which was busy and led to a lot of time not spent in front of the computer looking for things Odd or Awesome.
But here’s something: a brief tour of Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s workspace. This guy is very rapidly becoming a hero of mine.
That desk lamp is in the running for Best Thing Ever. I want one! (And heck, I could probably make one!)
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For Kevin, Val, and Walker Evans…and more….
Two of the finest people I know, Kevin and Val, have had to weather an awful lot of storms in the past few years, and now they have to say farewell to their beloved dog, Walker Evans. Here’s some music that I turn to in such times…because words are awfully inadequate. None of this has specifically to do with relationships between humans and animals, but then, the great thing about music is that it doesn’t have to map precisely to exact emotions to be of comfort.
(And in all honesty, I’ve had things like this on the mind all week, even before I heard about Kevin, Val, and W.E. It’s been a sad week for people near and dear.)
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Saturday Centus
Well, I’ve screwed this weekly writing exercise of late…I did one two weeks ago, but I forgot to link the bloody thing on Jenny’s site, so no Centusians are aware that it existed! And last week’s, I just missed entirely, because I just couldn’t think of a way to do that one without dwelling on death. So let’s see if we can’t do things right, this time! Instead of a word-based prompt, Jenny Matlock asks us to write a story in 25 words, using 5 sentences of 5 words each.
“Is that our new planet?”
“Yes, that’s it. We’re home.”
“I pictured it more blue.”
“Yeah…welcome to New Earth.”
“May it outlive the old.”