Tag: Ask Me Anything February 2012

[Oops. I’ve had this sitting in draft for a week…and I thought I’d published it, when I’d saved it in Draft to finish adding the links. I hate when I do that. Sorry, folks! But here it is.]

Time, at long last, to wrap up Ask Me Anything! February 2012. Huzzah!

Roger, a consistent source of intriguing questions, has a multi-part query:

There’s that woman from 2 Broke Girls that you and SamuraiFrog seem to…enjoy. I don’t get it. I mean she’s got big…she’s well-endowed, but her face has a hardness I find singularly unappealing.

Oh, and do you think that beauty is tied to the role one plays. That woman from Castle you like was in an episode of The Closer four or five years ago as a young Russian woman, forced into prostitution. But in Castle, she’s strong, which, I think, makes her WAY more attractive. Thoughts?

And where the heck is ROWR?

Well, there’s a lot to dig into there. The 2 Broke Girls woman is Kat Dennings, who I do like a lot. I don’t find a ‘hardness’ in her face at all; I like her full features, especially her lips, and…well, just in terms of physical attractiveness, she has gorgeous hair, her body curves, and her face has a ‘1940s movie star’ quality to me, in some way. I also like her a lot on the show, even if the show itself isn’t all that good. It’s hard to argue logically about what I find attractive; I seem to recall Roger Ebert once writing that Gene Siskel’s view on discussing erotica boiled down to “Try and talk a man out of an erection.” So there’s that. (My sample size on Ms. Dennings is pretty small — Thor and 2 Broke Girls. I like her in both, but it’s not really a large enough sample to have a good sense on her level of staying power.)

And from Castle we have Stana Katic, of whose work I also have a limited exposure – just Castle. But she’s awfully, awfully good on that show, both strong and vulnerable; she gets a lot of the show’s best lines (the writers do a really good job of spreading the wealth, dialog-wise); she shows a lot of good comic timing; and her chemistry with Nathan Fillion is fantastic. I find the character appealing in all those ways. The actress? Well, that she is able to embody all those qualities is pretty great.

But that’s not the question asked – is strength more attractive, or appealing, than weakness? Probably. I’ve seen a lot of weak characters on all kinds of shows who were much less appealing than other, stronger characters, and there have been times when I’ve liked certain actors or actresses more in one role than another because of strength or lack thereof. Maura Tierney is a good example: I loved her in NewsRadio, where she was strong and intelligent and professional, but I liked her less – or I liked her character a lot less – in ER, when she seemed to fill the ‘wallow in existential misery’ portion of the show much of the time that I watched while she was on it.

I do try to really differentiate between characters and the people who portray them. I hated Izzie Stevens on Grey’s Anatomy for a lot of reasons, but it was a while before I decided that I didn’t like Katherine Heigl much, either, and that was to do with all kinds of stuff I read about how obnoxious she is as a person.

Finally: where is ROWR? For those newer to the blog, ROWR is an occasional series of posts where I highlight women whom I think are both very talented and very beautiful. The series started way back in the early days of the blog, when Britney Spears was still an object of fascination; it really bugged me that she tended to get enormous press and praise despite not being all that talented at all. I moved away from that focus as Ms. Spears started to suffer her own slings of outrageous fortune; it started to feel like I was kicking someone who was down, and that’s never pleasant. (Not that she has the first idea who I am, nor should she. Nor should she care if she did.)

But even when I changed the name of the series, it sometimes felt to me like I was somehow engaging in objectification of women, which is something I really don’t want to do. I don’t know…you tell me, readers! Was I really objectifying? Or can I resume that series as the harmless admiration of beauty and talent that I meant it to be?

Roger also asks:

What is something you often do without realizing that you’re doing it? (I’m a hummer.)

I hum as well…and I tend to sing, under my breath. I also ‘write’ in my head, playing scenes from my work on the movie screen in my brain, sometimes long before I write them. When I’m doing that, I can get pretty absorbed, and when I get absorbed, I can get a pretty intense facial expression going on, and that particular expression is apparently more “angry” looking than “thoughtful”, because people will often say things like “Wow, you look pissed!” Oh well. Can’t win ’em all.

But anyway, I find it spectacularly easy to daydream. And I’m not terribly repentant about daydreaming, either. It’s an ability that has sustained me through any number of boring lectures, dull meetings, sleep sermons, and repetitive jobs in my life, and it’s through daydreaming that I get a lot of the ‘heavy lifting’ of plotting done for my fiction. Just the other day I solved a structural problem with the climax of Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title) whilst daydreaming.

Roger also asks about the current state of my ‘faith journey’. If there really is a journey going on, I’m walking in circles. I refuse to discount science and rationalism, which may make me unwelcome in a lot of Christian circles. My current pastor has a favorite saying, wherein he holds up the Bible and says, “When my life ends, I want to be able to say that I got this right.” My problem with that is that the Bible, while full of amazing and wonderful stuff, is also full of stuff that sets my teeth on edge, and I know too much about how the Bible came to be to really be willing to unreservedly endorse it as “God’s Word”. I just can’t help but think that if God was going to issue a book that communicates His will, he wouldn’t issue it in as messy a way as he did the Bible. There’s just too much humanity in the history of the Bible.

And besides, even if the Bible is an expression of God, by its very nature it’s a faulty one, with all the collation and translation issues abundant within it, coupled with the fact that it gathers writings that reflect understandings of things that were in play 2000+ years ago and over a very long time period. It seems to me that the world itself must also be seen as an expression of God, and that if careful study of the world tells us one thing and a literal reading of a book tells us another, then, well, the book loses. Simple as that.

Ultimately…I’m just not convinced. Too much of it just doesn’t add up for me. “God hates sin”, I’m told…but why did God create a world with sin in it, then? And if God isn’t responsible for sin in the world, well, how did we manage to create something that He didn’t? I think a lot of a question posed by Plato: Does God love what is moral because it is moral, or are things moral because God makes them moral? Put another way: can God rewrite arithmetic so 2+2=5? I don’t know that He can…which automatically poses a logical limit on a God who is supposed to be beyond limits of any kind.

Ultimately, I think I’m attracted to Christianity because I love the stories. But I’m not sure I can ever cross the line to total commitment. And I’m also not sure that this is a bad thing.

Roger also asked me to prognosticate on the Oscars, but I haven’t seen any of the films that were nominated, even at this point, so I can’t offer any thoughts at all. Sorry!

A reader who prefers to remain anonymous asks:

Do you like everything you read and see, or do you just write about the things you like?

Definitely the latter. I’m more likely to post about a movie I don’t like than a book, because I’m much more likely to watch a movie I don’t like all the way through than a book. If I’m not liking a book, I’ll quit reading it and do something else. And if that happens, I’ll rarely conclude that I don’t like the book, but rather than I’m not in the mood for it or not attuned to it as of yet. I’ve had a lot of experiences where I started a book and just not connected with it (I call this “bouncing off the book”), but then returned to it years later and found myself liking it just fine, if not loving it outright. This happens with movies, too, but less frequently.

Ultimately, I’ll post about something I dislike if I really really dislike it. A good example is Twilight, because I found my distaste for it kind of interesting, given that I really expected to like it a lot. I don’t get as much enjoyment out of writing a good rant as I used to; I’d much rather steer someone toward something that they might like by virtue of my own enthusiasm. So no, I don’t like everything. But I’m not a movie critic for a newspaper or something like that; I’m under no obligation to write about things I dislike.

Paul asks:

Corduroy overalls, yea, or nay?

Also, denim, deep blue, or faded?

I had a corduroy pair once, but they really fit weird, and corduroy tends to ‘hang’ differently, so I rarely wore them and eventually I put them on eBay. I like how corduroy looks, but in my experience, I don’t like wearing it myself all that much. I own nothing corduroy now, in any article of clothing.

As for the denim: either/or! I like nice, dark denim when it’s still fairly stiff (but not super stiff – you gotta wash them a few times). But well-broken in and faded is nice as well. I also like black denim, and I wish they were easier to find (aside from Carhartts, which are ubiquitous – I like Carhartts except for, oddly enough, the style of the shoulder-strap buckles, which always feel kind of weird to me).

Sticking with the overalls, Andy asks:

I have noticed when I wear my overalls that I get A LOT of people doing a ‘double take’ when they see me. Does this happen to you as well????

I don’t notice…but then, I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to other people when I’m out and about. It’s part of the whole “daydreaming” thing I mention above…I’m really pretty good at divorcing myself from the world, which is a useful skill to have because the world can really suck. I’ve seen this kind of thing once or twice, but generally I don’t care. One time I do remember that I thought was pretty funny – I was shopping, and some girl was snickering when I walked by, and when I glanced back a couple of times, each time she was looking in my direction. Funny thing was…well, not ‘funny’, but I’m not sure what the word is…she looked terrible. I hate to say this, but…well look, she wouldn’t have looked too out of place in that “People Of Wal-Mart” website. So I just consider the source.

From the same anonymous reader above:

Why on Earth would you want to get a pie in the face?

Because it’s fun and silly. Do I need a better reason than that? Nope! Hey, don’t knock it until you try it!

And finally, from one more anonymous reader:

So what is the title to ‘Princesses In SPACE!!!’, anyway?

When I know it, I’ll tell you!

And with that, thanks for playing, everyone! We’ll do this again in August. (Not that you need permission to ask me anything, anytime!)

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OK, I need to get going on these…last week’s time-sucking did not do the blog any favors. So let’s get going here!

A reader who prefers anonymity asks:

What “earworms” get stuck in your head?

“Hey Jude”. That’s a big one. Lots of Beatles songs, actually. Songs from Les Miz — “Do You Hear the People Sing?” is a big one that I often find myself humming. Show tunes of all sorts! Generally, I often have some kind of music traveling through my head, and I’ll often find myself humming it. I suppose it would be more useful to talk about earworms that don’t get stuck in my head!

What’s funny is how often I’ll get earwormed with a song I can’t stand. “Red Solo Cup” may be the single stupidest musical act ever committed by the hand of man, but damned if that horrible thing doesn’t end up stuck in my ear for an hour after I inadvertently catch it on the radio.

Can you deliberately think of a piece of music and “play it” in your head? Can you bring to mind the music pieces you’ve played yourself?

I can do this with a lot of music that I know very, very well. I can sit back and listen, in my head, to the entirety of Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony, for instance. Ditto Berlioz’s Fantastique, Beethoven’s Seventh and Ninth, and so on. Large sections of John Williams’s filmscores, and large portions of The Lord of the Rings. I have a very good musical memory…with one exception. Lyrics don’t tend to stick with me, or song titles. I hear a song and I can always say, “Yeah, I’ve heard that,” but if you mention a song by title to me, odds are I won’t know what you’re talking about. And if I know a song by title, there’s almost no chance I’ll be able to cite any lyrics without having taken trouble to internalize them beforehand. I don’t pick up lyrics from casual listening.

What little time-waster games do you play, if any? Any logic puzzles (minesweeper, say)? Solitaire?

I don’t really do this, for some reason…I like the default Windows games like Minesweeper and Solitaire and Free Cell; my computer shipped with a chess game that I like but never use any more, and I dug the Mah Jong game too…but I haven’t played that one in a long time, either.

The only real game playing thing I have right now is that accursed “Words With Friends” on Facebook. I love that thing…but I only check it twice a day. Otherwise I’ll stare at it for hours. (Anyone wants to play, go ahead and drop me one of those challenges!)

More to come! I should be able to finish up next time out.

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Continuing the replies to queries posed in Ask Me Anything! February 2012.

Charlie asks: Imagine you were called upon to recast the Star Wars movies, for some reason. Who would your picks be?

Hmmm, that’s tough. Very tough. Really, really tough.

If we were to reboot Star Wars right now, would it even have the same characters? Or would it go another direction? Interesting questions…but assuming that we just live in an alt-universe where Star Wars is made for the first time, right now, here’s how it might be cast. Maybe.

Luke Skywalker: Geez, I don’t know. I think you’d need a relative unknown for this role. I really do.
Han Solo: Well, if I can’t have any more adventures of Captain Malcolm Reynolds…Nathan Fillion!
Princess Leia Organa: Why not? Natalie Portman.
Ben “Obi Wan” Kenobi: We need a somewhat older Brit here, don’t we? You know, I’d be intrigued to see what Alan Rickman could do here.
Governor Tarkin: Christopher Walken.

Now, Darth Vader, C-3PO, R2-D2, Yoda, and others don’t even need casting, because they’ll be played by people in suits or CGI. When you really think about it, there really aren’t too many major human characters in Star Wars. To really get some interesting casting going, we’d have to re-do the story somehow to get some more people in there, I think. I’d love to get Clancy Brown in there at some point, but where? Meryl Streep as Mon Mothma? Michael Clark Duncan as Lando Calrissian? And Summer Glau could play a female Jedi who is so bad-ass that she doesn’t even need to use a lightsaber!

A reader who prefers to remain anonymous e-mails: What Guy Gavriel Kay novels do you think would make good movies? (Are there any films of his novels?)

What about other books? Anything you read recently that would make a good film?

So far, there are no films of GGK’s novels. I don’t think that all of them would make good movies — The Fionavar Tapestry would, by necessity, strike people onscreen as a big-time rip-off of The Lord of the Rings, because film audiences wouldn’t give him too much slack for ‘playing with tropes’ and that sort of thing. Tigana, by its structure, would be a difficult film adaptation as well. It might work as a miniseries, though.

I know that The Lions of Al-Rassan has been in development for several years.. I think it would make an interesting movie, but then, I’m biased in that it’s my favorite of his books. It would also be easy to screw up, though.

The Sarantine Mosaic is too big to fit into a single movie. The Last Light of the Sun would work, I think, and work very well. Ditto Ysabel, which would work very well as a ‘modern day’ fantasy — although the bits involving Dave and Kim from Fionavar would lack most of their impact without the earlier books as context. Given the quality of fantasy and adventure films from the far east of late, Under Heaven could be a magnificent film.

Ultimately, though, I tend to think that the GGK novel that would work best as a movie, by way of its fairly tight narrative, might well be A Song for Arbonne.

In terms of other books making good movies: I don’t normally think in these terms, but there have been some books that strike me as cinematic in their writing. I have yet to blog about it, but Jim Butcher’s Storm Front (the first of his ‘Harry Dresden’ novels) would film well, I think. There was a book I read a few years ago, called The Caliph’s House, that I think would film really well — it’s about a man who decides, almost on a whim, to move his family from London to Casablanca, into a house that’s a fixer-upper. A whole lot of ‘fish out of water’ stuff ensues.

The bit of reading I’ve done lately that would make the best movie, though, is this post of Sheila’s, about one of the firefighters she met in the course of some recent harrowing (but well-ending) stuff that went on in her life. A man and a woman, brought together by their shared love of Elvis…and one cat! (Well, not really, but a really terrific romantic comedy-drama could be made from this stuff.)

More answers to come! (And new questions are still welcome!)

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Time to knock off a couple more answers to questions posed in Ask Me Anything! February 2012. As before, note that I’m still open to questions!

In this edition I’m going to tackle all of the political questions at once, so if you don’t want to read ranty liberalism, just keep scrolling. I’ll put the rest of this after the cut.

First, Roger asks: Your specific analysis of the 4 GOP candidates for President (and any of the dropouts if you want). Positive/negative traits, whether your opinion of them has improved or declined since the campaign has started. How you think each would fare against Obama, and who you think each would pick as a VP candidate.

Anyone familiar with me likely knows that I’m honestly not the person to ask this question. For me to ever consider voting Republican again, that whole party is going to have to move significantly to the left, and I think the odds of that happening are spectacularly low. I honestly don’t want to get into a big long rant on why I find them all so loathsome, so here’s a short rundown:

Mitt Romney: He’d probably be the best President of the bunch, in terms of policy; but I don’t think that even if he was elected, he’d be able to command the party loyalty that it would take to get some stuff through Congress. Or, given his slavish desperation to prove that he really is a good little Movement Conservative, I suspect he’d espouse policies that he doesn’t really believe in himself…which would make for half-assed governance.

Newt Gingrich: This man is the Father of Scorched Earth Republican Politics. He’s a moral midget, a man with zero policy ideas that interest me, and…well, the man is a shit. I think that he’d be Nixon without the charm.

Rick Santorum: For different reasons, he’s even more loathsome to me than Gingrich. I hate this guy. I hate his smarmy smile, I hate his sweater vests (not that he can help that one, I just hate sweater vests), I hate his apparent belief that God communicates through him, I hate his misogyny, I hate his stance on everything he ever opines about. Everything about him screams out that he sees a Santorum Presidency as his chance to be High Moral Arbiter of the Land. The Inquisition would come to America, if he had his way.

Ron Paul: I hate this guy too. I hate that he’s almost certainly a sickeningly banal racist who has tossed out a whole series of contradictory and unconvincing lies to explain the existence of racist writings that appeared over his signature. I hate his transparent manipulation of the legislative process to score all kinds of Evil Gummint Money for his district, while he claims purity in his hatred of Evil Gummint Money. I hate that his Great Commitment to Freedom doesn’t so much extend to people who are attracted to people of the same sex, or people who have vaginas. And I hate the dewy-eyed cult that surrounds this guy, consisting of mostly young people who know exceedingly little but think because they’ve read Paul tracts and Cliff Notes versions of Ayn Rand that they get to tell everyone else to “educate themselves”.

A week or two ago, MightyGodKing described the Republican field thusly: “This primary is between a Republican version of John Kerry except less likeable and human, a dude who lost a re-election campaign by twenty points, a guy who was so dishonest that his fellow Republicans said “dude, whoa” and an insane dwarf.” That’s about right. All of these candidates deny global warming. All of them deny evolution. All of them champion a continued stampede toward stupidity.

How would they fare against President Obama? A lot can happen, but if the economic news continues to be good each month, leading to an increased mood of optimism in America, I can’t see any of these guys winning. My hope is that this is the last election cycle that the Republicans can get even crazier, because if they manage to come up with an even more vile batch of crazies in 2016…ye gods.

Sorry, Republicans. But I didn’t ask the question!

Sticking with Roger: Why, do you suppose, that Tea Party folks support the economic policies of the rich when it is not, IMO, in their own best interest?

Because they’re dumb? OK, maybe that’s not nice or charitable or whatever, but…I can’t come up with anything else. But when you get right down to it, the Tea Party is nothing more than good old Angry White Republicanism, dressed up in tricorns and spouting Revolutionary War rhetoric. I don’t see any interesting new arguments from them, just warmed-over “Anything gummint does is bad” nonsense. The Tea Party is branding, nothing more. There’s a visceral loathing of government in the American psyche that’s been there since before the country even existed. It’s often not even rational, but we have a powerfully mythological belief in this country in rich people who made it for themselves with no help from anybody, in awful government bureaucrats whose only reason for existence is to make decisions that affect people adversely (all the while accepting corporate bureaucracies whose only reason for existence is to make decisions that affect people adversely, with the extra bonus of doing it for a profit motive), and in the whole idea that so many have that “I do everything for myself!”

I could say more, but I don’t think I will.

Should civil rights issues such as gay marriage be decided by the courts, the legislature or by plebiscite, and why?

Probably a combination of the courts and legislatures. I am not a fan of voter referenda. I’m a fan of representative democracy, where sudden moods of an electorate are removed from direct decision making. It seems to me that referenda tend to be decided by the side that gets angry enough to vote on something, and further, that anger seems too often to translate into a referendum being decided on the side of limiting rights, rather than granting them. The fact is that public opinion often needs to be dragged kicking and screaming forward.

The 20th Century was clearly the American century. What will the 21st be?

Well, I see no reason to write off America yet, although we’ve got some troubles in front of us. China is coming on strong, isn’t it? And India is making big strides as well. This may be the Asian Century…but I’d be happy if it could somehow be the era when we start to put notions of nationhood behind. I’d like it to be the human century.

More answers to come!

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OK, I think I’ve waited long enough — it’s time to start answering the questions from Ask Me Anything! February 2012. And feel free to still ask, if you like…it’s the 10th anniversary month here, so let’s make this one special! If there’s something you’ve always wondered about Yours Truly, or something you’ve always wondered what Yours Truly thought about it, or something you’ve never wondered about Yours Truly but it just occurred to you to ask, go for it!

My good old college friend (and husband of another good old college friend) Aaron asks: As a very slow reader (I started reading Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy in October and am just nearing the end. And, that is a pretty good pace for me), with a decent sized list of books on the “need to get to” list, should I add the Song of Ice and Fire series?

Krista and I are just finishing up the first season of the HBO adaptation, and have loved it, but it feels like so much is missing.

I just finished A Clash of Kings the other day (blog post forthcoming), and I do recommend it, thus far. My admiration of the series’s first two books remains untouched; I’m most nervous now about the next two (as well as the fifth one, which I’ve never read yet), because I didn’t like those ones as much the first time through. For a slow reader, these books do represent quite an investment — I mean, look at these things! Since paginations differ, the best way to gauge lengths of books is word count, and check out the numbers on this site. Assuming these are accurate, and I don’t see reason to doubt it offhand, the entirety of The Lord of the Rings checks in at approximately 473,000 words, while just the first two of GRRM’s Ice and Fire books top 610,000 words. A Storm of Swords, GRRM’s Book Three, is 404,000 words…meaning, that one book is a short novel shy of the entire Lord of the Rings. Wow.

Of course, word count isn’t everything. Martin’s prose, when he’s on his game, can really propel the reader forward, in my experience; his dialogue can absolutely crackle, and the device of each chapter being told from the point of view of a different character is extremely effective when one gets used to it — one effect I’m rediscovering is that I’ll finish a chapter for a character I really like, Jon Snow for example, and then decide to keep reading until I get back to Jon Snow. What GRRM does, language-wise, is rarely as dense and descriptive-heavy as JRRT. So this is definitely a “Your mileage may vary” kind of thing.

As for the differences between the books and the teevee adaptations, I honestly don’t know, as I haven’t yet watched the teevee show beyond the first episode. I do plan to, though.

(BTW, on the subject of word counts — I’m really hoping to bring the first draft of Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title) in at no more than 180,000 words, with a further eye to cutting at least ten percent of the words upon the edit. We’ll see!

Bill asks: Have you kept up your chops? Do you play anything besides trumpet?

Sadly, no. I haven’t touched the trumpet since I played in a friend’s wedding — Aaron of Question Number One’s wedding, actually! — and that was in 1995 or thereabouts. Time and opportunities available tend to make it hard to do such things…not that there are no opportunities, but life has that odd way of moving on, and other interests surge forward, arise anew (when we have space to do so, one day, I plan to take up woodworking and carpentry), or resurface in a big way (I loved writing as a kid several years before I knew what music even was). My musical life now is pretty much as a listener, only. But that’s fine for me; at least my musical training earlier in life has equipped me to appreciate music on a level that would be harder to attain had I never touched an instrument.

As for other instruments, I played the piano in high school and college. I do wish I had devoted more effort to the piano, because in all honesty, I was actually fairly decent at it. But I never took the piano as seriously as I took the trumpet, so I never got good enough at it to do more than scratch a surface. I consider that one of the missed opportunities of my life. I suppose I should write a post about my piano teachers one of these years….

More answers to come, and feel free to ask more, if you like!

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Yup, folks, it’s February, which means that it’s time once again for Ask Me Anything!, wherein I throw open the doors to all comers who may wish to pose questions of goofy sort, or serious sort, or any kind of sort you can imagine. All questions and queries are welcome, so bring ’em on! This is your chance, folks!

Questions may be left in comments to this post, or if you prefer, you can certainly e-mail me (jaquandor AT gmail DOT com). Or send ’em via Facebook. Or Tweet ’em at me (make sure to put the ‘@jaquandor’ thing in there, or I’ll never see it). Or even in comments on Flickr, if you like. Lots of options here to make things easy.

I’ll have more to say about it later in the month, but February 2012 marks ten years I’ve been blogging, so let’s make this iteration of Ask Me Anything! a real hootenanny! (Or a lollapalooza. Or a shindig. Whichever.)

So…Ask Me Anything!

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