I’m going on holiday until January 1st. See you in 2012!
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The Word For Human In Any Language
Embassytown, By China Mieville
This was a strange one. Not quite what you’d expect, either form a space opera or from China Mieville, and both in a good way. I don’t even know if you’d want to call it Space opera, Or even planetary Romance, though it has elements of both adventure on alien worlds and galactic politics but they aren’t the driving forces of the story.
That driving force is language and where it comes form and what it means to communicate. Here we have a story that for once looks at humans meeting aliens and deals with the profound differences in psychology that creates a gulf in communication, the lengths we’ll go to just to say hello to something other, and what the ramifications of trying to communicate in our own fashion with something so unlike us and how it changes both us and the aliens culture.
China Mieville’s best quality as an author is in his ruthless abandonment of the genre scaffolding and willingness to just plunge the reader into an alien world and let them sink or swim. Most of the exotic words and neologisms are never defined. You just pick them up as you go along and figure it out, like the characters do. This can be disorienting and off-putting if you aren’t expecting it. But the joy of discovery and sorting out the world for yourself is part of the fun of this book.
Merkin Muffley for President
It seems GOP voters have grown tired of yet another sure-thing front-runner for the Republican Candidacy, and Newt Gingrich’s poll numbers are now in free fall. I could have told you this, without the polling data. Even ignoring his crypto-fascist platform, try saying “President Newt Gingrich” with a straight face. He sounds like a Terry Southern character.
Most of the GOP contenders have already ridden this roller coaster ride, but no one really expected Cain, Palin, Trump, Perry and the Bachmann to stay on top as serious contenders. They’re clearly just milking it for the publicity and shill for their more lucrative careers as pundits. I mean, actually being President is hard work. But they could make twice as much just sitting around talking shit about the president for the next four years on FoxNews. So it’s just savvy business to ride that whore train right now.
Newt, Paul and Huntsman are the the only Not-Romney candidates left and they aren’t treating the GOP primary like a game show, but each in turn will get their close up. Though it seems Ron Paul, everyone’s favorite anti-semetic pot smoking uncle, is up next and the GOP desperately want to keep him out of the limelight, since he shows them up as the racist brain dead nincompoops they really are. But then these re the idiots who talked themselves into thinking Newt was a good idea just last week. So round and round we’ll go until the only ones left on this tragic carousel of cretinism is Romney, the empty suit no one likes. At which point, the GOP will decide that since they don’t actually want to run the government anywhere but into the ground, they’ll toss Mitt out as election bait so he can be squashed by Obama and spend the next four years griping and sabotaging the governing process form the senate and house. I mean, why not? It seems to be working for them now.
Posted in Politics, The Election That Will Never End, What Are Conservatives Smoking?
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Links for 12/19/11
A few odds and ends making their way from the internet to my brain in the last week:
>A list of defunct auto manufactures and the cool cars they used to make, mostly from the nineteen-teens. Bless Wikipedia editors and their exhaustive interests.
>A transcript of Terrence McKenna talking about the DMT cave and intelligences from outside of time. You know, the usual.
>In the Arabian Nights, there’s the story of the City of Brass, which
[...] features a group of travellers on an archaeological expedition across the Sahara to find an ancient lost city and attempt to recover a brass vessel that Solomon once used to trap a jinn, and, along the way, encounter a mummified queen, petrified inhabitants, life-like humanoid robots and automata, seductive marionettes dancing without strings, and a brass horseman robot who directs the party towards the ancient city, which has now become a ghost town.”
There’s definitely a novel in there, but it’ll have to wait until I finish the three or four other novels already taking up space in my head. So look for it sometime around 2020.
>Here’s last year’s Krampuslauf Graz parade in Austria. Why can’t we have a demonic monster parade during Christmas in this country? Oh right, fluffy Jesus people. Weirdos.
>And ever since I saw the new trailer for GI Joe: Retaliation, this pretty badass dubstep version of Seven Nation Army has been stuck in my head.
The Next Republican Nominee for President
The Republican National Committee announced today that they’ve decided to skip the middle man and nominate as their candidate for the 2012 Presidential election noted Somali Pirate, Abduwali Abdukhadir Muse. “We’re tired of the small time grifters, the closeted sanctimonious hypocrits and backwoods cretins,” said RNC chair, Reince Priebus. “For this election, we needed a fresh face. Someone with leadership skills and a twenty first century idea of entrepreneurship. That he also knows how to handle an assault weapon is just a bonus!”
Mr. Muse came to prominence back in 2009 when he and his crew of desperate pirates took control of the Maersk Alabama, initiating a five-day hostage standoff that ultimately resulted in the death of three pirates and the freeing of Richard Phillips, the captain of the Maersk Alabama. Since then, Mr. Muse has been keeping a low profile, but the republicans feel that he has the qualities that are necessary to fulfill their plan for America.
“He’s already seen the future that the Republican party has in store for America,” said Newt Gingrich at a fundraiser for Mr. Muse this past Saturday. “Somalia is it. A land of complete lawlessness, a government so hobbled by corruption as to be practically nonexistent. They have no messy regulations whosoever. It’s a free market dream come true!”
“I grew up in extreme poverty,” said Mr. Muse of his humble beginnings. “I got my hands into something that was more powerful than me.”
Rush Limbaugh addressed Mr. Muse’s lack of US citizenship on his radio show,”At least we know where Mr. Muse came form. We still haven’t seen Obama’s real birth certificate!”
Sarah Palin elaborated, saying that,”Mr. Muse at least believes in the American dream and is willing to do what it takes to pioneer a small business and make it grow through hard work and dedication and that’s all the qualifications you need.”
Posted in Pirates!, Politics, Shenanigans, The Election That Will Never End
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Scooby-Doo as Secular Kids Show
Over at Comics Alliance, an intriguing theory regarding Scooby-Doo:
Michael Ryan recently wrote a really interesting article that suggested the decision to keep real monsters off of Scooby-Doo was originally done in order to appease parents who wanted something that was just scary enough to keep a kid’s attention without being so scary that they wouldn’t actually get “excited.” They wanted to have the fun of monsters without the consequences of having to deal with nightmares like the parents of those kids who saw Simon Belmont hoisting up Dracula’s severed head on the cover of Nintendo Power. It was all meant to be like the televised equivalent of a Nerf Dracula, taking something that was supposed to be scary and blunting it down until the the big reveal at the end of every episode, which would show kids that the monsters they were scared of were just normal dudes.
It’s certainly possible to look at the show like that — as Ryan points out, there were critics when the show premiered back in 1969 that saw that as a selling point — but whether or not it was the intent of the creators, what they ended up with was something that went far beyond that idea.
Because that’s the thing about Scooby-Doo: The bad guys in every episode aren’t monsters, they’re liars.
I can’t imagine how scandalized those critics who were relieved to have something that was mild enough to not excite their kids would’ve been if they’d stopped for a second and realized what was actually going on. The very first rule of Scooby-Doo, the single premise that sits at the heart of their adventures, is that the world is full of grown-ups who lie to kids, and that it’s up to those kids to figure out what those lies are and call them on it, even if there are other adults who believe those lies with every fiber of their being. And the way that you win isn’t through supernatural powers, or even through fighting. The way that you win is by doing the most dangerous thing that any person being lied to by someone in power can do: You think.
But it’s not just that the crooks in Scooby-Doo are liars; nobody ever shows up to bilk someone out of their life savings by pretending to be a Nigerian prince or something. It’s always phantasms and Frankensteins, and there’s a very good reason for that. The bad guys in Scooby-Doo prey on superstition, because that’s the one thing that an otherwise rational person doesn’t really think through. It’s based on belief, not evidence, which is a crucial element for the show. If, for example, someone knocks on your door and claims to be a police officer, you’re going to want to see a badge because that’s the tangible evidence that you’ve come to expect to prove their claim. If, however, you hold the belief that the old run-down theater has a phantom in the basement, then the existence of that phantom himself — or at least a reasonably convincing costume — is all the evidence that you need to believe that you were right all along. The bad guys are just reinforcing a belief that the other characters already have, and that they don’t need any evidence before because it’s based in superstition, not reason.
Link via Maggie Koerth-Baker at Boing Boing.
Posted in Geek
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Words, Words, Words
So, the novel. As near as I can figure, after much dithering about with thorny plot issues and restructuring, plus a couple of wasted days in early November, my grand total word count for the end of National Novel Writing Month is:
The problem is that I’m not exactly sure how long the thing is going to run. My previous optimistic estimate of plus or minus 110K was, well, optimistic. 125K may even be a little short of the mark. But! Progress is being made. Slowly but surely. One of these days, I’ll have a finished novel.
Now, as previously noted, I didn’t actually participate in NaNoWriMo this year and didn’t get to use it as a pace car either. My plan still stands to do my own private NaNoWriMo for the month of December. So, keep an eye on that death bar. I suspect it’s stalking me and may try and jump me if I go to sleep.
Posted in National Novel Writing Month, Writing
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The Smell of Pepper Spray in the Morning
As usual, Naomi Wolfe has the number on the OWS crackdown:
Why this massive mobilisation against these not-yet-fully-articulated, unarmed, inchoate people? After all, protesters against the war in Iraq, Tea Party rallies and others have all proceeded without this coordinated crackdown. Is it really the camping? As I write, two hundred young people, with sleeping bags, suitcases and even folding chairs, are still camping out all night and day outside of NBC on public sidewalks – under the benevolent eye of an NYPD cop – awaiting Saturday Night Live tickets, so surely the camping is not the issue. I was still deeply puzzled as to why OWS, this hapless, hopeful band, would call out a violent federal response.
That is, until I found out what it was that OWS actually wanted.
The mainstream media was declaring continually “OWS has no message”. Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online “What is it you want?” answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers. These were truly eye-opening.
The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process. No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act – the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.
No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.
When I saw this list – and especially the last agenda item – the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them.
It’s not just that the OWS movement is getting all up in the face of Wallstreet and thus bringing the ire of their lapdogs in Washington. OWS is now threatening the income of our blessedly corrupt leaders. And thus, the DHS is coaching our militarized police on how to crack skulls.
Much has been made out of the now Internet-famous cop who casually pepper sprayed seated protesters. But what did you expect? You give a cop pepper spray and a baton he’s going to go looking for an excuse to use it. It now appears that excuse came from Homeland Security and with the blessings of our ruling class. OWS is a little more than 2 months old and so far, has been surprisingly peaceful (at least on their side). It will take a miracle for that to last because if history has taught us anything, it’s that those who make peaceful progress impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.
Posted in Capitalism is a Whore, Occupy Wall Street, Politics
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As Goes Bella, So Goes the Nation
Over at Goodreads, they’ve discovered something interesting about the readers of the Twilight books (click the link to see the infographic):
There is no more divisive book on Goodreads than Twilight. It manages to top both our Best Books Ever and Worst Books of All Time lists. And now, surprisingly, we’ve discovered that where you live can indicate whether you’re a Twi-Hard or not.
With the release of the film adaption of Breaking Dawn (well, the first half of the film adaptation), we thought it might be fun to dive into some more of the incredible trove of data we have on the Twilight Saga and its readers.
A map of what each state thinks of Twilight ends up looking a lot like a map of the most recent election results. On the map above, the readers in the red states rated the book highly (the darker the red, the higher the rating), while readers in the blue states gave it a lower rating). The Midwest and the South represent The Twilight Belt, while the coasts were decidedly less impressed with the book.
Reviews were mostly distributed according to population, with the notable exception of Utah. Utah is the 34th most populous state in the US, but it generates the 6th most reviews of Twilight. In terms of cities, Salt Lake City—the 125th largest city in the country—is second only to New York in number of Twilight reviews. Opinion on the book is split in the Beehive state, with the average rating a pedestrian 3.64.
The series’ popularity in Utah becomes more explicable when you recall that the author, Stephanie Myers, is Mormon and so are the Cullens.
Having lived in the Twilight Belt/Red States most of my life, I find this not at all surprising. The lack of literacy in that region is a scourge upon the land and the popularity of Twilight, like the rise of yokel-bating politics, is a direct result of the fact that the locals are a proudly ignorant folk. They like their leaders to be Good Old Boys and their entertainment a slick patina of pop culture that just barely covers a misogynistic pseudo-spiritual story that just happens to reinforce hetero-normative values and white male privilege. The popularity of both Twilight and Rick Perry are part of the same problem.
Also: If you really want o make your head spin, here’s an article praising Twilight from a feminist POV, on the grounds that Bella’s objectification is something young women can relate to, unlike the ass kickery of Buffy Summers or Lisbeth Salander, who are icky masculine girls because of pants. Or something. And also that the pregnancy is realistically depicted (except for the whole vampire eating itself out of the mother’s womb).
Anyway. In the comments of that article there’s a long digressive discussion centering on Myers’ use of blank pages to represent Bella’s heartache when her vampire boyfriend leaves her (alas, temporarily). That particular passage is one of my pet peeves as a writer. The blank pages are just a gimmick to cover up Myers’ week writing skills. A good writer doesn’t shy away from delving into the murk of touchy emotional states. If anything, they relish them as a challenge. The blank pages are Myers admitting publicly she doesn’t have the emotional maturity or writerly craft to depict a lovesick teenager. Which begs the question of what she would do if a story required her to describe the savory delight of a well prepared cheesburger, let alone the ineffable quintessence of love.
On the upside, I did come upon the realization that Bella isn’t a character, she’s a McGuffin, an object to be hoarded, fought over (by men) and fetishised. Those blank pages representing Bella’s mental state when Edward isn’t around are extremely telling. Without a man to observe her, she literally has no presence in the story. She neither thinks about her predicament nor feels anything that registers as an emotion or a thought. She has about as much agency as the Maltese Falcon* (objectively worthless except for the secret thing inside her that everyone really wants).
________
*I was going to say the Ark of the Covenant in Indiana Jones, but the Ark has at least enough agency to melt some Nazis for failing to recognize its inherent inertia. The Ark will not tolerate being used crassly for the needs of men. Bella exists solely for that purpose.
Posted in Books, Politics, Vampire Mormons and their Girlfriends, Writers, Writing, You keep using that word...
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