The Invisible Library

We saw Indiana Jones and the [place] of the [spooky noun] Friday night and were amused enough not to get up and leave so I guess it was alright. I had medium expectations going in and they were met. I stopped expecting artistry from Lucus and Spielberg ages ago and now settle for passable craft form them and their plug and play lackeys. All was in order. The Koepp Scriptwriting software turned out a by-the-numbers story with no surprises that weren’t on the “so dumb I can’t believe they did that” end of the spectrum. The characters were slightly more than two dimensional (ranging between 2.2 and 2.8) and the egregious CG effects were kept to the animal kingdom, so no real foul can be called.

Spielberg has mastered the skill of keeping you engaged in a movie just long enough to make it to the credits. Maybe this has always been his gift. Not genius or even exceptional craftsmanship, but just good enough cinema-making skills to make an entertaining way to waste a few hours. There are worse skill sets to have. Though it is kind of sad that the trailer for The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor looks more like an Indiana Jones movie than the actual Indiana Jones movie we saw.

But there’s no way for Spielberg to deliver on that sort of expectation. He, Lucus and Ford spent the last 18 years twiddling their thumbs and in the meantime, the movies changed. The audience changed. Some of that was Spielberg and Lucus’ doing but how sad is it that they were beaten at the game they invented?

I would have liked a better Indiana Jones movie but got the Crystal Skull instead. It wasn’t socks for Christmas but neither was it the BB gun I wanted. “That’s OK,” says Steven Spielberg. “A better movie would have just put your eye out anyway.”

Kate Blanchett clearly had fun with her Lulu wig and Russian accent. And hay, swords! Shia The Beef got to be in a movie with Harrison Ford. His Erdos-Bacon number just went up. Seeing Karen Allen again was great. Wish there had been more for her to do than drive a truck off a cliff but hay, I’m sure John Hurt wanted to be more than just a walking, babbling treasure map. No Joy, John. This is a Koepp script and there simply is no room for that much characterization.

There’s much to be said about the plot holes, the silly aliens and magic of magnetic crystal skulls, CG ants that look like killer M&Ms and those silly, silly monkeys. But why bother? See the movie. Enjoy your two hours and then try not to be bitter as you leave the theater. It is after all, only a movie.

_________

* He could be a world class pianist and Soviet History specialist put in charge of managing the foreign policy of the world’s only empire, fighting a pitched battle against an asymmetrical foe that is neither Soviet (or even Russian!) and wouldn’t know an F from a G sharp. Steven Spielberg is no Condi Rice, that’s for sure. George Lucus may be the cinematic equivalent of Donald Rumsfeld though. The case is still pending.

Just a reminder that real Life is still stranger than fiction:

Remember how I was just in Vancouver? Well, instead of checking luggage, I had a box of clothes FedExed up there and then back down here when I left. It avoids the hassles of baggage claim and I totally recommend this plan. When you’re ready to head home, you just scoop your unlaundered clothes into a box and ship it off, neat as you please.

Except that they do some sort of operation at the border in which the shipping labels are removed and sometimes switched. Fun!

This means that when a box arrived at my home yesterday, it didn’t contain my clothes. It contained someone else’s clothes. Luckily, this person was savvier than I about the hazards of international shipping labels, and had included a piece of paper with his name and (business) address. I have the property of a “Mr. R. Starkey.” Those of you who know stuff about stuff are now freaking out. A little checking re: the address and the business name has verified: I have Ringo Starr’s clothes. Okay, now everyone can freak out. Please notice that according to any system of logic, this makes me the fifth Beatle.

Some things just couldn’t work in fiction because they are too real.

Brent Bozell has a column at Townhall in which he takes us dirty hippie librarians to task for our censorship:

It is quite apparent who the ALA believes to be the heroes and villains of this struggle. There are the avatars of intellectual freedom, the brave souls who champion open-mindedness, and then there are the censorious busybodies. Some have made the obvious point that challenging libraries to provide titles they’re not stocking would turn the tables and make people realize that librarians can also be censorious in the titles they choose not to display. The mere act of selecting some books and excluding others is a “censorious” act.

Press accounts leave out that the ALA not only disdains the public “challenges,” it lobbies on the books’ behalf. In 2006, the two-penguin-daddy “And Tango Makes Three” was honored as an ALA Notable Children’s Book. The librarians’ group isn’t simply for “freedom.” It’s for sexual liberation, promoting the “non-traditional,” and it takes offense at the idea that parents might not want their children discussing homosexuality in kindergarten. Simon & Schuster, the publishers of “Tango,” offer discussion questions about the book on their website. One says: “Tango has two fathers instead of the traditional mother and father. Do you have a nontraditional family, or do you know someone who does?”

Already we can predict how the ALA next year will complain about any objection to a book called “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding,” the story of a young guinea pig who worries that her Uncle Bobby won’t play with her anymore after he “marries” his boyfriend Jamie. The book ends at the “wedding,” with Chloe as the enthusiastic flower girl. In other words, the ALA doesn’t favor open discussion and debate with parents — which is what the “challenges” represent. Its idea of “freedom” is emboldening librarians to be brave enough to indoctrinate children with what they really need to know, whether their parents object or even know about it. If public debate follows, it’s viewed as a distasteful and unfortunate bump on the road to enlightenment.

You keep using this word. I don’t think it means what you think it means, Brent.

First off, the ALA’s Most Challenged list is compiled to bring attention to books that people–specifically, people form the community served by the local library–want removed for ideological reasons. Promoting books that bigots and other non-elites* want banned is the exact opposite of censorship.

Secondly, promoting books with a minority viewpoint, such as And Tango Makes Three, while not promoting, say the Bible is not censorship either. The Bible, or to be less inflammatory, Doctor Seuss books, don’t really need promoting. Everyone already knows about those books and the viewpoints they express and knows that they can come into just about any library and find them. But people also come into libraries looking for other books, sometimes ones they may not even know exist but hope to find because they need information that isn’t contained in the usual books. Information such as how to handle introducing children to the notion of same sex parents. And because libraries serve everyone in the community, not just the privileged white Christian majority, they often carry and promote these books as well as the standard selections that won’t offend your lily white, antiseptic mind.

Also: if you don’t see the book you want on the shelf, you can always find the nearest librarian and request them to carry it. They’ll more than likely agree to purchase it, with the caveat that they may not be able to do so right away, since their budget has been cut by anti-intellectual shills for one of the most unenlightened and disastrous administrations in US history.

__

Link via Mister Leonard Pierce at Sadly, No!

_________
* Thanks to the tireless efforts of Brent Bozell and the right wing clown car posse, everyone who isn’t a coal miner’s daughter or a member of the KKK’s noose tying brigade is now an “elite” which no longer means good, but has come to mean self-satisfyingly superior. Because why anyone would want to feel superior to mouth breathing red necks and lynch mobs in search of a body is clearly beyond the intellectual skills of Brent Bozell. These are his people after all.

Each of them is 101 words long. You can do very cool stuff with brevity. Just ask Jorge Luis Borges.

So, much to my embarrassment, it turns out there was a glitch of some sort when I was laying out the type for my book and the first edition of The Machine of the World is littered with typos. I know it was a software glitch because there is no way I would have missed every instance of the word “from” being replaced with “form.” Legitimate typos, I’ll own up to. But this is something beyond what I could have prepared for and must have been late in the process. The joys of self publishing: when it goes well, it’s all to your credit and when things go wrong, it’s all your fault. Maybe I should find a publisher so future problems can be blamed on them?

But! Everyone with a typo-edition now has a collector’s item. So there’s that.

Once I get the problem sorted out, a new edition will be up and I’ll see if I can find a way to do some sort of exchange for a typo-free edition for those who want it.

The Machine Of The World is selling well, beyond what I had hoped. Thanks to everyone who has bought a copy so far!

This is a first edition and as such, there are probably a few typos lurking between the covers. It happens. Stephen King has typos, and he has an army of proof readers and professional editors.* And in the case of someone who wrote, illustrated, designed and typeset their own book, well, it’d be a miracle if there weren’t a few typos somewhere.

So, consider this an open thread: if you find any typos in The Machine Of The World, leave a comment, telling me page number, paragraph and what the goof is. In a few months, when the book has been thoroughly combed through, I’ll make the changes and put up a second edition.†

Update 5/8/08: I’ve moved this back to the top and reopened comments. I’ve also added various formats to the free download option. You can now download a pdf, txt, html or Open Document Text file. There’s even a Word doc version. That’s right, I’m giving away Microsoft proprietary software. For Free. I’m sure Bill Gates will wake up tonight in a cold sweat, knowing that someone, somewhere didn’t pay money for something with the Microsoft name on it. Come and get me, Bill!

_________

* 86 years after publication, James Joyce’s Ulysses still has typos. In fact, there are whole sections that scholars debate over matters of typography and vocabulary, because Joyce had lifelong vision problems, hand wrote the manuscript and made constant revisions and corrections, sometimes contradicting previous edits, making it nearly impossible for there to be a consensus as to what the proper text should look like. MOTW has no such problems, as I follow standard typography and spelling conventions. The made up words are obvious and, I think, are consistently spelled throughout. When in doubt though, the spelling of the first use of the word is correct.

† Which means these first editions will be extra-valuable one day when I’m a famous author. Or just orthographic oddities from the long lost age of late-stage capitalist America, suitable for barter with the other roaming tribes of nomadic hunter gatherers scrabbling a hard existence in the drowned world of a post-oil collapse/globally warmed over society. Whichever comes first.

So, I was reading Pandagon yesterday when I discovered that some really weird folk think Battlestar Galactica is secretly a Mormon recruitment tool[1]. Their evidence? The show makes use of religious imagery and mythology. Which is pretty week as arguments for propaganda go. By this definition, Superman,[2] Star Wars[3] and everything Philip K. Dick[4] ever wrote is also super secret (but right out there in the open) religious propaganda.

Once upon a time, this argument might have applied to the original BSG, which was Mormon mythology dressed up in swank, quilted late seventies space opera. But the new series? Not so much. As Amanda Marcotte pointed out, just because a story derives some of its momentum from popular religious ideas doesn’t automatically mean the creators are promoting that religion. Also, religious pluralism, modern gender roles with women in leadership positions and decidedly secular attitudes towards sex, drinking and drug use don’t exactly scream, “Join The Mormons!” As with any artfully done work of storytelling, it’s not that simple. BSG can’t be broken down into simple declarative statements about its morals and message. It’s a nuanced discussion of various current ideas.

But there is one really obvious way you can tell that BSG isn’t telling it from the mountain: stories told with an ideological agenda are no fun. Whether they are serialized TV dramas, movies, comics or novels, an ideologically driven narrative stands out because the author is selling you a flat pack of easy answers to hard questions. And he (usually it’s a he) is not afraid to beat you silly with the truth stick to make his point[5]. This has some predictable effect on the way the story is told.
Read the rest of this entry »

We’re off to Jacksonville for the weekend. Lucy’s in charge.

I’m usually disappointed by literary best-of lists, because the compiler is either out to prove his erudition by naming obscure and pointless titles and leaving off well known but still notable ones, or because they make me feel inferior for having not read most of the supposed great titles on the list, especially the obscure ones no one has ever heard of. However, the Telegraph has a list of their 50 best cult novels is pretty good, and not just because I’ve read most of them. It’s a pretty decent list as these things go, if a bit incomplete–it leaves off Naked Lunch, which is pretty much the dictionary definition of cult novel. Also, no Brautigan or Lovecraft. Anyway, their descriptions make up for the incompleteness. My vote for snarkist short summary:

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943)
Bewilderingly popular and extremely silly Nietzschean melodrama, in which Ayn Rand gives her mad arch-capitalist philosophy a run round the block in the person of Howard Roark, a flouncy architect. Loved by the kind of person who tells you selfishness is an evolutionary advantage, before stealing your house/lover/job.

Nicely done.

I wold add The Hearing Trumpet, by Leonora Carrington, which might be a little too obscure for cult status, but it definitely has a place in my heart and on my bookshelf. Any other titles not on the list?