Ambrose & Elsewhere

We’re being blitzed by campaign material in NW Ohio–not only is Ohio traditionally a swing state (i.e. one of the few US states where one’s vote for president seems to count, thanks to the electoral college), but we’re facing a special congressional election next Tuesday to replace the late Paul Gillmor. The national parties seem to be pouring a lot of money into this race so that they can claim some sort of trend going into the next election. This barrage of advertising makes me, like you, I expect, think of only one thing: rabbitandmouse. (There are some cusswords speckled through the video below.)

The truth is that I’m sort of in favor of attack ads, as long as they’re accurate. They tend to have more content than the warm fuzzy commercials that show the candidate-we-are-supposed-to-love standing on a hill under a rippling flag or walking in shirtsleeves among the Regular Folk. And it’s not swiftboating if the charges are actually true, and relevant.

For instance, I saw an ad yesterday directed against the candidate I plan to vote for. The ad made clear that she was an X and a Y, and advocated polices W and Z. Since those were four solid reasons to vote for her in my view, I thought it was a fine ad (though I did wonder if it was having the desired effect among voters generally).

I think I may have some sort of Jonathan McCalmont allergy. I haven’t had a look at his ill-named SF Diplomat blog since the fantasy-is-authoritarian kerflufflet last summer. But today, in a desperate attempt to stave off useful labor, I followed a link from a friend’s page to his entry ripping Neil Gaiman’s praise of the Kindle. Personally I’d be interested in an e-reader that seemed like it was worth the trouble and money, but as the Kindle seems like an ugly inconvenient box that costs too much money and is packed with DRM technology and ways to go on siphoning cash from your pocket even after you’ve bought the thing, I was perfectly prepared to see someone put a verbal stake through its heart.

McCalmont begins promisingly:

Lots of people have been commenting upon the launch of Amazon’s new Kindle. Personally, it strikes me as an overpriced, crippled piece of junk put together in order to service an eBook market that no major publisher has any faith in.

Go, team. He goes on to talk about Gaiman’s overblown praise of the thing, and I didn’t expect this to bug me. Gaiman’s a talented writer, doubtless without a doubt, but I have sometimes felt that the buzz-to-honey ratio runs a little high.

After mocking Gaiman’s blow-quotes for the Kindle (which are eminently mockable), McCalmont goes on to dredge up Gaiman’s praise for Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell: “Unquestionably the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years”–a sentiment many would question, even if they liked the book, as I did.

Then McCalmont amuses himself and his dwindling audience by inventing blow-quotes for a series of apparently disreputable things and putting Gaiman’s name on them. Dumb, and slimy, even if the quotes were funny (which they’re not). If you can’t nail somebody with their ipsissima verba, maybe they don’t deserve nailing.

While at the site, I read his review of the Zemeckified Beowulf, a movie I’m probably going to have to see. McCalmont’s mixed feelings oddly echo my own premonitions, but I found myself annoyed with the pseudolearning about Old English and medieval literature he deployed in the service of his usual fantasy-is-bad-ick-put-it-down rant.

So I think I’m going to have to find more productive ways to avoid work. Is what I guess I’m saying.

…but the biggest surprise of all was a certain amount of plot movement on all fronts. I’m still not confident that Kring and his crew know what they’re doing, but this was the best episode of the season so far, I think.

I don’t suppose this is a novel observation, but I was forcibly reminded last night that fathers are everything on this show; mothers hover somewhere between irrelevant and scum. The exception would be Niki, except I’m not sure she’s an exception.

Explaining why Kurt Vonnegut’s books are still read in greater numbers than some of his contemporaries with higher reputations, like Norman Mailer and William Styron, Mailer’s literary executor, a guy named J. Michael Lennon, said that “Vonnegut was the American Mark Twain. He even looked liked him.”

I’m hoping that Lennon misspoke and what he meant to say was that Vonnegut was the modern Mark Twain. (There are some striking resemblances: imagination, humor, pessimism, populism. It has to be admitted that Twain towers over Vonnegut in every category.)

If not, I guess there are two possibilities. Norman Mailer’s literary executor doesn’t know much about American literature (does that make his job easier?) or he knows some dreadful secret about America’s greatest novelist. Is there a Scots-Canadian skeleton rattling in Huck Finn’s closet?

I recently saw a couple reviews of Black Gate 11–one just of the stories’ first lines at the wonderfully-named-but-apparently-dormant Ultimate Sword & Sorcery Blog of Ultimate Destiny, and also a more sustained appraisal by Sherwood Smith (a.k.a. sartorias) at The Fix.

The results were, I suppose, predictable.

Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.

Thanks to Karl Bradley and sartorias for the kind words, and fastfwd for the tip on the self-diagnosis quiz.

I’m having trouble believing it’s November already. My day job is really keeping me running these days. Which would be fine if I were even caught up on that, but I’m not.

But I can’t let another day pass without acknowledging the return of Flashing Swords. The current issue can be read online by clicking on the “current issue” link (obvious, I know, but it took me a while to figure out–I must have been distracted by something else on the page). There are a few options available for downloading a barebones text for offline reading, and both e-copies and hardcopies can be purchased through Lulu: a good thought, this. The prices might discourage the casual buyer, but the option is more for the FS fanatic, I think.

It was a satisfying issue, I thought. My favorite bits were probably Steve Goble’s Calthus story, the short poem of Nordic doom by Jason Waltz and the article by Joseph McCullough on Anglo-Saxons in (post)Roman Britain. But it was also fun to see S.C. Bryce continue her serial about Dermanassian. Michael Turner’s “The Jewel Below” is an interesting adventure story in a medieval Islamic setting, and if if I said anything less bland about it than “interesting” I would probably give away something about the ending, so I won’t. T.W. Williams kicks in a vigorous first-person yarn titled “No Man’s Knight” (and he means it). Michael Erhart contributes a story from the same background as his new book Servant of the Manthycore. The story stands well by itself, but it did made me want to read the novel. There’s also an interview with Ralan, and with Margaret H. Bonham.

Well, that’s all the time I have for fantasy at the moment. I have to run off and see an opera with witches and sea-monsters and knights and demons and Cupid losing his arrows and getting zapped with them. Serious, realistic storytelling from the Italian Baroque era.

GalleyCat passes along a rumor that Paramount might be interested in mounting another production of Dune.

Although I’m very fond of the original book (as opposed to any of its sequels), I find myself underwhelmed by the prospect. The David Lynch movie had some visual impact but didn’t tell the story capably; the versions on the SciFi Channel struck me as some of the worst television I had ever seen (for as long as I could stand to watch).

It took Hollywood three times to get The Maltese Falcon right, so maybe this is actually good news. But the thing is, I don’t think Dune is very amenable to film adaptation. There are too many characters, too many events for a single movie. A miniseries might work, or a multipart movie like the Jackson LotR. But the real impact of Dune comes from being in the heads of all these different people. A novel like that may never transfer well to the screen.

Some good rumination over opening sentences in a post by Paul Jessup, who links to one by Jay Lake, who links to one by Richard Parks, who links to one by Andy Duncan.

Writers writing about writing don’t always write stuff which is interesting to passersby, but this sort of shop talk (about beginnings, endings, story-architecture, etc.) also interests me as a reader, so I thought I’d indulge myself here. Also, it’s certainly less dull than posting about Heroes again (in summary: now the shark is jumping the show) or complaining about the latest LJ squeakfest I’ve become entangled in.

So: there are three ways to start a story, as I see it.

You grab the reader by the ear with a conversational opener that lures him into a conspiracy with the storyteller: “Call me Ishmael.”

You grab the reader by the eye with a sensory description that begs for further narration and explanation: “The doorknob opened a blue eye and winked at him.”

You push the reader off a cliff so that she finds herself swimming in the thick of the action: “The Skydiver dropped out of hyperspace an even million miles above the neutron star.”

Stories that take a couple of pages to hook the reader usually won’t. But it may be a mistake, as Jay Lake suggests, to try too hard. I like his last lines about first lines: “the first sentence will be what it is. The more you can load there, the better, but don’t force it. Stories, like wine or cheese, have to breathe.”

It looks like the Library of America is going to have a second volume of Philip K. Dick novels edited by Jonathan Lethem. It seems like it was only last Fall I was blogging about the first volume, and it was. They must have gotten great sales from that first volume–makes a great stocking stuffer in the holidays, no doubt.

PKD is the perfect writer for that institution to memorialize in this post-postmodern minute. I am not knocking the process or the result in any way shape or form. But I do have to wonder if PKD, in his most prolonged vacations from reality, foresaw anything like the Nachleben he has been afterliving: a Hollywood big-shot on the one hand, spawning movie after movie, and on the other hand a canonized establishment author, his pulpy paranoid operas (paranoperas?) entombed in those beribboned black permabooks. Not even he could have made this stuff up.

Eh. Not all bad, but lots of badness carried over from the previous season, and there is new badness added to the mix.

On the up side, the plot-line involving the older generation of heroes looks like it may go interesting places.

I’ll put most of the moaning and a spoiler or two behind a cut. Sail the whine dark sea.