Ambrose & Elsewhere

Thirty nine years ago much of my large and obstreperous birth family was huddled around our little black-and-white TV trying to make sense of the grainy images we saw there. Ostensibly they represented the outside of the LEM and we were waiting for Neil Armstrong to step out and take the first step that any human being would take on a world besides the Earth.

And we waited.

And we waited.

And we waited.

Finally I heard my brother Michael intoning in a nasal NASA™ monotone, “Houston… Houston… the string is broken…”

Most of us started rolling around on the floor laughing; my father was furious; and I’m not sure the uproar in the room had died down when the rest of the world heard this.

But that’s sort of how my memories of the space program go. I don’t associate it with science fiction at all. Before I was reading science fiction, or anything, I was used to Saturday morning cartoons being pre-empted by news of the Gemini Program. Space flight wasn’t a dream; it was mundane, though sometimes interesting, reality–sort of like political campaigns.

I was going to post a long political screed here, but then it occurred to me that there might be one or two other people on the internet who have that beat covered.

And now: this.

My brilliant agent Mike Kabongo (a.k.a. onyxhawke) ran some Strunk up the flagpole this afternoon, but I couldn’t salute it.

Strunk: “Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn’t been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place.” The second sentence is unquestionably true, but I never could wrap my head around the principle it’s meant to support. (The right noun can’t save the wrong adjective either; see below for some examples.)

I wrote in the comments:

I always enjoy alienating my friends, so I think I’ll argue this point.

I’m not crazy about “not” rules for writing. Writers should do what works. But this one in particular bothers me, possibly because of a B I got on a writing assignment in grad school. (The prof’s comment: “Your frequent use of adverbs reduces the gravity of your presentation.” My muttered response contained a verb, an adverb and a pronoun.)

But consider this old chestnut:

Red sky at night:
sailor’s delight.
Red sky at morning:
sailor take warning.

Take the adjective away and it’s not ungrammatical; it just doesn’t have any point.

I had more to say, but it was getting a little long for a comment, so I thought I’d continue here.

Take a sentence like this:

“Your cat is —- .”

It makes a huge difference what adjective (if any) fills that blank: consider the varying forces in this context of “ugly” / “orange” / “fuzzy” / “hairless” / “alive” / “dead”. The entire weight of that sentence rests on the predicate adjective.

Predicates don’t have to be adjectives, and (for that matter) nouns can be used as adjectives. (“Bob’s dog is dead” will have a different emotional force from “Your dog is dead”; “pit bull” is profoundly different than “Red Bull”.) That’s part of my bigger problem with Strunk here. He misconceives how language works, drawing a sharp line between categories of words that fundamentally and functionally overlap.

My view is that the writer sets out to make an impact on the reader using sound and sense. All other rules are just crayons in the box: use them if they’re useful; ignore them if they’re not.

I appear before you fresh from having searched the word “fantasy” in a blog-search program. And I have learned two things, one general and one specific.

A.) (general) Never do this.

B.) (specific) Do not write about BDSM unless you can spell “dungeon.” Misspelling this tricky but useful word may undermine your authority.

Now I’m going to try and apply these lessons in my daily life.

1. Happy Bastille Day.

2. WALL*E is (in my son’s words) “as good as Wanted was bad.” I liked the sparing touch with exposition, the soaring visuals, the courageous decency of most of the characters (and the plausible self-interest of the villains). Then there were the sneaky references: “The Blue Danube” and “Also Sprach Zarathustra” appear in the soundtrack at appropriate moments; WALL*E’s pseudo-relationship with the dormant Eve is Pygmalion-in-a-garbage-dump; the movie’s credits cunningly recapitulate the history of human art. But all those are just decorations: the story works, the characters are as dynamic as one can expect from a cartoon, the animation is beautiful. WALL*E is another one of those classics from Pixar which justify the existence of animated movies.

3. Hellboy II: The Golden Army: Eh. Wonderful integration of CGI with non-CGI, and wonderful visuals in general, not just on technical grounds. Some decent humor (although, as Nathan Long notes, a little too much straining for it). Some really good fighting scenes, particularly with the evil (but not unsympathetic) elvish prince. (I kept wishing that this were a movie about Moorcock’s Elric: del Toro has the horror/fantasy chops to pull off a screen adaptation of the White Wolf.) But my biggest problem was the plodding plot. It was perfectly self-evident from around minute 15 exactly how the antagonist would be defeated and by whom. The rest of the movie is a series of more or less sparkly beads strung on this all-too-straight thread.

There were some genuinely magical moments, as with the burst of glorious green life which followed the death of the plant “elemental.” It suggested a level of meaning which nobody talked about directly. That was cool.

Worth seeing in the theater for the spectacle. Did not leave me wishing for Hellboy III: Blood from a Stone, or whatever it’ll be called.