Ambrose & Elsewhere

queenoftheskies mentions The Writer’s Five, a new LiveJournal community that posts five questions for writers each week on Wednesday. I feel a pressing urge to post something here besides YouTube videos, so I’m in.

These questions are all about a character, so I’m choosing Morlock Ambrosius, only continuing character of mine that’s made it into print.

1 – What is your character’s favorite color? Does he own anything that color?

Morlock’s favorite color is probably red, but he can’t wear it and doesn’t own anything in that color.

2 – Your character wants to read a book or rent a movie – what would he/she choose?

Morlock would read a book, I think. His only interest in a video player and TV set would be in taking them apart to see how they work.

3 – Does your character have any siblings? Do they get along?

He has two sisters in his birth family and five brothers in his adoptive family. He’s pretty detached from all of them, but probably closest to one of his sisters.

4 – Has your character ever had a hangover? How did it happen?

Morlock is a drunk, with increasing and lengthening periods of sobriety in middle age.

5 – What is your character’s main mode of transportation?

Mostly he walks. But at one point he acquires a horse named Velox (seen here in the foreground).

I know it seems like this blog is becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of YouTube, but a friend brought this video to my attention, and since it is both useful and beautiful– Oh, no it’s not. But it is the 24 books of the Odyssey, summarized fairly well in about a half-second per book.

A mash-up of the 300 trailer, transforming it into family fun for all ages. I would pay big money to see this movie.

This meme has popped up in a few places that I know of. Steve Goble’s recent resurrection of it inspired me to make my own (not especially original) list.

Things I Never Want to See Again in Fantasy Fiction

1. Vampires. Particularly vampire lovers of moody vamped women. (Isn’t there some new metaphor for exotic doomed romance out there, waiting to be used? Were-panthers? Piratical walrus ranchers? Corrupt but dashing accountants? Enough with the vampires!) Offending authors to be locked in a glass cage with a cloud of mosquitoes to experience the sensual pleasure of bloodsucking parasites at first hand. (Somehow this line seems to good to be original. Whoever I stole it from is free to complain that I am a literary vampire; they certainly have my sincere fangs.)

2. People who are famous without having done anything. (Heroes have to earn their bones.) Offending authors to be sentenced to endless, increasingly disturbing fanfic.

3. Names with apostrophes: F’fiff’le’frr’f or the like. (Self-explanatory.) Offending authors must study phonetics until they can do it right.

4. The Hero Is The Chosen One Who Will wompfle-pompfle-yompfle. (Heroes have to earn their bones; they can’t inherit them from destiny, Aeneas.) Offending authors will be forbidden the use of capital letters.

5. Evil Dark Lords of Evil. (Evil rarely marks itself that conveniently, not if it has anything on the ball.) Offending authors to be compelled to read Melville’s The Confidence Man until they get it.

6. Fluffy harmless dragons. (Dragons can be for or against the protagonist, but they should not be merely nice.) Offending authors will be immersed in a vat of Beanie Babies until they acknowledge the horror of commercialized cuteness.

7. Novels that don’t fit into a single volume. I realize there are many stellar exceptions (Lord of the Rings, the Aubrey/Maturin series, etc.), and I’m not against sequels (a different matter) but I’m inclined to believe that most people continue their story past the first volume because they don’t know how to end it. Much as I don’t know how to end this paragraph with an appropriate punishment.

8. Killing secondary characters–with or without the involvement of refrigerators–just to lend a false similitude of danger and/or emotional depth. (You’re not fooling anyone, you know.) Offending authors to wear red shirts whenever they beam down to the planet.

9. Fake deaths. (It’s one thing to have a character who is believed to have died but actually has not; a character who has actually been killed should not be brought back for the convenience of the storyteller.) Offending authors to confront their own mortality.

10. Characters who don’t see the obvious. Offending authors to spend a week in a shopping mall wearing a Captain Obvious costume, constantly confronted by people who say, “Isn’t it Obvious?”

Howard A. Jones, Managing Editor for Black Gate, has set up a LiveJournal for the magazine. In the first entry he sketches some sword and sorcery musings. Looks like it might be a promising venue to kick some ideas around.

…is the music of Altan on St. Patrick’s Day, or St. Hubert’s Day, or any particular day.

Bo Mhin Na Toitean /Dark Haired Lass

Ta Mo Chleamhnas A Dheanamh

In a recent post Sean Stiennon mulls over the perennial issue of showing vs. telling with his usual wit and concision.

What he said got me thinking, and one of the things that occurred to me was that the oft-cited commandment “Show, don’t tell” is absolutely correct, but sometimes wrong. Sometimes it’s better to tell than show. Narrative should be as vivid as possible (showing) but exposition should be sneaky and quick as possible, which is where telling comes in. It’s unfair to the readers to clutter exposition with all sorts of vein-popping detail when they (hopefully) want to get on to the battle scene where Velfnarth the Embittered smites the Evil Master of Zeppelins with his Pointéd Stick. (Or on to the heart-wrenching scene where Velfnarth gives up his dream of vengeance to save a helpless kitten, or on to whatever the story is going to be about.)

I have a bad example of showing and a good example of telling from the same story, Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet. In the second part of the novella, Conan Doyle wastes 15000-some words drearily documenting the backstory of the murderer and his motive, when he could have sketched in the motive in a few dozen words. “Showing” is no good unless it serves to bring the narrative forward. For shame, Doctor! In the last chapter of Study, though, the murderer sketches in his motive in a few dozen words (“It don’t much matter to you why I hated these men…; it’s enough that they were guilty of the death of two human beings — a father and daughter — and that they had, therefore, forfeited their own lives.”). A lesser writer might have wasted 15000-some words on this project. Bravo, Doctor! When I read that chapter I thought this Conan Doyle and his detective hero might really hit the big time, and I think someone mentioned to me recently that they did.

On balance, I liked 300.

I decline utterly to interpret it as a political allegory for the war in Iraq, or whatever Procrustean bed of pseudosymbolism some commentators are trying to fit it to. It just doesn’t seem like it’s trying to make that sort of point.

Although the movie was not even intended to be historically accurate, there were three things that bothered me. First was the portrayal of the Spartan Ephors–not because it was inaccurate, but because it didn’t make sense. They’re all old and disgustingly inbred men. And they regularly get beautiful young women from the city to have sex with. More appropriately than elsewhere, I think here we may issue a big, red throbbing “WTF?” I also became a little annoyed at the treatment of Xerxes, the “god-king”–a notion considerably more blasphemous in Zoroastrianism than in Greek polytheism. But in the cartooniverse of the movie, it made a certain sense. Finally, brethren and systren, I hated the scene with the Molotov cocktails, hated it with a hot hate. Modern filmakers are incapable of staging a battle scene without explosions. There is no heroism without fireworks, it seems.

The filmakers went so far over the top that one forget where the top had been–I might mention the flute-playing goat-man, here, or the Orc-ninja Immortals, or a number of things, but I don’t cite them as a criticism of the movie, just to give you a sense of what it was like. It is ultraviolent enough to appeal to Alex and his droogs, but, given that it’s about a battle in which virtually all of the protagonists are killed, that’s to be expected. The arty portrayal of some of the violence (e.g. the corpse-tree made by an incursion of Persians, or the corpse-wall made of Persians), that was repellent to me, but it’s one way to make the horror of war strike home.

Things I liked about the movie: the fact that Leonidas did not shout his every word of dialogue (contrary to the impression one got from the trailer, the actors did beautiful nuanced work); the relationship between Leonidas and Gorgo; the political problem back at Sparta (though completely fictional, it was not hokey or in any way an idiot-plot); the Ninja-quick moves of the Spartan warriors and the fight-scenes generally. The digital images were superbly blended with the live actors, as well or better than in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (my previous gold standard for this sort of thing). I loved the bits of the source material woven carefully into the woof of the film (“then we will fight in the shade”; “we dine this evening in Hell”; “Tell the Spartans…” etc.).

In spite of the arty ultraviolence and the overthetoppitude, I think 300 may become one of my favorite sword-and-sandal movies. But now I want a companion piece about the Athenian victories at Marathon and Salamis (just to make it clear the Spartans weren’t solely responsible for the Greeks defeating the Persian invasion).

Ὦ ξεῖν’, ἀγγέλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε
κείμεθα, τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι.

As far as magic goes, in fantasy fiction, is less actually more? I’ve been mulling this over lately, apropos a thread at the Black Gate forum (starting about here).

On the one hand, I think a magic-intensive narrative faces the challenge of diminishing returns. If antagonists are throwing mountains at each other on page one, throwing pairs of mountains on page two will not have double the effect, likewise trios of mountains on p. 3 etc. Also, it’s likely to turn away a large amount of the potential audience as being too remote from reality to believe. This is dicier, though. The readers of Snergartholept: The Little Magazine of Big Weirdness are less likely to be alienated by freakish displays of magic than subscribers of Dulles Quarterly: The Magazine of International Policy and Missionary Somnolence.

But after all: are fantasists really trying to snatch readers from Dulles Quarterly: Where Interesting Information Goes to Die a Long Tedious Death Among Hypotactic Clause Structures? Probably not. They are (or may be) competing for readers of Snergartholept, starting with the editors. If these guys expect a little mountain throwing, you might want to try some on page 1, assuming you can justify and sustain it. Then it becomes a question of how you do it when you do it, not whether you should ever do it.

To self-plagiarize something I once wrote in another context: sometimes less is more. But sometimes only more is more.

My son alerted me to the new movie The Last Mimzy, which adapts Lewis Padgett’s Henry Kuttner’s “All Mimsy Were the Borogoves.”

The trailer is available at the movie’s official website.

It looks like an okay movie but I’m pretty sure it won’t ring my bell the way the story did. It makes explicit so many things which are mysterious in the story. Plus, I don’t think there’s enough plot there for a feature-length movie, and sure enough the trailer refers to something about “saving the future” which like, TOTALLY RUINS EVERYTHING is not part of the original.

In “On Fairy Stories” Tolkien has some wise words about words being the proper medium for fantasy (as opposed to drama). When I first read the essay, as a teenager, I was sure he was wrong about this, that it was only a matter of technology. Once special effects became convincing enough, I thought, fantasy would be as filmable as detective stories were. Now I’m not so sure. For one thing, there’s the uncanny valley effect–how something which is almost right can be horribly wrong. More importantly, an image that takes form in your mind will inevitably have more power than one which unfolds on a screen some distance away from you. The best thing about the Peter Jackson adaptation of The Lord of the Rings was the visuals, but they don’t mean anything to me compared to the visions of the Old Forest (of Isengard, of Minas Morgul, of Ithilien, etc.) that I see in my head when I reread the books.

But, to pause briefly from complaining, The Last Mimzy has already prompted the reissue of The Best of Henry Kuttner (as The Last Mimzy and Other Stories), and if the movie is successful it might lead to other good things. A multivolume edition of The Collected Stories of Kuttner and Moore? A feature-length adaptation of Fury? A Gallegher TV series? (Kuttner’s drunken inventor, I mean, not the watermelon-smashing comedian.)

Whatever it is, my son will hear about it before I do.