Ambrose & Elsewhere

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.

Paul Jessup proposes a new line of public domain classics in affordable editions. Sounds like a blast!

An interesting discussion of plot here at Steve Goble’s Swords Against Boredom, and a discussion of plot vs. character in fantasy, starting here on the Black Gate message boards.

More later, maybe, as this has been much on my mind lately. But right now I have to run off and explain to a bunch of serious-minded undergraduates why Aristophanes is funny.

It’s been a long wait, but the preview for Black Gate issue 10 is up. The magazine itself is due out in March.

As always, I’m impressed by Chuck Lukacs’ take on Morlock. Also, I wonder what the horse is thinking about the titular book, which was not something I gave any thought to before I saw Chuck’s art.

I’m looking forward to this issue for a lot of reasons, though: the Harry James Connolly story looks like a riot; there’s a new Judith Berman story set in the fascinating world of her earlier “The Poison Well”; and Howard Jones is pitching in with one of his Dabir and Asim stories: I’ve read three of these so far, and they’ve all been great historical fantasy.

Rich Horton’s column this issue is about sf/f magazines in the 1970s which was not, as we know, the Golden Age of Science Fiction, but it was the decade when I was a teenager, just discovering the genre magazines, so the column should be a fun read.

I succumbed to temptation and put up an egomaniacal shrine a website at https://jamesenge.com/.

The motivating factor was that, with Pitch-Black dead, one of my “published” stories is likely to be seen by almost no one. So I coded it for HTML and posted it there, along with links to some other stuff.

The site is pretty bare-bones at the moment. You wouldn’t believe how many hours it took me to make those dry bones live, though: I was not born for that kind of work.

In a recent post at Deep Genre, Constance Ash quoted a NYT film writer’s passing mention of genre in movies:

My point is not that these movies are interchangeable, or that their similarities betray a lack of imagination on the part of their makers. A genre is not a formula but a paradigm, an endlessly variable model that can be adapted to different temperaments and circumstances. Directorial acumen, agile screenwriting and sensitive acting distinguish the run-of-the-mill from the genuinely interesting.
–A.O. Scott

She wondered, shrewdly it seemed to me, whether this applied outside of film.

In a comment I wrote:

I guess I like the idea of genre as a paradigm, rather than a formula.

A formula is necessarily restrictive. “Three shalt be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, nor either count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out.” If you don’t follow the recipe precisely, the Holy Hand-Grenade will not explode.

But the root meaning of paradigm is “example” and I really think that’s how our sense of genre is formed. “This book has spaceships and multicolored rays, like Doc Smith; I’ll put it in the box with the Lensman series. This one has elves; I’ll put it in the same box with The Lord of the Rings.” Eventually the boxes get tags (”space opera”; “high fantasy”; “mysteries where the murderer sings ‘Banana Phone’”, etc). But these are really just abstractions from a set of specific examples. If the set of accepted examples grows, the borders of the genre can expand. (Likewise they can contract if the set of defining examples shrinks.)

So, I was going to add, but I thought the comment was getting a tad long, this model is more flexible than the formula definition of genre, but it’s not utterly chaotic. People’s notions of a given genre won’t necessarily coincide with each other (nor should they) but the addition of new examples, extending the genre paradigm, won’t necessarily eclipse the old examples. There will be continuity as well as change.

I’ve been flipping through Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style (2nd ed., 1972), prompted by a glance through Weird Tales‘ guidelines. I’ve owned the book for roughly 30 years and hated it continously all through that time. I don’t suppose I’ve actually had it open since the 1970s but its stupid lying prohibitions have been dogging my steps since, apparently, before I was born.

It’s not as if there is no good advice in Strunk and White. Right there on page one the it’s/its thing is handled with deft concision. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve marked a student paper for something like that, I would, um, have ever so many nickels. I’d love to be able to hand this book to students and say, “Read this and use it.”

But on the same stupid page it says that one may not form the possessive of a word ending in -s with a simple apostrophe. Except for the name of Jesus. But not the name of Moses or Isis. One must write The laws of Moses but never never Moses’ laws or Moses’s laws. Jesus’ laws–totally okay. Charles’ laws–totally wrong. Why? These are Strunk’s laws. Yours is not to reason why, not if you want a passing grade in composition.

Those who internalize these ad hoc prescriptions will not improve their English. Charles’ and Charles’s are both in common use and there is no reason to thunder against one or the other. But those who read S&W and believe it are likely to become usage-fetishists, constantly squeaking in excitement and horror when someone violates some dictate of the Master.

A decent style guide ought to combine direct, useful advice with tools that would assist the reader to think about writing effectively, rather than cookie-cutter mandates that kill thought. (Adverbs are bad! They make the angels cry!) And, of course, it ought to have some kind of linguistic accuracy. (Although prescriptivists tend to hate descriptive linguistics as much as linguists hate prescriptivism, the only valid basis for a stylistic prescription is sound linguistic knowledge.)

I wish I knew of such a guide. But, whatever it is, it’s not Strunk.

Another unexpected day off in the middle of the week. As I was kicking my way through snowdrifts, on my way downtown to buy some flowers for the One, I realized the storm had been a little more severe than I’d thought. The total amount of snow wasn’t that much, but the wind had packed it into high, hard snowdunes.