Ambrose & Elsewhere

Not to keep on kicking the Slate.com movie reviewers To go on kicking the Slate movie reviewers: there’s a hyperbolic review on that site of Mike Judge’s little-seen Idiocracy entitled “The DVD That Will Save America”. The title is no doubt meant to be ironic, irony being easier than saying what one means.

The plot of the movie sounds an awful lot like the future in Kornbluth’s “The Little Black Bag” and “The Marching Morons” (which was adapted to fit the Kornbluth/Pohl collaboration Search the Sky). These stories all have something to them, but Idiocracy seems to mimic their most repulsive premise. That is: upper/middle class people have less children than lower-class people do, and therefore the future will be full of morons. This can only be true, even for the sake of argument, if upper/middle class people are genetically superior to lower class people, a sentiment open to doubt.

Long years have passed since Minnesota unleashed Jesse Ventura on the unsuspecting policy world. It’s nice to see my home state is still in the vanguard of imaginary government. Maybe this sort of thing could be adapted to Iraq?

Read, reread and rereread with increasing lack of comprehension at Sartre’s Slate’s “Movie Club” feature:

“What was Little Miss Sunshine if not a brilliant ontological dissection of the perils of sublimation?”

I think the answer is, “A movie.” But I’m not sure what “ontological” can mean in this context, particularly modifying “dissection.” It certainly makes Little Miss Sunshine sound more like Saw 4: Being and Nothingness than the thin film of something described here.

John O’Neill at Black Gate wrote me just after Christmas to tell me he was buying the most recent Morlock novella (a sequel to “Payment Deferred”), and I have been invited to submit stories to two different places. So naturally I have been blocked. This is a relative rarity for me: normally when I have time to write I can write.

Nothing is more tedious than a self-involved writer writing about writing, except for a self-involved writer writing about not writing, so I’ll try to keep this brief. But one of the things I discovered about myself (as I was trying to find out what the trouble was) was sort of amusing.

I wrote for twenty years in the closet, tapping out stories for an sf/f market that was becoming increasingly remote from the kind of stories I was tapping out. This was not bright, but it was not unintentional. I decided that, since I was obviously not going to make a living at this business, that I might as well write the kind of fiction I liked reading (call it adventure fantasy, sword and sorcery, or …) and consider publication (should it ever happen) as gravy.

Dim as it was, this method had some benefits. The relevant one: as I accumulated a mountainous pile of rejection slips, I was increasingly willing to drop the big one and see what happened since there seemed to be no likelihood anyone else would ever lay eyes on the results, no matter how disastrous the experiment.

And now that some of those same stories have been published and read, I no longer have the sublime confidence of failure. There is at least a chance, a tiny chance, that the stories I write will be read by somebody. Instead of writing in a closet, I feel like I’m writing in a window.

The nice thing about an inhibition like this is that, as soon as you notice it, it vanishes like The O.C.‘s ratings. I… I ain’t a-scared o’ no windows (said the Mac user nervily).

Merry Christmas to those who like that sort of thing. To all a good night!

A message from the far future… of 1975!!!

[Edit (2/14/07): The old YouTube link seems to have broken so my technical aide son found another at iFilm.]

Paul Jessup has put up an on-line poll about the state of the sf/f fiction market.

Seen at Steve Goble‘s blog.

This one glommed from Danny Adams‘ LJ.

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: His Excellency James the Extemporaneous of Similar Ealand Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

Massive Stars in Open Cluster Pismis 24

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap061219.html

Edward Rothstein reviewed the new Robert Fagles translation of the Aeneid last week in the NYT.

He likes it, but from the review I’m doubtful I will. He doesn’t quote much (a bad sign in a review of a poetic translation) and what he does quote doesn’t exactly bite one on the eye or the ear.

But you, Roman, remember, rule with all your power
the peoples of the earth — these will be your arts:
to put your stamp on the works and ways of peace,
to spare the defeated, break the proud in war.

That’s Fagles, rendering Aeneid 6.851ff:

tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento;
hae tibi erunt artes; pacisque imponere morem,
parcere subiectis, et debellare superbos.

English is just wordier than Latin, but it is annoying that Fagles takes 2.5 times as many words (and an extra line) to inaccurately represent what Vergil says.

Remember, Roman, to rule the nations with lawful power.
These will be your arts: to impose the habit of peace,
spare the conquered and conquer the proud.

That’s my rendering, not terribly original, with only 9 more words than the original. Less words, more impact: it’s a cardinal principle of Latin poetry. It’s clear that Fagles isn’t the man to see this important point, and that may make him an unfit translator of Vergil.

But the thing that really bothered me about the review is that it praised the Aeneid by making it sound like an early Imperial civics text. The epic is this crazy wizard’s garden of gods and magic and monsters and ghosts and love and hate and death and destruction and hope and fate and horror and madness and reverence and revenge and deception and dreams and beginnings and endings and from all of this Rothstein has plucked the gray lifeless bloom of Roman Duty.

I say ugh to that. With friends like these Vergil won’t have any enemies, since no one will pay the slightest attention to him.