Category: film

Art

Transparencies of Days Past

Gradually, given enough time, I’ll both learn proficiency with the new digital medium and transfer my best images from nearly forty years of photography.  I’ve been doing this “in between” all the other things on my plate and it hasn’t had top priority, but once in a while I find some old negatives or, in this case, transparencies that make me wonder, for only a moment, why I’m doing anything else.  I finish working something like this over…

abandoned-house-copy.jpg

…and I get a thrill such as I used to whenever I first made a new image that I thought was worth a damn.

What’s fun now is  that I barely remember taking some of these photographs, but I remember them.  This was an abandoned house behind the property of the people I once worked for.  Furthermore, I shot this with my view camera, a 4X5 Linhof.  I very much wanted to do fine photography and I was raised on the idea that the f64 Group—which had members like Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Wynn Bullock, and others—were the gold standard.  Most of them shot with large format view cameras.  When I finally acquired one and started working with the format, I fell in love.

Negative size relates directly to print quality, that much is obvious, and I could make some very large prints from 4X5 negatives.  But the color work!  This was shot on a long obsolete Ektachrome, E3.  Through most of the 60s on until, oh, the mid 80s or thereabouts, amateur transparency film was E4.  That designates the emulsion type and the processing type.  E3 had been the studio standard for decades and even up through the mid to late 70s large format transparency film was E3.  I could process this myself at home, but it was a magnificent pain.  It required re-exposure part way through the process.  But it possessed a color saturation and vividness e4, as far as I’m concerned, never had.

This particular one, though, had problems.  When I pulled it out of the sleeve it was clear that I had probably been the one to process it.  The image was washed out, heavy in the cyan range.  It may not have been properly stabilized, I don’t know.  But there was enough to it to make it worth scanning.

Once in Photoshop, I was able to revive the original color, much to my surprise, and the image is as sharp as one might wish.  I took it further by erasing a couple of superfluous details, ramping up the contrast a bit, then de-saturating it somewhat for a kind of “aged” look.  Little else was done.  The original exposure had captured everything I needed in good register.

The view camera kit weighed about thirty pounds and I lugged it all over for several years, trying to make “important” images.  A lot of it turned out to be magnificent garbage, but some…well, some came out not too badly.

You’ll find this one and a couple others now on the Zenfolio site.  Enjoy.

Art

Photography and Change

Steve McCurry, a famous photographer whose image of an Afghan girl with brilliant green eyes for National Geographic has become iconic, has been given a great and sad gig—Kodak has handed him the last production roll of Kodachrome to take and shoot.  He’s doing it in grand style, traveling all over the world, with a film crew shooting a documentary about it.

I wanted to be a photographer for National Geographic when I was a teenager.  I knew nothing about how to do that, and for numerous reasons I won’t go into I never found out or took the chance.  I played it safe with a nice steady lab job and didn’t pursue a dream.  Oh well.

But I have nevertheless made some images of which I am very proud.  Here’s one:

cedar-in-canyon-copy.jpg

I just finished Photoshopping this and doing some work on it to make it more what I wanted it to be.  There are reasons for the abandonment of film, yet I feel sad.  Kodachrome had a special look and it was for a long time my favorite film.  The idea that Kodak won’t be making it anymore—or any of its other films—is just too weird to me.  I remember when they purged their paper line.  They once made dozens of types of photographic paper (b & w) in a variety of surfaces and in the mid to late 70s they discontinued 90% of them.  The market was changing, resin coated paper was becoming popular, sales flagged on the harder-to-use fibre papers…

Still, it’s a loss.  I will be very interested to see what Mr. McCurry does with that final roll.  Meantime, like most of the rest of us, I’m learning to do this digitally.

Gotta say, it has possibilities for me that are very seductive.

canyon-swirls-copy.jpg

Both images were shot in New Mexico.

Absurdity

Avatar

Okay, so I contributed to the James Cameron Self Love Fund and saw AVATAR. Yesterday we went to the 3-D showing (no way I would spend money on the normal view, I can wait for the DVD the way I do with 99% of the movies I see anymore).  I’ve had a day to think about it now and I’ve come to some conclusions, which are hardly profound, but I think worth saying.

Let me say up front that I wasn’t bored.  Visually, this is a stunning achievement.  But that’s what everyone is saying.  It is, in fact, the best 3-D I’ve ever seen.  Often in the past the effect is minimal and the cost in headache high.  This was neither.  And it fully supported the visuals rather than masking mundane or poor image elements.  Pandora, the planet involved, is magnificently realized.  Cool stuff.  Real gosh wow.

The biology is problematic.  You have a wide mix of lifeforms analogous to Earth.  Some big lumbering critters like hippos or rhinoceri that also have features of a dinosaur, and some small things that are clearly wolves, and one big nasty cat-like thing that’s like a sabertooth tiger.  It’s unclear if any of these creatures are mammalian, but it doesn’t matter much.  Dinosaur analogs.  Most of them apparently four-legged.  But the “horses” the natives ride are six-legged, reminiscent of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ thoats.  How does that play out in evolutionary terms?  Well, maybe that’s a quibble.

How then do you evolve humanoids out of this?  Well, maybe that’s a quibble, too.  This film is not about science on any level, regardless of the few bits of dialogue suggesting there are, you know, scientists, and that there is a studyable cause to any of this.

Because the story, basically, is hackneyed, cynical, and cliched.  I have to hand it to Cameron, he rips off the best.  Strong elements of Anne McCaffery’s Pern in here, as well as Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and a nod to LeGuin (The Word For World Is Forest), Poul Anderson (Call Me Joe), even Joe Haldeman (All My Sins Remembered).  If I dug through my memories I could probably come up with at least half a dozen more clear “borrowings” all mixed in.  There’s not an original idea in any two minutes.

The plotline, however, is straight out of post-colonial self-loathing and Western angst and while there is much to be mined from that pool that is legitimate for drama, its deployment here was purely sentimental button-pushing.  All the triggers were in place, with strong connections to the American Indian, Vietnam, and even a bit of Afghanistan just to bring it up to date.  And it was all thrown into the mix regardless of the logic behind it, which is profoundly flawed.  The few genuinely interesting touches are overhwelmed by the self-righteous indignation Cameron clearly wished to evoke.  We see Pocahontas, Dances With Wolves, and Custer’s Last Stand all in service to making a statement about…

The Big Bad Nasty Western Corporate Oligarchy Bent On Destroying Everything To Mine The Last Fragment Of Coal.

In this case, Unobtanium.

Which is somehow worth the cost of an expedition that would bankrupt the planet for the next century.

Which, if we buy the premise that interstellar travel is now practical, would be a pointless exercise in colonial assholery with no upside in terms of profit or prestige, because that one assumption means we’ve solved our energy and resource problems  and the scenario depicted rests upon a 19th Century mindset that would no longer be supportable—just as it pretty much isn’t now.

Which makes AVATAR a rather stupid movie.

Not that there wouldn’t be a way to actually sell this with a little extra work.  With a bit more imagination.  With less desire to beat up on a cultural motif that doesn’t actually need a half-billion dollar 3-D piece of propagandistic hyper sentimentalized derivative schlock movie to achieve.

Very simply posit that these trespassers are rogues.  It could be done in any of a number of ways and actually make a better story.  Not much better, perhaps, but it might be a little less cynical…

Why am I bothering to detail all this?  Because, beautiful as this film is—and it is beautiful—it pisses me off to see so much money dumped into a third-rate piece of hack writing when there are fine artists and projects begging for a little support, who have stories that would benefit the world much more than this dead-end preaching.

End of rant.

culture

Events and Events

Hard to believe it’s mid-October already.  Last weekend I was in Columbia, MO, for the MCB annual Celebration.  I’ve talked about this before—History and Fiction: Dueling Narratives—and all I’ll add here is that the programming for the day was marvelous.

Turnout was another matter.  It wasn’t embarrassing low, to be sure, but it wasn’t up where I’d hoped it would be.  We have a lot to learn about proper promotions.  But it was generally successful enough that there is no question about next year, which will be—

MISSOURI GENRE.

I sort of grabbed the title out of the air at the last board meeting, just so we could all start thinking about it and working toward it, and to make sure everyone understood that we have a program (even though we don’t, exactly).  I’ve already enlisted three writers to appear.  Katie Estill, who has two novels to her credit, the most recent one, Dahlia’s Gone, is quite a bravura piece of writing.  Not genre, not exactly, although it does involve a murder.  But in a way, mainstream is a genre insofar as it is recognized as distinct from all other “genres” like mystery or romance or science fiction.  John Lutz, a local mystery writer of considerable reputation, who wrote the novel on which the movie Single White Female was based.  And Robin Bailey, talented fantasy author and former president of SFWA.  I figured having them on the bill would be a good, solid foundation on which to construct the rest of the program.

This will be the last Celebration in which I’m directly involved as a member of the board of the Missouri Center for the Book.  Come April of ’11 I shall be leaving the MCB, per the by-laws.  So I hope this one will nail it up good.

I really enjoy being on panels and doing presentations.  I can’t claim to be exactly comfortable in front of an audience, but I like it, and occasionally I even do well.  So in future I hope to be doing more of that and less planning.

Assuming, of course, I also have some new novels to promote.  I’m still waiting to hear.

I’ve got another month or two of regular unemployment, then there seems to be some kind of extra rigomarole to go through to get the extensions.  I have a prospect that won’t come in till January.  We’ll see how that all works out.

I must say that all the presenters we had at this last Celebration were excellent.  The talks were first-rate.  We must solve this attendance problem, because people are missing out on some really great stuff.  Tenacity.  I’ve already put some things in place that I have to follow up on next year in terms of radio presence and such.

Meantime, I have one more major gig for the MCB this year—the book-to-film panel at the St. Louis International Film Festival.  I have obtained a copy of the novel in question—Woe To Live On by Daniel Woodrell, which is out of print—and I need to read it beforehand and make up my list of questions.  We’ll have Scott Phillips on stage to talk about converting novels to screenplays and a Civil War historian, Louis Gerteis, to do a little commentary on the subject of the novel, which is the Civil War in Missouri (which was particularly nasty).  Ought to be a great event.  The film is Ride With The Devil, of which a new director’s cut is being released in a couple of months.  Early Toby MacGuire work.  This will be on November 15th, probably at Washington University.

Then I will be immersed in my own work for the rest of the winter.

Oh, boy.

Absurdity

Casting Call

I’m feeling kind of antic this morning, so I thought I’d play a little fantasy game.  Most writers, whether they admit it or not, indulge in a game of imagining who would play what part in films from their books.  This comes almost second nature to me, since from an early age I started reading with a movie playing in my head and I would cast the parts.  (My most successful casting job was Michener’s Hawaii—I got just about every part right but one, that of Rafer Hoxworth.)

So I thought I’d post my choices for casting in movies from some of my books.  What I’d really like is for people to post their choices in comments.

To start with, Compass Reach.  The part of Fargo has changed over the years, from a youngish Daniel Craig to Robert Carlyle to  Ioan Gruffud (all Brits, imagine that) to more recently Jamie Bamber (another Brit) to my current choice of Ryan Phillipe (an American for once).  I still think Daniel Craig would be good.  But Fargo is mercurial that way.

But for Lis, one actress just leapt out at me the moment I saw her and I exclaimed “That is Lis!”  Franke Potente

Haven’t seen anyone yet who’d do better in the role.

Stephen, of course, is another mercurial one, but I finally settled on James Marsters (yeah, Spike of Buffy fame).  He’s it, I think, for the stricken telelog.

Metal of Night is a bit rougher.  For Cira Kalinge I have two actresses in mind.  The first is Indira Varma of Rome fame, but the other would be Nia Long.  I have one actor in mind for the dual role of Alexan and Nicolan Cambion and that is Johnny Depp.  Name dropping perhaps, but there it is.

But for Merrick…ah, yes, my ongoing spymaster/corporate magnate/mover’n’shaker.  Again, just one actor—Tim Roth.

Tim Kang as Tory Shirabe, Ralph Fiennes as Maxwell Cambion, and for the berserker part of Venner…Rufus Sewell

Peace & Memory has a larger cast and more possibilities, but the actress I have in mind for Tamyn Glass…well, bear in mind that I think if this film has a chance in hell of being made, it won’t be for ten years, by which time she’ll have grown into the part.  Eliza Dushku.  Which is a bit of a cheat, because everyone else I have in mind would be cast in a film made, say, tomorrow.  At one time Sigourney Weaver would have been a shoe-in, but in SF she’s too much Ripley, so it would be Ripley playing Tamyn, and that might not be a good fit.  However, as an alternative more in line with what I have in mind, someone like Angela Bassett would be good.  But this is up for grabs, really.  I’ll stick with Eliza as an image.

Joclen would be well played by Amanda Righetti

Kevin McKidd for Benajim Cyanus.  We can stick with Tim Roth for the discorporate Sean Merrick.  Then we come to the pivotal role of the prophylactic, Piper Van.  I have a couple of names in mind for that, one simply because I like her—well, I like them all—but she has demonstrated an ability to do the physical side:  Marley Shelton.   Perhaps a bit too “girlie” for Piper, but as I say, I like her.  Katie Sackhoff  which after Battlestar Galactica and her performance as Starbuck might be a bit obvious, but she’s got the presence to carry off the part.  A less obvious choice would be Thandie Newton.  Piper is supposed to be enhanced and, therefore, deceptive.

Naril Van, Tamyn’s lawyer, would be well played by Mary McDonnell,  but I could also see her played well by Mary Steenburgen.  Don’t know which I’d prefer.

Fisher, the bad guy, I’d cast Jonny Lee Miller.  Not, perhaps, an obvious choice, but thin about it, he’d do marvelously.

Which brings us to Ryan Jones, Bool Nooneus, and Elen ap Marik.  Ryan I think should be played by Robert Conrad of Wild Wild West fame.  Or The Black Sheep.  Or a gazillion tv movies.  But take a look at more recent pics and he looks perfect.  Nooneus, just to be antic, would be Stephen Fry.

Then there is Elen, the woman who falls for Benajim and has such, er, interesting modifications.  She’d have to be someone who could carry it off with one artificial eye.  My choice?   Maybe I’ll leave that one blank for now and see if anyone comes up with someone for the part.

That’s the Secantis Sequence and certainly not all of the parts.  It would be fun to see what people thought of the secondary and tertiary characters, who would be good to play them, but also the alternatives to my list.  There are several characters I skipped in this, but we can revisit the topic later if it’s fun.

Ah, fantasy.  Now, who would I get to direct…?

Art

John Adams and the Efforts of Time

We just watched the last episode of John Adams.  I got the DVD from the library and we went through it in one week, all seven installments.  I have to admit, the last episode brought tears.  The partnership between John and Abigail was well-portrayed and deeply moving.  The older I get, the more I find the strongest story resonance with depictions of deep, deep friendships, especially those that exist between lovers, spouses, life partners.  I cannot imagine losing Donna, who has become exactly that for me, in spite of the fact that I have friends of longer acquaintance, good friends, too.

The casting was incredible, the make-up superb, the writing first class.
What struck me most about this as well was the marvelously-nuanced dramatization of the fundamental differences in political philosophy between Adams and Jefferson.  I can’t help but think that when Adams declared that “the true history of our revolution is lost” he must have been thinking of the initial partnership and later dissolution of like-mindedness between himself and Thomas Jefferson, whom Joseph Ellis depicts an an American Sphinx.

Adams is here portrayed as an idealist who cannot separate his philosophy from his pragmatism.  In the first dozen years of the new republic, there was enormous public sentiment for France and when that country descended into the frenzy of its own revolution gone mad, that sentiment demanded that we support the revolutionaries.  The irony that France supported us when it was still a monarchy and now those very people that had backed us (granted, as a move in their own war with England) were the victims of the mob ascendant was lost on most people, and apparently even Jefferson, who wanted us to embroil ourselves immediately and deeply in support of the revolutionaries.  Washington—how lucky they were to have him—refused.  He was a militaryman by training and he understood how to assess the chances of success and how to go about surviving a conflict in which you are outmatched.  He had seen more than his share of defeat in a long career and knew well that ideology needed a strong hand to keep it in check, lest it carry you over the precipice.  He refused to side with France, believing that neutrality was the only way for the United States to survive.  Adams shared that belief.

Jefferson, and those like him believed that the rightness of the cause would win out.

Neither Jefferson or Adams had served in the military, but it appears that Adams at least had seen a bit of bloodshed.  He grasped an essential reality—that ideals do not win battles.  And yet, politically, he clung to his ideals in the face of an enemy who seemed capable of indulging any tactic in the cause of winning, namely Jefferson.  Almost a complete reversal of roles, at least in appearances.

Or was it?

Adams seems to have had a grasp of the long-term in a way that Jefferson, with his mercurial fixation on posterity, did not.  Adams grasped that the fields in which ideals must be left unsullied by pragmatism are different than those in which an immediate fight for survival is waged.  He would not interject himself where his loyalty to the Constitution said he ought not, even when it might win him another term as president.  Jefferson seemed willing to do work-arounds whenever his vision demanded.

I’m simplifying, of course.  Adams blundered in terms of ideals badly with the Alien and Sedition Act.  He knew he would be remembered more for that—and not well—than for having steered the country through the shoals of potential disaster by refusing to take sides in the squabble between England and France.  And the Alien and Sedition Act is a nasty, unAmerican piece of political offal.  Patently unConstitutional.

And yet Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana Territory was also patently unConstitutional, a violation of due process, and in many ways unleashed nastiness and ugliness by opening up all that land to American incursion, wiping out more Native American nations and people, bringing us into direct conflict with Spain and then Mexico, lent opportunity for future presidents to exercise the worst aspects of imperial ambition all in the name of the United States and in contradiction to the Founding Intent of the republic….and for that he is praised.

The essential element of the American Revolution, as it was happening at the time, is simply a group of talented men scrambling around trying desperately to make something workable out of a deadly situation.  They didn’t want a king anymore, they wanted to run their own affairs, but they were also terrified of their neighbors, so some legal wall had to be built to keep New York or Pennsylvania or Virginia from dictating to the smaller states.  The southern colonies operated as agrarian economies based on slave labor, and they wanted to maintain that, so something had to be done to make sure the abolitionists in the north couldn’t strip them of millions of dollars worth of property and labor.  In the tumult of ongoing war, they were working at a fever pitch to make sure they came out the other side with what they wanted, even at the expense of the unity that was to guarantee a victory, and they had no idea how it was all going to look.  It was bedlam.  It was panic-stricken intellectual jerrymandering.

And somehow out of this a framework evolved that, not then and not for a long time to come, but eventually emerged as a marvelous machine.

But there was little solidarity of invention, little conformity of vision.  They all knew that they had to fight to be severed from Great Britain.  That afterward they needed to erect a coherent government that wouldn’t take from them what they saw Britain trying to take from them.  How they were going to do all this, on that there was little agreement.

It was a mess.

The myth prevails.

But not so much that sound research and a little patient thought can’t recover what might actually have been going on, and sometimes the results are something wonderfully poignant, insightful, and honest as this miniseries.  It ought to be shown in grade school.  It ought to be part of any American history course.

At a book festival a few years ago, I attended a discussion by a historian who had just published a biography of Aaron Burr.  She’d taken the trouble to go back to primary sources and look at the man through the lens of his times rather than our modern, prejudiced view of a murderer and traitor.  She talked about the humanness of these people, who were an amalgam—hero and villain, coward and genius, self-serving and patriotic, publicly strong and privately weak—when someone stood up to condemn her for her scholarship.  His argument was that it wasn’t right to denigrate these people who had given us so much.

“I’m not denigrating anyone, sir,” the historian said.  “I’m simply showing them as they actually were.”

“What good does that do?  I don’t want to know that they were assholes.  I don’t agree with what you’re doing.”

I don’t want to know that they were assholes.

Understandable sentiment, perhaps, but without realizing how utterly human they were we risk deifying them.  And we’ve seen that process at work through most of our history, to greater or lesser degrees.  The temptation to cast the revolutionary era in bronze and hold it up as some ideal age is great because it seems so simple and honest and straight-forward compared to our present age of almost fractal complexity.  We can see the desire for that kind of simplicity and, we believe, dependability in the constant purges against politicians who prove themselves frail or hypocritical or simply too human.  We want paragons, walking talking ideals who never stray from the Philosopher’s Gold of which we think the Founding Fathers were composed.  We sacrifice a lot of talent this way.  Brilliant economists, diplomats, orators, legislators get harried out of office because they slept with someone out of wedlock or smoked pot in college or eschew a religious point-of-view.  The examination of private lives in search of the unstained, pure of heart, consistently noble character drives the best and brightest away from even putting themselves forward to serve.  As if any of these factors relate to competence or civic virtue or ability to lead.

Any examination of the Founding Fathers shows such a catalogue of human frailty that likely none of them today could get elected as small-town councilman much less to the highest offices of the land.  Among them were speculators, slave owners, philanderers, alcoholics, bigots, gamblers, and all manner of personal hypocrisy.

But look at what they managed to build.

I think more such dramatizations ought to be made.  We should know very well how human these people were.  We should know that, really, they weren’t so very different than we were, beyond those differences that time and circumstance inevitably produce.  It would do us good to get the idea that if these—uncertain, petty, churlish, hypocritical, frightened men—could do what they did when the opportunity presented itself, what can we not aspire to accomplish with all the benefits of their histories and our present abilities?  Knowing that we are more like them than not would be a good thing, I think.

Absurdity

Readingless Writers—Not Right

I’ve heard of this phenomenon, but never before encountered it directly.  Excuse me, I’m still trying to wrap my head around the utter vapidity of this…

I have a MySpace page.  Admittedly, I pay less attention to it these days in lieu of my Facebook page  (all these Pages…for such a functional Luddite, it amazes me I navigate these strange seas), but I do check it at least once a week.  I post a short blog there.  And I collect Friend Requests.

I received such a request the other day from someone whose name I will not use.  Unless it’s from someone or something I recognize, I go to the requester’s page to check them out.  Saves on a small amount of embarrassment.  This person had a legit page.  Aspiring writer.  Claimed to be working on several short stories and a novel.  Great.  I’m all about supporting other writers.  Sometimes we’re all we’ve got.  But I scrolled down to the section where he lists his interests and find under BOOKS this:

I actually don’t read to much but I do like a few. Twilight, Harry Potter, Impulse, Dead on Town Line, etc.

I sat back and stared at that and the question ran through my head like a neon billboard, “How does that work?  Just how the hell do you want to be a writer and not like to read?”

So I sent this person a message and asked.  I told him that to be a writer you have to love words, love stories…

Well, here’s the exchange, sans names:

Okay, you sent me a friend request, so I looked at your profile. It says you want to be a writer, but then under Books you say you don’t read much.

How does that work? You want to be a writer you have to love words, you have to love stories, you have to love it on the page, and that means reading A LOT.

You might just blow this off, but don’t. If you really want to be a writer, you must read. That’s where you learn your craft, sure, but more importantly that’s where you nurture the love of what you say you want to do.

Either that, or you’re a poser.

Apologies for the bluntness, but I am a writer and before that I was a reader. You can’t have one without the other.

Mark

REPLY:

You don’t have to like both to be a writer. That’s a ridiculous thesis to be honest. That’s like saying that you have to like listening to someone else to you how their day was in order to tell them how your day was. It’s just true. Reading bores me, and prefer to witness a story as a much faster pace, eg. a Movie. Writing, however, doesn’t bore me. It’s as simple as that. I don’t know why people always over complicate simple things like that.

MY RESPONSE

Well, good luck with that. It’s like being an auto mechanic and not liking cars. Or being a musician who doesn’t listen to anyone else’s music.

Maybe someday you’ll get it.

Mark

You don’t have to like both to be a writer?

Well, I suppose in the absolute strict sense of wanting to write things while disliking going through other people’s work, he’s right.  But that, it seems to me, is legitimate only insofar as a narcissistic indulgence.

But a ridiculous thesis?  How do you even come to a notion of what it means to be A Writer without some affection for the product in general?  This is so alien to my experience, my way of thinking, that I’m still struggling to make sense of it.

It only scans in one of two ways.  (A), it’s not that you want to be a writer.  Being a writer is hard work, it’s paying attention to all manner of triviality that goes into the making of Life, sorting it into piles of Meaning and Dross, and from that compiling and elucidating an observation that is relevant to strangers, because if you publish you have no idea who will read your words, and the viability of what you do must find a resonance with people you do not and will never know.  Being a writer is living through the word, through the paragraph, the scene, the story.  The way in which story operates—how it comes to be, how it is constructed, how it moves—can only be learned by responding to it yourself, both in life and on the page, but on the page is where the art happens, and you cannot learn how to do that unless you read, widely and deeply.  So it is not that you want to be a writer, you want to be an Author, someone with titles strewn beneath your name, who is adulated by the public, respected for what wisdom may be found in works you presumably did by some mechanism (but not, apparently, by actually being a writer).  You like the idea of being a writer, but having no idea what the purpose of it is, you cannot be one, only, if you learn the trick, an Author.

Or (B) you are simply in love with the sound and look of your own voice on the page.  Nothing wrong with that, but unless you have some external input what you write will only be relevant to yourself.  It will be indulgent.  And it will have resonance to others only by accident—not because you are so different from anyone else, but because you have no notion how to convey your commonality.  It is a form of masturbation, and while that is legitimate, it is done in isolation, born out of a fantasy of connection and, in time, if it is all you do, an inability to touch anyone outside yourself.

But what genuinely troubles me is the whole disregard—the blind ignorance—of what writing is all about.  It is an art and if you cannot respond to the art you cannot do it, not so that it means much to anyone else.  It is, to stretch a metaphor from the previous sentence, like having sex with someone you don’t much care to spend any time with.  You like the orgasm, but you don’t want to be bothered with other people and their desires and needs.  It’s selfish, true, but it’s also tragic, especially if you then go and pose as a Great Lover.

We do have a generation (and I’m using that term to define an age bracket—this group includes people from 10 to 50) that is enamored of film.  That’s where it is for them.  But a lot of flawed and failed films get made and often—not every time—but often the failure is because someone doesn’t read and has no idea what it is that good writing conveys.  It begins with the word, but they want to bypass that.

Why?  I have a theory, of course.  Because it’s hard work to make the translation from words on a page to images in the mind.  Most of the people I know who do not read for pleasure—read fiction for pleasure, I should say—seem incapable of running the story in their imagination.  The words do not make pictures for them, do not open vistas of the imagination, do not convey the essence of character.  They’re just words on a page.  This is sad and I think a failure of education on a basic level.

But it’s sadder still when these sorts then try to do film.  Or fail to do film.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it till I have no more breath with which to say it—reading is fundamentally different from almost any other form of entertainment (the closest is radio drama) because it is interactive and participatory.  You must do the work of creating the images suggested on the page in your own mind.  It is a trick best learned young, but it is a trick that will give us the stars, because the imagination is a living thing that must be nourished from both within and without. If you cannot envision, you cannot build.

There are many reasons to read and I was encouraged more this year than ever before to learn, via and NEA report, that reading in America had increased substantially for the first time since they’ve been keeping track in 1982.

But you run across these bizarre confluences from time to time and you wonder how this happened?  I can live with the idea that there are people bored by reading.  But then to be told that these same people want to be writers baffles.  If reading bores them one can only assume that what they write will be boring—because they’ll have no clue how it can be otherwise.

Art

The Bubble and Warehouse 13

I just finished watching the new show on SyFy called Warehouse 13.  I enjoyed it, it was a good ride, even though they clearly went after the X-Files crowd with this one.  It could be worth a few hours to see where they go with it.  They took the endless warehouse from Indiana Jones, added some National Treasure grace notes, stirred in a dollop of Muldur and Scully, and introduced a bit of humor.  That last is very important, because when you have a premise that is this borderline, taking it too seriously is risking alienating a lot of audience.  The main reason the X-Files worked was the mood, the color, the textures that Carter wove into it, and he played the conspiracy theory game like a master.  But for me, it got very old very fast.

The problems with the X-Files were manifold and manifest.  The biggest one was Scully.  She was the dumbest “scientist” I’d ever seen on television or read in fiction.  To remain so obdurately unseeing through all that she was put through required zero imagination in the character, zero sense of humor, and probably some sort of serial fixation or related pathology.  If they’d played that up it might have worked, but for pity’s sake she was just dense.  And therefore unbelievable.

The other problem with it was the profundity of the secrets ultimately being kept.  It worked well when Muldur was just going through a bunch of old case files no one wanted to tackle because they led to bizarre places.  Kept modest like that would have allowed the concept to work on the fringe, where it started out, and could have been very entertaining.  But when it became this all-encompassing, “the aliens have been here and we are in league with them” kind of schtick, it became ridiculous.

Because they were trying to keep it consistent with mimetic fiction.  They were trying to convince us that the world really is this way, only we don’t know it.  They tried to make it mainstream.

Doesn’t work.  Fringe stuff has to stay on the fringe.  Now you can use the premise that what’s on the fringe is really there, but it’s kept on the fringe, and the agents in charge are tasked with keeping the rest of us from knowing it, and in so doing keep all this weird shit away from everyone.  You build a bubble attached to the “real world” and populate it with fun plots and wild extrapolations. but it doesn’t have to bear the burden of supporting itself interwoven with the rest of the world.

Which one can do as well, but not at series length.  A single movie will work.  A novel, a short story.  Once you extend the concept into multiple seasons, you run into problems.

The Warehouse 13 people aren’t making that mistake.  They’ve created their bubble and there is a conduit attaching it to the real world, but it is not in the real world.  The two agents are tasked with removing the weird stuff and quarantining it in South Dakota.  That will work.

They will, certainly, imply that what is secreted in the warehouse has, in one way or another, over time, here and there, now and then, affected the real world, and that’s cool, too, but with the conceit that the three habitues of the warehouse are supposed to bottle this stuff up we are not burdened with the implausibilities and inexplicabilities of having the government know about this stuff and attempting to use it.

And keeping everything looking like it still does when we step out our front door.

The way science fiction would work in that instance would be to set the show in the future and posit that everything is now different.  It would not then be burdened with selling the audience that this is “our” world, but a world yet to come.  Suspension of disbelief proceeds apace then without fear that some major difficulties with the audience b.s. detector will come into play.

Part of this problem is also with what I call the Escalation Problem, which has been part of science fiction almost from day one.  Look at, say, E.E. Doc Smith’s Lensmen.  Each succeeding book—indeed, each succeeding chapter—required a bigger bang than the last.  It was almost a Hollywood approach—to feed the expectations of the audience, the special effects have to keep getting bigger, wilder, more impressive, almost to the point where the storytelling and plot become little more than vehicles for the next cool thing.  Smith could match his plots and ideas to his effects, so it wasn’t a disaster, but today, especially in television, this is a Big Problem.  It leads to escalations of the absurd in many instances.  It leads to cul-de-sacs out of which the writers cannot write.

But it’s a real disaster when  stories are set in the given world, the mundane world as it were.  Because eventually you have to explain, subtextually if nothing else, why the world hasn’t changed when the tv is turned off and we turn on the news.

Hence the bubble.

I’m looking forward to seeing a few more episodes of this show.  I like the premise (such as it is) and I love Saul Rubinek.  He’s one of the better character actors working today.  For a treat, you should see his portrayal of Lon Cohen in the Timothy Hutton Nero Wolfe’s.

So, with a caveat or two, I’ll give Warehouse 13 my blessing.  As if it needs it.  Let’s just hope they can keep it on track.

Art

Compassionate Fangs

Last week I received my DVD of Dreams With Sharp Teeth, the new documentary about Harlan Ellison.  I’ve watched it a couple of times now, thoroughly enjoying it.  Neil Gaiman makes the observation in the film that Ellison has been engaged in a great big piece of performance art called “Harlan Ellison” and I think he’s spot on.  Harlan—he is one of the only writers who ever worked in the realm of fantastic literature to be known almost immediately by his first name—is very much part and parcel of his work.  You don’t get the one without the other.

Which is not to say the work doesn’t stand on its own.  It does, very much so.  No doubt there are many people who have read the occasional Ellison story and found it…well, however they found it.  Anything, I imagine, but trivial.  If they then go on to become fans of the stories, eventually they will become aware of the person, mainly by virtue of the extensive introductions Harlan writes to just about everything he does, secondarily by the stories told by those who know, or think they know, something about him, either through personal experience or by word of mouth.

He’s fascinating to watch.  Sometimes it’s like watching a tornado form.

Harlan was born in 1934, which makes him 75 now.  This seems incredible to me, sobering even.  He will always seem to me to be about 40, even though I have seen him now for years with white hair and other attributes of age.  The voice has gotten a bit rougher, but he’s just as sharp as ever.

I have been in his actual presence on two occasions.  In 1986 he showed up in Atlanta at the world SF convention that year and I have a couple of autographed books as a result.  He dominated a good part of one day for us.   The second time was in 1999 or so, at a small convention called ReaderCon in Massachussetts, where he was guest of honor.  On that occasion I had lunch with him and few others and that lunch remains memorable, because I got to see the man when he isn’t On.  That is, it was before the convention began and he was, so to speak, “off duty” and was more relaxed, less hyperbolic.  And it was a great pleasure.  It is easy to see why people are drawn to him.

He is something of a contradiction.  He is a fine writer.  Even if one doesn’t care for the subject matter or even finds his style abrasive, it is clear to anyone paying attention that this man can write.  He deserves to be read.  At the same time, he is a class A, high functioning extrovert, one able to extemporize brilliantly and fluently on a wide range of subjects, and exhibits all the traits writers by common apprehension are thought to lack.

He is also dramatically confrontational.

In many ways, he reminds me of my father, who is also a man who brooks no foolishness, suffered fools not at all, and generally always said what was on his mind.  Harlan seems to be less controlled so more of his mind gets said than many people can stand.

The weekend of Readercon way back when  gave me a chance to observe him working and I noticed that—also like my father—Harlan is a 110 percenter.  That is, he gives more than he really has to give, especially when he’s fulfilling an obligation, in this case the duties of the guest of honor.  I suspect he’s like that in his personal life, too, and it certainly shows in the work.  Which also means that when his efforts are in some way betrayed, his disillusionment is also great.  I’ve watched my father end friendships, lose deep interests, and walk away from whole careers because something soured it for him and because he had committed so much of himself there was no room to shrug off the slight and go on from there.   He engaged too deeply, more deeply than the person or object could return or could suspect, and when the break came there was no space for backing off and starting over.

In Harlan’s case—as, indeed, with my father—the work is and was paramount and would not have been done with as much passion and precision if they were otherwise.

As far as I’m concerned, Dreams With Sharp Teeth could have been another hour longer.  There are details, aspects of his life and his work, that I would have liked to hear more.  Harlan did not live the life of a writer—he lived the life writers are sometimes said to have lived, and a few did, but most are ill-suited to living.  Hemingway sailed boats, hunted lion, led men in war, boxed, took lovers, and did it all with the kind of gusto that fits someone a writer would write about, not the writer himself.

Harlan marched with King to Selma.

I am in no way suggesting he and Hemingway are the only ones to have done such things, certainly not, but they are among a handful who are known for those things as much as for the work.  That takes a lot of presence, a lot of person, a lot of spirit.

In a way, one could describe Harlan as a perfect storm.  The man matches the words, and the words are…

I defy you to read Jeffty Is Five or Shatterday or The Whimper of Whipped Dogs or All The Lies That Are My Life or The Executioner of the Malformed Children or I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream or Shattered Like A Glass Goblin and come away unmoved, unaffected, for that moment unchanged.   One Life Furnished In Early Poverty is an homage, a justification, an epitaph, and an elegy all rolled into something that also contains enormous glee and childish wonder.

Or go find his two volumes of television criticism, The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat, books which were the objects of actual censorship (something that never happens in this country, of course) under Nixon.  Though they were written and published in the Sixties, the observations are fresh and if anything more relevant today.

One thing that I’ve always found interesting, and didn’t quite understand until I met the man and saw him before an audience, is that he is the only writer I know who consistently appears on the covers of his books.  Usually in marvelous illustrations by artists like Barclay Shaw or Leo and Diane Dillon, but consistently enough to be remarkable.  Once you see him and listen to him, you begin to understand.

Anyway, I recommend the film.  And if you haven’t read any of Harlan’s work, do so before you die.  He really should be up there with Pynchon and Mailer, Vidal and King, Burgess and Hemingway, and others.  In my mind, he is.  He’s that good.

culture

Face Book

Busy morning.  I like it when I find myself working in a groove that doesn’t give me time to think about what isn’t working.  Not today.

Over a foot of snow is now lying like a serene comforter over everything outside.  Fluffly, white, very beautiful—if you don’t have to go out in it.  I am a snow humbug.  After learning to drive and struggling through a few winters way back then, I quickly lost my love of snow.  Pain in the ass.  Would be nice to look at, but go out in it?

Anyway, yesterday I had a snow day from work.  So I took care of a lot of pending stuff, including laundry.  This morning I’m finishing up the pending stuff.  I wrote a new book review and emailed it off to my editor.  And I am busily building a…

FACEBOOK PAGE!

Yes, indeed.  One more bit of distraction to make the writing of great literature a bit more difficult to get to.

Not really.  Once the shiny wears off, it’ll be much like the other online pages I now have, like my MySpace Page and my Shelfari Page and my LinkedIn Page…

I’d been told, though, that all the “serious” people were on Facebook, as opposed to MySpace, and I must admit that so far that seems to be true.  I’ve found many more of the sorts of folks I’d wanted to link to on MySpace but couldn’t, because they weren’t there, here on Facebook.  So cool.

I really should just sit back now, though, and see how many friend invites I actually get.  I’ve cast my net to many and sundry and various to at least establish a friend list, but I ought to go write some fiction and let this thing churn.

On another front, I finished a couple of new books for review.  Jack McDevitt, who is a very nice man and a reliably entertaining writer, had Ace send me his most recent, The Devil’s Eye.  It was a quick, enjoyable read, smart people’s SF, and I intend to do a few paragraphs for the Post.

I finished Ian McDonald’s collection Cyberbad Days last week.  I already wrote two reviews of it and sent one off.  I’ll add it to the one I do for Jack.  I need one more for the roundup…

Have to go to work today.  The sun in shining, it’s a tad warmer.

I’m rambling here.  But what the hell.  Last night we watched episode #2 of Lie To Me, the new series with Tim Roth as a specialist in lying.  All the scientific acumen of his cinsiderable gifts are applied each week to determine who is lying and, more importantly, what about.  I can’t help wondering how much grief this show might cause among people who, after a few episodes, will start applying some of these techniques in their own lives.  Calling someone out for a lie can be a dicey proposition.  Even when we know they’re lying, how often do we know why?  And how often would calling them on it do the slightest bit of good?

I don’t know.  I’ve wrestled with this one for decades.  But it’s an amusing show.

The thing about these new shows—and there are several of them that all rely on the heightened experience of a trained observer, like Bones, The Mentalist, Eleventh Hour, House—is that while I applaud the foregrounding of rational observation and and a hardnosed skeptical approach to life these series embody, you have to realize that the degree of observational skill these characters bring to the task is the equivalent of an expert martial artist.  Most people are not that observant.  And even when they are, how many people know how to correctly interpret what they’re observing?  It’s the thing that made Sherlock Holmes both fascinating and alienating.  Holmes explained early on in the series that he refused to remember any detail that did not directly bear on his chosen pursuit—which meant he was, in this instance, unaware that the Earth moved around the Sun and, now that Watson had told him so, he intended to forget it as quickly as possible.  It made him strange, weird, offputting, and Conan Doyle played on that skillfully.  It’s the one thing the Basil Rathbone portrayals got wrong and expunged and the thing that Jeremy Brett brought to the forefront, which makes the Brett portrayal superior.

In the case of House, who is in many ways a direct copy, it just makes him obnoxious.

And not really a very good doctor…