Books

I read…a lot. Here’s where I ramble about books and printed media.

Watching the Watchmen

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Since I can only spend so many hours a day tossing resumes out across the ‘net before I start to go buggy, I decided to take a few hours out of the day and head out to catch the matinee of “Watchmen“. I got home a bit ago, and I’m going to see what I can do as far as getting my thoughts down. Perhaps a little jumbled, but so it goes.

First off, a few thoughts on what came before the movie. Remember when you would go to a movie, find your seat in a relatively hushed theater, and have a nice few quiet moments before the movie? Heck, at this point, I’m nostalgic for the stupid advertising slideshow we got for a few years, rather than the constant, loud bombardment of noise and flashing lights we get from the moment we step in the theater these days. Of the many reasons why I don’t go see movies in the theater these days, the advertising barrage is a big one.

This time, I scribbled little notes on my iTouch as the drivel went by…

“Last House on the Left“: Ugh. So not interested.
Worst thing about going to the movies these days: the stupid Kid Rock/National Guard music video.
E*Trade’s freaky talking babies don’t benefit at all from the big-screen treatment. Oh, and I get _two_ of those ads. Yay.
“Knowing” still looks interesting.
The Kia Soul hamster wheel commercial was cute, but will probably get old fast if it goes into wide release on TV.
Hmm…the “no calls during the movie” blurb has been updated to “no calls or texts.”
Previews:

  • “Wolverine“: Okay, so this one could be fun. Still likely a rental for me.
  • “Angels and Demons“: Another rental.
  • “Star Trek“: So, so, so nice on the big screen! This one, I’m there on opening weekend, if not opening night.
  • “Public Enemies“: Looks intriguing. Good cast, good director, could be worth seeing. Again, though, I put it on the rental pile.
  • “Terminator Salvation“: I just can’t get excited about this. Much like how (in my universe) nothing exists of Highlander beyond the first film, nothing exists of Terminator beyond T2.
  • “Observe and Report“: Oh, dear god, another mind-numbingly stupid mall cop movie? And to make it worse, it’s the last trailer we get, so after a lot of geektastic goodness, we’re left with a bad taste in our mouth (almost literally, any movie that features vomiting in the trailer is guaranteed not to get my money) before the main event. Nice job of programming, dolts.

And now, Watchmen.

First off, the good: it’s an incredibly faithful screen translation of the comic book, even with the changes made to the ending (no big spoiler there — that changes were made has been well-known, it’s what those changes are that have been kept more-or-less secret). From an artistic and technical standpoint, the film is astounding. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see someone make an attempt at a mashup between the comic book’s boxes and text and the movie’s images once the DVD comes out and they can get good screengrabs. You’d be able to stay incredibly close to the original work, save for the last issue. Very, very nicely done.

The casting was also incredible. Most of the cast were actors I didn’t know very well, if at all, but who fit their characters beautifully. I also got a kick out of seeing some old favorites pop up, including Max Headroom himself, Matt Frewer, as Moloch. Spot-on perfect.

That said, the movie ended up leaving me cold. It’s not at all that it’s a bad movie — as I just said, on a technical and artistic level, it’s amazing — it’s just that it completely failed to engage me, and in quite a few scenes actively repulsed me. I’ve been trying to work out why, and I think it boils down to two main points: first, that while I enjoy the original graphic novel and recognize it’s importance to the geek world, it was never the “event” for me that it was for many other geeks my age; second, I find that as I get older, I’m getting less and less desensitized to overly realistic depictions of violence.

To the first point: I’ve never been a huge comic geek. I don’t have anything against comics at all, I’ve enjoyed reading many, have a few collections and graphic novels in my library (Watchmen, V for Vendetta, The Dark Knight Returns, Marvel 1602, and the entire Sandman series being the standouts), but I was never hugely into either reading or collecting them (with the sole exception of The Tick, of which I still have the first ten issues — first prints of 2-10, and the second printing of issue one — carefully preserved). While I’d heard about Watchmen many times, I didn’t ever read it until I picked it up a few years ago, and even now, I’ve only read it twice: once when I first bought it, and once again last week. Because of that, while I find it a good read, and have read enough about it over the years to recognize it’s importance to the comic world, it doesn’t hold any particular personal importance for me. Good book, worth reading, that’s it.

To the second point: Yes, Watchmen is a violent book. I know this, and I wasn’t expecting there to be a strange lack of violence in the movie. However, I was more than a little put off by just how much, and how graphic, violent imagery there was. In some instances, it was simply the director being faithful to his source material. In other instances, though, the movie actually ended up being quite a bit more graphic than the original work did, and not simply because of the transition from drawn artwork to live action.

The rest is going beyond a cut, as I’m quite likely going to be more than a little spoileriffic here. If you’re reading via RSS or on Facebook, stop now or don’t whine. ;)

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On the Neverending Story

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As I’m sure most people have noticed, there’s a huge trend right now for movie studios to forego the troublesome process of actually having to come up with new ideas, and just dig back into the past to resurrect formerly successful properties. That way, nobody actually has to think too terribly hard, and they can hope to gain a few ticket sales by cashing in on misplaced nostalgia. The success of these ventures has been uneven (to say the least), and every time word leaks out of another ill-conceived attempt to recreate something from our childhood, my question is always, “Why can’t they try to remake the bad films into something good, instead of ruining films that were good in the first place?”

This morning, I woke up (early, for some reason), and saw this tweet:

seattlegeekly: RT @GeekTyrant: NEVERENDING STORY: Another Childhood Film Classic Gets Jacked http://bit.ly/19nlmr – WHY do they feel they have to do this?

I expected my usual reaction of, “oh, geez, why?”…and didn’t get it. You see, yes, there’s a chance that they’re taking a film that’s loved by many who were kids when it came out and “updating” it to be bigger, louder, and — as is typical for today’s reimaginings — stupider (see trailers for the upcoming recreation of Disney’s “Witch Mountain” franchise for a prime example of what I’m talking about). However — and this is where I risk lynching by those only familiar with the film — if we’re lucky, this could turn out to be one of those cases where they just might improve on the original.

Some background: I grew up in Anchorage, Alaska. Now, Alaska in the 1980’s was still far enough removed from the Lower 48 that more often than not, we tended to run a few weeks behind the rest of the U.S. I must have been around nine or ten years old when I saw a trailer for the original “Neverending Story” on TV, and I was immediately entranced. A kid not much older than me getting literally sucked into a fantasy book, with fantastic creatures, flying dragons, and beautiful princesses? Awesome! And so I eagerly waited for the movie to come out.

And waited.

And waited. I have no idea how long I actually waited, but it was long enough in kid years that it turned into “forever.” This was before the modern technique of releasing trailers six months to a year in advance of a film to build excitement, so I’ve always assumed that Alaska just got the movie a month or two after it opened in the rest of the U.S. Whatever the reason, I was annoyed and anxious…I wanted to see that movie! And then, while wandering through a bookstore, I saw it: the book of the movie! It had pictures on the front cover of the kids from the trailer, the dragon…that was it! Now it didn’t matter that we hadn’t gotten the movie…I had the book! I got it, went home, and dove in.

I dove in much like Bastian did. Here was a kid much like me, for whom books weren’t merely printed words on paper, but entire worlds that would flow out of the pages, wrap around us and envelop us, drawing us in to the story as if we were really there. I was with Bastian on his adventures just as he was with Atreyu, Artax, Falcor, and all the rest. I fell in love with that book.

Not too long after I finished reading, word came out that the movie was finally opening in Anchorage! Finally! All the adventures I’d just lived, I’d get to see — the creatures, the battles, everything! I’m not sure I’ve ever been quite so excited to see a movie…this was it. This was exactly what I’d been waiting for since that first trailer.

And then, over that next hour and a half, my ten-year-old self became suddenly, bitterly, painfully schooled in the realities of translating a novel to the screen. Roger Ebert’s review of “North” had nothing on the vitriol that spewed out of my young mouth when I “reviewed” the film to my family and friends. It was horrid! A tragedy! A disaster!

For years now, I’ve described the major differences between the book and the movie thusly: “Take your favorite childhood novel. Now, tear it in half, and throw the latter half away. Now, start randomly tearing pages out of the first half, until it’s about half the size it was when you started. Now, take what’s left, and shuffle it around until it loses nearly all resemblance to the original story. There’s your script!”

There were so many moments in the book that I’d played over and over in my head, that I’d been dying to see on the screen, that simply didn’t exist. One of the key scenes that I felt cheated on was when Atreyu and Falcor meet. In the book, Atreyu has lost Artax, spoken to Morla, and left the Swamps of Sadness on his own. Travelling through a canyon, he witnesses a battle between two great monsters: a luckdragon, and a shape-changer named Ygramul the Many…

The battle between the two giants was fearsome. The luckdragon was still defending himself, spewing blue fire that singed the cloud-monster’s bristles. Smoke came whirling through the crevices in the rock, so foul-smelling that Atreyu could hardly breathe. Once the luckdragon managed to bite off one of the monster’s long legs. but instead of falling into the chasm, the severed leg hovered for a time in mid-air, then returned to its old place in the black cloud-body. And several times the dragon seemed to seize one of the monster’s limbs between its teeth, but bit into the void.

Only then did Atreyu noticed that the monster was not a single, solid body, but was made up of innumerable small steel-blue insects which buzzed like angry hornets. It was their compact swarm that kept taking different shapes.

This was Ygramul, and now Atreyu knew why she was called ‘the Many’.

To have this scene played over and over in my head for weeks, seen from every angle, imagined from every possible vantage point, and then to watch in disbelief in the film as Falcor simply appears for no particular reason — a deus ex machina that bothered me at ten, even if I didn’t know the term — to pull Atreyu out of the swamp? Oh, this was just not right!

I didn’t watch that movie for years afterwards.

Eventually, as I got older, I started to wonder if it was really as bad as I remembered, and rented it. Of course, no, it wasn’t that bad. A little older, a little wiser, and a little more cognizant of the sacrifices that must be made when adapting a 377-page fantasy novel to a 90-minute movie, I came to realize that it’s really not that bad of a movie at all, and even had a lot of fun on one trip to Germany when I got to see some of the sets. However, it’s definitely one of those films where I need to keep it in a compartment entirely separate from that of the book. Two creations that share a name and many characters, but in most respects, are two entirely separate things.

So now comes word that there may be a new take on the film. Admittedly, it’s still in the very early stages of planning, but one key quote stood out to me: “The new pic…will examine the more nuanced details of the book that were glossed over in the first pic.” Now, who knows just what details they’re looking at (though they certainly have a lot to choose from), and this could be nothing but marketingspeak aimed directly at people like me who are more attached to the book than the movie, but I’d like to hold out at least a little hope that we may get something closer to what Michael Ende originally created.

Links for January 27th through January 28th

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Sometime between January 27th and January 28th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Babies Know – a Little Dirt Is Good for You: "'What a child is doing when he puts things in his mouth is allowing his immune response to explore his environment,' Mary Ruebush, a microbiology and immunology instructor, wrote in her new book, 'Why Dirt Is Good' (Kaplan). 'Not only does this allow for 'practice' of immune responses, which will be necessary for protection, but it also plays a critical role in teaching the immature immune response what is best ignored.' One leading researcher, Dr. Joel V. Weinstock, said in an interview that the immune system at birth 'is like an unprogrammed computer. It needs instruction.' He said that public health measures like cleaning up contaminated water and food have saved the lives of countless children, but they 'also eliminated exposure to many organisms that are probably good for us. Children raised in an ultraclean environment,' he added, 'are not being exposed to organisms that help them develop appropriate immune regulatory circuits.'"
  • Feb. 17 Digital TV Conversion Is Still on After House Vote: "Bucking the Obama administration, House Republicans on Wednesday defeated a bill to postpone the upcoming transition from analog to digital television broadcasting to June 12 — leaving the current Feb. 17 deadline intact for now." A very welcome bookend to my grousing the other day. The Feb. 17 date has been trumpeted for a few years now, delaying it would just cause more problems and more confusion. Just flip the switch and get it done with already.
  • Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance—Now With Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!: "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies — Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen's beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton–and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she's soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers–and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead."
  • Graffiti Removal – City of Kent, Washington: "Immediate removal within 24-48 hours is the key to successful graffiti prevention. Property owners can take back their neighborhoods by helping to clean up graffiti. Any effort to remove graffiti makes a big difference. Remove graffiti immediately and work with your neighbors to ensure your neighborhood remains clean. If you have been the victim of graffiti vandalism, you may complete a case report by utilizing the Kent Police Department's online reporting system."

Links for January 26th through January 27th

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Sometime between January 26th and January 27th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Gods and Monsters Is 99 Cents Jan. 27th, 2009 Thru Feb. 03rd, 2009 at iTunes US: For those of you with broadband connections and Apple's iTunes, Gods and Monsters is only a 99 cent rental this week. It's an excellent drama, with Sir Ian McKellan and Brendan Frasier (in one of his few non-action, actually acting roles), looking at the relationship between original Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein director James Whale and his gardener. Definitely worth the rent!
  • Obama Tells Arabic Network US Is ‘Not Your Enemy’: "President Barack Obama chose an Arabic satellite TV network for his first formal television interview as president, part of a concerted effort to repair relations with the Muslim world that were damaged under the previous administration. Obama cited his Muslim background and relatives, practically a taboo issue during the U.S. presidential campaign, and said in the interview, which aired Tuesday, that one of his main tasks was to communicate to Muslims 'that the Americans are not your enemy.' The interview on the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya news channel aired as Obama's new envoy to the region, former Sen. George J. Mitchell, arrived in Egypt on Tuesday for a visit that will also take him to Israel, the West Bank, Jordan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. 'What I told [Mitchell] is start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating,' Obama told the interviewer."
  • 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read: Science Fiction & Fantasy: "It is sometimes assumed that science fiction, fantasy and horror must mean spaceships, elves and vampires – and indeed, you'll find Iain M Banks, Tolkien and Bram Stoker on our list of mind-expanding reads. Yet these three genres have a tradition as venerable as the novel itself. Fiction works through metamorphosis: in every era authors explore the concerns of their times by mapping them on to invented worlds, whether they be political dystopias, fabulous kingdoms or supernatural dimensions. Every truly original writer must, by definition, create a new world. Here is a whole galaxy of worlds to explore."
  • Layers | Screen Forensics: "Capture your displays as a Photoshop layered image. Don't waste time capturing each window separately, importing them in your favorite PSD editor, naming the layers, positioning the images, etc. Do it with Layers in no time! Press the capture hotkey or customize your capture in the inspector. You'll obtain a full fledged PSD file with one layer per window, including menu and desktop icons, dock and menubar. " I've been quite happily using Snapz Pro X for my screenshots for years, but this looks like a very tempting competitor. Looking forward to giving it a try!
  • Pope Outrages Jews Over Holocaust Denier: "Jewish officials in Israel and abroad are outraged that Pope Benedict XVI has decided to lift the excommunication of a British bishop who denies that Jews were killed in Nazi gas chambers. The church's decision to lift the excommunication comes a few days after a Swedish television aired an interview with Williamson in which the 68-year-old claimed the Nazis did not use gas chambers. 'I believe that the historical evidence is strongly against — is hugely against — 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler,' he said in the interview, which appeared on various Web sites since its broadcast. 'I believe there were no gas chambers,' he added."

Links for January 14th through January 15th

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Sometime between January 14th and January 15th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • The Year in Pictures: Mystery Solved!: Tracking down the source image for Shepard Fairey's iconic block-print style 'HOPE' Obama poster.
  • Klingon Language Keyboard: Expensive (about $65 plus shipping) and uses a PS/2 connector instead of USB…but still! Klingon keyboard! How cool is that?
  • Am I on MySpace.com?: No. It appears you are not on MySpace.com. You're safe at the moment, but at any point you could accidentally follow the wrong link and end up stuck inside the sweaty armpit of the Internet. But with our helpful Firefox plugin you can browse in peace again. Any visit to MySpace will cause it to jump in and save you with a large prompt offering to take you back to sanity.
  • Mark your calendars: January 27th is Rabbit Hole Day: January 27th is the birthday of Lewis Carrol, author of ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND. Alice fell down a rabbit hole into a place where everything had changed and none of the rules could be counted on to apply anymore. I say, let's do the same: January 27th, 2005 should be the First Annual LiveJournal Rabbit Hole Day. When you post on that Thursday, instead of the normal daily life and work and news and politics, write about the strange new world you have found yourself in for the day, with its strange new life and work and news and politics. Are your pets talking back at you now? Did Bush step down from the White House to become a pro-circuit tap-dancer? Have you been placed under house arrest by bizarre insectoid women wielding clubs made of lunchmeat? Let's have a day where nobody's life makes sense anymore, where any random LJ you click on will bring you some strange new tale. Let's all fall down the Rabbit Hole for 24 hours and see what's there. It will be beautiful.
  • Twitter Author List!: By NO MEANS is this comprehensive, I’m just filtering it through my own knowledge base and the info I was forwarded (Clearly my tastes go towards Urban Fantasy, Sci-Fi etc) so feel free to post in comments with more info.

Links for January 12th from 10:14 to 15:44

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Sometime between 10:14 and 15:44, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: The Elements of Spam.: Form the possessive of nouns by adding 's, just an apostrophe, just an s, a semicolon, a w, an ampersand, a 9, or anything. "My wifesd*porcupine hot pix for u."
  • Stephen King fan publishes Shining’s Jack Torrance’s novel: A Stephen King fan has published an 80-page version of the book which novelist Jack Torrance obsessively writes during King's The Shining, where his descent into madness is revealed when his wife discovers that his work consists of just one phrase, endlessly repeated.
  • W. and the damage done: After a couple of presidential terms, mismanagement in every area of policy — foreign, domestic, even extraterrestrial — starts to add up. When George W. Bush entered the White House in January 2001, he inherited peace and prosperity. The military, the Constitution and New Orleans were intact and the country had a budget surplus of $128 billion. Now he's about to dash out the door, leaving a large, unpaid bill for his successors to pay. To get a sense of what kind of balance is due, Salon spoke to experts in seven different fields. Wherever possible, we have tried to express the damage done in concrete terms — sometimes in lives lost, but most often just in money spent and dollars owed. What follows is an incomplete inventory of eight years of mis- and malfeasance, but then a fuller accounting would run, um, somewhat longer than three pages.
  • Milky Way Transit Authority: I was re-reading Carl Sagan's novel Contact recently, essentially a series of arguments about SETI wrapped into a story, and he alludes to some sort of cosmic Grand Central Station. That, coupled with my longtime interest in transit maps, got me thinking about all of this.
  • How big Jurassic flying reptiles got off ground: Habib used CT scans of the bones of 155 bird specimens and a dozen species of pterosaurs and found that they were greatly different in strength, size and proportion. In birds, the hind legs were stronger than the front and in some pterosaurs the front legs were several times stronger than the hind ones. "It's a lot like a leapfrog," Habib said, describing how he figures the pterosaurs got off the ground. "They kind of pitch forward at first, the legs kick off first, then the arms take off." That allowed some of the ancient giants to get into the air in less than a second. Habib calculated that the 550-pound pterosaur called Hatzegopteryx thambema launched at a speed of 42 miles per hour.

Books, Books, Books, and More Books!

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We have so many books in our apartment!

For a few years now, I’ve been using LibraryThing to track my book collection. Ever since Prairie and I moved in together, we’ve been occasionally talking about adding her books to the listing, but it always seemed like such a monumental undertaking that we never actually did anything about it. However, with us both on a bit of a holiday break, we decided that the time had come, and we’ve been plugging away at the collection, putting about a shelf a day into the database on my computer and then uploading the day’s entries into the LibraryThing database.

And now, the project is done: our entire library — all 1,465 books — is cataloged!

It’s a fun library, too. Between Prairie’s years in English Literature classes and love for the classics, my science-fiction collection, our mutual love for good children’s literature, and many other influences, we’ve ended up with a collection that goes all over the place.

This also gave us a good chance to get a look at how we’re doing with those authors we’re making a point of collecting: Agatha Christie, Anne Rice, Dean Koontz, Roald Dahl, Stephen King (a full set, we believe), and others.

We do love our books!

Secrets of the 2008 Campaign eBook

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Over the course of the week, Newsweek has published a fascinating seven-part series called Secrets of the 2008 Campaign, an “in-depth look behind the scenes of the campaign, consisting of exclusive behind-the-scenes reporting from the McCain and Obama camps assembled by a special team of reporters who were granted year-long access on the condition that none of their findings appear until after Election Day.”

Since I wanted to read the whole thing, but have also been experimenting with reading eBooks on my iPod Touch, I figured this was as good a time as any to play with seeing what it would take to create an eBook. As it turns out, it’s not terribly difficult at all, at least as far as the .epub format goes. After some time with this tutorial and a little bit of minor troubleshooting, I had it all set up.

If you have an eBook reader that supports .epub files and would like to take a peek, here it is. It’s been working fine for me in both the desktop and iPhone versions of Stanza, but I can’t at this point vouch for any other eBook reader.

Obviously, seeing as how the only thing keeping me from breaking copyright criminally (rather than simply flagrantly, which is were I stand now) is that I’m not charging for this, so should Newsweek decide to give me the smackdown, this will be disappearing faster than Sarah Palin leaving the stage after McCain’s concession speech.

Still, it was a fun exercise in figuring out eBooks.

An Ode to the Short Story

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Following up, in a way, to a quote from Stephen King that I posted a couple weeks ago, comes this essay by Steven Millhauser, The Ambition of the Short Story.

Of course there are virtues associated with smallness. Even the novel will grant as much. Large things tend to be unwieldy, clumsy, crude; smallness is the realm of elegance and grace. It’s also the realm of perfection. The novel is exhaustive by nature; but the world is inexhaustible; therefore the novel, that Faustian striver, can never attain its desire. The short story by contrast is inherently selective. By excluding almost everything, it can give perfect shape to what remains. And the short story can even lay claim to a kind of completeness that eludes the novel — after the initial act of radical exclusion, it can include all of the little that’s left.

(via Kottke)

Stephen King on Short Stories

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I’ve always been a big fan of short stories, will happily snap up a collection from any author I know, and have often found some wonderful gems in various “Best of” collections. In the introduction to Skeleton Crew, Stephen King has a nice little bit on just why they’re so fun…

…most of you have forgotten the real pleasures of the short story. Reading a good long novel is in many ways like having a long and satisfying affair. I can remember commuting between Maine and Pittsburgh during the making of Creepshow, and going mostly by car…. I had a reading of The Thorn Birds, by Colleen McCullough, on eight cassette tapes, and for a space of about five weeks I wasn’t even having an affair with that novel; I felt married to it….

A short story is a different thing altogether–a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger. That is not, of course, the same thing as an affair or a marriage, but kisses can be sweet, and their very brevity forms their own attraction.