Monthly Archives: June 2010

First the movies …
WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE (1951) is George Pal’s end-of-the-world spectacular in which prediction of an interstellar collision leads to a crash program of space-ark construction, panic in the streets and apocalyptic disaster (to the extent the budget could handle it) before the survivors land their space arks on the unconvincing backdrop of a new planet (the weak effects are one of the flaws). Despite a largely forgettable cast this worked for me; Deep Impact started out as a remake but mutated to the point the original no longer needed crediting. “Are you stating for certain that the world will be destroyed on August 12?”
DARKON (2006) is a documentary about live-action fantasy RPGs that left my fiancée TYG gobsmacked at what the people do, while I found it fairly familiar stuff-nicely done, but not fresh enough to me to hold my interest beyond the talking lamp level.
GENGHIS BLUES (1999) is a much stronger documentary, about a blind blues musician who becomes intrigued by the ancient tradition of Tuvan throat-singing and travels to that backwater to compete. Not much deeper than a Travel Channel show, but still fascinating. “Feynman actually wrote a book about trying to travel there, TUVAN OR BUST.”
LE SAMURAI (1967) is a competent French crime drama in which hitman Alain Delon finds his latest kill complicated by a living witness, then by his employer’s decision to cut short the police investigation by killing the killer. Well executed, but I wasn’t as impressed as most critics—give me This Gun For Hire any day. “I like it when you come here-it means you need me.”
THE TOWERING INFERNO (1974) has been cited by some books as the archtypical disaster film with its big-name (for the time, at least) cast (including Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, William Holden, Richard Chamberlain, Jennifer Jones, Fred Astaire, Robert Wagner and Faye Dunaway) facing death on a titanic skyscraper, but the two hour-plus length is a fatal flaw—both the danger and the personal dramas move along at a snail’s pace. “See what I mean? I can’t even sell a phony stock certificate.”
SKYSCRAPER SOULS (1932) has Warren Williams as a wheeler-dealer engaging in assorted financial schemes to keep control of his seventy-story creation, while womanizing in his off-hours (with Maureen O’Sullivan as his latest amusement). This has the pace Towering Inferno sorely needed, with all the various melodramas moving along briskly; quite risque in its pre-code way. “She’s underage but she’s no innocent-take it from me, she’s wise as they come.”
TOY STORY 3 (2010) has the toys in a panic when Andy’s imminent departure for college leaves them wondering if they’ll be condemned to the attic, or worse, the dumpster-only to wind up by chance in a nightmarish day care where the toys are ruled by the Care Bear of Doom. Much better than I’d have expected for this point in the series. “No child ever truly loves a toy!”

And now the books—FIRE AND HEMLOCK is Diana Wynn Jones’ retelling of Tam Linn, in which a young girl enters her flashback booth and discovers she’s forgotten all about that Mysterious House nearby, the old musician she met there, the picture he gave her and the strangely sinister forces that seemed intent on keeping them apart. Rereading this, it strikes me as a departure from her previous work in having no overt magic until the end—I realize now that one thing that vaguely dissatisfied me the first time is that this makes the book close to a straight coming of age tale, which is not a genre that works for me in print. It improves on rereading though.
THE BLOOD OF KINGS: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art by Mary Ellen Miller and Linda Schele is lavishly illustrated with pictures of lintels, tombs, figurines and bowls, along with detailed explanations of what it all means. This emphasizes that far from the spiritual pacifists they were perceived to be, the Maya indulged in just as much bloodletting and war as the Aztecs, as well as being talented artisans and gifted punsters (“The glyphs used for the king’s name are never the same on any two monuments.”) though the authors find their timekeeping skills overrated (“It’s easy to keep an accurate calendar when using whole days-their lunar calendar was no more accurate than that of other cultures.”). Excellent.
ANGELOLOGY by Danielle Trussoni is a leaden mainstream fantasy novel in which a young novice nun discovers the Nephilim Walk Among Us (and have been responsible for pretty much every horrible thing from the Final Solution to British Imperialism) and that they’re dangerously close to uncovering the McGuffin that will enable them to release their imprisoned fallen-angel ancestors and totally take over. This is too familiar for my taste and there are several tin-ear details such as making the angelic aura radioactive (that doesn’t make sense given they’re real angels, not just ET impersonators).
JUST AND UNJUST WARS: A Moral Argument With Historical Illustrations by Michael Walze, is an attempt to figure out what constitutes war crimes from a moral perspective rather than a legal one, dismissing Sherman’s “war is hell” (“This leads to accepting atrocities as a normal part of war”) while discussing the ethical problems of reprisals, sieges (“Besieging a city is an attack on civilians, yet it’s universally accepted as a moral tactic.”), guerilla warfare, terrorism (under which category he’d put bombing of civilian targets) and nuclear deterrence (“We’re all hostages, but we walk around without any of the restrictions hostages usually experience.”). Thought-provoking, though not always what I expected (since Walzer argues that in extreme cases human rights can be overriden, he might be OK with the ticking-bomb rationale for torture) but I’d like more discussion how to apply his theories in practice when every war these days is proclaimed a Just War on which the fate of humanity depends.
NECRONOMICON is a TPB of a 1920s set horror comic book in which a gathering of Miskatonic University students finds themselves caught in a war between various Lovecraftian races. Didn’t care for the art, but nicely done.
REX MUNDI: THE BODY OF THE KING is a TPB of a series set in an alternate 1930s where the Catholic Church oppresses heresy with an iron fist and trade guilds operate much as multinationals do in our world. A young doctor discovers a sinister conspiracy involving a mystery killer, Near East oil and a temple in the Paris catacombs to someone named Baphomet … Great set-up but the fondness for decompressed action scenes (i.e., taking a couple of pages to show something that lasts seconds) didn’t work at all for me.
THE ESSENTIAL AVENGERS Vol 3 takes Marvel’s super-team from their introduction to the Black Knight and the Black Panther through meetings with the Vision, Hank Pym’s transition to his Yellowjacket identity and the debut of one of the Assemblers’ arch-foes, Ultron. Not without its flaws and head-scratching moments (the whole Yellowjacket sequence was better handled in the EARTH’S MIGHTIEST HEROES retcon), but Roy Thomas and his collaborators (primarily John Buscema) were at the top of their game here.
ASTERIOS POLYP by David Mazzucchelli is a quirky graphic novel about a socially inept architectural designer (“He was an acclaimed prize-winner, but none of his designs had ever been built!”)! who goes walkabout after his house burns down and winds up a car repairman in a small Southern town. Works as story and as art, though the ending didn’t quite succeed for me.
MAKING COMICS: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels was Scott McCloud’s follow-up to UNDERSTANDING COMICS and confirms my sense that even non-comics storytellers can learn from his discussion of storytelling tools, how words and images coordinate, the ways writers can shift between panels (or scenes) and the use of body language. While some of the art stuff was too technical for me, I suspect I may pick up a copy to keep (this one was the library’s) eventually.

Does it matter why an author writes what he or she does? Or whether it reflects something in their past? And would knowing that improve the book for us readers?
In The Shakespeare Wars, which I commented on recently, Ron Rosenbaum thumbs down the idea. He dislikes the idea of “explaining” writing by looking at an author’s life, arguing that the work on the printed page (or the stage) is what we should be studying. Doubly so in the case of Shakespeare, where we have next to no information about him.
As an example of how not to do it, Rosenbaum cites one writer’s theory that Shakespeare saw a Jew hanged in London and was so horrified by the bigotry of the crowd he wrote Merchant of Venice as a rebuke (I’d agree with Rosenbaum that it’s nothing of the sort—no matter how you dice it or slice it, the anti-Semites in the play are the good guys). As Rosenbaum points out, that wouldn”t change the play, even if it were true (and we have no proof it was).
The best counter-argument (read some years previous) was from a literary historian who argued that rejecting the biographical approach was a way for critics to defend their turf: Never mind the details of the author’s life, look at his writing! Nothing else matters!
I tend somewhat toward Rosenbaum’s view. I do think author biographies can be interesting, and they can explain a lot—but I agree with Rosenbaum that if you have to know the biography to make sense of the book, the book is seriously flawed.
Take Orson Scott Card. A great many of his stories (Hart’s Hope, Songmaster, the early Alvin Maker books and Ender’s Game, among others) focus on a gifted child whose talent is as much a burden as a curse. Quite possibly this represents something in Card’s past; then again, it could be he just likes a child under pressure as a central character. I’d be interested to know—but it doesn’t change the books. Knowing Card’s decisions come from life rather than creative choices (I’m simplifying the alternatives here) wouldn’t make the books any better or worse.
Another example is “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a story by Jorge Luis Borges in which Menard sets out to write Don Quixote—but even though he’s writing exactly the same book, he has totally different intentions for his work than Cervantes did so in the eyes of critics, it’s a totally different (and superior) novel (note: Borges is mocking this view, not endorsing it). It’s the same logic by which if Shakespeare were someone completely different, the plays would be different.
Also, I can’t help thinking that some of the impulse to “explain” authorial choices is less about true understanding than the inability to accept that we writers sometimes just pull things out of our butt. One of the standard scenes in old biopics about composers has the protagonist sitting around hearing birds tweet, horses clomp or rain patter—and suddenly, the sounds are the basis for his new symphony/waltz/concerto (brilliantly parodied in the PBS special Norbert Smythe: A Life).
Likewise, Dreamer of Oz shows L. Frank Baum creating everything in the Wizard of Oz based on real experiences—a bully who turns out to be a coward inspires the creation of the Cowardly Lion for example. In A Beautiful Mind, John Nash is shown coming up with his concepts of game theory by watching his friends hit on girls.
Some of this is dramatic convenience—having sit around and think is kind of dull—but I wonder if doesn’t indicate an underlying inability to understand creativity; the story of Newton getting hit by the apple goes back well before Hollywood. It simplifies what can be a fairly baffling creative process, even for creative people.