HELL by Robert Olen Butler has a damned news anchorman sentenced to conduct newscasts in the underworld (where you definitely do not want to rely on the teleprompter!), carrying out an awkward affair with Anne Boleyn, reporting news stories that invariably turn out bullshit and hunting desperate for a gateway out of Hell and into Heaven. Amusing in bits (like J. Edgar Hoover’s rationalization that he’s in Hell to prevent a Commie takeover)) but ultimately lacking in substance compared to Larry Niven’s Inferno.
100 BULLETS: The Hard Way by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso is an excellent installment in the series as the drifter Wylie recovers the memories of his past as a Minuteman, learns why he was glad to forget and we learn more about the differing agendas of Graves, Shepherd and their plans for Dizzy (I’ve frequently wondered if Graves and Shepherd were really on the same side despite their stances——this answers that). This is noteworthy for giving the history of the mysterious conspiracy the Trust and the Minutemen, though it doesn’t explain their later rift. Well done, as usual.
KILL SHAKESPEARE by Conor McCreery, Anthony Del Col and Andy Belanger has Hamlet’s trip to England take a different turn from the play as Richard III recruits him to take down a mysterious godlike entity named Shakespeare who exercises a strange power over Richard and his people. Accompanied by Falstaff, Juliet, Othello and a seemingly reformed Iago, Hamlet sets off to find Shakespeare, unaware that Richard and Lady Macbeth have their own agendas … Entertaining, but not as clever a reworking of fiction as Fables or Unwritten.
THE ASTOUNDING WOLF-MAN by Robert Kirkman and Jason Howard has a successful businessman bitten by a werewolf on vacation, then turning his powers to crimefighting under the direction of the urbane vampire Zechariah. The toll it takes on his life and a few details Zechariah hasn’t mentioned soon become a problem … More than the Werewolf by Night knockoff I anticipated, though it didn’t really win me over either (but as Durham Library has several more TPBs, I’m sure I’ll keep reading); I did like some neat touches, such as Zechariah’s amusement over current vampire fiction (since writers don’t use the classic powers like shapeshifting and turning to mist, people have no idea just what his powers are).
SCALPED: Indian Country by Jason Aaron and R.M. Guera is a hardboiled crime comic in which Dashell Bad Horse, son of a former AIM radical (no, not the Marvel crime cartel, the American Indian Movement of the 1970s), returns to his home reservation and becomes a deputy in the corrupt law-enforcement regime of reservation boss Lincoln Red Crow, who’s unaware Dash is working with the FBI to take him down. Very grim and gritty in showing a world where everyone’s either corrupt, has a hidden agenda, or both, but not to my taste as much as the more classic noir of Criminal or the elaborate conspiracies of 100 Bullets.
MODESTY BLAISE: The Black Pearl by Peter O’Donnell and Jim Holdaway is the third collection of the newspaper strip, including the unremarkable title story, the much more entertaining “The Magnified Man” (with a very clever adversary) and “The Killing Ground,” the only comic strip adapted into prose (the short story of the same name in Pieces of Modesty). O’Donnell’s interview in the front covers his work as romance novelist Madeline Brent.
THE IRREGULARS by Steven-Elliot Altman, Michael Reaves and Angelo Dazo has Sherlock Holmes call in the Baker Street Irregulars when Watson is identified, by eyewitnesses, as a brutal killer. The solution involves a shapeshifter and a scheme by Moriarty to mathematically reach outside space-time and summon Lovecraft’s Old Ones——can a handful of children save the day? Well, of course, but it’s fun watching them try.
Monthly Archives: December 2011
No movies, just books and graphic novels
Chekhov’s gun
As I noted a few posts back, Chekhov’s gun is the rule supposedly coined by the Russian playwright taht if you put a gun on stage in the first act, it should be fired before the end of the show.
This is something slightly from the idea that the core of your opening should pay off at the finish: If you start with a character problem, you need to resolve it (whether by success or failure); if you kick off with a mystery, you need to answer it (more discussion of that here). Chekhov’s gun is about all the other elements that you may introduce: Supporting characters, secondary puzzles, subplots, set pieces. If you introduce them, don’t forget them.
Case in point, the movie Blood Simple shows Dan Hedaya constantly accompanied by his dog; Hedaya’s romantic rival’s dog gets a lot of screen time too. About halfway through the movie, they’re no longer seen and never even mentioned. Not a fatal flaw in an excellent film, but it is kind of odd.
The more you emphasize something, the more payoff it needs: In my last completed novel, Questionable Minds, I had a subplot involving a telepathic blackmailer that Scotland Yard is attempting to catch while hunting Jack the Ripper. I didn’t want it to look as if my cast immediately realized the plot of the book; instead, I wanted them tackling other cases until the threat of the Ripper became paramount.
My trusty beta reader Dori told me, however, that I’d spent too much time on the subplot, to the point readers would assume it ties in with the main arc, rather than wrapping up on the side. So I finished it several chapters early, and I think that was the right move.
On the other hand, I have some sympathy for an article I read many years ago which argued that writing by a rule that everything you introduce has to be “used” in some way. Life isn’t like that: It has dead ends, aimless side paths and a good story should mirror some of that.
Of course, fiction isn’t like life, but the author has a point. I’m sometimes annoyed by stories in which every detail dovetails together, just like the clues in a 1920s mystery. Or where everything the protagonist (or other characters do) somehow reflects or illuminates his character; in real life we do a lot of things and have a lot of tastes don’t show anything about our character. We’re sloppy.
I think the kind of story where you have the most freedom in not firing Chekhov’s gun are setting-based stories (discussed at my links above), stories that aren’t so much about plots or events as about a world, or a part of the world. For example, slice-of-life stories, which present a typical day in the life of whoever (small town John Doe, Martian artist J’Onn D’oe, medieval peasant John of Doe, etc.). We know we’re only getting one day (or afternoon, or hour) of someone’s story, so it’s no surprise if the gun isn’t fired.
War stories that are about war itself are the same way. Films where the focus isn’t on one character or one mission, but life in wartime: Individual character arcs may wrap up, some people die randomly, but other stories go on, without finishing. Ditto legal or police stories that are about the life of a cop or life at a law firm (think L.A. Law or Hill Street Blues). These stories aren’t about a plot or a story arc (though they still have them) so they don’t have to pay off in quite the same way a plot-centered tale does.
Sometimes you don’t have to fire Chekhov’s gun.
For a change, running behind for a good reason
Work on Mage’s Masquerade went so well this afternoon, I kept at it instead of proofing my eHows. So now I have extra work this evening to make up, but I’m pretty good with that.
However, that means no time for anything but another link post:
•Some suggestions on how to mix faith and politics safely. I don’t agree with them all: I think voting based on someone’s faith or professed faith rarely produces good results, but I don’t think that’s the kind of religious test the Constitution bans.
•Daily Howler asks why if the National Assessment of Educational Progress is the “gold standard” for school achievement, newspapers don’t go into more detail on what it says.
•The same website ponders a Club for Growth tax proposal and asks how a “revenue neutral” proposal can possibly reduce the deficit.
•A New Hampshire Republican official explains that state voter-registration efforts are meant to reduce the number of liberals voting.
•On being wary of our own intentions as well as those of other nations. And Glenn Greenwald observes how projecting strength just makes things worse.
•No, the fact Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War does not mean it’s okay to do it now.
•Digby rips into a proposal for fixed Medicare benefits. Another Hullabaloo blogger discusses how little government funding goes to people under 30.
•Contractors push to put military technology into police hands.
•An account of how a humor book about werewolves was linked to a “satanic sex stabbing.” It’s a good reminder of the importance of not just parroting other news accounts when reporting. Meanwhile, a Civil War historian analyzes the politics of Gingrich’s new novel.
•If billionaires think Obama’s a big meanie, imagine how they’d react to Teddy Roosevelt or FDR.
•The FDA allows women to buy emergency contraception over the counter. So Obama overrules them. Digby adds comments here.
•And here’s a Supreme Court case on the right to face your accuser. It’s significant because it involves the defense’s right to question forensics experts about their analysis (as noted in the book reviewed here, it’s not infallible).
The word envy does not, perhaps mean, what Charles Coulson says it means
In a column called Killing Your Neighbor’s Cow, religious conservative Charles Coulson recycles the standard right-wing argument that Occupy Wall Street and its supporters are just resentful the 1 percent have been more successful, and that “the line between clamoring for justice and envy can be very thin.”
As slacktivist points out, there’s really a wide gap between justice and envy, certainly in classic Christian thought. (more from slacktivist here). The folk-tale Coulson cites——a peasant resentful of his new neighbor’s cow asks God to strike it dead——is just a laugh at the mean-spiritedness of people; there’s nothing suggesting the peasant was trying to get justice at the time, he’s just pissed off.
If the critics of the rich were pushing envy, we’d be looking at something really radical: 100 percent taxation for incomes over x amount, really massive distribution. Not say, the merits of restoring Clinton-era income tax rates. Hell, even though there are arguments a tax rate of 70 percent on the very rich would work, I don’t see many people pushing it (and that’s a good thing. Even though that was the top rate when Coulson was working for Nixon, I still think it’s unfair).
It’s noteworthy that Coulson’s examples of envy are all focused on the peasants envying the rich. Apparently he has nothing to say about the “53 percent” lie that the 47 percent of the population who don’t pay income tax are therefore leeching off the hardworking producers (I have links here discussing this bullshit). Which certainly seems a kind of envy-based argument, implying the “lucky duckies” (as the Wall Street Journal calls the poor) are exploiting the hardworking middle class and rich.
Coulson also argues that “income redistribution will do nothing to help those in need or create a more just society, it just creates a bigger government.” This ignores the side-effects of the current slump: Cities that have turned off street lights, counties that replace asphalt roads with gravel, Topeka KS decriminalizing spousal abuse because it says it can’t afford to prosecute. Guess what, Mr. Coulson? I’d like my government to be big enough to handle those jobs.
For Coulson, as Slacktivist notes, there are no exceptions: Any proposal for raising taxes on the rich is envy-based, period, and therefore cannot possibly be just. But if we follow that logic, we might as well get rid of all taxes completely: They’re all taking money from someone and giving it to someone else. So apparently Coulson doesn’t think taxation is theft, just that taxing the rich is theft.
Meanwhile, this column argues that the idea of the rich as job creators who contribute far more to our economy than they’re paid for is codswallop: Giving big tax cuts to millions of people rather than a handful of rich types will do far more for the economy. As someone who’s long supported “trickle-up” economic policy (cut taxes on the lowest income groups that pay any, then work your way up the income ladder until the cuts run out), I greatly enjoyed it.
Slightly OT, here’s my latest And column, on Sen. Lindsey Graham’s deranged conviction that giving the government the power to lock up Americans it claims are terrorists, without ever having to produce evidence, will keep us safer. Not for the first time I’m reminded how much Republicans in Washington resemble leftovers from the USSR: Isn’t locking up enemies of the state for life the sort of thing Stalin would have done?
Filed under Nonfiction, Politics, Writing
And more books
BLACK AND WHITE by Jackie Kessler and Caitlin Kittredge is a good super-hero novel (I think I have to reconsider my insistence that I don’t like this genre) set in a near future world where super-heroes provide services through a powerful, seemingly benevolent corporation (it comes off as a more sinister version of Marvel’s 50 State Initiative), focusing on Jet and Iridium, who become friends during their long years of training, then enemies after Iridium goes rogue in the belief the corporation is the wrong side. While this uses a lot of familiar super-hero elements (Jet’s struggles with her dark powers aren’t that far from Marvel’s Cloak) the authors manage to give them a fresh spin. I’m looking forward to reading the sequel eventually.
RITES OF PEACE: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna by Adam Zamoyski actually starts with the Austrian diplomat Metternich’s efforts in 1812 to both build an alliance that will not only neutralize Napoleon, but will prevent either Russian or Britain from taking France’s place as European overlord. The following years of negotiation seem eerily familiar as the Great Powers try to draw up national boundaries to suit their self-interest, despite the awareness that they can’t completely ignore public opinion (while monarchs were often fine with trading and swapping provinces as long as they ruled as much land, the residents weren’t so thrilled), Tsar Alexander keeps insisting all his decisions are for the Greater Good, and the dream of a New World Order frequently turns out to be an excuse for power-grabs. A good example of the complexity is after Napoleon’s escape from Elba and subsequent defeat at Waterloo, after which the allies punished the Louis XVIII’s government in France, even though they’d technically fought on Louis’s behalf. The book also has moments of humor, such as Metternich pining over his unfaithful mistress and one Italian monarch who upon reclaiming his country from Bonaparte voided all government acts of the previous 18 years, including marriage (so all children during the interregnum became retroactively illegitimate). Zarnoyski concludes that contemporary critics assessed the Congress’ failures more than later revisionists: It didn’t create a pax Europa and in many ways stifled reform, as most of the allies came to see any attempt to challenge their new system as subversion.
KAFKA ON THE SHORE by Haruki Murakama is a magical realist novel in which a teenage runaway finds himself falling for the ghost of a living librarian’s 15-year-old self while a mentally handicapped senior and possible murderer is driven to set out on a mission to find a mysterious “entrance stone” that he can’t explain. This gets a marginal thumbs up——it resolves the A plot on a satisfactory emotional note, but the backup with the senior ends up not amounting to much.
SIDESHOW USA: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination by Rachel Adams focuses primarily on how 20th century artists and authors——Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, Diane Arbus and Tod Browning in the film Freaks——have used the freak show as a symbol to explore racial “othering,” sexual nonconformity, or the boundaries of normality. The book also covers the change in the meaning of “freak” in the sixties (until I read that chapter, I don’t think it had ever occurred to me how big a change that was) and the boundaries between science and freakishness (pointing out, for example, how much the display of the primitive tribesman Ishi a century ago resembled the freak shows’ Wild Men of Borneo and the like). Very good.
Movies and Books
Second in the Godzilla series, GODZILLA RAIDS AGAIN (1955) is the retitled Japanese film Gigantis the Fire Monster, in which a new specimen of the “gigantis” species (the original Godzilla having died in the first film) thaws out of ice and begins stomping Japan (as with the first film, the sense of ruin is much more powerful than in similar American movies of the era) in its battle with an “angersaurus” that also thawed out, making this the first of many in the series to have multiple monsters. Some good continuity touches (explaining why the oxygen destroyer of the first film can’t be reused, for instance) but a weak finish——attacking the Gigantis on an isolated island away from civilization just isn’t satisfying. “It is no longer in the lap of science——now it is in the lap of the gods!”
JUDGE DEE AND THE MONASTERY MURDERS (1974) adapts one of Robert van Gulik’s mystery novels about the eponymous 7h-century Chinese judge, here investigating a series of mysterious events at a monastery where half the residents seem to be hiding secrets. This TV movie is noteworthy for having an all-Asian cast, including Khigh Diegh as Dee, Mako as his chief guard and Keye Luke as a kindly sage. Good, though the villain’s scheme seems to do little more than accomplish evil for the hell of it. “Nobody builds a wall 10 feet thick!”
THE NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES (1948) is the film version of the Woolrich novel in which sideshow mentalist Edward G. Robinson becomes increasingly tormented by his genuine flashes of precognition, especially when it becomes clear he can’t change anything he sees, however tragic. When he sees the daughter of his best friend lying dead, however, he sets out to avert it, even though hardboiled cop William Demarest is determined to expose him as a con man. This has a tighter mystery plot than the book, but undercuts the sense of doom; still, a good film in the noir tradition of struggling against an inevitable, inexplicable fate. It would double-bill well with Black Rainbow for Roseanne Arquette’s similarly tormented fake psychic. “I was living in a world already dead——and I alone knowing it.”
AUNT DIMITY BEATS THE DEVIL by Nancy Atherton is part of a “cozy” mystery series about a rare-book specialist who gets help from her deceased aunt in crises (via writing in a notebook, nothing more dramatic). In this case, the protagonist falls victim to another, more obsessed ghost while investigating the rare books in an isolated mansion (surprisingly, they don’t do more with how much of a Gothic cliche this is); different from the usual cozy, but not quite enough to hold me.
WHOSE BODY? by Dorothy Sayers was the first in her Lord Peter Wimsey series, as Peter and his faithful manservant Bunter investigate how a naked, shaven corpse would up in the bathtub of a middle-class flat. Wimsey plays the Wodehouse-style silly ass much more than I remember him doing in later books, though it’s also clear he’s both good as a detective and not at all silly (suffering Great War PTSD, for example). The babble gets a little too thick, but Sayers’ writing compensates for some of that (like one character’s observation that around the short Wimsey, he feels as if being six-two is “vulgar assertiveness.”). Despite its flaws, enough good stuff to appreciate why Wimsey would go on to outlast most of his contemporaries.
I feel some links coming on
Columnist Timothy Dalrymple tries to prove gay marriage will destroy heterosexual marriage by shifting the goalposts. No, gay marriage won’t destroy any individual marriage. No, of course it hasn’t done any harm in the states where it’s been around for years. Because the problem is (cue the ominous music) the long-term effect on the institution of marriage! So it doesn’t matter if things look fine now, somewhere down the road it might cause problems (because gays rights are linked to the sexual revolution and the sexual revolution was bad, so gay marriage must therefore be bad).
Brilliant, in a way: No matter how long we go without anything bad happening, Dalrymple can always insist we’re starting down that dread slippery slope.
•This slacktivist post has several good links in it.
•As some of you may have heard, Congress is debating a bill that would allow the military to detain accused traitors even if they’re American citizens on American soil. The Administration is fighting back, but mostly because they see it as restricting the Executive Branch’s power in favor of Congress in several ways. For example, although it sets into law a lot of the increased detention powers the Bush and Obama administrations have claimed, by so doing it makes it harder for Obama (and successors) to make new powers up on the grounds the 2003 authorization of military force somehow justifies it (more discussion here).
It’s a sorry day when the big debate is over whether congressional authoritarians or White House authoritarians have the power to lock Americans up in military detention. Pandagon adds technical detail.
•Ta-Nehesi Coates points out that no, studying the difference in IQ between the races is not some dispassionate exercise of science unaffected by culture. As witness that a century ago, Slavs, Poles, Italians and other immigrants were considered separate races from the true, Anglo-Saxon white people, and much inferior to them.
•In a lovely example of how politics trumps religion, Southern Baptist leader Richard Land instructs Newt Gingrich on how to convince Southern Baptist women who find his marital history disgusting to vote for him anyway.
As I’ve observed before, right-wing politicians and pundits love to talk about how their past sins don’t matter because God forgives them, but they never apply that outside their own little set (no forgiving Clinton, for instance). It’s almost like elections were more on their mind than God.
•You’ve probably heard about the Kansas high-school student who tweeted that GOv. Sam Brownback [edit: I originally wrote his former title, Senator]”blows.” WaPo’s Ruth Marcus is just horrified that some kid would talk like that to an elected official: Sure, there’s that First Amendment, but it doesn’t give you the right to do stuff like that! And don’t her parents realize their duty is to “inculcate values of respect for authority.”
As Glenn Greenwald points out at the link, Marcus’ belief in civil discourse didn’t stop her dismissing liberal critics of Obama as “deranged” people who “ought to be drug-tested.” But of course, those were only everyday citizens, not our glorious leaders.
I’ve no idea what prompted the young tweeter was thinking. I agree with her Brownback blows, given his ultra right-to-life stance (anyone who dismisses the burden of being forced to bear a rapist’s child by blithely asserting it’s “a beautiful child of a loving God, that we ought to protect in all circumstances in all places” blows big time), but she may have been thinking of something else. Or just mouthing off.
But you know what? It’s our right as Americans to mouth off. And hers too. Three cheers for her and her mum for not showing the same fawning respect for authority that Marcus does.
Filed under Politics
