Oh, sure, I'd seen movies. I loved movies. But Ebert, in his various passionate film reviews, showed me what to look for. He could often be wrong about films. He was more often right, and it was thanks to him that I discovered so many beautiful, wonderful moments on film. I collected the books of his film reviews and read them and worked on narrative and found movies to look for.
I hope wherever you are, Mr. Ebert, you can still enjoy a big bucket of popcorn, a Coke, and movies in the company of friends.
( Cut for specific spoilers for the episode/previous seasons; vague spoilers for Storm of Swords (book three).Collapse )
You suck.
- Me.
I have mixed feelings about the whole going by mobility scooter thing. I used to take the trike, but that requires using the cane once I arrive, and the farmer's market is filled with small excited children looking for clowns, camels, and ice cream and not me; I've been knocked down a couple of times. So I thought the scooter would work. And it does, sorta, but I still find using the thing outside of theme parks highly irritating -- not to mention it's kinda terrifying to cross busy streets with it. It's low to the ground, and I know drivers can't always see me in it, and for safety reasons it can only go so fast. I really wish it had a way to go just a little faster when crossing busy streets. Oh well. Not to mention that my feet swell up after a mere hour on that thing. Grr.
But I did do fairly well at the farmer's market, since local oranges, cucumbers and tomatoes were all on sale. The prices may quite possibly mean that I overdid it on cucumbers; I don't like oranges, so I restrained myself there, but cucumbers are awesome, so, no restraint. Local honey was not at all on sale, but it was there so, er, local honey. Also a mango cheddar which, yes, I shouldn't be eating at all, but, mango cheddar. What can I say?
Hopes that the trip would shake cobwebs from my head were alas overly optimistic. I came home feeling completely drained, a feeling that persisted and worsened on Sunday, when my body suddenly decided it had had enough. I wasn't dizzy - a nice change - just completely wiped, so I spent much of the day sleeping, looking outside to not see hummingbirds (they've been coming to our feeders, but never when I'm looking) sleeping, comforting a cat, sleeping again. I still feel drained this morning, if at least a little more capable of finishing sentences.
In mostly unrelated news my brother put up a second set of bird feeders and a birdbath near the dinette window. This has delighted a number of creatures, including the two cardinals who appear to have taken up permanent residence in the yard, some house wrens, one very happy cat (the window has a sill that is about the perfect size, if you are a cat), and, of course, one squirrel. The arrangement was not precisely ideal at first, since the birdbath was located within perfect jumping distance of the feeder for the squirrel, who would see either me or the cat and leap happily over to the birdbath, scattering water everywhere. This has been changed, forcing the squirrel to either leap down to the ground or climb down a pole, burning off some of the calories gained from the sunflower seeds. I've yet to see anything other than the squirrel using the birdbath, but summer is coming. We shall see.
Sample: "And als the ladyes came to bange a gong, to call Arthur to Avalon, Ich sawe Odin laugh grim and garisshe - the daye the musique perisshede."
It gets even better.
James and the Giant Peach (the film, not the book).
Friday's Child (Georgette Heyer's first bestselling Regency)
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory which is still such a terrifying experience that I haven't dared to look at the comments.
On a related note, to answer a couple of lingering questions from ICFA, Tor.com is probably the hands down worst way to contact me. I do have an account there and in theory you can send messages to it. In practice since the only people who were sending messages to that account were people desperate to sell me fake Prada bags or introduce me to new ways of finding porn, I stopped checking it, with the result that you could have a message there for three months before I noticed it.
This year was no different. The only real difference was that I spent Thursday and Friday nights at the IAFA hotel (kinda ruing this when I was sick Friday and Saturday mornings, which kinda felt like a total waste of spending money on a hotel) and that I ate a lot more cheese. (Cheese is good.) So I felt a bit more like I was part of the conference, even though I did even less of it than I usually do, and though I was pretty certainly the only person at the conference also following a golf tournament. (In actual fact most of the other attendees didn't even know about the golf tournament.) Various highlights, in no particular order, especially not in the order of events:
( Neil Gaiman's Whiskey! Shoes! Gators! Tornados!Collapse )
Which is all just a touch too much for one post, so, first, lessons learned from Arnold Palmer:
1. Tiger Woods may or may not be back. But his crowds? Definitely back. I quote from my Twitter
"A whole mass of people are trailing behind Woods, like a large pack of brightly colored cockroaches."
2. Being right on the edge of the hole when Woods' crowds arrive, and by "right on the edge" I mean "right behind a rope, which is not technically an edge, but edge sounds better here, and I'm losing this sentence, I see, so let me get back to it," is a moderately terrifying experience, and by moderately terrifying, I mean that even with brakes on it will feel as if the masses of people behind you will push you right into Tiger Woods.
3. Your fears that people will push you into Tiger Woods will be easily overcome by fears that a Reuters photographer is about to fall on you.
4. This will in turn lead to something distinctly different about the 2013 tournament – actual, loud, noise on the 7th hole (and to a lesser degree on hole 10 and holes 1 and 9.) Noise distracting enough to cause caddies to frown and call for noise reduction which will end up being completely ignored.
We honestly wondered what might end up happening with that – the noise came from a corporate group who had rented a large air conditioned tent with a balcony and bleachers and also apparently provided a lot of wine. (I am guessing on the wine, but almost everybody on their balcony had a crystal glass in hand and the noise level suggested a certain relaxation level.) On the one hand, golf is meant to be quiet for a reason – a missed stroke can cost someone thousands to tens of thousands of dollars. On the other hand, this was obviously a corporate sponsor. Hmm. I've no doubt something was said, especially since this was hole 7, but whether anything was done is another question.
5. The habit of pretending that you are really at the coffee shop to work, work, work and certainly not to people watch or socialize or anything has indeed spread to the porches, patios and balconies of people with large, elegant homes right on the golf course ostentatiously "working," while constantly raising their glasses.
6. Thanks to modern technology, even the fierce rules of the PGA Tour (NO CAMERAS NO CAMERAS NO CAMERAS ABSOLUTELY NO IPADS UNLESS YOU ARE AN ACCREDITED MEMBER OF THE PRESS AND EVEN THEN WE ARE NOT HAPPY AND YOU MAY NOT, and by not, we mean, ON PAIN OF EXECUTION AND LOSING ALL ACCESS TO THE INTERNET FOREVER AND EVER AND EVER, TWEET RESULTS WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?) cannot prevent people from ALSO following March Madness even as they happily trail behind Tiger.
7. You will go ahead and tweet what's happening anyway, just without golf scores, Just To Be Contrary. (I did feel like pointing out that a grand total of one person on my twitter feed might be interested in golf scores and that one person would be considerably more likely to check, say, CBS, and not me, but I felt this might end up causing more of an argument than was warranted.)
8. Golf is a lot more fun when you have a lot of wind, and by a lot more fun, I mean balls go into trees and into paths and bounce round and round and round.
9. You will not be at all surprised to find that the able bodied man attempting to burst into the disabled porta-potty is the exact same man who was earlier cheerfully smoking a huge cigar right next to people who were pointedly coughing to make him go away.
10. A gator who has climbed up to the sixth hole because, you know, all the water is just too much, will be almost completely ignored by the various very focused golfers, proving once again that Florida residents are hardly the only ones to feel blasé about gators.
11. Rules or no rules, you will end up taking a picture of the gator anyway because, gator on golf course.
12. Because this is your cheap cellphone no one will believe that you took a picture of a gator, because instead of a gator, what they will see is something blurry that might, or might not, be grass, and behind that, something blurry that might, or might not, be water, or possibly a nuclear waste site. This will all be terribly unfair to the immaculately kept Bay Hill golf course.
13. Despite having found in previous years much better food around the golf course than the kinda tragic hamburgers and hot dogs offered at about a third of the holes, you will once again completely forget this and find yourself eating a not very good hot dog. On the bright side this will be on hole 17 where balls often go hop hop hop into the water which is an excellent distraction from problematic food.
14. Despite careful, careful application of sunscreen everywhere and chilly temperatures which cause you to keep most of yourself fully covered, you will still miss a tiny patch of skin just above your foot which will then burn and burn and burn causing all kinds of angst at ICFA, like, WHAT SOCKS CAN I WEAR WITH THIS, and PLEASE TELL ME HORROR WRITERS ARE NOT STARING AT MY FEET GETTING IDEAS. But that's another post.
( Major spoiler for the most recent episode of Once Upon a Time, the Pinocchio episode.Collapse )
However, the rest of the week is devoted to golf (Arnold Palmer tomorrow) and IAFA (tonight and after tomorrow) and getting amused by how excited IAFA attendees are getting about alligators. See, I counted nine of them while going to and back from the Ocoee grocery store last week, and I can see one from the balcony where I'm typing right now, so my excitement levels, not quite as high.
Hope to see various IAFA people in a couple of hours, and perhaps throw in bits of blogging in between doing my very serious resting moments.
( Aggressively spoilery snark ahead!Collapse )
2. Over at Tor.com, the Georgette Heyer reread continues with Penhallow. Wow. I remembered this book as deeply, deeply unpleasant, but I hadn't remembered just how unpleasant or how many times characters threw things at each other or tossed people down the stairs. The comments recommend reading Cold Comfort Farm as an antidote. I agree.
3. My mother wants you to watch this. (In French, but you don't need to speak French to follow it.)
3. So I finally got around to catching up with Once Upon A Time, and ( Some brief spoilery comments.Collapse )
For those who have forgotten, Rachel Cosgrove Payes wrote The Hidden Valley in Oz, the serviceable but not great 39th book in the original Famous Forty Oz books. For whatever reason -- possibly the terrible illustrations -- the book didn't sell well, and the publishers turned to Eloise Jarvis McGraw and Lauren McGraw for the next book in the series. Cosgrove moved to writing romances, science fiction, and Gothic romances. The House of Tarot is a 1975 Gothic romance, and oh, it's terrible.
A few words about Gothic romances: the idea is pretty much standard: Girl arrives at old house which is sometimes crumbling, sometimes not, and finds herself wildly attracted to a Man with a mysterious past or a Man with a Strangely Compelling Personality. Mystery Ensues, usually combined with possible Very Real Ghosts and Insanity. The books have multiple variations -- Victoria Holt, a leader of the genre, sometimes said "oh, screw this" and refused to give her readers the expected happy ending (especially once she'd reached the level where she could do so and remain financially comfortable); Elizabeth Peters typically made fun of the entire genre (while milking it under her other pseudonym of Barbara Michaels); Mary Stewart played with the personalities of her male leads, and so on.
Payes flops on nearly every level.
Oh, she has the naive heroine (Amanda) and the Rival Woman with Questionable Motives (Toni) and the Mysterious House and Things That Go Bump in the Night. So far, so good. She's killed off the Man with the Brutal Personality early on in the novel (also good) replacing him in a sorta romantic role with the Man Who Is Just Really Boring (less good) and who May Or May Not Have Mysterious Motives But We Are All Yawning Too Much To Tell. Since Boring Man shows up early on I was expecting another Mysterious Stranger to show up, and he does, taking up the role of Surprisingly Boring Mysterious Stranger. And then not much happens apart from Thumping Things until The End when Amanda Must Escape.
It's the end where things really fail: Payes fails to provide the expected romance, or a reason for not having the expected romance, instead leaving something that's both vaguely dissatisfying and incoherent.
Nonetheless, I'm glad I read this -- it answered a nagging question I've had since doing my read through the Oz series -- which is, what could Payes have done with the series had she been allowed to continue? And alas, the answer seems to be, not much.
1. The Roald Dahl reread comes to a close -- but we're not quite done with Roald Dahl yet! Next up: I take a look at the films based on Dahl's work. This should start well and then go badly.
2. Speaking of Tor.com, at some point today I should be seeing the Oz the Great and Powerful film. From what I've heard so far, my response will be in two parts: a nice essay for Oz fans and everyone else on the Tor.com blog, and snark right here for you diehard readers that haven't fled LJ/Dreamwidth yet.
3. This month I'll be heading to MegaCon and ICFA. The current plans for Megacon are beyond tentative ("10 sounds ok - no, wait. I think I'll sleep in more. Do we want pancakes first?") but so far it looks as if I'll be there Saturday afternoon and perhaps Sunday.
ICFA is as always a touch more complex, but I should be there Friday and Saturday, and possibly Wednesday or Thursday evening. Chances are excellent that regardless of the date I will be at the pool sipping little drinks, because, pool! Little drinks! It's that kind of con.
I'm assuming by then it will have warmed up. It's odd -- we had an unusually warm January, and we are now having an unusually cold March - it was in the 40s this morning, just enough to make the sun delightful.
Ok, maybe just one went with option two.
L. Ron Hubbard seems to have led a colorful life before deciding to go the religion route. I say, seems, because as Lawrence Wright's Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief notes, the details of Hubbard's early life are not entirely clear and may have been partly made up. It appears, however, that Hubbard did spend a lot of time travelling, was at least in the military (disputes about his military record form a large section of his book), was extremely successful at selling science fiction to pulp magazines, was abysmal to at least two of his three wives (and according to this book cheated extensively on all three of them), made friends with various science fiction writers and enemies of others (the quotes from L. Sprague de Camp are among the book's highlights) and founded a religion. Of sorts.
One reason Scientology has had issues obtaining official "religious" status is that many of its elements do seem to come from pure space opera – not surprisingly, given Hubbard's background. Wright details the more, um, interesting of these, while also noting that the earlier stages of Scientology – the ones advertised in those endless Dianetics commercials years back, have a combined quasi scientific and "Buddhist" feel. (I'm not sure that either Wright or Hubbard knows much about Buddhism.) The whole "reading" thing (to really oversimplify and risk the wrath of Scientologists, a machine that "reads" your energy as you kinda work through your memories and your problems going "up" various levels until, as the book's title has it, you are "clear,") is encased in scientific wording; the reincarnation is...well, it's not really Buddhism; the space opera stuff is pure pulp fiction. Ahem.
(Sidenote: MS Word is ok with Scientology, but not Dianetics. JUST SAYING.)
This science fiction background helps explain why John Campbell, editor of Astounding for one, was an early adherent. Heinlein, however, was more skeptical, and eventually even Campbell backed off. But the science fiction writers backed off for multiple reasons. Scientology thrived, as Wright documents, by finding adherents in Hollywood, and by taking many of its most devoted followers on ships where they could be more easily controlled. In Wright's version – and in the testimony of many ex-Scientologists – the Scientologists engaged in frequent physical and emotional abuse of its members and engaged in techniques similar to brain washing (although Wright also notes some skepticism about whether or not brainwashing actually exists.) Top Scientologists within the church hierarchy enjoyed luxuries not available to others. They became, in the terms of many, a cult (many anthropologists reading the book will be banging their heads against the nearest wall when they reach that point of the book, but moving on). Defenders noted that some of their critiqued behaviors are at least superficially similar to some groups within the Catholic Church, which has a history of indulging some of its top leaders (hi, Vatican) and practicing self-flagellation in some groups. And, of course, Scientology could offer the hope of making connections in Hollywood.
It's easy to see why the Church of Scientology objects to this book. Wright scrupulously includes comments from multiple people, perhaps most notably Kristie Alley, who claim to have been helped by Scientology, and discusses Narconon, a Scientology program many people credit with breaking their drug addictions. Wright also scrupulously notes multiple denials from the Church and from various lawyers for John Travolta and Tom Cruise. (It's safe to say that Travolta and Cruise's attorneys would still not be happy with the final result.) But these denials and legal statements are generally buried in footnotes, and some of the more questionable negative stories about Scientology, like this one:
David Mayo was sent to the RPF. He was made to run around a pole in the searing desert for twelve hours a day, until his teeth fell out.are presented without skepticism. The endnote for this anecdote credits an interview with Bent Corydon, a biographer who worked with Hubbard's estranged son Ronald DeWolf to write a biography that the Church of Scientology strongly disputes. I'm willing to admit that running around a pole in the searing desert for twelve hours could cause all sorts of medical issues, but unless David Mayo had prior major dental issues (the text doesn't say) I don't think that teeth falling out is one of them. "Collapse" or "death," sure. Teeth falling out....maybe not.
And although attorneys for Cruise and Travolta apparently reviewed sections of the book (and objected), other attorneys and celebrities did not, most notably Kristie Alley and two of Cruise's wives, Nicole Kidman and Katie Holmes. Given that Alley was reportedly a witness to some of the events Wright mentions, and Kidman and Holmes form a part of the allegations against Cruise in this book, this seems a bit odd. (None of the three are portrayed in a negative light; it just seems odd.)
Wright has one or two odd moments elsewhere. For instance, in his comparison of Scientology and the Catholic Church (specifically Franciscan friars), he claims that unlike Scientologists, Franciscans can enter or leave their orders without needing to cut off contact with friends and family. This has not always historically been true. (And going beyond the Franciscans, it's not always true today for some enclosed orders.) It's a minor slip, but it makes me wonder what other minor slips are in there. And from a narrative point of view, it might have been better to tell the story in a straightforward way, rather than beginning with screenwriter Paul Haggis, going back in time to Hubbard's life, then forward to Haggis, then back to Hubbard and so on. It's not particularly difficult to follow; it just made the book feel, how do I put this? More literary and less detached. I was also annoyed by Wright's continued avoidance of the word "bisexual" – come on, Wright, it's 2013. Some people are gay, some people are straight, some people are John Travolta, and some people are bisexual.
I suspect most of you will be intrigued by all of the Hollywood gossip – I felt new levels of compassion for Kidman and Holmes (I told you Cruise's attorney would not like this book.) Speculative fiction writers, on the other hand, may be more interested in the tidbits at the beginning of the book – the bits where Hubbard is hanging out with the Heinleins and Campbell and so on. Also the bits where Hubbard seems to have been involved with a group that took its guidance from Alistair Crowley, because, you know, Satanism. This is all great stuff and frankly I found the IRS battles and the Hollywood gossip, even with the brainwashings, forced separation from spouses, parading potential spouses in front of Tom Cruise and so on kinda boring in comparison. My quibbles aside, fascinating read. Recommended.
Oh well. At least they don't employ David Brooks.
Aaaaaaaaaaaanyway, what caught my attention was not so much the discussion of financial issues, but something pretty much buried deep down in the article: "Any time I imagine the glamorous world of writing for The Atlantic or The New Yorker or Harper's in 1968 or 1978, I remember that most journalists were going to homecoming football games and writing about the king and queen."
Not many people know this, but I started out as a sports writer.
Truth.
My first paid, professional pieces were for the local paper, reporting on the the high school soocer team. It was pretty cool -- I got to go around on the bus with the team and say that I wrote for the paper AND I got paid. My mother still has the articles somewhere.
Here's what the Atlantic's article missed entirely: I wasn't a journalist. I did exactly no investigation of the high school soccer team (not that I had much to investigate) or anything else. The later occasional (very occasional) articles I did for the Miami Herald and the Sun-Sentinel weren't much different: short fluff pieces describing some places around South Florida. I never entered a journalism program, and although I certainly applied for multiple positions at various magazines in my senior year of college, these were all for editing positions, not staff writing experiences.
Because I was fully aware that what I was doing wasn't journalism. It barely counted as reporting. It was a cheap way for the local paper to get some local things covered while giving all of us writing creds to help us get into college. Any actual investigation of our school was done by the New York Times (the daughter of the education editor for The New York Times attended our school, so we got a bit more national attention than probably justified, and no, this has nothing to do with my current occasional screeds against the publication; I didn't know her at all although Facebook continues to insist that I did. I hate Facebook. Moving on.)
And here's the dirty little secret: contrary to what the Atlantic's editor is suggesting, this is exactly how many local papers got those homecoming king/queen articles going. Sure, sometimes they hired people (and high school students) hoping to start the fast track to journalism. And sometimes they hired people just thrilled to get their names in the paper for whatever reason, or who wanted to say, "Well, I occasionally write for the Y" or who were told by their high school counselors to get their acts together and have something besides "piano" on their college applications -- preferably something involving an organization.
Am I saying I got nothing out of that? Not at all. I learned how to type up my little articles and send them in and learn early on that even local editors can be ruthless with your limited copy if they think a nice ad about a furniture store will look better there. I learned early on that often, other things -- like my job at the library -- will pay better than writing gigs, but you have to pay taxes anyway. I learned the very basics of writing pitches, which later helped me write a few things for newspapers later. Listing that on my college applications probably helped me skip my senior year of high school (a definite plus) and was later of considerable use in my first query letters to larger newspapers and magazines and led to some decently paid freelance work which helped pay the bills. (And some very irritating freelance work, but we'll skip that for now.) And I could always tell myself that yes, I'd been published -- when I was fourteen. (Well, technically when I was seven, but very, very few people apart from my grandfather really counted that one.)
And I got paid.
I don't claim to know where U.S. journalism is going. It's got its decidedly weak spots (pretty much all of the coverage of Hugo Chavez' death has been just awful), though longer magazine articles can still provide something worth reading. (Also from the New Yorker: coverage of a Congo literary festival -- much shorter than the piece I linked to above and The Borowitz Report. Also, no David Brooks.) The Tribune Company is reportedly trying to sell off its newspapers to focus on television. So who knows? But as a writer, I am perhaps not surprisingly hoping that pay continues to be a part of real journalism, at least.
NIN/Call Me Maybe mashup.
You're welcome. And we'll see if the blogging bug bites again in a few days.
It's also just a teensy eensy bit possible that you might -- might -- be seeing a few more Oz posts popping up at Tor.com. Might.
....of course, that meant Twitter was snarking away without me. So I had to turn it on.
To see, and I wish I was kidding, a talking teddy bear telling us that he wanted to join an orgy right before launching into various anti-Semitic jokes.
( The Queen of VersaillesCollapse )
( The Captains – William Shatner's Star Trek documentaryCollapse )
