Mari Ness

Peanuts

Tue, 13 May 2008 01:08:51 GMT

So I just finished reading a biography of Charles Schultz by David Michaelis. Like many of you, I grew up on Peanuts; I always grabbed for the strip when I could. My parents rarely bothered with a daily paper, but I did read the Sunday funnies, tgregoryt collected Peanuts collections which I more than occasionally stole from him, and I had three small Snoopys, even while I longed for one of those dress up Snoopy dolls, which I never got. I read Peanuts during its more mellow years; it was a bit of a shock to read the collections from the 1950s and realize how genuinely nasty the strip was in its original days, back before it mellowed it.

I assumed that like most artworks, Peanuts had its roots in Schultz's life, a thesis that Michaelis sets out to prove by illustrating Schultz's life and background with various strips. Schultz grew up in what seems to have been a rather repressed Midwestern household before heading off to World War II; he then fell in unrequited love numerous times until he met his first wife, Joyce, who, Michaelis tells us, helped inspire the character of Lucy.

I kinda have to question that one – largely because I cannot imagine living with an actual Lucy, day in, day out, but then again, Schultz did eventually divorce his first wife, and it's possible to see connections between Lucy's demand for attention from the piano obsessed Schroeder to problems in the Schultz's marriage when the withdrawn artist failed to give his wife emotional support. Michaelis seems to be on slightly firmer ground when he connects Snoopy's happiness after meeting an adorable girl beagle with soft paws to Schulz's meeting an adorable girl human with, sigh, soft paws, that he clearly fell into an utter passion for.

The biography occasionally lacks of sense of timing and sequence of events – an aside about Schulz's troubles with union workers in 1978 inexplicably appears in the middle of a narrative about 1971 events, for instance, a narrative flaw that becomes a much larger problem when Michaelis is talking about Schultz's second wife, Jeanne – although the two met while Schultz was legally married, the biography is confused on the timing, making it unclear whether they met before Schultz left his first wife, or afterwards. Given that the biography quite openly describes an earlier affair where Schultz was still living with his first wife, this seems an odd thing to be confused about. (Since many of the people in the biography are still alive, however, it's possible that some of this happened to shield the privacy of living people.) And some of the connections between the strips and events in Schultz's life seem, to put it kindly, to be a bit of a stretch.

But I sensed a deeper problem in the biography, the sense that although Michaelis had done all of the interviews, read all of the documents, studied all of the cartoons, in the end, he hadn't really understood an essential part of Schultz – the cartoonist's clinical depression and severe agoraphobia, which clearly haunted the strip and his relationships with family and friends. It reminded me of the multiple biographers who choose to write about bisexual people (Edna St. Vincent Millay, Queen Christina of Sweden, Lord Byron) while insisting, against all available evidence, that their subjects most certainly couldn't possibly be bisexual, even when they were fantasizing about/falling in love with/actually sleeping with both genders. That fundamental lack of understanding not only made the biographies frustrating, but also kept the biographers from gaining an insight, or an acceptance, into their subjects, and places barriers between the person and the readers. The same thing happens here: at the end, I felt that I knew more about Schultz from just his strip; the book had filled in fascinating background detail, but failed to understand his depression.

I'm not suggesting that writers can only write about what they know – if we did that, we wouldn't be writers. But I'm not sure that anyone who doesn't understand, really understand, clinical depression, should be writing a biography focusing on someone with clinical depression.

Observation # 1345, 1346, 1347

Sun, 11 May 2008 14:21:31 GMT

1. Serenading is not always the romantic gesture it is meant to be.

2. Specifically, attempting to serenade someone using what is apparently some sort of portable karaoke machine with rap music and first tripping over a tree root, then falling into a tree, then yelling, "FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK THIS SHIT! WHO PUT A TREE HERE!" will rob your thoughtful gesture of the romance you intended, even if you attempt to recover with the rap song.

3. Any hopes that you could salvage this will be wrecked with a) the not precisely romantic excitement of a barking dog b) the response of your adored one, who will point out, in no particular order, that you are totally wasted and do not know what you are doing, and she has pictures, you [several colorful descriptive words deleted].

Poker

Sun, 11 May 2008 00:43:22 GMT

Does anyone else share my odd fascination with the World Poker Tour?

I've been trying to work out just why, given that although I adore games, I typically don't enjoy watching people play them unless I'm involved, and I haven't played or had much interest in poker for years.

Must be the sports style commentary.

Puzzlement

Fri, 09 May 2008 22:25:00 GMT

Anyone want to speculate on just why the U.S. Post Office placed an empty plastic grocery bag in my mailbox?

*************

On a completely unrelated note, but before I forget about it again, norda is spending the summer blogging Dracula -- that is, posting the novel in real time, date by date. I'm finding that this is a marvelous way of picking up all of the little touches that I'd completely forgotten -- like the bit where Dracula is running around making beds, for crying out loud. You can follow along here. Warning: massively Victorian prose awaits you. Which is great if you're into that kind of thing.

Mike Gravel

Thu, 08 May 2008 12:56:16 GMT

All of the recent excitement over a certain major party primary race has overshadowed the real story of the 2008 campaign: Mike Gravel is still in the presidential race, this time running for the Libertarian party. And even if he should fail to win that nomination (which my practical Libertarian friends assure me is all too likely since the Libertarians apparently are going to insist on nominating an actual, you know, Libertarian, an understandable if short-sighted political approach*), we still have hope that he will continue a quirky independent run, perhaps under the newly formed Throwing Rocks party, illustrating his honest approach to government.

The endorsement below includes bikinis:

* Have you seen the Libertarians win a presidential election through this "we only nominate Libertarians" policy? I didn't think so. Time for a new approach: nominate Stephen Colbert.

Lest you think only one cat is causing difficulties today:

Wed, 07 May 2008 17:38:18 GMT

Note to cat:

After due consideration, I have come to the conclusion that the pull cord for the ceiling fan did not just mysteriously break and fall down on its own.

While I am well aware that ceiling fans, like virtually everything, can suffer from entropy, rot, and breakage, in this case, just prior to the sudden fall of the ceiling fan pull cord, I happened to be glancing in the general direction of the living room, and could not help but notice a furry black and white body flying through the air, far too close to the ceiling fan for this to be a genuine coincidence. I also happened to observe what seemed like an extended black and white paw deliberately reaching towards the pull cord. I admit, of course, that appearances can be deceptive. But when combined with my earlier observations of your multiple attempts to play with the pull cord of the ceiling fan, and my knowledge of your inability to resist the temptation of dangling, swinging things, I must tell you that I do not find your puzzled, innocent looks remotely credible. Your request for tuna to help you endure the trauma of this event is therefore denied.

Help me, Internets!

Wed, 07 May 2008 15:06:41 GMT

I swear, I left for only 15 minutes.

But when I returned, a small grey cat was sitting on the keyboard of my work computer. That was bad enough. Worse, she has somehow flipped the screen so that it is displaying upside down.

How do I get it back? I've gone to the Control Panel and tried to play with the monitor settings, but nothing seems to be switching this -- and trying to move the mouse in an upside down pattern is driving me MAD.

It's a Dell computer, running on XP. Anybody know the key stroke combination to get me right side up?

(Typing this on my personal computer.)

Edit: Never mind. I fixed it -- you have to hit ctrl, alt and then the up key.

Can I ask why the hell the ability to flip a monitor screen upside down with just pressing keys like that is even in XP to begin with? Do the Windows developers not have cats?

Just for the superhero lovers among you:

Wed, 07 May 2008 13:24:35 GMT

Batman and Iron Man chat about summer movies:

*****************

YouTube just makes it far too easy to post these things. Real content is coming. I promise.

Myanmar

Tue, 06 May 2008 12:14:46 GMT

Whatever you want to call the country, it's in bad shape right at the moment. Because this is Myanmar, getting relief there is proving difficult. Here's some organizations attempting to help:

American Red Cross

Directrelief.org.

The American Burmese Buddhist Association.

Unicef.

Press reports are saying that the World Food Programme is also heading to the area, but I couldn't find any info on their website.

Note: I understand that people have two concerns about sending aid, or attempting to send aid, to Myanmar: one, the question of if the aid can even get there, given the government restrictions, travel issues, and general infrastructure collapse, and two, that sending support might end up benefitting the Myanmar government – some are arguing that a disaster of this sort could help destroy the government. I don't have a good answer for the first point: for the second, I'll just note that historically, natural disasters have not always brought down governments.

***************************

The storm happened to pass over the Irrawaddy river, one of the homes of the Irrawaddy river dolphins (Orcaella brevirostris), aka some of the cutest dolphins on the planet. (They blow bubbles and spit at people, and also have been trained to help in cooperative fishing efforts.) For political reasons, no one except for biologist Tint Tun has been able to do much research or conservation on Irrawaddy dolphins in Myanmar, but even before this, the dolphins were on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. I'm not sure any of us can do much to help that subspecies, so instead, I'll direct your attention towards the Mekong Dolphin Conservation Project, which is working to help these dolphins in Cambodia.

Potter puppets

Mon, 05 May 2008 12:03:44 GMT

Many of you will want to kill me for posting this:

From devinjay.

This will make more sense if you've seen the movie:

Mon, 05 May 2008 01:39:46 GMT

From a recent instant message conversation:

Friend: And he was working on a care engine.
Friend: that's a car engine, not a care engine.
Me: Maybe if he put the robot voice in the car engine it would start liking him and slowly that liking would grow to more and then it would become a care engine.

Forks.

Mon, 05 May 2008 01:21:28 GMT

Alas, it is my painful duty to confess to you all that athenakt cannot be trusted with plastic forks.

We were sitting at lunch – a normal, kindly lunch, not the sort of lunch that would make anyone other than athenakt demonstrate wild violence towards plastic forks. And yet, as we were having a perfectly normal conversation about Iron Man --

Pop!

"What do you have against that chicken?"

"Nothing," she said, unconvincingly. "It's the fork."

Shortly after that, she snapped a second plastic fork.

"I've broken them too," confessed a complete stranger.

"I'm not sure we should trust you with that," I told her.

"It's not me! It's the chicken!"

"Right."

She promised to be more careful with the next fork…

….which snapped.

The fourth fork, though, resisted her strength, allowing her to finish the meal.

(I suppose we could ask, what's up with those forks, but I'll just note that the plastic fork I chose from the same location survived for my entire meal. Just saying.)

Afterwards we attempted to go shoe shopping, since she had been under the illusion that I might be helpful in this. I shall spare you the pain, and only note that I was probably the last person in Broward County that she should have called on for shoe shopping advice. About my only genuine assistance was calling my Shoe Emergency friend loucheroo, who wasn't available, which meant that as assistance went, I couldn't offer much. On the bright side, by the end of the day she'd spent more on tea than shoes. I consider that a positive. And equally fortunately, we were kidnapped by gelato later that afternoon. Well, if you define "kidnapped" as "we were heading straight for it and decided to have some."

No!

Sat, 03 May 2008 21:32:56 GMT

Giving squirrels robot allies is not the way to go!

Iron Man, part 2

Sat, 03 May 2008 04:44:05 GMT

I never got into Iron Man or the Avengers, even in my heaviest comic reading days. It wasn't merely because the original Avengers shared the then ubiquitous Marvel trend of adding token female characters with generally passive superpowers which emphasized their fragility (thus, Invisible Girl of the Fantastic Four merely goes invisible and puts little shields around herself (the powers displayed in the movies are considerably later additions); Marvel Girl can move small things around, but usually hides and comes out at the last minute, if at all; worst of all, the Wasp grows tiny, as if to emphasize her comparative powerlessness – I've never been able to stand the Wasp.) They just seemed, I don't know, unrealistic. And by unrealistic here I don't mean the whole preposterous concept of a woman that could turn into the size of a wasp (sigh), but rather that not one issue ever gave me the feel that these characters would actually work together, or would want to actually work together – or indeed, that any of the Avengers were anything other than imported characters (Captain America) or sad shades of earlier characters (taken to extremes with the Vision, revealed as merely an android of a previous character, not to mention the ridiculous storyline where his children ended up not even existing, but Giant Man was not exactly an original character type, and Iron Man owes quite a bit to Batman.) Even Tony Stark's alcoholism felt just like another Marvel angst saga. I never felt the storylines, and never felt drawn in. I'd read an issue here or there, but that was about it.

I was expecting the same thing from the movie. But surprisingly, I was drawn in – this because the movie took the time to be something other than a mere action flick, or even a mere superhero angst flick. The script sets the film in a contemporary, very realistic Afghanistan, and doesn't flinch from showing terrorism and the price of war before moving into more action flick territory. This grounding not only gives a surprisingly real feel to a pretty preposterous storyline (er, he, um, made some super battery thing that his own company couldn't develop in a cave in Afghanistan? And just how careless would his watchers really have been, and who seriously thinks that any terrorists would believe that a single person could, even with parts, put together a major missile system in a cave in Afghanistan? I mean, really, and yet, the film makes it work) but also makes us feel that this could be really happening, while giving more than a token look at the grey morality of weapons manufacture and torture. (Incidentally, a large number of people, alas, will probably watch this film and still come out not realizing that the U.S. government has also been practicing waterboarding….but I digress. Back to the movie.) ) This is quite a lot for a superhero movie. Obviously, quite a lot of this is wish fulfillment stuff, both a "AUUGH, THE ONLY WAY I CAN COMBAT THE GREY MORALITY OF THE WAR ON TERROR IS BY GOING INSANE AND PUTTING ON A METAL SUIT WHERE I CAN TALK TO MY BRILLIANT BRITISH ROBOT AND SHOOT THINGS," and a "BUT AT LEAST I, AN INDIVIDUAL, CAN AND AM DOING SOMETHING, RIGHT?" Hmm.

This may be why this is one of the few movies I've seen that generated spontaneous cheers from the audience – that realistic background forces us to genuinely care about the supporting characters, and gives the villains genuine, believable motives, at least, up until the last ten minutes when all of this is abandoned for a pretty typical hero vs. villain fight, with pretty good special effects and those ludicrous high heels I was complaining about in the earlier post.

I doubt that any of this would have worked if Robert Downey, Jr. hadn't been playing Tony Stark – his Tony Stark is an utter asshole, but played with Downey with just enough charm to keep him likeable. Any less, and the first few scenes might have convinced us that the terrorists should have just killed him. The script also helps – it gets in a few good laughs at the right places, and with the exception of the aforementioned slightly overoptimistic terrorists, everyone is fairly believable.

*******************************

So, is the next Iron Man flick going to focus on Tony Stark's alcoholism, as I originally thought this one would (actually, I thought it would come up more in this movie, but they did at least keep a strong motif of drinks in the film) or, as that final scene would suggest, on the creation of the Avengers? And if the second, which Avengers? I understand that Robert Downey, Jr. makes an appearance in the Hulk film, suggesting that the Hulk could make an appearance, but otherwise, seriously, who? The very realistic nature of the Iron Man movie immediately means that Thor's out, and the same is true for Hercules, although Captain America could certainly make an appearance.

And then who? Ant Man/Giant Man? God help us, no. Hawkeye and Mockingbird? More than workable. The Scarlet Witch/Quicksilver? Hmm. The Black Panther? Sure. The Black Knight? Sure, if the Avengers weren't being recruited through the U.S. government, which might not want to use the term "Knight." The Black Widow? Maybe, if we go with the concept that the KGB is still training superspies and just not paying them enough to keep them from defecting. Ms. Marvel? That could be cool. She-Hulk? If Bruce Banner has a cousin in this summer's Hulk movie, I'll expect this one. Spider-Woman? Kinda hoping not.

Iron Man:

Sat, 03 May 2008 02:34:31 GMT

Just got in from seeing Iron Man. My initial non-spoilery comments:

1. Wow, did this movie make me dizzy. I think it was all of the various things flying around and spinning on screen.

2. What is it with women running around in tottering high heels in action flicks? Can we, for once, please, please, please have an action movie where the girl is running around in flats? Sneakers, even? I spent entirely too much time wondering precisely how Gwyneth Paltrow was balancing on those shoes. (And she does so very nicely, mind you; I just kept thinking that under the circumstances she would have invested in a nice pair of comfortable, elegant flats.)

3. Stick around for the end of the credits. I'm trying to figure out what precisely the movie studios gain from tacking on important scenes like this at the end of the credits -- it was one thing when these were just humorous little add-ons, like the post-credits bit in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. I suppose the idea is to reward dire fans.

4. Good flick.

Spoilery comments later.

Kushiel's Justice

Fri, 02 May 2008 22:06:14 GMT

Just finished reading Kushiel's Justice.

The Kushiel series is growing on me, I admit. I never liked Kushiel's Dart much, partly because that type of sex is really not my thing, and mostly because I was irked by the praise saying, "Yay! A book that finally gets masochism! Submissiveness! It's SO FEMINIST! Finally, something that celebrates the fact that some women love to be submissive! Ooooh!" Er. This sort of praise, I thought, missed the point of the character – she didn't choose submission/masochism, or do it for fun, or because it was her sexual orientation, but because she was cursed, to the point where, as the character herself notes ruefully, it was damnably inconvenient. I might have taken this praise differently had Phedre, the main character, instead said, "Oooooh, really enjoy this whipping thing," instead of constantly reminding us over and over that she'd been pricked by Kushiel's Dart and therefore had no choice in this kinda thing. But anyway.

Other than that, I thought Jacqueline Carey had a good feel for court intrigue, and although I didn't enjoy the first book, or the second, somehow, I kept reading. I liked the third book, Kushiel's Avatar, much more.

Kushiel's Scion and Kushiel's Justice are sequels to that first series, and are more of a coming of age story set amongst court politics than a pure "how many ways can we beat this chick up," saga, although Carey still likes to see just how much she can torture and emotionally devastate her characters as they run round and round popping in and out of bed. These two books, however, feel more self assured, and it's become much easier to tell the various minor characters apart – although that may be from my growing familiarity with them, as well.

And now, off to the chaos that shall be Iron Man!

The true cost of being unable to drive, revealed:

Fri, 02 May 2008 20:54:58 GMT

Fear me, people.

I am now completely out of coffee filters.

HOW COULD SUCH A THING HAPPEN, EVEN IN AN UNJUST UNIVERSE?

Using paper towels as an emergency filler system, since I have people to see tonight, and they cannot be allowed to see me without coffee. This is for their safety, I assure you.

Helping to explain just what's wrong with the presidential election today

Thu, 01 May 2008 17:54:45 GMT

Thanks to the internet, I have a lot of international friends and acquaintances who watch U.S. politics with interest and complete befuddlement. "Do you actually, um, understand your own voting process? Do any of you guys actually pay attention to your own candidates and what they're saying?" is a not infrequent observation from around the globe, and anecdotally, they seem in general to be better informed about U.S. politics than many Americans are. (Although it's entirely possible that I'm just choosing to hang out even online with people with an interest in politics.)

Here's part of the problem:

Edit: Irk. For some reason the MSNBC.com video isn't embedding properly. So, instead of the video, a link to where I found it.

Most Americans, alas, get their news from television shows just like this one.

Brought to my attention by CrooksandLiars.com.

For National Poetry Month:

Thu, 01 May 2008 00:52:51 GMT

National Poetry Month ends today, and I haven't posted any poems, or done anything to celebrate it.

I originally had planned to write some spiel or other about how we should be celebrating poetry all year, not merely in one short month, or chat about my love for the greatpoets community which I'm a silent lurker at – a community that does celebrate poetry, both bad and good, all year round. (I say " bad" because some of the posted poems are, in my opinion, dreadful.) Or write up some silly poems.

Instead, I'll just leave you with this, which I wrote many, many years ago now:

a poem
should be
not more
nor less
than the
sudden
gleam of
moonlight
through
green
water

I've forgotten all that I meant by that now, but I still like to have moonlight creep into my poems, when it can.

When Shakespeare goes bad

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 03:21:10 GMT

I have previously declared that some writing is so astounding, so magnificent, so marvelous, so exquisite, that absolutely nothing can tarnish or mar it. I am often speaking, in this case, of, say, the works of Shakespeare, and, as so often, I'm totally wrong. I've just been watching the MST3K version of a 1961 version of Hamlet -- filmed for television in Germany and very unfortunately dubbed into English, and even more unfortunately, with Ricardo Montalban dubbing Claudius, which made me keep thinking that Claudius was about to shout out "KIRK!" or that Hamlet would shout out "KHAN!" which does not lead me to the proper mood to appreciate Shakespeare. Not that this particular version could be appreciated without the MST3K additions, because, ow, ow, ow, and if you have any appreciation for a well played Polonius, or a desire to see a well played Polonius, this isn't the film to watch. On the bright side, the ending has never seemed less tragic; you just wonder why the television audience didn't do the killing instead.

This is the sort of headline we need to see more often:

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 22:18:11 GMT

Chocoholics wanted for health study.

And of course it's true! The media says so! Why would the corporate owned media lie to us?

(she says, while meandering off to find some dark chocolate for her own health experimentation...)

Today's disturbing overheard conversation:

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 02:12:16 GMT

Woman in Pet Supermarket: "So I thought I'd given my dog AIDS, because she was losing weight, you know, but it turned out she was just pregnant."

Said woman afterwards bought an enormous bag of puppy food. I shall spare you the rest of the conversation.

***************

In news causing slightly less terror for the human race, athenakt rescued me from my homebound state and took me to a mall, which I still insist was experiencing an earthquake during our visit, or had suddenly been placed on top of the Atlantic Ocean, whatever she may say about the mall being Totally Normal, except, of course, for the sad truth that the mall also lacked a Godiva store and a Teavana store, so it was a Abnormally Deprived mall. We were forced to find comfort with an Orange Julius instead, a necessity after looking for dresses in a mall where the floor kept moving. (Well, moving for me.) One small annoyance: the saleswoman at Sears, who chatted on and on about the "Buy One Get One Free" deal -- which would have been lovely, but which had been the day before, and was thus completely useless information to us at that time. Afterwards we restored our spirits with watching videos of the original Barrage and dinner.

Some Ben Affleck love

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 18:16:40 GMT

For everybody except my mother, who won't find this remotely funny:

Sent my way via coldecho. Completely unrelated, as far as I know, to yesterday's sheep and Ben entry.

Some sentences should certainly not be heard out of context:

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 16:02:41 GMT

Like this one:

"He gets sheep and Ben all in one day!"

My life has most definitely improved:

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 03:26:22 GMT

Colin Firth is on The Daily Show explaining how a random photographer took a photo of his penis in New York City.