I finished reading the quite disappointing Fight Club 2 comic book yesterday. I've read the book twice and seen the movie once (a CleanFlix version) many years ago, and I love the dark humor and twisted sense of reality that it provides in both of its iterations. I didn't think that it needed to a sequel. Having read the sequel, it didn't really, um…make sense? There was a lot of random stuff in it, the appearance of the author, Chuck Palahniuk, was too meta and obvious to be anything other than dumb (though the panels where an angry fan says, "There's a book?" and Palahniuk rubs his face in exasperation is pretty great), and though there were a couple of moments of pretty good stuff--things that worked really well for a comic and wouldn't have landed the same way if it were in novel form--on the whole it was a lot of sound and fury that signified nothing.
You might feel differently, but if you do choose to read it (or check out the originals), you should know that there's a pretty strong content warning on all of it. That leads to a conflict I've been wrestling with. Reading through my thoughts on The Hate U Give from a few months back, I pointed out--a couple of times, actually--that the book swears. A lot. And, considering its film is coming out in October, and is rated PG-13, it's clear that they tidied up that particular aspect of the source material. I don't think I would want a rated-R The Hate U Give, even though the book would be (because of language and some violence), because I personally find frequent swearing a distraction and detraction. Additionally, for a story as important as THUG, having a PG-13 rating will help it gain a broader audience. Which makes me think about content and what we mean by that. I've used the phrase myself. "Content warning," as if there isn't content in everything in media. Of course, when we say "There's content" we mean, perhaps, mature content, inappropriate content, or bad content. We drop the adjective in order to broaden its meaning--after all, it's the adjective that is carrying so much of the meaning--and allow our societal backlog to fill in the gap. The problem is, there's a lot of reason to avoid stuff with "content warnings". I think a lot of movies and books have trashy content (there, I put an adjective in) because they're schlock and, well, trashy. Back when I had zombies on the brain, I picked up book called City of the Dead by Brian Keene because it said that zombies had gotten a major upgrade in Keene's works. It was a sequel, but I picked it up anyway, thinking that I'd like to see something fresh with the genre. As it turned out, his take was interesting in that the zombies were corpse-inhabiting demons. That meant that everyone who died turned into a zombie, regardless of if they'd been bitten (kinda like what we see in The Walking Dead), but the bodies were controlled by intelligent demons. Zombies driving tanks is the elevator pitch I would use. The book, however, was pretty stupid. Premise aside, it just wasn't very good. The writing was poor, characters made stupid decisions, and on the whole I didn't like it very much. It ended with everyone--and I do mean everyone--dying and the demon-zombies devouring the world. Plus, of course, it was filled with graphic violence (zombie story, after all) and swearing. So, by default and virtue of having bad content, the story was therefore bad. Or so the thinking goes. But then I read It. I know, I know: I've brought It up a bunch over the past year, ever since I read it in summer of 2017. I reread the thing this summer, and there's a remote-but-real possibility I'll read it in 2019. (Since it takes about 3 weeks for me to get through it, there's a chance I won't.) In terms of "bad" content, it has it all--sex (including some really bizarre stuff for which people have--rightly, I think--panned the book), incredibly graphic violence, and tons of swearing. Admittedly, It clocks in at over 440,000 words--but if you were to take out all of the swearing, it would probably drop by over a thousand. In other words, It has a lot of content--in both sense--and so, by the equation explored above, it should be a lot worse than Keene's (significantly shorter) novel. But that is really far from the case. I've never read a still-living author's work that has affected me as profoundly as It has. There are many reasons for this, and I'm pretty certain that its power (Its power?) comes because of certain confluences within my own life and past, things that correlate to the story in ways that are unique for me. Obviously, every reader has a unique experience reading a book, but It touches on certain aspects about me in ways that have really helped me understand myself better. (I wrote a bit about this back when talking about my reading journal.) Again, It has deeply impacted me…yet it's a "rated-R" book (and movie…which is pretty good, I thought, though not particularly scary). This is the real rub: Some of the best stuff I've read/seen has "content" that makes it inappropriate for most audiences. How do I square that circle? As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I'm supposed to seek after that which is "virtuous, lovely, or of good report". A book about a killer clown from outer space that eats children in the sewers doesn't seem to fit that definition. Yet, here I am, insisting on the importance this book has had on my adult life. Returning to The Hate U Give, there are plenty of people who would not want to read the book because of the "content". This is particularly galling, as the swearing is bothersome (to a prude like me), but the things the book is talking about--racial injustice, the difficulties of being a Black girl in a dangerous neighborhood, the humiliation that is so often heaped upon the minorities in our country--are also "negative" content. The book is talking about bad things--and it's a message that people ought to hear. Need to hear, in fact. That being said, I don't know how I would feel if I were asked to teach this book. It seems much more fraught even than The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Maybe because it's more topical while still discussing the same problems? Maybe it's a problem that I have, that I can look at the racist epithets from an academic distance (since it's not part of my past, it's not part of my inheritance) but the "eff-word" is too much everywhere to have that comfort zone? I don't feel like I've really expressed this idea well--an indication that I wasn't ready to tackle the subject today--and so I may return to it later. I don't know. If you haven't already, go read The Hate U Give and see which content bothers you more: The injustice of the world Starr inhabits, or how many times they swear. This past week I spent at my family's cabin. Again. If my calculations are correct, I've spent almost three full weeks in my cabin this summer. In my previous visits, I wrote a novel. This time, as it was with the whole family, I settled with reading a book. Sadly, the two books that I brought with me simply weren't interesting enough for me. You know how there are books you feel like you should read, even though you don't really want to? Stuff that's good, it's fine, but when you try to force yourself to read it, the entire experience is harder than it ought to be? Yeah, that's what it was for the books I'd selected. Since I was at the cabin, there really wasn't any alternative…until I saw that the new Stephen King novel, The Outsider, was on sale for only $20. That's a pretty good price for a hardcover--loss-leaders are what Walmart is all about, right?--so I scooped it up and started reading. Like much of King's stuff that I've read (he has somewhere in the neighborhood of 55 titles, so, having read five of them, I'm at about 10% of his entire ouvre), it's a page turner. I shuffled my way through all 560 or so pages in less than a week. I liked it all right. It will always be my favorite of his, I think, for many complicated reasons, but I felt that The Outsider was more engaging than, say, The Stand, which I'm still only 250 pages into. But I'm getting ahead of myself: The Outsider is a book that would have been a lot more enjoyable if I hadn't read the cover on the front. Admittedly, the premise of the story is easy enough to say: A man arrested of a heinous crime has an airtight alibi for where he was on the day of the murder. That's cool, and had I stopped at that point of the cover blurb, I would have probably enjoyed the book a lot more. As it stands, I read on, which gave away a plot point in the middle of the book and made the second half comparatively tedious. That isn't to say that it was tedious. Save the last twenty or thirty pages, I was going along pretty well with it. And while it was an interesting book, so far as it went, it wasn't a particularly memorable book. I know I shouldn't compare The Outsider to It, but, honestly, The Outsider almost feels like a retelling of It, except with police instead of a bunch of kids. Oh, and it's not as well written. Here's an example, taken at random (page 472) from It: Beverly Marsh had shown up around three o'clock, wearing faded jeans and toting a very old Daisy air rifle that had lost most of its pop--when you pulled its tape-wrapped trigger, it uttered a wheeze that sounded to Richie more like someone sitting on a very old Whoopee Cushion than a rifle-shot. And from page 271 of The Outsider: She slapped her open hand down on the table, a flat pistol-shot sound that made him jump. Her eyes were furious, crackling. The first example is a single sentence--twisting, detail-drenched, and effortless. The second is actually two sentences that serve as a pragmatic declaration. I know that King writes long books, and he also claims that he cuts down 10% from every draft (meaning that some of his table-busters would've been even longer than they ended up being), so maybe the second example serves as an indication of his newer style? Prose cut to the bone and sentences spared any extra flourish?
I realize that I'm guilty of this very thing: Sometimes, when I sit down to write--my personal essays, my novels, whatever--there's something extra. Maybe it's the ideas are more prepared to slide out, maybe I'm more aware of my verbs. I don't know what it is, necessarily, but there are days when I write better than others. I have off days; maybe Stephen King has off books? Having not read enough of his copious body of work, I can't say for certain. I think most people feel that It is King's best novel--so maybe I've started at the top and it's only downhill from there? I don't really know. Anyway, the combination of serviceable-if-not-inspiring prose and a slightly spoiled premise made my experience with The Outsider less thrilling than I had hoped for. It is clever--and surprisingly low on the gore, gruesomeness, and swearing. King can really cut loose when he wants to, but this one is more restrained of an offering than what I've read in the past. I don't know if that's a pro or a con, especially as it's a comparative thing: Less swearing for a Stephen King novel is still quite a few swears. Less gore doesn't mean no gore. So, if I were a King fan throughout his career, I think I would probably be disappointed in this book. As a fan of one of his books and mildly interested in a host of others, I'm at the point where I simply feel empty at the end. The book concluded in a way that was satisfying if predictable, and I'm staring at my overstuffed bookshelves wondering what will pull me into its world. Would I recommend this book? I suppose. I mean, its greatest affront is it reads like any other supernatural thriller. The characters were well defined and the dialogue convincing--Stephen King is a good writer in that sense, and he's consistently a good writer that way--and the action is fairly well described. If you aren't looking for anything particularly scary or shocking, then you could do worse. Three years ago, give or take, I saw a book coming out that summer: The Dinosaur Lords by Victor Milán. The blurb was all I needed: "It's like a cross between Jurassic Park and Game of Thrones."
Dinosaurs fighting in a medieval setting somehow? Sign me up. I did a weird thing that particular summer: I wanted the book immediately, so I decided to buy it through the Kindle, but then I realized I wanted the physical copy. I returned the Kindle version (I think…it may still be accessible on my device; I haven't checked) and then, later that day, made it a point to buy the book from the Barnes and Noble in Salt Lake City.* We were in Salt Lake because Puck had his annual appointment with his cardiologist, and I convinced Gayle to go to the Gateway. I had to ask an attendant at the store where the book was, as it had come out that day but I didn't see it anywhere. The man brought it out, I bought it, and then sat in the shade of a patio umbrella whilst my children frolicked in the fountain at the foot of the Gateway steps. (The Gateway is an outdoor mall in Salt Lake, which, sadly, is changing its motif--including the Barnes and Noble store there.) It is a very different kind of book. The setting is Paradise, a planet that is similar to ours--indeed, there are hints that the humans on Paradise originated with Earthlings--with a number of important differences. The most important one is that dinosaurs of all stripes (or, rather, feathers) live there. They're mostly Cretaceous dinosaurs, but there are plenty of others that come from different epochs. There are pterosaurs, too, and I think some ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs in the mix. In other words, it's whatever looks cool and fits the story is included. There are additional layers of world building here, with different religions, languages, and customs that all take some time getting used to. Milán has quasi-European names everywhere, as well as a healthy dose of Spanish (called Spañol, which shows how Milán puts familiar flavors but with his own spin on them) throughout. There is politicking and massive battles and interesting characters and magical experiences…it should, really, by all counts, be my favorite series. But it isn't. There's something…rough? I can't quite put my finger on it, honestly, but I have a really hard time getting through these books. Yes, books. If you'll notice, I titled this "The Dinosaur Princess", which is actually the third book in the series. (The Dinosaur Knights is the second one.) This is instructive, I think, in that it shows that there can be cool concepts, excellent execution, and some pretty interesting descriptions and still not be fully immersed in a book. It might be because I'm trying too hard not to feel jealous that Milán came up with the idea before I did. (And did it much better than I would have. The fact that he's friends with George R.R. Martin and was able to use his friend's blurb, mentioned above, didn't hurt his product, either.) It might be that there's a lot of swearing, violence, sex, and nudity--the last one is kind of funny, because the books take place in a tropical setting, so people (who are less prudish in his world) choose to wear very-little-to-nothing-at-all throughout. And this is also interesting to me, because there's a lot more swearing, with more gruesome violence, in It, yet I don't get as bothered by it there? I don't know. I'm certainly desensitized to this stuff on certain levels (probably not a good thing), and so my critiques on that level are unreliable: Sometimes it's enough to turn me off of a book. Sometimes I don't care. Sometimes it's in between. In this case, it's the lattermost option. Here's the thing about the series: It's incomplete. Impressively, Milán wrote three books in just over three years. That is no small feat. In fact, The Dinosaur Princess came out last summer, but at the very tail end--it was September, actually, so I was already back in school. I had sort of built up a "tradition" in that I would buy another Dinosaur book as part of my summer reading experience. But that can't happen anymore: Victor Milán died in February. People die. Authors die. Everyone dies, eventually. And that leaves me in a conflicted position. The Dinosaur Princess ends the third act of the overall drama that Milán was sharing, which means that there is plenty of unresolved stuff in there. And by plenty, I mean plenty. The ending of each book is kind of a "Thanos is coming" feeling, with the subsequent book dealing with that world-threatening problem, only to have repercussions of it grow. The ending of Book 3 is a cliffhanger. And I don't think the series will ever be finished. This happened, most notably, back in 2007, when Robert Jordan died before finishing his Wheel of Time series. Brandon Sanderson was tapped to finish the series, which cemented his career as a fantasy novelist and launched his popularity through the stratosphere. But the reason that happened, in my opinion, is because of a couple of factors that don't apply to Milán's case: One, the Wheel of Time was eleven (!) books deep into the story by the time Jordan passed away. There were people, Sanderson included, who literally grew up during the time the books were being written. That many books, with that deep of a fan base, is an incredible well-spring to give to anyone who would need to finish the series (and, fittingly, Sanderson wrote three books worth of the last book, so the series ended up with a total of fourteen volumes). In short, there was a lot to draw from. In the case of the Dinosaur series, there are three books, published in quick succession. That's it. Two, Robert Jordan is--like him or not--the preeminent fantasy writer of the nineties. Terry Goodkind and maybe Stephen Donaldson to a lesser degree both had a steady and important following. David Eddings, too, had a lot of books. But when it came to being the fantasy writer for an entire generation? Robert Jordan. Milán doesn't have that sort of following--at least, not that I'm aware of. I'm confident there are fans and appreciators of his work. I would say, however, that when someone big in the speculative fiction realm--most recently Octavia Butler--dies, the memorials and mourning I see on writer Twitter is pretty frequent. I didn't get news about Milán until a couple of weeks ago, when I was peeking around to see when Book #4 would come out. While loved and respected, I don't think there's a large enough following/demand for the difficult task of passing the series on to another writer. Three, I don't know that Milán's estate has anything for anyone else to write. In the case of Jordan, his wife, Harriet, had thousands of pages of notes, to say nothing of the immense fanbase that had created databases galore of everything Jordan had added to his world. The final chapter, even, had already been written by Jordan before his passing, as he knew he had limited time. If I were to die, there wouldn't be hardly anything for anyone to do with regard to the worlds I've created. I write a lot of notes on worldbuilding, but I rarely do more than outline a single book at a time. I don't have notes about what would happen next, what the end of a character's life would be like, or anything of substantial use. Robert Jordan knew he was dying and, if I remember correctly, set out a lot of stuff that he wanted to see happen. Milán, from what I can see, died relatively quickly. Did he leave much behind? I genuinely don't know. And that leads to my last consideration: Why am I eagerly wishing for another book when I wasn't head-over-heels in love with the first three? It's a greediness in me, but I think there's a lot to be said about how jealous I am of Milán's idea. I might not enjoy these books because I wish I had written them. I've been trying for years to write a dinosaur story. It's never come together, though I've come close a couple of times. And here's a guy who put three down in as many years. Maybe I'm thinking that if someone else finished the series, I would be like, "Yeah, it's not her idea, so I don't have to be jealous of her." But wouldn't I also kind of wish I were the one who got to finish it? Yeah, probably. I'm a fantasy writer: Imagining fantastical, impossible to happen events is kind of my stock and trade. I mean, I definitely understand that I wouldn't ever be considered as a replacement. I know that. But I would still think those thoughts. As for the book itself, I think it was the best of the three. I read the last one hundred pages in a single sitting, as the logic of the books finally started to click into place. Who knows? Maybe I'll reread it after all? Oh, who am I kidding? I have other books to read, other writers to be jealous of. There's always another book on my "To be read" pile that will influence me and make me dream and imagine and hope that I can do something great with my words, too. I'd better get reading. --- * I don't have memories for every book I buy, but it isn't unusual for me to remember which store I was in or why I picked up a particular copy of a particular book. For me, books are about stories in more than one way. Note: I'm trying to get the second part of my Wooden O presentation put together. This is what I managed to write after about four hours of work. Also, ignore the footnote links. They don't work right.
"In early modern anti-Semitism…the Jews were denounced for their limitation, for sticking to their particular way of life...With late nineteenth-century chauvinist imperialism, the logic was inverted: the Jews were perceived as cosmopolitan, as the embodiment of an unlimited, 'deracinated' existence, which, like a cancerous intruder, threatens to dissolve the identity of every particular-limited ethnic community." --Slavoj Žižek[i] "Jews have never been grafted onto the stock of other people." --Andrew Willet, 1590[ii] "Just as it is often hard to tell a toadstool from an edible mushroom, so too it is often very hard to recognize the Jew as a swindler and criminal..." --Der Giftpilz (The Poisoned Mushroom)[iii] "Certainly the Jew is the very devil incarnation." --Lancelot Gobbo It is fairly well established that modern audiences of any of Shakespeare's works see a different story than what the Elizabethan/Jacobean audiences experienced at the Globe Theatre. Nowhere is this more visible than with The Merchant of Venice. Reading this play in our post-Holocaust world means that we access the story through Shylock--an avenue that likely would have baffled the original audiences. In some ways, our extratextual sympathies for Shylock come as a type of cultural allergy to anything connected to Nazism. In my view, such an allergy is important, and in the case of The Merchant of Venice, it serves to urge a cautiousness on the readers. After all, Germany had, for many years before the rise of the Third Reich, called the Bard "unser Shakespear", or "our Shakespeare".[iv] Hitler is said to have declared that "Shylock was a 'timelessly valid characterization of the Jew'."[v] In some ways, audiences want to sympathize with Shylock simply as a way of, as it were, striking back against the horrors that Nazism unleashed on the Jewish people. Shakespeare makes it easy for us to sympathize with his villain. There is, after all, his stirring speech about the shared humanity of all: "Hath not a Jew eyes…?" (Harold Bloom argues that he is "not moved by [Shylock's]…litany, since what he is saying there is now of possible interest only to wavering skinheads and similar sociopaths"[vi], perhaps mistaking the specific for the general.) And, read in this excerpted sense, it's easy to see how sympathetic Shylock's plea is. Read in further context, however, we see that Shylock's words also spell out his justification for a legalized murder. The difficulty of critiquing this sort of behavior is that Shylock is himself a victim of oppressive systems--if not through Shakespeare's version of Venice, but through the centuries of anti-Semitism and racism that he and the Jewish people have suffered. Shylock, then, is a different villain than Iago. What would Othello look like if the Black character were Iago? The villain? That is what we get with Shylock, and yet he manages to gain the sympathies of the audience more fully than perhaps any other antagonist in Shakespeare's cannon. In order to try to transmit the feelings of the anti-Semitic Elizabethan past--a past in which, legally, no one could have known a Jew, as it was illegal to be one and live in England since the late thirteenth century--I once was the dramaturge for an ensemble piece performed here at the Utah Shakespeare Festival high school drama competition. In it, we aimed to invoke the anti-Nazi allergy of our modern audience and translate it into something that would have been familiar to the first audience of The Merchant of Venice. Using the language of Nazism in the form of uniforms, swastikas, and goose-stepping actors, we cast Shylock as the Fuhrer and had his claims for the "pound of flesh" to be coming from our concentration camp survivor, Antonio. By putting the inherent sympathies of a concentration camp survivor onto the "Christian", we created a dissonance between the text and our shared history. This sort of verbal/visual language transported the emotional reactions from the original audience to the modern one. (As an aside, the judges reacted very negatively to the piece, with the forcefulness of our deliberate inversion so powerful that they didn't have time to dwell on any of the nuances or potential purpose of such a choice.) But what of the language itself? When the words are on stage, what do they say? Almost all of the Christians in the play have a racial bias, if not against Jews (as Antonio, Bassanio, the Salads (Salarino and Solanio), Lancelot, and Gratiano all show), then against any who look different to the Venetian society (consider Portia's snort, "Let all of his complexion choose me so" (2.7.79)). To pursue but one example of many: Consider this conversation between the Salads and Shylock (3.1): SALANIO Let me say 'amen' betimes, lest the devil cross my prayer, for here he comes in the likeness of a Jew. Enter SHYLOCK SALANIO …And Shylock, for his own part, knew the bird was fledged; and then it is the complexion of them all to leave the dam. SHYLOCK She is damned for it. SALANIO That's certain, if the devil may be her judge. SHYLOCK My own flesh and blood to rebel! SALANIO Out upon it, old carrion! rebels it at these years? SHYLOCK I say, my daughter is my flesh and blood. SALARINO There is more difference between thy flesh and hers than between jet and ivory; more between your bloods than there is between red wine and Rhenish. The racial lines are clearly staked in color, flesh (with attendant connotations of sexuality), and animalistic metaphors, but there's an unambiguous intonation, too, one that we've seen time and again throughout the play: The equation of Jewishness and the devil. As demonstrated by the colors on the slide, you can see the interplay of assumptions, contradictions, puns, and insults mounting on top of Shylock and, in many ways, the Jewish nation in general. Shylock's explanation for such hatred and scorn is never denied by the Christians: They do hate him, it seems, because he is a Jew. The manifestations of the racial animus are heard throughout the play, then most clearly seen in the climactic trial scene (4.1). When Portia first arrives, she asks a question that can be read in many ways by inquiring "Which is the merchant here, and which the Jew?" (169), a question that can be comedic if the merchant is in chains and the Jew is wearing his gaberdine and yarmulke, but points to the possibility of Portia's disinterest in the case. Yet Shylock's assertion when he completes the brief chiasmus ("Is your name Shylock? / Shylock is my name" (171)) points toward what David Suchet observed, as mentioned earlier: "He's only called by his name, Shylock, six times; Jew, twenty-two." In a world where the removal of a Jew's name carries with it dark undertones, it's difficult not to see the significance these words carry. Perhaps it is poetical rational, as it was with Othello: the Jew as opposed to Shylock (the one being an iamb, the other a trochee). Portia's line (177) "Then must the Jew be merciful" can't fit the meter with "Shylock" in place of his euphemism. Still, Shakespeare does not always fit in with his consistent blank verse, and a shift could have been orchestrated in some way. No, this subtle form of racism--of "deracinating" or, more largely, "dehumanizing"--is encoded in the words which are spoken and support the system which is designed to oppress and deny those deemed subhuman. Maybe we should say that Shylock's eventual--perhaps even inevitable--defeat is the largest indictment of a racially unjust society. His goal of murder is hardly laudable, and there is much to be said about the way in which the Venetian government got out of the curse he laid on them ("…fie upon your law" (100)), but the point still remains that, in a racist, anti-Semitic society such as the one we see on the stage, Shylock never had a chance. He tried to show the Christians their "villainy", only to be subsumed into Christianity. His rebellion turned into submission with the heart-breaking lie--his penultimate utterance of the play--"I am content" (389) and we see, yet again, how those exploited by the system which oppresses them is deliberate designed to maintain them in their so-called "proper place". [i] Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. The MIT Press. 2006. [ii] As quoted in James Shapiro's book, Shakespeare and the Jews. Columbia University Press. 1996. [iii] As quoted at https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/der-giftpilz where the Nazi children's book The Poisoned Mushroom is discussed. [iv] As quoted in "Shylock and Nazi Propaganda" from The New York Times. 4 April 1993. [v] Dickson, Andrew. Worlds Elsewhere. Henry Holt and Co. 2015. [vi] Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Riverhead. 1998. When it comes to modern animated family features, Hotel Transylvania and its sequels rank up there as a mysterious phenomenon for me: On the one hand, Genndy Tartakovsky made some of my favorite late-teenage-years cartoons, most particularly Dexter's Laboratory and directed a bunch of Powerpuff Girls episodes. His style of humor and animation--as well as his character design--has been carried into the verve of Teen Titans GO! (a series that I can love unabashedly because I didn't watch Teen Titans first and felt as though it was "ruined" by the tonal shift in the programing) and, to a lesser extent, The Amazing World of Gumball, which is another Cartoon Network gem that I love with a deep and abiding passion.
On the other hand, the movies aren't particularly good. Or rather, they aren't specifically bad. That's what's mysterious to me. They have some memorable bits (the "blah, blah, blah" gag gets a lot of mileage in that first film, and it crops up again in the third iteration) and good visual gags. The speed of the movements--the smoothness of some of the gestures--is tightly juxtaposed with hilarious poses and sharp angles. It creates a visual style that is definitely a Tartakovsky earmark of animation. But there's a slickness to it all that I struggle with it. Part of what I loved about the original Dexter's Lab episodes was a roughness to the backgrounds and animations. It was energetic in its design instead of being precise and I really liked that. When it comes to Tartakovsky's new animated medium of computer generated stuff, it has a polish that his previous work lacked…an artificial polish. Some of this is the result of computer generated animation becoming the mode of animation we see nowadays, at least on the silver screen. I can't remember the YouTube video, but it pointed out that, with the advent of computer generation, what we see that couldn't happen when animation was done by hand--and that is movement. If you think of The Lion King when Mufasa is talking to Simba and the camera pans around the two lions, you can see the "gaps" in the animation where the hand-drawn stuff breaks down. That same sort of camera movement can be done easily with computers. Another piece are the large-scale crowd scenes. The camera can take in huge metropolises that are bustling about (Zootopia springs to mind, as well as that older movie Robots) with hundreds, maybe thousands of different elements. Since the computer is running the animations, that sort of movement is much more easily transferred. There's nothing wrong with this, by the way. I bring it up as saying that it's an aspect of Tartakovsky's style now, but it isn't really his style, if that makes sense. It's the tool influencing the artist. I'm not saying that he isn't aware of this--I have no idea what he does or how he goes about doing it. Instead, I'm saying that I'm aware of this and I'm not used to thinking of, say, an episode of Powerpuff Girls being conceived of and executed this way. None of this is speaking about specifics of the film. The movie is fun--it's exactly what it purports to be in the trailers (which I tend not to watch, and had only seen a teaser of this one before going in) and it's put together well. I was shocked to see Jim Gaffigan as voicing one of the bad guys--doing such a great job I didn't know that it was him until the credits ran. The score was fine, though I liked the way that the big dance sequence happened according to the dictates of the plot, rather than the Shrek-esque "requirement" that basically every non-Pixar animated film ends with a choreographed dance (heck, even Zootopia has this problem). Nothing fundamentally wrong with this (it's downright Elizabethan, if you check out what post-play entertainment looked like), it's just a trend that movies do. I'm not going into spoiler territory, so I'll suffice to say that, though there's a dance section, it serves the story. The trick of sequels is to have characters grow, since their arcs should have finished in the first film. Cars is like this--which is why the second film is such a misstep--with Cars 3 showing how to move the character on. In Hotel Transylvania 3, the character growth still occurs as Dracula figures out how to move into the next phase of his (after)life. This was a good choice, and the film stays tightly focused on this story, which I enjoyed. I missed the second installment, but I'm willing to say that, if you enjoyed the first film, the third one has some redeeming moments. It's not perfect, but it's not a misery (like Minions, for example). Sometimes I get a few minutes of quiet where I can look at my glowing screen and type furiously. These are sparse times, often carved out of what could otherwise be called "family time" and thus they're fraught with twinges of guilt ("I could be/should be spending these moments with my kids") and an emptiness of inspiration ("It's been so long since I've had this kind of time, I don't know what to do with it").
Being a parent is an exercise in many different frustrations, a good number of them happening simultaneously. The inability to decide if you want to kick or kiss them (I don't actually kick my kids, save when I'm holding their shoes in hand and smack their butts with their own shoes, all the while asking, "Why are you kicking yourself? Why are you kicking yourself?" because I have yet to be mature enough to actually be a parent) is one of those great question marks of parenting. I honestly have no idea why I talk to my children four-fifths of the time. They honestly and constantly do not (and, based upon cumulated years of on-the-job research, cannot) hear my voice. Take this evening. Puck had a new print of a dinosaur milieu that we'd picked up for him. We didn't want it to stay in the car, as having that thing get bent would be a cause for great sadness. I said, "Puck, grab your print. You don't want it to be left behind in the car where it could get bent and be a cause for great sadness." He promptly walked away from the car. Flatulence gets a quicker response from that kid than my actual voice. Admittedly, they have some funny moments. Demetrius celebrated his fifth birthday at the top of this month. As Fourth of July fireworks cracked the sky, I asked him why the celebration. "Um," he said, thinking hard about this bit of mind-breaking trivia. "Um…" Oberon jumped in. As an eight year old, he definitely knew the answer to this one. "To celebrate our independence." "Good. From whom?" (I put the pressure on with this one; not only was it diving deeper into trivia, but it also had correct grammar.) "Um," said Demetrius, finally hearing a question he could answer. "Jesus? Heavenly Father?" Being a parent can be a type of emotional whiplash. The kids can be hilarious--usually when they aren't trying to be funny, though that can happen. Once, Oberon said, "I'm hungry." "Hi, Hungry. I'm Dad!" I said, triumphing at having at last found the perfect opportunity to crush my son's whining with the epitome of Dad Jokes™. Without missing a beat, Oberon replied, "Why did you name me this way?" In fact, Oberon has been cracking me up quite a bit lately. As I've mentioned before, I've been playing Dungeons and Dragons with my older boys. It's a lot of fun, and Oberon has spent a large portion of this summer reading through the Monster Manual. He memorizes different creatures' stat blocks, weaknesses, challenge ratings, and attacks. I've taken to calling him "Encyclopedia Orange" (since orange is his favorite color), even though he doesn't know the reference. The hardest part for me, though, has to be finding patience with them. I think I'm (marginally) better at it because I don't expend so much of my finite patience with students at school, but I hear the scarcely concealed (which is to say, not-at-all concealed) frustration in my voice almost every time I talk to Puck. It's not that he deserves it: As is the case with most eleven year olds, he's trying to figure out what his sense of humor is, what is funny, and how to interact with people. Unlike other eleven year olds, he is still struggling to figure it all out. As a result, both Gayle and I have less success than we'd like when it comes to teaching Puck how to best behave. The fact he doesn't really seem to listen to us doesn't help, particularly when we try talking to him in a patient or calm voice. That tone/volume doesn't register, meaning we have to bark at him more often. And that gets really tiresome, because then he feels like all we do is shout at him--mostly because he never hears us when we do anything otherwise--and we feel like we're constantly on his case. And that's the big thing about being a parent that I hadn't foreseen or understood back when I was making a large decision, the consequences of which I didn't really appreciate: Breaking free of entrenched habits can sometimes feel absolutely impossible. Scratch that--there's no sometimes about it. Each kid is a new chance to improve one's parenting, and in my particular case, I've already messed it up so much and so frequently that I don't feel as if I can make any fresh progress with the experience at all. All that being said, I obviously still care about being a parent. After all, I have a few minutes alone in the quiet of my room to write about anything at all in the world, yet here I am, thinking about the things that make my life so noisy. If that isn't proof positive of what it's like to be a parent, I really don't know what is. Last year, I picked up It. I finished a second round at the end of June. I wrote over a dozen pages in my personal reading journal about it. I gained a lot more from the book the second time around, the entire experience pushing It from a good book that I begrudgingly liked to one that has hit my "favorites" list. (This is problematic in that it is such a long book that it doesn't really lend itself to easy rereadings.)
Since the summer is now over halfway over, I'm at the point where I'm eager to get another non-required book read before the days bleed into August, but I'm rather stuck. Every other book that I'm trying to read is…not as good. And that isn't to say they aren't worthy reads and good books. They just don't grab me the way It does. In fact, most books I read don't grab me the way It does. Which has me thinking: What makes for a gripping story? I know that, in the case of Stephen King's It, part of what attracts me to it is the quality of the prose. You could make the argument that the writing itself is overly florid or detailed. My writing yesterday was significantly more florid and detailed than most others. Does that make it "good"? Was it even "good"? Of course, what makes for "good writing" is not really what I'm trying to explore here--that's a complicated issue that I haven't really figured out--and I know that style shouldn't be a replacement for good. Shakespeare and Homer aren't good because their style is elevated; there's more going on in each of them that makes them worthwhile. But the question is what makes for a gripping story. That is, why do we gravitate toward some stories, some writing, some writers, and not others? I've tried a couple of other Stephen King books. I went through The Shining just fine, but The Stand is…boring. I'm a couple hundred pages into it after eight months and I'm not really feeling the pull of the book. So what makes that happen? There are some obvious answers: The style is good, the characters are well drawn, the action is exciting, the idea is fresh. But these all correspond to subjective criteria ("good", "exciting", and so on). What I find so compelling about, say, Paradise Lost doesn't resonate with everyone--or very many, to be really honest. The density of the poetry and Milton's exalted style are part of what makes the work so powerful…it's also what puts people off of it. So I can't point at one thing that makes things exciting, knowing that what thrills one anesthetizes another. I think of Alan Moore's Jerusalem. I have made but little progress through it, despite really liking it. The style is difficult but rewarding, yet I don't see myself hauling it around from vacation to vacation in an attempt to finish it as quickly as possible. Even The Dinosaur Princess, which is marketed as being "Game of Thrones meets Jurassic Park," and is a fantasy novel in which people ride dinosaurs as they joust in medieval battles, doesn't hold my attention as much as one might expect. I have had that book for almost a year now and still haven't finished it. There are all of the things that make for a "good" book, a gripping book, an interesting book--wonderful detail, enjoyable characters, interesting idea--but it just doesn't pull me in tightly. This is honestly less a question about writing than it is about reading. I genuinely worry that my ability to read--not the literacy of word comprehension, but the ability to focus on a text--is waning. I don't want it to go, yet it's a muscle that hurts too often when I'm trying to exercise it. There's a fallacy, I think, in saying, "It doesn't matter what you read so long as you read." There are better pieces of fiction and literature out there. Some of it is challenging, some less so. But I--an avid reader since I first read Green Eggs and Ham--struggle to want to read very often. My paradigm has shifted toward film and video games, though each attracts me in different ways. It's alarming for me to think that I want to read more (and I want others to read what I write; that's why I'm still trying to get published), yet I don't actually do it. There's a hypocrisy there that I'm uncomfortable with. Well, I'm no closer to the answer than when I started. I guess I'll have to keep picking at it. If I come up with some conclusion, I'll let you know. I like summertime. While the dry heat of Utah does a number on my sinuses, plugging them with scabs and desert-like wastes, and the temperature flirts with the triple digits far too often for comfort, there's still a lot to commend it.
For starters, my job allows me to take over two months off at a go. Admittedly, this is because teachers also get summer break. Having chapter breaks in my life is enjoyable, a way of punctuating each year. While other things can provide the marks of changing time--seasons or holidays--nothing hits me quite like summer does. Summer mornings, with their too-early brightness and almost-always-fulfilled-promises of too-hot days are charming on their own. I miss most sunrises (I've always been a sunset kind of guy, though that may be a greater matter of consequence than direct choice), but those I do catch as the previous night's sprinkler work evaporates into the arid air are really nice. And maybe that's another thing about the mornings--I can sleep through them. I'm not as adept at snoozing late as my wife, I should say, though I can push toward the 9:30 timeframe if given the right circumstances. Being able to have the option of sleep according to my body's clock, rather than my phone's, is a nice change of pace. I envy those who get to dictate those terms on an annual basis. The days are hot, yes, and the air conditioning is stuck in the fishstick Venn diagram of burning-on-the-outside-but-frozen-on-the-inside. This can have the weird effect of needing a blanket whilst watching TV when the world beyond the window wavers with the mirage-blurs of overheated concrete. And there are doldrums where nothing sounds engaging but you're bored with what you have--kind of the "I'm hungry but nothing sounds good right now" malaise that afflicts most everyone. Having the kids at home can be a trial: We're five different people with different desires. I would like to be able to walk through my living room without the tactical care of a minesweeper on a Pacific beach; my children feel this is the best--nay, only--way to live. Devising ways of entertaining, feeding, and distracting them can try my patience, and I'll admit that I have allowed video games or "why don't you go to the neighbor's house?" routine on them more than once, if only to get a handful of quiet minutes in which to think, I'm bored but nothing sounds good right now. Except playing Overwatch. That always sounds like fun. When I'm at home during the summer, I do get more writing done, though nothing comes close to the output I generate when I'm at the cabin all alone. This is my great frustration with summer, I'd say: Tons more time in which to do what I really want, but I'm so out of shape/practice I can't get it done. It's like alcohol: Increases the desire, decreases the performance.* Evenings during the summer are my favorite, though. Hands down, it's the time when I feel the most at peace and the most relaxed. The sun hovers over the west, as reluctant as the first day of school, lingering on the sunburned swath it has carved over the course of the elongated day. If the wind isn't too bad (which it is a good four times out of seven), I'll park myself on my patio, letting the stretching shadows of the trees and the neighborhood kids still shouting and sweating their bikes down the street scrape toward an eastward escape. My garage will shield me from the direct sunlight, so the gilded world sparkles in front of me whilst I sit in my red plastic chair and read a book or think small thoughts. Then comes the grip-loosening, the time when summer yields its yellow-blue heat and the scarce clouds that Utah can hardly be bothered to conjure, and the intolerable heat--the pointed, sometimes angry heat--can no longer maintain its power. It slips, maybe regains some footing with a hot blast from the tar-drenched road, but then slips again. The power of the day is cracked and the brief darkness of another night begins to approach. Eventually--and it always comes so much later than I expect--the sun's last kiss slips off the lips of the ridgeline and only the ruddy afterglow of the experience illuminates the margins of the mountains. If I'm fortunate enough to be on a beach--a rare occurrence in my life's experience--I get to watch the sun melt into a puddle of its own reflection, a reassuring orange that seems to say, "I'm only gone for a little bit. Don't worry. I can't wait to come back." The fingernail moon will begin it's scratch across the sky before the sun has finished it's farewell, and maybe the freckles of stars will manage to push past the light pollution and grace me with their brilliance. The bugs drone, the endless murmur of the traffic on nearby streets, occasionally broken by the over-compensating roar of a white pick-up truck's engine, drone like a river, and the still, hot (and still hot) air caresses my cheeks as I step back into my climate-controlled home and prepare for sleep. The bedroom has held onto the day's fire, so there's a Lewis and Clark expedition to find a cool spot on the sheets. Pillows are flipped. Legs are extended or retracted. Sleep comes, often sought after but elusive, as flirtatious as an across-the-room glance, something that rolls toward you, then away--a tidal teasing that, given enough time, will pull you under. Yes, I think it's fair to say that I really like summertime. It's always been good to me. --- * We have Macbeth to thank for that one. And, since I've never had a drop of alcohol in my life, I have no idea how accurate that idea is. The sentiment, however, is a fitting one. 14 July 2018
Back in 1789, the French Revolution really took off (some heads) and majorly changed the world. The destruction of the monarchical reign in France was bigger than we Americans sometimes credit it and it's cool to have been in Washington, D.C. (if only for part of the day) on "the French 4th of July". And that goes along with a lot of what I've been rolling over in my mind whilst in D.C. The ideas of liberty and freedom (which have slightly different meanings) are supposedly writ large in D.C., with the French version an even more radical one than what the Founders envisioned. While I didn't get to read the Declaration of Independence, I did get to sit in the Jefferson Memorial and read part of it; what seems clear and obvious to us now had to be, at one time, set down and explained--carved in stone, as the case turned out to be at the Jefferson Memorial. But what do we even mean by American freedom? I saw a quote whilst at the Capitol Building's exhibition, something about how America was the only place where a person can be free. Yet there are plenty of "free" places: Canada is a quick and easy example, as well as many of the European countries. Japan has quite a bit of freedom, too. Some might argue that we have "more" freedom, as if it's quantifiable. And maybe it is. But there are plenty of things to unpack there: Is more better inherently? Do various types of freedom change the measurement? Is it how equitably the freedoms are distributed? What about the praxis of freedoms? As I write this, I'm in the Baltimore Washington International Airport. To get into this area, I had to 1) purchase a ticket (without money, my freedom of movement is contracted almost to the point of worthlessness); 2) navigate a fairly complicated privatized system of check-in and baggage tagging; 3) process through the security system where I was not free to leave this laptop in my bag, nor keep the shoes on my feet or my phone in my pocket; 4) purchase a subpar meal without the ability to negotiate or barter (corporate policies most likely being the one that impinges there); 5) keep my mouth shut about certain topics (bombs, terrorism, hijackings); 6) refrain from loudly proselytizing while standing on a table of the nearby Potbelly's. While the list is far from comprehensive, it shows that there are a lot of things that an unfettered freedom can't really approach. Some of these strictures are on the federal level; others are on Maryland; some are corporatized; some are social norms that we aren't "supposed" to break. It's a normalized type of world, in a lot of ways: These things are taken for granted and we move on with life. I'm not saying these things should change (except the TSA: Those security lines don't have to be the humiliating process they've become--but since we're addicted to the convenience of airlines, there's little chance at changing it) necessarily, but instead am noticing the small "erosions" of lost liberties (or freedoms, if you prefer) that we get in our country right now. There are larger issues than the fact that money is what's accepted and not the option to barter, but I think it's illustrative that we've normalized so much. Having just come from the World War I training, I'm reminded of how bad it was for some people in 1917 and 1918 who voiced dismay or disgust or anything other than full-throated support for President Wilson and/or the war. In one instance, a grocer was tarred and feathered because, when a person complained about the food quality, he said, "Don't blame me, blame --- ---- Wilson." (The blanks were in the quoted newspaper, so you can fill in whatever you want.) A pastor who preached pacifism was likewise tarred and feathered. There was a genuine paranoia and social expectation during the Great War--one that we saw resurface in the Second World War (most visibly manifest in the Japanese internment camps) and again later during the Red Scare--that caused a much clearer loss of American rights. Fortunately, the Sedition and Espionage Act is no longer on the books--and other heinous laws that have been implemented have likewise gone away--and one can voice discontent without fear of immediate mob violence. But we can't simply say that "America means freedom," because that's too simplistic for truth to be inside of it. I wrestled with these emotions as I went through the Capitol Building today (not as much when I saw the far too small dinosaur exhibit at the Smithsonian). There are dangers in the world and unfettered freedom exposes a people to danger. I definitely get that. But the Sedition Act is no longer--what about the USA PATRIOT Act? What about the continued surveillance of people? What about the clearer threats to our democracy--any and every attempt to disenfranchise citizens, Russian interference, erosion in confidence in the press, a dismissal of truth in an era of "fake news"--that we aren't addressing? It's easy to blame the GOP (as they have full control in Washington) for not doing something, and the change truly should start there, but there are so many other things--small, seemingly inconsequential things--that aren't necessarily as big but can be just as important or worrying. After all, I'm only in line for the airport security once every couple of years. I'm on my phone every day. What freedoms are being impinged by both governmental and corporate entities that I don't even recognize? And what would Robespierre say about what American (or French) freedom today? If he and Washington could come to 2018 and look at their respective countries, would they be impressed by the freedoms we have? Dismayed at what we take for granted? Embarrassed by aspects of their legacies? Desperate to explain themselves after having their descendants interpret their words and deeds and governments for the past couple of centuries? On this year's Bastille Day, as I leave the epicenter of American politics, I think about these questions. And I wonder. Well, I finished up. While I will still be in town for most of tomorrow, the official purpose of my trip here has concluded. It was a really enjoyable and exciting professional development--worth, I should say, the amount of time I put in (though the cost is debatable simply because flying out to D.C. in the middle of tourist season probably isn't the cheapest thing on the planet) by a long shot. Personal experiences are included in this: I feel like I'm a better person and a better teacher and a better American for having been here and experienced this city.
Our day went well. The assignment we were given was to create a lesson plan that utilized some of the techniques and research we'd done. Mine went well--I got a lot of positive feedback and even some cool new ideas to try to implement. How well it will go in a classroom is another conversation entirely…one that I won't get to see until 2019 when I teach World War I again. As soon as the class was over and we said our goodbyes, we rushed back to the hotel to drop off our materials and so that I could change. We then headed to the Folger Shakespeare Library (yes, again) and this time spent some time looking at the display. The current exhibit is talking about the book--how books have been made and how they are, in and of themselves, works of art. (Remind me to write about some of my thoughts on that idea sometime.) While looking through one of the glass panels, I almost breezed past one book…until I saw the title on the spine. "Wait a minute! That's a copy of Paradise Lost!" Yup. My main Milton gets to kick it in the Folger's Shakespeare Library as well. Pretty sweet. Whilst hanging about the First Folio, one of the docents happened by and we started asking her questions. It didn't take long before we dove into some of the more esoteric stuff, and I picked her brain on things like the apocryphal writings and the rarity of the folios. (I didn't know this, but since there are 240 extant copies of Shakespeare's First Folio, it isn't considered a "rare book". One of the others--I think it's the third--is, because there are fewer copies. Like, one. And it's in the Folger's Library.) She led us into the back room where I got to see a beautiful painting of Queen Elizabeth I (a replica, but still stunning) and a Fourth Folio, which was behind glass. The docent then invited us back tomorrow to take a tour of the reading room. I'm very excited and hopeful about that. We stayed there until they kicked us out--and, since we had ended early at the institute, it was a substantial amount of time. We came back to the hotel, not having any place else to be, and waited to have dinner with a mutual friend whom we had bumped into serendipitously a couple days before. Due to some scheduling snags, we decided to meet her at the Eastern Market Metro station instead of the Capitol South one, and I'm glad we did. Whilst waiting for our friend to arrive, we saw a bunch of teenagers dressed in the same outfits--maroon shirts with white lettering on them and black leggings/shorts--dancing in unison in the square. Curious, we went over to watch them dance. I'm not particularly skilled at understanding dance. I'm really glad that people like it, but I don't understand hardly any of it. So they did a great job (I thought) and, when they finished, they descended upon us like a flock of doves, thanking us for watching them dance. As they got closer, I saw that their shirts read, "I am FEARLESS 2 Tim 1:7". "What is this?" asked my friend, wowed and excited. "We're a dancing ministry group," the girls (they were all girls, save for three boys…and, yes, I counted) said, braces flashing almost as brightly as their smiling eyes. Neither my friend nor I had heard of this before. Apparently, it's a summer Bible camp, but instead of just doing camp with Bible themes, they rehearse choreography to Christian rock music and then go around dancing to attract people to the Word. After they dance, they go minister to the audience. It was really interesting. Since the kids were from nearby, being in D.C. wasn't as cool for them, but they loved dancing and spreading the gospel message. One of the girls--the most outspoken one, a girl named Kaiden (I'm making up that spelling--asked us if there was anything we needed that they could pray for. "Uh, that we get home safely! That the flight doesn't have any problems." The girls nodded and bobbed their heads and mentally logged that request away. They stayed and chatted with us for a few more minutes, telling us about some of where they'd been and what they're doing in school and just…normal stuff. We asked what the scripture was. They couldn't remember, so we looked it up for them, which made me laugh. Once they had flocked away, our friend showed up and we headed down to a recommended restaurant not far from the station. We asked for a table for three, and they said, "It'll be about an hour and ten minutes." "Um," we said, hesitating slightly. We didn't have anything on the agenda--catching up with our friend was kind of the point of the evening. "No, it'll be forty-five minutes," said one of the other hostesses. "If you're okay sitting in the booth at the front, you can take it as soon as it's bused," said the first one. "Um, okay." From an hour and ten minutes to thirty-seven seconds? Not too shabby. We ordered, and my two friends, Kathleen (the mutual friend) and Laura (my coworker) began their catch up. The thing is, both ladies have quick, infectious giggles, and Kathleen's is particularly memorable…and loud. I thought we would get dirty looks and be served quickly to get us out, but we ended up staying there for a long time. The manager brought the ticket, along with three complimentary tarts (which mine was fantastic, by the way) because he thought we were having such a good time and he was rather jealous of it. Free tarts in to-go bags, we wandered down to the Botanical Gardens where we stood by a fountain, chatted and laughed some more, and then turned around to hike back to the hotel. It was a very relaxed, enjoyable way of spending my last night in Washington, D.C. |
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