About Fred

Who’s Thor-y now?

Today I went to see the Thor movie, which I quite liked, and I wrote this:

They killed another of the savages last night, brought it up deck, lashed it tightly to the mast, and took turns with the captain’s whip until the poor frightened beast bled out. This morning, none of three men would claim the killing blow for himself; they hemmed and they hawed and they refused to set their stories straight, though Mr. Murtha and I questioned them each for the better part of an hour, both together and separately. As for the captain, he would claim only the whip, taking it back from the men with half-hearted admonishments I knew were more for my benefit than for theirs. He does not like me, Captain Androse, and I think that would be the case even without Mr. Murtha’s intimidating bulk constantly at my side or the crew’s natural displeasure at having a dead man sailing with them. The captain is as close to another man of science as I am likely to find aboard his ship, less frightened by superstition or believing of rumor, but I know even he would be just as glad to be rid of me. If he could kill me twice, he no doubt would have done so.

If only he knew how little I wish to be here myself.

And yet I go wherever His Majesty sends me, serving at the pleasure of the crown.

The native boy’s death is a distraction — not worthy of our time, the captain says — and what’s worse I know that he is right. What do I care that the men took a little sport with the heathen, took it all too far, and ended his life? As a slave, he would have fetched little profit, and so it is not the destruction of His Majesty’s property that galls me. Nor is it even the principle of the thing… I am bound, not only by royal decree but by the wards the king’s necromancers carved into my skin, to uphold the laws of the realm, but I am free to choose how I do so. We have better things to do than punish these men for spilling a savage’s blood.

And yet why, then, can I not let this go? Is it as a dead man myself that I take offense?

It was, whadyacallit, a Sunday.

Long weekend

I took Friday off, which was really nice, even if I did nothing more exciting with the day than go to the post office and buy some pants. (I did these separately; the post office has a lousy selection of trousers.) It was nice having the day off, though it did weirdly feel like Saturday, which by extension made today feel like Sunday. And while there are things I like about Sunday — the crossword puzzle, my writing group — there’s a certain kind of melancholy to it that I’m not sure needs to be repeated twice in one week.

But still, in reality it was two Saturdays, so it’s not so bad.

Last night, I watched Brian De Palma’s 1978 movie The Fury, which was…how should I put this? Terrible. It’s like De Palma got done making Carrie the year before and thought, “That psychic stuff was fun, but it wasn’t halfway confusing enough. Maybe we could throw in some really bad comedy, too?” The plot of The Fury is just a mess, and characters disappear for long stretches, connect in ways that either bore or don’t make any sense. It stops short of being a total disaster, but only just, and all of De Palma’s worst excesses and impulses as a director are on screen. Carrie, on the other hand, is also full of visual excess — you may know its most famous images even if you’ve never seen the movie — but it also has terrific performances, particularly from Spacek, and a simple story grounding the whole thing.

This? Not so much.

Though I did note that Andrew Stevens, whose acting in this isn’t very good, was last in Mongolian Death Worm. So, y’know, Sepegal.

Tonight, I watched Oldboy, which was….weird. Very violent, disturbing, visually impressive, and weird. I’d been meaning to watch it for some time, since Spike Lee’s American remake will be coming out soon, but Netflix only has a dubbed version available for streaming.

Other than that, I’ve been watching Scandal, which is ridiculous, but ridiculously addictive. Also, How I Met Your Mother, and I decided to sample the first episodes of Arrow and Haven. The latter is a little too Syfy Channel-y for my liking, and the former could become too CW-y, but so far they’re intriguing. Not as compulsively watchable as Scandal, maybe, but intriguing.

That’s been my weekend, more or less, and I still have an actual Sunday to go.

Random 10 11-8-13

Last week. This week:

  1. “Now I’m Here” by Queen, guessed by random passer-by
    Down in the city, just Hoople and me
  2. “Derelict” by Beck
    Shooting venom at the passersby
  3. “Dog Days Are Over” by Florence and the Machine
    She killed it with kisses and from it she fled
  4. “Take Your Carriage Clock and Shove It” by Belle and Sebastian
    Honor forbids me, but honor be damned
  5. “40 Dogs (Like Romeo and Juliet)” by Bob Schneider
    We’re like good times that haven’t happened yet, but will
  6. “Holloway Park” by Fatty Gets a Stylist
    A man in overalls worries the weeds away
  7. “Peaches” by the Presidents of the United States, guessed by random passer-by
    They were put there by a man in a factory downtown
  8. “Get Ready” by the Proclaimers (orig. the Temptations), guessed by Clayton
    I never met a girl who makes me feel the way that you do
  9. “The Book of Love” by the Magnetic Fields, guessed by Clayton
    I love it when you read to me
  10. “Country Comfort” by Elton John
    Deacon Lee prepares his sermon for next week

Good luck!

Monday

I had to go into the office today, rather than work from home, but that’s only because I’ll be taking Friday off. I’ll actually be taking every Friday off in November, and a good number of them next month as well, as we wind down toward the end of the year.

Next year I think I need to better manage my vacation time…and actually take a vacation, not just a handful of days or a week when I do nothing much but sit at home and — this is what I did last month, anyway — become addicted to the TV show Scandal. I’m determined that next year will be the year I finally get my own apartment again — I moved back home just shy of ten years ago now — and that will eat into my disposable income. But I still think I need to go somewhere, and use up my vacation time in more creative ways than looking at the calendar and thinking, “Oh, I guess I could take those Fridays off…”

I mean, I like a good three-day weekend as much as the next guy, but there’s only so much you can do with them.

But anyway, going into the office today wasn’t so bad, its being a Monday notwithstanding. I’m moving to a nicer cubicle at the office, though IT has yet to switch my computer and phone over, so I’m kind of spread across the two workstations right now, my computer and phone (and me) in one, and all my books and files and whatnots in the other. Hopefully it’ll be sorted out before the end of the week.

One good thing about not working from home on Monday: I don’t have to carry my laptop home with me each weekend. (Or nearly miss my train every Friday because of ill-timed Windows updates.)

And finally, one of the textbooks I put into production this year, the first one I’ve worked on since joining the larger development group, has finally published, or at least arrived from the printer. That’s a great feeling, actually seeing this thing you worked on (and hopefully helped make better) and hold it in yours hands. I think it looks great, both with the content and how it looks, and I’m really hoping the author’s pleased and that the book sells really well. I’ve got two more books due before the end of the year, and another in late January, but this has been the first book I’ve developed that’s published in a while.

So, anyway, that’s pretty much Monday. I’ll just leave you with this. You can decide how accurate it actually is:

ageanalyzer

Ender of days

This afternoon, I went to my writing group and wrote this in the time allotted to us:

“If you’re going to raise a demon,” said Howard, “then you raise a demon. You do it right and by the book. This is no time for half measures.”

Daisy nodded, and mmhmmed, although she wasn’t really listening, and moreover she didn’t care if Howard knew it. This was her show as high priestess; she’d earned that title for whatever it was worth, and she wasn’t prepared to cede her authority to Howard just because he’d spent a few more lonely nights in the council library than anyone else. If the council had been looking to reward bookishness, then they would have given the book to Howard, now wouldn’t they, instead of handing the litany of rites and arcana over to her. Daisy respected his knowledge, and lord knew she’d have to lean on it a little when the time actually came, but for now Howard could take all his talk of half measures and demon raising and shove it up his pompous ass.

“Have we heard back from Cairo yet?” she asked him absently. The dig was a good three hour’s drive over land from the capital, she knew, but by now they should have heard something, anything, even rumor. What was that archaeologist’s name again — not the lead, but the one the council had secreted on to the team three months after their arrival in-country? Was it Winsome? Winstone? Daisy could ask Howard, but god, he would love that, wouldn’t he, her not knowing some key piece of information. And Cairo was critical to the success of the ritual, even more than any garden-variety demon raising that might need to be undertaken stateside, and Howard would have no hesitation reminding her about that over and over. It was just the woman’s name Daisy couldn’t remember — it was definitely something with a W, she was sure of that — but she wasn’t about to admit to any ignorance here and now.

“Nothing,” Howard said, “which as I’m sure you know is unusual. If they’ve run into some kind of difficulty at the tomb — “

“It’s too early for contingency plans,” said Daisy. “And you worry too much. Last we heard, everything was going just peachy.”

“That was before the dreamer awoke,” said Howard. “They’ve been transcribing new prophecy for the better part of an hour.”

“The dreamer,” Daisy snorted. “You old guys put way too much faith into the things that man says. If I smoked a half pound of hashish before bed I’d have some weird visions too. What was that one about all of the women with arms slicked to the elbow with oil and rice and tiny cubes of diced vegetable matter? It’s crazy. Show me a single ’dream’ of his that has led to anything tangible.”

“He found the old one’s tomb,” Howard said.

“That’s debatable,” said Daisy. “It’s a lot more likely the old one’s the one who found him.”

It’s probably not too difficult to figure out one of the writing prompts, shoehorned-in as it is there. (I picked it, so I have no one but myself to blame.)

After that, I went with the group to see Ender’s Game.

Before seeing it, my feelings about the movie were pretty complex, owing mostly to Card’s odious politics and extreme right-wing views. I thought about buying a ticket to a different movie, or boycotting it altogether. Although that would only be symbolic at best — John Scalzi rightly points out it would be hard to monetarily hurt Card at this point with one, or even millions, less ticket sales — there was a certain appeal to it. But I wasn’t really looking to make a symbolic gesture, and I think I can see the movie without it reading as an endorsement of Card’s backward views on homosexuality.

Then people on Twitter started talking about the book itself, and how it was bad, with its own breed of noxious politics. While less of a screed than Card’s more recent political writing, they argued that the book itself was worthy of derision and boycott.

I haven’t read the book since I was about Ender Wiggin’s age myself. I was tempted to try to find my old copy — I think it might be buried in a box in the basement — that temptation came only sometime this morning. (I mean, I did have that extra hour, but it was not to be.) From my memory of the book, though, I think those people are wrong, if only because the terrible things that are done to, and ultimately by, Wiggin in the book are not necessarily presented as a good thing. And — spoiler warning — he spends most of Speaker for the Dead, the sequel, trying to atone for the brutal genocide he’s ultimately (albeit somewhat unwittingly) responsible for in the first book. I’ve read Speaker (and Xenocide) more recently, and Card the man, with his baggage of views and politics, doesn’t really rear its ugly head.

The book’s not perfect, and I think maybe it does deserve a re-read from me at some point to better unpack those imperfections, but I remember liking it a lot, even if I was only about twelve at the time.

So my feelings were complex. A couple of days ago, on Twitter, I wrote: I will/won’t go see Ender’s Game because it doesn’t/does reflect the author’s original intent. Yeah, I think that about covers it.

After seeing the movie…well, it was okay.