Month: June 2009

Friday various

  • In his review of The Proposal — which doesn’t sound at all appealing to me, frankly — Keith Phipps writes:

    Bullock plays a feared, powerful book editor, a job that apparently consists entirely of reading unsolicited manuscripts while riding an exercise bike, and trying to coax authors into appearing on Oprah.

    Yes, this is exactly what the job of book editor consists of, just as the job of book author involves nothing but music-filled montages of frenetic typing, feverish concentration and crumpled-up wads of paper. Red pens are sometimes stategically employed in either case.

    And authors need coaxing to appear on Oprah?

  • In his review of Woddy Allen’s new movie, Whatever Works — A.O. Scott writes:

    Mr. Allen’s unwavering belief in an empty cosmos made somewhat less bleak by the charms of old movies, older music and much younger women is one of the few things left we can count on. If the man ever gets religion, then we will know we’re really in trouble.

    Frankly, this new one doesn’t look so great either.

  • Meanwhile, I agree with Scott Tobias: Quick Change is an underrated comedy.

  • This must be a joke, or else it takes the idea of “urban exploration” way too far. And I hope like hell I don’t live near anyone like this. [via]

  • And finally, Amanda Palmer on the importance of being bored:

    “I don’t want to sound like a luddite old-fart, [but] I kind of worry about the ‘digital generation.’ Kids today don’t have the freedom to be bored. There is something really important about boredom, and how you choose to fill it. If I had had the Internet at age 14 or 15 and had been able to expose myself and connect with people that way, I don’t know if I would have gone and messed around with the piano. Kids can definitely use the Internet creatively, but I think that there is something important about incubating on your own. I think boredom, space, time, and development need ‘unconnectedness.’ These kids are so connected, and they are never bored, because they don’t need to be. I think that’s dangerous. I think boredom is important.”

Random 10 6/19

Last week. This week:

  1. “Union Song” by the Nightwatchman
    There’s a thunder cloud exploding
  2. “You Could Be Happy” by Snow Patrol
    Is it too late to remind you how we were?
  3. “If I’m Dreaming My Life” by David Bowie
    Was it air she breathed?
  4. “Run Like Hell” by Pink Floyd, guessed by Clayton
    They’re gonna send you back to mother in a cardboard box
  5. “Play the Game” by Queen, guessed by Kim
    Light another cigarette and let yourself go
  6. “New Speedway Boogie” by the Grateful Dead, guessed by Generik
    Things went down we don’t understand, but I think in time we will
  7. “Road to Nowhere” by Talking Heads, guessed by Clayton
    And we’re not little children
  8. “Roll Me Away” by Bob Seger, almost guessed by Kim
    Took a bead on the northern plains and just rolled that power on
  9. “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by the Rolling Stones, guessed by Clayton
    She was practiced at the art of deception
  10. “Johnny 99” by Los Lobos (orig. Bruce Springsteen)
    The bank was holdin’ my mortgage and they were gonna take my house away

And so it goes. Good luck!

Zombies on the brain

Here are three zombie-inspired links: Zombie Neurobiology [via], Zombie Legos [via], and China Mieville’s proposed literary movement, “Zombiefail ’09-ism” [via]:

…this will be the movement for those tired of the unrelenting imperialism of zombies in horror–and now other–fiction. The writers’ position will be that what started as an invigoration (one hesitates to say ‘revivification’, in this context) of an antique trope has viralled to the point where its ubiquity makes it ambulonecrotophile kitsch. Zombies that once stalked the cultural unconscious like baleful rebukes are now cuddly toys, dead metaphors (ba-boom) at which we can’t stay mad. Paradoxically, out of very respect for increasingly degraded zombies, Zombiefail ’09-ist writers will either explicitly undermine their banalisation by melancholy mockery of them, or refuse to write about them at all, instead plundering various mythoi for more neglected monsters with which to end the world.

I’m not sure I can jump on the “fewer zombies” bandwagon, however tongue-in-cheek, and even if we maybe are reaching a saturation point. Books like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies are supposed to be surprisingly good, Plants vs. Zombies is great and addictive fun, and there’s no end of intelligent discourse on zombies to be had. Just because there are zombie toys, that doesn’t mean that zombies can’t also be scary. (I’d maintain that those zombie Legos are pretty darn creepy in their own right.)

Still, Mieville isn’t wrong; their ubiquity maybe has undermined some of what made zombies so frightening in the first place. Certainly it’s happened with other boogeymen, notably vampires. As Zach Handlen writes in his reivew of Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s new novel The Strain:

Vampires aren’t scary anymore. Blame Anne Rice, Stephenie Meyer, Hot Topic, whoever; whatever the reason, blood-sucking fiends lurking in the shadows no longer carry the same old skin-crawling cultural cachet. Which presents a problem for writers who still want to use them.

But every problem is a challenge if you look at it in the right light. I have no doubt there are still new and inventive takes on the zombie still waiting to be created. Even 28 Days Later, which Mieville includes among the “negative influences” his movement will shun, can be seen as a reaction against the sort of campy Romero knockoffs that dominated zombie pop culture for most of the’70s and ’80s. No doubt something — or many different things — will come along to react against the camp that’s since followed it.

Then again, even in Romero’s movies, it’s rarely the zombies who are the most frightening people.

Tuesday various

  • I have never read Ulysses, and only a few of the stories in James Joyce’s Dubliners — I have a copy somewhere at home — but today is apparently Bloomsday, commemorating the life of the author and the events of his most famous book. As Gary Dexter writes:

    The paradox of Ulysses is that one needs to read it to understand twentieth-century literature, but one needs to read twentieth-century literature to build up the stamina to read Ulysses.

    Gene Wolfe’s “Solar Cycle” is my big reading project this year, so I think Joyce will have to wait.

  • Dana Carvey and Robert Smigel in the AV Club:

    Robert Smigel: One thing about Dana’s determination not to be a showbiz person: Dana was the only celebrity I knew who was offered Sesame Street when his kids were very young, and turned it down.

    They’re both refreshingly candid about the quality (and sometimes lack thereof) of their work, specifically on The Dana Carvey Show.

  • John Scalzi offers some thoughts on internships:

    What bothers me about unpaid internships is not fundamentally that they are unpaid (although that really isn’t a good thing), but that the purpose of internships seems to have changed in an uncomfortable way: it’s gone from a way to train students in practical real-world application of skills they’ve learned in college to a way to plug, for free, actual skill gaps in one’s work force.

    I don’t know for certain if our company pays its interns, or if we’re teaching them any valuable skills they can apply in the publishing world later on. But I do know it makes our jobs easier when we have one.

    I’ve always sort of regretted not going after an internship of my own back in college.

  • Despite what Jonathan Wright might say, I think story arcs are generally a good thing. They don’t always work, I’ll grant you that. You’ll find no argument from me that Babylon 5 didn’t falter in its final season, or that the show’s mythology arc isn’t what eventually undid The X-Files. (Well, that and Annabeth Gish, but don’t get me started on that.) But I much prefer story arcs to the more formulaic alternative, where characters never change (or acknowledge past events), and where the status quo is never challenged. There’s room for both in my heart, but if I had to choose, for example, between Star Trek, where the status quo is de rigeur — the new reboot not at all withstanding — or Farscape, which repeatedly proclaimed to have no reset button, I’ll absolutely choose the latter. Story is all about character, and characters who grow and adapt are simply more interesting.

    Abigail Nussbaum had some interesting thoughts on serialized vs. episodic television not too long ago.

    I’ll reserve judgment on these new Torchwood episodes until I’ve seen them — I was a big fan of the second series, which I re-watched recently, but still think the first was pretty dire — but it’s worth noting that this is a mini-series, which by its nature implies expectations of a self-contained story arc. (Also that there’s plenty of story arc to be found in the earlier episodes; you’d probably have better luck starting at the beginning than anywhere in the middle or at the end. I don’t know how standalone those episodes really are.)

  • And finally, I’m with Caitlin R. Kiernan on this:

    I need summer. Real summer. Too hot to walk barefoot on the sidewalk without blistering your feet summer. Sweltering after dark summer.

    Well, okay, I don’t know about the “sweltering after dark” bit, but I’m a little tired of this schizophrenic weather. It could be worse — Heather was reporting snow in her neck of the woods just over a week ago — but frankly, I like seasons that feel like seasons, genuine spring and summer, autumn and winter. And the less that one bleeds into the other, the better. Is that so awful?