Month: February 2010

Giant inflatable beavers?

Not a whole lot to say about today, actually. It was the tail end of my unexpected three-day weekend, and I spent it mostly doing the same things I did for the past two days. I did finish a short-short story I’ve been working on recently, and I e-mailed it out to a small-press magazine for consideration. So, y’know, fingers crossed and all that. Regardless of what happens to the story, it’s nice to finish a piece and send it out. That’s not something I do often enough.

I spent the rest of the day reading through accumulated links in Google Reader and watching some stuff online and on DVD. There are scant few extras on the DVD for A Serious Man, but I was amused when one of the production crew discussed how, in re-creating the ’60s, they couldn’t use cars made later than 1960, since these look too distinctively flashy, too later-century, to our modern eyes and therefore don’t read as believable on the screen anymore. I remember this sort of thing coming up a few years back in my viewing of Lost and Deadwood, and how those shows had to diverge from reality in order to make things look more real.

What I didn’t watch today was the winter Olympics — though from all the talk on Twitter, I gather I missed one heck of a hockey game between Canada and the United States and I am, right now, missing one very interesting closing ceremony. I watched a lot more of this year’s Olympic games than I have in recent years, and from the little I saw I think Vancouver did a splendid job of hosting the events. It was nice to regain a little of the Olympic spirit I really haven’t felt too strongly since the early ’90s, but I’m afraid that didn’t translate to watching a parade of flags and Nickelback. Not when there were episodes of The Mighty Boosh and Being Human I could watch.

Though if someone had told me there would be giant inflatable beavers, I might have reconsidered.

♪ When the truth is found to be lies ♪

Today felt a little like Sunday, what with yesterday’s unexpected day off, and I spent the afternoon not doing a whole lot. I went to the library, read some, played some computer games, and worked a little on a flash story I’m really hoping to finish by tomorrow. This evening, I watched A Serious Man on DVD. I think, more than any other Coen Brothers before it, I feel like I need to watch it again. It’s really quite an accomplished, and often brilliant, piece of work. I really enjoyed it.

And that, really, is about it for Saturday, I’m afraid. Onward to actual Sunday.

Everybody always talks about the weather

I don’t know about you, but I had a snow day today.

I woke up a little early this morning, and when I noticed the snow that had started to fall in the middle of the night — it was still mostly just half-frozen rain when I went to bed — I debated calling (or rather e-mailing) in to work and taking the day off. It was tough to tell from my bedroom window just how much snow had fallen, much less how bad it would get later in the day, but I really didn’t feel like risking it. I just didn’t want to be the first person in my group to take the day off. But twenty minutes or so went by and nothing seemed to be happening, either by e-mail or on the company’s emergency telephone line. And the office is officially open at 7 AM. I was going to have to commit to either taking a shower, or taking the day and going back to sleep.

In the end, I guess I did a little of both. I took a shower, but no sooner had I finished then an e-mail informing us that the office would be closed for the day was sent out. Had it been sent only ten or fifteen minutes earlier, I could have just gone back to bed, but, hey, a snow day is a snow day. It was pretty unexpected, but I was happy to take it.

I spent a good chunk of the day shoveling and snow-blowing out the driveway, and in trekking out into the backyard with the dog, who seems mystified every time we go out to discover there’s still snow everywhere. I also watched the really terrific Passing Strange, which I have out from Netflix — and which, I’ve got to say, beats venturing into Manhattan to reformat PowerPoint files all day. Which is probably what my day would have entailed, had our office been open.

Right now, I’m thinking about watching this week’s episode of Burn Notice or maybe a little late-night capping. I’m really just enjoying this unexpected three-day weekend.

A horny devil

I think I may have to finally cave on my (admittedly foolish) no-new-books-for-2010 policy, if only to buy a copy of Joe Hill‘s new novel, Horns. I’ve been a big fan of Hill’s writing since his debut short story collection, 20th Century Ghosts, and while I didn’t think his first novel, Heart-Shaped Box, quite lived up to those stories, it showed a whole lot of promise and was a really fun read. The new book sounds like it will be, too.

I particularly liked this recent interview with Hill at the AV Club:

AVC: Horror fiction tends to operate on a strict, E.C. Comics-style morality. In your stories, bad people still get punished, but there’s more sympathy toward people who make mistakes.

JH: There’s two things to say about that. First of all, I was talking to someone the other day who was talking about a line in the new Peter Straub novel [A Dark Matter], which I haven’t read. A character in the book’s saying, “What am I feeling here, horror or terror? I think it’s horror.” There is a difference. Terror is the desire to save your own ass, but horror is rooted in sympathy. It’s really rooted in this notion of imagining what it might be like for someone else to suffer the worst. On that level, I suspect that horror fiction is very humanizing.

Though he goes on to acknowledge that

Okay, one of the great flaws of genre fiction is, characters understand each other. They talk about a situation, they trade information in a way that makes perfect sense to both of them. I almost never have conversations like that in real life. I think that one of the things you see in literary fiction is a much more honest and daring approach about character, where characters have a tendency to talk past each other. They’re each talking… This is something I learned from watching John Sayles movies. A couple who are in love will sit down at a table and tell each other about the day, and neither one is really hearing a word the other person says. They’re talking, the conversations are existing on two different planes. I kind of love that. Because real connection is rare.

Yeah, I think I’m going to have to read this book. Maybe Straub’s new novel, too, come to think of it.