Month: May 2011

Wednesday various

  • Scott Tobias on Fast Five:

    Fast Five may be lizard-brain escapism—and there’s something unsettling about how it lays waste to Rio’s desperately poor favelas—but nonsense this well-orchestrated is a rare and precious thing.

  • Genevieve Valentine on Priest:

    Basically, Priest exists as an example of what happens when a team of creative people all get a concussion at once.

  • John Seavey on Smallville — and, more specifically, why it is not Doctor Who:

    And then, the next night, I watched “The Doctor’s Wife”. And while I won’t spoil anything, because the episode is very wonderful, very surprising, and many people probably haven’t seen it yet, I will say that it is the epitome of everything that Doctor Who is and everything that Smallville isn’t. Instead of being an “epic game-changer” that really doesn’t change anything, not even really the things it’s obligated to change…this was a normal, everyday, stand-alone non-arc episode that just happened to transform everything you thought you knew about forty-eight years of the series. And it did it almost casually.

    Doctor Who is, and always has been like that. It’s never been afraid to reinvent itself, not even after forty-eight years. It’s a bold, inventive show that has no boundaries, no self-imposed rules, and no orthodoxies to uphold. That’s why it attracted a writer of the caliber of Neil Gaiman, whereas Smallville has had to content itself with Geoff Johns and Jeph Loeb. That’s why it’s still going and why I don’t think it’ll ever stop. Because it’s a show that can do anything…and one that will do anything.

  • And speaking of shows that promise but don’t deliver on change, Zach Handlen on House:

    It’s like a game, really. Each year, the writers have to come up with some new way to trick us into thinking that the show is moving on. And then, come next season, they have to find some way to undo all those changes, because in House-land, we can have the illusion of growth but not growth itself.

    Everything I’m reading leads me to think that my decision to quit on the show at the start of this year was wrong only in that it came too late.

  • And finally, Existential Star Wars [via]:

A night at the library

I spent another day wrasslin’ with a manuscript, taking all my corrections and putting them back into a Word document to send to the authors. We’ll see how quick they can respond, and if they agree to all my changes.

A few other e-mails aside, and a quick escape for lunch, that was pretty much my day. My evening was spent at an event called Speculating on Fiction at the New York Public Library. The guests included John Scalzi, Scott Westerfeld, Cat Valente, and of course my favorite author, Lev Grossman. Gavin Grant of Small Beer Press emceed, and Brian Slattery and friends provided music.

It was a lot of fun. John Sclazi was quite entertaining, essentially just repeating the story he tells here about The Shadow War of the Night Dragons, Book One: The Dead City. Cat Valente was maybe the best reader of her work, making me wonder what’s wrong with me that I’ve never read any of it yet, and Scott Westerfeld not for the first time made me want to read his Leviathan series. And even Grossman was good, reading from the forthcoming Magicians sequel, which, at least in the section he read, focuses more closely on one of the first book’s most woefully mistreated characters, Julia. It wasn’t good enough to convince me to actually read the new book — I don’t think anything could do that — but he didn’t seem out of place on the stage or anything like that.

(I did note that only one person had a question for him during the Q&A, about how he manages being a full-time critic for Time with writing a novel. But the man’s not tedious idiot. Anybody can write a lousy book. A really, really, really lousy book.)

Tuesday various