books

The Walking Zed

I wish I could say I’ve been exceptionally busy since last Sunday, and that’s why I haven’t written here much since then, except to post the occasional song and song lyric. But it’s really more that one day has been just like the last, and there hasn’t been a whole lot to write about. Lots of things happening at work, lots of projects underway, but nothing that necessarily bears mention.

Yesterday, I finished reading World War Z, which was surprisingly entertaining. Today, I went to see the movie version, which, maybe unsurprisingly, was not.

The movie has its moments, but far too few of them, and I was bored more than anything else by the end. (“More like World War Zzzzzzzzz,” I joked on Twitter, until some madwoman suggested it should be pronounced “Zed.” I know, right?) The book works a lot better than it ought to, given that there are no central characters or even, really, what you would call a plot. Brooks is great at introducing a lot of neat ideas, and surprisingly adept at wringing tension out of stories that we know, right up front, are going to end at least reasonably well. (It’s an oral history told by the survivors of the zombie war, after all.) He’s not quite as skilled at making the authors of each of those stories sound like a different person, but it’s a clever concept overall and engaging enough that I could forgive the book its occasional faults.

I’m less forgiving of the movie, which bears only a passing resemblance to the book. Not that I think the book is especially cinematic, or that I can’t understand all the changes that they made to it. It’s just that those changes don’t add up to an exciting summer spectacle, or a good time at the movies. There are hundreds, if not thousands of extras on screen — super-fast zombie swarms, one of many deviations from the text — but it’s remarkably bloodless for a zombie movie, with only a few genuine scares. (That’s what you get with a PG-13 rating, I guess.) It’s not an awful film, and I don’t think it quite unseats Survival of the Dead from its place in my heart as most disappointing zombie movie. But I honestly think I would have been better off going with my first impulse and seeing Fast & Furious 6.

Yes, that was my first impulse. What? Don’t judge me.

Last night, I watched another somewhat disappointing movie, The Awakening. As the AV Club review says, “the film does include a few effective chills, thanks to its elegantly creepy setting—an old manor house turned boarding school—and its use of period paranormal-detection equipment.” It takes a real turn near the end, however — one that’s impossible to discuss without spoiling the entire movie — and one that I’m not at all convinced really works. As the AV Club also points out, “the unraveling is a letdown, not just because it diffuses the frightening mystery, but because it treads on the wistful, doomed sense of longing the film built up.”

Today I also had my weekly writing group, where a set of pictures and words pulled from a magazine prompted this for some reason:

In theory, he was already dead. He could stay inside the capsule for another year, maybe longer if he managed to stretch what was left of the supplies, or he could swing open the hatch and let what would inevitably happen, happen now. There would be no rescue, even if Tabitha reconsidered, and he knew there was little chance of that. And even if she did, even if right this minute she was telling the others where to find him, and they were plotting a course, it would be the better part of a decade before they reached him, at best. He had only two options: face death now, the brutal cold of the planet’s surface, hypothermia or asphyxiation — he was not entirely sure which would claim him first; or delay the end, for a little while, push it off with few short months of solitude and exile and nothing but his own thoughts and corps rations for company. There was only one logical choice. And yet, it was logic that had found him in this place to begin with. He would be an even bigger fool not to realize that. There was only one choice, but that did not mean he had to make that choice today.

He was lucky the rest of the crew had died on impact or in the explosion before. It would save him from the tiresome chore of having to kill them.

There was still the on-board AI to contend with, only a vestige of what had been destroyed in the main ship, more child’s toy than super-computer, but it could still pose a threat if it was running the code that Tabitha had written into it. He had heard nothing from the AI since crashing; the capsule’s internal diagnostics suggested it was inactive, likely inoperable if not destroyed, but he did not know how far to trust that. The diagnostics had already been fooled once by his wife’s clever sabotage.

He didn’t think she had meant to kill McKenzie or Parish, who had escaped in the capsule with him, or any of the ship’s modest crew. The AI had disabled the fire suppression system during a routine refueling, then allowed a short-circuit in one of the hydroponic bays. If the bay had been empty at the time, if they had been using the refueling stop to also restock their supplies, they might have remained at the station long enough for everyone aboard to escape. Instead, he had…

It feels rushed near the end, not least of all because it literally trails off, and I don’t really have a handle on the character (much less the others he mentions). But what can you expect from forty minutes in a crowded Panera Bread?

Oh, and I started reading Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane. I’m about a third of the way into the novel and really quite enjoying it so far.

Until next Sunday, then?

Friday

Tucker continues to heal, although I can’t say he seems to be enjoying it, much less the collar he still has to wear all the time. There’s no word yet on how many days he’ll have to continue wearing it, though he returns to the vet tomorrow morning to evaluate his progress and the stitches. The estimate on their removal was 10-14 days, but I suspect we’ll know more tomorrow.

Meanwhile, life continues pretty much as normal. Yesterday, I (finally) finished reading Stephen King’s Under the Dome, which is a lot of fun, and above all else a compelling read. It is, of course, a very long book, and took me something like a month to get through. (I get most of my reading done on my daily commute, which only adds up to about six hours a week. Though that’s not a hard and fast rule, and I hope to do more reading on the weekends now that I have half a year off from reading Kaleidotrope submissions.)

Anyway, I really liked the book. I’m much less enthusiastic about the TV miniseries now that I’ve actually seen the trailer for it, since it looks like they’ve taken a lot of liberties with the novel. That said, King himself seems quite pleased with it. Of course, that said, King also seemed quite pleased with the television version of The Shining starring Steven Weber and Rebecca De Mornay…

Without venturing into spoilers too much, here’s one particular quote I highlighted in my reading:

America’s two great specialities are demagogues and rock and roll, and we’ve all heard plenty of both in our time.

I feel like I want to read a lot more King now…but I also think maybe I should take a break with something a lot shorter.

Tuesday

You know, I was aware that summer hours meant I would have to stay at the office a little later than usual, that there was a chance I would miss even my one-later train. But summer hours are a whole lot different when you’re working them from home.

So I did miss my train, by maybe half a minute. I had to stop by the UPS Store on my way to Grand Central — I ordered a book I needed for a meeting today through Amazon, then unexpectedly got another copy through a book swap with the publisher — and just missed the subway when I got stuck behind a woman with crutches on the stairs down to the platform. I’m hoping at least one of those things won’t happen again tomorrow and I won’t have to wait around Penn Station for half an hour.

But, honestly, the summer hours themselves aren’t so bad. An extra forty-five minutes a day, one of which I get to work from home, so I can take a half day on Friday? The occasional missed train’s probably worth that, right?

If nothing else, it’ll give me more time to read. I’m currently reading Stephen King’s Under the Dome, and that is a long book. I’m really enjoying, but I’m still only about sixty percent of the way through with it.

Time off is over

I go back to work tomorrow, although luckily not yet back to the office. I’ll be working from home on Mondays starting this week, and also starting summer hours. So that should be interesting.

The weekend was okay. I watched Die Hard again on Friday night for some reason, not that anyone really needs a reason to watch Die Hard. On Saturday, I watched Greenberg, and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that. I’ve also been watching episodes of Better Off Ted, Orphan Black, and The Fall. It’s amazing that I actually also got some reading done — Under the Dome and World War Z, in preparation for both their adaptations — or writing. But I did:

I wasn’t born on Mars, not like my brother, who nearly died when the borders were closed — he says — and the space ports stopped letting refugees like our parents escape off the planet. They made it as far as Phobos, thanks to a pair of forged visas, my asthmatic brother in tow, and that’s where I was born, in this half-built lunar colony that was never supposed to be anything but a staging ground for the red planet below. If the government of Mars even knows we’re still here, they haven’t publicly acknowledged that fact in fifteen years, just like they’ve said nothing about the military listening posts that are supposed to be someplace on the far side of Deimos, either on the moon’s surface or in near orbit, radioing back to Earth. I don’t know how you can be afraid of someone who’ll keep their head in the red sand like that for so long, but my brother says we’re lucky they don’t turn their attention towards us.

“You weren’t there at the fall, Mary,” David says. “You don’t know what it was like. When they wrested control, it was bloody and brutal and — ”

To be honest, I sometimes just tune him out. David has a flair for the dramatic; and while sometimes that’s fun — it’s maybe the only flair this old abandoned moon base has going for it — it can get a little tiresome. He’s too cautious, which I guess I understand. He’s not wrong, I wasn’t there, and I didn’t see what the new regime did to dissenters less lucky than my parents. Whole villages reduced to dust, like reverse terraforming, the tools of the original Martian settlers turned into weapons by Kendall and his followers. We still have some of the footage, and David’s right about the bloody and brutal part. Kendall was a maniac, vicious and power-hungry, and he forced good people like my parents to flee to this ramshackle little moon.

But is he even still alive?

That was the weekend.

And this is my monthly music mix for May:

  1. “Q.U.E.E.N.” by Janelle Monáe (feat. Erykah Badu)
  2. “Dayton, Ohio – 1903” by Randy Newman
  3. “The Rains of Castamere” by the National
  4. “Buildings & Mountains” by the Republic Tigers
  5. “The Dark End of the Street” by James Carr
  6. “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” by Milan & Phonenix
  7. “Mr. Spock” by Nerf Herder
  8. “Au Revoir (Adios)” by the Front Bottoms
  9. “Dead Against Smoking” by Admiral Fallow
  10. “Always Alright” by Alabama Shakes
  11. “My Love Took Me Down to the River to Silence Me” by Little Green Cars
  12. “Dougou Badia” by Amadou & Mariam (feat. Santagold)

A different class of Monday

I met my parents in the city for dinner this evening. Which is good, because my work computer decided to install nine updates right when I was shutting down for the evening, and if I hadn’t stayed in Manhattan, I would have missed my train anyway.

We just met for a quick bite at a diner not too far from my office. My mother is taking a course for a few weeks, so it’s altogether possible I’ll meet up with her for dinner regularly while that’s going on.

My father and I thought we’d maybe spend the hour-plus at the nearby Harry Potter Exhibit in Times Square, but it seemed really over-priced for what it is — a very crowded, not terribly informative, tour past a bunch of replicas. I’m a fan of the books and the movies, for the most part, but even if every single one was a real, honest-to-goodness, held-by-Daniel-Radcliffe prop, that’s not really the sort of thing that’s every really much interested me. I just caught a slightly later train home.

I wish I could say I spent the evening much more productively, but I mostly just stumbled into re-watching Seven (or Se7en, I suppose) on cable. It’s not a perfect movie, but it’s elevated so far above what it probably ought to have been by some very good acting, direction, and cinematography. I’m not suggesting that Andrew Kevin Walker’s doesn’t deserve some of the credit…even if the rest of his short resume so far isn’t hugely impressive. But it’s so easy to see how this movie could have gone differently if it hadn’t been so well cast and so well shot. Again, it’s not perfect, and sometimes I think it’s grisly just for the sake of being shocking. (But, then again, it’s maybe also a little more visceral and alive than some of David Fincher’s more recent work. Maybe.) But it does so much so well, and none of it should really work, that you just realize that some movies are just a weird kind of alchemy.

So that plus work, lots and lots of work, was pretty much my Monday. I also finally finished reading The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers, which was a lot of fun. Yep, that was a Monday.