movies

Saturday and Sunday

It’s been a pretty quiet weekend.

Last night I watched Riddick, which turned out to be surprisingly entertaining, given how remarkably terrible its predecessor turned out to be. It’s not a brilliant movie, and hardly original, but I quite enjoyed it.

Today, I went to my weekly writing group, where we each spent our forty minutes working on a prompt from Writer’s Digest, from their monthly contest. Using their first sentence as a jumping-off point, this is what I wrote:

“If you can guess what I have in my pocket, you can have it.”

She says this like I’m supposed to be impressed, when we both know the pocket and whatever she’s tossed in it are stolen. She wants me to think she’s learned to fold space, that’s fine, but she knows as well as I do that this particular pocket of it isn’t her handiwork. It’s too polished a job for that, the seams too neat. It hardly shows up on her ship’s sensors, probably wouldn’t show up at all on mine, and there’s nobody outside the core planets who could have done this kind of work so well. What it’s doing all the way out here, or why the core might have abandoned it, I don’t know, but she’s not fooling anybody if she thinks I believe she did this herself. This little pocket, and whatever she’s got hidden inside it, are like everything else in my sister’s life: an unhappy accident she wants to make somebody else’s problem.

“What makes you think I want it?” I ask. “Even if I guess right, I’ve got cargo of my own left to unload.”

“You’re running light and you know it,” she says. She adjusts the screen with a few random taps and the pocket is outlined in a dark angry green. It’s nothing you could see with the naked eye, if you tried staring out into the blackness of space, but Claire knows I trust the ship’s readings. After all, this salvage tug used to be my own. “And you’re gonna wanna guess. It could earn you millions.”

“If it’s so tasty a haul why don’t you sell it?” I ask. “What’s with the hide-and-seek, the guessing games? That’s not why I agreed to come out here.”

“No,” she says, “you’re just checking up on me for the core, reporting back on my movements. Just like Dad would’ve wanted, right?” She’s angry when she says this, even though she knows it isn’t even half as simple. “But, don’t you see, Nick,” she adds, “that’s exactly why I can’t be the one to unload this. The core’s already got it in for me. They’d take me before I even got planetside.”

“If you’d just talk to them,” I tell her, “I’m sure they’d drop the charges.”

“If I just let Dad talk to them, you mean. Let him pull a few strings, rehabilitate his smuggler daughter. That’s what the core wants, Nick. I set one foot back in the system and that’s what they’ll get.”

“So what, you want to off-load this on me, whatever smuggled goods you’ve got to hide in pocket of space all the way out here in the ass end of nowhere? I’ve got cargo, Claire. I’ve got a reputable business.”

“You could also have millions,” she says. “And all you have to do is guess.”

I don’t think I have any intention of trying to submit that to the contest, not least of all because it isn’t yet a story, and yet at 480 words it’s well past half of the magazine’s 750-word limit. But I had fun writing it, even if it took me a long while to get into anything like a groove.

I noted on Twitter yesterday that I occasionally get stories that were very clearly written based on writing prompts, most notably for the Machine of Death anthologies. Those books had such a distinctive premise, no matter how very different the stories that were written for them, that I always feel weird when I encounter it again in my own submissions. I understand the impulse to try and take a story you’re proud of, one that for whatever reason didn’t make it into either of the two anthologies, and try to sell it elsewhere. But even if I loved the story, I don’t know that I would feel entirely comfortable accepting it. For one thing, you’re admitting the story has already been rejected elsewhere, although, really, that’s hardly a factor. I have to assume that Kaleidotrope isn’t the first stop for a lot of the writers who submit. But, more importantly, it’s such a distinctive premise that your story can’t help but be seen as a cast-off, a reject, by the reader. That’s maybe unfair, but I think that’s the reality. I less frequently see stories clearly based off the prompts from The First Line, which I’ve noted in the past, but I think that’s much different, easier to work around, maybe even less central to the story. I don’t reject stories out of hand just because they clearly were first intended for someone else. But I’m probably more likely to pass on stories where a machine that predicts the cause of everyone’s death is a central concern.

Finally, this evening, I read What now? by Ann Patchett. I liked it, although it’s maybe a bit of a cheat as an actual book. It’s the text of a commencement speech that Patchett gave at her alma mater Sarah Lawrence a number of years ago, and while it’s a good speech, the book is really quite short. It’s full of large print and white spaces, as well as many full-page stock photographs of mazes, footprints, puzzle pieces, and other things that would probably put Patchett well above the “cliché quota” she mentions at the top of the speech. It’s the sort of book you give as a gift, mostly to graduating seniors, and while fifteen bucks seems a little pricey for that gift, it’s a gift of kindly good advice. It’s a very short book, hardly a book at all, but it ends well:

The secret is finding the balance between going out to get what you want and being open to the thing that actually winds up coming your way. What now is not just a panic-stricken question tossed out into a dark unknown. What now can also be our joy. It is a declaration of possibility, of promise, of chance. It acknowledges that our future is open, that we may well do more than anyone expected of us, that at every point in our development we are still striving to grow. There’s a time in our lives when we all crave the answers. It seems terrifying not to know what’s coming next. But there is another time, a better time, when we see our lives as a series of choices, and What now represents our excitement and our future, the very vitality of life.

Saturday

I had my yearly performance review at work yesterday, and while I was a little nervous about it — those “where do you see yourself in x-number of years?” questions are always a little tough — I think it went well. I’m looking forward to 2014, even if the next couple of months are going to involve a lot of work.

I spent about four hours doing some of that work today, actually, which is not exactly how I wanted to spend my weekend. But I’m losing Monday, since I’ll be at a conference for work, and this review report really needs to have been finished weeks ago. The closer I can get it to finished, the better.

It wasn’t all fun and work games, though. Yesterday I finished reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake, which just made me sad all over again that he’s no longer with us. And today I finished Are You Mother? by Alison Bechdel, which made me want to re-read her earlier book about her father, Fun Home. This “comic drama” is very good, too, although there’s a lot of distancing with all the talk of D.W. Winnicott and Virginia Woolf, maybe by design. In some ways, it’s a book about psychoanalysis as much as it’s a book about Bechdel’s psychoanalysis and her relationship with her mother. I liked it, but I seem to remember liking Fun Home a lot more.

Although I really do like that this is now the status of my Goodreads reading challenge:

Screenshot 2014-01-11 at 11.37.33 PM

Finally, this evening I watched Ultraviolet, which is maybe the worst movie I have ever seen. (And I saw Jonah Hex only two weeks ago.) It’s such a ridiculous mess of a movie that it’s painful to watch, and it’s a regret I’ll take with me to my grave. To make it worse, I watched it on Crackle, who kept interrupting the movie with the same three or four advertisements — all of them terrible — and making the experience just that much worse.

So again it’s Sunday

Yesterday I took down the Christmas tree in the living room, boxed up the ornaments and tinsel and lights, and then disassembled the tree into its many components (“branches”) and returned that box to the attic. It was exactly fun, but it needed to be done.

Later that afternoon, I finished reading my first book for the new year, My Friend Maigret by Georges Simenon. I liked it, and the nice thing about having now discovered Simenon is that the man wrote close to 200 books in his lifetime, so I’m unlikely to run out any time soon. Though I am somewhat disappointed to discover that so few of his Maigret mystery novels seems to be available in English translation, much less in this series design I rather quite like. I enjoyed My Friend Maigret, though like Inspector Cadaver, which I read last year, the book was less of a murder mystery than a leisurely stroll through the detective’s mind.

Then yesterday I watched Passchendaele. It’s not a perfect movie, though I did like it considerably more than Paul Gross’ first film as director, Men With Brooms. He and Caroline Dhavernas are both quite good in it, no surprise, and there are moments of real beauty in the film, both in specific lines from the script and in the scenery. (Seriously, I’ve been to the Canadian Rockies and can attest to their wonder, and Heather has been known to post a photo or two in her time, but there are scenes in the movie, set in the foothills of Alberta, that are just achingly beautiful.)

Again, not a perfect movie, maybe occasionally a little too on the nose about the horrors of war and a little muddled in its storytelling, but well shot and grounded in very good performances.

Today I wrote a little:

She wasn’t afraid of anything except for dying, and since that had already happened, Lisbeth said, she was fearless. Those who knew her — and there weren’t many, maybe just a few handlers at the agency — knew it was a lie, but it was a lie they were happy enough to let her keep if it meant she got results. She acted fearless, and the act was all that mattered. The results were all that mattered. If a lie was needed to keep those results coming, then so be it. She wasn’t likely to encounter the thing she really was afraid of in this line of work, not anymore, at least not if she kept her head down and focused on the job. No one at the agency was going to help her do anything else. What she really was afraid of was the thing that had killed her, and that thing was long dead as far as she or any of the official files were concerned. Fearlessness was a lie, but it was a lie that won out in the end.

That had been before Hobbs’ End, of course, and the murders that had happened there on Lisbeth’s watch. It had been a mistake to send her, her handlers said, and Lisbeth herself had been reluctant to go. The case was too familiar, too much like the events that had led to her death, five years earlier, and that had led her now to be in the agency’s employ. She had never been to Hobbs’ End, never even heard of the town, but that didn’t matter. She wasn’t afraid, she said — of course she wasn’t afraid — but it was a coincidence that hit a little too close for home.

But they’d sent her, and because the lie of fearlessness was all she had to guide her, she went. At that point it was only a disappearance, or rather two dozen, a high-school class that had vanished on a field trip. A teacher, two parents, and all of the students but one. By agency standards it was almost run-of-the-mill. There was no reason to suspect the same thing that had happened to Lisbeth five years earlier was happening again.

No idea where it’s headed yet, if anywhere, and I’m not entirely in love with the way the last sentence underlines the fact that Lisbeth is not really a character so far, just someone that this is happening to. But it was free-writing well spent, I think. Better forty minutes of mediocre, or even terrible, words actually on the page, than years of theoretically perfect words never let out of your head.

So that was my weekend. A lot of the snow has melted, first in yesterday’s sun and then in today’s rain, but I’m still glad I won’t have to head back to the office until Tuesday.

A year at the movies

I watched 107 movies this year. Fully a quarter of those have been in this past month alone.

I find it difficult to pull together “best of the year” lists. I mean, some of the most fun I had watching movies this year was with films like Equilibrium and Mongolian Death Worm, and I’m not going to claim either of those were good movies.

There were a lot of very good movies on my list, and even a few from this calendar year like Captain Phillips, Gravity, Before Midnight, Upstream Color, and The World’s End. (I’d include Frances Ha, but I think technically that first came out at the end of 2012.)

Most recently, the best movie I’ve seen has definitely been Beckett, with terrific performances from both Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton. The worst, on the other hand, was easily Jonah Hex.

I saw a few really great movies this year, a few really terrible ones, a few really terrible ones that were made great by live-tweeting them with friends, and the rest kind of a normal mix.

Winter vacation, day 15

It dawned on me this morning just how close I am to the end of my vacation — only two days left — when I realized I had to buy my monthly train ticket. It also occurred to me how long I’ve been on vacation — more than two weeks now — when I finally opened up my work laptop and realized I’d completely forgotten my log-in password.

(It’s okay, it was on a small post-it note in my wallet. Though maybe we don’t tell my IT department that that’s where I was keeping it?)

I’d changed my password a day or two before leaving the office, since it was about to expire, and I really did think I’d have some call to use the new one while I was out. But except for a couple of e-mails answered way back at the start of my vacation — a couple that hopefully kept a book from slipping in the production schedule to February — I haven’t really done any work. I’ve been checking in occasionally, as I’d already updated the e-mail password on my iPhone, but nothing that really justified my going back to the office after the holiday party to pick up my computer.

In my defense, I was a little drunk then.

Of course, in retrospect, there’s not a lot of work I could have been doing, which I confirmed when I actually logged in and compared chapter reviews that were due against chapter reviews that have actually come in. I knew this was going to be a difficult time of year for instructors to take deadlines seriously, but in the past two weeks I received very few of the responses I need to get anything done. I could start collating what little feedback I have, before I go back to the office, but that’s not going to save me a lot of time in the long run. And saving myself time in the long run — preparing for a January that’s going to be front-loaded with so much to do — was the only reason I took the laptop home with me.

I can think of better ways of spending the next couple of days, like maybe reading a book.

I spent a good part of today mostly working on Kaleidotrope, whose new issue will be ready for launch tomorrow or Wednesday, if all goes according to plan. I want to do more with Kaleidotrope in the coming year, really make it work the considerable out-of-pocket investment of time and money.

I’m okay with the time, even if I’m a little scared about re-opening to submissions in two days. But it’s the money part that’s a tougher sell sometimes. I pay a cent a word, way below what’s considered a professional rate but still pretty steep for a project that takes in no money — beyond a couple of very generous and welcome donations — and it’s a cost I want to justify by making the zine more than just a collection of other people’s work. I did that a little last year, and I want to look for new ways to do it this.

Because right now, I’ve already filled the next two and half years’ worth of issues with last year’s submissions. It would be too easy for the fun of producing the zine to disappear on me.

This evening, after writing fake horoscopes — that’s something I do for the zine, something I started when I was editing the weekly newsletter for the Penn State Monty Python Society (and something I almost certainly stole from The Onion — I watched You’re Next. It’s an okay movie, mostly because it mixes up a couple of horror genres and isn’t just your standard home invasion scary movie. It gets off to a slow start — which is probably necessary, in retrospect, even if it could have used some better acting there — and ends poorly, but it takes a couple of interesting turns along the way. (Not surprising turns, necessarily, but ones that keep it, at least, from being something more than similar movies I’ve seen.)

And that was Monday. It was Monday, right?