various

Monday various

  • Laura Miller on why we love bad writing:

    And, chances are, quite a few of his listeners would be well aware that Larsson and Brown aren’t very good writers. If pressed, they’d say that sometimes they just want to gallop through a story — or in the case of Larsson’s novels, proceed along with a weird methodicalness that taps into what appears to be an amazingly widespread streak of latent obsessive-compulsive disorder. They’d say that they’re not, at the moment, equal to the demands of literature, but that just last week they finished “Disgrace” or “Wolf Hall.” And then they’d say, Would you mind? Are we done here? Because I’d really like to get back to my book. [via]

  • A.O. Scott on 2010 in film:

    The ritual of year-end list making is a way of sifting through scattered, memorable moments and forcing them briefly into focus. A handful of movies from 2010 will still be interesting in the future, in which case the date of their first appearance will be little more than the answer to a trivia question. Was it a good year for movies? A great year? Hard to say, and finally, who cares? The movies — good and bad alike — shed a blinking, blurry light on the times, illuminating our collective fears, fantasies and failures of will.

  • Zach Handlen on Star Trek‘s Deanna Troi:

    You know what? I don’t think a therapist who could physically sense your emotional state would be all that useful. Therapy is a relationship based on trust, and one of the ways that trust is established (the primary way, I’d argue) is through an exchange of information. That exchange is somewhat one-sided; the counselor may share certain experiences from their own life if they feel its relevant to the discussion, but the sessions are focused on you and the problems you’re dealing with. But it’s still a dialogue in which the two of you working together establish boundaries, and then work to move those boundaries as necessary. Troi essentially shortcuts this process. Her Betazoid empathy allows her to get past all manner of subterfuge and stalling, and while that seems like it would be useful for her, I’m not sure it’s that helpful to her patients. Instead of breaking down their own barriers, she just takes a peek and tells them what she sees. You can’t write a very good paper on Ulysses if all you ever read is the last five pages. (“There aren’t any periods or paragraphs, but the narrator seems pleasant enough. Maybe she’s drunk?”)

    And, from the recap, on Data:

    Data’s confusion about emotional responses only works if the emotional responses are ones that make sense to us; part of the enjoyment of seeing him puzzle through things is realizing how absurd most of what we feel really is, and there’s no fun in randomness being identified as randomness. Of course, Data couldn’t follow what happens. No one could.

    I always look forward to Handlen’s Next Generation recaps.

  • Sam Adams on the Rocky Horror Picture Show and other cult films:

    When you partake of a historically transgressive artifact, whether it’s reading Tropic Of Cancer or listening to Never Mind The Bollocks, you’re interacting not just with the thing itself, but also with its history. As Thurston Moore observed in The Year Punk Broke, when Motley Crüe is covering “Anarchy In The U.K.” in football stadiums—or, he’d surely add now, when the band re-records the song for Guitar Hero—the context in which the song was meant to be heard is irretrievably lost. Either you listen to it as if it were just released, which inevitably dulls its impact, or you project yourself back in time—and, while you’re at it, across the ocean—playing the part of a scandalized Briton eagerly awaiting the Queen’s Jubilee. You pretend you’re breaking rules that no longer exist.

    The transgressive, and the prescient, almost without fail, ultimately become quaint.

  • And finally, this is taking love of a television show to a whole new level: recreating the M*A*S*H set in your backyard. [via]

Thursday various

  • “What’s a Canooter to Do?” Heather reviews Jenny McCarthy’s latest book, so the rest of us don’t have to:

    Is this what the book is about? No, not really. But even my canooter agreed that there was a glimmer of something just underneath the surface — a subtext of what happens when you turn to a life of reality TV and high profile media. And when you finish reading the book — when you finish with McCarthy’s tale of how she has turned to Buddhism to try to find peace and acceptance in her life — you’re left with a vague, nauseous feeling. A feeling that if you want to be like Jenny McCarthy, you’re buying into a view of the world that is tough, jaded, and incredibly cynical. It’s a fleeting feeling, though. Give a moment, and then you’ll be back to laughing about the silly things you can do with your canooter. Hahahahahah. Seriously. I’m not making this up. Hahahahaha.

  • On why dancing is like being a Time Lord:

    When dancing is going well, time does funny things. Sometimes it feels like the most perfect special effect. The suspended water drops. The muffled pause inside an explosion, with every piece of debris hanging still in midair. The only other time I’ve felt the same endless expansion was one evening when I drove down the freeway and a car in front of me lost control, spectacularly and ridiculously. It spun the way cars do in movies, actual elliptical twirls that carried it across the entire spread of lanes, first one way and then the other. It struck the central divider and pinwheeled off again, and everything looked so gentle and so inevitable that when it swung towards me, it seemed to drift along an obvious curve and I had all the time in the world to twitch my own car the smallest degree to the side and watch it slide past. Time suddenly opened up, every edge of it unfolding, like some sort of weird, reversed version of origami. [via]

  • A short but interesting interview with Chevy Chase:

    Let’s not call physical comedy falling down and pratfalls. All humor is physical, no matter how you dish it out. It’s timing, like a dancer or an athlete would have. The raising of an eyebrow, how you do it; when you look, how you look. All those little things are physical. [via]

  • Genevieve Valentine on bad movies:

    If you are on a desert island and Legion is the only movie available in the island-proof DVD player, use the reflective surface of the DVD to angle sunlight onto some dry grass and start a fire; do not use it for any other purpose. I am serious.

  • And finally, Theodora Goss on why she goes to the museum:

    It’s part of a writer’s training, in a sense, to experience as much as possible and to store what is experienced away, not as though doing research, but storing it in the mind so that what is most important is retained. The sheen on a particular piece of glass, for example. Because we create a sense of reality by describing our fantasies as though they were real, and in order to do that we need to draw from what is real, from our experiences. That’s why monsters are hybrids: we always draw from and recombine reality, and so our fantastical creatures are recombinations.

Wednesday various

Fanciful insects

It was just as cold again today, but luckily I thought ahead and wore a warmer coat. (Or rather, the same coat, but this time with the heavier lining put back into it.) Also luckily, my train was on time today, not at all canceled, and only rather crowded instead of ridiculously so.

And since that lack of excitement was probably the most exciting thing that happened to day, I share with you today’s bit of Forgotten English:

People, after they have been fou, feel as they are returning to their wits again, a buzzing and singin’ in the head, which are called bees o’ the brain. Also, when they are getting intoxicated they feel these fanciful insects.

Tuesday various