writing

That was Sunday

Today was Sunday, so that meant I mostly just did the Sunday crossword and went to my weekly writing group. This is what I came up with there:

He took another sip of his whiskey, then told her politely to go to hell.

“I know you think you’re helping, Rachel,” he told her, “but your kind of help, we really don’t need.”

“You don’t have to be such an ass about it, Jim,” she said. “And it’s not your decision anyway. If Justin wants to bring me on board, then that’s between him and me.”

“On the contrary,” Jim said, swirling the last few dregs at the bottom of his glass, then reaching again for the bottle. “It’s between him, you, and the investors. And it’s my job to make sure the investors doesn’t start looking for reasons to walk.”

“You’re saying the producers don’t like me.”

“The producers hate you and everything you stand for.” He tested the contents of his refilled glass and smiled. “I thought that much was understood. But I’m talking about higher up, the people actually financing the damn film.”

“You mean my mother.”

“Among others, but yes.”

Rachel sighed. So again it came down to this.

“Save me a glass of that, would you,” she said.

He poured the whiskey and handed her the glass. She stared at it for a moment, saying nothing, as if willing some argument to rise from whatever rotgut it was that Jim Gilbert was drinking these days. Then she downed the glass.

“Look,” she said, “I’m not my mother, and yes, clearly, if she finds out I’m working with you, she’ll take her money and her friends somewhere else. But I think I could be a valuable addition to Justin’s film crew.”

Now it was Jim’s turn to sigh. “I understand why you think that,” he said, “and Justin’s obviously fond of you. But I’m going to say it again: we don’t need your help. And if you think you can force yourself in, you can definitely go to — ”

“I can help you find Hoffman,” she said. “I know where he is.”

“Hoffman’s a myth.”

“He’s what Justin’s film is all about. Justin doesn’t think he’s a myth. And neither, I should tell you, does my mother.”

“And you’re saying you know where he is? The world’s spent thirty years trying to figure out if he’s even real and you’ve found him?”

She grinned. “Yes.”

“Then maybe we have something to talk about after all.”

I’ve been reading William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition recently, and really enjoying it. This is decidedly not that, but I can see the (or at least feel) the influence.

Thursday various

  • A fascinating story about a young writer who disappeared. Although it’s arguably a story that has precious little to do with her having been a child prodigy and more the difficult circumstances of her life following her parents’ divorce. [via]
  • With New York bracing for more snow tomorrow, I think it needs to be said again: Bloomberg and the rest of the city really botched it two weeks ago. [via]
  • Meanwhile, New Jersey wants to seize your unused gift cards. I honestly don’t know enough about how gift cards work to know whether or not this is a terrible idea, but they’ve already been struck down in court. I’ve always been led to believe that stores view unused gift cards as essentially free money — they get the giver’s cash, but then never have to part with merchandise in exchange — but again, the bare-bones economics might be different. [via]
  • Meanwhile, Virginia revokes what may be the greatest license plate ever. Won’t somebody think of not eating the children? [via]
  • And finally, Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness. A fascinating article — and I think not just to folks like me who happen to work in the field of mental health publishing — about the battles being fought over the forthcoming DSM-5.This exchange is particularly revealing:

    I recently asked a former president of the APA how he used the DSM in his daily work. He told me his secretary had just asked him for a diagnosis on a patient he’d been seeing for a couple of months so that she could bill the insurance company. “I hadn’t really formulated it,” he told me. He consulted the DSM-IV and concluded that the patient had obsessive-compulsive disorder.

    “Did it change the way you treated her?” I asked, noting that he’d worked with her for quite a while without naming what she had.

    “No.”

    “So what would you say was the value of the diagnosis?”

    “I got paid.” [via]

Here endeth the vacation

I go back to work tomorrow. On the one hand, it seems much too soon; on the other, though, I suppose I have been away for two whole weeks. I’m not entirely sure what I did over those weeks — I know a couple of holidays were thrown in, but otherwise? It’s all kind of a blur. So maybe it’s just as well that I’m going back to the regular grind in the morning.

That’s what I’m going to keep telling myself, anyway.

Today, I helped my father take down the Christmas lights, and then I joined friends for our weekly writing group. (We didn’t meet last week, thanks to the holiday and the already very melted snow.) And that’s really about it. I read a little, didn’t quite finish the Sunday crossword — though I got the theme answers — and hung about the house on a cold and rainy day.

Thursday, huh?

I had a nice lunch out this afternoon, at the local Japanese seafood buffet nearby. It wasn’t exactly cheap — it never is there for lunch — but I sort of found myself craving sushi. And they have plenty of other, cooked selections for when fleeting sushi cravings inevitably dissipate. (I used to hate sushi altogether; that I don’t now is, perhaps, a sign of the end times.)

Over lunch, I read two pieces by Adam Gopnik in the most recent issue of The New Yorker. I particularly liked his comment on the uniqueness of snowflakes:

In a way, the passage out from Snowflake Bentley to the new snowflake stories is typical of the way our vision of nature has changed over the past century: Bentley, like Audubon, believed in the one fixed image; we believe in truths revealed over time—not what animals or snowflakes are, but how they have altered to become what they are. The sign in Starbucks should read, “Friends are like snowflakes: more different and more beautiful each time you cross their paths in our common descent.” For the final truth about snowflakes is that they become more individual as they fall—that, buffeted by wind and time, they are translated, as if by magic, into ever more strange and complex patterns, until, at last, like us, they touch earth. Then, like us, they melt.

And his longer essay on “the power of the pastry chef”:

(Though, as we walked through the White House, it did occur to me that, from the point of view of a caterer, the White House might seem less like the nerve center of the free world than like a medium-sized, slightly shabby charming resort hotel in Virginia, the kind where your best friend from college puts everyone up when he marries that horsy girl you all have doubts about.)

In those le Carré and Deighton thrillers, the things the antihero learns on the other side of the curtain tend to be brooded on stoically rather than applied with spirit. What you saw on the other side of the curtain stays there. What I learned in Barcelona was that genius can produce what it chooses—but not much of it was really applicable to the table I sit at or the kitchen I cook in. It wasn’t just that you can’t do this at home; it’s that home is the last place you were ever meant to do this. The earlier great changes in cooking were a kind of baroque template, suitable for simplification—you made haute cuisine with cream and butter, nouvelle cuisine by leaving them out—but “techno-emotional” cooking was created only for the three-star stage. It was pure performance, cabaret cooking, the table as stadium show. As often happens with the avant-gardists, by advancing the form they had only deepened the crisis. There was nothing that you could do with what I had learned, other than serve cake and ice cream while the soccer game was on, which we knew how to do already.

Then this evening, I watched Batman: Under the Red Hood, a short direct-to-video animated movie featuring the Caped Crusader. It wasn’t at all bad, but I do feel like my knowledge of DC comics continuity was too limited to really appreciate large parts of it. I mean, I was aware of the whole A Death in the Family thing — enough so that I could jokingly suggest the other week Sweeney Jason Todd as a replacement show for the new Spider-Man musical — but I’ve never read it. Nor have I read many of the other comics that clearly influenced the animated film. Reading the description of the movie online, and of the two comics on which it’s directly based, basically just served to spoil the movie’s big reveal for me.*

Ultimately, I found the movie to be kind of a weird mix of gritty realism, sci-fi actioner, and mystical fantasy. It’s set in a very real world, full of brutal violence and no small amount of blood and death, but it’s also a world of superhuman android monsters, assassins clad in robot suits, and pools of magical life-restoring waters. I guess maybe that is the DC comics universe, but it was still a little strange.

In other news, how can it possibly be the day before New Year’s Eve already?

* Although I do see now that Sweeney Jason Todd might be more than just a bad pun. Maybe someone should write that musical. I nominate @DoctorHu.

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]