writing

That’s one way of putting it

Joss Whedon on working on Wonder Woman:

They didn’t tell me to leave, but they showed me the door and how pretty it was. Would I like to touch the knob and maybe make it swing?

I also like how he calls his upcoming movie, Cabin in the Woods, “old school horror with grad school sensibilities.”

Via Whedonesque. It’s not a new interview with Whedon by any means, but there’s still some interesting stuff in there, mostly about comics and Dollhouse.

“My industry butchered itself”

I always feel slightly depressed after listening to David Simon talk about the state of the world today, but the man always say something worthwhile to say. Here he testifies before Congress on the death of the newspaper industry:

Reporting was the hardest and, in some ways, most gratifying job I ever had. I’m offended to think that anyone anywhere believes American monoliths, as insulated, self-preserving and self-justifying as police departments, school systems, legislatures and chief executives, can be held to gathered facts by amateurs presenting the task—pursuing the task without compensation, training or, for that matter, sufficient standing to make public officials even care who it is they’re lying to or who they’re withholding information from.

The whole thing’s worth your time. Via Gerry Canavan.

The Ten-Per-Cent Solution

Teresa Nielsen Hayden is absolutely right, this is what editing is all about:

Yes, you get cynical, because you see one submission after another that says “Read this, it’s great!” Only it’s not great, it’s anything but great, it’s passable at best; and the passable ones are a tiny fraction of the many, many, many submissions you see. Then one year you open yetanotherenvelope, and ZOMFG it’s the real thing!!! Overcome with joy, you fall over backward and wave your arms and legs in the air in that wholly ravished “Do with me what you will” kind of way. OMG OMG OMG it’s Maureen McHugh, it’s Stephan Zielinski, it’s Jo Walton, it’s wonder beyond reckoning. It’s the real thing. It’s what you live for.

She brings it up in response to all the hoopla surrounding Susan Boyle’s stunning recent performance on Britain’s Got Talent. Sometimes, real talent just gobsmacks you upside the head. If Sturgeon’s Law applies — and it seems to apply nowhere so well as in the fiction slush pile, let me tell you — you can’t help but be floored when you’re lucky enough to stumble upon that ten percent that isn’t crud.

There is the question, of course, of whether we should be so surprised what that non-crud comes from someone like Susan Boyle. Do we find her story uplifting because she has a beautiful voice, or because we think she looks like somebody who almost certainly couldn’t? On this week’s Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me!, guest panelist Tom Bodett joked that the moment he teared up at Boyle’s performance was “when I questioned my own moral character.” It’s that subtext of “oh wow, ugly people can do beautiful things” that he found disconcerting. Host Peter Sagal quipped, “Tom, if it wasn’t for ugly people doing worthwhile things, there’d be no radio.”

But I think it’s a valid concern, and it’s one that’s echoed by Dennis Palumbo, who asks the very simple question: What if Susan Boyle couldn’t sing?

The unspoken message of this whole episode is that, since Susan Boyle has a wonderful talent, we were wrong to judge her based on her looks and demeanor. Meaning what? That if she couldn’t sing so well, we were correct to judge her on that basis? That demeaning someone whose looks don’t match our impossible, media-reinforced standards of beauty is perfectly okay, unless some mitigating circumstance makes us re-think our opinion?

Real talent is rare enough without the assumption that it can only come in certain packages. If ninety percent of everything is crud, why on earth would you want to further limit your sample size like that? It can be exhausting to wade through that ninety percent — most of it well-meaning, honestly attempted, but crud nonetheless — but imagine missing the opportunity to discover those ten-percent gems!

Of course, there are plenty of cynics ready to say those gems are ersatz, to call bullshit when something seems too perfect, too good. And maybe that’s okay; a healthy dose of cynicism is necessary for survival sometimes. Personally, I happen to think Boyle is the real thing. Maybe there’s some spin after the fact, and maybe Simon Cowell was feigning his surprise. But you know what? Who cares? The woman can sing.

“Masked musclemen and their melon-breasted mamas”?

I can usually accept Lucius T. Shepard’s opinions, because I think they’re often considered and well thought out, but I don’t think there’s any possibility that I could ever agree with him on anything. From his pretty negative take on Watchmen:

Despite the insistence made by some that pop culture be taken seriously as high art, =Watchmen= remains a superhero comic (if it were something else, it would not serve its author’s purpose), and as such its vision of history and its take on human relationships are adolescent and simplistic, and its profundities are merely quasi-profound; its themes, variously interpreted as everything from political satire to the death of the hero, are essentially a juvenile nihilism embroidered with masked musclemen and their melon-breasted mamas. It seems the work of an precocious sophomore whose reading of philosophy ended with Nietzsche and whose literary obsessions (Jack Kirby, Raymond Chandler, and so on) have produced an absurdly pretentious style of noir, a style that has since proliferated and that I’ve come to call the It’s-Always-Raining-Where-I’m-Drinking (high) school of creativity, usually defined by rundown urban settings rife with graffiti and rainy streets awash with obsessed loners and women in tight and/or revealing clothing. Labeling it one of the great novels of our era doesn’t change the fact that you could probably make a list of a hundred better novels written by authors whose surnames start with the letter Z. It’s a seminal work in the comic book field, a genre-expanding work, but the genre it expands, superhero comics, targets a demographic composed mainly of adolescents and adults clinging to their adolescence (I make no implicit judgment here—I’m clinging like all get-out to mine), a vast percentage of whom are prevented by an R rating from seeing the movie.

Which is just so arrogantly dismissive that it pisses me off. It doesn’t matter if you think Watchmen was a great or terrible movie; Shepard is saying that it can’t be great, because it’s based on a comic, and those things — as anybody with two brain cells to rub together could tell you — are by their nature shallow and immature.

It’s not that Shepard levels these charges against Zach Snyder’s movie, or against Alan Moore’s book. Nobody says that he, or anybody else, has to like either of them, or that they should escape all criticism. It’s that he comes in with all sorts of assumptions and prejudices and applies them across the board.

I’m reminded again why, although I can accept Shepard’s opinions, I tend to avoid reading them. And why, although I don’t always agree with her opinions, I think Abigail Nussbaum was completely right about the man.