Monthly Archives: October 2011


Show, don’t tell

Home } Writer's Life } Show, don’t tell

It never fails to amaze me how much “show” it takes to convey the information in 100 words of “tell.” I’m guessing the ratio is something like 10:1.

Yup, just checked. I eliminated two paragraphs of “tell” with 2700+ words of show. That’s more than 10:1.

In fairness, I accomplished a hell of a lot more in those 2700+ words than I did with those 200+ words. But I’m still wondering what to do with something like 2000 more words of “tell” — which was a hell of a lot of political exposition. And I know that I just need to man up and cut the stuff. Very little of it is truly essential.

D.

, October 30, 2011. Category: Writer's Life.

Tossed salad, before salad tossing came to mean something else.

Home } asides } Tossed salad, before salad tossing came to mean something else.

D.

, October 29, 2011. Category: asides.

Paranoia

Home } asides } Paranoia

So I’m trying to use Google Earth to check out some of the neighborhoods in the Washington DC area, and guess what? When I zoom in, I don’t see details on the homes or buildings. It’s like I’m looking at some kid’s Lego model of Capitol Hill.

Seriously. At first I thought, “Gee, the houses on this little inlet of Chesapeake Bay look similar. And, wow, they’re all painted white?”

If you have Google Earth, go take a look at Capitol Hill. Named buildings like the Library of Congress have greater detail than other places, but they’re still fakes.

Maybe there is no Capitol Hill. Maybe it’s all one giant sound stage. Maybe after the War of 1812, DC was never rebuilt.

D.

, October 23, 2011. Category: asides.

You got that right . . .

Home } At the movies } You got that right . . .

Internet research on World War II led me to a list of “best WW II movies of all time,” which I can’t find at the moment, but which contained a lot of obvious choices (Bridge over the River Kwai, for example) and some films I’d never heard of before. Enter Come and See, of which the list-writer raved, so I thought what the hell. And put it on my Netflix queue.

Tried to watch it tonight. It was incomprehensible to me, perhaps because there’s a vocabulary at play that I do not understand. I noted many sequences of screaming, there were people running around, there was our protagonist looking empty and/or horrified, and things kept getting worse and worse.

It was the best movie I’ve ever fast-forwarded through.

That Wikipedia article has a quote from one of the screenwriters:

I understood that this would be a very brutal film and that it was unlikely that people would be able to watch it.

Yup.

I wanted to appreciate this film. I really did. But I couldn’t even manage to watch it beyond the first half.

D.

, October 22, 2011. Category: At the movies.

Bits and pieces

Home } asides } Bits and pieces

I’m up to 23 tongue depressors. Still can’t open my mouth as wide as Karen (I’m betting she could fit at least 30 to 32 tongue depressors) but 23 is much better than 12, which is where I was stuck about one week ago. I’m thinking that this IMO (intermaxillary opening — doctor jargon that measures how wide you can open) is good enough for the dentist to put on that new crown. Hopefully, the new dental work won’t set me back another 10 tongue depressors.

***

Yesterday, I finished China Mieville’s Embassytown, which was a bit of a disappointment. With Kraken and The City & The City, I’d begun to feel as if Mieville could do no wrong. Perdido Street Station was a mixed success in my opinion, but then, it was one of his earlier works. I was really looking forward to Embassytown, which is Mieville’s stab at science fiction. Except it’s not. Not really. There’s an artificial-ness to the story, the sort of creeping falseness that happens when the idea or argument is central, and the characters and plot are secondary to it. In the case of Embassytown, I get the strong sense that he wants to engage us in an exploration of the fundamentals of semiotics. This sort of thing may be interesting, but it hardly makes for a great story. Let me put it this way . . . I have a linguistics friend from college who would absolutely lurve this book. Everyone else? Well . . .

Avice Benner Cho (and I’m sure the “ABC” of her name is intentional) is a colonist at a distant outpost, one of the fringe settlements of Homo diaspora. She grows up in Embassytown, a human (and other non-native sentient species) ghetto within the City, which is where the Hosts live, also known as the Ariekei. The Ariekei are mostly insect-like beings whose language is devoid of symbolic elements. When they say their word for “aircraft,” for example, their minds equate the word with the aircraft. It’s not so much that the sounds “aircraft” symbolize an actual aircraft; they might as well be that aircraft. The only way they can create similes is by having a concrete representation of the simile in their living experience. Thenceforward, they can refer to the memory of that simile and use it in conversation. In one of the book’s earliest scenes, Avice Benner Cho becomes one of their similes.

To a large degree, the success of such a story depends on whether you can accept that initial set-up: that a sentient being could exist for whom language lacks symbolic value. Red is not just a sound which we associate with a color, it is that color, and so on. Unfortunately, I was never able to make that leap.

There are, nevertheless, some cool aspects to this story. Without giving away too much, I’ll only say that Embassytown has about the most convincing “language as mind-altering substance” thread as any I’ve seen in a science fiction work of any media. Mieville sets up a language-based crisis which is convincing, and things go to hell in an equally convincing manner. Whether you’ll buy Avice Benner Cho’s solution to the crisis is another thing entirely.

You have to give the guy credit, though. He’s tackling some big questions here on the nature of language and how it shapes thought, and so I’m loath to criticize him for not hitting a home run on every point he tries to make. So many books these days are about nothing at all.

Which reminds me . . . did I forget to hype Sara Gran’s Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead? Pure pleasure.

But now I need something new to read.

***

Gave a talk to the pediatricians today on tonsillitis, tonsillectomy, nasal and ear foreign bodies. I was competing with a talk in the other classroom — that one was on “the motivational interview” (basically, how to convince your patients to do something — quit smoking, exercise, lose weight, manage their diabetes more closely). Most of the docs went to that one, but I got the pediatricians and family practitioners, most of them, maybe 15 or so.

It went over well but I think they mostly wanted to share foreign body stories. Doctors love foreign body stories.

D.

, October 19, 2011. Category: asides, Books 'n' Authors, The Barbarous Craft.

22 tongue depressors

Home } asides } 22 tongue depressors

Apparently, Balls and Walnuts has descended to the new low of being the chronicle of my declining health. First my teeth get massacred, now I’m dealing with evil TMJ. More accurately, a lot of the muscles of mastication on my right side have been in spasm, resulting in some nasty trismus (inability to fully open one’s mouth). Trismus can be measured with a ruler, the “inter-dental opening” distance, or with the number of stacked tongue depressors you can jam between your incisors. A week ago, I could only fit 12. Now I can fit 22! So it seems that jamming depressors in my mouth is a good thing. At least I can (almost) yawn again.

But really. It was getting ridiculous. Rock bottom was when I couldn’t even open wide enough to eat a banana. Here I am trying to do the right thing by my TMJs and eat soft food, and I can’t even eat soft food. I thought I was going to have to start taking all my meals through a straw. Which wouldn’t be too bad, since it’s hard to get fat on smoothies. (At least it’s hard to get fat on my smoothies.)

Speaking of fat, and still speaking about my body, I can fit my thin pants again. They’re a 32 inch waist. About a week or two ago I could wedge myself into them, suck in my gut and button the button, but that doesn’t count. I am now appropriately sized such that I can comfortably fit the 32s. Time to get some new pants to show off my ass. Do they make Apple Bottoms for guys?

apple-bottom_jeans1

Yeah, somehow I don’t think it’s a guy poured into those jeans.

D.

, October 17, 2011. Category: asides.

Showtime goes all 24

Home } At the movies } Showtime goes all 24

This post is one big spoiler, so if you hate hate hate spoilers, don’t read on.

Still here? I’m about to reveal the name of the program I’m spoiling, and what with that title right up there in humongo-font, if you know anything about 24, then you know what I’m gonna say next.

So, yeah. Karen recorded Homeland for me, and I watched it last night. I asked her to record it for me because I’ve loved Mandy Patinkin’s acting ever since Princess Bride, not to mention the short-lived series Dead Like Me. From the trailers, it looked like an updated Manchurian Candidate with al Qaeda as the puppetmaster, but I had hopes. This is Showtime, after all, not Fox. They can be edgy, right? Right?

Well. Um.

Claire Danes plays Carrie Anderson, a CIA operative who risks everything blah blah blah to get a particle of information: that al Qaeda (essentially) has “turned” an American POW. When an American POW is discovered shortly thereafter, Claire’s convinced that he is the sleeper and will stop at nothing *yawn* to prove that he’s eeevil.

Mind you, I wasn’t being a little bitch just yet. As I said, I had hopes. The first episode was well directed, and the al Qaeda mole, Sgt. Nicholas Brody, looks like nothing more than a very damaged man. Which is what you’d expect from a man who has spent 8 years in a hole, has been tortured, etc. Neither the director nor the screenwriter has tipped his hand, and everything is just ambiguous enough that you could see this story going either way.

About forty minutes into it, I said to Karen, “You know what would be great? If he really is just a POW. Nothing more. And Claire Danes’s character absolutely wrecks this guy’s life, this guy who has already given up about all he can give to his country short of dying for it. This guy who everyone is welcoming back as a hero — he really is a hero, and she wrecks his life all in the name of counter-terrorism.”

I think Karen’s response was something like, “Naw, never gonna happen,” but I had these hopes, see?

So Carrie Anderson with her own money bugs the crap out of this guy. I mean she has every room in his house wired for visual and audio, and she has a couple of guys following him around in a van that can pick up his conversations at a distance, et cetera. ALMOST at the very end, she’s discovered by her mentor (Mandy Patinkin’s character) who advises her to get a lawyer. And I didn’t get this, because if it’s all going to go to hell for her, shouldn’t that happen at the end of the series?

She spends her last night of freedom at a bar trying to pick up some dude for a quick lay, when she twigs to this hand-signal code Brody has been using to signal to someone via national TV — oh, whatever. Bottom line, the show resolves itself into just another 24. It’s okay to thoroughly violate someone’s civil rights if it turns out he’s eeevil. The ends justify the means. Give this series a few more episodes, and Carrie’s gonna torture some vital information out of some poor bastard. You just watch.

Or don’t watch. I think I’ll wait until the series is over and then I’ll check it out on Wikipedia.

D.

, October 5, 2011. Category: At the movies.

Chi-rated

Home } asides } Chi-rated

From the assigned readings in my son’s Theology class.

The Roman legates could only protest in impotent Latin ejaculations as the proceedings moved majestically to their predictable climax

Someone has a dirty mind. But we all know that’s me, so I guess I should say someone else has a dirty mind.

But seriously, this reads as though the author had farmed out major bits of his essay to his undergrads to write, and they, pissed off over the assignment, got together to think up the most ridiculously loaded phrases they could. What’ll be next?

The barracks emperors’ failure to protect their flank led to numerous rear guard incursions, and the empire’s borders were soon covered in Santorum.

D.

, October 4, 2011. Category: asides.

Robocall

Home } asides } Robocall

A few moments ago . . .

Robocaller: Hello! This is a forty-five second survey. Are you registered to vote in the State of California?

Me: Yes.

Robocaller: Do you believe that public schools in the State of California should teach children about gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered lifestyles?

Me: YES, AND IN AS MUCH GRAPHIC DETAIL AS POSSIBLE!

Robocaller: This survey will end if you do not give a simple “yes” or “no” answer.

Me: Yes.

Robocaller: Thank you. This has been a forty-five second blah blah blah

*click*

D.

, October 3, 2011. Category: asides.

total word count 9300

Home } Writer's Life } total word count 9300

just so you know I haven’t been completely lazy.

D.

, October 2, 2011. Category: Writer's Life.