Still here, and writing
Just went by the 40K-word mark yesterday, in fact. Sorry I haven’t updated here, but life has been crazy. I’m pleased it hasn’t screwed with the writing because that is soooo easy.
So, hey: take a beloved American novel . . . some claim the Great American Novel. And turn it into a Nintendo platformer.
Here’s the video walkthrough, in case you’d rather not mash buttons to see how it ends.
I want to see their treatment of Heart of Darkness. Then again, maybe I don’t.
D.
great scene, despite the funky tropes
From Miller’s Crossing:
I doubt you could sustain much more than a five- or six-second burst from a tommy gun with a full magazine, but Leo manages at least two to three times that. And then there’s the exploding car at the end. It’s always better when cars go kaboom. Still, as I get older I’m finding myself more and more fond of badass seniors, which is why I’m probably writing them into my story (there will be three before all is said and done . . . four if you count the #1 Bad).
Research today has focused on krav maga, Israelis speaking in English, and the evangelical back-to-Israel movement. Having a lot of fun with this, although it seems like there isn’t enough time in the day to do as much as I would like to do.
D.
Special
It’s rare that I find something this funny, that George Takei hasn’t discovered first.
How the hell is everyone?
D.
more tsuris
Got into an accident today. Nothing major, no injuries, just very expensive (I’m predicting). But it’s hard to get too upset about this sort of thing — my niece’s death has become a sort of yardstick by which to measure tsuris.
As I told Jake, I take this as a wake-up call to clean up my act, vis a vis my driving. I’m rough on cars. Generally this means that I bash the car into inanimate and immovable objects in the hope that they will animate and move. They never do. I’ve snapped off the driver’s side mirror three times now, and at least half of my car’s panels have more or less serious damage. I may have passed that magical halfway point today. And indeed, I confess to the thinking, when I looked at my sorry-assed car, “Time for a new car to destroy!”
But I generally don’t bash into other people or their cars. Today was the first time. Other people bash into me, not the other way around.
Guess what I’m saying is, I need to start driving like an old lady. But not a senile and half-blind old lady. You know what I mean.
D.
. . .
My niece Amanda died on Monday, unexpectedly. She had the flu and had stayed home from work; she had a fever, and that’s all I know. Her husband came home to find her dead. She leaves behind two small children.
You never expect this. Old people? Of course. Young people in accidents? I’m sure it’s just as much of a shock and every bit as horrible to the loved ones, but again, it’s something people have heard of. But for a young, healthy person to die from the flu?
The families are devastated. She was my brother’s only child, and I’m sure he’ll never be the same.
My sister and I will be driving down to Orange County this weekend to spend some time with them. In a perfect world we’d spend longer, but for a variety of reasons this is the best we can do. We’ve never been a very close family (despite what my mother might think), but we’re not so distant as to blow each other completely off at a time like this.
D.
Multibook mode
For some reason, I get this way sometimes: I prefer to be reading multiple books at once (well, not EXACTLY at once), dipping into each one as the mood hits me. This morning, I realized that the number has piled up:
1. The first Skulduggery Pleasant book, a YA magical-sorcery-thingy which Lyvvie recommended as an example of someone who writes 12-year-olds well. Her daughter loves the stuff. And while I can see the attraction to a pre-teenaged girl (the heroine is strong, intelligent, and brave), there isn’t much meat here for the adult reader of YA. My vote is still for the Bartimaeus Trilogy, which admittedly is aimed at an older YA crowd, but has enough humor and depth to appeal to the adult reader. And while the protagonist is male, one of the main characters is, you guessed it, a strong, intelligent, and brave young woman.
2. Still working my way through China Mieville’s The Scar. This is one of his earlier works, and I tend to like his more recent novels better. The Scar is just on the cusp of eh, think I’ll put this one down for now. But I’m 3/4 of the way through and haven’t given up yet. There simply isn’t enough there: not enough action, not enough appeal to the characters or plot, not enough of Mieville’s signature weirdness. All it has going for it is a bit of narrative drive. I want to know what happens next.
3. I’m rereading Crime and Punishment . . . again, as the mood hits. I read it between 9th and 10th grade, I think, and wanted to revisit it as an adult. I may not finish it; every time I pick it up, I want to slap Raskolnikov upside the head. He’s a very Hamlet-like character in the way he dithers, and I’ve never much liked Hamlet.
4. When I have nothing to read but Nook on my cellphone, I turn to James Ellroy’s The Cold Six Thousand, a novel about the two Kennedy assassinations and the MLK assassination. Lots of dish on J. Edgar Hoover, Jimmy Hoffa, various mobsters, etc. Who cares if it’s fiction; it reads like a dramatization of true events. And who doesn’t want confirmation that the JFK assassination was a fix from the highest powers? (Yup, God wanted JFK dead.) (Kidding, kidding!) I’m reading this mostly because I find Ellroy’s style so fascinating: staccato, brutally stark. Ellroy himself described the style as “ugly.” Plus, it’s fascinating how well he evokes the early 60s.
5. And when I have to have an actual paperback in my hands, I’m reading/rereading Tim Powers’s time travel novel, The Anubis Gates. First time I tried reading this many years ago, I bogged down at around page 120. The time travel gimmicks struck me as just a wee bit too coy and obvious. Now I’m at page 265 and I’m finally hooked. I enjoyed it more this time around (the first half, that is), and in retrospect I think I abandoned it for a number of reasons. Powers suffers from the too-much-research problem (. . . and I have to share all of it with you) and yet he occasionally screws up, as when one of the minor characters in the 1600s calls sausages ‘sawfages.’ Just because typesetters used that f-thingy for internal s’s doesn’t mean people PRONOUNCED it that way. Jeez. Anyway, I’m skimming through all of the dense descriptive bits and having a much better go of it.
So what are y’all reading?
D.
Smiley & Smiley
We’re fans of John Le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and were skeptical that anyone, even an actor as accomplished as Gary Oldman, could put his own mark on the main character, George Smiley. And how do you compress a seven hour (I think) miniseries into two hours without undermining motivation and creating serious plot-holes?
Nevertheless, the movie received some glowing reviews, so we’ve been looking forward to it. And looking forward to it. But this is Bakersfield, and I suppose Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is, what? Too much of an art film for this blue collar community? Very frustrating: we had to drive ninety minutes south to find a showing — at the Burbank AMC. And, wow, the “big city” (or perhaps I should say the suburb-of-big-city) movie experience has changed. We weren’t expecting to have trouble finding parking for a 9:40 PM showing. We came twenty minutes early, and only managed to get in line for tickets by 9:40. The line took ten minutes. There was even a line to give the guy our tickets, since he was checking folks’ IDs for the R-rated movies. We were sure we were going to miss the opening, but we didn’t count on them showing 20 minutes of trailers. And the theater was so crowded, Jake and I couldn’t even sit together.
Like I said, it’s a different experience . . . not at all like seeing a movie in Crescent City, or even Bakersfield, where we would have had the theater nearly to ourselves. But back to the movie. Here’s Smily & Smiley:
The good news: casting on the film was excellent. Colin Firth was a wonderful Bill Haydon, and I can’t imagine a better Control than John Hurt. The toad-faced actor who played Percy Alleline was great (Toby Jones, who played Karl Rove in the movie W), and accomplished what I had hoped more of the actors in this film would have accomplished: he brought a whole new angle to the role. Michael Aldridge (in the miniseries) seemed slow-witted, a conveniently gullible stooge, while Toby Jones’s Alleline is power-hungry and vindictive. Inner Circle member Roy Bland, a relatively minor character in the miniseries, shines with veteran actor Ciarán Hinds (Julius Caesar in Rome) in the role. He’s not given much to do, but he dominates his every scene.
And Smiley? I doubt anyone will ever top Alec Guinness’s depiction, which reportedly left an indelible mark even on Le Carre. The best anyone can do is not do a terrible job. Oldman is a believable Smiley, but Jake and I both had the same impression: My, doesn’t he do a fine Alec Guinness imitation? He brought nothing new to the role and he brought a whole lot less to it than did Guinness. With Guinness, there’s a wealth of sadness and disillusionment and cynicism. Very little of that came out in Oldman’s version.
The worst criticism, however, concerns the plot. This is a cerebral story. You don’t watch Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy for the gun play and car chases; you watch it for the acting and, well, the story. They’ve nailed the acting fairly well, but in the movie, they’ve glossed over too much to make the story convincing.
In the movie: How does Smiley track down Jim? Why does Toby flip so easily, with relatively little pressure from Smiley & company? Worst of all, how do they know for certain they’ve caught the right mole in the end?
Anyone watching this without past knowledge of the story (and an eidetic memory) will be lost.
I’m left to conclude that some stories are not meant for a two-hour format. You wouldn’t fit LOTR into a two-hour format, would you?
***
In other news, my word count is up to 25,000, and I’ll be writing more today, hopefully finishing Chapter 5.
D.
For once, I did not futz with the recipe
For tonight, I made Tyler Florence’s recipe for galumpkis (stuffed cabbage). And now that I think about it, I did futz with the recipe: I used a pound of lamb and a pound of pork, no beef. Otherwise, yeah, everything was the same.
Quite good, although the sauce came out watery. I suspect the only fix for that is to cook down the sauce (in the earliest stage of the recipe) until it’s like mud. The meat and cabbage give up too much liquid, so I suspect that’s the only way to deal with the problem.
Oh, and I’ve decided I like working with grape leaves far more than cabbage. Cabbage is a pain. On one of the comment threads (perhaps on someone else’s stuffed cabbage recipe), one person claimed that if you froze and thawed the head of cabbage, the leaves will come off perfectly. Hmm. I can tell you it was impossible to remove the leaves from a fresh head without a lot of tearing.
Happy New Year, everyone! Here’s hoping it will be better than 2011. At least up until that end of the world thingie.
D.