A tale of two &s
While on vacation, I finished Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and made a serious dent in Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Both novels were bestsellers in their time, both have won awards (S&N won the Hugo, the World Fantasy Award, and others; K&C won a Pulitzer), both were big “airplane novels” — books I saw folks read on the plane, along with Stephen King and Michael Connelly and a host of others. But there the resemblance ends.
It has been less than a week and I’ve already forgotten the ending of Strange & Norrell. Mind you, I always forget the endings, but I think this has been record time. I remember bits of it, I suppose, but the bits I remember won’t last long. I can tell — they’re simply not that memorable. The most remarkable thing about Strange & Norrell is that I spent over 900 pages with a small handful of characters and I feel as though I barely know any of them. That, I would say, takes an odd sort of talent.
In contrast, I’m halfway through Kavalier & Clay, and already I care about the principles and their families so much that I’m reluctant to read further, because Chabon’s foreshadowing makes me fear the worst for them.
I think I understand the difference between the two novels, the failure of one and the success of the other, but I can’t prove my hypothesis. I suspect the difference lies not in the technical abilities of the two authors (though Chabon can write circles around Clarke) but in their own conceptions of their characters. Strange, Norrell, their wives and friends were, I suspect, two-, perhaps three-dimensional in Clarke’s mind, while Chabon’s characters must have lived and breathed inside him during the writing of Kavalier & Clay. Entities with souls. To get a little goofy about it: Clarke created characters while Chabon became a biographer.
I’m also reading George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, the first book (all 3500 pages have been downloaded to my Nook). The TV series (presently airing) follows the book slavishly, but I’m enjoying it nonetheless.
D.
Yet another post that none of you will read
. . . or at least, you’ll stop reading once you know it’s about gaming.
But I have to say it. Portal 2 is freaking awesome. I’m only about 30 minutes into it and I’ve already gone back to replay the first thirty minutes, because the writing and voice acting is just that good. I didn’t want to miss anything, and I’m glad I went back, because you know what? I missed a lot of things my first time through.
It’s probably way too early to say this, but I think Valve has achieved what I never would have thought possible: creating a sequel that is at least as good as the original. While the novelty factor is gone, the humor is sharper than ever. Your lovable AI companion through the intro, Wheatley, is full of personality, which is wild considering he’s only an orb with a glowing eye and a pair of handles. GlaDOS (your not-so-lovable sociopathic AI companion) returns too, of course, and she’s as sadistic as ever.
And the grudge match is on.
I have this bad habit of forgetting puzzle solutions, which of course drives my son crazy. But you know what? It makes it possible for me to enjoy games over and over again. So I’m thinking, this intro is so great, forget the rest of the game. I’ll just keep playing the intro. But I’ll have to listen to it through ear buds so that I won’t have to hear my son’s screams of frustration.
D.
Well, we’re back
and I’m tired the way working makes you tired after you haven’t been working in a good long while. I’d like to say, “Vacation is never long enough,” but that’s not true. As a kid, summer vacations were always way too long for me. Sorry, but I liked school and I didn’t like being home 24-7. Fast forward to internship, and we all got two count ’em two months off during the year (not back to back, thank heavens). Four weeks was way too much time off, especially since the horror of internship lurked just around the corner. You knew you were obliged to return to the grind, and that took much of the pleasure out of your time off. But, really, four weeks was too too much.
Our honeymoon was a three-week trip to Europe, our one and only vacation there, and I doubt we’ll ever make it back, though you never can tell. It’s the jet lag that killed us — I think it took us a good four or five days to adjust. We would have to take several weeks off to make it worthwhile, and that’s not very easy in my current job. Although people do it — take their three or four weeks off in a block, and go back to see their families in the Philippines, or India, or China.
I maintain that the most relaxing vacations are the ones you spend at home, on your ass, book or laptop in hand, nothing to do but veg out. And I think I know why I feel that way: I like sleeping in my own bed, with my own pillow, on my own damn mattress.
Very bizarre dream while on vacation. Can’t go into great detail here (mixed company, after all) but it involved roughly cylindrical items, lubrication, and malpractice lawyers. *shiver*
Tech question for y’all. I need to convert 8 mm film (our old home movies, which my dad just passed on to me) into DVD. Lots of folks online say they’ll do it, but how do I decide whom to use?
D.
The week in food
In our family, vacations are all about the food. One of our favorite vacations, an early 90s trip to New Orleans, rawked because of the food. That one of our best friends was getting married, that was just window-dressing. And our one trip to Maui (also in the early 90s) suffered for the lack of a single decent meal.
By the only metric that counts, this vacation has been a success. And without any further ado, here is our week in food.
Night one in Las Vegas: Firefly (link to our first trip there, in 2009), a tapas restaurant on Paradise (menu here). We love this place. This time around we had gazpacho, stuffed dates, baked tetilla, chorizo, and I’m not sure what else. We had a couple of drinks, too, and the bill came to around sixty. What a deal!
Night two in Las Vegas: Claim Jumper to make my parents happy. My dad has his usual: beef dip au jus. Mom and I had rotisserie chicken, Karen had a seared ahi tuna salad, and Jake had some sort of nondescript pasta dish.
Night three in Las Vegas: Buca di Beppo, a really fun family/Italian place. We had chicken parmigiano and gnocchi. About the best gnocchi I’ve ever had . . . I’m not usually a fan of gnocchi, but these were light and tasty.
Night four, our first night in the Bay Area, we went to a sushi place somewhere near San Jose. Don’t remember the name but it was fine sushi. (Seems to me the trick is finding lousy sushi in the Bay Area.)
Night five: Aziza, an uber-trendy one-Michelin-star Moroccan place in San Francisco. For appetizers, Jake had the lentil soup. Karen, Karen’s mom and I had the various spreads and the duck bisteeya. (Interesting take on bisteeya — definitely gave me a few new ideas.) Karen had the yellowtail appetizer as her entree, I had the squab, my MIL had the snapper, and Jake had the chicken with black trumpet mushrooms. Karen and I shared about the strangest cocktail ever: concord grape, elderflower, peat smoke, and laphroaig scotch. Fun desserts, too.
Tonight, we went to Amber India with Karen’s sister and her family. Lots of appetizers and velvet butter chicken and lamb tandoori and three different kinds of breads, lentils and some spicy greens. We floated away.
Tomorrow, it’s back to Bako. See ya!
D.
Vegas once again
We’re back in Las Vegas visiting my folks. Not much time to blog, I’m afraid. So far we’ve done a lot of our usual Vegas things: we had dinner at Firefly last night (an awesome little tapas restaurant), and made the obligate trip to Claimjumper for dinner tonight. (It’s either that or a buffet, so we usually opt for Claimjumper.)
Today, Jake and I went to Red Rock Canyon to do our version of rock climbing, which involves me falling on my ass a lot while Jake tries his best to give me a heart attack. Lots of fun, and we do it whenever the weather permits. It was more fun than usualy this time because we got to watch some real rock climbers do their thing. I suggested to Jake several times that if he goes to college in California, most of the schools should have courses in rock climbing.
Tonight, we are going to see Penn and Teller. Karen somehow got us front row seats (or close to it).
C ya
D.
Of editors and gunsels
From The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiel Hammett (1929):
“Another thing,” Spade repeated, glaring at the boy: “Keep that gunsel away from me while you’re making up your mind. I’ll kill him.”
The word “gunsel” made it into the script for the 1941 film with Humphrey Bogart, Sidney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre. The various editors — Joseph T. Shaw for Black Mask, where the story was first serialized, and whomever Warner Bros. employed to parse scripts — apparently figured the word was slang for “gunman.” Has “gun” right there, don’t it? But in fact, “gunsel” was a brilliant sleight-of-hand showing why, when it comes to words, you should never screw with a writer.
Erle Stanley Gardner writes in “Getting Away with Murder,” The Atlantic, Vol. 215 No. 1 (1965):
Hammett wrote a story which contained an expression that gave Shaw quite a jolt. He deleted it from the manuscript and wrote Hammett a chiding letter to the effect that Black Mask would never publish vulgarities of any sort.
Hammett promptly wrote a story in which he laid a deliberate trap for Joe Shaw.
One of the characters in the story, meeting another one, asked him what he was doing these days, and the other shamefacedly admitted that he was “on the gooseberry lay.”
Had the editor known it, this meant simply that the character was making his living by stealing clothes from clotheslines, preferably on a Monday morning. The expression goes back to the old days of the tramp who from time to time needed a few pennies to buy food. He would wait until the housewife had put out her wash; then he would descend on the clothesline, pick up an armful of clothes, and scurry away to sell them.
Shaw had the reaction which Hammett had expected. He wrote Hammett telling him that he was deleting the “gooseberry lay” from the story, that Black Mask would never publish anything like that. But he left the word “gunsel” because Hammett had used it so casually that Shaw took it for granted that the word pertained to a hired gunman. Actually, “gunsel,” or “gonzel,” is a very naughty word with no relation whatever to a bodyguard, a gunman, or a torpedo.
(Full excerpt here.)
So what’s a gunsel? From Wiktionary,
gunsel (plural gunsels)
1. A young man kept for homosexual purposes; a catamite .
2. (street and prison slang) A passive partner in anal intercourse.
I first encountered that word in The Maltese Falcon, and all these years I assumed it meant a gunman, or a hired punk with a gun. I was going to use it today, and googled it merely to check the spelling. Imagine my surprise. And think of all the writers who use it as a synonym for “gunman,” propagating Hammett’s little joke for generations to come.
It’s stuff like this that makes it all worthwhile.
D.
writing
The key to breaking the block, I think, has been to write. I knew this all along, of course, but I didn’t have anything to write. But in editing The Brakan Correspondent (which henceforward will be referred to by its new name, The Correspondent’s Daughter), I’ve realized that I need to write more stuff. Not padding, no — there’s stuff missing. I’m serious. The pacing is off in many places because I’ve rushed things terribly. There are opportunities missed, settings and characters not fully fleshed. I need more writing, not less — a black pen, not a red pen.
Realizing this has made all the difference. All the many times I’ve opened up my TBC files, only to get discouraged because I couldn’t fix things by changing words, cutting words, rewriting or cutting sentences. Each time, I had hoped to edit a chapter a day and zip through the whole job, and each time I would wither and die by the third chapter. I couldn’t fix it. It was beyond me. I couldn’t make it the book I wanted it to be, not without rewriting it altogether.
The truth is somewhere in between the total rewrite and the speedy edit. And the truth, it seems (based on the fact that I’ve managed to write for four days out of the last five), is far easier to accomplish than either extreme. It will be slow-going, and I really shouldn’t celebrate until I’ve made it past that deadly Chapter 3 barrier. But for now it feels good, really good, to be creating new scenes, and that good feeling has given me the energy to fix the busted scenes.
But I’m done for the day. Time to play video games. Or give the ferrets a bath.
D.
Mensch
Life imitates art.
In my SF novel, the heroine’s mother is notified by the principal of her private religious school that her daughter is “faith impaired” and would be much better served by a nearby secular school. Nothing so drastic with my son today, but he did put them all to task.
In Theology, he was obliged to participate in a Stations of the Cross activity. He was Station 5. (According to Wikipedia, this is the “Simon of Cyrene carries the cross” station.) In this activity, Jake was supposed to read a passage that was written in the first person. He refused on the grounds that it would be hypocritical to imply belief when he had no such belief.
His teacher objected, and insisted he go along with it. But when it came time, he refused again. Unlike Peter, Jake didn’t get the chance to deny her a third time, but was instead sent to Pontius Pilate’s the Dean of Student’s office. She passed Jake along to his counselor, who tried to use the argument that students in biology are all obliged to learn about evolution, even though some might not believe in evolution. Jake countered that the proper comparison is that students in biology must learn evolution just as students in theology must learn various things about the New Testament. But there was a huge difference between learning these things and professing belief. If the biology students were asked to get up in front of class and commit to a belief in evolution, then her comparison would be valid.
The counselor also pointed out that if the teacher allowed one student to abstain from participating in the Stations of the Cross, she would need to allow others to abstain, too. Jake’s response was, “What would be wrong with that?” She also said that most of the students at the school were not Catholic, implying I suppose that others’ lack of principles should allow for Jake, too, to have a “principle-free zone” at school.
Afterward, Jake returned to Theology to get his backpack and binder, and to ask his teacher for her point of view. She told him that she felt there was an expectation that students at a Catholic school would participate in school-related activities, and if they made an exception for Jake, etc. But this breaks down, too. While Jake must attend Mass at school, no one insists that he take communion. Perhaps even his Theology teacher sees the inanity in an atheist taking communion.
I don’t know if she is losing patience with him. Earlier this week, the kids were assigned to write a brief parable involving God in some way. Jake wrote that God was like a blanket used by people for comfort, but sometimes it’s a good idea to get out of bed.
Stay tuned.
D.
On the up side,
I’m writing again. Two days in a row and I’ll do at least a bit more tonight. It’s slow going, but I’ve put together all the old files, things I have not touched in nearly six years, and I’ve started adding new material to the beginning of Chapter One.
You can thank Maureen for this (folks from Writer’s BBS might remember Maureen . . . she hung around the Fiction section and kept clear of SF or Horror, but still managed to enjoy my novel). We were chatting on gmail the other day, and she told me she would reread the novel if I managed to finish editing it. And she told me it was really good and I really shouldn’t drop it.
You’d think I would be able to tell myself such things, but I can’t. It’s way too easy to pick up the old manuscript and think, “What a load of bollocks,” but it wasn’t. Not entirely. Just for fun, I took a look at something I haven’t read in over five years: the last two scenes of the novel. And you know what? It’s good.
So who knows how long this will last. Hopefully longer than my excitement over turning the novel into a web comic, which ran into a wall over my lack of artistic talent. I mean, it takes me HOURS to finish one drawing, and I just don’t have that kind of time.
Wish me luck . . .
D.
To some degree, where it all started
Karen trashing Jon Scalzi’s first novel drove a great deal of traffic to my site — something like 1000 hits per day for a while? I don’t remember precisely. But it was hit and run stuff that generated no enduring readers.
What really got me rolling was another Karen-inspired blog, this one about tarantula sex. Somehow the Smart Bitches got wind of it, gave me a shout out, and that’s how many of my long-time readers found me.
You know the saddest thing about this story? Karen has never had a successful mating. Intercourse (such as it is) but no conception. No pitter patter of several hundred hairy legs. But it wasn’t for want of trying.
From 2005, hot tarantula sex . . . below the fold.