I read the story that Ray refers to (”The Lake”) recently and it really is a tremendous piece of work.
Tag Archive for 'Books'
Some time ago, I mentioned there was an exhaustive collection of “Bloom County” comic strips coming soon to a bookstore near you. I think I’ve also mentioned that I adore Berke Breathed’s masterwork, but — despite the fact the book is out now and that I covet it like a certain hobbit-y thing covets a certain piece of gaudy jewelry — I have yet to lay claim to a copy. Ain’t it Cool News has seen fit to torment me by running an interview with Scott Dunbier, the editor of the new collections. The piece is surprisingly lengthy and also quite interesting.
Fahrenheit 451:
Is it weird that I didn’t especially care for Fahrenheit 451? Despite the fact that I’m a huge fan of author Ray Bradbury, “451″ felt like the work of a young, inexperienced writer finding his way. The book, with its anti-censorship stance, is on-target thematically, but the bulk of the text comes off as stretched and thin. Basically, what we have here is a short story blown out to novel length, but there’s not enough material to support the expansion.
Also, in this story, one of the writer’s chief virtues becomes a liability. When he’s at the top of his game (which is a frighteningly high percentage of the time), Bradbury’s writing is poetic in a clean and elegantly beautiful way. Fahrenheit 451, however, is self-consciously poetic in places and it’s very jarring.
Zombieland:
Zombieland, while not exactly High Art, was both funnier and more sophisticated than I expected it to be. The film was defined for me by two of its strongest scenes — a moment of genuine pathos late in the story, and also one of the funniest celebrity cameos of all time. Both scenes, as different as they were, generated a lot of affection in me for the movie as a whole.
We need more movies like Zombieland (and, indeed, we used to get them). Where is it written that all films nowadays must be bloated and shallow? Personally, I would much rather see something like Zombieland than I would Transformers — films with modest ambitions, executed with enthusiasm rather than with a crass eye toward commercial exploitation.
500 Days of Summer:
500 Days of Summer is another example of the sort of movie which seems to be endangered in the current blockbuster-driven Hollywood ecosystem. (Funny that I managed to see two such movies in one weekend. Sadly, I don’t think this signifies a trend.)
“Summer” is a simple love story (or rather an anti-love story). Though it’s not completely successful, it feels both sincere and hand-crafted. The central narrative device — the nonlinear recounting of a doomed relationship — wears a little thin, but that doesn’t undermine the fine acting and otherwise clever screenplay.
Extract:
Mike Judge’s Extract is a modest movie with the simple goal of telling a straightforward story in an unpretentious, almost old-fashioned way. It succeeds at this admirably. The movie isn’t loud or assaultive, it makes perfect sense, and it’s amusing without being overly crass — all of which means its operating under a handicap in today’s marketplace.
I’ve seen mostly middling reviews for Extract and I’m not sure why that is. As far as I’m concerned, Judge set himself a target and then hit that target. I have a feeling that, like Office Space, Extract will ultimately find its audience on home video.
The October Country:
The October Country is a collection of horror-themed short stories by a master of that form, Mr. Ray Bradbury. The book doesn’t disappoint in the slightest as nearly all of the stories are at the very least palatable, and one in particular (”The Lake”), was truly exceptional. It really is in shorter spurts that Bradbury manages to excel — the novel just isn’t the man’s forte. The Martian Chronicles is a set of interconnected short stories and not a proper novel at all, and Fahrenheit 451 (which I am currently revisiting and will talk more about later) has issues of its own. Fortunately, Ray has gifted us with something like eighty bazillion short stories so its not like there’s a dearth of material.
The Big Lebowski:
I’ve seen The Big Lebowski two or three times now and I’m still not sure what to make of it. Is it a film noir? Is it a comedy? I’m hesitant to tow the party line and call it a successful marriage of the two because film noir and comedy share an uneasy alliance in the film. I’m not just sure the melding is ever fully realized. However, much like Extract, “Lebowski” creates its own unique and internally consistent world and it is fun to inhabit that place for two hours.
Star Trek: The Original Series — Vol. One:
When you’re seven years old and your dad says you oughta check something out, by God you do. It was the early seventies, and Star Trek was apparently entering into its second wave of syndication. A commercial for the show appeared suddenly on our local UHF station, and I was immediately intrigued. Next to me, my dad looked out from behind his paper and said “Oh, hey, you should watch this. Spaceships, ray guns… Should be right up your alley.” The visuals I was seeing coupled with that prompting from my pops were all I needed to give Star Trek a whirl, and for many years thereafter, the original episodes were a constant companion to me. Sure, the spaceships and the ray guns were cool, but more than anything else, I enjoyed the chemistry between the three lead characters. I never doubted for a second that Kirk, Spock, and McCoy were friends and colleagues who respected one another. The fact that they happened to work together on a starship was almost incidental.
Over time, the Star Trek feature films became my primary touchstone for the doings of Kirk and his pals, and I lost touch with the original shows. Now, thanks to a tremendous new Blu-ray set, I’ve reconnected with the “Trek” of my youth. I hadn’t seen many of these episodes in close to twenty years and I was tickled at just how well they hold up. With the exception of one entry (”The Alternative Factor”), there’s really not a bum show in the whole lot. Right out of the gate, in Season One, we get classic episodes like “City on the Edge of Forever” and “Space Seed” (which introduced the world to Khan from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan). Not only do we get well-told stories performed by fine actors, we get new visual effects which, I feel, enhance the experience tremendously. For you purists out there, give these remastered shows their day in court. The new FX are very much in keeping with the aesthetic of the old show. If the creators of the effects from the 1960s had had computer technology, they would have produced shots which look very much like what we’ve been given in this set.
I’m Dying Up Here:
William Knoedelseder’s book I’m Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-up Comedy’s Golden Era tells the story of the rise of stand-up comedy as a mainstream force in entertainment in the middle 1970s. Comics like David Letterman, Robin Williams, and Richard Lewis feature prominently as does the strike against the Comedy Store in 1978. As I think I may have mentioned, I’m a bit of a comedy junkie so “I’m Dying Up Here” was fascinating stuff to me. Knoedelseder was obviously there when a lot of the events in the book went down and his access to the participants is impressive. If you were around during that era and you were a fan of stand-up as I was, definitely give the book a shot.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931):
The best thing about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is Fredric March’s performance — or, more specifically, his performance as Hyde. A lot of what goes on with Jekyll is pretty stock and uninteresting, but it’s a necessary contrast to the Hyde scenes which are a tour de force. March won an Oscar for the role and it’s not hard to see why — he’s simply outstanding.
![Image of Star Trek: The Original Series - Season 1 [Blu-ray]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41W1M2S%2B4-L._SL160_.jpg "Star Trek: The Original Series - Season 1 [Blu-ray]")
Postscript: The Perils of Hi-Def Redux:
I did have one problem with the Star Trek set which I failed to mention above… Periodically, the sound would drift out of sync and I would be forced to pause and then re-start the episode in order to correct the problem. A little online research quickly revealed that other Blu-ray early adopters were having similar issues — further proof that perhaps this new technology was not quite ready for prime time.
Harlan Ellison: Dreams with Sharp Teeth is a documentary about writer Harlan Ellison. Ellison, who’s name has come up a time or two on this blog, is a well-respected and prolific author of essays, teleplays and short stories. Within the literary and science fiction communities, he’s something of a legend. That being said, however, he’s hardly the household name that he, perhaps, deserves to be. I can well understand how some of you reading this might say ‘I don’t know this Ellison guy… Should I bother with the movie?’ The answer to that question is a resounding ‘Hell, yes.’
First of all, let me just say that if you haven’t read Ellison’s work, you should seek it out. The guy writes like a proverbial sumbitch. He’s really very, very good. Experiencing his work, as I say, is not a prerequisite to enjoying the documentary, however. The simple reason for that is that Harlan himself is enormously entertaining. If there were a competition for World’s Angriest Jew (and, by God, don’t you think there ought to be?), Harlan would be right there in the running. The depth and breadth of his ire (on a wide range of topics) is damn funny — partly because you can’t believe just how incensed he can get and partly because you agree with nearly everything he says. I laughed a lot watching “Dreams with Sharp Teeth”, and by the end, I was thinking I should pull my copy of The Essential Ellison down off the shelf again. The entertainer (and the businessman) in Harlan Ellison would no doubt be very pleased.
Yesterday, quite by accident, I finished reading Appaloosa by Robert B. Parker and I also watched Lonely are the Brave, a 1962 film starring Kirk Douglas. It struck me not too long thereafter that the two are somewhat of a piece with one another. Cowboys striving against the forces of modernity is a perennial theme in Westerns, but that’s okay because it nearly always works (see Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Wild Bunch for further proof). This Grand Theme is certainly used to great effect in both Appaloosa and Lonely Are the Brave.
I can sum up Robert B. Parker’s Appaloosa for you quickly: If you liked the movie, you’ll like the book. It’s actually pretty remarkable the fidelity with which Ed Harris adapted the novel for the screen. Apart from making a few necessary excisions for running time, Harris basically just shot the book. I would say his only mistake was in casting Renee Zellweger as “Allie”. Others have commented (and I agree) that Zellweger is, at the risk of sounding crude, not nearly attractive enough for the role. The character, as Parker has written her, is a smart woman with the feminine wiles to cloud men’s minds. Zellweger can certainly do the smart part, but as for the rest… I’ll leave that up to you. (And, to be fair, I will say that a lot of the blame lies with the costumers and the make-up people — Zellweger looks plainer in Appaloosa than I’ve ever seen her look before.) Happily, in reading the novel, I was free to “recast” the role of Allie in my head, and this I did. (I kept everyone else the same in my “mind movie”: Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen were perfect for their roles.) Of course the theme of marginalization I referred to above is just as present in the book as it is in the film. Two thirds of the way through the story, the forces of money and the modern world (in the form of the villain, Randall Bragg) move in and begin to force our two heroes out of their accustomed roles. The way this situation is ultimately resolved is better left for the reader to discover, but I was satisfied by that climax.
Bottom line: Appaloosa is a terrific book. It’s written in a clean, concise (almost Hemingway-esque) prose style and it goes down real easy. I’d be more than happy to read Parker again. In fact, part of the reason I read the novel was that Parker has written two sequels featuring the same characters. I have every intention of “kindling” those as well.
Where Appaloosa takes place in the sunset years of the American West, Lonely Are the Brave takes place in the early 1960s, long after the true west had gone to its grave. The character played by Kirk Douglas is a sad anachronism, a man who doesn’t realize he’s about a century too late to the party. Our hero runs afoul of the local authorities in a New Mexico town and most of the movie is an extended chase with Douglas on one side and local sheriff Walter Matthau on the other. I’m hesitant to say too much more about the plot for fear of spoiling it; it’s just one of those things you have to see unspool from beginning to end to truly appreciate. That being said, here are some factoids to further entice you:
- Lonely are the Brave was adapted for the screen by former blacklist-ee Dalton Trumbo — one helluva fine writer who also did the script for Kirk Douglas’ Spartacus.
- Speaking of Douglas, this is one of his best performances. He’s utterly convincing in the role of Jack W. Burns, that sadly misbegotten cow-poke.
- Lonely Are the Brave is one of Steven Spielberg’s favorite movies. In fact, it would seem that he’s largely responsible for this recent DVD reissue. He sings the movie’s praises in a retrospective documentary found on the disc.
Marginalization, anachronism, these are meaty themes, and maybe I relate to stories featuring those themes because I sometimes feel I was born too late myself. But that’s fodder for another post somewhere down the trail. ‘Til then, read Appaloosa and watch Lonely Are the Brave.
My father, brother and myself were always pretty tight, and I think part of the glue that held us together was a shared loved of comedy and a similar sensibility in terms of what we found funny. Throughout the 80s and part of the 90s I was a bit of Comedy Nerd. I watched a lot of funny movies and I was familiar with most of the stand-ups working at that time. Starting in the mid 90s, I went through some life changes that took me away from comedy. I still loved to laugh (and to make others laugh), but I had fallen from the True Faith. Reading And Here’s the Kicker by Mike Sacks has served to reignite some of that earlier passion.
“Kicker” is a collection of interviews (all conducted by Mr. Sacks) with twenty-one comedy writers. Some of the humorists included in the collection are out-and-out giants — people like Buck Henry, Harold Ramis, Merril Markoe, David Sedaris, Robert Smigel, Dave Barry, Dick Cavett, and Larry Gelbart. Of course, there were a few names I didn’t know right out of the gate, but as soon as I read their bios, I knew that their inclusion was a smart choice. Trust me, there’s not a runt in this whole litter. Sacks’ interview style fits the subject matter terrifically, as well. He’s done his research and some of his questions and responses are humorous in their own right. I was a little worried when I saw that the publisher was Writers Digest Books, however, because I feared that the editors might try and steer the book too far into how-to territory (and I’ve sworn off Writing How-tos for all of calendar year 2009). I needn’t have worried, as it turns out. There are brief interludes of writing advice for humorists, but these run no more than a page or two each and are relatively innocuous. The real meat here is the interviews and it’s, well, pretty damn meaty. I found myself energized by the experience of reading And Here’s the Kicker to the degree that I wished I could forget about it and read it again. Hell, I might read it again anyway just for shits and giggles. Another (perhaps unsurprising) side effect was that I found myself wanting to get more comedy into my life. This I plan to do.
In fact, join me in celebrating My Comedy Year: July 11th, 2009 through July 11th, 2010.
Wow, it felt really weird finally polishing off this collection…
I scored The Complete Calvin and Hobbes on eBay a couple of months back (at a significantly reduced cover price, of course) and it’s been my bedside companion ever since. I would knock out twenty or thirty pages a night, in no real hurry at all to finish. The collection is the very definition of “light reading” and it always felt like a good way to end my day. An hour or two ago, I read the last ever strip — a Sunday comic from December of 1995. Three hardcover volumes, nearly fifteen hundred pages at a total weight of roughly twenty two pounds (including the fancy slipcase). Now that it’s over, I’m sorry to see it go.
I think I may have commented a time or two on this blog that I didn’t give cartoonist Bill Watterson his proper due back when “Calvin” was still running in newspapers. At the time — to me at least — the strip felt repetitive and dry. Now, having consumed the whole ten year run in a relatively short period of time, I see it for what it is — a disciplined and articulate work by a genuine artist.
Calvin and Hobbes has several things in common with its only slightly more famous forebear, Peanuts. It focuses on a narrow set of circumstances, has a very limited cast of characters and is clearly not meant to be perceived only as what it is on its surface. Both Watterson and Charles Schultz before him don’t intend for us to take their dialogue and comic scenarios featuring children at face value. What we get when we read Calvin or Charlie Brown’s dialogue is a direct window into the worldview of the their respective creators. So, to be clear, we’re not talking Ziggy here. Calvin and Hobbes has a consistent voice and an integrity that sets it apart from the vast majority of the comic strips done over the roughly one hundred year history of the medium. Yes, it has a limited series of repeating motifs, but the overall effect is a fully-realized world with honest-to-God thematic through lines. Some novelists have trouble laying claim to that sort of artistic achievement, let alone lowly cartoonists.
I’m mildly ambivalent about Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, though I think it’s a terrific piece of work in many respects. The book, as good as it is, is missing many of the core mechanics which I look for in a strong piece of fiction — with two “for instances” being highly relatable characters, and a palpable sense of conflict (in either the strictly dramatic or the more literal sense). The book often reads more like a historical treatise than it does a proper novel. (Not surprising, I suppose, since it was inspired, so the story goes, by The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.) In fact, Foundation is not really a proper novel at all, but rather a grouping of short stories held together by a common setting and a clever device for narrative progression (the overarching story, as loose as it may be, is the history of a particularly rough patch in the history of a galactic empire). Because of its structure, Foundation reminded me a great deal of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (which is also a book-length narrative made of loosely connected parts). Asimov’s book, however, lacks “Chronicles’” warmth. Bradbury is a much more poetic storyteller and his tales are rooted in nostalgia and human connections. Asimov seems to be more concerned with history and politics — so much so that I was often reminded of another book: Frank Herbert’s Dune. For of all its political intrigue, however, Dune is still a more emotionally grounded work than Foundation. I see Foundation then as occupying a weird middle ground between those two other works — inferior to both in most important repsects, but a landmark of the genre, nevertheless. (Oh, did I forget to mention that, despite its coldness, Foundation is a very quick and enjoyable read? Guess I should’ve pointed that out before spending so much time ragging on poor, dead Isaac.)
I’ve wanted to learn how to program computers for a while now — not because I have any burning desire to do the work full-time, but mainly because of a longstanding God complex. I like the idea of making machines do cool stuff. I’ve dipped in and out of the subject off and on many times over the last few years making very little headway. In fact, to be blunt, I would invariably devote a little bit of time to it, get frustrated quickly and then bail. The reason for that each and every time was that there are no good books on the subject. People that know how to program either don’t know how to write or they don’t know how to teach (and, often, both in equal measure). I realize, of course, that I’m generalizing, but I’ll come back to that in a moment. The truth is that, in literally decades of checking, I failed to find a book that didn’t go from zero to sixty in the space of three chapters. Programmers (or at least the programmers I have met) have an arrogance and a lack of patience that I think informs their work when they attempt to instruct. They literally forget that the prospective student doesn’t know as much as they do and they begin rolling out the big guns early. You would think that that arrogance would come with a corresponding meticulousness, but sadly, this is not the case. The other thing I have found in looking at books on programming over the years is that nearly all of them are shot through , to varying degrees, with errors. I’m talking about actual inaccuracies in the codebase (from which, remember, the reader is supposed to be learning) that cause the program not to run. It’s been my experience a few times that I knew I was learning when I began recognizing these errors and fixing them myself. In a strange way, I felt as though I was making progress, but is this really the best way to learn?
At any rate, I’ve got time on my hands here lately (long story) and I’ve decided to fully commit and learn programming come Hell or high water. I’ve elected to go about doing this via Microsoft’s XNA. To sort of nutshell it, XNA is a modified version of the C# [pronounced "See Sharp"] language via which you can write games for your XBox. This struck me as a palatable means of entry and C# has many applications beyond the aforementioned games. The first book I used to crack the nut of XNA was Learn Programming Now! XNA Game Studio 2.0 by Rob Miles. I’m going to give it up for Miles right now: though he hasn’t completely redressed the sins of Programming Books Past, he’s come the closest to date. In fact, it takes him almost ten chapters to get to sixty from zero and, by then, I knew enough that I could (kind of) muddle through. I suppose I’m paying “Learn Programming Now!” a good compliment when I say that I’m referring to it fairly often now that I’m reading my second book on XNA/C# — a book shot through with inaccuracies, poor explanations, and just-plain typos.
Deja vu.
I love mythology, but there’s always a problem with reading it in any great quantity: the stories have a tendency to devolve into mutual contradiction, and in some cases, incomprehensibility. The Children of Odin, Padraic Colum’s great retelling of the Norse myths, goes some distance toward addressing these problems. Colum’s main innovation is in continuity — he takes some pains to space the events out so that they link together in a way that not only brings narrative logic, but also suspense. A causality is present that isn’t typically there in a more straightforward gathering of myths and legends. In other words, Colum works harder than most people do when they try their hand at a massive retelling of this kind. He’s not entirely successful in part because the material doesn’t support it. Ragnarok (the Norse Apocalypse) is, in its own way, just as opaque and confusing as the Christian Book of Revelation. For that reason, the last chapter of The Children of Odin is a bit of an anti-climactic head scratcher. This final battle constitutes a tiny percentage of the overall work, however, so it’s not a mortal blow. In fact, The Children of Odin is not only very readable, it’s fun.
There’s been a trend the past few years of publishing the entirety of a classic comic strip’s run in handsome (sometimes “super deluxe”) hardcover books — every single strip, Sunday and daily.They’re in the midst of doing it with Peanuts (no small project that since it ran for more than forty years); Popeye has an ongoing series of books; there’s a deluxe version of The Far Side strips; and there’s even an exhaustive set of — are you ready for this? — Dilbert. Out of all of them, the one that I’ve come closest to buying is The Complete Calvin and Hobbes — a set of three ginormous hardcover books with a combined weight of twenty-two pounds (you read that right — twenty-two). The one I really want though is Bloom County — my hands-down favorite strip of all time. Whenever I see an interview with creator Berke Breathed, he’s asked whether or not BC will ever get the “complete treatment”, and for years he’s said “no, not interested”. Well, apparently he’s had a change of heart because this coming October will mark the release of the first volume of The Bloom County Library. Each book will contain approximately two years worth of strips (for a combined total of five volumes — my math, not theirs: Bloom County ran for roughly nine years). Here’s the press release:
“Bloom County Library to Collect Entire Run of Classic American Comic Strip”
Oh, and here’s that crazy Calvin and Hobbes thing I was talking about…
My history with video games falls into distinct, easy to define eras. First there was the Atari 2600 era, then the Sega Master System era, the Sega Genesis/Super Nintendo Entertainment System era, and then the PC Gaming era (which, to some extent, continues to this day). The heyday for gaming on Windows machines was, for me, in the early to mid-1990s. During that time, I was, I am not afraid to admit, a rabid LucasArts fan-boy. In the company’s storied early years, nearly everything they did was kick-ass. They practically wrote the book on “point and click” adventure games with titles like The Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max Hit the Road, and Full Throttle being true standouts in the genre. Not only were these games cleverly designed, they were genuinely funny — witty even. Then there were the Star Wars games… games that not only paid the license its proper due, but expanded upon the mythos in credible and exciting ways. For my money, X-Wing, TIE Fighter, Dark Forces, and Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight are still amongst the best PC games ever made. So, you can imagine my excitement when I first heard about the book Rogue Leaders: The Story of LucasArts. You can probably also extrapolate the level of my disappointment when I tell you that the book is a pretty mediocre effort.
“Rogue Leaders” starts well enough with a thorough accounting of the events of the early years. We get what seems to be a credible timeline of the division’s founding, and we hear from most of the heavy hitters who were present during that formative era. The book loses its footing, however, as LucasArts diversifies and begins publishing more and more titles. As there is more to discuss, author Rob Smith does a progressively more cursory job — until most of the games from the later years are given incredibly short shrift. In fact, I think that many of them would have been better left unmentioned than given the tremendously superficial treatment they are. Also, it seems clear to me that this book was not only rushed but poorly edited. As we enter into the final chapters, things get alluded to and are never mentioned again. To borrow a term from the world of film, it was obvious to me that parts of this book were left on the cutting room floor and the seams were never repaired. It’s too bad too since LucasArts deserved a better history than it gets in “Rogue Leaders”.
Ah, well, it’s not a total loss… As I said, the early chapters are good and there are plenty of pretty pictures. Whatever you do, just don’t pay the sixty dollar retail price for this one. Get it at a discount from Amazon. That way you can at least be okay with the fact that the book doesn’t quite live up to its potential.
Author Neil Gaiman (who’s gotten a fair share of virtual ink here at the Cove) appeared on Comedy Central’s Colbert Report last night. Here’s the clip (I particularly like the bit about The Lord of the Rings):
Colbert very clearly is a dyed-in-the-wool geek — which makes him strangely endearing.
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