Dan'l's Multiapostrophic LiveJournal

5:48pm: Read: Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, by Samuel R. Delany
This is an immense book in which, at a certain level of discourse, "nothing happens." Eric Jeffers, at seventeen, meets his life partner Morgan "Shit" Haskell. They fall quickly in love and remain together for 70+ years. Nothing terribly dramatic happens to them in all those years.

...at another level of discourse it's one of the most moving love stories I've ever read. Eric and Shit have a relationship that I wouldn't want any part of. There's a great deal of explicit sex, between them and others (I'm trying to avoid spoilers in this little review), but none of it is for me, and indeed much of it would probably not be a turn-on for most gay guys. It is, as Shit constantly says, "nasty" ... and at times even boring.

...at yet another level of discourse it's the story of the next sixty years of American history, in which huge and dramatic events occur (offstage), technology advances greatly (and hardly affects our near-Luddite protagonists), and society changes almost unrecognizably (leaving Eric in his 80s as confused by the world around him as any old person can be and many are).

...and at still another level of discourse it's an extraordinarily finely observed chronicle of ordinary life. (As Eric observes late in the book, he doesn't have a story, he has a life.)

I thought at first I was going to give up on it. By the time I came to the end, I was crying.

12:02pm: Seen: Next (2007)
Cris Johnson (Nicholas Cage) can see the future. The problem is that he can only see two minutes into the future, and only where he is personally involved.

Except that he has this long-rage vision of a woman. He sees her in a particular diner, and the clock tells him what time, and he's sipping a martini. So he goes to that diner and orders a martini twice a day until she walks in.

In the meanwhile, an FBI agent believes that his power may be sufficient to foil a major terrorist plot.

That's the setup, and the story mostly follows as you'd expect, though there's a final twist that redeems it somewhat.

10:36am: For the old D&D hacks
Something Awful. I recommend the articles on the first edition monster manual.

8:09am: Jenghiz Khan, but ...

Which philosopher are you? Your Result: Immanuel Kant   There are things in themselves, but they are unimportant to us. We must interpret everything through certain immutable categories, such as time and the laws of physics. All rational animals must see the world through these categories, and what they see is unrelated to the things in themselves. --This quiz was made by S. A-Lerer.
Plato (strict rationalists)
Nietzsche
Aristotle
Sartre/Camus (late existentialists)
W.v.O. Quine / Late Wittgenstein
Early Wittgenstein / Positivists
Which philosopher are you? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

11:21am: Tattoo fail

1:31pm: Quote for the day
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
-- President Dwight David Eisenhower

9:28pm: Seen: Mission:Impossible III (2006) and Mission:Imposssible Ghost Protocol
M:I3 was directed by J.J. Abrams, which doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be good, but gave me hope.

Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is getting married, and not to the thief he walked into the sunset with in the last film. He's retired from field work and trains IMF agents. But he's called in for one last job, which goes about as badly as it can go. Action and suspense galore.

The only point I would make about this one is that ... well, if you read my little reviews, you may recall my political complaint about #2. Perhaps others made similar complaints, because they reversed the situation in this movie. Hunt's wife is set up from the beginning as the victim/damsel in distress, but before the movie's over she saves his ass at least twice. So good for that.

* * * * *

M:IGP was directed by Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, Up, The Incredibles) so I had some definite expectations. They were not, entirely, met.

Hunt is in a Russian jail for reasons we don't learn until well into the film. An IMF team breaks him out and he's immediately put to work infiltrating the Kremlin.

Which gets blown up real good, under circumstances that seem to point to the IMF. The IMF is disbanded and "disavowed," leaving Hunt and his team hanging while seeking a lunatic who seriously wants to start World War III and may be able to do it. This is easily the most spectacular of the M:I movies, and the plot holds together somewhat better than most.

But let's face it. These are movies about things going fast and blowing up, and lots of stuff does that in these two films.

9:15pm: Seen: Tower Heist (2011)
So I didn't expect much, but...

I have been known to describe Being John Malkovich as "the best Philip K. Dick movie not actually based on anything by Philip K. Dick." This movie does the same thing for Donald Westlake. It's a caper film with a very Westlake-y heart.

Josh Kovacs (Ben Stiller) is the manager of the Tower apartment building in NYC, an incredibly posh -- and hugely secured -- place on the route of the Macy*s Day Parade (which does play into the plot). Penthouse-dweller Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda) is a financier on the board of the Tower. Trying to stop an apparant robbery of Shaw's apartment, Kovacs accidentally interferes with the FBI takedown of Shaw for a huge Ponzi scheme.

Turns out that the whole hotel staff's pension fund, as well as many folks' savings, were tied up in Shaw's investment "opportunities." When Kovacs confronts Shaw, he loses his job, along with several others'.

But! there is cause to believe that Shaw has at least $20M secreted in his apartment for the getaway he was going to make. Several of the hotel's employees, ex-employees, and one ex-resident (including Matthew Broderick and the ever-incredible Gabourey Sidibe) decide to rob the penthouse.

There are several problems with this plan, not least of which is that they know squat about robbery; as well, Shaw is under house arrest. To solve the problem, they recruit Slide (Eddie Murphy), a professional thief -- who has never stolen anything really big before...

Alternately funny and tense, this movie is enjoyable as all get-out; and it's well plotted: almost everything pays off in time.

1:35pm: Two great tastes that taste great together
What if Maurice Sendak had drawn The Avengers?

7:27am: Ecumenical note
A very happy Feast of the Ascension.

7:33am: Though few of you will care...
...today is the 100th birthday of Studs Terkel, author of (among other things) Working.

5:57pm: Read: Legion of Superheroes Archive Volume 13 by DC Comics
I'm embarrassed by how much I love the old LSH. I realize that it's a dumb idea full of dumb characters, but I love it. Partly, it's because I grew up with it (literally; the LSH debuted the year I was born), partly because of the nifty 30th Century in which it took place, and partly because of the big optimism that always went with it.

This particular volume is full of stories by Paul Levitz, who would go on to be arguably the best writer the Legion ever had. Here, he's groping his way a bit and there are several gimmick stories that I could do without. But hey -- it's the Legion, and this helps complete my collection.

There are no new LSH comics. The Legion I knew and loved died in the '90s, with a thing called "Zero Hour." One of their finest moments, actually, but it was an excuse to reboot the DC Universe and undo the entire LSH continuity (which was already pretty rocky due to changes in the 20th Century continuity.)

This volume begins and ends with the introduction of two of Levitz's signature villains, Pulsar Stargrave (which I put up as one of the great villain names of all time) and the Infinite Man (meh). In between are battles with standard Legion villains including the Dark Circle, the Fatal Five, and Doctor Regulus. Plus, as I said, some gimmick stories.

Fun if you like this sort of thing, and I do.

11:32am: Read: The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux (2012-19)
One of those "I've been meaning to read it for years" books, it bears little resemblance to the movies (I've not seen the musical), which were largely a vehicle for the sfx of the time (notably, Chaney's makeup and the final collapse of the Phantom's lair). It isn't a horror story in the modern sense at all, but a penny-dreadful sort of affair with heroic heroes facing a dastardly madman. All are saved (in various ways) in the end by the power of love.

Quite a rousing read, but nothing my life would have been incomplete without.

6:04pm: Read: Studies in Words by C.S. Lewis (2012-18)
One of the few Lewis books, published by him, that I've never read. (They're all professional work, and I'm working my way through them over time.) Well, now I have.

It consists of an introduction, nine loosely linked essays, and an afterword (though not so-called: they are eleven chapters). The introduction sets forth the purpose of the book and some of its terminology. The afterword is something of an excursus on pejorative terms in general and their inutility in criticism in particular.

The nine essays discuss the semantic history of a number of English words and phrases, with their roots and relatives, with the particular purpose of helping a modern reader understand how these words were meant by older writers. It's often quite surprising to discover how much I've misunderstood a well-known phrase.

An excellent example of this: in the doxology said by a preponderance of Christians during their services, we say "...as it was in the beginning, it is now and ever shall be, world without end." Now, one of the fundamental beliefs of Christianity is that "this world" is transitory, so one takes it that the "world" in question is that of Heaven, which is certainly "as it was ... and ever shall be." But it turns out that "world" in this context doesn't mean a world in the modern sense at all, but the Greek aion: so that the "world without end" is precisely Eternity.

If you're the kind of person who likes to read precisely, this book is an aid and a guide to the wild world of philology; if you like unexpected revelations, it's full of those. And it's written in Lewis's patented reader-friendly style, so that even the most technical explanations are quite palatable.

Good stuff.

7:54am: Happy World Naked Gardening Day!
Really, need I say more?

8:54am: Roger Zelazny...
...would have been 75 today. Sadly, he died pretty young, in 1995.

9:21pm: Seen: The Avengers (2012)
This is the culmination of the last two or three years of Marvel superhero movies; they've been laying the grounds for it at least since the first Iron Man flick. And was it worth it?

Well, it's entertaining, and the characters established in all those movies have real chemistry together, especially between anybody and Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) who manages to get on everybody's nerves in his endearing way. The characters we've seen before are much as we've seen them before; only Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) is new to us, and manages to be kind of a nonentity among all the more spectacular heroes. Which, come to think of it, Hawkeye always was in the Avengers comics. Chris Evans has settled into the Captain America role and gets some good mileage out of having slept for seventy years. Samuel L. Jackson is back as Nick Fury of SHIELD, complete with helicarrier and Council. And Mark Ruffalo is the best Bruce Banner ever.

But the real delight is Tom Hiddleston's Loki. Where he was a bit shaky in the Thor film, he's spot-on in this. And don't we really watch superhero movies for the villains more than the heroes? (Well, except for the Iron Man films, where the heroes are pretty boring but the hero is fun.) (Speaking of villains, there's a great reveal (for Marvel fans, anyway) in the first Easter egg. There are two, one in the middle of the credits and one at the end.)

One thing that's brushed over is that a lot of people must die in the climactic battle, but that's never mentioned. Massive parts of New York are destroyed, by aliens and heroes both. The Avengers find themselves as a team. Tony Stark finds his inner hero. It's good fun.

One should probably say something about the special effects, but at this point who cares?

6:57am: RIP Maurice Sendak
Where are the wild things? In the night kitchen.

12:58pm: Read: Firebird by Jack McDevitt (2012-17)
The latest entry in the Alex Benedict/Chase Kolpath series.

Alex is a dealer in antiquities (meaning items from several thousand years in our future) who, with his assistant and pilot Chase, gets involved in big stuff. In this case, an attempt to sell the effects of a physicist who disappeared mysteriously sixty years in his past leads to questions involving black holes, a lost paradise, disappearing spaceships, and whether AIs can be truly sentient.

Well written, fast moving, and intelligent, as are all McDevitt's books.

12:36pm: Read: Big Jack by J.D. Robb (2012-16)
Another murder mystery in the Eve Dallas series, concerning some diamonds stolen fifty years earlier (in our time) and never found, and someone willing to kill for them. Pleasant fun.

10:19am: 75 years ago today...
...big ba-da-boom.

5:08pm: Read: The Play of the Hand in the 21st Century (2012-15)
Originally by Audrey Grant, revised by Betty Starzec. One of the American Contract Bridge League's series on the basics of bridge. Well presented with lots of practice exercises. Not much more to say.

8:43am: Tolkien in His Own Words
The BBC Television programme "British Authors In Their Own Words" interviewed J.R.R. Tolkien in 1968. That programme has just been released on YouTube. It's a bit of a mischmasch, a bit of an omnium-gatherum, and, frankly, a bit of a dog's breakfast; and we don't really learn anything new about JRRT or his work; but the parts where we see and hear him in his proper voice (including a recitation of the Ring inscription in the Black Speech) are fascinating.

Part 1

Part 2

8:59pm: Read: The Birthday of the World, by Ursula K. Le Guin (2012-14)
This 2002 collection by one of the finest writers living proves that she is one of the finest writers living. Of the eight stories, only one is less than fabulous -- the last one, which is merely good, largely because for long periods she forgets to tell her story and does anthropology instead. It's fun anthropology, but a novella ain't a big book like Always Coming Home and really doesn't have room for all that stuff.

Six of the stories take place in the Hainish/Ekumen universe. (Or perhaps seven: Le Guin herself isn't sure about the title story, or wasn't when the book was published, anyway.) One takes place on Gethen, the world of The Left Hand of Darkness, and gets into the nitty-gritty of kemmering as that book did not. Several of the others take place on worlds with sexual arrangements almost as different to ours as Gethen's, though they all happen within the context of two sexes -- where Gethen is physiologically strange, these are culturally strange.

Possibly the strangest to me is the arrangement in "Solitude," a vision of a ruined world where men and women live completely apart. (Well, almost completely. There is getting of children, after all.) Certainly I found it the saddest of the stories in this book: it's basically a tale of "going native," to a culture that -- to me -- is markedly inferior in every way to the Hainish culture. Though the Hainish would probably disagree.

Every story made me feel something. What more can I say to praise them?

8:56pm: Seen: Mission: Impossible II (2000)
Eh. I'll watch the third one (because the love of my life wants to see the new one), but this was nothing to write home about. And I was actively annoyed by the way the whole thing came down to a fight between the hero and the main villain over the girl.

Scriptwriters everywhere: If you go to the trouble of setting a woman up as interesting and competent, don't reduce her to a prize to be fought for. Just ... don't.