Gaiman stuff

Here's a link to Neil Gaiman's profile on IMDB.

And here's a preview for the movie Stardust.

He has a pretty cool website.

And there's a website, of course, for the Stardust movie.

Neil Gaiman?

I'm sometimes annoyed by a phenomenon that is becoming more frequent as I age - the experience of being blindsided by an important author or director. This happened to me recently with Neil Gaiman. As I have come more and more to admit to myself that I want to be a science fiction writer, and as I have made my peace with my future as a genre writer, I have explored the existing practitioners to a greater degree. And I have found several authors who publish extensively but who write total crap. I couldn't handle Terry Pratchett - far too priggish and self-important. I don't think a writer should be in the business of obfuscation, and I feel like Pratchett wants to confuse more than he wants to explain and entertain. And, in my humble opinion, he's just not a good writer. (After writing this, I think I might give him another chance, and pick up a different book and try him out. After all, I'm sure he's contributed something.)

Neil Gaiman was a complete unknown (to me) when I found an interesting book with his name on it at a bookstore a few weeks ago. American Gods had an interesting cover, and an interesting title, and I pulled it off the shelf and skimmed the first few pages trying to get a feel for it. It seemed like a meaty, character-driven book about a mythical American landscape, peopled with supernatural "gods" - hence the title. A cool idea for a novel, and one that hit close to home for me. The main character was a little overly heroic (tall and manly - residues of wish fulfillment), but I plowed through the book in less than a week, despite the workload I was simultaneously shouldering. It was a great book. The characters - these washed-up divinities - were fascinating. Gaiman managed to tie together some arcane American geography with arcane mythial figures from all over the world. I had no prior knowledge of many of the gods he refers to, but I was impressed enough not to question his research.

I enjoyed the book quite a bit, and it wasn't obsessed with itself the way that a lot of books can be. It was a good story, and I liked that the plot and characters didn't need beautiful language to stand up on their own. I don't really recall being impressed with Gaiman's prose style, but I pushed hard to read and finish this book - that means a lot more than sitting and contemplating beautiful lines. Nabokov wrote some of the most beautiful lines of prose I've ever seen, and I never came close to gobbling up his books like I gobbled this one.

To return to the initial point about being blindsided: after I picked up and began reading this book by Gaiman, I started seeing him everywhere. I noticed his movie, Stardust, based on his book. I noticed that he had a hand in the recent film adaptation of Beowulf. And I noticed that he had a few young-adult books - a genre that I am also interested in for professional reasons - and, according to IMDB, one of those is about to be released as a movie as well. So this guy gets around. He also has a new book out, that I've seen and haven't read yet.

Unfortunately, he's not quite popular enough for me to bring his books out in public and let myself be seen reading them. There's the unfortunate possibility of mispronouncing his name - Gay-Man - that I wouldn't want to open myself up to if I were to be confronted with a boorish lout intent on mocking us bookish types.

What I'm working on

I have a lot of story ideas, but things continue to stall. I'm working right now on a short piece of fiction. I think I need to develop some habits of finishing my fiction before I fizzle and get too old to be good. I mean, too old to have a writing "career" and not an avocation or hobby. I don't want to be the guy who writes one novel in his lifetime and dies. That would suck - because I know that I'm going to be able to churn out ten. Or I hope that I can do that. It doesn't seem like the past is any promise of productivity on that front, though.

Oh well.

7 Minutes of X-Men

Here's a link to the final X-Men movie. I hate to dislike this, because I like Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen. They are both great actors - I just wish that the movie didn't fall apart in the end.

This chunk of film highlights some of the potential of the material. In better hands - or in the hands of a better editor - it could have become something much more than it was. Too many irreconcileable elements. If it were a student's paper in front of me, I would tell them that the scope is too great - that merely refocusing on a handful of characters instead of a universe of characters would resolve so much, and make the movie so much greater. The second movie had its problems, but the focus on Wolverine made the plot much more unified and sensible.

Links to Serenity

Here's a link to the Serenity trailer.

Returning to Film?

Thank you for the comments. I'm shocked and a little humbled to have an audience.

I've moved away from Chabon a bit lately, and I've been wading through some sci fi films. This includes movies that most would consider rather "low-brow," like The Fantastic Four or the X-Men trilogy. All of these were mostly a waste of time. I find myself intrigued by the social implications of the mutant in the midst of mainstream culture, and that was probably the best part about the X-Men movies. But the flashy finale of the three was really empty for me. Jean Grey's massive power seems to come out of nowhere, and becomes an important part of the plot without really being used or explored. I probably would have spent another half hour just on her, roaming the country destroying things. She trashes the whole island in the end, and murders dozens of people, but it seems like she's too easy to kill. If she's really that powerful, why isn't she important until the third movie?

Perhaps that's what annoyed me about X-Men - the final movie concocts this whole Jean Grey thing and suddenly makes her the engine of the plot. They invent a classification system that might have been implied before, but is suddenly overt and important. Magneto knows that he's a Class 4, and he knows that Jean is a Class 5, and he knew that all along, and showed no interest in her powers in either of the previous two movies?

Several movies that I saw were surprising, though. I finally sat down and watched War of the Worlds. I was surprised at how unusual it seemed to me that Tom Cruise was shown as a bad father in the beginning of the movie, with some violent tendencies. I liked that part - it was unexpected, and it added an edge to the movie that helped make it more interesting. The ending of the movie was horrible, though. Other than the struggle to escape the tripod using the grenades, there was no epic battle between the humans and the aliens. It was a victory because of our diseases? Say what you want about Independence Day, but at least it had that element of battle and victory.

I also watched the movie Serenity. It might be easy to dismiss this one as another butt-kicking-chick movie (like The Fifth Element, Aeon Flux, Elektra, Catwoman, Tomb Raider, Dark Angel and Alias on TV, Terminator 2, Sarah Connor files now on TV, and so on), and the fact that Joss Whedon is also the Buffy the Vampire Slayer guy adds some credence to this theory. (Perhaps I could lump some Chinese martial arts movies in here, like House of Flying Daggers or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but that seems unfair and might make a nice follow-up post.) Heck, even Heroes has a killer cheerleader. But this movie is not just about a killer teenage girl. It also wants to be about a government that hides from its mistakes, and tries to control people and information.

Film genres?

It's interesting to think about what film genres I really enjoy the most. I'm starting to enjoy Westerns. I'd have to say that my usual pick would be either Sci-Fi or Film Noir. I suppose that historical stuff has to factor into something.

Trailer for Pale Rider

It's pretty cool to be able to do this.

Today - Pale Rider

I just finished watching Pale Rider, an old Clint Eastwood western. He is the star and the director. I think that I've been on a Western kick partly because of Eastwood. I've seen him in lots of other movies, and I think that watching Unforgiven many years ago, without having seen many of his previous westerns or very many westerns in general, that movie didn't make much sense. I've been working my way through old movies, and lately I've come across a few westerns that were worth watching. It started, I think, with an interest in John Wayne as a cultural icon. Catching a few clips on cable just wasn't enough to understand the draw of that guy. It helped to see True Grit and The Searchers, both of which were good but not fabulous. Or, to my eyes, not fabulous. Not worth the hype. Another key motivator in this interest came from the Akira Kurosowa links. I've been a bit of a pedant, wading through the foreign film section of the local library, and checking out all the titles by famous foreign directors. Most of it was senseless, frustrating, and boring. It's hard to appreciate a movie when you have to stare at the subtitles. You miss a lot of the acting, and a lot of the action. I'm sure that if I spoke German I would like some of the German movies better. But I didn't find any German directors (yet) that I liked. There were a few interesting French movies, and I have a little smattering of French to be able to catch a phrase or two. Melville was interesting, but the real find - for me - was Godard. The guy is a wonderful movie maker in any language.

That brings me to Kurosowa. Many years ago, I found a copy of Dreams. It's a strange and wonderful little movie, told as an interrelated sequence of short stories. That eventually lead me, many years later, to Rashomon, the Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, Yojimbo, and Sanjuro. All of these were fascinating - or at least entertaining. I suppose it doesn't hurt that I have more than a passing interest in medieval Japanese culture.

When I found out that Sanjuro was re-made as a Clint Eastwood movie, I sought that out. I also really liked the fact that The Magnificent Seven, a movie that I had heard about for years from my father but had never watched myself, was based on the Kurosowa film. The movie makes no secret of that - but I hadn't heard that until I saw it on the credits of the Magnificent Seven.

Anyway, that was a long intro for such a short thing. I've been dipping into movies, mostly, because I've always loved movies but I've never watched movies the way that I read. I watch movies - or I did until recently - for entertainment. I read for edification, aesthetic beauty, and entertainment. I watch any crap that looks good. I read the best books I can find - I want to read and to know the best in print. I can't say that about film. As I suggested, I've been trying to remedy that disparity.

Pale Rider - to finally get back to the title here - feels a little formulaic now. It's about a colony of families panning for gold in California, with an evil, rich boss threatening to drive them off their claim so that he can take it over and rip the gold out. In rides Clint, and he has this spectacular swordfight - with what look like axe handles or shovel handles. Then he follows the wholesome but unthreatening other guy back to the colony, and all the women - including a 14-year-old girl - fall in love with him. He turns them all down, until the end, where he has sex with the woman that is going to marry the good guy who is going to stay behind. And, of course, there's lots of shooting and that kind of stuff.

I suppose there's something enjoyable in this. I suppose it's interesting to see the way that Clint acts like a "real man," and the way that - of course - all the women are going to love him. Even the little ones. It's a little frustrating that he doesn't get hurt - not even nicked - and that he manages to outgun and outthink about twenty people. It's fun to watch this stuff sometimes, but when it gets this improbable, I start to lose interest.

It is what it is, I guess. Maybe I shouldn't expect so much. It's hard to compare this movie to something like Dreams, or even The Seven Samurai. Heck, even the Magnificent Seven lets some of the main characters die, even if it isn't entirely clear how they were killed.

Mysteries of Pittsburgh movie?

Here's a link to the film's website:

And here's a link to the IMDB profile of the film, for release next year?

This looks like good timing. I'm loving everything that I read by this guy, and I'm sure that even a bad version of his book as a movie would be entertaining. Let's hope that it doesn't get the same level of angry, frustrated praise that the "gay cowboy" movie - good old, heartbreaking Brokeback - got.

Just finished reading Mysteries of Pittsburgh

I really enjoyed this book. It's about a young man who has just finished college, and who isn't sure who he is. He goes through some sexual confusion, and he manages to be confused and excited in interesting, fun-to-read ways. The reviews were strongly positive - managing to make an old story sound interesting and new.

I suppose what makes this book interesting for me is that Chabon makes his characters - and his plots - worth reading about. I want to get to know and understand Phlox, the female love interest. I'm curious about this Arthur character, and I want to know what this guy is going to say. Cleveland is also a very interesting character, and he is worth finding out more about. The ending was also a bit unexpected, though not annoyingly so. It followed from the material provided without being either predictable or completely crazy.

I also really think that Chabon is capable of turning rather apt phrases. He can capture an image with astonishing care. An example would be the way that he describes an Italian restaurant as "darkness and garlic." I'm not reproducing the whole effect, but he manages to evoke - the word that I attach so often to Hemingway, one of my favorites - emotion and image, not merely describe it. He's a crafty writer, and his characters are full and interesting. His dialogue is sharp and interesting. For this kind of book, it was unusually captivating.

I've talked to myself about writing a book on a similar theme. I'm glad that I read this book first. I'm not so sure that I want to write that book anymore. No, I don't suppose I would be writing about a sexual awakening. But the confusion after college was definitely a tempting subject.

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This is a test.

Hiatus

I've got a new teaching job, and a new resolve to write more about things. I'm going to try to focus on things that concern me, and try not to hash through the mundane details of my mostly mundane life. I'm not that interesting. My best hope for something worth reading is to be observant about my mundanity.

Thinking poetically

There were times, buried long ago
among memories of schools and friends and the ashes of a life -
the slash-and-burn living of everyday scattering of
identity
- of hope.
I love that word. I wrap myself in it, my nose and eyes burn when
I see it. It chokes me, those four bulging letters,
Like the furies. I've almost murdered you.
Almost.
Remembering a car ride with my father, when it felt like he lost hope.
Or maybe it was the first time I noticed.
Driving me home from something, somewhere, and answering
my probing about his new job with that soft calm serious voice
I'm not interested in a promotion,
that soft calm serious voice again,
that stuff doesn't matter to me anymore.
and again, battering at me with calmness,
i'm too old to care about that now.
too old.
That soft calm voice was a corpse to me.
My own hope weakened that day, my hope
felt a little chest pain and ignored it
That my novels - those aborted children sitting headed with no trunks, no bodies, no real flesh or meaning and certainly no life -
sat meaningless unfinished in cold computer-memory corners
my memories and muscles fading, collapsing.
Hope - that great hope that bulged from under my eyelids, that crammed my guts full of brilliant strong words like sackfuls of expanding grain bursting and breaking my body open to pour out the fecund language of hope and love and meaning

I hope, but that hope is weakening as other things weaken, my grip my memory my strength
I hope, but that hope knows limits that before were but the medieval constraints of small nervous minds
I hope, but that hope knows that sometimes sleep and food and money are needed to live and keep on
I hope, but that hope knows that time is short and fleeing fast
I hope, but that hope knows its weakness.
It is a wise, weak hope.
I hope.

Poem by Neruda

This is a translation of a Neruda poem, an ode. Even for a translation, this poem shows a masterful articulation of the delight in the everyday that can really sparkle. I sometimes think that the most powerful poetry shows us something beautiful about our everyday lives. This is a poem like that.

Soap,
I bring you
near my face,
and your snowy perfume
seems foreign to me.
I don’t know the land
of your origin,
aroma,
do you come from
provincial turf?
Or from my gorgeous cousin?
From laundry in a trough
soaking, or from the starry hands
of a chill?
Or from those lilacs,
oh those lilacs?
Or from the eyes of
Maria, the farm girl?
From branches, full and heavy,
with green plums?
From the soccer field
or from the bathroom
under the trembling willows?
Do you smell like arbors,
like sweet love,
or a saint’s day cake?
Do you spread the aroma
of a dewy heart?

What do you bring me,
soap?
To my nostrils
suddenly
in the morning
before entering dawn’s
waters,
to leave through the streets
among men overwhelmed
by the burden of their merchandise?
What perfume of a distant
town,
petticoat flowers,
honey of wild girls?
Or maybe
it is the old-fashioned
essence of the
general store
and foodstuffs,
strong white linens
pressed in the hands of country folk,
the happy
plushness
of spun sugar,
or my uncle and aunt’s
kitchen cupboard,
or a red carnation
like a ray,
like a crimson arrow?

Is that
your brisk
bouquet
of bargain
stores,
of an unforgettable colony,
of beauty parlors,
of a pure province,
of immaculate water?

Soap,
you
are
pure delight,
fleeting fragrance
slipping like a shipwreck,
like a blind fish
in the profundities of the bathtub.

Posting again?

I'm pulling an old trick and posting twice when I have time, so that I don't feel so bad when it takes me another week to get back to a computer.

I just watched Munich, and I was disappointed. Spielberg uses an interesting plot device to highlight the moral conundrum the main character faces. The massacre of the Israeli Olympic team is told in chunks alongside the story of a team of Mossad assassins sent to kill the people who murdered the athletes. The story is mostly about how the Mossad killers struggle with the morality of assassinating killers - who probably deserve to die, but who deserve to die for doing things very much like what the assassins have to do now. In other words, the act of assassinating the terrorists is a lot like terrorism. Perhaps it could be argued that these were not innocent people, but terrorists argue that way too.

I suppose it's an interesting thing to think about, and I like sitting here thinking about the ways that this movie folds back on itself and connects in odd ways. I like the way that the movie pulls an actor that I haven't seen in anything except Moonraker as Mr. Drax, and makes him a strange sort of French businessman. This actor, and the son who supplies most of the information about the whereabouts of the terrorists to the Mossad team, really intrigued me as a character who sold information about the location of the terrorists, and then someone who turns around and sells information on the Mossad team.

I hate it, though, when a movie tries to catch you not paying attention. There were a lot of things that I missed because of bad lighting or because I wasn't paying enough attention. I couldn't decipher whether they managed to kill the last target or not, and I don't know if the guy who was with him died or not. I hate that I don't know, and I'm too frustrated to go back and check now. Part of it was that I was watching it on a small TV from far away and my eyes are not that great. Part of it was that they didn't make the movie in a way that I could follow easily.

The other movie that I watched was Batman Begins. This was much better. I was surprised at how deep they tried to take it, and how I was willing to follow it. I suppose I'm a sucker for superhero movies, and Batman has been a favorite of mine since I was a kid - though not as big as Spiderman to me. Anyway, I thought that this movie was really well done. I like Katie Holmes as the in-your-face idealist assistant DA, and I like it when she slaps Bale around for bringing a gun to kill the guy who killed his parents. I like Liam Neeson in the movie - he seems a good choice for the strangely mystical Shadow guy. The Ninja training that Bruce goes through doesn't seem like much - there are some montage scenes of fighting and stuff that look kind of cool. But the scary part was the sudden way that Dr. Crane spooks people. That was kind of nifty. I suppose I liked that part - the dust and the scarecrow mask were kind of a shock.

Anyway, I'm going to bed now. Night night.

It's Been a While

It's funny how things get crazy when school starts. There are so many things that I had planned to do over the two weeks that we get between Christmas and the start of school. And so few of them happened.

I've been commiserating with other teachers through my program a lot lately. That's one nice thing about the alternative certification thing - you end up hanging out with other new teachers more than most, I think. I mean, there are twenty other new teachers in my classes that I take two nights a week. I hear a lot of horror stories (war stories, I think we can call them), and I get a lot of sympathy when I choose to share my stories. I know that I'm not the worst off out there, and I know that other people are really struggling to be good teachers. It's hard to take a room full of overachievers and throw them at an uncertain situation with so many ways for things to go wrong. It's a really tough job, and I'm not just saying that. It's funny how many people say that to be nice or respectful but don't really think that. It's like people who say that we should respect our elders but politely tune them out when they talk, or don't go and visit. Don't get me wrong - I know that I should, but I also neglect my family and my elders more than most.

Anyway, I managed to stay up all night last Thursday. And I got two hours of sleep this Thursday night. The way my schedule is, I get almost no sleep on that night. And then I'm burnt out for the weekend and need the time off to recover, so I fall behind again and the cycle repeats itself. Oh well.

Thinking about Teaching

I'm a teacher, and I'm thinking today about how good I am. I'm going to start classes again on Monday, and I'm also going to have to attend classes at a local college of education - that same place that I was attacking in my last post. I'm not excited about the workload, but I'm getting anxious sitting here doing so little. I'm not the kind of person who does well with a lot of free time. I make big plans about all of the things I will do with that time, and I get very little done. I seem to thrive on being busy, and I don't know what to do when I'm not. That's not good for your heart, especially with a family history of heart disease.

So I'm sitting here planning out my classroom as much as I can. I'm not very happy yet with all of the plans, partly because there are so many things that I want to be able to do today. I can't get into my school during the break, so I can't get in there and start making the physical changes that I want to make. So I'm going to be scurrying around on Monday morning, arriving as early as traffic and coffee will let me, and trying to make things happen. I wanted to make the class look physically very different, but I'm not sure that it's going to happen. I don't know that I have enough time. I suppose I could do it on Monday evening after school, but how much can you get done in that short of a time?

I've mentioned the book that I'm reading to help me figure out more about how to plan a lesson and be a better teacher. It's How the Brain Learns by David Sousa. I'm finished now, and I think that reading his book has been very enlightening. This is the first time I've finished an entire teaching book, which says something. Maybe it says that I'm desperate. I don't know. But it suggests also that the book is valuable and readable. It presents ways that the brain retains information, retrieves it, and how to make these things work best in an instructional context. I would like to think that this has made me a better teacher - knowing more about these things - but we'll see.

Anyway, back to work at it. I hope to be as ready as can be come Monday.

Thinking about Schools of Education

I just had a meeting with a professor at my school of education. I won't name it, because I don't want to have to be nice. The place is, first of all, like a poorly run corporation, sitting in an office building in Chicago with administrative offices spiraling through the building in incomprehensible order and array. You have to get help to find an office. It's not even all in the same building. The professors are mostly former and current teachers, and because of the strange diversity of skills in the profession, the professors are also diverse in teaching ability. In other words, many of the instructors in the school of education can't teach. Or they teach the class in a way that doesn't match their students. It's so hard to adjust your teaching from one age to another - speaking as someone who took three years of college teaching into a fifth grade classroom - and many of these teachers don't do it well. There have been a few exceptions. But mostly it's embarrassing how bad some of these professors are.

Then there's always one. One person on the faculty who gets it. Who knows what's going on, understands the issues that you're facing, and constructs the class as a solution to the problems that you really have. Or will have. A teacher who can teach. Isn't that a strange idea? A teacher who can design an effective lesson, and then carry it out. Someone who cares so much about her students - all of her students - that she can learn all of their names within the first week - difficult when there are hundreds and you only meet once a week - and then she makes herself available for office hours DURING THE HOLIDAY BREAK. In my ten years of higher education, including my preliminary examinations, I've only been able to meet with a professor over a break three times. And that was serious graduate school stuff. This was just because she wanted to make sure we were doing okay.

And, of course, many of us aren't. She's smart enough to know that and take steps to solve it. Damn. She's good.

I just wanted to think about her, and I wanted to throw it out there that I want to be as good as her someday. Or even half as good.