The fitting series finale of Angel
Note: A recent discusion on Kulturblog brought to mind a post I made on a messageboard about the series finale of Angel — “Not Fade Away”. I managed to track it down. I’m posting it here because I think it deserves a canonical place in my oeuvre. Re-reading it, I find nothing I disagree with, eight years after the fact. I have made some minor edits for grammar, spelling, clarity and punctuation.
Spoiler warning: I think the shelf life on requiring spoiler tags has come and gone for Angel, but since I know that there are still viewers out there still working their way through the series (via Netflix, DVD, etc.), I’m going to post this warning: this spoils pretty much everything about the series ever. Like from the second sentence on. Do not read until you have watched the entire series.
After the series finale of Angel (“Not Fade Away”), I thought that I was going to be writing a defense of the Manichean ending: the forces of good poised to battle evil. But as I’ve thought about it, I’ve realized the ending isn’t all that Manichean after all — even though it ends with the iconic pose of four heroes, weapons in hand, staring down a rushing flood of demon warriors.
First, it’s not as simple as good vs. evil because all the heroes are deeply scarred and not wholly pure.
Gunn has never fully recovered from his role in the revenge killing of the professor who sent Fred to the demon dimension. Sure, he didn’t strike a fatal blow, but he was the one who pushed the man into the portal where he would be transported to a place where he wouldn’t survive for long. And then, of course, in his attempt to retain the power boost to his brain, he signed the papers that set up the events that led to Fred’s body being taken over by the demon Ilyria.
Fred herself is not quite as pure as the image she projects. Although Gunn gave the final push, Fred was the one who was out for blood and is most responsible for the whole professor thing. Of course, Fred is no longer Fred. She’s already gone, her body now the vessel for Ilyria — Ilyria who shows up for the final battle filled with grief for Westley. A demon finally affected by the vestigal humanity of her vessel, willing to stand and fight with the others Fred loved even though it’s not really her battle. [BTW, is anyone else struck by how embodiment is such a constant theme in this series?].
Wesley betrayed his best friend. Seduced by a (false) prophecy, he took Angel’s infant son and delivered him to Holz. And then there’s all the murky stuff after that — forming a relationship with Lila, keeping Justine locked up in a closet [so he could rescue Angel, but still...]. In fact, Wesley’s tragic flaw is that he thinks in stark, Manichean terms. It started with his failure with Faith, and in spite of how ‘dark’ he became, the flaw remained with him — thus Connor, thus his leading role in doubting Angel this final season, etc. This, I think, is part of the reason he was the one who died before the final fight [and the why the whole 'lie to me now' is so poignant]. He doesn’t quite fit with the others.
Neither does Lorne. Which is why he isn’t there. A compassionate, sensitive demon with a distaste for violence. I’ve never heard a silencer sound so mournful.
Finally we have the twin paradoxes — Angel and Spike. The vampires with a soul. Angelus, one of the greatest mass murders the world has ever known and William the bloody. Sure they are champions. But the demon is never far away with them. Angel is there to finish the fight that began when he fled Buffy’s arms for LA. Spike — he’s living on borrowed time anyway.
It’s tempting to think that Angel has gone fey , itching to battle to the end because he has given way his incentive to live [to life]. And yet the Shanshu prophecy was never what it was really all about. Sure, Angel would have liked to be fully human again. But his core motivation has always been redemption: atoning for Angelus’s bloody deeds.
And here we get to the second reason why it’s not some simple Manichean struggle: it’s not some ultimate, almost abstract, good vs. evil thing. It’s much more human than that. From the beginning Angel and co. have been about freeing people — individual humans — from demonic influences. Slaying the demon, vampire or whatever so people can get back to their ‘normal’ lives. Angel reminds us in his stirring speech in the offices of Wolfram & Hart that you can’t ultimately erase evil, you can’t destroy forever end of story — you can only slow it down, throw a wrench in the works. It may mow you down, but you still win by standing against it because in choosing to stand you assert what humanity is all about: the freedom to make choices.
Through five seasons Angel and co. have fought to create a city (the city of Angels) where individuals have the space, the room to choose their own fate, unterrorized by evil. The final fight at the end isn’t some crazy suicide mission engaged in by world-weary individuals who have nothing left to lose. It’s the final chapter of the battle they’ve been fighting. It’s what they’ve been doing since the beginning — writ large.
William Gibson’s advice to writers
I quite enjoyed William Gibson’s collection of non-fiction Distrust That Particular Flavor, which was published earlier this year. It’s always dicey writing about the future, and Gibson has his share of head-scratchers, although, on the whole he was right about a lot of things. He also was no tech-utopian.
The prose of his nonfiction is not all that different from his fiction — it has his unique, particular flow (and, yes, flavor). Every so often he strings together a verb with some adjectives around a couple of nouns and it’s quite astounding. But even more importantly, Gibson writes comments after each essay that show an awareness of his career and/or glimpses of his personal life that help humanize him. Turns out he really is a Writer.
And some of the stuff from the ’90s is worth reading simply as a reminder of where we were once at, and where we thought we were heading.
The very best passage in the whole collection, though, is of recent vintage and comes very early in the book, on page 2 — it’s the sixth paragraph of the introduction:
We have to learn to write fiction, but we have already, to varying degrees, had to learn to read it. And I felt like quite a good reader of fiction, when I began to write fiction, or at least a good reader of that fiction which I most keenly enjoyed. And thus are we shape as writers, I believe, not so much by who our favorite writers are as by our general experience of fiction. Learning to write fiction, we learn to listen for our own acquired sense of what feels right, based on the totality of the pleasure (or its lack) that fiction had provided us. Not direct emulation, but rather a matter of a personal micro-culture. (2-3)
I totally dig this notion of a writer’s personal micro-culture and think he’s right on target with this observation on the important of reading and how it influences writers.
Appreciation: Adoulla in Throne of the Crescent Moon
I enjoyed reading Saladin Ahmed’s Throne of the Crescent Moon very much. It has a lot going for it: it’s complex and gritty without being depressing and uber-graphic. It’s fun and humorous while still filled with violence and action. It has a magic system and secondary world that while familiar is also unique and fresh. It delivers a ton in one short novel, but also sets up further adventures. But the main reason I enjoyed reading Throne of the Crescent Moon is the character Doctor Adoulla Makhslood.
Adoulla is an old, fat dude who wears a white kaftan (an impossibly white kaftan mind you). He is sometimes witty and often whiny (about traffic, about tea, about the aches and pains of getting old). He lives in a sweet townhouse bachelor pad (okay, so it’s more scholar’s den than bachelor pad) in the poor part of town. He also just happens to be a powerful ghul* hunter with a spine of steel — the last of his kind in his native city of Dhamsawaat. He’s a wily old sorcerer who with a toss of a powdered herb or other concoction and the right prayer can unmake ghuls. His love for Dhamsawaat is endearing and vividly described. His not-quite relationship with the proprietress of a brothel is poignant: she won’t marry him unless he gives up his calling as a ghul hunter. The way he razzes his very serious, very religously observant, very deadly with a blade assistant Raseed is hilarious but also, at times, a bit exasperating. In fact, Adoulla is an exasperating guy to many — there’s a fine line between charming and forceful and annoying. The paternal concern he has for the shapeshifting desert princess that appears on the scene that is combined with his willingness channel her fury and thirst for vengeance comes across as realistic.
In short, he is a complex, interesting, fallible, humorous, competent, tough character. For all the other lovely realized characters in the book (and they all are — the characterization is great), it’s Adoulla who makes the novel. He’s one of the best characters to show up in epic fantasy in quite some time.
*Ghuls are nasty fiends made by a magus from water, bone, etc. to wreak havoc at their master’s bidding.
What services authors need and what they should give up to get them
I don’t plan to write a lot about publishing issues here at WHM. There are plenty of other great places where you can dive into that morass. This is where I can play the wannabe author, the fanboy, the literary critic, the comedian. However, I do work in higher ed marketing and communications. Which means I do have some expertise in some of the key issues authors are facing right now. So while I don’t plan on banging this drum too often, I may have something to say on the matter from time-to-time. This is one of those times.
I think we’re all tired of the “NY” publishers vs. the self/indie publishers debates. I think the bloom is also off the rose of the major ebook platforms (Amazon KDP, in particular). I’d like to take a step back and look at what the core needs are for authors right now and who the candidates are to fill those needs. I make no claims to what the right answer is. But I also don’t think that the answer of “well, it all depends on what you want” is all that useful either. It’s too often framed as “do you want to do all the work yourself and hold on to the rights to your creative work?” or “do you want your agent and publisher to do all the work and give up some (many) of the rights to your creative work?” Or in other words, the choice is framed as more freedom + more work (which means more direct profit) vs. less freedom + less work (which means more time devoted to writing).
That’s not what the calculation should be. The calculation should be: how can I as a writer of fiction maximize…
a) the quality of the packaging of my creative work [product/branding] and my creative persona [branding]
b) the awareness of my creative work as well as my brand as an author as well as the feelings about both my creative work and authorial persona [marketing/public relations]
c) the sales of my creative work [sales]
d) the profit I derive from the sales of my creative work [ROI]?
e) the time I spend on writing while still finding time to manage the business side of things as well as my brand building
On an abstract level, I like the notion of self-publishing because I like the idea of authors being able to hang on to as many of their rights as possible. Authors should control what happens to their works: they created them, after all. The practical considerations, however, appear daunting.
So the next question for fiction authors as I see it is: who can provide the best mix of services that lead to a quality product, high awareness, good branding/awareness, excellent sales and fantastic ROI (measured both in terms of profit and time freed up for writing) for the least onerous trading of rights?
The Candidates
These are just capsule analyses. There’s a lot more that could be said about each candidate. And there’s serious diversity among the actual entities in each candidate category. But for the sake of this discussion here’s what we have:
Publishers: love them; hate them. The question is can they get back to providing value on the development side and pivot to provide more value on the marketing/sales side, especially when it comes to ebooks.
Distributors/Booksellers: Amazon, Apple, B&N, etc. The problem is that if any one gets too much power than they may start demanding even more rights. They’re already making it more difficult than it should be to promote across sales platforms and control pricing. They also care less about the development side, leaving that to those who are willing to do it themselves. To Amazon, or yes, even Apple, as long as it’s at a basic level, quality doesn’t matter so long as there’s a big enough audience to lead to sales.
Literary Agencies: Are only in the game because publishers have outsourced so much of the talent development to them. Some are making tentative steps to dealing with the other side of things (covers, layout, marketing and sales), but I’m dubious about their ability to handle the nitty gritty of distribution, pricing, and marketing (except for public relations, where they could do just fine).
Marketing Agencies: A total dark horse candidate here. But since success in the new era of publishing may rely heavily on SEO/SEM, pricing strategies, negotiating with distributors and social media, some agencies, especially those who have pivoted away from advertising towards web marketing, could possibly have a leg up on all of the above when it comes to the execution of certain strategies.
Authors Themselves: it’s certainly possible for authors to gain the skills necessary to engage in the various activities required to bring a creative work to market and sell it (and subcontract some of those activities out). It requires a wide-ranging skillset and the ability to move between roles as required.
Note that any of the above (except possibly for distributors) could come in the form of paying independent contractors, co-0ps, bartering of services, etc.
The reality is that we’ll probably see a mix of all of the above, at least for the near future.
The Required Elements
1. A novel that appeals to a large enough audience that provides a good chance of sales that leads to a decent ROI. Yes, that’s a lot of business speak. But when it comes right down to it: books are units. The problem here, though, is that creative units are different than industrial units: quality and creativity count. That usually means that the novel needs to pass through the hands of someone who can provide good feedback on developmental edits. It also needs to be thoroughly proofread.
2. A book cover that not only is both pleasing to the author (this is important and one of the major reasons for authors to maintain control of their product) and effective in the marketplace and that works in all the various sizes and formats in which the book is going to be sold (cover design is more complicated in the era of ebooks).
3. The packaging of the novel in all the physical and electronic formats that it needs to be sold in to reach readers. And it needs to be formatted and packaged correctly for each of those formats. This may mean, going forward, additional packaging of the novel (other than trade paperback and ebook). This could be anything from a premium hardbound book package that includes extras (signed bookplates, posters, etc.) to an enhanced ebook experience (video, music, audio, extra illustrations, etc.).
4. The presence of the novel in all of the stores, physical and electronic, where it is most likely to reach potential readers. And priced correctly in each of those venues with the right meta-data, categorization/shelf space, etc. This would also include continual monitoring of sales to tweak metadata and pricing to try to optimize sales, and those efforts should be pegged to both analytics data based on trends, but also to take advantage of any bumps in interest/sales related to publicity.
5. An ongoing marketing campaign that may or may not include advertising (paid ads) but should definitely include an active ongoing social media conversation (with advice and analytics on which platforms are the best use of the author’s time); media pitching (reviews, Q&As, profiles, top ten lists, etc. — and to both traditional outlets and bloggers/social media stars); search engine optimization (SEO); giveaways/contests; appearances at bookstores, cons, etc.; and all of those need to be tied to actual data where possible and benchmarked with other authors where possible.
6. Active reaching out to sell/lease/cut a deal on foreign rights/translations, film rights, game rights, merchandise rights, etc. and then management of those deals so that there’s the best chance possible for a decent ROI (or at least an ROR — Return on Rights — if things don’t work out) as well as preservation of the author’s brand which means any further iterations of the book/story have to meet certain quality standards.
7. Further management of the author’s career/brand. That includes other works in the series (if applicable). Branching out into other series, genres, media, etc.
The Bottom Line
That’s a lot. And it requires someone or a team of people with creative, analytical, managerial and relationship skills. It’ll be interesting to see who emerges with the ability to do all of that (and obviously execution of the above can be grander or smaller/deeper or shallower depending on the author, the book and the ability to provide an initial investment). And this is why many authors prefer to have publishers. The problem is that neither publishers, nor agents, nor marketing/pr firms really have a grasp on it all (or at least very few do). And the bigger problem is that all of this can lead to significant costs, and some of the activity may not have much of an effect on sales. This is the argument the publishers make for taking a large cut of sales and/or not investing in marketing and/or not publishing certain works (or dropping midlist authors). Not everyone agrees that the value they add is worth the cost.
It’s going to continue to be tempting for authors to trade rights for services (which is essentially what they do now when they get literary agents who then sell to publishers). Many fiction writers just want to write. But I think more and more we’re going to see authors questioning what services they are getting for giving up all those rights. And what the ROI is for them in the long run.
I also think that more and more authors will choose to hold on to their rights and either DIY or contract out or collaborate with others to make the required elements happen.
So the biggest question I have is if the right agency (literary agency, marketing/pr agency, publisher that turns in to an agency) with the right fee structure and expertise can positions themselves to be able to provide some or all of these services. If so, I do think it would be worth looking at. Ideally, it would be one that doesn’t invest in huge overhead (authors don’t want to be paying for that). Ideally, it would also provide the level of reporting that publishers don’t often provide, but are more common in the world of sales and marketing (especially SEO/SEM services). Things change when you are the client rather than the raw material provider.
In the end, my answer is no different than anyone else who has weighed in on this topic: you have to choose what’s right for you. But I think you need to be clear about what you’re getting and make sure that all the elements I mention are covered and covered efficiently and professionally. And for that clarity I think it’s key to think about this issue as one of trading rights to creative work for services. What do you need and what is worth giving up (or paying for) for what you need?
The thematics of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians
Please note that this is a work of literary criticism and as such there may be major or minor spoilers ahead. Also note that I have yet to read Grossman’s sequel so my mind may change once I read it.
I enjoyed Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, but it was not an unalloyed experience for me. Part of the reason why can be found in the levels of thematics that one encounters near the end (but not the very very end) of the novel, especially in the latter part of the Fillory section.
The first theme, Quentin’s theme, which is one that Alice specifically spells out for us at one point, is that a change of scenery doesn’t cure unhappiness. You are who you are no matter what magical educational institution (Brakebills) or land (Fillory) you may gain access to. This is a good theme. It’s an especially good theme for a novel that’s trying to provide a grittier, more complex version of both the magic school and the magic land tropes in fantasy. Of course, I could do without the straight-up explication of the theme at some many points. But that’s okay. It still worked for me.
The second theme, which is Martin Chatwin’s theme, is that you can’t stay in a fantasy land forever and doing so warps you and turns you into something evil. This is also a good theme, although it’s hammered home a little too bluntly for my tastes.
The third theme, which is Jane Chatwin’s theme, is bound up with the meta-narrative of the novel. Jane has been manipulating timelines using her magic watch. Thus all the pain and loss and alienation that Quentin and co. experience is kind of her fault. This theme is that even the best possible timeline/outcome still leads to pain and loss — that such things aren’t avoidable because that’s just how life works. This is an okay theme, but it feels rather tacked on, and that made me a little bit cranky.
The fourth theme, which is Martin Chatwin’s deeper theme, is revealed by Jane to Quentin. It is that child abuse causes serious damage to a child and can turn them into someone who later inflicts pain on others. This one really made me cranky. Let me be clear: it’s a perfectly valid theme. Child abuse is horrible. The problem, though, is that it clouds the other themes and crowds out much of what it seemed to me Grossman was trying to do. The whole trail of causation leads back to an act of child abuse. Perfectly plausible and valid, even in a genre work. Not where I would have chosen to go in a work that is trying to deconstruct Harry Potter and the Chronicles of Narnia. Again, I’m fairly sympathetic to the project Grossman is undertaking with this novel. But I think that by taking it in this direction you add darkness to already darkness, which mitigates the impact. And it also, in some ways, let’s everybody off of the hook: Martin, Jane, Quentin, Quentin’s friends.
On the whole, I could have done without the thematic layers that Jane brought because I thought they muddied the wrong waters (I’ll have more to say about the actual actual ending of the novel later). Although I will say this: I loved Jane’s crack about the clocks in the trees that don’t do or mean anything. That’s the sort of meta-absurdity that The Magicians could have used more of.
Mindy Kaling: romantic comedies are a subgenre of sci-fi
I love this bit from the intro to the “Types of Women in Romantic Comedies Who Are Not Real” chapter from Mindy Kaling’s Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?
I simply regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world created therein has different rules than my regular human world. Then I just lap it up. There is no difference between Ripley from Alien and any Katherine Heigl character. They’re all participating in the same level of made-up awesomeness, and I enjoy every second of it.
So true.
Italo Calvino, Bakhtin, permanent revolution
In his essay collection The Uses of Literature, Italo Calvino writes about his reaction to reading Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism. The essay was published in 1969. In it, Calvino has an aside about why he reads criticism:
If I continue to read books of criticism, it is because I always hope they will give me surprises of this kind. The greatest of all was to find, hidden in the pages of Bachtin’s Doystoyebsky, a model of “permanent revolution” (seen as typical of antiquity and the Middle Ages) which could very well be suggested as the society of the future, the only model that would respond to all those requirements that we cannot make fit together: a society based on the regular alternation of destructive periods of consumerism and carnival spirit with periods of productive austerity. (58-59)
I will not subject you to a long rant on the social, political and cultural events and trends since this was written that suggest to me that Calvino was on target with that observation. I will also spare you a rhapsody on the joys of Bakhtin (when read correctly). Rather, I would point to science fiction and fantasy (especially all of the various permutations of fantasy from the past three decades that are not high fantasy) as fascinating, effective vehicles through which to both remind us of our condition of permanent revolution and give us glimpses of actual revolution. Both, I think, are necessary tasks. One can either fight/engage the twin poles of consumerism and austerity by going narrow and precious — the little epiphany; the static suspension of character; the annulment of reading pleasure; the quiet desperation; the sterile play — or you can go big, bold, beautiful (even if darkly so) and fun.
Of course, I’m the madman trying to cross-breed the two, but that’s neither here nor there.
Yet.
The Writing Life: what I want in a text editor
A screen shot of my humor piece "Liberating the Joycean Corpus" as composed in gedit (click to see full size)
I do the bulk of my writing, including fiction, in a text editor. I like the simplicity of text editors. I like the fact that text files, even large ones, open quickly. I like that I can sync my text files with Dropbox and open and edit them on any phone and any computer and any tablet (although I don’t have a tablet yet) regardless of operating system or platform. I use gedit on my home Linux desktop and work MacBook and Notesy on my iPhone. Both are great tools. But I’d love to see a truly multi-platform text editor that was especially geared towards writers.
Here is what I would want in such a text editor:
Comprehensive dictionary
For writers, it would be useful to be able to peg the spellcheck to a specific dictionary and even edition of that dictionary, especially if you’re working with a defined house dictionary/edition. This would, of course, require paying licensing fees, but if they were reasonable, I’d be willing to pay.
Customizable colors
Being able to customize the color of the background and type is a must for me. This is an option on most desktop text editors — less so (or limited on) on the mobile ones. My preference is white on dark blue. It’d be cool if a multi-platform editor not only allowed customization (via a color wheel or sliders) but also came with several pre-sets.
In-document section breaks
It would be great if you could use some sort of tag plus number and or file menu tool to break chunks of text into drafts, chapters and/or sections. I currently keep every revision of a work in the same text file. It’s very handy, but, admittedly, it does lead to a lot of scrolling sometimes (although I insert manual tag cues that allow me to use ctrl+f to find the beginning of each draft). To me, such breaks are much more natural units for thinking about the text (and navigating through it) than pages.
Customizable navigation pane
One of the reasons I use a text editor is that when you have it open there’s very little stuff you have to work with — no toolbars or ribbons or whatever. What I would like, though, would be the ability to open up a navigation pane/sidebar that would display the draft, chapter and sections of the open document. Even better would be if you could customize the sidebar to also list supporting text files (worldbuilding stuff, list of names, etc.). It would sort of be a minimalist Scrivener, but since everything lives in text files, you aren’t locked in to any one platform or even one way of organizing the information. If you want to make a bunch of separate text files for a writing project, you could do that. Or if you want to keep everything in just one or two, that would also work.
Extra word count features
All text editors can do a basic document or selected text word count. I’d like expanded word count features such as a wordcout countdown (for writing sprints) and chapter or section word count (see above).
Word frequency tool
I’d also like a word frequency tool that generates smart (as in, it leaves out words like ‘and’ or ‘or’) word frequency lists for a document, draft version, chapter, section or chunk of highlighted text. Reading level/readability analysis would also be interesting, but wouldn’t be a high priority for me.
In conclusion
The problem with most text input programs is they are overkill — they try to also be layout programs. Text editors are minimalist, which is awesome. But with a few extra, non-obtrusive tools, they could be ideal for writers. Now, I realize most writers aren’t going to break their MS Word habit. And it’s true that once you get to the submission stage and/or to the stage where you’re working with an editor, you’re going to need to layout it out in Word and, likely, use track changes. But there’s no reason everything up to that point can’t be done in a text editor. And I, at least, find that I’m productive working that way. In fact, since upping my output of fiction, I’ve found it quite lovely. Uncluttered is awesome. Now if only there were just a few more writerly-oriented, non-screen-cluttering features and a truly cross-platform/device option.
Anthologizing: Nebula Awards Showcase 2010
Here are some rough, quick impressions from my reading of the Nebula Awards Showcase 2010.
MashUp That Worked: the novelette “Pride and Prometheus” by John Kessel. This is a form that was already hackneyed the first time you even heard Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (and, of course, there are similar mashups that predate that phenomenon), but just because it’s a MashUp, doesn’t mean it’s not good, and this collision of the worlds of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley (Frankenstein) worked for me. In particular, Kessel exquisitely details what it’s like to have an attraction that is doomed not only because of who the two people involved are, but also because of the choices they have made in their life. And even if you know how it’s likely to turn out, it all unfolds nicely.
Shoulda Just Been a Novel: the novella “The Spacetime Pool” by Catherine Asaro. I liked the adventure and the romance (although the deliverance from the final difficulties seemed to come way to easy), but even more than that I really enjoyed all the math and physics references and clues about what the alternate world that the heroine is transported to. And yet we get so little answers and pretty much no payoff from all those hints and references. This should have been bumped up to 70-120k words and delivered with a real conflict and some world-building payoff.
Best Retrospective: this volume has several retrospectives of the field in earlier decades. Contributors include Robert Silverberg, Frederick Pohl and Elizabeth Ann Hull, Kevin J. Anderson, and more. The best of them is David Drake’s look at the Golden Age and what it made it so and what didn’t make it so. But really, all the ones up through the 1960s are worth reading. The latter decades, less so.
Cute and Precocious or Not so Much?: I can’t decide which when it comes to the excerpt from Flora’s Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room) by Ysabeau S. Wilce. The freakiness and frenetic pace appeal to me, but I wonder how it stands up over the course of an entire novel. I may or may not investigate further. If I recall correctly, I did enjoy her story “The Lineaments of Gratified Desire”.
Cracked Me Up: the Selected Commentaries from Algis Budrys. Budrys (among other things) was a editor and critic of science fiction in the 1960s. In these commentaries he writes about the current state of the field, the already nostalgia for the golden age, the state of the slush pile, etc. with wit, authority, cynicism and world-weariness. I found his commentaries amusing and informative and, although this the cliche, they are a reminder that when it comes to writers and editors and the market, the more things change; the more they stay the same.
Harder Than It Looks: the excerpts from the script for Wall-E are deceptively simple. Now, of course, much of the success of an animated film comes from the art, voice and sound work, and editing. But that makes the script all that more important and one thing that really stands out is the verbs — and that economy and clarity and crispness very much translates on to the screen.
Liberating the Joycean Corpus
The recent entering of James Joyce’s oeuvre into the public domain has led to a surge of renewed interest in his writing. The following excerpts have been pulled from just a few of the many exciting new editions of Joyce’s most famous works that publishers the world over have planned for the coming weeks and months:
From The Barefoot Schoolhouse’s illustrated copy of “The Dead”:
Yep, the TV weather guy got it right: it is snowing lots and lots all over the land of Ireland.
From the Little Debbie Appreciation Society’s YouTube! video “Molly’s Soliloquy”:
…yes first I gave him the bit of Banana Pudding Roll out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my Gosh after that long kiss I ate a whole box of those Zebra Cakes and yes then there were the Star Crunches and they weren’t melted one bit and oh yes the Swiss Rolls so many Swiss Rolls…
From the Life Affirmations pamphlet “Araby”:
Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a valuable, lovable person driven to succeed and destined to manifest my dreams; and my eyes misted over with courage and positivity.
From the CleanReadz version of the Nausicaa episode of Ulysses:
O — all your — – — I saw — – made me — – — we two — — — she — – — – — met him — – — – — – — your wife — – — – — – young eyes — – — dreams return — – — – — – — – next year — – — – — – — – –.
From the Lola loves Max 4Ever Press version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
16 April: So outie!
The music be pumpin’ over in Amsterdam. I hear they voices hollerin’ ‘Get ya’ bad self on over here. It’s time to get sweaty on the dance floor. It’s time to shake you’re groove thang. You one of us now.’
26 April: Ma is packin’ my new pimp threads. She’s gettin’ all up in my face about learnin’ something and absence makes the heart grow fonder. Whatevs. I’m gonna go tear up the continent. I’m gonna represent.
27 April: Irish and proud, yo! It’s go time.
From the ending of Pageant Pride’s version of “A Mother”:
They thought that they had only a girl to deal with and that therefore, they could ride roughshod over her. But she would show them their mistake. They wouldn’t have dared to have treated her like that if she had been a man. But she would see that her daughter got her rights: she wouldn’t be fooled.
So she made a big fuss, and the promoter gave her daughter four more concerts, and a talent agent was in the audience for the second performance. And then three talent agents the next night. And then fifteen for the final performance. And after that there was a bidding war, and her daughter signed a huge contract with CAA, and she was officially made her daughter’s manager with business cards and everything, and eventually the two of them also got their own reality show. And her daughter had a successful career, but everybody knew it was all thanks to her mom. The end.
From 17th Earl Publishing’s version of Ulysses:
Sitting at his side Stephen solved out the problem. He proved by algebra that Edward de Vere’s ghost is Hamlet’s grandfather.
NOTE: the Dothraki translation of Finnegan’s Wake has been stalled by a dispute over whether or not animacy, which affects noun declensions, should be ignored or not when dealing with the many portmanteaus in the original text.
A Book I Edited
What I’m currently reading:
