The big 4–2. I’m the age of the Answer from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy.
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The Fountain of Indolence
I discovered Salvador Dalí, I think, in my first year of University, back in the earliest of the 90s. Something about his art struck a chord in me, and I’ve been fascinated by him ever since. So when I found out that I hadn’t missed seeing his paintings at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, of course I went to check it out.
But a funny thing happened. Of all the paintings and sculptures I saw (and let me tell you, friend, I saw a lot), the one that struck me most wasn’t a Dalí piece at all.
It was The Fountain of Indolence, by Joseph Mallord William Turner.
Something about it — the tree, the fountain, the mountains in the distance and the revelers in the foreground, the narrow channel of water passing into the front — really called out to me. It put me in mind of the feeling I got when reading Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, though I’m at a loss to explain why.
It got me, the way that art sometimes does, in a visceral way; a way that bypassed my brain entirely, and went straight for my gut.
The Dalí Exhibit
We went in to Winnipeg this past weekend to visit family. While we were there, my mother pointed out that the Salvador Dalí collection — which had been scheduled to leave town at the end of last month — had been held over for another three weeks. I’d resigned myself to not seeing any of it.
So when I found out it was still in town, well, I think you might be able to guess what I did on Sunday afternoon.
Ascension, ep. 1
On the weekend I recorded the first episode of Ascension on CBC. Tonight I watched it.
This post contains spoilers for episode 1 of Ascension. You Have Been Warned.
Ascension is the story, ostensibly, of a secret Kennedy-era generation ship (named, conveniently, Ascension) launched sometime in the 1960s toward Proxima Centauri. As the story opens, the ship has been underway for 51 years, contains 6001 people, and is nearing what the captain and XO refer to as “the Rubicon”, or what normal folks would call the point of no return. While everyone in the upper decks enjoys a dance, the lower-deckers (a lower caste, apparently) drink their illegal (?) whisky (?), and a woman named Lorelei goes for a swim in a pristine blue pool right next to the greenish tanks of the fluid-reclamation systems. (Must smell lovely.) Lorelei ends up dead, the apparent victim of an accident — or is it?
Of course it isn’t.
Meanwhile, on modern-day Earth, the architect of the Ascension project, hospitalized after a stroke that apparently makes him quote something that sounds vaguely like Scripture, is visited in the hospital (or the hospice, maybe?) by his son. The son finds out that someone else has been visiting Daddy‑O, and storms off to catch this interloper. The visitor turns out to be doing his Ph. D. thesis on “the early Space Age”, and tries to talk to the son about Ascension. Sounds like everyone on Earth that’s heard of it (other than Mr. Ph. D.) thinks that Ascension is a myth. NASA’s projects are open, says the student; Ascension was a military project.
Back to the starship. Was it accident, or murder most foul? The discovery of a .22 bullet in the victim’s head seems to point at the latter. The captain orders his XO to investigate — but keep it low-key, right, we don’t want everyone to panic.
Oh, and hey, everyone seems to be shagging someone else’s wife.
I realize I’m sounding a little less than impressed with the show, and that’s probably because I am. This episode had a lot of strikes against it:
- Clunky exposition tumbling from almost everyone’s mouth (“As you know, as XO, you’ll need to learn to play politics.” “As you know, my husband is conveniently working the late shift. Let’s do it here on the table.” “As you know, Ascension was a pipe dream.” (Super-subtle cut to Ascension plodding through space.))
- Apparently they worked out a system of stable and continuous artificial gravity in the 1960s, which makes me wonder why they’re not using it on the ISS. Here I am, thinks Samantha Cristoforetti, floating around like a sucka.2
- I kind of liked the fact that the Captain’s and the XO’s uniforms look like US Navy or US Air Force uniforms, but (and this is nitpicky, I know, but if you’re gonna do it, do it right) the XO either needs a different collar device or a couple more stripes on his epaulets. The silver oak leaves go with the Lt. Commander stripes, not the Lieutenant ones he’s wearing. (Military folks, please feel free to correct me on this. I’m getting my info from Wikipedia. Yes, I know.)
- 600 people isn’t even a small town anymore. It’s a village; a hamlet. Everyone knows everyone’s business in a community that small. But there seems to be plenty of infidelity going on, and the cuckolds don’t seem to realize it’s happening. Odd.
- The stars in the forward observation lounge are awfully red. If they’re traveling fast enough to see a red-shift that extreme (and they might be, if the shipboard gravity is due entirely to constant acceleration3), then you’d expect to see it to the rear of the ship, with the stars up front shifted to the blue end of the spectrum…
- …and oh look, the stars just to the right of the red ones, those guys are all blue. (Also, a child actress tells us that the red stars are “death”, and the blue stars, “those are life”. I… see.)
- Also: What the hell are those dark clouds that stream by the forward observation windows?
- Also also: Next week’s episode apparently features an “ion cloud” (ooh, how Star Trek-y) that sneaks up on them quickly enough that they have only 30 minutes to save the ship and everyone aboard her. You’ve been traveling for 51 years and you only noticed this death-dealing cloud of ions (I guess?) half an hour before you’re going to plow right into it? Fire your forward watch astronomer, then. (Possibly toward the ion cloud, in the hopes that the body might disperse it.)
I guess my major complaints about the show are a) clunky dialogue with waaaay too much exposition happening, and b) a lack of science solid enough for me to suspend my disbelief. (One example: you want me to believe this generation ship has a constant 1g pulling everyone to the floor? Build the habitat like a torus and spin it, then. Have an external shot of the torus spinning. Show me that that gravity is earned.)
You want me to believe in a science fiction show? Then put some science in it. It doesn’t have to be rigorous, dry, this’ll-stand-up-to-peer-review science, either. Just show me you made an effort.
All that said, I have set my DVR to record the rest of the series, for two reasons:
- It’s short — there are six one-hour episodes in the miniseries.
- Despite my complaints, there was enough to keep me interested. I’ll give it another hour. Hopefully now that all the pieces are in place, and the world is established, the dialogue will improve.
Miyazaki on writing
I’ve become skeptical of the unwritten rule that just because a boy and girl appear in the same feature, a romance must ensue. Rather, I want to portray a slightly different relationship, one where the two mutually inspire each other to live — if I’m able to, then perhaps I’ll be closer to portraying a true expression of love.
— Hayao Miyazaki (source)
Celebrate Short Fiction Day
On the shortest day of the Northern year, take some time to enjoy some short fiction.
You can thank Pixel Hall Press for the idea.
Here’s some of my short fiction, free every day for you, but highlighted today as the solstice approaches:
Some of these stories feature strong language and adult situations.
- City Kid, a brief amuse-bouche to get you into the swing of some really short fiction.
- Resurrection Radio, my first published fantasy tale. (Originally published in On Spec, 2004)
- Heat Death — at the end of it all, a beginning. (Originally published in Tesseracts Fourteen, 2010)
- Seven Very Short Stories — what it says on the tin, as they say. Stories in 1024 characters or less. My personal favourite is “The Trick”; a lot of people seem to like “The Wait”.
- And in closing, something amusing — Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One — never published, though not for lack of trying.
Amazon v. English Punctuation
Apparently Amazon.com is not a fan of hyphens (note to those with an F‑bomb sensitivity: the linked article contains a few). This is ludicrous for a lot of reasons:
- Hyphens are absolutely necessary in some situations (there’s the “one nightstand” vs. “one-night stand” that the referenced post brings up, and phrases like “twenty-year lease”, “hundred-dollar bill”, “the whole good-versus-evil trope” all use them).
- Hyphens1 are used in English for various reasons, and anyone who’s read most any book that doesn’t have more pictures than words — what my nephews charmingly refer to as “chapter books” — has encountered them, and puzzled out how they work. A practiced reader’s eye will simply skip over them. They’re a nearly invisible piece of punctuation, their function in any given situation transparent.
- If hundreds or thousands of people have read a book without any troubles, then it should take more than one complaint to suddenly make Amazon (or any algorithm with an iota of fairness coded into it) decide to even flag a book for trouble, let alone remove it from circulation.
I haven’t read the book in question; I hadn’t heard of this particular author before I read a post in the Fiction Writers’ group on Facebook regarding this particular post.
Checking out the preview of his novel, here are the first few hyphen/dash uses I came across:
- “…a tall, grey-haired man…”
- “…Mac-10…”
- “…Mid-thirties…”
- “…drug-fuelled sex act…”
- “…Not the sort of mental image you want of your mother-in-law…”
They all look correct, in my studied opinion. I suppose you could replace mother-in-law with mother in law, but even that looks better to my eye with the dashes. (I’d spell it fueled, and I suspect the weapon in question is a MAC-10, but the nitpicks there don’t involve the dashes.)
As presented, this is a ludicrous situation, one that I surely hope Amazon will correct.
(It might be nice, though, to read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road with some punctuation. Actually, no; I can’t envision a punctuation system that would ever make The Road a nice read. Not even scratch-‘n’-sniff daisies and smiley faces on every page.)
- Fine, hyphens and various species of dash. Typographers know the differences, and can lecture you at length about them. For the sake of brevity I’m lumping them all — utterly incorrectly — under the “hyphen” banner. Mea culpa. ↩
You learn something new every day (II)
Part I (almost entirely unrelated).
Somehow I’ve managed to go my entire judo career — 17+ years — without trying to use Silvio’s famous1 hip-throw grip (ie, grabbing the gi at the hip, just above the belt) to perform hane-goshi2, which is my favourite hip throw, if not my favourite judo technique3 bar none.
Hane-goshi
Tonight I tried it, and the world, suddenly, was my oyster. At least as far as hane-goshi was concerned.
My judo friends will know what I’m talking about. (Especially the ones that knew Silvio. Have a drink in his memory tonight, if you’re so inclined. I intend to.)
Rebutting Yann Martel
This past weekend I spent 2½ all-too-short hours with ten other Manitoba writers in a roundtable with Man Booker-prize winning author Yann Martel. There was a great deal said about writing: the whys and wherefores, the hows, the fact that no one really writes for money. (Money’s nice, but you write to write. To exorcise demons, to entertain, to process the world — all these come long before money, assuming that money ever comes.)
There were at least three genre writers there, and the discussion came up of literature vs. genre. I was pleased that Yann wasn’t the snobby type that gazes down his nose at the apparent ghetto of genre. (In fact, I may be snobbier — he read The Da Vinci Code to its end, whereas I gave up on it at about page 60.)
One point that he made, however, kind of stuck in my craw. He claimed that literature can wring emotion from a reader far more effectively than SF, or fantasy, or mystery ever can. He posited that in 100 years’ time, Stephen King will be largely forgotten, but Dickens will live on, because the reader connects on a deeper, more emotional level. He said he can’t think of a single SF novel that’s made someone cry.
Well, here are two novel that succeeded in making me tear up:
- Circuit of Heaven, by Dennis Danvers — It’s Romeo & Juliet for the mind-uploading set, in essence. Star-crossed lovers, separated by the life that may come after death.
- The Dark Tower, by Stephen King. The chapter that did it for me is “In This Haze of Green & Gold”. If you’ve read the saga, you know why. (Also, “ ‘Olan” kind of got me, too.)
Tiens, cherchons le mot juste
Tonight, I watched a pair of amazing home-grown documentaries at the Evans Theatre: the 3rd film in the Warpaths trilogy, subtitled Silver Crosses, for the memento received from the government by mothers and wives of the men killed in action during the First World War; and Shaun Cameron’s Tales from the Eddy, a look back at Brandon’s famed Prince Edward Hotel, whose opening was delayed by the loss of its furniture in the Titanic disaster, and whose ignominious end could have (perhaps) been averted if the list of proposals before City Council had been ordered differently.
Warpaths: Silver Crosses, like its two predecessors, was an amazing look at the effects of a global conflict on the lives of local folks (specifically, the Bowes family of Boissevain, MB). I enjoyed it immensely, as I knew I would. Kudos to Marc George and Graham Street for a fitting capstone to an important series.
Tales from the Eddy was an eye-opening experience. I moved here years after the hotel was demolished; I never knew a skyline with its imposing bulk in it. For the last two decades I’ve heard people reminisce about the Eddy, usually with that faraway look in their eyes, and I must admit, I rolled my eyes a little (inwardly, anyways). It’s just a hotel, I would think. How grand could it be, really?
Very grand.
I learned a lot about Brandon’s heyday in the hour-and-change that the documentary was up on the screen. Dozens of still frames of the hotel’s interior and exterior showed me just how amazing the Prince Edward was in its day. For whatever reason, seeing the skate park that has been built where the hotel used to stand — complete with helpful painted labels marking LOBBY and PLATFORM to indicate roughly the extent of the building’s onetime footprint — struck me quite hard.
Entropy grinds away at us. That could be tonight’s theme, I suppose. But we keep pushing back against it, and I think I like that theme better.
Watching Shaun’s documentary, I felt a strange emotion, a nostalgia for something I never knew. If the Germans don’t have a name for it, surely the French do.