Once Upon a Time

I've been watching the last few weeks of Once Upon a Time. We're not in love with the show so it's easy to put off and now watching two episodes in a row I think I may have strained my eyeballs, I've been rolling them so hard.

The difficulty is the love story they are trying to make. Prince Charming and Snow White. There are only so many reversals I can handle. He loves her, she's playing thief and soldier. She loves him, he's playing good son/prince/hero. Lots of issues that a good talk will solve, and no good reason that they haven't talked. Now he asked if she killed someone, she's angry at the lack of trust and kicks him out.

Will this be the end?

Probably not. I'd really like it to be, but probably not. It's like those couples who get married and divorced and married and divorced and you think, "just end it already," but you can't say it because they're already planning their fifth wedding and that would just be tacky.

And the writers will likely milk it for another five or ten episodes. I will probably watch the next episode because of the Mad Hatter with Lost Boys music in the preview, but the enhanced drama (what I think of as soap opera style, though since I haven't watched soap operas in decades I might be maligning them) will almost certainly drive me away in the not-too-distant future.

However, it did introduce me to Dark Shadows! Or rather I saw a trailer for Dark Shadows while watching Once Upon a Time and I now have a new movie I want to watch. Maybe even in the theaters! (It's been so long since I've been excited about a movie so you'll have to excuse my squeeeing)



Doesn't it look excellent?

Alright, you guys. I might have a different idea of excellent than the rest of you, but it opens a few days after my birthday. Thank you for the wonderful present, Hollywood. At least I hope it's a wonderful present.

I can't wait to see.

Hunger Games, tired of the hype yet?

I saw the movie. Yes, I liked the book better. No, I don't think they skimped on the violence.

These are the arguments I heard most often. I don't think a movie can really live up to such a visual book, so what's on the screen can never be as awesome as what's in my head. I think this is where the violence came from. That and the scenery of the Capitol had to be cut for the movie because of time constraints. Still, it was pretty freaking violent.

The most alarming thing I heard is the explosion over the internet (fostered, I hope, by trolls) that Rue shouldn't have been african american in the movie, even though she was in the book. Google it because I'm not touching that silliness.

Who else saw it? Opinions?

Epitomize

I'm late. I had a post half-written, but I wasn't sure it worked and I couldn't trust myself to make any good decisions yesterday. It was one of those days where I begin with a small bothersome headache and end with one that feels like if I let go of my head it would fall into pieces that would scatter so fast I'd never see some of them again.

Today is, thankfully, better so I thought I'd entertain you with some small thoughts. Merriam Webster says that epitomize means "to serve as the typical or ideal answer" and are some people who, when their face flashed on my screen, I thought, "Oh my god, that's it."

So, who makes an epitome to me?

Dick Cheney = "The Man".

The first time I ever saw him, (all those years ago when Bush first selected him as Vice) I stopped everything and stared because I was sure I had finally found The Man that hippies and African Americans (or television shows containing Hippies or African Americans) had talked about for all my formative years.

It's not his politics (though they could fit right in there, I think), but his face. Possibly his very sharp nose and the fact that he's even whiter than me (a redhead who burns and peels, but does not tan) which is a feat for the record books. But for me that's the one role the movies would never be able to cast him in because it would be too obvious. There's a The Man in this movie. Well, it has to be this guy.


Annndddd....

The Pope = The Picture of Dorian Gray

I have never seen a more evil-looking religious figure. It's not just me, either. I went looking for pictures to illustrate with and it's amazing how many of them are on sites discussing wicked images. Though if I saw it, I guess I shouldn't be surprised others do.

I know he's a person rather than the picture, but doesn't he look like he's taken all the sins of the world into his image? (He is truly the creepiest person I've ever seen -- or possibly, I just don't like old white dudes.)

Lastly, not an image. A song.


I love the song, but his voice epitomizes plaintive wailing to me. (Walk Off the Earth has done a cover of this song with 5 people on one guitar. That's worth watching too.)

Have you ever seen someone or something and thought 'that's it!' Something that you later picture whenever you hear that term? I'd love to hear yours.

Fairy tales, looking to the past

Fairy tales are big right now, both on television and the movies. Someone else will have to tell us if they're big in books. So, why are we looking to the past, to tales we know by heart? To turn them on their heads, of course. Just look at the fanciful and warrior remakes of Snow White coming to theaters or any of the fairy tale characters of the television show, Once Upon a Time.

We're injecting these old, dangerous tales with all new dangers, new twists. I for one am happy they're looking at women in a new light, as something other than cautionary tales or helpless rescues. I'm glad Snow kicks butt and Red Riding Hood is the wolf. I just wish the current political climate in the US acted like women should have a say in their own destinies. Hell, maybe that's why fairy tales are so popular right now. By recasting women in the role of hero, maybe it'll tell the GOP to wake the hell up and not anger over half the population.

Then again, maybe that's wishful thinking.

As If I Have Time For This?

(Late Post Again. No, Really?)

Over at Tor.Com, Mari Ness has been running a series of essays I cannot stay away from -- The Madeline L'Engle Reread.

If you're like me, A Wrinkle in Time was one of your SF Gateway books. I know it wasn't my first SF book -- that was Heinlein's Have Spacesuit, Will Travel -- but it was among the first SF books I read.

All the SF books at my school library had little rocket stickers pasted to their spines, even though, as I soon discovered, very few of them had actual rockets in them -- A Wrinkle in Time, for instance, did not. But I liked it anyway, enough that I went on to read every L'Engle book in the school and then the public library, even though most of the others had no little rockets on their spines. I also went on, through my adolescence and early twenties, to read most of the L'Engle I could find, and most of the books she would put out, though hardly any of them were actual SF, and though the quality, frankly (as Ness comments in this reread) is very mixed.

Even Wrinkle in Time, as I find in on a reread, is not the book I thought it was at 13. (Here is Liz Henry with a good reading on that.)

Still, despite her flaws -- which are many: I am rereading A Severed Wasp right now and keep literally choking at the smug pronouncements that L'Engle keeps putting in Mimi Oppenheimer's mouth about how Jews need to realize that it wasn't only Jews who were harmed in the Holocaust and that "other people" were hurt by Nazis too -- oddly, it's only the other people we hear and are told to be concerned about: no damaged Jew ever appears on stage. Hmm! Damaged Nazis, damaged Germans, damaged classical French musicians by the score, mais oui! But damaged or dead Jews? No, only a noisy living Jew who says Christ! every few lines and Oy vey! every other.

Not to mention the utter classicism: A casual comment by what is either the narrator (L'Engle) or the main character (who we're supposed to take as a decent human being) that it is "as surpising" to find true talent in a ten year old mixed race street child as it is to find that her mother is a gourmet cook. And then endless snide comments about bisexualism and people who smoke dope and people who listen to "pop" music and all the horrific crime in New York -- this despite the fact that our narrator has had affairs, two we're told about, that our narrator drinks -- we see her drink, often -- and that our narrator likes various sorts of music. But hers is "good" music!

Not to mention the religion crap. Oh L'Engle NO! It's not just that she goes on and on -- as she became more and more prone to -- about the Jesus-y stuff. No, there is also the anti-Haiti bits. Early on in the book, she and the Davidson children, as well as another priest, come upon "evidence" of "Black Magic" in the cathedral, done by those immigrants from Haiti. And we get a rant about how worship of Satan is real and very powerful, and the evils of worshiping that sort of "magic" religion. Dean Davidson, who (we are told) has "ancestors" from the islands "knows" about this sort of thing and keeps a close guard on the Cathedral, keeping it out.

See, it's not racism. Because Dean Davidson says it's not, that's why.

All this makes it sound as though I do not like L'Engle. Or this book. Neither of which is exactly true. There are bits of this book I like a lot. First, I like that Katherine Vigneras is not nice. Not even close to it. She's the meanest women in modern fiction who is meant to be an admirable character I have ever read, I believe. Also, the character of Emily is very well done, and the relationship between Emily and Katherine I enjoy every time I read the book. Plus the book totally passes the Bechdel test -- tons of women characters, who talk to one another all the time about things that matter in their lives. Plus these are women who have not made men the center of their lives -- although, to be fair, Katherine at least claims she made Justin, her piano teacher, the center of her life at one point. But frankly, from what she herself tells us, this is not at all the case. Her music was always the center of her life, as well as being the center of his life.

This is another reason I like the book, and a reason I keep coming back to it, despite all its flaws, and its flaws are MANY: it is an accurate portrait of an artist. Katherine Forrester Vigneras (she takes her husband's name, OF COURSE SHE DOES) is obsessive about her music. It is really all she thinks about. Everything translates through the music. People come over -- she wants them to leave so she can work on the music. She's at a party -- is there going to be music? Music is played -- is it like the music she's working on, or music she heard once, or music that was part of a program she worked on once? She's visiting the cathedral -- what are the acoustics like, how will the music sound here?

This is, in fact, what it is like to be an artist. The art is all there is. It's not that nothing else exists. You do (sometimes) get married, have relationships and friends and go to parties; but all that is secondary (third, or fourth, or fifth, even) to the art. L'Engle catches that perfectly in this novel.

Even without rockets.

Book Binge

I have been so frustrated this week, I almost want to talk politics -- how can anyone respect a man who has had 4 wives, but has no idea how birth control works? "...they’re having so much sex they can’t afford the birth control pills!"


I have to clear my mind after I think about this. He has so much pull for a man who knows so little. (The ignorance bothers me more than the sexism, I think. Ignorance proudly proclaimed makes me twitchy.)


So I've been binge reading instead.


Usually, when I'm binge-reading I go through a few dozen books full of frustration, and finish one or two. This week I've finished five (yes, FIVE) so I thought I'd talk about them and invite comments if you've read them too. Each of them caught my attention in a different way.


White Tiger by Kylie Chan


Most of this book happens in Hong Kong. I was fascinated by the inclusion of nationality and ethnicity. Australian Chinese, American Black (Black American?)....

It's a silly small thing to catch me, but here if someone has Chinese features they're usually considered Chinese no matter where they were born. I do live in a smallish town though. The numbers of people moving in and out are pretty high since the university is here, but most of that is American. We have a small foreign student population, but college is more expensive the further away home is, so nothing like Hong Kong. Still, seeing another culture in Urban Fantasy was fascinating to me.

About halfway through I realize that it's written diary-style rather than the usual three act, increasing tension to climax.... Then I started getting bored. Day to day is cool enough when the days are all new to me, but once I got used to it (around page 200), I started wondering how they were going to end it. It's a trick to make fighting demons humdrum, but they managed.

How it ended? Some random page says "the end". At least, that's how I felt. If I followed the series on, maybe it would be different, but I'm a little afraid to try.

No Place for a Lady by Louise Allen

The Earl has a nipple piercing.

If you're wondering about historical accuracy, I mean. This is not your grandmother's regency. <snerk>

Nipple Piercing. And stage coaches. And modern contractions and phrases in speech bubbles. And she jumps quickly from independent lady to girly girl running to a man for help.

It's fluffy. Don't read it if this kind of thing gives you a headache.

Shakespeare's Landlord by Charlaine Harris

I don't usually like Charlaine Harris' stories, and not just because she's famous (When I also didn't like Twilight, I worried about that; they both got very popular around the same time), but this is the first one of hers I read and considered collecting more of this series. A little too much into the all-men-are-sexy stage after the first time sex wasn't terrifying (rape victim), but otherwise I found it interesting.

Maybe because the main character wasn't Southern, even if the others are.

I have trouble reading in Southern -- there's a cadence to the words I have trouble finding in my head so I often have to reread sentences to find the meaning. With this one, I didn't have to.

Wait Till Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn

This may be YA, I'm not sure. The main character is 12. It's a ghost story. It caught me pretty quickly, but the end was a very quick with an extra easy wrap-up.

Like Taadaa and it's done -- which is part of what makes me think it's YA. Everyone is sympathetic in the end with many coincidences to make it so. The moral of this story is forgive and forget. Strong on the forgetting.

I also struggle with the idea of some ghosts able to walk through solid objects, but others stuck because they're trapped behind a tumbled down wall.

Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale by Holly Black

Faeries and a 16 year old main character, but I liked it.

At first I didn't think I'd be able to keep going. Neglectful parents bug me, but at least you can see that there is some love in the family. The lack of violence that I associate with these types of people helped so I kept reading and soon it was hard to stop.

I never read on the treadmill, but I had to take the kids to school so I finished it there. I haven't decided yet if I liked it enough to hunt down the rest of the series, but I had to finish this one.

I wonder if I'll continue like this for a while. Finishing book after book makes a nice change for me.

Zombies, dead and well

Who doesn't love a zombie? Apparently, no one. I've even sneaked them into my latest fantasy book. And I've seen them everywhere on TV lately and not just in The Walking Dead.

The following could be spoilerish both for The Walking Dead and The River, so if you're saving those up to watch, you might want to ditch now.

So with the last episode of the TWD, we're finally seeing mass zombies again! I was wondering where they went, wondering if the story was going to continue to degenerate into he said/she said and family drama. I know it's good family drama, but I can get that from any number of shows. I tune into something with walking dead in the title for the zombies, man. I'm so glad we're going to be seeing them again.

As for The River, last night they introduced zombies to that plot line as well, though I don't know if they were the real kind or 28 Days Later kind where they're not actually deceased. Either way, I'm in. It made a show that was starting to lag really pick up again.

Something about the apocalypse, especially the zombie apocalypse appeals to me, though it also terrifies the crap out of me. Even though I wouldn't want to live during one, I can't help but think of various ways I'd survive, different things I'd do. Of course, that kind of thinking is done safely from my couch. If ever confronted by a real tragedy of such massive proportions, I'm sure I'd stand and stare just like the characters I constantly scream at to get moving already.

Do you love end of the world movies? What is it about them that makes them so appealing to you?

e-reading

I've had a nook color for a year now. I rooted it. I un-rooted it and rooted it again. Right now it's un-rooted (or factory) because it didn't want to talk to the Air my sister gave me as a rooted device. I don't know why.

And recently (this morning, in fact) I got a Kindle Fire. I poked through all the kinds of Kindles and had to admit to my husband that I didn't want a kindle as much as what comes with a kindle. (What I really want is that new nook Touch -- that little black and white one, tiny and almost weightless. That, I want.) Anyway, I've had the prime membership since I was a long distant student a few years ago and I ordered most of my textbooks through Amazon. It only made sense, then.

Then I got into the habit of ordering from Amazon rather than going across town to Target. Because, you know, shipping is free. As long as I didn't need to try it on or have one of the kids try it on. So I kept the Prime Membership. And Amazon has spent the last few months teasing me with that membership and their extensive lending library.

I click on a book because it looks neat, and guess what!

It's free to Kindle owners.

And I can't stand it.

Want book. Want FREE book!

One can never have too many books -- especially electronically where I won't eventually have to star in my own episode of hoarders because I've buried my children under other people's words.

So, when Husband said I could splurge, I got the Kindle.

It's interesting to see the two next to each other.

The Kindle is slightly smaller than the nook, everywhere other than depth, but it feels heavier, and clumsier somehow. Maybe it's the same weight in a smaller package? And the edges are squared while the nook is curved and narrower around the edges.

My favorite of the two is the nook still -- especially the nook rooted. I love the rooted nook because you can install the Kindle app on it and read whatever you want. Sadly you can't read the prime books for free on the kindle app -- only the physical kindle itself. I sort of understand, but I also feel the pain as they rudely keep their books away from me.

And there are other ways the Kindle is easier. Checking out books from the library, you click the Kindle lending button and it appears on your Kindle without you having to do anything else. nook makes you download Adobe Digital Editions and physically attach the device to your computer to port it over. (Do you capitalize a lower-case brand name when it falls at the beginning of a sentence?)

nook takes an sd card expansion -- which can also be used as an easy way to port data from device to device. Kindle doesn't.

I got the color nook because I liked it better than the two-screen black and white that was available at the time. (I have since been given one of those and am very glad of that decision. Using the two screens is way more annoying than you'd think.) I got the Fire because looking at all the e-ink versions of Kindle only made me want the e-ink nook more -- but the nook wouldn't get me all those free books.

When I travel, I prefer the electronic reader. When I'm at home, I prefer paper books. When I take one of my exceedingly long, muscle soothing, shower-baths, I prefer the e-reader in a Ziploc.

I haven't had the Kindle long enough to decide whether the free books makes up for the odd feeling form-factor, or whether either of the two can actually be called better than the other.

Do you read electronically?

Which device do you prefer?

So sorry I ditched

I have a good excuse, I swear!

Or maybe not. I was in San Diego, where sci fi nerds speak of their love for all things SF only in hushed tones. In spite of Comic Con taking place there every year, few people will acknowledge they know what firefly the insect is, let alone the show.

Nerd guilt. For some reason, the pretty people of CA don't want to acknowledge their geekdom. Maybe they're afraid they'll break out in acne. CA people, there are SF lovers in all walks of life. Don't believe the hype. We are men and women, girls and boys. We come in all shapes and sizes. There are plenty of hot lookin' SF lovers, and your embracing your inner geek will only make you hotter.

Let out your geek love. Come to the dark side. You know what, if you got that, you're already there. ^_^

Do you know anyone with nerd guilt? Is someone you love hiding a hard-on for Doctor Who? Secretly worshiping Captain Mal? Has a shrine to Xena in their closet?

Science in Fiction

My plan here today was to talk about alternate realities constructed by those who are voting GOP, but you know, I just don't have the strength.

Let's talk about something cheerier!

When I was traveling to and in Boston recently, at Boskone, I did not take any books at all with me. Instead I took my iPad. Loaded with ebooks! What a delight this was, I cannot tell you. It is the first time I have traveled for any length of time since I got the iPad, and what a difference -- when I used to travel, half (or probably actually more than half) my luggage was books and their paraphernalia -- notebooks, bookmarks, pens and dictionaries. All contained in the iPad now.

Not to mention email and the internet, so that if I needed to research anything I was reading about, voila!

But the main thing I wanted to write about was one of the books I read on the way to and at Boskone, Joan Slonczewski's Highest Frontier.

You hear a lot (in the SF world at least) about "hard science" SF and "soft science" SF, space opera and fantasy and which is better than what. I've always mostly disliked the hard science boys and their toys, putting hard hard hard ideas at the center (like Wilson's Spin or anything by Neal Stephenson) often at the expense of character. Good SF avoids this. Science is paramount, and cool; but character still drives the story.

This happens in Slonczewski's novel. I disagree entirely with this reviewer, who says that the science drives the characters. The science is definitely shaping the characters -- how not? Doesn't our science shape us? We've entered into a new sort of existence, one that began in 1998 or thereabouts (probably earlier) when the world changed. That change is what Slonczewski writes about.

Her characters live in that changed world. Her POV character, Jenny Ramos Kennedy, is almost never really alone. (I love the bits where, when she's doing other things, strolling with her boyfriend, doing homework, whatever, out of a nowhere a popup appears in her Toybox (another great touch) and she gets a newsflash from the outer world.) Plus she has a therapist who lives in her head and monitors her full-time for any mental transgressions. And (because she is one of those Kennedys) she has ethical and political obligations which means she must be available to the world. I won't give too many spoilers, but she has other obligations, too, dealing with her ability to sift and understand the world-wide net.

The internet science is only part of the very cool science involved here. The science of education aspects I found especially interesting; climate science and the political science are also great. Biological science, which I believe is Slonczewski's area, and the medical aspects, are worth the trip alone.

But the science, as cool as it is, only shape the characters; the characters and how they take charge of the world Slonczewski builds for them are what make this novel work. This is hard SF at its finest.

A much better use of your time than watching the GOP act like tools one more time.

Wondrousity

Garage Sales give me the most wonderful things.

3 for a quarter.
Yes, I'm STILL drooling.
Be glad you can't see it.
It's terribly unattractive, and has already ruined several t-shirts, but I can't help myself.

Nonfiction. Fifty cents each. Still drool.

Then there was this one. Still 50 cents, but drooooool.
So much.
The Illustrated Book of the World's Great Nations

Title page 1888!

And feet!
You wouldn't think I'd get so excited over feet...
Particularly a cruelty that we all hope is over, but...
Assumptions. Or so I assume.

It can't have been anything they actually saw.

It's not FanSci, but it makes me just as happy.