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Texas. Thanksgiving. Truth. Beauty.

I spent Thanksgiving break in Texas, and came back with lots of notes for my new epic Western novel.  It was originally titled A Texas Thanksgiving, but then I decided to poetry it up a little and now the working title is October Tamales in November Husks.  It has symbolism.  Here's the first line:

It was a one horse town, but that horse was huge.

And it just gets better from there!  Thematically, it's about all sorts of stuff, but the main plot revolves around a friendly loner cowboy type who makes a really embarrassing faux pas with his gun and has to leave the brutal, lawless Texas high lands and cross the border into Mexico, where life is still lawless but at least it's festive.  Then he crosses the Mexican border into Guatemala, and El Salvador, and on through South America, and without giving away the ending, he eventually learns the secrets of manhood at a penguin rodeo.  Don't think that it gets all whimsical and sentimental, though, because he also kills every single person he meets on his journey.  Even the minor characters:

Which way to Panama stranger? asked Bringun Gristleback.

(Oh, I forgot to mention, I don't use quotation marks or apostrophes.  Like Cormac McCarthy.  Also, Bringun is the main guy, and the other speaker is the minor character.  His name is Wangly but he doesn't live long enough to mention it.)

--I reckon youre in Panama, friend.  Thats the canal.

--Whats on the other side.

--More Panama.  I reckon its pretty good too.

--Thanks.  Whoops I shot you.

--Thats on you then.  I never did nothing to you.  I am dying now.  Take care of my cow for me.

--That cow over there?  Whoops.

--That aint what I meant by take care of my cow.

I'm knocking out this stuff at a great clip now that I don't need to worry about punctuation or what happens to my characters after a couple of pages.  Once I get into the zone, it's like I am Bringun Gristleback, and his needs are my needs.  We need to keep moving, and we also need water, and some food, nothing fancy, but hopefully cooked all the way through.  Such a life makes a man watchful, and a little . . . lonely?  As I sit at my keyboard, the tears trickle down my cheek like the last traces of rain winding through a painfully handsome arroyo.  Each mournful droplet that plashes onto the backspace key erases a single letter from my life's work.  Hey, that's kind of symbolic, too.  Although mostly it's just annoyin

 

Technorati Tags: Texas, Tejas, Cormac McCarthy, Corjac McJarthy

Have You Heard of This Halo 3 Game?

Senator Ted Stevens (R-Internet) just sent me an email asking when I was going to get around to the mandatory Halo 3 post.  All Internet typists need to put up a Halo 3 post by the end of the week or face a hefty fine and possible senatorial teabagging.  Sorry, y'all.  I'm still getting caught up on my BioShock posts.  I think I need to write eight of those before I can even pretend to be a "games journalist," also known as a "playa writa."  Technically, I was out of the country when BioShock dropped, so I get an extension, but Halo 3 is too mainstream to be ignored.  I like to keep my finger on society's pulse for so long that it gets uncomfortable and society starts wondering, "Is this guy even a doctor?  Most doctors don't move their lips when they count."

This Halo 3 thing is tricky because I don't have the game and I won't until it comes out on PC at least a year from now.  Also, I don't like Halo.  I don't hate it, either -- I just don't think it has that something extra that makes a great game.  It's a lot of fun playing multiplayer matches with friends, but almost everything is fun with three or more.  Chess can be fun, but have you ever tried to play while a third person picks up all the pieces and moves them around randomly?  Instant excitement.  And Halo matches, fun as they are, tend to reward the same limited skill set, as opposed to, say, Team Fortress 2, with nine genuinely different ways to play, and a chance to switch each time you die.  In Halo, the most important choice is whether you're going to use the pistol, and in Halo 2, it's whether or not you should pick up an energy sword.  The answers are, respectively, yes, and yes, you cheap bastard.  Have fun stabbing people with a giant Quake 2 logo.

As for the single player campaign, well, everyone knows that's not the main draw.  Personally, the Halo universe doesn't do it for me.  It's futuristic, frantic, and colorful, but also annoyingly familiar.  I blame Master Chief, the protagonist.  I don't like him, and I hate his friends.  He's just a soldier, or super-soldier, which is even dumber.  He just follows orders, shooting up each level, and moving on to the next one.  His sidekicks have no personality beyond the sort of hoo-rah team antics that you see in any war movie, as perfectly satirized in Starship Troopers.  (I don't care for Cortana any more than for Denise Richards in that movie.)  In any FPS, the game forces you to complete somewhat arbitrary objectives, but the Half-Life series, BioShock, and to some extent Far Cry disguised the linear narrative by putting you in the bodies of self-motivated characters who were really just fighting for their lives.  Master Chief is fighting to save Earth.  Screw Earth.  It's a pretend future Earth.  Almost none of my friends live in pretend future Earth, and I bet I could convince them to move before shit went down.  I would offer them, uh, credits and homemade cyber-pie.

Three questions for writers, even writers of video games:  In your story, is an entire race, planet or universe in danger?  Is your story set in the future or another alternate world?  Finally, is your hero very very special -- superhero, super-soldier, or Chosen One special?  If the answer is yes to all three, start over.  Two out of three is acceptable, but still requires a lot of work to keep the cheese level manageable.  You'll need to be extra clever, extra funny, or extra nude.  The Halo series has a cool way with names (a robot named 343 Guilty Spark, a ship named In Amber Clad) but never follows through on the allusions.  Thanks to a ten million dollar marketing campaign, Halo 3 gets plenty of attention from the non-gaming press, but they may be wondering if this game is worth the hype.  Probably not, because no game could live up to that buildup.  If you want to enjoy Halo 3, I'd suggest not reading another word about it.  I'm not even going to write another word

Technorati Tags: Halo 3, Master Chief, Starship Troopers, Team Fortress 2

Harry Potter Has Many Feelings

Harry Potter is an ordinary teenage boy, with one difference.  He feels things.  His scar hurts.  It hurts a lot.  And every time his scar hurts, his glasses get pinchy.  Because Harry Potter is the Boy Who Feels Two Things.

Spoiler-free examples:

p. 21:  . . . Harry, whose sadness mixed with a sense of humiliation . . .

p. 40:  Harry was embarrassed and astonished himself.

p. 41: . . . said Harry, torn between annoyance and a desire to laugh . . .

p. 181: . . . while inside him a kind of quiet eruption sent joy and grief thundering in equal measure through his veins.  [Ugh.]

p. 206: . . . their expressions reflected the mingled shock and gratitude he felt.

p.326:  He did not want his excited trepidation tainted with resentment.  [Without resentment, that's just one emotion, right?  No.  Excited trepidation.  Tricky!]

p. 327: . . . he felt a little lurch of apprehension and anticipation.

p. 362: . . . hardly knowing whether he was trying to hold in his anger or protect himself from the weight of his own disillusionment.

p. 368:  All the same, a little more fear leavened his exhilaration . . . [Shockingly, this takes place during Passover, when we feel only unleavened fear.]

p. 396:  "Fine," said Harry, half amused, half irritated.

p. 508:  Harry met her eyes with a mixture of defiance and shame.

 I mentioned in a previous post J.K. Rowling's prose style, which started out barely tolerable and got worse with each book, perhaps because she forced herself to knock them out so rapidly.  Consider this a simultaneous expression of annoyance mixed with more annoyance.  When characters feel two things simultaneously, neither emotion makes much impact on the reader.  Readers can figure out how a character feels in any given situation if you have well-defined characters acting realistically.  The English language doesn't have a lot of subtle words for emotions, but it has a lot of verbs, so let us use our brains a little and extrapolate motivation from action.  Or write in Russian, it has tons of emotions.  Japanese seems to have a lot, too, and I think at some point every single one of them has been displayed on a game show.  Japanese people have an emotion that encompasses saltiness, fear of lions and a desire to win.

 Or, if you want to exhaustively describe someone's inner life, create a timeline of emotion.  I've never been half amused, half irritated all in one go.  One feeling flows into another, following certain channels previously carved into my mind.  Henry James set most of his novels in other peoples' heads, but he created little stories out of their interior struggles, rather than just tagging a line of dialogue with two adjectives.  Daniel Radcliffe can figure out how to say this shit in the movie without Rowling beating us over the head with, "Harry is angry!  Also, he's sad!"

In conclusion and in summary, I feel conflicted about this subject.  On the one hand, this style of writing is insulting to the reader.  On the other hand, maybe the Harry Potter reader deserves to be insulted.  But if it were written less insultingly, no insult would be necessary.  Let's not head any further down that path.  Unlike J.K. Rowling's prose and Celine Dion's heart, I won't go on forever.

Technorati Tags: books, writing, J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter, emotion, Daniel Radcliffe, potions, lotions, love

Charles Simic, Poet Laureate

Wonderful news from the world of poetry and the world of honorable leaves landing on someone's head.  Charles Simic has been appointed America's Next Top Poet Laureate, and recently won the 2007 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.   But you know who really wins here?  All of humanity.  Particularly people who like Charles Simic?  Oh, and Simic wins, too.  He gets the money.  Good for him!  Money is nice.

I started reading Charles Simic in college and discovered not only a world of weird, fully consistent images and rhythm, but also a reassuring voice for all those nights I couldn't sleep.  I don't know how to sleep properly and there's something about being the only one awake that gets to me.   The futile energy, the endless series of self-asked questions.  Simic doesn't offer any answers but he lets you in on his own worries and dreams, not in a confessional sense but more as someone who lets the poem take its own path toward some obscure goal.  You don't generally "get" a Charles Simic poem, or solve it like an equation, but if it affects you, you get to carry it around like a colorful scrap of foreign currency.  Here are some more samples of his work, see what you think.

In The Unemployed Fortune-Teller, a collection of essays and memoirs, Simic mentions that he sometimes walks around the house, opening books at random and writing down images to use in a poem.  But he doesn't trust pure chance enough to just let them sit there, so he re-works them to play off each other in interesting ways.  That's the key to "surrealist" poetry that actually works.  Be random, then start cheating.  If you set out to write something random, you'll end up with, say, "Octopus.  Cheese.  Parking tickets.  Mint."  All of that is worthless, except for "mint".  "Mint" is solid.

But the opposite is also true.  Once you have a thing that you're trying to say, you need to stop trying to say it.  Otherwise, that's not a poem, it's a very concise essay.  Let the unknowing part of yourself have a whack at it.  So you kind of hop back and forth until the poem is done or you're exhausted.  You'll know it's done if you don't remember how you wrote it, although that could just be the exhaustion.  Then you should go eat something.  Eat something nice.

Speaking of which, here's a little Simic poem from The Book of Gods and Devils:

CABBAGE

 

She was about to chop the head

In half,

But I made her reconsider

By telling her:

"Cabbage symbolizes mysterious love."

 

Or so said one Charles Fourier,

Who said many other strange and wonderful things,

So that people called him mad behind his back,

 

Whereupon I kissed the back of her neck

Ever so gently,

 

Whereupon she cut the cabbage in two

With a single stroke of her knife.

 

Technorati Tags: poetry, Charles Simic, poet laureate, cabbage

Harry Potter and the [Joke goes here]

I'm sick of Harry Potter.  I've read all the previous books but I want to skip this one.  If I ever want to know what "finally" happens to Harry and his cheesy magical world, I can find out without reading 784 pages of characters dying, characters almost dying, characters dying and coming back, and characters caring about other characters, who promptly die.  Once you stop caring about the plot, there's no going back, because the prose sure as hell can't hold your interest.

My new favorite example of J.K. Rowling's style, from Nicholas Lezard in The Guardian:

Here, from page 324 of The Order of the Phoenix, to give you a typical example, are six consecutive descriptions of the way people speak. "...said Snape maliciously," "... said Harry furiously", " ... he said glumly", "... said Hermione severely", "... said Ron indignantly", " ... said Hermione loftily". Do I need to explain why that is such second-rate writing?

 You have to turn off your brain when you read Harry Potter.  I think that's why readers get hooked on the plot, because they're already numbed by the repetition and clichés.  After around the third book, even the plot started repeating itself, and we had to settle for the same old school year with the same easily-solved mysteries and interchangeable villains.  To be fair, these are children's books.  Children like repetition and need a lot of adverbs to explain how characters feel.  On the other hand, children also like giving each other purple nurples and after six of those you can see how I might be reluctant to receive a seventh.

My favorite part of Harry Potter has always been the fonts.  When Harry receives a letter, you'll actually see the letterhead and signature.  Newspaper articles and posters appear in news type, with big headers.  Sometimes there's even a little wax seal!  It's always a delightful surprise.  It feels like someone suddenly popped a piece of candy in my mouth.  Still, that's the only pleasure that sticks with me after reading all those pages, because the writing itself is just an artless series of instructions.  Harry does this, says that, and this new character or setting looks like that familiar fantasy image.  You don't even need to write a separate script for the movie adaptation -- there's nothing to adapt.  That's why the first couple of movies just let Chris Columbus expecto his patronum all over the screen, if you know what I mean.

Let's play our own game with a copy of Order of the Phoenix.  I'll select a page at random and show you the most clichéd part, adding a word or two from one of the many works of Harry Potter fan fiction here on the web.  Can you find them all?

There was an appreciative laugh and an outbreak of applause as Dumbledore sat down neatly and threw his long, turgid, glistening beard over his shoulder so as to keep it out of the way of his plate -- for food had appeared out of nowhere, so that the five long, engorged tables were groaning under joints of and pies and dishes of vegetables, bread, sauces, dildos, and flagons of pumpkin juice.

Harry, who was sweating profusely, looked desperately about the heaving, thrusting dungeon.  His own cauldron was issuing copious amounts of dark gray steam; Ron's was in a passionate embrace spitting green sparks.  Seamus was feverishly prodding the flames at the base of his cauldron with the tip of his wand, as they had gone out.  They all collapsed in a tangled heap of exhausted flesh.

Deprived of their usual car-washing and lawn-mowing pursuits, the inhabitants of Privet Drive had retreated into the shade of their cool houses, windows thrown wide in the hope of tempting in a nonexistent breeze.  The only person left outdoors was a teenage boy who was lying flat on his back in a flower bed, masturbating.

Technorati Tags: Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling, writing, parody, nonprofit use of brief quotes for purposes of parody, which is OK