Stuff and Moonshine

 I guess my informal New Year's resolution is to try to stand up for causes I agree with, as least so far as a person can with limited income and a spouse who can't leave the house most days.

I'm among those irritated by Simon and Schuster giving a book-deal to arch-troll Milo Yiannopoulos, and thisfinecrew  makes the case that the best way to get a publisher's attention is snail-mail.

Simon & Schuster is already pitching the deal as a blow for freedom of speech, and in any case I often find myself loathe to base an argument on political opinion or even ethics, as the other person may not share mine or even have any. Instead I've decided to try the suggestion that giving a large advance to someone whose previous published work is full of plagiarized lines might not have been the wisest move, and that at the very least the editors are going to have to earn every penny of their paycheques. My printer isn't working, so I hand-wrote it, but that will probably add an extra bit of passive-aggression to the missive. 

To to be mailed out tomorrow when the post offices open, I guess.

         Book 10 -- Now with Even More WarMore seriously -- Even though Epilogue I could pretty much be read as "and most of the surviving characters got a reasonably happy ending," it depressed me for some reason, maybe because it ended abruptly and sort of anticlimactically and was followed by a second epilogue in which Tolstoy recaps all the abstract historical-theory parts of the novel; maybe because Natasha and Sonya's endings were "being happy being an ordinary matron" and "being happy being a doormat."

 So, the wolf-hunting scene was… fairly horrifying. I can’t tell if Tolstoy meant us to go, “ugh, animal cruelty” or “yay, sport in the countryside.” Maybe the latter, because it starts off several chapters in which the Rostovs Do Traditional Stuff and Are Folksy and Russian Instead of Sophisticated and French.

 Interestingly, their traditions include both Christmas mumming and trying to fortell one’s future husband by looking in a mirror in a dark room, both of which I knew in western variants.

While they’re both  cross-dressed as part of the mumming, Nicholai suddenly remembers he’s in love with Sonya and proposes. Never let it be said this book goes for the obvious romantic cliché.

While the girls are fortune-telling with the mirror (still with mustaches drawn on their faces from earlier) Natasha asks Sonya to look on her behalf:

“Of course she will!” whispered Natasha, but did not finish… suddenly Sonya pushed away the glass she was holding and covered her eyes with her hand.

“Oh, Natasha!” she cried.

“Did you see? Did you? What was it?” exclaimed Natasha, holding up the looking glass.

Sonya had not seen anything, she was just wanting to blink and to get up when she heard Natasha say, “Of course she will!” She did not wish to disappoint either Dunyasha or Natasha, but it was hard to sit still. She did not herself know how or why the exclamation escaped her when she covered her eyes.

“You saw him?” urged Natasha, seizing her hand.

“Yes. Wait a bit… I… saw him,” Sonya could not help saying, not yet knowing whom Natasha meant by him, Nicholas or Prince Andrew.

“But why shouldn’t I say I saw something? Others do see! Besides who can tell whether I saw anything or not?” flashed through Sonya’s mind.

“Yes, I saw him,” she said.

“How? Standing or lying?”

“No, I saw… At first there was nothing, then I saw him lying down.”

“Andrew lying? Is he ill?” asked Natasha, her frightened eyes fixed on her friend.

“No, on the contrary, on the contrary! His face was cheerful, and he turned to me.” And when saying this she herself fancied she had really seen what she described.

“Well, and then, Sonya?…”

“After that, I could not make out what there was; something blue and red…”

This is kind of interesting, because if it does later turn out to be prophetic in some way, it would seem that the prophesy lies not in consciously seeing anything, but in what one’s mind prompts one to say about it afterward.

Oh, also Natasha is presently engaged to Prince Andrei, which is… either they’re perfect for one another or a hot mess, and no one (including themselves) seems to know which.

So, I finally read Experimental Film: A Novel, today, and it's great, but a very weird experience. Apparently it's a truism that female writers have to cope with everyone assuming their work is autobiographical; except in this case it's partly right -- Gemma's made no secret that Lois, the narrator, is based on herself (or how she feels about herself when it's four in the morning and she can't sleep), and Lois' family are based on hers. Which, since I've met them all, makes it read sort of like fanfiction about real people I know. The first act, especially, is like everything I've heard her talk about in the past five years, condensed into a hundred pages. The big difference between Lois and Gemma is that the former doesn't have a career of fifteen-odd years as a fiction writer on her resume, and consequently with her other careers (film critic, teacher) having gone under (through no fault of her own,) feels like a failure.

I'd been looking forward to this book for a while, because I'd suspected that Gemma's horror and fantasy works aren't so much divergent streams of fiction, but the outcome of different story lengths: her short stories are horror because they end just as the protagonist sees what they're falling towards, while the Hexslinger trilogy gives the characters time to hit bottom and start climbing out of that hole and redeem themselves. I don't think Lois needs as much redemption as she thinks she does; unlike some other Files protagonists, she's never killed anyone.(1) Anyway, I still need some time to process this latest novel before I decide if my theory holds; also I don't want to spoil it for anyone.


1. She's not even involved in an underground necrophiliac puppetry ring (and I did wonder if "Ding Dong the Derry-O" is a children's show in this book's universe, but probably not, since Lois never lists it among the tv shows that filter into her son's echolalia.)

San Francisco jeweller Alexander Eden, who's brokered the sale of a valuable necklace for Madame Sally Jordan of Honolulu, becomes suspicious when the purchaser, millionaire P. J. "The Plunger" Madden, suddenly calls and asks that the pearls be delivered to his ranch outside Eldorado, instead of his home address in New York. Det. Sgt. (not acting in his official capacity here) Chan, who couriered the necklace from Honolulu as a favour to Mme. Jordan, his former employer, concurs; and so Eden's son Bob travels to Eldorado, ostensibly to deliver the necklace, while Chan (who actually has it) works there undercover as a cook. At the ranch, Chan senses that something is not right, but with no obvious crime, he can't tell what. He convinces Bob to keep stalling while the two of them (quickly joined by local journalist Will Holley and movie-location scout Paula Wendell) investigate. At first the only murder victim is a parrot, but when the ranch's usual cook and caretaker Louie Wong returns unexpectedly, someone dispatches him as well...

Project Gutenberg has Earl Derr Biggers' Charlie Chan novels, and I've just finished reading The Chinese Parrot (1926). It bolsters my (admittedly white, Canadian, and 21st-century) opinion that the novels are less problematic than the movies -- we don't have to see Chan played by a white actor in makeup, and his dialogue is a bit less stereotypical than in most portrayals. Biggers lampshades this by having the detective go undercover; as "Ah Kim," he affects a very heavy dialect and plainly feels humiliated at having to do so. I was thinking it would be interesting to see a modern adaptation with Keone Young or somebody, when I realized the real problem with adapting this novel:

(Spoilers for 89-year-old novel ahead)
( Read more... )

You see, the plot turns on a case of impersonation: the real Madden appears in the opening chapter, but when we change locations to Eldorado an imposter has taken over. In a visual medium, you'd therefore need to either cast two different actors and risk the audience spotting the substitution, or one actor in a dual role and risk the audience feeling cheated. (Though having watched more than one season of Orphan Black, the latter trick might work with the right actor and a makeup artist who can create enough inconsistency between scenes to plant some subconscious doubt.)

In the text, OTOH, Biggers can do a beautiful job of misdirection while dropping enough hints to satisfy the golden-age-mystery rules of Fair Play. The physical descriptions of Madden constantly dwell on his red face (distinctive, and easy to fake); and at least twice someone states they "recognize him from photos in the newspaper;" in other words, from a grainy black-and-white photo that they don't actually have with them at the moment. Holley, who does recall meeting him years before, turns out to have met the imposter back when he was first pulling his con.

The main trick, however, was switching the POV without setting off alarm bells. It occurs to me that Fair Play is the reason mysteries use either first-person narration, or third-person-but-we-only-hear-one-character's-thoughts. In The Chinese Parrot, the POV character in the first two chapters is Alexander Eden;he third chapter POV is Chan; and chapters IV and onward are from the POV of Bob. Neither Bob Eden nor Chan were on the scene when the real Madden was introduced in chapter 1, but as the perspective shift falls into the natural flow of the story, it doesn't seem suspiciously forced. Furthermore it's soon forgotten in the bewildering crowd of incidents and characters. This is a novel with a large and vividly-described cast. I'm not sure it passes the Bechdel test, but even the female supporting characters include a Chinese-American telephone switchboard operator, a doctor running a desert sanatorium, and a stage performer who outwits Bob when she suspects he's trying to trick her into giving up information about her boyfriend; even Paula gets to advance the plot in at least one way besides being Bob's love interest. It's sort of depressing to write that sentence, and about a novel from the 1920s; maybe someone really should have a go at an adaptation.

Siderea has been posting about Watership Down, specifically it theme of how to be King (in the Jungian archetypal sense, but also in the more literal sense, because Hazel actually does become Chief Rabbit.) This is pretty much tailored to appeal to me as a topic, as I loved that book as a child, as much for the story of Hazel doing his best to lead his people as for the immersive descriptions of landscape from ground level.

Today was our second year with a table at the Friends of the Merril Collection Science-Fiction and Anime Flea Market. As always it was held at the Metro Reference Library.

We brought a rollaway suitcase full of paperbacks, and a poseable 18-inch Hal Jordan, Green Lantern doll with cloth costume and light-up ring. There were many people with brightly coloured hair and anime t-shirts. Also a baby in a tiny knitted Jayne Cobb hat. An old man at the table across from ours was talking up the collectability of his vintage paperbacks, in a plaintive yet extremely loud voice. I tried to assume he was hard of hearing; Andrew just kept muttering under his breath about how his books were overpriced for the venue and he wasn't even grading them correctly. There's no sniping like geek sniping.

He eventually got to gloat that we were selling more books than his rival, as we sold all but four of the paperbacks. He'd originally marked the Green Lantern doll at $80, but sold it at half-price to the young man who was selling manga and video games at the table next to ours with his wife who was dressed as Pikachu. I picked up a copy of Nalo Hopkinson's Skin Folk, and some costume jewelry which included a large felt brooch shaped like a donut with embroidered sprinkles:


I see the Toronto Library System now runs a small press for people who want to self-publish; and their Digital Hub includes a 3D printer. They had a glass case full of examples of things they'd printed on it. All in all, a very successful day out.

Les Silences du Colonel Bramble (The Silence of Colonel Bramble) and Patapoufs et Filifers (Fattypuffs and Thinifers) were both written by the same author (Andre Maurois).

That actually…. kind of makes sense now that I think about it.