Just because you can, doesn't mean you should: creepymouth commercials

There seems to have been some minor technical barrier surmounted in animation, and now you can stick realistic-looking moving mouths wherever you want to in an ad.

Unfortunately, there is absolutely no good use for realistic-looking mouths anywhere but on someone who already has a completely functional mouth, in a pretty good spot. So whenever the technology comes up, it is almost miraculously creepy.

Below, a couple of students from Uncanny Valley High, class of 2012:

"Another one of those green beers, Scarecrow?" I stay home on St. Patrick's Day, and now I know why.

Holy ....! PSAs tend to attract a bad element--recent grads with more technical capabilities than sense, a feeling that they don't need to pay attention to consequences because they are doing something socially good, and access to public-service money that needs to get spent so that a box gets checked on some bureaucrat's annual plan. This one is particularly egregious. (via Copyranter, who has just moved to Buzzfeed.  Actually, I bet the three-mouthed beast is from Copyranter too, but I was too traumatized to remember where I saw it). I'm sure newly breastfeeding moms have exactly this nightmare.

When something can be done, it will be done, but that doesn't mean it should be done.

A situation is not a story: Martha Marcy May Marlene

People who join abusive cults voluntarily are likely to have preexisting problems. This is makes it harder to disentangle the origins of their symptoms once they leave.

MMMM is a movie about a situation. A young woman (named Martha, renamed Marcy May in the cult she joins, and answering the phone as Marlene, as all the women in the cult do) escapes after two years and moves in with her older sister and her sister's husband. Martha is skittish, weird, paranoid, and somewhat dopey-seeming. As we see flashbacks to her time in the cult, we see how she was manipulated, abused, and finally ended up participating in some of the cult's violence.

It is all well done, I thought.  But aside from anatomizing the situation, the movie didn't really go anywhere, and I have a genre desire for imposing plots on inchoate reality. Martha's sister and brother-in-law are on vacation in an isolated lake house, and both are dull and flat of affect. No one ever talks about anything interesting. The cult members are likewise deadpan.

So the movie seems really long.  The flashbacks do have a kind of progress to them, but the post-escape scenes do not. The movie does add some ominous touches, as a way of adding suspense, and those are the only trace of narrative energy. Scenes are slow-moving and dull. Maybe the actress who plays Martha, Elizabeth Olsen, acts, maybe she doesn't. I found it hard to be sure.

So: good raw material if you have a project that might include a character who was already damaged and was further damaged by a cult, and who plays a role in an actual plot, but not recommended if you just want to see a movie.

Post-surgery entertainment: Frailty

I like movies but watch too few of them. Somehow I can't sit still for long enough, or have something else to do. I have to make resolutions to watch them. It's really quite silly.

But after my eye surgery, I was confined to bed, and still am forbidden much movement, so have watched more movies than usual, and even a whole season of Deadwood, in a truly decadent binge.

As I've mentioned before, one thing I really like is movies that are pretty good but not great, that let me rewrite them as they are going on, and serve as inspirations for new plots. Last week I watched a movie that was perfect for that: Frailty, which is about religious revelation and murder in an East Texas town. I liked it, but thought it was only half good, in that it carefully built up a situation that it then blew. Most crucially, it dumped a key character, one with genuine strength of soul that we had every reason to respect, in the toilet, in an ill-advised attempt at a creepy twist ending. And the ending was genuinely creepy. I just thought it was the wrong one.

On a rainy night, a young man, Fenton Meiks (played by Matthew McConaughey) shows up at FBI headquarters to tell FBI Agent Wesley Doyle (the impressive Powers Boothe--also in Deadwood, as it happens) that he knows who a notorious serial killer, the Hand of God, is. And he knows this because of what happened to him in his childhood.

Now, as a movie viewer, you know that, in any kind of movie worth watching, the FBI agent is not just a neutral listener to a confession. He is receiving this confessional because he, in some twisted way, is related to the things being confessed.

And so it is. I won't tell you what the connection is, except that it turns out to be lame and pointless and totally contrived. That revelation comes pretty late in the movie, though, so most of it can be enjoyed before it gets to that point.

As Doyle and Meiks drive out to check out where the bodies are buried (oddly enough, though the Hand of God is billed as a serial killer, only the first of his bodies have been found, an oddity that gets explained later), Meiks tells the story of his childhood. He starts with some idyllic childhood scenes of him and his younger brother Adam, an idyll shattered one morning when their widowed Dad comes into their bedroom and tells them that he has been visited by an angel. This angel has told him that the world is inhabited by a number of demons, looking exactly like normal human beings, that it is his mission to eliminate. And his sons need to help him.

The steady progress of this mission is the main motive spring of the film. Dad finds the instruments of his vengeance (gloves, a pipe, an ax). And he starts kidnapping people, murdering them, and burying them in a rose garden near his house. Young Adam is down with this. Fenton, a bit older, resists, and is savagely punished for his resistance. Things get worse and worse.

Is it crazy to do something crazy if an angel with a flaming sword appears on the underside of the oil pan of a sedan you are repairing and tells you to do it? Well...yes, of course it is. Even Moses asked for some indication of God's bona fides before doing his bidding, but Dad is a sad and lonely widower with two sons that are probably more trouble to raise than it seems, and is happy to have a mission.

I write novels, not screenplays. Novels can handle a lot of narrative complexity. Movies can't.  You can only do so much in 100 minutes. So the movie had no way to tie Agent Doyle to the past story, detail the actual actions of the Hand of God killer, and show the two boys in later life.  But the movie at least toys with an obvious notion for a science fiction writer: what if the demons are real? What if Dad has a real mission, no matter how deranged he seems?

When I was a kid I loved a show called The Invaders. It was about an architect who sees an alien spacecraft one night, and spends the rest of the series trying to persuade people that there are aliens invading the Earth. No one ever believes him. The aliens are always out to get him, and he often has to kill them. When they die they vaporize.

Already rewriting things in my head at age 10 or so, I waited, every week, for him to screw up and kill someone who doesn't vaporize, but just lies there and bleeds on the pavement. How can he possibly maintain a 1000 batting average? What does he do when he realizes he has killed a human being, not an evil alien? What new secrets get revealed by that, and what does he do? Needless to say, it never happened, but I thought something of the same thing watching Dad kidnap people and haul them home to be eliminated. Even if some of them are demons, is he always right?

Plus, the point of killing them off is unexplained. There is no hint of a coming apocalypse, a final struggle, whatever. It's just a form of extreme police enforcement, religious vigilantism. But that Dad is unreflective is totally fine. Bill Paxton, who also directed, does a great job with the role, holy vengeance as everyman. He's a good and loyal employee at the garage where he works, and he's a good and loyal instrument of the Lord.

But Fenton's childhood resisting the demands of his holy serial killer Dad...connected to a more interesting Now story, one where the consequences of that time really come home to roost, and some unexpected truths are revealed...some potential there.

Secular skeptic that I am, I'm probably not the right person to write it. Because I see refusal to play ball as a valid response to an insane request, even from a supernatural being. It's like the ending of one of the best debate-the-meaning-with-your-friends movies ever made, Michael Tolkin's 1991 The Rapture: if God insists on generating an evil world and then following it up with an Apocalypse that is simultaneously arbitrary, cruel, and cheesy, isn't the only existentially valid response to refuse to go along?

Many people would argue that it isn't. Ours is not to reason about the mission God gives us, or to criticize His special effects.

But it's been two decades since The Rapture and one since Frailty, so it's about time for another meditation on what one of us moderns would do if some being stepped out of Scripture, grabbed us by the shoulder, and gave us a mission.

Where I've been

A couple of weeks ago, I suffered a detached retina in my left eye.  That required some fairly significant eye surgery, then a lot of lying propped up in bed with instructions not to move around too much, bend over, or read.

My eye seems to be recovering, though there are no guarantees. And I feel well enough to slide slowly into some of my usual activities.  So I will be writing more as time goes by.

The drone in your future

Get ready. Within a few years they will be everywhere.

Drones. They'll be flown by national governments, state governments, local governments. By news agencies, archeologists, meteorologists, real estate investors, transportation engineers, paparazzi...the list goes on. Their price is going to keep dropping.

The effects will be dramatic. Local SWAT teams, tick-full of Homeland Security money, will be desperate to acquire them to survey for drugs, bust in doors, and overawe evil doers. A war of assassination will pervail throughout unsettled areas of the world. Outdoor weddings will be less popular. Secure delivery of small parcels will have a new modality. Hobbyists will create ever stranger devices.

And, at some point, things could get rough. Our government is already overarmed, both internationally and domestically.  What happens when you can officially be ordered to stay inside, and that order can be enforced everywhere?

Well, for a long time it's just going to be pointless extra feeds of drone visuals in local news shows and shots of celebrities trying to sunbathe somewhere. And a few bad guys killed in peripheral areas. Maybe that's all it's going to be. I have to say, I don't even know how to prepare.

That which does not destroy us: delivering a novel to the workshop

In my day job, I am a marketing writer. In cartoons like Dilbert, and in much common belief in tech companies, marketing people are blithering idiots who have no idea of what the products do, who the customers are, or even what business they are in.

That hasn't actually been my experience. People actually expect marketing people to know a lot about the business they are writing for. In my case right now, that's a wide range of medical devices, from heart valves to hip implants. So, sometimes people are a little uncomfortable telling me when I have something wrong ("does he really not know that a good market for facet arthroplasty might not develop?") Well, no, I don't. That was just my guess.

But what I say to them when they wonder if I really want to be corrected: "Either you think I'm an idiot, and it's just between us, or you and some thousands of other people think I'm an idiot." There's really no way around it. Unlike most jobs, mine is practiced in the open. By definition, the world sees pretty much everything I produce.

I'm not telling this so that you'll feel sorry for me, or respect me more.  Or both. Paradoxically enough, we do frequently want both of those things simultaneously.

I'm telling you because I just turned in the manuscript of my novel, Timeslip, to my writing workshop, the Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop (CSFW). Finally, someone other than me will read this thing.

The CSFW is a powerful tool. It has a procedure set, a corporate culture, and a long-serving subset of members that makes it effective in uncovering a wide set of shortcomings in a manuscript. Like any workshop, it is a great servant but a terrible master. In my experience, they can only make a book better. Not that every suggestion or even observation is good or pertinent.

And it's done in private. No reader will ever have to experience that poorly motivated character or that impossible use of steam power. Just those brave folks of the CSFW.

It's long past the time when luck had anything to do with it, but I won't mind if you wish me some anyway.

In search of a fruitful idea, like the Trinity

In a recent post, I characterized novel ideas as something like fugue subjects, something that can be reversed and transformed and played against itself, in the form of other characters, subplots, locations, etc. If it has that flexibility and extensibility, it can serve as the basis for a novel.

The same is true, I think of a variety of other ideas. Some ideas are fruitful, that is, they lead to other ideas. In another post, I wrote about the writer Ron Carlson's notion that, when writing, you should make sure your narrative choices give you "inventory". You make initial story choices not just on behalf of the plot, but on behalf of the future self that will be writing the rest of the story. You want to keep that person from running out of stuff to use. I've also written about how irritated that person will be if you aren't careful to do that.

In Christian theology, the Trinity plays something of that role (how's that for a dramatic transition?) The Trinity became dominant as a concept, not because it is, in some sense "truer" than, say, Arian monotheism, Monophysite spiritualism, or Nestorian humanism, but because it allowed for an incredibly complex narrative. Someone could always grab some part of that idea and develop an entire theology out of it. As a result, Trinitarian sequels, spin-offs, and fan fiction outcompeted the more closed-off and conclusive narrative notions of other Christological constructs. 

Having explained both post-Nicean theology and novel writing, what can I do next?

I can go in search of a fruitful idea.  I just sent my novel to my workshop, and have new tasks to take on.

The Matt Ridley Prize for Environmental Heresy

I should start this post with my usual boilerplate disclaimer when discussing environmental issues: I live in Cambridge, I ride my bike everywhere, I am concerned about global warming, but more concerned about issues to do with water (both drinking, and the kind that is losing all of its fish).

But I find most of the things people like to propose as ways of solving our problems, like high-speed trains, wind generators, and electric cars, are kind of...silly. There is no way a dollar spent on any of those things generates anything like a dollar's worth of value. They have a vaguely cargo cultish feel to them: useless rituals performed by people who do not understand the real means of production. Wind towers are really just fancy statues of John Frum. These things will bring us Green Cargo.

Well, I started to tell you about how, really, I was one of the great and the good, and now I've gotten all Copenhagen Consensus on you, which just demonstrates my unreliability. You now suspect I am in the pocket of the Heartland Institute.

So, with that preparation, via Knowledge Problem, a notice that the U.K. magazine Spectator has announced the Matt Ridley Prize for Environmental Heresy: a  £8500 prize for the best 1,000 to 2,000 word essay the makes

the most brilliant and rational argument — that uses reason and evidence — to gore a sacred cow of the environmental movement. There are many to choose from: the idea that wind power is good for the climate, or that biofuels are good for the rain forest, or that organic farming is good for the planet, or that climate change is a bigger extinction threat than invasive species, or that the most sustainable thing we can do is de-industrialise.

Over $13,000 by today's exchange rate. That's midlist novel advance-level money!

BTW, now you know why midlist authors are pathetic.

I like Matt Ridley's science journalism, and it's a challenge worth taking up. Entries close June 30, 2012.

The pain of the endgame

I've spent the last two weeks slicing and dicing the workshop-bound draft of my young adult novel, Timeslip. A few chunks need to be fixed, but right now I'm doing delicate surgery on the endgame: final confrontations, removals of pieces from the board, and a set up for what will come, I hope, in the next book.

It's harder than I expected. Pretty much everyone of significance in the rest of the book plays a role here somewhere. It takes place in an isolated factory building with some sinister features. But getting everyone there, on stage, then appropriately off, requires a lot of narrative machinery that must then be hidden so the reader doesn't get a glimpse of that sweating, desperate man behind the curtain as he raises and lowers scrims, moves furniture on and off stage, and gets the actors prepped for their entrances and exits.

I try to give my workshop a fairly finished piece. It may still have some deep problems, but it's not for lack of trying on my part. So, even though I suspect this section will require some significant changes once they get through with it, I do want it to work on its own terms, now.

I've learned, both through the response my earlier work has gotten, and what I have responded to from others, that lack of attention to that leads to a kind of weary annoyance that encourages the critic to focus on the wrong thing, and miss significant issues that need to be dealt with.

It's just like in marketing: you make your mockups, drafts, and approaches as polished as possible, even though you know they will get completely hacked up later. Otherwise people end up complaining about the font or telling you that you really should have put something in that last bullet where you indicated there was room for an additional point.

So, I'm later with it than I implied to my workshop, but it's in a good cause. I hope.

A great ad that clarifies why newspapers are dying

The ad Copyranter described as "the best ad of the year, so far":

It's totally fun, but as an ad for the Grauniad, or any news entity, it seems a bit off kilter. You don't actually see any reporting or investigation, though I suppose the guy in his bathrobe could be a reporter.  All you see is a mass of instant opinion, ending with a Greek-style "you made us borrow too much money" riot that seems to justify murdering mortgage holders.

As a Madisonian nightmare of an overconnected populace run amok, it's dead on.

An idea even sillier than green roofs on buildings

Green roofs on buses. (via Human Transit)

I have no real technical analysis to add to John Metcalfe's "make the rubble bounce" takedown: weight, watering, safety....

But the fact that any number of media outlets have picked up this notion, roughly similar in realism to the doodles of car-top lasers or backyard rocket launchers found in the notebooks of bored kids in class across our great land, says something.

One thing it says is "reporters are lazy", which you know, because you are lazy, and you would be even if you were a reporter.

The other thing it says is "we're doomed".

There are no good answers out there. We face serious, genuine environmental problems, and we have no idea of what to do about them. Reporters jump on things like planting sedum on top of buses because there really isn't anything else to put in their stories.

Moderating and getting value out of a convention panel

A lot of smart people go on panels at a science fiction convention. Put a bunch of them on a panel, however, and you often end up with mess.

The same is true of work. Some places have a lot of smart people at them. But these people can ineffectually waste a lot of time if they are not managed properly.

Enter the middle manager (my role for some years). Underappreciated and definitely unsung, but the essential feature of bringing problems and minds together in an organized way.

In the same way, a convention panel needs a moderator. That too is an underappreciated and unsung position. I take it seriously, when I have it. Some people do. Others are pointy haired bosses who ask you ridiculous and unanswerable questions, or, on the other side, lose control and let gabby people sitting in the front row of the audience hold forth endlessly. Poorly managed panels are the devil's playground.

One important thing is not just keeping the panel on topic, allowing flexibility when an interesting and potentially fruitful side topic pops up, but making people interesting, by not allowing them to fall into default positions. It may surprise you to learn that your favorite writer is a bit of blowhard. It is the moderator's job to prevent you from reaching this realization.

I like moderating, and like to think I'm good at it. At least, I take it seriously. But at Boskone, I failed my audience by inadequately controlling my panel. The topic was Global Warming, but with an interesting and idea-generating twist: it wasn't about what to do about it, it was to assume it was going to happen and then discuss what people should do to survive and prosper. Or, as I put it, "global warming for fun and profit". Tell me, panel, where I should put my resources. What decisions should I make, what portfolio should I hold, what things should I look out for?

Fun, right? The panel didn't think so. They pretty much defaulted to discussing giant space shields and other such things. Now, just to be clear, there's nothing wrong with that topic. It just is the one people always talk about. We'd been given the opportunity to approach things from another direction.

I learned a few things about panel and audience management, so it wasn't a total loss. But I still want to know how to Profit from the Coming Disaster. I'll bet you do too.

Short story ideas vs. novel ideas

I was moderator of a panel on how we do short stories at Boskone last weekend, along with fellow workshop members James Patrick Kelly and F. Brett Cox, nearby neighbor Craig Shaw Gardner, and new friend Beth Bernobich. It was quite a fun panel.

Everyone said interesting things, but I most remember the smart thing I said. I don't know how that happened. I'll try to pay more attention next time.

Oh, what I said. One of my questions was how you tell a short story idea from a novel idea. Do have to run some battery of tests on it, or can you pretty much tell from the way it sits in your mind? And what about the idea makes it one or the other? I have to play with the idea for some time before I know which it is.  I compared it to the difference between a tune, and a fugue theme. A fugue theme can be pretty simple, but it can be inverted, stretched, modified, and played against itself in a variety of ways. Even as you add things to make something a novel, the additions in some way reflect that underlying fugue theme.

Not a piece of practical advice, really ("But that's just a metaphor. I still don't know how to tell!") You'll have to ask one of my other panelists for something actually useful to you.

My Boskone schedule

This weekend is our increasingly low-key winter science fiction convention, Boskone. Here is where I'll be and what I will be doing.

Saturday 10:00 - 11:00, Occupy Luna, Carlton ( Westin)

How do we have a lunar society that avoids some of the problems we have today.

Vince Docherty (M), Allen M. Steele, Ian Randal Strock, Alexander Jablokov, Patrick Nielsen Hayden

I presume I will figure out what this means by the time I'm done with the panel.

Saturday 11:00 - 12:00, The Writing of Short Fiction, Carlton ( Westin)

Let's take a close-up view of what to do when you create a horror, science fiction, or fantasy story in one of the shorter lengths. How do you decide that this idea will work best short? How many characters can you fit? What's got to go in? What must you leave out? What short form masters should you steal blind?

Alexander Jablokov  (M), Laird Barron, F. Brett Cox, James Patrick Kelly, Beth Bernobich

Hey, I’m the moderator for this panel! That’s way more work than just making ill-considered observations. I’ll have to figure out some interesting questions to ask.

Saturday 13:00 - 13:30, Reading: Alexander Jablokov, Independence  ( Westin)

I will probably be reading my recent alien sex story, “Comfort of Strangers”.

Saturday 15:00 - 16:00, Environmental Rearguarding: What To Do After It's Too Late, Burroughs ( Westin)

Let's assume, as some scientists now fear, that the tipping point for catastrophic global climate change has already been reached. What can and should we do to 1) lessen its effects and 2) build a sustainable civilization on the world we'll have left?

Alexander Jablokov (M), Jeff Hecht, Tom Easton, Joan Slonczewski, Shira Lipkin

I only just noticed that I’m the moderator for this one too. Better start thinking.

Sunday 11:00 - 12:00, Reading: Flash Fiction from the Cambridge SF Workshop, Lewis (Westin)

Elaine Isaak, F. Brett Cox, Alexander Jablokov, James Patrick Kelly, Steven Popkes, Kenneth Schneyer

This was a fun event last year. I’ve been so busy with my novel that I had no time to write a short piece for this. I’ll probably read a short, relatively self-contained portion of the novel in progress, Timeslip.

Sunday 13:00 - 14:00, Crossover: Mystery & Genre, Burroughs ( Westin)

Which genre do mysteries most resemble: science fiction, fantasy, or horror? What mental muscles do they use similarly, for writer and for reader? If a mystery story is a whodunit, is an SF tale often a howdunit? What works have most successfully crossed the streams?

Toni Weisskopf (M), Dana Cameron, Alexander Jablokov, Leah Cypess, Toni L. P. Kelner

I love SF/mystery crossovers, and have written a few myself.

Dealing with meetings

Most people--most people with jobs, that is--say they hate meetings. The waste of time, the boredom, etc.

They are lying. Almost every employed person secretly likes meetings. Why? Because, bar the odd one where you have to do some tedious presentation or other, you don't have to work at a meeting. And, since you have to be at work all day, an hour or two sitting on a conference room is a chance to relax. All you really need to do is look alert. And make intelligent-seeming comments that have no work consequence for you.

Imagine that. All you need to do is sound smart. It's a great deal. People say they don't like them because if they admit they do, they fear someone will do something about it. Like cancel the meeting. Which just adds another hour of sitting in your cube staring at a screen.

When you're a freelancer, it's different. They pay you for product, but when you aren't working, it's entirely your business. Meeting filler is less valuable, because the alternative is not the grim cube, but the couch, or leaving the house altogether, or working on some other project. I have several regular meetings during the week with my main client, and they are nowhere near entertaining. Not terrible, just not something I would pick if it weren't part of the job. They just move me an hour closer to whatever deadline I have without allowing me to get anything actually done on what I'm supposed to deliver. They are a source of stress.

I do try. The meetings where they make me use a webcam are complete loss, plus I have to put on a nice shirt, adjust the lighting, and not slouch. But even the other ones, where I can put the Mute button on and type or something, I feel obliged to pay attention to what people are saying. It's just distracting. And sometimes they mix real content in with the announcements about events I won't be able to attend, staffing changes of no possible relevance to me, and bonus programs I don't qualify for. It's a cruel trick.

So, you, office worker: stop complaining about your meetings. They are a relatively painless way to abrade your day.

Trying to watch TV: Fringe

When I was young, I watched a lot of TV. Every night after dinner, my younger sister and I would retire to the den to watch a black and white TV pretty much until it was time to go to bed.  For a good while after that I had a TV in my room. I watched it after school while I played with my Cape Canaveral set.  I kept watching a lot of TV until partway through college.  Then I stopped.  I didn't have a TV for a while, and kind of lost the habit.

TV shows really are much better now. If you don't believe me, watch an episode of Gilligan's Island or F Troop, staples of my youth.  And they now have way more sex in them, which would have been a big plus for me as an adolescent.

All my fellow writers watch a lot more TV than I do. I feel left out, particularly as I've never much liked SF TV shows.  I've discussed this before.

But I'm willing to keep trying. Since I'm writing a book that involves alternate universes, several people have recommended Fringe.  But there are three gigantic seasons of the thing. I didn't feel like digging through all of it.

Fortunately, a writer and editor named Jennifer Heddle came to the rescue, with a guide to what episodes to watch in the first seasons. I can't emphasize how much this kind of thing helps. I can be up to speed quickly, and not waste a lot of time on filler material. If you actually enjoy watching TV, as an activity, filler material is fine, even necessary. I'm just trying to get a basic knowledge, so I can fake it. I'm using leverage, and Ms. Heddle is providing the capital.  Thank you!

Did you ever think you would need Cliff's Notes for television shows?

So far, Fringe is OK. It has the problem I find inherent to SF TV shows (and most written SF, truth be told): it's always about what it's about. The characters know what the story is, and they do what they need to in order to move it along. Employees of evil megacorporations spend their time kidnapping people and plotting world domination rather than clockwatching and attending project update meetings. Everyone feels obliged to follow the dictates of a typewritten manifesto from decades ago. And Olivia, the main character, God love her, has the sense of humor of a cement mixer. Of course, she is slowly discovering that she was the victim of unauthorized experiments on her in childhood, which could ruin anyone's day.

And why does the ravishing Astrid get to do nothing but turn things on and examine bodies? I'm worried she'll start sending out her resume, looking for a sidekick job where she actually gets to say mordant and amusing things and occasionally kick someone's butt. Is that too much to ask?

Nice ending episode, with some cute mysteries set up.  If I'd had to watch the entire season to get there, I would have felt underrewarded, but as it is, I'm looking forward to zipping through Season 2!

God of Carnage: play without subtext

Last night I went to the Huntington Theater to see Yasmin Reza's God of Carnage (which is currently also a movie, Carnage). It was better than most Huntington productions, though given my experience with them, that's setting the bar pretty low.

The play was translated from the original French by Christopher Hampton. He must also have had to translate a lot of cultural referents from the 14th Arrondissement (or wherever) to Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. The housing supply owner Mike Novak reads a bit too generically working class--self-satisfied upper middle class people tend to be easier to port from one cultural operating system to another, while strivers still have culturally specific rough edges.

You probably know the story. One 11-year-old boy hit another one with a stick, breaking a couple of teeth. The two pairs of parents come together to reasonably discuss the situation, only to fall apart into almost hostility, drunkenness, and self-pity.

It's pretty fun, and has the advantage of being really short. But it says nothing other than what is there. There is essentially no subtext. No character is anything other than what he or she says there on stage. There is no sense of anything deeper, any history, any unarticulated feelings. At one point they flirt with wondering what the real story of the boys' relationship might be, a potentially deeper issue, but quickly drop it in favor of squabbling over cell phones, tulips, and Darfur.

Movies can get away with that kind of thing, because they have so many other ways of distracting you from lack of underlying content. Plays can't. If those real people in front of you don't bleed out past the edges of the stage and the hour or two they are there, they become just people saying lines.

I won't see the movie, so feel free to tell me what that's like.

We live in Newt Gingrich's alternate universe

There are certain figures that genre writers like to use as defining specific eras.  If you go to early-to-mid eighteenth century America, no matter where you go, you run into Benjamin Franklin. Straining at the limits of biography, Neal Stephenson bootlegs an extremely young Ben Franklin into Quicksliver, and Jim Morrow puts an only slightly older one into The Last Witchfinder. Similarly, Mark Twain puffs a cigar and comments mordantly in almost any version of the Gilded Age you can imagine, Theodore Roosevelt yells "Bully!" in alternate worlds with steam-powered land dreadnoughts and Confederate empires, and Winston Churchill nobly faces down invading German armies even in worlds where history varied widely from our own. No amount of historical change can seem to get rid of these guys.

I am sure Newt Gingrich sees himself as a similar linking figure, looming darkly in a variety of divergent histories. Often he is scorned and disregarded, which doesn't make him any the less penetrating and right. But now, in our universe.... The muffin and the moment have met.

Gingrich writes and reads science fiction. I am sure that he consciously thinks this. This is the right universe, he thinks, for his improbable ascent. This is the line of history that is the true one. There are lesser lines where he goes down to defeat. They are low-probability lines, inhabited by shadows.

I don't think he'd ever blurt this out, in debate or on the stump. He has learned some control over the years. It would make him seem...crazy. But look into his eyes. He doesn't really believe that you exist. You're just a shadow appearing in a single universe. But he is a reality in all of them. Believe it.

My Arisia schedule

Since getting back from the holidays I've been buried by both my jobs:  many hours per day of book revision, plus prep for some sales meetings next month for the freelance job.  I should have more time in bit.

And so I am feeling a bit squished by the fact that, a long time ago, I decided to go to the convention that kicks off our season here in Boston: Arisia.  I still have a lot to get done!

But here, quite late, is where you can see me at Arisia, if you are attending.  My panels:

Friday 5:30 pm
The Heinlein Juveniles, with Karen Purcell, Sandra Hutchinson, and Julia Rios.  I don't think anyone will ever read these again, but the reasons why are worth discussing.

Saturday 1:00 pm
Our Grim Meat-Hook Future, with Ken Kingsgrave-Ernstein, Steve Sawicki, Glenn Grant, and Suzanne Reynolds-Alpert.  Are we looking at the right dystopias?

Sunday 10:00 am (the hour otherwise known as the Event Horizon)
Traditional Stories, Modern Audiences, with Vikki Ciaffone, Meredith Schwartz, April Grant, and Bob Kuhn. Elaine Isaak, a friend from my writing workshop, indicated that she couldn't figure out why I was on this panel, and she may be right, because I want to talk about how removing religion, class distinctions, and early death from past stories alters something essential about them. But who is going to hear what I have to say at that hour?

If you're around, find me and say hi.