Monthly Archives: June 2003

Kiki’s Delivery Service, by Miyazaki Hayao

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The Miyazaki film festival continued last Friday night with
Kiki’s Delivery Service. I was both impressed and
disappointed. But first, a word about the story.

Kiki is a thirteen-year-old girl whose mother is a witch (a word which should
probably be translated as “village healer who happens to be able to fly
on a broom”). She’s been raised to be a witch herself, and has just
embarked on her training. Quite literally–a witch begins her training
by flying off on her broom, by herself, and finding a witch-less village
or town, where she must survive on her own for a full year. It’s clear
from the beginning that Kiki’s going to have some trouble; she likes the
idea of being a witch but hasn’t paid much attention to the skills
needed. She can fly on a broom, but that’s about it. Being as spunky
and resourceful as all Miyazaki heroines, she starts an airborne delivery
service to make ends meet. She also meets a variety of people, some she
gets on with, and some she doesn’t, and does a mess of growing.

I was impressed, as always, by the quality of the artwork and animation.
The town Kiki settles in is a beautiful place, and the flying sequences
are breathtaking and hilarious by turns–Kiki has a way of ricocheting
from trees and buildings as she gets started. He does rain remarkably
well, too.

I’m equally impressed by Miyazaki’s storytelling skills and his pacing.
It’s a heartwarming story, well-told, and I enjoyed watching it.

So why am I disappointed?

For a movie about flying on a broomstick it was a little…pedestrian. It
has none of the action or
gee-whiz moments of Castle in the Sky; despite being about a
witch, it has none of the magic of Spirited Away or
My Neighbor Totoro. Not once did I feel transported somewhere
else, as I did with the others.

To be fair, I had fairly exalted expectations when I put the DVD in the
player. And I really can’t fault the movie, either; it’s exactly what
it’s supposed to be, and what it’s supposed to be is simply different
than the other ones. It’s not about a human being in Faerie; rather (to
the extent that childhood is a different country than adulthood, and a
large town a different country than a small village) it’s about a
resident of Faerie having to make her way in the Mortal Lands. It’s not
Kiki’s fault that I’m used to living there all of the time.

Possession, by A. S. Byatt

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During my last knitting group get together, we were chatting about
books. It’s a common topic since most knitters I know are also
readers. Mysteries seem to be the most popular genre with Miss
Marple, Brother Cadfael and the Judge Dee books the most popular. Why
this is so, I have no clue, though we have had chats about the precise
techniques for knitting while reading. Perhaps it’s some primal need
to multitask that I never inherited. I do know I have never gotten the
hang of it, the book keeps flopping closed or I drop a stitch or I
forget to knit and just read or whatever. So I must divide my time.

Anyway, Byatt as an author came up and I mentioned that I had tried 3
times to read Possession without success and had given it up as too
obtuse or modern for my sensibilities. Another member of the group
suggested I give it another go, staying with it for the 1st hundred
pages or so before tossing it into the trade in box for the used
bookstore. And of course, she was right. The story kicked in somewhere
around page 70 or so and I was hooked for a week.

I mean, really hooked. I read it at work on breaks, while cooking,
before bed, waiting for my dinosaur computer to boot, etc., etc. I even
delayed knitting on a sweater I’ve been dying to work on to finish
it. I got a little anxious when I realized that I only had about 20
more pages and the book would be over. Sort of anticipatory separation
anxiety. This happens rarely.

The plot is more complex than this but essentially it’s a mystery. A
young, unemployed researcher of an obscure British poet runs across a
draft of a letter by the poet to a woman. There is no known
documentation that the two had ever met except for a brief reference
to the woman at a dinner party he attended. She, however, had written
an epic romance that the feminist camp had rediscovered recently so he
takes himself over to the leading scholar of the woman’s work to see
what he can find out. She, of course, is brainy, beautiful and
interested…in the relationship between the two poets. From there, it
is the bit by bit unraveling of the poets’ story thru letters,
journals and literary detective work and the building of the
relationship between the two modern researchers. It was
entrancing. Byatt writes with a command of the language that is
breathtaking. Some of her descriptions I read two and three times just
to enjoy them again. Her use of color was so interesting I was noting
them on post it notes to see if I could find the pattern. There is
one, but I will leave it up to you to discover. A rare, fine
read. And she has other books she’s written to be discovered and read.

Mac OS X Hacks, by Rael Dornfest and Kevin Hemenway

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This book makes an interesting companion to
Mac OS X: The Missing Manual. Rather than trying to cover the
entire operating system and desktop environment, the book focusses on 100
“hacks” — which is to say, 100 advanced topics. It’s really a cookbook
full of recipes for doing interesting things with your Mac, and throws
light in a number of dark corners. I’m glad I bought it, and I expect
that I’ll refer to it regularly.

That said, the book suffers from being…well, from being a book.
The Mac OS X scene is evolving rapidly, and many of the hacks are to
some extent out of date. As just one example, there’s a section on how
to install a MySQL database server; it appears to be a terribly involved
process. And yet, even though the book was just published in March it’s
already out-of-date; there’s now a version of MySQL for the Mac that can
be installed as easily as any shrink-wrapped software. More easily, in
some cases.

Bad Poetry

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I’ve never been a big fan of poetry; it’s an acquired taste, I think, and perhaps I simply have never taken the time. It may simply be that after so many years of reading and writing technical documentation I value clarity and precision too highly; many poems seem to me to be the literary equivalent of the entries to the annual Obfuscated C competition.

Consequently, I’m not the person to try to distinguish good poetry from bad poetry. But even I can tell when the emperor is naked, and so I found this article both enlightening and entertaining.

Lt. Leary Commanding, by David Drake.

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When I reviewed With the Lightning, I nearly accused Drake
of channeling
David Weber, and
suggested that Honor Harrington fans would love it. Somewhat
surprisingly, my wife Jane is a big Honor Harrington fan; she latched
on to Weber’s books shortly after I brought them home, and now has
read them several more times than I have. She’s not reading much
fiction these days–no time–but when a new Harrington book comes in,
everything stops until she’s done with it. I told her a bit about
With the Lightning, and she picked it
up, and everything stopped for a couple of days until she finished
this one, too. So I seem to have hit that nail on the head.

But in another way, I was mistaken. The obligatory Hornblower
comparisons on the back cover notwithstanding, Drake is channeling
neither
C.S.
Forester nor
David
Weber. Instead, he’s channeling
Patrick
O’Brian.
The parallels are so blindingly obvious that I should have noticed them
immediately. Here are a few:

Jack Aubrey succedds on luck, determination, and pure good
seamanship. Lt. Leary succeeds on luck, determination, and pure good
spacemanship.

Stephen Maturin is suspected of disloyalty because he was
tangentially involved in an uprising in Ireland. Adele Mundy is
suspected of disloyalty due to a conspiracy for which her parents were
executed.

Jack Aubrey is a womanizer. Lt. Leary is a womanizer.

Aubrey and Maturin’s first meeting is marked by a serious
disagreement out of which friendship is ultimately born. Leary and
Mundy’s first meeting is marked by a serious disagreement, out of
which friendship is ultimately born.

Surprisingly, for a physician, Maturin is a skilled duellist and a
first class shot (and also a dab hand with a sword). Surprisingly,
for a librarian, Mundy is a skilled duellist and a first class shot.

When Maturin goes to sea he is much beloved by all the crew for his
undoubted skills, despite being clumsy and no seaman at all. When
Mundy goes to space, she is much beloved by all the crew for her
undoubted skills, despite being clumsy and and so spaceman at all.

Jack Aubrey makes his name when his sloop Sophy captures the
much larger frigate Cacafuego. Lt. Leary makes his name when
his corvette….

Well, you get the idea. There are more parallels, but I won’t get
into that.

It’s not a perfect match, by any means; except for a few minor
elements, the plots are entirely different. And in some other ways it
doesn’t quite work. Aubrey and Maturin are tied together by a great
love of music; there is no such shared interest between Leary and
Mundy. There is cause for mutual respect, but no real cause for great
friendship of the kind we see developing.

But all of these comments are really beside the point, which is
that, like its predecessor, it’s a ripping good yarn and a lot of
fun.

Welcome to our New Home!

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Welcome to the new home of “A View from the Foothills”. I’ve decided to stop rolling my own blog, and go with a package called Movable Type. There are some advantages and disadvantages to the change–for one thing, this blog will no longer be quite as easily integrated with the rest of my site. On the plus side, though, you folks can now leave comments if you like.

Over the next few days I intend to migrate all of the old weblog archives over to Movable Type’s database; they will also stay where they are, so that the old perma-links will remain valid.

And then will begin the tweaking, to make the weblog look the way I want it to.