I’ve just posted the October issue of Ex Libris Reviews, our monthly book review. If you’re a regular reader of this weblog, then you’ve already seen my reviews and Deb English’s reviews, but you haven’t seen Craig Clarke’s reviews. So go see ’em!

The news of Donald O’Conner’s death prompted me to have a 2 Blowhards kind of moment the other day. As everyone knows, O’Conner was one of the leads in the classic film Singing in the Rain, arguably the best musical Warner Brothers ever made. It’s now clear that Singing in the Rain is an outstanding work of art–but that was far from clear to its creators when they made it. The movie was intended to be a sort of review–a retrospective of songs used in previous WB movies over the years, all wrapped up in a light-hearted romp. They did it for love, they had a good time, they pleased themselves–and somehow they created a work of art.

Much the same is true of the classic Warner Brothers cartoons. Chuck Jones makes it clear in Chuck Amuck that they weren’t trying to create anything timeless. They had to produce a certain number of cartoons of a precise length to accompany the studio’s live action releases. In general, Jones and his compatriots got little if any feedback on their cartoons. So they produced cartoons to suit themselves, and never worried much about how they’d be received. On the contrary–an edict come down from management that they were not to make cartoons about bullfights, because bullfights weren’t funny. They immediately realized that bullfights must have untapped comic potential if management was agin’ ’em, and made Bully for Bugs.

They never guessed how enduring and timeless their work would be…and yet the Bugs Bunny and Road Runner cartoons have been pretty much continuously on TV for my entire life. (The latest development is a new Duck Dodgers TV show featuring all new cartoons.) The best of these cartoons are clearly works of art. And again, that it’s art was completely unintentional.

Works like Singing in the Rain and What’s Opera Doc? are art by accident; and yet they are among the most charming, delightful, and timeless works of art of the 20th century.

What happened to elevate these works above their near-relatives? Why are they different? Was it luck? Was it the attitude–one might even say, the humility–of the creators? (I lean toward this view; An American in Paris has some fabulous moments, but overall it’s a much weaker film than Singing in the Rain–and it’s much more self-consciously arty). Did the fact that they were group efforts play a role?

What do you folks think?

Chapter 38 and Chapter 39 of my novel Through Darkest Zymurgia! are now available for your delectation at Once-Told Tales

This week: The Wrath of Basenis. Next week: The Thrilling Conclusion!

It’s not kind to laugh at another man’s terror, but Yahmdallah has posted a marvelous tale of his encounter with an absurdly large spider.

Ms. La Fetra, kindly just move along; there’s nothing you want to see here.

Forager 23 has an interesting couple of posts on the importance of artwork in superhero comics and on how film would be taught if he had anything to say about it. Neither comics nor film are really my thing–but I enjoyed the posts anyway. Go read ’em.

If you came in late, you’ll want to read Making
Movies I, Making
Movies II, and Making
Movies III.

Today being Saturday, it was time for David and I to do some more
shooting on our movie. I do try to learn from my mistakes, and so
things went much better this week right from the start. It was
cooler, for one thing; we started at 9:30 in the morning instead of
1:30 in the afternoon, and the light was better in the parts of the
yard I wanted to use.

I reshot one scene from last week, the one with Yellow the Snake
coming down and around the corner as the sun-shade terminator moves
noticeably; that spot is in complete (though not dim) shade during
the morning, so I was able to get the shot without trouble. In fact,
I ran through it twice, and not only did both versions come out well,
they also dovetail perfectly. It looks like there are two snakes
coming round the corner, one after the other. There are
possibilities there I’ll have to explore.

Next, I tried an experiment. I wanted a shot with a snake’s-eye-view
of the world. Trying to carry the camera smoothly at that level
clearly wasn’t going to work, not without a Steadicam, so that meant
I needed to be creative. Enter the tricycle.

My kids’ tricycle is colorful and made of an equal proportion of plastic and
metal, but otherwise it’s a lot like the one I had as a kid. In
particular, there’s a kind of plastic step that covers the axel
between the rear wheels. The Sony TRV-22 fits onto that step quite
nicely. Voila–I’ve got a mobile platform that’s close to the
ground. The camera points out the back of the tricycle, of course,
so to move the camera forwards one just rolls the tricycle backwards.

Now, the section of ground where I wanted to shoot this is paved with
bricks, and it’s rather bumpy. I thought that shooting continuously
while rolling the tricycle probably wasn’t going to work very well,
so I animated it, taking a few frames, moving the trike a few inches,
taking a few more frames, and so on. I might as well not have wasted
my time; the result was incredibly ugly.

Next I decide to try just shooting it live. I repositioned the
tricycle, turned the camera on, and set it on the little shelf at the
back, and just rolled the trike slowly along my desired path. The
result was rather bumpy, more so than seemed natural, but much better
than the animated version.

As I was setting up the next shot, I realized that I’d been shooting
with the camera zoomed in a bit–no wonder the result was bumpier than
I’d though it should be. The zoom was magnifying every motion of the
camera. Consequently, I went back and did that shot three more times
shooting full wide (twice rolling the camera forwards and once rolling
it backwards–I can reverse the clip direction in iMovie), and had no
trouble except that toward the end of the backwards shot the camera
fell off of its shelf. It kept recording, though, video and
audio, and I think it’s a tribute to my years as a father that all I
said was “Whoops!”

Ironically, the backwards shot is probably the smoothest, best looking
shot, once I reversed it and cut out the bit where the camera fell
down. Naturally, it’s also the shortest. Go figure. But anyway, now I
have four to choose from.

After that we went back to doing the stop action thing. We got a
great shot of Yellow crawling out of the umbrella hole in the middle
of our picnic table, and then I reshot Yellow going down the steps and
around the corner as I described earlier. And it was about that time
that David said, “Can Megatron be in the movie?” My first thought was
to say, “No, this is a movie about snakes, not about robots”–but I
reconsidered, and I’m glad I did. The song Attacked By Snakes
is fully five minutes long, and scenes of Yellow crawling around the
yard by himself are going to be diverting for maybe half that time.
Clearly I needed some additional elements, and Megatron was a perfect
choice.

For those of you not blessed with young boys, Megatron is a
Transformer from the Transformers Armada TV show. He’s a robot that
transforms into a battle tank. I saw definite possibilities–and was
not slow to give them a try. The results are truly delightful.

All in all, I got about 40 to 45 seconds of good animated video; I’ve
posted about 30 seconds worth as a highly compressed Quicktime
movie–it’s about 368K bytes in size. If you downloaded last
week’s clip, be sure not to miss this week’s; it’s a lot more fun.

Pippi Longstocking, by Astrid Lindgren

I first read this book as a kid–I inherited it from one or another of my
siblings–and it was with fond memories that I bought a new copy some
while back to read to my oldest boy. Fond but faded memories; all I
could really remember about Pippi was that she lives all by herself, and
is extremely unconventional, and her father is a sea-captain, and that
in Pippi in the South Seas she and her friends Tommy and Annika go
to visit her father on the tropical island where he’s now a cannibal
king. In short, most of my memories were from the other two Pippi
books.

So given that, and given my recent unhappy experience with
James and the Giant Peach, I opened this particular volume
with some sense of trepidation. Having now re-read it, my feelings are
mixed.

Pippi is undeniably a fun character, and her tall tales are easily the
high point of the book:

Once my grandmother had a servant named Malin. She had chilblains on her
feet, but otherwise there was nothing wrong with her. The only annoying
thing was that as soon as company came she would rush at them and bite
their legs. And bark! Oh, how she would bark! You could hear it all
through the neighborhood, but it was only because she was playful. Only,
of course, strangers didn’t always understand that. The dean’s wife, an
elderly woman, came to see Grandmother once soon after Malin first came,
and when Malin came dashing at her and bit her in the ankle, the dean’s
wife screamed so loudly that it scared Malin, so that her teeth clamped
together and she couldn’t get them apart. There she sat, stuck to the
dean’s wife’s ankle until Friday. And Grandmother had to peel the
potatoes herself. But at least it was well done. She peeled so well
that when she was done there were no potatoes left–only peelings. But
after that Friday the dean’s wife never came to call on Grandmother
again. She just never could take a joke.

Pippi’s also outrageously strong, and in between her tall tales, Pippi
occasionally gets to do something fun–like carry the policemen who’ve
come to take her to an orphanage out of the house when she’s tired of
making them run after her. Apart from Pippi’s stories, the humor is
almost entirely slapstick.

So, yeah, there’s some genuinely funny stuff here. David enjoyed it
thoroughly, especially the bits I thought were a bit too silly.

But on the other hand, nothing much happens. It’s not so
much a story about Pippi as it is a collection of sketches in which she
gets to perform, always in contrast to next-door neighbors Tommy and Annika,
who are as colorless a pair of goody-two-shoes as you’d ever want to meet.

Since David enjoyed this one I’ll no doubt be looking for the other two
Pippi books–but I’m no longer so thrilled about the whole thing.

The ever informative Cecil Adams reveals that the familiar cliche, “The Butler Did It!”, is in fact a vile canard. So far as Cecil’s been able to determine, the Butler has only done it in earnest (as opposed to in satire) just once, in the 1930 novel The Door, by Mary Roberts Rinehart.

What, you say? You’ve never heard of Mary Roberts Rinehart? Sure you have–she’s the Rinehart (well, one of them) in Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

(No, I hadn’t heard of her either.)

Deb’s review of the Robert Fagles translation of The Iliad reminded me of a different translation I bought some years ago after hearing the translator interviewed on NPR. The fellow’s name is Stanley Lombardo. He read selections from his translation on the air, and I was immediately hooked. His version was immediate, down to earth, and accessible, and seemed to me to capture the grumbling nature of a camp of war better than the more high-falutin translation I’d read in college (that would be the Lattimore translation, of course).

In my quest to find a copy I first bought the Fagles translation thinking it was what I had heard (I’d forgotten the translator’s name), and then later the Lombardo translation, and consequently I now have them both to hand. I thought it would be interesting to post a few lines from each, just as a comparison.

Fagles begins:

Rage–Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.
Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed
Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.

Lombardo begins:

Rage:
    Sing, Goddess, Achilles’ rage,
Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks
Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls
Of heroes into Hades’ dark,
And left their bodies to rot as feasts
For dogs and birds, as Zeus’ will was done.
Begin with the clash between Agamemnon–
The Greek warlord–and godlike Achilles

Try reading both of them aloud. Compare in particular this:

…hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls, /
great fighters’ souls…

with this:

…pitched countless souls /
Of heroes into Hades’ dark,…

and this:

…made their bodies carrion, /
feasts for the dogs and birds…

with this:

And left their bodies to rot as feasts /
For dogs and birds

Now, you tell me–which one is more vivid? Which one gets the point across more clearly?

Fagles was handicapped, of course–he was aiming for something midway between the Greek text and the expectations of today’s audience: “For the more literal approach would seem to be too little English, and the more literary seems too little Greek. I have tried to find a cross between the too, a modern English Homer.”

Lombardo, on the other hand, had a different goal: a performable Homer: “…what we love is the poet’s voice, and finding its tone, rhythym, and power is the heart of Homeric translation.” “This requires loyalty to the essential qualities of Homeric poetry–its directness, immediacy, and effortless musicality…”

I tried reading both aloud to Jane. Fagles’ version limped along, and I could tell Jane wasn’t following all of it. Lombardo’s version flowed effortlessly from my tongue, and though I had intended to read but a few lines (those quoted above) the story held both of us for several more pages before I reluctantly put it down.

It seems to me that the modern analog to The Illiad is the Western movie. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; The Magnificent Seven and The Seven Samurai; and war movies as well, like The Great Escape. I can just see a crowd of rowdy Greeks sitting around the fire listening to the Illiad, quaffing some fermented fluids, and nodding to each other after some particularly heroic feat, “He’s one mean dude.” “Yup. He bad.” (Quaff.)

Lombardo has that kind of immediacy. Fagles tries, but he doesn’t quite make it.

My brother gave me this book for my birthday. Subtitled “Evil Laughs,
Secret Lairs, Master Plans, and More!!!”, it’s a complete guide to how to
be a villain. Topics range from “Getting Started With The Forces Of
Mayhem” to “Thwarting The Forces Of Good” to “Making An Evil Plan”. It
leads you through an aptitude test to help you decide what kind of
villain you wish to be, whether criminal mastermind, necromancer,
corporate bastard, mad scientist, black knight, horror-movie villain,
demonic avatar, or marketing executive.

I passed a mildly amusing hour with this book; but I suspect that the
Evil Overlord list is better value for the money. (Take a look, if you haven’t seen it.)