Monthly Archives: February 2011

Well, Heck!

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I’m in the process of putting together a set of family yearbooks using Blurb’s software and printing services. I’ve done a couple of them, and they turned out quite well; today, I decided I’d go back to 1997, when I got my first digital camera, and redo an album I did then. Why redo it? Simply, because we’ll get better prints from Blurb than I did from my inkjet in those long lost days, and because we can make multiple copies.

Anyway, I’ve got all of the pictures; at least, I’ve got all of the pictures as they came out of the camera. But there are half-a-dozen or so pictures that I doctored to include my eldest (then eight months old) in odd places or at odd sizes.

They’re all gone.

I’m pretty good at archiving things I want to keep; I have files on my computer that go back to the very first computer I ever owned, a Kaypro 4 I bought in 1984.

Those early albums were done in PageMaker on a Windows PC. Some years ago, long after getting a Mac and discovering that PageMaker was no longer available, I guess I deleted them; and apparently I deleted the doctored images as well. I’m going to have to try scanning the pages from my old album…but considering the originals were edited 640×480 JPEGs, I’m not sanguine about the results.

Sigh.

Alice in Wonderland

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So last night, in a most atypical move for me, I signed up for the one-month free trial of Netflix; and then, just to try it out, I watched the recent Johnny Depp version of Alice in Wonderland. Friends of ours had told me that they weren’t surprised that it had tanked, but that it was really quite interesting.

A precis for those of you who haven’t seen it. Alice grows up in England, remember her adventures in Wonderland only as a scary recurring nightmare. Then she returns to Wonderland as a young woman, where the Red Queen’s reign of terror has driven the inhabitants to the edge of revolution. They need Alice to slay the Jabberwocky, just returning the White Queen to power and saving the day.

It’s not uninteresting, the visuals are good, I was mildly entertained.

Now for the blood letting.

Let me say a few things up front.

I’m a much harsher movie reviewer than I am a book reviewer, and I’m especially picky about movies made from books. However, I understand that the movie way of telling a story is different than the book way of telling a story. I’m OK with that. I understand that you usually have to elide the plot and merge characters in order to whittle a book down to movie length. And of course, in this case the story they are telling is a sequel of sorts to Carroll’s book, so they can make the story whatever they like. Fine.

What kills me, then, in most book to movie conversions, is not the necessary changes; it’s the unnecessary changes. And especially the wholly stupid, ridiculous, absurd changes that could have been avoided given two minutes thought, no additional cost, and no change to the story the filmmakers have decided to tell.

For example, the monster that Alice must slay is called the “Jabberwocky.” It makes me want to scream. “Jabberwocky” is the name of the poem. The creature in the poem is called the “Jabberwock”: “Beware the Jabberwock, my son!” “…the Jabberwock, with eyes of flame…” “And hast thou slain the Jabberwock!” Why do they call it the “Jabberwocky”? It’s wrong, it’s just plain wrong, and there’s no earthly reason for it except that someone felt superior to the source material.

Gah.

Do they do this on purpose?

One last thing. (Feel free to stop reading if you don’t like spoilers.) There’s a framing story in which Alice is expected to get married to an upper-class twit with a battleaxe of a mother. He’s a lord, she’d be provided for, she’s nearly twenty, her pretty face won’t last forever, blah, blah. Of course, naturally, (what other narrative have the movies been peddling for decades) at the end of the movie she opts for independence instead, and in a most unlikely turn goes into business with one of her late father’s old business associates. Her father was a merchant who traded in the East Indies. Alice impresses her father’s associate by suggesting that her father didn’t go far enough; they should push all the way through to China! Hurrah, China! No one’s ever traded there, before. We can use Hong Kong as a base, and trade in China!

It’s a throwaway line at the end of the movie, designed to show that Alice has been paying attention to her father’s business and has bold ideas of her own. Fine. But everything about it is wrong.

It’s not clear just when Alice in Wonderland is set; but Carroll first began the story in 1862, and allowing for Alice’s growth to adulthood (13 years, according to the movie), let’s say it’s 1875. England fought the Opium Wars with China from 1839 to 1860, entirely over the issue of open trade. Hong Kong was founded for the purpose of trade with China. The Portuguese had been trading with China via Macau for centuries.

Whatever grown-up, independent Alice is going to be, it isn’t the first English person to trade with China.

Again, do they do this on purpose?

(Deep sigh.)

Yeah, I know, it’s just a movie.

The Reapers are the Angels

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Julie’s been gushing over Alden Bell’s The Reapers are the Angels for quite some time now. She reviewed it, and then she kept mentioning it, and then she and Scott Daniels started up a new podcast just so that they could talk about it. I listened to the first half of the podcast, right up to the spoiler warning, and was curious enough to find a copy and read it so that I could listen to the second half.

One of the cover blurbs describes the book as “southern gothic: like Flannery O’Connor with zombies.” I can’t speak to that, as I’m not even sure what “southern gothic” is, and I’ve read very little Flannery O’Connor.

But what it is, is a zombie novel, set about twenty-five years after the zombie apocalypse. In Bell’s world, people who die and aren’t properly dispatched will come back as “meatskins”, barely sentient creatures with a taste for human flesh. Meatskins can be killed by destroying their brains; otherwise, they seem to last more or less for ever. Starvation doesn’t kill them, though it slows them down until they are almost inert. It’s clear that meatskins are no longer human, but only animals in human form.

Society has collapsed, naturally. There are little pockets of people here and there, scraping out a living from the remnants and huddling together in fortified buildings at night. And there are a few brave souls who travel about.

One of these is main character, a girl named Temple. She’s fifteen or sixteen, and hence has no memory of the days before the meatskins. She simply accepts them as part of the landscape. She feels uncomfortable with other people (for reasons I won’t go into) and likes to see the wonders that there are in the world; so she travels about. Along the way she kills a man who tries to rape her; the man’s brother feels compelled to avenge him, and the resulting pursuit forms most of the matter of the novel.

The most striking aspect of the novel, for me, is Temple’s approach to life in the world of the Zombies. They are dangerous, certainly, and not to be taken for granted; but they are just one of those things you have to deal with, like (in my world) paying the bills and taking out the trash, just part of the cost of living. In fact, she finds them much easier to deal with than the living, because they are so uncomplicated.

I liked the book; it’s surprisingly quite and peaceful considering the amount of death and destruction and violence it contains. I do have one complaint, from a science-fictional point of view. Early in the book, in an area with no living people other than herself, Temple gets some cheese crackers and soft drinks from an abandoned minimart, and finds a car by the side of the road that she’s able to hot-wire. One gathers that the bulk of the population became zombies in a very short time, leaving the world full of stores that are full of goods and the roads full of cars with tanks full of gasoline, and that the few remaining humans are still living on this stuff. OK, but twenty-five years later? I don’t buy it.

Still, The Reapers are the Angels isn’t really science-fiction; rather, it’s a reflection on what it means to be a person, on responsibility, on gratitude, and on justice versus mercy. Temple’s going to stick with me for a while, I think.

Tactics vs. Mechanics

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John C. Wright has posted a fascinating discussion of how human society works. He points out that we tend to think of human society like a machine. If we want to have a society that runs smoothly, we analyze the problem as an engineer would and try to come up with a carefully engineered solution. And just as our science and technology continues, year by year, to improve, we expect our society to progress, to improve, to get better, as we work the bugs out.

The trouble is, it ain’t so, no how, because we aren’t dealing with impersonal laws of nature; we’re dealing with people. And when people realize that someone is trying to engineer their behavior, they tend to throw a spanner in the works.

Here’s a simple example from present day society. Ten or twenty years ago, someone observed that people tend not to make eye contact in elevators. Everyone gets in the elevator, and they all face the doors and don’t look at each other. Having read this, I kept my eyes open and observed that it was largely true, at least in the elevators I was in. But that was then. Now it’s become a commonplace that everyone behaves this way; and what do I see? Nowadays, people tend to stand with their backs to the walls of the elevator, facing in toward the center. Only those away from the walls face the door.

When people are told how they tend to behave, that makes them self-conscious and they start to behave differently.

A similar pattern occurs in war. It’s famously been said that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy; that’s why they are called the enemy. In any war, the tactics you adopt depend on what you think your enemy is likely to do. There’s no one proper tactic or set of tactics that will serve in all times and places. The engineering model simply doesn’t apply.

And that’s Wright’s point. The problem of having good government and a just society is much more like fighting a war—against venality, corruption, and tyranny, or what Wright terms the Leviathan problem—than it is like engineering a machine. It’s a thought well-worth contemplating.

The Franchise Affair

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In a few weeks, Julie & Scott’s A Good Story is Hard to Find podcast will concern Josephine Tey’s mystery The Franchise Affair. I read through Tey’s entire oeuvre quite a few years ago now, and enjoyed them considerably; and they’ve been sitting on my shelf untouched ever since. And as it happens, The Franchise Affair is the first of Tey’s books that I read. And as it further happens, I’m home with a cold. All in all, this seemed a fortuitous time to renew the acquaintance. And when I opened the book, I ran headlong into this line on page 5, which reminded me why I was so enchanted with Tey to begin with. This is in a small English town, circa 1950:

…the scarlet and gold of an American bazaar flaunted its bright promise down at the south end, and daily offended Miss Truelove who ran the Elizabethan relic opposite as a teashop with the aid of her sister’s baking and Anne Boleyn’s reputation.

Leonard Warren

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I have just discovered that one of my favorite albums is available on iTunes: Lebendige Vergangenheit — Leonard Warren (Vol.2). Leonard Warren was a mid-20th century operatic baritone; he died young, 49 years of age, in 1960. He was reasonably famous at the time.

This album, however, is not an opera album. Rather, it’s an album of sea shanties, folk songs, and Kipling poems set to music, sung by a man with a huge voice and amazing expression. His recording of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” will lift you right out of your seat. If you think that “Blow the Man Down” and “The Drunken Sailor” are old chestnuts, you’ve not heard Warren sing them.

The whole album’s great, but my two favorite pieces on the album are by Kipling: “Gunga Din” and “Boots”. The latter is from the point of view of a British soldier serving in Africa. Soldiers in those days got from place to place by marching, and Africa is a big place. Soldiers marched for thousands of miles. And there’s nothing to see as you march but “Boots, boots, boots, boots, going up and down again, and there’s no discharge in the war!”

Seriously, get this album…either from iTunes, or, if you prefer, from Amazon. (Note, I don’t get any kickbacks.)