Content has returned. Old familiar sidebar content and styles will come along soon. Sorry for the hiccup.

UPDATE: Hurm. Archives appear to be nonexistent. Will have to work on that.

UPDATE: Turned off dynamic publishing ’till I can get it to work. But — ugh — reimporting everything means that individual archives now all have different numbers. Apparently it’s because individual archive numbers were interspersed between here and “Cerin Amroth”:http://www.polytropos.org, but since I imported the two blogs one at a time, they all have new numbers. This sucks royally

1. Trackback spam is just killing me these days. I want to upgrade to the latest version of Movable Type, and it’d be nice to have a clean, new installation to tackle the problem from.

2. I really ought to switch to dynamic page builds, and that, too, might be easier from a clean install of MT. Doing so could screw up external and internal links, but I haven’t exactly been plugged into to the linkety-linkety scene of the blogosphere lately, so that’s not that big a deal.

3. I’ve got that itch I want to scratch — I haven’t toodled with MT in a while, so it’s due for some toodling. It’s the same impulse that makes me change email programs every couple of years for no reason whatsoever.

Ergo: I’m going to re-install MT from scratch and re-import the entries at some point soon. Depending on how the import goes (and how different the 3.x templates are from the 2.x ones) things may look very different, or not. In any case, do not be alarmed.

Let’s bust out on the realpolitik for a second.

So Europe wants to sell weapons to China, and the U.S. is raising a stink about it. It struck me that this is not a case of the world’s big brother setting a couple of other kids on the playground straight, but rather a case of the old guard trying desperately to hold on to influence in the face of a couple of rising powers.

Whether you see the EU as a nightmarish instance of Big Government or harbor a fondness for ol’ Europe because they all hate Bush as much as you do, there’s no denying that a united Europe is an economic force to be reckoned with. Sure, the U.S. isn’t going to get into a military tangle with them, but the economic rivalry itself could very well make them the next big threat to American hegemony (Charles Kupchan “thinks so”:http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200211/kupchan).

But I’ve still got my money on China. One point three billion people. There is no getting around that number. We have yet to feel the full extent of it on the global stage, because China is a big-ass boulder edging slowly down a shallow slope. But at a certain point its momentum will reach a tipping point, and it will start to roll, and then there will be no stopping it.

At this critical juncture the current U.S. government is running unheard-of deficits and has its military tied up in an ill-advised foreign occupation. While our diplomats appear to have shifted to damage-control mode, there is no denying that way, way more people hate our guts than did a few years ago, an outcome that was not inevitable, but required the deliberate squandering of goodwill and sympanthy engendered by the events of 9/11.

This has “end of empire” written all over it. And I’m not saying that triumphally. I have quibbles aplenty with our current government, but taking the long view, I’d still rather have us as the bully on the block than China, or even Europe. But that’s not the way we’re heading.

So I just noticed that NBC is going to air their “own version”:http://www.nbc.com/The_Office/ of the sublime British dark comedy “The Office”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/theoffice/. Since I’m hard pressed to think of a way to either improve upon the original or translate it into Americanese, I’m rating this one a Rather Bad Idea.

Two rays of hope: Steve Carrell of _The Daily Show_ heads up the cast, and Ricky Gervais (the star creator of the original) has a writing credit for the pilot, which suggests a certain amount of collaboration and/or consultation.

Shallow imitation or brilliant reimagination? If anyone happens to catch it on Thursday night, let me know . . .

Following a tangent from the previous entry …

The vast majority of the books I’ve read, I’ve only read once. And I have forgotten far, far more about those books than what I remember. After a few years, I can still recall whether I liked it, a general outline maybe, and some favorite characters or scenes, but not enough to engage in any conversation or analysis of particular depth. A few years after that, there’s little left but wisps.

Of course, you can get by on wisps of book-memory at cocktail parties. Heck, wisps have served me well enough both in the classroom and in front of it. But that’s just getting by—in order to really feel like I know a book, I have to have read it more than once, and even then need to revisit it every several years to keep it fresh. I know plenty of people whose retention of book-knowledge is much greater—who can read something once and still call on it, in detail, much later. They’re the lucky ones.

What about the rest of us? If you can hardly remember a thing about a book you read a few years back, what does it matter that you’ve read it at all? It’s not all lost, of course. Even if you can’t summon specific memories, whatever book you read stays with you at an unconscious level. And the experience of reading a book may have been rewarding—emotionally, intellectually, or otherwise—at the time, which feeds somehow into who you are just like any other life experience that you remember dimly or have forgotten. But a book that stays with you is clearly something much more.

What if you were given this choice: Pick thirty books to read once, and that’s all you get for the rest of your life, or, pick ten books, but you get to read them three times apiece? I’d pick the second option. It wouldn’t even take much thought.

I think about this a lot more now that my reading time is limited and I’m getting old and crotchety. Any time I’m trying to decide what to read next, I consciously consider whether to read something new or revisit something old that I know I want to keep fresh. And it occurs to me that as the years roll on, the number of great books that I’ll want to keep in mental circulation by periodically rereading them will grow, and so the room for new books will shrink. (One can see how this process leads to the ease with which older generations perennially poo-poo the current literature as inferior to what they read when they were younger. They can’t afford the time to read it; easier to dispense with it.)

The situation is accentuated by rich books like The Knight and The Wizard that demand a second reading just to achieve a full appreciation of the work in the first place. That’s not a bad thing, though—such books are often the ones that are most worth keeping in your mental circulation in the first place.

Another complicating factor is that if you wait too long for a second reading, it really counts more as another first reading. Sooner is better for a reread. Maybe the thing to do is reread something right after you’ve read it, or at least within six months or so. That’s a great notion in theory, but if your book backlog is like mine, and if, like me, you know of things on the horizon that you’ll want to read as soon as they come out, it’s pretty hard to pull off.

All this ramblings comes as a result of my urge to reread The Wizard Knight right away. And I think I will—not because other stuff isn’t calling to me, but strictly as an experiment in bookreading. Can right away be too soon? I’ll find out.

I was a little hard on The Knight in my earlier comments—and I’m not only saying that because the second volume, The Wizard, redeems the first so completely. I was just a little hung up on the Wolfeisms about it that annoyed me, and so didn’t dwell on the stuff that was good about it.

Somewhere in the first quarter of The Wizard we actually get a fair chunk of exposition (gasp!) and a plot that sticks to one event (the mission to the land of the Giants) for a good half of the book. Things splinter again after that, but come together in the end. Reading The Knight you could never be quite sure if Wolfe was telling a fantasy story or was spinning some meta-tale riff on boyhood fantasies. With the second book the verdict decisively shifts toward “a good fantasy story,” and events in the first book look differently in retrospect as a result. But the whole thing is an awfully rich affair, so that’s not to say that there aren’t some meta-narrative riffs in there or other subtleties I haven’t even picked up on yet—just that that stuff doesn’t overwhelm the most important thing, a good yarn.

Jim once told me that the key to understanding any Wolfe novel is figuring out the point when the narrator dies but doesn’t realize it. Things are a little clearer here: Sir Able dies and does realize it, at the end of the first book when he kills the dragon. But in between the books he’s taken up into Skai (think Valhalla) and spends a good bit of time there. But his love for an Aelf drives him back down to middle earth, though he cames as a being from above forsworn not to use his full powers. In some ways he still is the boy-knight of the first book, because those years in Skai work something like a dream, and little time has passed for his friends on earth. All this makes his arc a heck of a lot more interesting. He’s still—if you set side by side all his decisions and step back and look at them—not all that bright, as he himself admits, but the twist on his fate makes his arc in the second book well worth following. I doubt I could have taken another 400 pages of Sir Able from The Knight.

But this is really an ensemble piece. Sir Able meets at least as many people in this book as he did in the last, and all the ones from the last one are still around, such that there are a dizzying amount of characters. And the animals are the best—Gylf, his loyal hound, Mani the talking cat, Cloud, his horse. All the way through I gave a shit about a good many of the characters, which is more than I can say about Book of the New Sun. They’re both the sort of works that you need to reread before you really have a handle on them. Maybe someday I’ll get around to rereading New Sun; The Wizard Knight I’ll read again within a year, for sure.

More in-depth ramblings later, maybe, if anyone’s interested. Who else has read these books?

UPDATE: A quick peek at what the serious Wolfeheads have to say on a Gene Wolfe mailing list has me wanting to reread these books right away. The extent to which the characters and situations are tied into real-world mythologies is much greater than I at first supposed, and I have a feeling that what the books have to say about honor is probably more profound than I would have given them credit for at first.

Reread Wolfe, or start Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell? Decisions decisions…

I was pleasantly surprised by _The Aviator_. Sure, it was up for Best Picture, but all you’d usually hear about it is how it wasn’t Scorcese’s best, though maybe he should get Best Director anyway since he’s overdue. And sure, it’s not his best, but it’s head and shoulders above _Gangs of New York_. Certainly good enough to make me want to see it again. Movies, the cult of celebrity, aviation, technology, politics, business, mental illness: the film puts all these balls in the air and doesn’t drop a one. I was wondering what all the fuss about DiCaprio’s performance was about until the OCD started to kick in — and then I was so taken in that I forget to think about the acting while I was watching. The big crash scene was absolutely riveting, and I’m pretty sure the plane slicing through all those suburban California homes was a deft metaphor working on a number of levels that I’ll leave to the film students of the world to piece out. And since I knew precious little about Hughes’ life, I found most of the plot surprising/interesting/enlightening.

My one historical accuracy question: was the dialogue during the Senate testimony scenes taken directly from the transcript, or adapted?

I missed Before Sunrise a decade ago when it came out. It was one of those movies that I always meant to see, but every time a chance came to rent it or put it on the Netflix queue, it felt like its moment had passed—that listening to an hour and a half of a couple people in their early twenties Talk About Life was something I was too old for, even if one of them was Julie Delpy.

And I also missed Before Sunset, at least in the theater, but at least now I had a reason to see them both. (Super-brief synopsis for those who haven’t seen them: Sunrise is an American young man meeting a French young woman on the train in Vienna, convincing her to spend the day with him, walking and talking, falling in love, and agreeing to meet at the spot six months later. Sunset is them actually meeting, nine years later, each of them having gone on with their lives. What follows will contain spoilers, btw.) The opportunity to get an epilogue—to see both people nine years later, i.e. as old as I am now, and to see them one right after the other, was too good to pass up.

They’re both very fine films. The whole “two people just talking and talking” thing can be tricky to pull off, needless to say. But Linklater is relaxed about it, lets the conversations build to their natural climaxes but doesn’t try to force too much drama into them. Has ultra-picturesques backdrops, which doesn’t hurt. Before Sunrise had me looking at the clock a couple of times, I don’t know if that’s because the filmmaking wasn’t quite as mature, or whether the subject matter didn’t speak to me as directly. Certainly Ethan Hawke didn’t quite have the acting chops to pull off his role in the first one, though he’s great in Sunset, and Julie Delpy is perfect in both. What Sunrise has going for it is the core energy of a budding romance—not the kind of thing I’m usually drawn to in movies, but everybody’s susceptible to it if it’s done right, which it certainly is there.

I had a couple days between seeing Sunrise and Sunset, and I found myself thinking a lot about what was going to happen to the characters and what they were going to talk about. Jesse (Ethan Hawke’s character) has a line in Sunrise where he worries about settling down/getting married/having kids because the things he wants to do in life (not that he knows just what they are yet) will take all his attention and if he settles down he’ll look back one day and realize he never got the stuff done. I remember thinking such things too, and as someone who has unambiguously set foot on the “settling down” path, I was very curious to see what Linklater was going to do with that dilemma in the second movie.

And he dodges it, kind of, but in a way that works for the movie he wanted to make. Jesse is married, and has a kid, but it’s a loveless marriage, at least from his side. Celine is only loosely commited—thus, there’s room at the end for them to get together, although (thankfully) Linklater has the presence of mind to end his film at only the hint of it. And ultimately for Jesse it’s not that he didn’t have time to Do Those Things—he is, after all, on a book tour—but that he, like her, gave up on romance, if just unconsciously, after they didn’t meet again in six months, nine years ago. Which, if you can imagine that real people might have had just such a filmically perfect encounter as they had in the first movie, makes a certain amount of sense.

They do talk about more grown-up things, like the state of the world and spirituality and getting older. But none of that achieves any particular depth. I should be disappointed by the film more than I am, because it doesn’t wrestle with the sense of lost time, the disappointments, and the what-ifs that are an inevitable part of aging. What it does do is build in a subtle, steady way from their first uncomfortable attempts at conversation, on to the veneers they maintain as they dig deeper, and finally into the raw feelings they’ve both been harboring all along and the realization that neither of them have gotten over their long-ago moment. So it turns into another romance movie, not a post-romance movie. But their conversations are so fresh, their performances so convincing, their dialogue—which I have to believe is largely improvised by the actors—so natural and believable, that it works purely on the level of just enjoying them in their ambling conversation. Sunset turns out to be just a much more artfully constructed film in all respects, though I think you need to see Sunrise first in order to care enough about the characters to notice.

Anyway—both worth seeing, especially if, like me, you haven’t before.

Curse you, Gene Wolfe!!

I know, I know, I should have expected it. But I must have read somewhere that The Knight and The Wizard, Wolfe’s recent duology, were his take on straightforward genre fantasy. That led me to expect that they might be just a little, y’know, straightforward.

But these is Gene Wolfe we’re talking about here. So we get Fairyland, dream logic, sudden shifts in scene and plot that feel like they might be anchored in some allegorical significance that you’re just not catching but maybe is just an illusion anyway. I admit, I had hoped that what I’d find in The Knight was Wolfe, a real master of language, telling a straight story. But having made my peace that this was something else, if I have any complaint, it’s that all the wackiness isn’t that far afield from Book of the New Sun.

First person narrator with unclear background, possibly unreliable: check.
Knack for acquiring items of particular power as he bumbles along: check.
Keeps meeting the same people over and over again who are somehow drawn to him: check.
Big, bulbous mystical entity that lives beneath the water: check.

If the form is familiar, the subject matter’s pretty different, though—we have a boy who gets sucked into a surreal fantasy world, in which an Aelfmaiden turns his body into that of a muscular young man. But his mind remains the same, and so Sir Able of the High Heart, as he is known there, literally has the mind of a boy—and he’s our narrator. The dream logic aspect is strong, too—whatever errand Able is on at the moment, it is inevitably sidetracked by something else before it can reach a conclusion. He is diverted and whisked away time and again, and if the novel ends up in a place that somewhat makes sense, given where it began, it sure ain’t because of any sort of logical chain of events.

So whether this whole thing is just an extended riff on wish fulfillment or something else entirely, I’ll wait ‘till I’m through The Wizard to decide. In the meantime, it’s Wolfe, so it’s worth the ride for the language alone. There’s something refreshing about the clear, plainspoken dialogue of the people of Mythgarthr and the adjoining realms of Wolfe’s invention. Enough to make me tolerate the mind games—for a few more hundred pages, at least.

I certainly don’t intend to make a habit of referencing _Reason_ magazine, but “their interview with Neal Stephenson”:http://www.reason.com/0502/fe.mg.neal.shtml is definitely worth a read. Hat tip to “Kaedrin”:http://kaedrin.com/weblog/archive/000896.html, who has some good comments on it as well.