Some recommendations

Being in the Scribblerati carries with it certain responsibilities.

A lot of people often come up to us (and by "a lot", I mean: None. And by "often", I mean: Never) and they say: "You Scribblerati... you're pretty awesome. Pray tell, what kind of things do you like, because I would very much like to like them too. I would love to stroll about town and lord my new found tastes over the heads of others' much more inferior tastes while laughing, taunting them until my throat is sore, saying: 'ha ha, jerks, you're not cool like me and the Scribblerati!' Simply put, that would be... heaven."

Your cries have not gone unheard...

Some Recommendations

by Jon

Books
Reading... gross.

1. Cloud Atlas

By David Mitchell, in its own words:

"A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan’s California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified “dinery server” on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation — the narrators of Cloud Atlas hear each other’s echoes down the corridor of history, and their destinies are changed in ways great and small."

Fantastic and soon to be a major motion picture. I intend to both read and watch the hell out of it. See the trailer here.

2. Red Country

By Joe Abercrombie. It's not out yet; that fact drives me nuts. However, it will be out around my birthday... ahem... Anyway, this will be his sixth book of an intended nine, all of them set in the same world, and the third and final one in the middle "loose" trilogy. In its own words:

"They burned her home. They stole her brother and sister. But vengeance is following. Shy South hoped to bury her bloody past and ride away smiling, but she’ll have to sharpen up some bad old ways to get her family back, and she’s not a woman to flinch from what needs doing.  She sets off in pursuit with only a pair of oxen and her cowardly old step father Lamb for company.  But it turns out Lamb’s buried a bloody past of his own.  And out in the lawless Far Country, the past never stays buried. Their journey will take them across the barren plains to a frontier town gripped by gold fever, through feud, duel and massacre, high into the unmapped mountains to a reckoning with the Ghosts.  Even worse it will force them into alliance with Nicomo Cosca, infamous soldier of fortune, and his feckless lawyer, Temple, two men no one should ever have to trust…"

Can't wait.

Movies

Ah... le cinema...

1. Cabin in the Woods

It has come to my attention that not very many of you have seen this film. What is wrong with you? Seriously. For real. Seriously, what's wrong with you? The film is directed by Joss Whedon. It stars Thor. It's so meta, you'll shit. Seriously. One of the best films of the year. A geek must.

2. Detention

Okay, with this one I will just go ahead and assume that many of you haven't seen this film either. Don't feel bad, Joseph Kahn also directed Torque (barf). As a result, there are only 12 people on the planet, including the cast and crew, who have heard of this film, let alone actually taken the time to watch it. I am one of the lucky few. Part teen comedy, part slasher flick, part scathing indictment of society, part time traveling adventure, part sci-fi horror, part 90s nostalgia trip, part sarcastic laugh riot, part Space Bear snuff film, part domestic terrorism thriller, part meta-comedy (you will also shit), this film is absolutely worth your time, although you won't think so at first. At the very least, wait for the moment when the kid remembers different eras throughout 19 years of detention. And yes, I'm recommending it, even though Dane Cook is in it.

Comics

Sequential art, cavemen loved and respected it, why can't you?

1. Prophet

Rob Liefeld created this character. Are you familiar with his work? No, read this, we'll wait. Ah, you're back. Please join the others in looking at me and my recommendation somewhat dubiously... Go ahead, because I'm serious. This is a good comic. Really good. But, but... you say. How? How can a comic book featuring a character by one of the worst in the industry from a time when comic books seemed to be competing to be the worst of the indutsry (the 90s), actually be good? Well, for starters, Liefeld isn't involved. As a result we get an intergalactic, far-flung-future tale of clone soldiers on insane alien planets. They live for the mission. They die for the mission. It all reminds me of an arty Doctor Who or Star Trek, but crazier and a shit ton more violent. I don't do it justice. Trust me. Classic Sci-fi. Great art. Fantastic designs.

2. Locke and Key

Joe Hill is the son of Stephen King. He is a writer. Not since Dick Grayson has a man been more doomed to exist in his father's shadow than poor old Joe. The good news is: He's pretty all right. In fact, he's actually pretty good, as evidenced by this fantastic tale of the Locke family and their lives in the aftermath of trajedy while living in the family's ancestral home: The Key House. It is weird and rambling old structure set at the tip of a strange little island at the far flung edge of Maine, a place well known for odd. Oh, and also, the house is full of locked doors and keys, find the right key and the right door and odd things happen. Become a ghost. Beome an old man. Become a giant. Mend things. Alter time. Bring shadows to life. Switch genders. Steal memories. Go anywhere. But what does the Black Door Key do? And who is the ghost woman trapped at the bottom of the well...

TV

This and beer keeps us from going crazy.

1. Louie

There are few hard luck cases like Louie. He is the hang-dog man, sad-faced and trod upon. And hilarious. And brilliant. Riotously funny. Suddenly serious. Shockingly insightful. Often kind of gross and pathetic. But still great. It's a show that is constanly in flux and always innovative. The episode where he and Robin Williams go to a funeral? Genius. This is a man's life, so sad, so entertaining...

2. Archer

There are few things as awesome as Sterling Archer.



Told'ja.

Danger zone,

Jon

In Praise of Time

"The people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now..."

So starts Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home, a novel written as though it were a text created within a new discipline: an archaeology of the future. It includes the record of the poetry, stories, lives, mythology, philosophy, religion...of a peoples who are not yet living. The 525 page novel also includes maps, over 100 pages of glossary and index materials, and, in a box set, even a cassette recording of the music and poetry of the Kesh.

A critique session or two ago, Claudia mentioned that she couldn't figure out the correct verb tense to use for a particular spot in her novel, because her main characters are time travelers. (They are also interesting, stubborn, hilarious, and sexy; you will want to get to know them, trust me.) Anyway, when I picked up Always Coming Home from the library shelves and, on reading the first line, put it immediately in my pile to check out.

They might be going to have lived a long, long time from now.

Oh yeah. It sounds a bit off. It stops your brain from continuing on the paths that it wants to go along. It catches you up. And suddenly you are thinking. About time and reality and how you fit in, and then you're just loving Ursula for what she's done to you.

Soon after I started reading the novel, a student in one of the philosophy classes I teach said, and I quote, "If I have to think about time travel right now, I think my head is going to explode."

Which I loved, because that's my job: getting students' heads to explode. Getting my own head to explode. I speak figuratively, of course.

At core, philosophy should be getting our brains to wake up from the ruts they so easily get stuck in and start seeing ourselves, other folk, and world (aka: Life, The Universe, and Everything) in new and startling ways.

And thinking about the mechanics and paradoxes of time travel is a lovely way to make your brain swivel inside your skull.

In my novel, which also includes some time travel, I'm attempting to uncover non-human understandings of time. How would Beryl (a bear disguised in human skin) understand time? How would a tree?

Thinking back on my years in philosophy, I can see the history that has led me to become the writer I am:

In an African philosophy course I took as an undergraduate, I learned that not everyone thinks of time linearly: my instructor, Ifeanye Menkiti, talked about how time in some African understandings includes a distant past, a present, and a near future, but no far future, instead the line of time bends backward from the present/near future toward the past, rather than continuing on indefinitely into the future.

In my dissertation I examined the work of James Hamill, who studied Navajo logic and some of the ways their system of reasoning differs from Western/European systems, precisely because they have a circular sense of time, while ours is linear. Which again, in my very limited understanding, might imply that there is no far future, the present always circling back to the past, the past circling back toward the future/present.

I'm currently teaching Simone de Beauvoir in my ethics class. Beauvoir is very suspicious of too tightly holding onto a project. We act unethically if we hold on so tightly that we are looking only at the far future of the project's realization, concentrating so hard on that end, an end so distant from ourselves, that the present means nothing, that the means we use to get to that end are completely subordinated to that end, that we do whatever it takes, sacrifice whomever it takes to get to the end. Instead she suggests that we concentrate on the near future.

How cool is all that? Pretty cool if you're a sci-fi loving, philosophy geek.

In my novel, I've taken what I've encountered in philosophy about time, and used it to figure out how time might be understood by the more-than-human world. Especially the spiders. They've just got to have a super-freaky understanding of time. My bet is that of all of us they're the ones who see time most clearly of all, what with all the eyes and the spinning.

But like Claudia, I have to think hard about how to communicate other species' understandings of time in a human language. In a critique session that is coming soon to a cafe near you, I'll find out how well The Sclibblerati think I've done with capturing the spiders... But as a preview it goes something like this:

I'll end as I started. I end as I start. I will end as I will start. I will have ended as I did once start. I would have started as I will be going to end.

No seriously, I really mean it. I'll end as I started: with a little Le Guin Wisdom:

"What was and what may be lie, like children whose faces we cannot see, in the arms of silence. All we ever have is here, now."

Claudia's Very First Blog Post Ever: TMI

Because of an odd series of circumstances, I am, ironically, writing this, my very first blog post ever, in a coffee shop, on notebook paper, with a pen.

This is how, for a short time after personal computers became readily available and affordable, I insisted was the only way I could write. “Philistines!” I'd cry, in between cranking my Victrola and scrubbing my linen finery in the creek out back. It didn’t take me too long, though, to give writing on the computer the old college try, and I almost immediately discovered that it pretty much rocked. First of all, it’s faster. Right now, as I scribble this down the old fashioned way, my brain is about 4 sentences ahead of what I’m actually writing, plus later I’m going to have to go type the whole thing out anyway. Also in the plus column, it’s a boon being able to move great swaths of text hither and thither, willy-nilly. No more Rube Goldbergian arrows and cross-outs and teensy notes squished into the margins.

I get people who still write on paper, though. There’s that connection to the words and to the ink spilling out onto the page that just isn’t the same on a computer. Also, what with the aforementioned arrows and margin scribblings and whathaveyou, you can see the evolution of your work – where you started, where you’re going. Still, I’ve thrown away my chisel and slab, my chalk and slate: Give me a computer any day.

There is a caveat. In the last several years, a new element has been added to the writing-on-the-computer experience: the readily accessible World Wide Web. The Intertubes. The Webbynet. It’s a dangerous distraction for me as a writer for a very specific reason: T.M.I. Or should I say T.M.P.R.A.I.: Too Much Promise of Readily Available Information.

The novel I’m working on right now is about a Temporal Investigator, Ursula Evermore, who travels back to a manor in rural England, 1928, to solve a murder that was never supposed to take place. An Agatha Christie Cozy meets a Sci-Fi Comedy. I know. Neat, huh?

Naturally, this involves a lot of research. For one, I’m not British. For another, I don’t live, nor have I ever lived in 1928. While outlining my book, I researched the big things upon which the plot was contingent, but while writing, a lot of little stuff has cropped up that I hadn’t anticipated. For instance, did they have envelopes in 1928? Sunglasses? Plywood? (Yes; Yes, but nobody wore them; Yes). The danger, then, is having that big ol’ pile of Internet out there, waiting with the answers. Instant Gratification. (Or Sift-through-the-2000-tons-of-misinformation-and-wikis-out-there-until-you-come-across-the-real-answer-Gratification).

So, for a time, I would pause in my writing in order to jump online and find out, say, in what year the song Stardust was first recorded. (1927). It turns out this is a very efficient way to never get any writing done. It took me a several months of fervently and repeatedly drowning myself in the vast sea of global information before I finally came up with a method of stopping the madness. At first I tried logging out of the Internet while I wrote, but this was no good, as it turns out it’s really, really easy to log back in. Now all I do is highlight the section or word that needs researching in red, take a deep breath, and move on. Sure, sometimes I have to whisper, “Later…later…” to myself in a sultry voice, but for the most part: simple and effective.

Now there are a lot of little red sections in my book. This is good. It gives me something to work on when writing fails me.

Like right now. Ouch, my hand is tired.

- Q