January 2007 Archives

Order your very own copy of Literary Cash : Unauthorized Writings Inspired by the Legendary Johnny Cash from Amazon.com with just a click--and help Readerville.com earn a few bucks when you do! Enjoy PC's short story "The Snow Chaser" (based on Cash's "Field of Diamonds") plus Cash-inspired writings by Russell Rowland, Gayle Brandeis, Gretchen Moran Laskas and others.

It's taken its sweet time about it, but winter is finally here. Today we're in partly-cloudy mode, with occasional burst of sunlight, but the overriding weather phenomenon is without question COLD. Weather.com claims it's 31 Fahrenheit here, with wind chill making it feel lik 23, but I suspect that may be underestimating the nip in the air. We've still got snow on the ground from the three sets of flurries we've enjoyed since last week, but it's mostly confined to the shady and northerly areas of campus. (NB: this is the sort of thing that "The Snow Chaser" deals with, at least in part, so if you find the idea of snow-retention patterns fascinating, by all means, click on the link and order the book.)

The good news for us is that the ski slopes at Massanutten will almost certainly be covered with snow by the time we get there Saturday night. We've been there twice this year as part of our annual family participation in the Orange Recreation Department's "License to Slide" program, and neither night was quite ideal. On the first night, the resort had been suffering (like the rest of the southeast) from unseasonably warm temperatures, which meant they'd had only a few hours to get snow made, which meant that only three slopes were open--two beginner slopes and one intermediate one. That wasn't a real problem for Kel, whose lingering respiratory illness has kept her from wanting to breathe cold air much lately; she just sat in the lounge and knitted up a storm when she wasn't reading Nextwave (about which I'll say more below). The boys and I hit the slopes, but with only three open, none of them especially challenging, we had a bit of trouble maintaining interest.

Last week there was more snow, thanks to the lower temperatures, but the resort was still making it as fast as they could in hopes of opening up more slopes. Alas, this meant that EVERY run downhill involved a gauntlet of Snowcat machines; every few dozen yards there'd be another burst of frozen, crystallized shrapnel blown into your face, blinding and disorienting you. Worse, every lift chair was right in the blast radius, meaning that every ride to the top required you to spread your butt over not just a cold metal chair, but a thick layer of ice as well. We lasted about two hours before deciding we'd have more fun going home to watch the end of the UNC-Georgia Tech game. Here's hoping tomorrow's session is less brutalizing.

But at least we had Nextwave, which is Warren Ellis and Stuart Immonen doing their level best to combine The Champions with Transmetropolitan. Restricted by Marvel Comics from reaching the heights of profanity, scatology, and sheer gonzo that he achieved with Transmet, Ellis has instead decided to give the super-hero audience what it wants, good and hard, right in the groin. Slapping together an unlikely quartet of third-rate Marvel heroes (plus one inspired new addition), he proceeds to remove anything he considers extraneous--codenames, backstories, characterization--and throws them into the important stuff: beating the crap out of monsters.

The new character is known only as The Captain, a Brooklyn-born powerhouse whose original codename was Captain (Censored), which apparently got him into at least one knuckle-dusting at the hands of Captain America. He's fun, but it's the old leftovers who are the most fun to see. Boom-Boom (a/k/a Meltdown, rn Tabitha Smith), Photon (a/k/a the Captain Marvel from the 80s that nobody likes to talk about, rn Monica Rambeau), Machine Man (a/k/a the Living Robot, rn Aaron Stack, and Ulysses Bloodstone may have been useless minor characters, but as Ellis shows, a talented writer can make any character work in the right context. By ignoring their past histories (and focusing on Ulysses' much hotter relative, Elsa Bloodstone), Ellis manages to make Nextwave by far the most enjoyable Marvel comic book this side of Joss Whedon & John Cassaday's Astonishing X-Men.



L-R: The Captain, Tabitha Smith, Monica Rambeau, Aaron Stack, Elsa Bloodstone

Some super-hero trappings are still there; most of the cast still wear the obligatory tights, though now they're somewhat hidden by Matrix-y trench coats, and there are still plenty of improbably explanatory bits of dialogue, but lord, it's a hoot. And best of all, the first monster encountered by our heroes is the legendary FIN FANG FOOM!



The above comic, from 1974, was the one where I first encountered the reptilian brainchild of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (who came up with him back in 1961, a bit before hitting their stride with the Fantastic Four). Even at age eleven I realized it was pretty goofy to have a giant humanoid dragon in underpants serving as your villain, especially when your hero was a giant purple statue named IT! and their battle was an outsized kung fu fight involving telephone poles used as bo sticks.

Still, Mr. Foom (I don't know him well enough to call him Fin) serves Ellis's purposes admirably, providing both a plausible menace for the Nextwave team to fight (he's 150 feet tall and likes to eat people, after all) and an excuse for Ellis to do what he does best: make fun of things. Once FFF is brought into the picture, Ellis even has his name rendered in enormous movie-monster lettering in every caption, and those captions set up the nature of the conflict just beautifully:


FIN FANG FOOM! has burned with the urge to mate since 1958!

FIN FANG FOOM! has no genitalia whatsoever!

Oh, you cannot IMAGINE how annoyed he is!

And naturally, Tabby points out the worst thing about him: "Oh my god... he's wearing underpants."

Add some genuinely hilarious throwaway lines ("Fear my robot head!" "Cute widdle bears... of DEATH?" "Leave Father Blood Drench Robo Crush alone now, fleshy," and of course "NO NO NOT DOING THIS NO NO NO RUN AWAY RUN AWAY THIS IS MY SPECIAL RUN AWAY SONG SO I DON’T GET KILLED BY SCARY GIRL!") and you've got a terrifically entertaining comic book. And if that weren't enough, there's this monologue from tough-guy Nick Fury-wannabe General Dirk Anger:

"Every day I smoke two hundred cigarettes and one hundred cigars and drink a bottle of whisky and three bottles of wine with dinner. And dinner is meat. RAW meat. The cook serves me an entire animal and I fight it bare-handed and tear off what I want and eat it and have the rest buried. In NEW JERSEY!"

Yes, this is what makes comics worth reading. And it makes the cold of winter a good deal more enjoyable, too.

5:52 PM

Order your very own copy of Literary Cash : Unauthorized Writings Inspired by the Legendary Johnny Cash from Amazon.com with just a click--and help Readerville.com earn a few bucks when you do! Be among the first to enjoy PC's short story "The Snow Chaser" (based on Cash's "Field of Diamonds") plus Cash-inspired writings by Russell Rowland, Gayle Brandeis, Gretchen Moran Laskas and others.

I'm just so tired of it, y'know?

We've all heard of compassion fatigue, the numbing that affects a person who has witnessed one example of suffering after another until there simply isn't any more sympathetic energy left in one's soul.

I haven't hit that particular phase yet, thank god, because I'm fortunate enough to live where I'm not confronted by misery on a daily basis. I don't know how aid workers manage it; perhaps they compartmentalize really well, or perhaps they focus on the nuances of the situation so tightly that they can see a slightly-less-miserable situation as a significant improvement over the usual misery.

But I'm getting tired... so tired... so fucking tired... Goddammit, I'm exhausted!

Sorry. I was channeling Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles there for a moment. Doesn't happen often, luckily...

But anyway, I was noting that I'm tired. Really tired. And I don't know how to regain my pep anytime soon.

I have outrage fatigue.

It's been building up for over six years now, and the occupant of the White House is the reason why. I started feeling outraged back in November of 2000, when I began hearing reports of the Florida election shenanigans. I kept having regular bouts of outrage at everything from the dissembling of Katherine Harris to the smirking of Antonin Scalia. They started hitting me in waves during the Ashcroft days, with the passing of the Patriot Act, the dismantling of sex education programs, and the NCLB act, but they weren't quite as strong--for a while.

No, I had my bad moments, but it wasn't until the Iraq war started that I started feeling outraged practically every time I opened a newspaper or opened a link to Kevin Drum's Political Animal or Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish and learned of something new that Bush or his cohorts had done: "Mission Accomplished"... empty bunkers... Guantanamo... Abu Ghraib... "Bring it on"... the Pat Tillman cover-up... forged yellowcake documents... the Jose Padilla case... unauthorized wiretaps... casting aside the Geneva Conventions... inadequate armor for the troops... ignoring habeas corpus... extended tours of duty... it was like malaria, coming on in tidal surges.

And then the real tidal surges came: Katrina's landfall... "No one could have expected the levees to fail"... the Superdome... Trent Lott's porch... "You're doing a heckuva job, Brownie"... refugees in Houston... Bush clearing brush on the ranch and Cheney shooting lawyers... DeLay and Abramoff and Libby, oh my...

And now, when I'm at my lowest ebb, drained by more than half a decade of near-constant outrage, the president chooses to take a strategy that isn't working and do it even harder.

So what do I have left in the tank? How can I still get outraged this week? A bunch of U.S. attorneys have been forced out of office by the administration and replaced without Senate confirmation--a small provision of the Patriot Act that nobody seemed to know about until recently. You'll no doubt be outraged--outraged!--to learn that the replacements are political cronies with limited experience (except in doing such things as digging up dirt on Democrats for Karl Rove.) Not that the Bush administration would ever do something so dirty for mere political advantage...

It's exhausting--absolutely exhausting. The offenses committed by this White House are myriad--numberless like the leaves in the wind, the stars in the heavens, the pixels on the internet. To greet each new one with the proper degree of shock, horror, and anger seems beyond the limits of human stamina.

But if our men and women in Congress don't do something to help us, we've got another two years and two days to go.

D'you think we could pray to Madeline Kahn to intercede on our behalf?

3:06 AM

Click here to order your very own copy of Literary Cash : Unauthorized Writings Inspired by the Legendary Johnny Cash from Amazon.com and help Readerville.com earn a few bucks when you do! Be among the first to enjoy PC's short story "The Snow Chaser" (based on Cash's "Field of Diamonds") plus Cash-inspired writings by Russell Rowland, Gayle Brandeis, Gretchen Moran Laskas and others.

LBJs

*The new draft of The Amazing Q is done, printed, and awaiting my trip to the post office. I thought I'd polished it off Thursday, but Kelly astutely caught two mistakes--one a narrative issue, one a typo--and I corrected them last night. Keep your fingers crossed...

*During Xmas break, partly due to the encouragement of my next-door neighbor Greg, I started doing a ten-week workout program designed for our faculty by Woodberry's football coach. (It's adapted from the version used by the football team.) It's designed to take about 30 minutes a day, four days a week. The first two weeks were mostly invigorating. I've now done three days of the third week and am discovering that the number of reps for each exercise is higher than the number in the first two weeks--sometimes significantly so. When you've done a lift eight times, then twelve times, and now suddenly you're supposed to do it twenty times... well, let's just say it's a bit more challenging that way. The good news is that I've been making myself get off my butt and go to the gym, even when Greg and I couldn't coordinate our schedules, which is basically whenever classes are in session. (WFS has seven periods, but F period is the only one when neither of us has a class, and it always falls next to a period when one of us has to hurry up and get ready.)

I can already feel changes in my upper body--my biceps are not just larger and firmer, but actually slightly wider. The crucial issue, of course, is whether I can get rid of my belly fat and strengthen my abs and lower back. If I can do that, everything else is gravy. I'll let you know how things are going in Week Ten, but I'll try to shut up until then.

*Every once in a while I'll get a second chance to listen to a band and realize I should have appreciated them earlier. Right now that's happening with the Violent Femmes. I've long been fond of their best-known tunes--for example, "Blister in the Sun" and "Gone Daddy Gone" (yes, even before Gnarls Barkley covered it)--and I've often appreciated their contributions to anthology and soundtrack discs. Their version of "I Can Change" (the song sung by Saddam Hussein) is my favorite by far of the reworked songs recorded for the South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut soundtrack, and they do a great "Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah (Means I Love You)" (originally from The Jetsons) for the Saturday Morning: Cartoons' Greatest Hits collection. Still, I wasn't prepared for the delights revealed on their Add It Up (1981-1993) greatest hits disc: the dark, disturbing "Country Death Song" (a tune Johnny Cash really, really, really should have covered), the strutting, drag-racing saxophones of "Black Girls," and the smoking live version of the title track. These guys were in heavy rotation at WXYC, and I remember playing both their first and second albums on the air during my DJ days--why the heck wasn't I listening?

*The fam's been watching the first season of Due South on DVD. Anybody remember this series? It involved a by-the-book mountie (and his pet wolf, Diefenbaker) coming to Chicago and pairing up with a slightly disreputable police detective. When it was airing, I never watched it--the buddy-movie set-up never really appealed to me--but it starred Paul Gross, who was just startlingly wonderful as Jeffrey Tennant in the brilliant CBC backstage-at-the-Shakespeare-festival comedy Slings & Arrows, so Kel decided to check it out. It's a bit clunky in spots--the lousy closing them, for example--but Gross is excellent, adding layers of believability to a character who could easily be a cartoon. I mean, come on, a mountie in full kit, with red coat, riding boots, and crisp-brimmed hat, is already treading dangerously close to the iconic Dudley Do-Right (and the forest rangers of the musical Little Mary Sunshine, for that matter.) When you further make him a cross between an always-prepared Boy Scout, a hyper-observant Sherlock Holmes, and a scat-sniffing Natty Bumppo, you're really asking for ridicule--but it works, and Gross is a big reason why. His Constable Fraser comes off as fundamentally, completely, blindingly decent--but far from stupid. He's capable of manipulating people through his sheer refusal to compromise, such as when he persuades his unwilling partner to help him with an undercover investigation through a cheerful and deliberate demonstration of his own inability to dissemble.

So it's worth checking out, yes, but it's noteworthy because of what Kelly realized about Fraser: he's Captain Carrot. Yes, the hyper-decent officer of the Ankh-Morpork police force in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. Right down to the friendly wolf. The only question: did Pratchett borrow from the CBC, or did the producers of Due South borrow from Pratchett? (If any borrowing was done at all, I'd bet on the latter.) She's sharp, that Kelster.

*You know what would be nice? To not be at war with Afghanistan, Iraq AND Iran at the same time. Is that too much to ask?

Lord, I sure hope it's not too much.

7:08 PM

It's here at last! Click to order Literary Cash : Unauthorized Writings Inspired by the Legendary Johnny Cash from Amazon.com and help Readerville.com earn a few bucks when you do! Be among the first to enjoy PC's short story "The Snow Chaser" (based on Cash's "Field of Diamonds") plus Cash-inspired writings by Russell Rowland, Gayle Brandeis, Gretchen Moran Laskas and others.

Yep, I'm holding it in my hands... Unauthorized, right here in black and white... My very own contributor's copy of Literary Cash. Niiiice. I haven't had a chance to actually read it yet, since it arrived only yesterday... well, okay, yes, I did look over "The Snow Chaser," just to make sure it was, y'know, printed with all the words in the right order and all... but as soon as I'm done with The Great Mortality, I'll give the whole thing a once-over.

In the meantime, I'm trying to deal with the fact that I'm now a published fiction writer. That catches me up with Kel, who got a short story pub about four years ago. Unfortunately, I'm still a bit nervous because this particular story is stuck in the same book with stories by Gayle and Gretchen and Russell, and they're not the three fiction writers I would have picked to have myself compared to. Frankly, I think I'd come off a little better if I were in a book with, say, Tom Clancy, Newt Gingrich, and Lynne Cheney.

And while we're on the subject of fiction, I'm also happy to announce that I've successfully beaten the new draft of The Amazing Q into shape, and that'll be sending it on its merry way in just a day or two, in hopes of its landing a "Good god, yes!" and a big fat check from my editor. We'll see.

Two days of break left--really only a day and a half, what with the boys returning to school Sunday evening. Usually Woodberry tries to come back from a break with a short week, but not this time--no, we dive right into the full six-days-of-classes thing. I'll also be wrestling with the cast and crew of The Nerd for the next four weeks--the show goes up on Feb. 1st. And we get a forced vacation for three days in late January just to make it more challenging. Whee.

And tomorrow morning, Thing Two gets to go take the SSAT. Yes, he's entering that phase where he's compared to every other kid his age. Yesterday he interviewed for the Blue Ridge Virtual Governor's School program, which is a whole different competition, but one where I think he's got a shot, and not just because his brother got in. No, he's got his own thing going, too. The interviewers asked him to complete the nursery rhyme in which the cow jumps over the moon--where did it land?

He thought for a moment and told them, "Still in orbit, mooing helplessly."

4:30 AM

It's here at last! Order Literary Cash : Unauthorized Writings Inspired by the Legendary Johnny Cash through this link to Amazon.com and help Readerville.com earn a few bucks when you do! Be among the first to enjoy PC's short story "The Snow Chaser" (based on Cash's "Field of Diamonds") plus Cash-inspired writings by Russell Rowland, Gayle Brandeis, Gretchen Moran Laskas and others.

Well, here it is, 2007 already. Thanks to a healthy supply of Barnes & Noble gift cards, I've purchased and finished my first book of the year: Legends in Exile, the first volume of Bill Willingham & Lan Medina's comics series Fables. It's an entertaining what-if series, putting characters from various fairy tales (Snow White, Bluebeard, the Big Bad Wolf, Jack the Giant-killer, etc.) in a modern-day urban setting. The first arc concerns the apparent murder of Rose Red and the investigation (performed by Sheriff Bigby Wolf) to determine what happened. Fun stuff.

I also snagged a variety of other books, including the newest Doonesbury collection, Heckuva Job, Bushie!, Max Barry's novel Jennifer Government, John Kelly's history of the Black Death, The Great Mortality, and David Foster Wallace's essay collection Consider the Lobster, which contains "Authority and American Usage," the masterful analysis of lexicography that he originally wrote for Harper's Magazine. I've wanted that in hardback for years.

I also got pulled in by a cover/title combination and picked up Tom Standage's A History of the World in 6 Glasses, which discusses human history in terms of its beverages: beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and cola. Basically, I'm hoping for a liquid variant of Michael Pollan's delightful The Botany of Desire.

And of course the Year List has begun for 2007 as well. Driving the kids around the county yesterday, I spotted a raft of Ring-necked Ducks on a local pond, so that's one slightly off-the-wall species I don't have to go looking for again. It's also the one that has replaced the Red-bellied Woodpecker as my candidate for "Least Useful Species Name." The RBW's belly is almost never seen, what with its being pressed up against a tree most of the time, but if you happen to spot the bird perching, or flying, or dangling off a feeder, the reddish belly feathers do contrast nicely with the white feathers of the rest of the underside.

The narrow ring around the male Ring-neck's neck, however, is concealed by nothing whatsoever--except by its dark red-brown color, which contrasts not at all against the duck's black breast and head. Unless the light is absolutely perfect--or unless you happen to be gripping the duck by the neck at the time--you'll never see the ring. I certainly haven't. Even more bizarre: the white ring around the male's bill is a terrific field mark; some birders even refer to the Ring-neck (scientific name Aythya collaris) as the "Ring-billed Duck," but apparently the AOU hasn't caught on to the wisdom of this particular bit of nomenclature yet, despite what eNature.com has to say:

This species might better be called the "Ring-billed Duck," for its chestnut neck ring is usually seen only at close range, while the white ring on the bill can be a prominent field mark.

Judge for yourself:



As for the 2006 list, I'm afraid that last year I logged only 110 species--not a huge number. I must say that I'd hoped for something more when Dad and I took off for the Okefenokee last spring, but perhaps this year's spring break trip will produce more variety. (I'm not yet sure where we're going, but I think it's safe to assume it'll be somewhere I haven't been before.)

I've got a few days yet before I've got to get back to class, so it's time for some heavy revisions: yes, the latest draft of The Amazing Q needs to be finished off and sent back to its home away from home on a certain editor's desk; with any luck, this will be the last such draft I'll have to do.

Happy New Year!

4:21 AM