Several Followups
May. 19th, 2009 07:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brennaMy eye is fine now. The bloodshot bump went away all by itself. I swear some good fairy must have cast Regen on me as a baby. I may be impervious to bullets; I have not checked. So, based on that, and the way it gradually got less uncomfortable, all I can conclude is that it was... maybe... a mosquito bite? On the surface of my eyeball. Does that happen? I'm just glad, but surprised, that having this theory has not made me more afraid of bugs.
Speaking of which, you know what's a great mosquito repellent? It sounds like a joke because it makes so much sense, but I find it to be true: swatted mosquito. Just get the first one, and display it (smearing as desired). It feels very war-painty to me.
Moving the salt shaker just out of arm's reach worked great, until I started writing this very entry. But it's back on the shelf again now, since I got to this paragraph, looked down, and felt shame. (A tiny bit.)
And that girlfriend I mentioned-- scratch that; apparently we are friends. :c I actually raised the issue with her intending to confess that I wasn't sure about the relationship and I didn't know why, but before I could get there... I found out why! It was all very friendly though, and she went home and I lay around going "o_o..." for a little bit before taking a walk and angsting into my paper journal about my shortcomings in human relations. Then I came back and instead of taking stock of how I needed to grow as an individual person and all (as I'm sure you all can tell I should do), I instantly hit up OKCupid~ =_=
I think that mood may have passed again already. But there needs to be a more casual outlet for the need to be hugged and have your hair petted.
Furthermore:
A YEAR WITH FROG AND TOAD - The Broadway Musical! - stale liveblogging:
Dude, this is the only CD whose auto-informationget has ever worked on any computer in my entire life.
OKAY PRESSING PLAY NOW - GOODBYE CHILDHOOD MEMORIES
>_<
(one hour later)
Well, I thought their voices were backwards, but I got over it because they are pretty dang adorable. I can't say I approve of the lyrics overall, and they didn't really choose the most emotionally nuanced Frog and Toad stories to work with in the first place (I was holding out hope that The Dream might be in there-- it's trippily depressing and messed me up a little bit as a child)-- but the comedy and the straightforwardly sweet parts are pretty much right.
But I'm pretty sure Snail is my favorite.
I looked for youtube clips, but they're pretty much all high school performances, so as always, ask and it shall be given unto you.
PALIMPSEST - Form Swallows Function - poorly organized thoughts
You really can't not mention the style, so I'll get to that first. It is quite something. I'm too illiterate to know who to compare it to, but if you read the free short story version I linked, then it's that. Only more so. More in that it's longer, obviously, and also in that in this version not even the dialogue is spared from that distinctive literary blinging-out. These characters never speak but they soliloquize-- something that ruins my suspension of disbelief every time. Everything that's not a LOL-DRUGS-baiting poem in disguise about how the bricks are made of antelope horns and smell like wisdom is an impossibly polished conversation about the past and desire and great truth between people more self-aware than they have any right to be. And yet for all this insight, I'm still not sure I know what most of them are even like. They all have different personalities and approaches to things, but somehow it's very hard to tell that they do. The minor characters get to rage and scheme and have the wrong agenda and throw a wrench in things, but everything the main characters think or do is overshadowed by the obvious, inevitable finale. And, of course, scenery.
Now, it is hella neat scenery. Make no mistake. You can't read the book without cutting together a kickass, heavily-CGI'd trailer for the movie version in your mind's eye whenever you put it down. There is straight up quality imagination at work here, in concepts and communities and materials and rituals (that last was especially interesting to me-- the city of Palimpsest has little social customs and taboos like Middle Earth has songs. I think there's a hell of a piece of writing to be had out of the kinds of details an author thinks are necessary-- or sufficient-- to make their worlds seem more real, but I' m not the person for the job. Are you?) I guess it's the way our heroes become scenery themselves that was a problem for me. Opposite the ZOMG SILK BALLGOWNS AND SENTIENT OBJECTS we have, not so much ordinary human beings, but ZOMG POETIC HOBBIES AND CRAZY FAMILY LIVES. Maybe I'm just a lazy reader, but I could have used more foil than that.
I also ended up not being sure what the lesson was. It's largely about the poetry, true, but there's also a lot of essay, and not enough thesis to go with it. How open should the borders of a fantasy land be? Would it really be all that different in our hands than in theirs? What does it take to make a good life? How responsible are we for ensuring the happiness of others? And most importantly, what exactly does personal growth and heroic triumph entail?
Vague spoilers, but spoilers nonetheless, in this paragraph: This, to me, is where the book proved to be less rewarding than I thought it was going to be. Once they get to the city of their dreams, the characters are offered extravagant new lifestyles that satisfy desires born of their sad, twisted backgrounds. They have to choose between accepting their weird, difficult, sign-in-blood-first ask-questions-later destinies exactly as presented to them, or to go home and forget the whole thing. They choose the former, and without much of a fight. Once this occurs, it is suddenly unambiguously a good thing. Their past traumas confront them, not the other way around-- fair enough; it is basically a dream setting, so that's fitting. But they never transcend those traumas; they remain defined by them, even in finding happiness. The story is dreamlike in a literal sense, where each character is subjected to private, bizarre renderings of their own emotional landscapes, and you wait for them to learn enough from it all to stop being simply led along by confusing impersonal forces, take the reins, and change course from whatever led them to this point. This waiting never pays off. "And they never woke up again" is sort of an unsatisfying ending even when the dream is a happy one. When it's questionable whether it's happy or not, it's plain uncomfortable.
Vague spoilers over. You may look now.
But back to the style, actually, because I'm glad I read it and that's a big part of the reason why. It's interesting enough that it gets into your head and you start seeing things that way yourself. I used to get terrible cases of the take-me-with-yous over stuff like this, but-- if my younger self could hear me now!-- I think I may have grown beyond that. It helped, of course, that I don't quite buy the setting as an obviously desirable place, but more than that, it reaffirmed for me that if you're bored, you're boring. It left me thinking about things like how many more words English has for cold weather than for singing, on my way to make money drawing with pure light, in a world that runs on domesticated lightning and the corpses of dinosaurs. I appreciate fiction that inoculates me against needing it to be real-- it's thoughtful.
Speaking of which, you know what's a great mosquito repellent? It sounds like a joke because it makes so much sense, but I find it to be true: swatted mosquito. Just get the first one, and display it (smearing as desired). It feels very war-painty to me.
Moving the salt shaker just out of arm's reach worked great, until I started writing this very entry. But it's back on the shelf again now, since I got to this paragraph, looked down, and felt shame. (A tiny bit.)
And that girlfriend I mentioned-- scratch that; apparently we are friends. :c I actually raised the issue with her intending to confess that I wasn't sure about the relationship and I didn't know why, but before I could get there... I found out why! It was all very friendly though, and she went home and I lay around going "o_o..." for a little bit before taking a walk and angsting into my paper journal about my shortcomings in human relations. Then I came back and instead of taking stock of how I needed to grow as an individual person and all (as I'm sure you all can tell I should do), I instantly hit up OKCupid~ =_=
I think that mood may have passed again already. But there needs to be a more casual outlet for the need to be hugged and have your hair petted.
Furthermore:
A YEAR WITH FROG AND TOAD - The Broadway Musical! - stale liveblogging:
Dude, this is the only CD whose auto-informationget has ever worked on any computer in my entire life.
OKAY PRESSING PLAY NOW - GOODBYE CHILDHOOD MEMORIES
>_<
(one hour later)
Well, I thought their voices were backwards, but I got over it because they are pretty dang adorable. I can't say I approve of the lyrics overall, and they didn't really choose the most emotionally nuanced Frog and Toad stories to work with in the first place (I was holding out hope that The Dream might be in there-- it's trippily depressing and messed me up a little bit as a child)-- but the comedy and the straightforwardly sweet parts are pretty much right.
But I'm pretty sure Snail is my favorite.
I looked for youtube clips, but they're pretty much all high school performances, so as always, ask and it shall be given unto you.
PALIMPSEST - Form Swallows Function - poorly organized thoughts
You really can't not mention the style, so I'll get to that first. It is quite something. I'm too illiterate to know who to compare it to, but if you read the free short story version I linked, then it's that. Only more so. More in that it's longer, obviously, and also in that in this version not even the dialogue is spared from that distinctive literary blinging-out. These characters never speak but they soliloquize-- something that ruins my suspension of disbelief every time. Everything that's not a LOL-DRUGS-baiting poem in disguise about how the bricks are made of antelope horns and smell like wisdom is an impossibly polished conversation about the past and desire and great truth between people more self-aware than they have any right to be. And yet for all this insight, I'm still not sure I know what most of them are even like. They all have different personalities and approaches to things, but somehow it's very hard to tell that they do. The minor characters get to rage and scheme and have the wrong agenda and throw a wrench in things, but everything the main characters think or do is overshadowed by the obvious, inevitable finale. And, of course, scenery.
Now, it is hella neat scenery. Make no mistake. You can't read the book without cutting together a kickass, heavily-CGI'd trailer for the movie version in your mind's eye whenever you put it down. There is straight up quality imagination at work here, in concepts and communities and materials and rituals (that last was especially interesting to me-- the city of Palimpsest has little social customs and taboos like Middle Earth has songs. I think there's a hell of a piece of writing to be had out of the kinds of details an author thinks are necessary-- or sufficient-- to make their worlds seem more real, but I' m not the person for the job. Are you?) I guess it's the way our heroes become scenery themselves that was a problem for me. Opposite the ZOMG SILK BALLGOWNS AND SENTIENT OBJECTS we have, not so much ordinary human beings, but ZOMG POETIC HOBBIES AND CRAZY FAMILY LIVES. Maybe I'm just a lazy reader, but I could have used more foil than that.
I also ended up not being sure what the lesson was. It's largely about the poetry, true, but there's also a lot of essay, and not enough thesis to go with it. How open should the borders of a fantasy land be? Would it really be all that different in our hands than in theirs? What does it take to make a good life? How responsible are we for ensuring the happiness of others? And most importantly, what exactly does personal growth and heroic triumph entail?
Vague spoilers, but spoilers nonetheless, in this paragraph: This, to me, is where the book proved to be less rewarding than I thought it was going to be. Once they get to the city of their dreams, the characters are offered extravagant new lifestyles that satisfy desires born of their sad, twisted backgrounds. They have to choose between accepting their weird, difficult, sign-in-blood-first ask-questions-later destinies exactly as presented to them, or to go home and forget the whole thing. They choose the former, and without much of a fight. Once this occurs, it is suddenly unambiguously a good thing. Their past traumas confront them, not the other way around-- fair enough; it is basically a dream setting, so that's fitting. But they never transcend those traumas; they remain defined by them, even in finding happiness. The story is dreamlike in a literal sense, where each character is subjected to private, bizarre renderings of their own emotional landscapes, and you wait for them to learn enough from it all to stop being simply led along by confusing impersonal forces, take the reins, and change course from whatever led them to this point. This waiting never pays off. "And they never woke up again" is sort of an unsatisfying ending even when the dream is a happy one. When it's questionable whether it's happy or not, it's plain uncomfortable.
Vague spoilers over. You may look now.
But back to the style, actually, because I'm glad I read it and that's a big part of the reason why. It's interesting enough that it gets into your head and you start seeing things that way yourself. I used to get terrible cases of the take-me-with-yous over stuff like this, but-- if my younger self could hear me now!-- I think I may have grown beyond that. It helped, of course, that I don't quite buy the setting as an obviously desirable place, but more than that, it reaffirmed for me that if you're bored, you're boring. It left me thinking about things like how many more words English has for cold weather than for singing, on my way to make money drawing with pure light, in a world that runs on domesticated lightning and the corpses of dinosaurs. I appreciate fiction that inoculates me against needing it to be real-- it's thoughtful.