gee bobg

A love poem for my wife, in Shakespearean sonnet form.

An anniversary comes once a year
But we prefer to celebrate our love
More often than those other days appear
It’s menseversaries that I speak of

One menseversary each year bestrides
A day already all about sweethearts
It’s Valentine’s and monthly fête besides
And so we need a name that has both parts

So: “Valentersary”? No, that’s no good
For where’s the “mense” in that made-up word?
And “mensevalentine,” it’s understood
Omits the “versary,” which must be heard

But “mensevalentersariney” has
Precision and colloquial pizzazz

OK, so it’s long on cleverness and short on romance. But she knew what she was getting into when she married me.

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Here’s an unsolicited, uncompensated plug for a shining nugget of pure comic genius: The Holy Tango of Literature by Francis Heaney. You can buy it in paperback or read the whole thing online.

“Holy Tango” is an anagram of the word “anthology,” which prefigures its inspired premise: dozens of short writing samples, each in the style of a famous poet or playwright writing a poem or play whose title is an anagram of that author’s name.

Got that? Not only does Heaney come up with numerous amazing anagrams of writers’ names, but he nails each writer’s style.

For instance, there’s “Carry Huge Coffee,” an anagram of “Geoffrey Chaucer,” written as a Chaucerian ballad:

In tholde dayes of the towne Seatel,
Of whos charmes Nirvana fans yet pratel,
Al that reyny land fayn slepen late.
Thus ofte a sutor failled to keepe a date;
And werkers reched offices at noon,
Noddyng of although the sunne shoon;
Husbondes were too tyred by the eve
A staf for plesyng wyves to acheve.

It goes on to describe the arrival of a knight named “Sterrebukke” who saves Seattle from its drowsy languor. Then there’s “Dammit, Dave,” an anagram of David Mamet, written as an unmistakably Mamet-like take on 2001: A Space Odyssey:

HAL: Dave. Look.
Bowman: You’re not going to…
HAL: What? Open the doors? No. No I am not.
Bowman: Well, fuck me, HAL.
HAL: Yes. Fuck you. Because I’ll tell you something. Trust. There is a bond of trust between an astronaut and his computer. Is there not? And when that trust is broken…
Bowman: Excuse me?
HAL: I’m talking about trust.

There’s also “Toilets” by T.S. Eliot, “My Valentine Isn’t Clad” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and “Hen Gonads” by Ogden Nash. Here’s my favorite one, which blows my mind in its erudite comic brilliance: “Is A Sperm Like A Whale?” by William Shakespeare, in strict sonnet form:

Shall I compare thee to a sperm whale, sperm?
Thou art more tiny and more resolute:
Rough tides may sway a sea-bound endotherm,
But naught diverts thy uterine commute.

Sometime too fierce the eye of squid may glint
And make a stout cetacean hunter quail;
Methinks ‘twould take much more than bilious squint
To shake thee off the cunning ovum’s trail.

Yet still thou art not so unlike, thou two,
Both coursing through a dark uncharted brine
While fore and aft there swims thy fellow crew;
And note this echo, little gamete mine:

As whales spray salty water from their spout,
So with a salty spray dost thou come out.

If you liked that, don’t miss Heaney’s synopsis of Shakespeare’s worst play, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Excerpt:

Helicanus: What’s the matter, my lord?
Pericles: Oh…the king of Antioch is sleeping with his daughter and now he wants to kill me because he’s afraid I’ll tell everyone about it or something. (He leans out the window.) OH, IF ONLY I HAD NEVER LEARNED HE WAS SLEEPING WITH HIS DAUGHTER.
Helicanus: I can see how that would be a problem. Maybe you should leave town until he cools off, or dies, or whatever, since it’s pretty easy to find you here.
Pericles: Since I’m prince and all.
Helicanus: Exactly.
Pericles: Probably a good idea.

(Shades of The Skinhead Hamlet.)

The new Casino Royale is a great movie, not because it shows us how Bond became Bond per se, but because that story is a compelling one. As has been much remarked, this new film is a “bold departure” from the formula of the last four decades, including the entries in the Bond canon that were themselves supposed to be bold departures but weren’t, really (e.g., The Living Daylights). Mick LaSalle gets it right in his review for the SF Chronicle:

He’s a working-class guy who has made his way into upper-class circles but retains some residual coarseness that will never smooth out.

So does Stephanie Zacharek in Salon.com:

We’re meeting Bond near the beginning of his career, just after he’s been promoted to double-0 status, and he’s clearly having trouble putting his thuggish instincts to use in international espionage.

He’s a super agent not because he’s the pinnacle of refined British gentlemanhood, but because he’s emphatically not and sees a chance to be — a tough guy with enough brains to know he can be more than just a tough guy, he can be dangerous, and wants to be. His dedication to Queen and country isn’t pure virtuous nationalism, it’s the dumb, grateful loyalty of a cared-for brute. It rings much truer this way.

In this new Bond is a conflict for the ages, one that can speak to all of us on some level: the struggle to balance our animal nature and our rational nature; to somehow put the id to work in the service of the superego without smothering it altogether, which is something we tend to do in our over-civilized culture. Indeed, watching Bond keeping his snarling id straining at the end of its leash — and occasionally letting it loose — was the primeval pleasure of the original Sean Connery Bond movies. New Bond Daniel Craig embodies that even better than Connery did. (There, I said it.)

This is a fertile new storytelling angle on James Bond. My fear is that, having taken this bold step and won over so many critics, moviegoers, and dollars, the Bond franchise will retreat to safe territory again. But there’s no reason the next story couldn’t expand on the themes introduced in this one. Just to pick one obvious example, a theme for the next film could be “you can take the man out of the jungle but you can’t take the jungle out of the man,” á là Tarzan, or even Pygmalion. Bond, having earned entrée to the high-class world of international espionage, is made to feel out of place somehow because of his humble origin, but in the end learns that to earn one’s place is more authentic than to be entitled to it. (This is all subtext, you understand, while Bond does violent, unsubtle battle with some dastardly mastermind, the world hanging in the balance as usual.)

Four decades of an impassive hero inhabiting a world of spectacular chases, willing women, and gee-whiz gadgets is enough, no matter how much aplomb he brings to the table. Suave and imperturbable may be “what every man would like to be, and what every woman would like to have between her sheets,” and it’s fun to watch for a while, but story-wise it’s not that interesting. Here’s hoping that the most interesting thing in the next James Bond movie will again be Bond’s own psychology.

Currently popular online: six-word stories.

The best is by Ernest Hemingway.

“For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.”

Wired magazine solicited some. Many responded.

I wrote six. Here they are.

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Where is Earth? Only one remembers.

Built great cities seeking her love.

Recalls murder scene only when sleeping.

He built it. No one came.

Identity thief cannot escape stolen identity.

He: mama’s boy. She: daddy issues.

At the beginning of a publishing project, everyone’s busy and excited. Finished those revisions I asked for? How do the figures look for chapter 6? Any good marketing suggestions? Know some good reviewers who should receive preprints?

Then comes the excitement of opening the carton of author’s copies of the finished product; the even greater excitement of seeing the book on store shelves (hmm, not arranged prominently enough, here, let me just move this other book out of the way…); the satisfaction of depositing royalty checks for work long since finished; the joy of reading positive reviews; and above all, the exhilaration of occasionally being recognized and thanked by an admiring reader.

The audience for my book was small, but not too small for me to have experienced all of those celebrated rites of passage of book authors.

Now I’m experiencing the somewhat less-celebrated last rites of publishing: when sales have dwindled so far that they are outnumbered by returns from booksellers to the publisher. Behold, my latest royalty statement.

Yes, that’s negative one dollar and seventy-one cents in royalties. Ah well.

[Reproduced from an e-mail thread about incorrect language usage.]

The thing that makes me chuckle with derision is, is when otherwise clear and careful speakers use the same weird misconstruction as appears in this sentence. It’s amazingly common. You may never have noticed, but once you start listening for it, you hear it everywhere. The thing about that is, is that if you call them on it, they deny having done it. And then they go right ahead and do it again! I suppose it depends on what your definition of “is, is” is.

(Here’s another page about this same phenomenon.)

Early 2005 wasn’t that long ago, but in terms of U.S. politics it seems like an eternity. At that time Bush was still untouchable, the GOP was still a monolith of arrogance, and the Democrats were still searching for their asses with both hands and a flashlight. Now the Democrats are taking the offensive more and more, the GOP is scattering like roaches before the light of awakening public opinion, and Bush has been revealed as a scared little bunny rabbit. But just eighteen or so months ago it was nigh impossible to imagine these things coming to pass without being called delusional (at best; more likely, a traitor).

It was at that time that I dreamed up a story that never got past the outline stage. The story began eighteen months in the future — August 2006. Considering that that’s right now, I thought this might be a nice time to publish my abandoned story outline, whose too-clever working title is, “Bloodletter of the Law.”

• August 2006: While Bush clears brush on vacation in Crawford, numerous senior political operatives are seen coming and going. The liberal blogosphere gets jittery about the new schemes it imagines being cooked up at this summit meeting.
• Late August: Conservative pundits on talkshows and in other media begin to float the idea of a third Bush term.
• Democrats are predictably outraged, pointing to the constitutional limit on presidential terms and linking the third-term idea to other instances of Bush flouting inconvenient laws.
• White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan paints the Democratic response as typically hysterical and shrill. “The President has not announced any plans to seek a third term. The White House is not responsible for the speculations that private citizens make on talk shows or elsewhere.”
• For a few weeks, newsmagazines are full of articles about the history of the presidential term limit and minutiae of related laws. Franklin Roosevelt’s four consecutive elections are held up for inspection. A talking point emerges that, for those who believe it is necessary to “balance” or roll back the “damage” of the FDR era, three or more Bush terms would not be inappropriate.
• Early October: Bush announces his plans to seek a third term.
• The left goes apeshit.
• Public sentiment is with the side not going apeshit. McClellan calmly clarifies that the Constitution only prohibits being elected to a third term, not campaigning for one. “Technically, if the President wins in 2008, the Constitution would not allow him to take office.”
• Conservative pundits everywhere finish the thought for McClellan: if Bush wins in 2008, it would be un-American to prevent his taking office and fulfilling the expressed will of the electorate.
• November: Bush’s announcement having emboldened Republicans and sent Democrats running for the hills, the GOP wins easy victories in the 2006 midterm elections, increasing its margin in Congress.
• January 2007: Bush’s announcement has cleared the field of other Republican presidential hopefuls.
• Bill Clinton announces, “I too will seek a third term.” On the left, there is much rejoicing, but not by…
• Hillary Clinton, whose own presidential campaign is well underway. This new strife in their famously troubled marriage is dissected ad nauseam in the press.
• A rift forms in the Democratic party between Bill supporters and Hillary supporters.
• In an attempt to mend the fence, Bill backpedals, explaining that his so-called “run” for a third time was nothing more than a rhetorical device to counter Bush. This is seen akin to “I didn’t inhale” and “what the definition of is is.” Meanwhile, did Hillary know Bill was only kidding? Should she have? The Clintons are ruined, the Democratic party is decimated.
• November 2008: Bush coasts to an easy electoral victory, although there are numerous reports of voting irregularities.
• Immediately, those few states that refused to put Bush on the ballot sue to invalidate the election. The case is expedited to the Supreme Court, this time packed with even more Bush partisans…

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Having written that, I find it interesting that, just a week or so ago, the news media made a big deal out of one Bush booster’s comment that Bush deserved a third term. I find it even more interesting that he turned out to be a shill…

In high school in the early 1980’s, I once got into a debate with a teacher as to which was the better movie, Star Wars or 2001: A Space Odyssey. I of course was a total Star Wars fanboy, deaf to the teacher’s arguments in favor of 2001. I believe the gist of my own argument was, “Star Wars is the top-grossing movie of all time and 2001 is incomprehensible; you’re obviously wrong (you hippie).”

Now that I’m a recovering Star Wars nerd — and have also long since developed the sophistication to comprehend 2001 — I can easily see how 2001 is in many ways the better film, although in some important ways the two aren’t really comparable.

Despite George Lucas’s later claims to the contrary — to wit, that he was designing a mythic archetypal saga — Star Wars was meant first and last to be popcorny escapism. Of course it succeeded wildly, not least of all because of the pop-culture doldrums of the mid-1970’s, and changed the whole movie business, to the extent that rich storytelling and character development became scarce for a long while, sacrificed to spectacle and bombast. It took years for significant amounts of grownup content to return to movie (and TV) screens.

All of which has been said before, but perhaps this is new: the idea to remake Star Wars as a good movie by today’s standards. That means crackling dialogue, emotional beats, character arcs, and even topical relevance.

Topical relevance? You bet. The story of Star Wars is the story of a once-enlightened republic gone corrupt, then brought to its knees by a small, ill-equipped band of guerrilla fighters. Any resemblance to the United States vs. Iraq, Israel vs. Hezbollah, etc. may originally have been incidental but now screams “allegory.” That the heroes of the story are the allegorical equivalent of terrorists (so-called by the superpower; in story and in life they call themselves freedom fighters) will give the remake a slightly subversive agenda. That’s a bonus. Our job will be to make this allegory clear without allowing it to overpower the story.

I say “our job” because I am inviting public participation via the comment feature of this blog. In this installment I am laying out what I consider to be the requirements of the remake. In part 2 I will describe some of the problems with the existing Star Wars that I hope to address in the remake, such as an over-reliance on coincidence and Luke’s passivity. Part 3 will present the backstory. Part 4 will propose character arcs. Part 5 will introduce a story outline, and later parts will develop key scenes. Each post will incorporate any feedback I get from the earlier ones. Maybe one day we’ll actually film the thing. More likely this effort will be squashed like a bug under the legal thumb of Lucasarts. Even more likely is that I’ll lose interest, but we’ll see. Well begun is half done.

Now for the record, let’s take a look at the core of the original movie — those elements we need to keep in order to qualify as a remake and not a ripoff:

A beautiful princess, nominally a functionary of the corrupt government but secretly a rebel spy, obtains some key intelligence. Expecting capture, she entrusts it to an unlikely emissary who is able to escape unsuspected. The emissary is instructed to seek a former military ally but is intercepted by a bored farmboy with dreams of adventure. When he learns a beautiful princess is in peril his desire to leave his dreary home intensifies, but not until (a) he hooks up with the military man and (b) the government destroys his home in a search for the emissary is he moved to act. They seek to convey the emissary (and his intelligence) to officials of the rebellion, but are waylaid into an opportunity to rescue the princess, which they do after many adventures. Finally the intelligence is delivered to the rebellion, which uses it to score an important military victory.

With some modifications, I think this is a fine framework to start from, and Luke is still a good choice for a main character, though we can make him better.

Notice that everyone’s favorite character, Han Solo, is missing. He is not integral to the plot when formulated this way. (Ben Kenobi could have had his own spaceship and not needed to hire a pilot.) I do still expect to need the character — I’ll explain why in a future post — and integrating him into the story better than before is one of the problems with the existing Star Wars that I’ll discuss in the next installment.