is a blog by Brendan
Dear gentle reader: this blog has been operating continuously since I was a teenager. The writing below is at least a decade old. In that time every molecule of my body has been replaced, along with many foolish ideas and flighty beliefs. I want to keep some of those things public out of an honesty and humility I owe the world. I trust you to carry that context with you.
There’s a decent article on MSNBC / Newsweek–an interview with Miranda Rivers, who cast the Lord of the Rings. My favorite part is where she describes her on-sight classification system:
“We would walk down the street, and people were not people, they were types: I’d be going, ‘Hobbit!’ ‘Elf!’ ‘Uruk-hai!’ ‘Rohan!’ I got a lot of elves off the street.”
I find it interesting how similar that is to the typing system (man, hobbit, dwarf, elf) Randy Waterhouse defines in Cryptonomicon.
Well heck. While I was busy nonblogging, I managed to completely miss the two-year anniversary of this journal (this past Tuesday). This is why sometimes there will be things that say “2 Years Ago” over on the right.
Yeah, that’s basically it.
I highly recommend John Allison’s Girlspy, which I just got in the maaail to-day. And it’s great! There’s popes in it.
(Yes, I know feng shui is so done. But as I lack any natural decorating skill, I figure it can’t really hurt to look through a free book with nice pictures.)
The cool indie bookstore chain in town got bought out by Borders. The hell! This really sucks. Any bookstore in a storm, but a big nasty chain store is way down the ladder from anything locally based. I mean, Borders is the store on which Robot Stories – True Tales of Retail Hell is based. There’s not much good to say about that.
Well, actually there could be. Joseph-Beth, dude, the incumbent’s down for the count. Your move!
Says Mister Crummy, regarding this last entry:
“The obvious thing that comes to my mind is ‘3001’ by Arthur C. Clarke, which is an awful book but which features, among other things, tame, semi-intelligent velociraptors who do menial tasks like gardening. This is just an incidental detail which is not important to the story, but it’s portrayed as a good deal for everyone including the no-longer-extinct dinosaurs…
Another one is David Brin’s Uplift series, in which one type of genetic engineering (making semi-intelligent species fully intelligent) is seen as a social good and a duty. Some of the characters in the books are genetically engineered chimps and dolphins.
If a piece of technology is central to a science fiction story then usually something has to go wrong or the technology has to be abused in some way, or there’s no story. I like Brin because he’s good at coming up with different drivers for conflict.”
He’s right, and that’s a common weakness of science fiction: Neat Idea Syndrome. My Creative Writing visiting professor, Nancy Zafris, told me when asked that yes, SF did have a pretty low standing within her literary circles.
“Why?” I asked. “There’s so much vibrant, progressive fiction out there.”
“I don’t know,” she said, distastefully. “It just always seems like there’s a problem, so they have to… do something with the computer, and that’s the end.”
Which you know is ridiculous, if you’ve ever read SF, but it does make a point: Neat Idea SF exists, and it’s perceived by the casual reader as a) all the same and b) boring. The casual reader is pretty much right, when the story doesn’t involve you with a character. When it gets down to it, a Neat Idea may catch your fancy, but eventually humans are only interested in reading about themselves.
So yeah, now I want to read David Brin, because what Leonard says makes him sound like exactly the right kind of character-focused writer. Unfortunately, my current bedside reading pile is staggering. I went to the library again tonight, with my newly repaired bike tires, and picked up yet more of my reserved books (Frank Miller, Diana Wynne Jones, Rob Thomas). I’m going to have to get a new box when I move on Friday just to keep my library stuff in. Is there a twelve-step program for this kind of thing?
It occurs to me that the one thing most of my favorite science fiction authors share is an intense dislike of science. Maybe it was different back in the hard-SF technotopia days, I don’t know, but I can’t actually remember reading a book involving a future where science makes things better. Seriously, can you think of two sci-fi stories in which genetic engineering, for example, is portrayed as anything but horrible?
About half the books I requested from the library arrived yesterday (and the magic Library Computer telephoned to tell me so!), so after I got off work I biked on down to get them. About a block away, I got a flat tire.
I really should have had them replace the tires when I got it tuned, but I thought I’d save a little money and just get new tubes. Smart me. I’ll take it in this afternoon and get two new ones–the back tire is the one that popped, but I’m sure the front isn’t far behind.
Anyway, I walked the rest of the way to the library and picked up another packful of pages (Lovecraft and Lem, both of whom I’m trying for the first time, and more) and started the trek back. A few blocks on, I noticed that this store called Twice Told Books was actually open–it had always been closed when I passed before. So I decided to check it out, locked my bike to a parking meter, walked in and was eaten.
The books were so dense there. The shelves weren’t nearly enough to hold them all, so they were stacked on top, piled at the bottom, stacked on top of the piles at the bottom, everything. It smelled like dry paper and glue, exactly like the stacks at the old EKU library, before they tore it up and made it big and glassy. I spent a lot of evenings there in middle school, while Mom was earning her Rank I (again), and read a lot of books. The shelves and the overstocking and the smell were all the same, and it was a pretty memory-intensive experience.
They apparently live to buy old sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks, too, and I picked up a lot of them–Le Guin, de Camp, all books about which I’ve thought “I should own that” but never got around to buying. I even got a book I’d been thinking about lately but never thought I’d find again, because I had no memory of the author or title, only the cover illustration. It’s called The Sword and The Satchel, as it turns out, which I learned when I found its cover staring up at me from one of the aforementioned piles.
They had to kick me out when they closed. I was enthralled, and for the first time I honestly wish I wasn’t leaving Bardstown Road. The music stores and comic shop and ice cream I could do without, but I’m going to sneak back to that bookstore whenever I can.
Think they’d give me a job?
I read for at least one solid hour every day at lunch, and I’ve managed to get through all the new books I had with me already. I brought Cold Mountain with me today, because I had it and I hadn’t read it and everybody read it a few years ago, so why not. Twenty pages in, I was like “forget it.”
So tonight I went out and got my card. Finally, after twenty-two years, I have unfettered access to a metropolitan library system! This is glorious. I checked out nine hardcovers today (Flannery O’Connor, Terry Pratchett, lots of Margaret Atwood) and requested probably a dozen more, then biked back happy in the rain, my backpack taut and heavy with words.
Back from a whole, whole lot of driving (or, technically, riding). I’ve played cards and doodled and finally bought the third Sandman book and now am trying to think of things to amuse a sinus-infected Audrey. This is not to say that the sinusly infected aren’t easily amused–she’s currently zoning out at the fake wood grain on my desk–but rather that thinking of things to amuse her helps make me feel useful in the face of illness. I hate it when people are sick.
And speaking of that, I should really quit talking about “somebody” and talk about Maria, who was the person about whom I was worried and who turned out fine after all. She goes to Brown and she’s one of my best friends in the world, and now you, true believer, will have a reference for when I mention her.
I can’t do what I’d like to do, of course, and mention her name with a link to her blog, because she doesn’t have a blog. Why do so few of my friends have convenient blogs? Get a blog, Maria!
For the perceived length of this spring break, I really don’t have much other news, except this: dream school Carnegie Mellon said yes to me but no to any kind of financial support, which essentially means saying no to me, as I don’t think I’m legally permitted to Stafford-borrow as much as it would cost to go there. Still, it feels good to know that I could be there, in another life. Maybe there’s another Brendan in potentiality who software engineered himself right through Pittsburgh and into Blizzard after all.
And maybe he got smashed by a pig truck. You know, it really doesn’t do any good to speculate.
This one’s a little different. The content makes me pretty sure it’s spam, but for some reason–to foil antispam software, I guess–it includes a chunk of well-known (to me) fiction at the end. For the record, it worked; this is the only piece of junk that’s gotten through unscathed to my xorph@xorph account since I installed
From: Feel Younger
Subject: Strengthen your immune systemNow – Powerful Anti-Aging Breakthrough
Claim….Ýours….Nów
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Free Óne Months’s Supply
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Say good by from us, show me.
“Pages one and two [of Zaphod’s presidential speech] had been salvaged by a Damogran Frond Crested Eagle and had already become incorporated into an extraordinary new form of nest which the eagle had invented. It was constructed largely of papier mache and it was virtually impossible for a newly hatched baby eagle to break out of it. The Damogran Frond Crested Eagle had heard of the notion of survival of the species but wanted no truck with it.”
Candidate dozed off during interview.
