Confide in Me Saturday, February 07, 2004

When you feel twisted
Call me, I'm listed

From a Donald Fagen B-side I hadn't played in ten years. Like finding a quarter under your cushion. And just now, another gut punch, from "Snowbound"--a song I'm sure you've heard over the Lite Favorites channel in your supermarket. Here are the

lyrics in their entirety:

At Nervous Time
We roll downtown
We've got scenes to crash
We're gonna trick and trash
We're gonna find some fun
We hit the street
With visors down
With our thermasuits
Sealed up tight
We can beat the freeze
And get saved tonight
Let's stop off at the Metroplex
That little dancer's got some style
Yes she's the one I'll be waiting for
At the stage door

Chorus:
Snowbound
Let's sleep in today
Wake me up
When the wolves come out to play
Heat up
These white nights
We're gonna turn this town
Into a city of lights

We take the tube
To Club Hi Ho
It's about deadspace
It's a marketplace
And a party house too
Something new
From Charlie Tokyo
It's a kind of pyramid
With a human heart
Beating in an ion grid
A critic grabs us
And says without a smile
The work seduces us with light
Eviva laughs and we step out
Into the blue-white night

Chorus

We sail our icecats on the frozen river
Some loser fires off a flare, amen
For seven seconds it's like Christmas day
And then it's dark again
And then it's dark again

That last verse is wonderful beyond words. Reading it won't do it justice. It's wistful, mournful, a little existential bonbon--a lifetime lived in the time it takes a flare to burn out on a frozen river.

A long day. Secret Thing #3 is begun. This time I think I'll come up with an outline first...

@ 7:12:00 PM, ,

All Come True Friday, February 06, 2004

A crummy morning, but it brings a theory. In his essay on Fairy Stories, Tolkien argues that staged presentations of fairy tales don't work for a number of reasons: you're concentrating on the illusion, not what it means (i.e., you care more about Peter Pan flying over the crowd than the metaphor of flight); and you can't give things any depth. You can show a rock on stage, but you can't show all the connotations that the word rock summons up when you read it on the page.

I think this fills in, sort of, my feelings about sci-fi these days. I hate reading it, it seems underwritten and overwritten at the same time, pallid and limp and ridiculous. But a good movie can still transport me. I wouldn't read "Voyage of the Space Beagle" again if you paid me, but I'd watch the movie it inspired, "Alien," again and again. (Even if a certain Lithuanian friend thinks all of Ridley Scott's movies look like L'Oreal commercials.)

Why is that? Here's my theory: Some sci-fi works better on screen because you don't have to worry about the words. You don't have to explain why this machine works, or why there's water on Mars, or why that guy's green. Relieving the story of that burden gives it much more direction and energy. I don't need to know how the androids work in "Blade Runner" to believe in them; knowing how they work would make the story even more "meditative" (i.e., slow and occasionally dull) than it already is.

So there you go.

@ 8:56:00 AM, ,

In Delaware When I Was Younger Tuesday, February 03, 2004

My buddy from the Last Homely House in Jersey City makes a good point about my kid-book kvetching:

You're not the target audience (i.e. a kid)

Yes, but. "Treasure Island" is a great book for kids. So is "The Hobbit." Or any Jules Verne. But they succeed as kids' books because they're great books, period. They don't try to affect a specific tone or mind-set, or assemble a specific collection of characters, to make their point. "A Wrinkle in Time" is not a great book by that measure. It involves a bunch of implausible kids that wouldn't pass the smell test in a "real" novel; ditto its unrelentingly spacey, wistful tone. The target audience is a certain kind of kid--or an adult who never got over being that certain kind of kid. (One of the most problematic people I ever knew once wrote to me that she wanted "to believe that people can Tesser." Oy vey.)

To clear away the taste, I started re-reading "The House With a Clock in Its Walls," for at least the millionth time. How can you not love a book with a paragraph like this in it:

He held the book up to his nose. It smelled like Old Spice talcum powder. Books that smelled that way were usually fun to read. He threw the book onto his bed and went to his suitcase. After rummaging about for a while, he came up with a long, narrow box of chocolate-covered mints. He loved to eat candy while he read, and lots of his favorite books at home had brown smudges on the corners of the pages.

I know, I know...I'm supposed to love L'Engle because it's Christian mysticism, because it's got angels and love-your-neighbor-even-if-you-don't-like-him etc. etc. But those sentences above say more to me about love and fun and how to be human than every last goddamn word Miss Madeliene ever wrote.

Kvetch! Kvetch!

@ 1:32:00 PM, ,

Solar Shoe Salesman Monday, February 02, 2004

Finished Wrinkle, mostly through skimming. I kept getting distracted by the science and the theology and the endless descriptions of how icky evil feels. I came to an unhappy conclusion: I'm not sure I like sci-fi anymore. There's something about the rationalization that never sits well. That's what I like about PKD, I think: The "twist" in his books wasn't some obtuse scientific theory but a new spiritual awareness. It was a lot more fun than I'm making it sound. "Spiritual awareness" usually involved God showing up and offering you money to go to planet Lumpy IV.

Still, I want to see how it all shakes out, so I've picked up "A Wind in the Door." Details to follow.

@ 8:32:00 AM, ,

There Is Another World Inside of This One Sunday, February 01, 2004

A productive weekend--imagine that! Tore through a big chunk of the Secret Thing, which as we all know is a game about a certain specific time in the future. Tearing through, of course, means that I wrote up descriptive stuff but skimped on the nuts-and-bolts rules. That will come soon, probably at 5:30 some morning...

A friend of mine in Brooklyn had a bunch of us over Saturday for another kind of gaming. Somehow he'd hot-wired a bunch of makeshift PCs into a LAN, and ran hours and hours of Quake II. I haven't played a first-person shooter in some time and found myself getting nauseous within a few minutes. Not so nauseous as to stop ripping my buddies to shreds, but hey.

Heard from another dear buddy, a mad scientist who is trying to turn molecules into Eskimo pies. (As Gore Vidal said of J.D. Salinger, "It is very cold where he lives...") We hadn't talked on the phone in ages, and it was great to get back into that groove--e-mail can only give you so much.

A pretty blah entry, but I think I used all my poetry on real life this weekend. More soon.

@ 7:46:00 PM, ,