Another day, another defilement

I read Robert E. Howard's short story "Pigeons from Hell" today, inspired by a piece of art that my good friend the Lord Admiral bought for a paltry ten dollars at a convention he had the pleasure (and I did not) of attending. Although the story sounds as though "Two Gun Bob" was challenged to write the scariest story he could with a silly title, it works.

Place plays a crucial role in the story, as it is uniquely steeped in the culture and legends of the South. In much of the story, Howard seems to be responding to HP Lovecraft's tales of horror by arguing that his native South is much scarier than New England. For instance, the character through whom we see the story exclaims halfway through,

"Voodoo!" he muttered. "I'd forgotten about that -- I never could think of black magic in connection with the South. To me witchcraft was always associated with old crooked streets in waterfront towns, overhung by gabled roofs that were old when they were hanging witches in Salem; dark musty alleys where black cats and other things might steal at night. Witchcraft always meant the old towns of New England, to me -- but all this is more terrible than any New England legend -- these somber pines, old deserted houses, lost plantations, mysterious black people, old tales of madness and horror -- God, what frightful, ancient terrors there are on this continent fools call 'young'!"

Earlier, Howard narrates the same character's changed perception about the South, seeming to echo how he imagines Lovecraft would react to Texas: "He had thought of the South as a sunny, lazy land washed by soft breezes laden with spice and warm blossoms, where life ran tranquilly to the rhythm of black folk singing in sunbathed cottonfields. But now he had discovered another, unsuspected side -- a dark, brooding, fear-haunted side, and the discovery repelled him."

Much of the story owes to Howard's own self-image as a Southern storyteller, which he defends and validates through his story. In his letters, he often refers to his stories as "yarns," and he uses Southern tropes to explain how his stories come to him: he says, for instance, that the idea for Conan popped into his head fully realized without much thought on his part.

The story itself seems to be a purposeful who's-who of Southern storytelling elements. Black magic, voodoo, snakes, the Devil, a man on a horse wielding a Colt six-gun, returning from hell, the living dead, a haunted house, and the Civil War all play a role. Howard, best known for writing stories in mythical Hyboria, is perhaps best seen here as exploring the legends and stories of his native South.



Now for something completely different:
Freaking cool!

The poet Robert Wrigley

A poet from Idaho (but not an Idaho poet, as he pointed out) came to my campus today, and I had the opportunity to attend his poetry reading, to go to lunch with him, and then to attend a panel discuss that he shared with three of our local creative writing faculty: Michael Sowder, Jennifer Sinor, and Charles Waugh.

Wrigley looks a little like a gray-haired Al Pacino, and the way his mouth moves made me smile a few times at the likeness. The poems he read were quite good; poems about how fragile and beautiful life is, using some excellent nature imagery and exploring human relationships with a soft touch.

After the reading, some of the other graduate students and I, along with one of our creative writing faculty went to lunch with Wrigley. At first, I felt as though he was a bit too focused on himself as he talked, laying on his opinions and insights a little thick, but after I spoke with one of my fellow graduate students, I came to the decision that, since he was being paid to be here and talk to us as the great visiting poet, he was giving us our money's worth of his wisdom and experience. That was more palatable. The lunch was interesting: there were sweet potatoes, ham, and pie, among others. The Skyroom was practicing for Christmas Dinner already.

The panel was solid, but I never really liked panels. It seems people always ask the same questions. It was interesting to hear various insights into how place and the natural world affect writing. I agree with Wrigley's assessment that speaking of writing about the "natural world" presumes that there is an "unnatural world," when really, there isn't. Cities aren't unnatural. Most animals change their environment in some way; we're merely termites building our mounds on a larger scale.

Robert Wrigley, you're not Naomi Nye, but I won't hold that against you. Thanks for visiting. I look forward to seeing your poem in The New Yorker.

lol. noobs.

Earlier this evening, I received an e-mail from someone obviously very confused about the way listserves work. This anonymous person wrote the following e-mail to everyone signed up for the Caine School of the Arts listserv:

I would like to be on this list.
Thank you! :)

I shook my head and smiled, hitting delete. Everyone would understand that someone had made a mistake, I reasoned. A few minutes later, the following, also anonymous e-mail response demonstrated that wasn't the case:

Um what?

=EDIT=

(It gets better:)

i think the system is messed up because i didn't write either of these messages and i don't even know what caine school of arts is.

(And then...)

Did everyone here just get a random message about this?

(And)

I don't want to be on the list

(And even...)

Take me off the list. I don't know what this is
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

=EDIT 2=

I finally got sick of receiving these idiotic e-mails (I got five in less than ten minutes at one point), so I sent out the following:

Due to the nature of this mailing list, every reply that you send to these messages will rebound to a great many people. We who are receiving your e-mails do not have any way of knowing who you are, let alone of removing you from the list. Please, if you have an issue with the service, contact a webmaster from the Caine School of the Arts about it. For the sake of everyone's sanity, do not continue to reply to these e-mails.

Only you can prevent more spam. And nobody likes spam. Well, nobody except Monty Python.

Pests

I walked down to the dumpsters to throw away some recyclables I had been gathering in my apartment. As I went to throw them away, I saw a whitish-blond cat climb out of one of the dumpsters and into the parking lot a level above where I was standing. A few weeks ago, I was throwing away a couple of pizza boxes when a cat jumped out of the dumpster and just about startled the life away from me. This led me to an interesting thought: what is a pest? What difference is there between vermin and a pet? I have always loved cats, those furry, purry creatures that make me smile just by rubbing against my leg or climbing into my lap. But what role does a cat have? They don't guard a house and they don't drag children out of fires (with maybe the odd exception). They're just assigned the role of companion, a role they're not particularly suited for. They're just a change in fate from climbing around in garbage. It's entirely a matter of subjective perception.

Take rats. Some people keep rats as pets; for most people, rats are vermin, annoying at best and dangerous at worst. It's all subjective. We choose arbitrarily to call one thing a dear pet and another a pest. Heck, some people keep poisonous snakes and tigers as pets.

But what does this thought lead to? Sadly, I have the feeling this question also applies to us. One person's pest is another person's loved one. Do we ever treat people as they are, or are we always dependent on our subjective views, the entirely arbitrary responses we have to people based on the tiny part of their lives that we observe? With a different first impression, could an obnoxious jerk have been a hilarious scamp? Could arrogant have been self-assured? How much of what we think we know about people is based on our own wishful thinking or skewed perception?

Well, it's a thought.

Paul Muldoon

I went to a reading by Irish poet Paul Muldoon today in Salt Lake City. He is a fantastically funny man, in a very quiet, clever way, and he has very curly gray hair that was almost a joy to look at in itself. I traveled with my mother and a teacher/poet from the University.

I enjoyed his first few poems the best; they were about growing up in Ireland, and created vivid scenes and inspired deep emotional connections with lovely phrases and stunning images. One poem started by talking about visiting a new traffic circle, the first in the area, as a day's excursion, but then ended with the story of a boy who got his bicycle trashed and had a gun held against his head by Unionists who forced him to curse out the Pope.

His later poems relied, I felt, more heavily on word play (the rhyming in some of his poems was particularly thick), although I will admit that, for the most part, his poems were lyrical and clever. He has a way of connecting something simple, like a turkey buzzard feasting on roadkill, with something personal, like his sister slowly dying, and making it sound beautiful and touching rather than as odd as I just made it sound.

Afterwards, there was going to be a reception, but we didn't stay because it was already eight o'clock and we still had the hour-and-a-half drive up.

As a side note, we stopped at a small restaurant called Salt Lake Pasta and Pizza, where they got us our sandwiches, soup, and salad in less than five minutes when we told them we were in a hurry to catch the show. I've never seen a place be so Johnny-on-the-spot, which was particularly nice since they said they were so busy. They definitely catered to our demands, and although my soda was flat, my sandwich was quite good and my fries were great.

Where creativity goes to die

So, the new Dune book by Brian Herbert is called Paul of Dune, further cementing the fact that they are going to write every conceivable novel and simply add of Dune to the end of it. Yes, prepare for Phil of Dune, Hank of Dune, and the page-turning bestseller Bubba of Dune.

Maybe I'm just tired and bitter. I only read the first book, back when it was still of Dune (except without the of), and I'm not sure I even finished that one. One thing is for sure: it's another argument against having any children. Being childless means not having my progeny screw up my legacy after I've moved on to the Happy Hunting Grounds. I'm looking at you, Christopher Tolkien.

(Yes, I know Paul was the name of the protagonist in the first novel. You may have too much time on your hands. Just like me.)

Toph time!

Holy crap, I've gone fanboy. Okay, I'm wearing my Naruto headband and my Alucard hat, and it's time to talk like I have a retainer in my mouth, because I'm pulling out the stops (and the sanity) to go all-out fanboy.

I was on Deviantart earlier. I'm tired of the rep it gets as a home for softcore porn. It's that... AND lots of great fan-drawn pictures of anime shows. So, without further ado, everyone's favorite Earthbender. I picked pictures that I felt did a good job portraying the character differently than she appears on the show, while still keeping true to who she is.

http://greendesire.deviantart.com/art/Toph-Bei-Fong-56855462 A realistic picture of Toph's face.

http://lychi.deviantart.com/art/Toph-69678934 A very dynamic shot of Toph Earthbending. Bend away, Toph. Bend away.

http://piyoko-shannaro.deviantart.com/art/Toph-81195943 Toph cosplay! I felt the artist captured her personality as well as her costume.

http://nokomento.deviantart.com/art/TOPH-61317018 A uniquely comics-like Toph.

http://ninjatic.deviantart.com/art/Toph-Badass-70035962 A more realistic Toph.

http://poorachan.deviantart.com/art/LOAD-THE-TOPH-68548309 And last, because I had to include it, unabashed Toph cheesecake shot.

What have I become? *Tears in the rain...*

Don't judge me!

And, because I suppose it must be said, Toph is from the Nickelodeon show Avatar: The Last Airbender, and you should check it out.

Doomsday, aka Dog Soldiers Reunited

What do Terry, Joe, Spoon, and the Sarge from Dog Soldiers have in common?

They're all in Doomsday. Although only Spoon really gets much of a role, and even that is mostly as the guy following along whose presence really doesn't affect the story. At all. He's a foil. He might as well have foil wrapped around his head with a sign following him around that says, "Foil." I almost started hating him myself, even though he was spoon.

The lead character is a one-eyed, smoking badass who just doesn't give a shit (one of the other characters underlines this by saying, "You just don't give a shit, do you?") whose mission is to go into a quarantined zone where the locals have gone savage, on a secret mission to retrieve something of vital importance to the country.

And it's not Snake Plissken. (Or so they claim. Pretty much the only difference is it's a woman with a bionic eye. Oh, and she's emotionally scarred and out for nonspecific revenge.)

Take one part Mad Max, one part 28 Days Later, and one part Escape From New York. Mix thoroughly. Voila! Doomsday.

I was hoping there would be a zombie epidemic in this film, but I don't think the writers ever worked out whether or not the virus made people psychotic, or if people just went psychotic from fear/panic. At one point, an infected person murders a few people in cold blood, but it never explains why. I guess he just had issues.

The production values were pretty much off the hook and made the film great to watch at times (it also had some great shots of Scottish countryside), which is sad, because the writing was bottom-shelf and the characters weren't even stock; they had virtually no character at all.

The Mad Max reject villains and their over-the-top villainy were cool, but then I had a moment where I sat back and said, "Okay, now this is just silly." You see, the second group of bad guys had just wandered off the set of BBC's Robin Hood show, seeing as they were dressed in perfect medieval armor and carrying bows and things. They even hung out in a castle (I guess they got the weapons from the castle, but come ON! There was even a hawk in one of the scenes, and an old guy with a skullcap reading a mouldy tome). Oh, and they were led by Malcom McDowell in a fur cloak.

The movie also starred the guy who played Doctor Bashir in DS9 and Bob Hoskins, looking older and jowlier than ever. Not that either really matters.

I give the movie points for some imaginative sequences, particularly with the Mad Max ripoff post-apocalyptic villain gang, because I have a soft spot for that sort of thing, I suppose. But I just can't support the movie as a whole. When we got to the Renfaire rejects as a villain group, my brain said, "The hell with this, I'm going back to sleep" and my body spent the rest of the movie watching alone.

That wasn't a particularly coherent review, but it wasn't a particularly good movie, and my brain is still fighting me. I'm inclined to give it 4 stars on Netflix just because Hollywood needs more cannibalistic savages in leather. But I won't, because that would be just dishonest. Three stars for effort.

I think the bottom line is that a movie like this needs a strong leading character that the audience enjoys spending time with, watching him or her kicking ass and getting into all kinds of bizarre situations. This movie just doesn't deliver that. The heroine is, to use a Kevin Smith line, weak sauce.

And the hot savage woman who appeared in all the promo work? Dead in the first third of the movie, although that's not the last we see of her. I think she spends about as much screentime dead as alive.

Just like the movie as a whole.

Last thought: at one point in the movie, our heroes stumble across the BIGGEST HERD OF COWS EVAR. Why, then, are the bad guys all cannibals? I guess they just really like the taste of people....