time delayed

OLD BUSINESS: I want to be more timely when posting about books/movies. Sometimes I need to think about things for a while to get my head around them - that's how this habit of delay started. But then it morphed into taking forever with everything! It's because I'm either too lazy to sit down and do the work, or (embarrassingly) scared to be wrong. Me! Wrong! Like that would happen. However, it's not like no one has ever been wrong on the internet before and it's also not like I can't have one opinion now and have a different opinion later. So basically, I'm calling bullshit on my whole avoidance scheme.

But before I get to my new way of doing things, here are some Old Business matters I'd like to address:

OB1. My judgement on the US version of Life on Mars (What? it's been less than a year.): I really loved that show and would have liked to see it unspool over a couple of seasons. The ending was insane, but I did grudgingly admire the pure audacity of making it THAT INSANE. I mean, there was no way they could have convincingly tied anything up in the number of episodes they had left, so why not? I'm also somewhat forgiving because the finale aired on April 1, which gave it an air of "we know this shit is bananas!"

OB2. The funniest book I read this summer was called How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely. It made me laugh out loud (the kind where it's actually embarrassing, but rather than look away with shame I'd brazen it out and insist on reading the funny parts aloud to anyone foolish enough to make eye contact). It's a sendup of blockbuster best sellers, the writers who write them, the publishers who publish them, the people who read them -- the fact that no one is spared makes it less mean spirited than it sounds. Nobody gets it as bad as our narrator, Pete Tarslaw. I put this on hold at the library after John August wrote about it -- I didn't have to wait, there were available copies. When I took it back, there were 7 holds, last time I looked 17, and when I just checked now there were 33 holds. Word of mouth, people!

Here's a quote -- I had to grab this in a hurry as I was taking it back to the library (IN JULY!), so maybe it's not the most apt, but I flipped it open and there it was and it made me laugh so here it is. At this point in the book, Pete is trying to decide what sort of book he will write in order to become famous and make his ex-girlfriend sorry. (Tim Drew is the bestselling author of The Darwin Enigma):

Writing a thriller, a Hawaii beach-house personal-helicopter-level blockbuster, is damn near impossible. That's why Tim Drew can give away his secrets for free.

It's easy at first, describing your hero's monumental chin and iron-core integrity and so forth. But slowly you discover it's like a complicated math problem, or assembling a bookshelf. You have to keep track of dozens of tiny parts, which good guys turn out to be bad guys, and which cars will get blown up by which helicopters. And you know your readers will have no patience. They're demanding entertainment, so every page has to be interesting and full of guns and veiled threats and snappy retorts. It's exhausting.

With literary fiction, on the other hand, you can just cover everything up with a coat of wordy spackle. those readers are searching for wisdom, so they're easier to trick.


OB3: here's a picture from the Andrew Bird/Decemberists concert at Edgefield (also from JULY!) The concert lawn at Edgefield has it all over the concert lawn at the Zoo, I have to say. Much roomier! We were sitting pretty far back, but it was lovely nevertheless. I loved that from where I was sitting the stage got an extra leafy frame, which just added to the Evil Forest Ambience, which played right into thier full performance of The Hazards of Love. This (blurry, zoomed in the dark) picture is from the very end (Sons & Daughters).

...and here are 20 random seconds of video from that song! (Maximum clapping, minimal singing, although you can hear the tail end of the excellent word 'dirigible.' I don't know why this is what I chose to record, other than random slaphappy button pushing.)