| Continued |
[Nov. 11th, 2009|11:56 pm] |
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Hrm, in reply to comments to my previous post, let me clarify the situation:
-imagine you are in college and you have a professor in a class you need to get a good grade in or you are screwed, and the prof is a 26 year old hottie just out of grad school, barely older than you, and you spend as much time in class staring as working. Now does that mean you find some excuse to try to get into your professor's pants , risking some super awkward situation and screwing your grade by forcing a situation with a teacher who likes you but hasnt even shown at all that he/she is sexually attracted to you? Then if this prof sends you an email 6 months later saying he/she wants to jump your bones does that mean an opportunity was missed? Was there ever really an opportunity, at the time?
This is sort of the situation I was in at the DAs office, except rather than needing a grade, I needed a recommendation which means I have to be extra extra careful not to screw up personal relationships. So I'm not so much concerned with missed opportunities- as far as I knew at the time with the information I had, there was no opportunity. For all I know she was dating at the time and her breakup has her started to message me (its pretty typical rebound behavior, but I dont actually know what sparked it, if anything). Had there not been law school at stake... maybe I would have been more aggressive, but such a risk is not worth a reccommendation that can quite literally make or break me getting into a law school.
I guess I was more annoyed that the attention I get is so often in such unhelpful and inconsistent varieties. I dont think there was really an opportunity to miss... and if there is a way of effectively hitting on your boss/teacher/superior without screwing yourself in the process and putting yourself on a really dangerous limb, I'd love to hear it, cause I have no idea how that would even work.
And I guess we all know one way of doing it, but no, I dont plan on being a secretary wearing a revealing miniskirt and bending over a lot, so that path, while a well known method of boss-seduction, is not a path I plan on ever pursuing. And please disregard any facebook pictures that might provide evidence to the contrary.
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| The Mists of Time |
[Nov. 9th, 2009|10:48 pm] |
 There's another review from me up on Unreality SF: it is sort of related to my regular Companion Chronicle duties (which I'm trying to limit myself to at the moment), as I am reviewing the Companion Chronicle that came free with issue #411 of Doctor Who Magazine, The Mists of Time, written by Jonathan Morris (Max Warp, The Glorious Revolution) and starring Katy Manning as Jo Grant.
This came out with the July issue, actually, but I kept on letting it slide, wanting to work my way through Cyberman as well as some "just for fun" audio dramas (mostly the Mila trilogy) first. So I've finally gotten around to it four months later. I justified the delay to myself on the basis that as it was free, no one really needed to know if it was any good or not; it's not like they could be ripped off if they got it and it was crappy (though it wasn't).
Steve
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| Fall Update |
[Nov. 8th, 2009|12:29 pm] |
This semester has been, as predicted, incredibly busy, and I've been sort of up and down throughout it. Both pottery and horseback-riding have proven to be really enjoyable. Yesterday, for the first time, I had finished products come out of the glaze kiln, and I'm incredibly pleased with how they've turned out. And on a horse, Claire, Liz, and I can now do quite a bit at a trot and even went up to a canter at our last lesson. Cantering reminds me most of the first time I went skiiing, and went downhill really fast before I learned to control my speed by weaving back and forth. Thankfully, the horses we work with are so great that if we're not in control, they take over and know what to do. Their intelligence and personalities never cease to amaze me.
The downs, of course, came from not feeling well for so long. My courses and work are enjoyable so long as I'm on top of them, but falling behind was a bit overwhelming. Thankfully, I'm on top of my game again, and am back to enjoying what I'm doing. There's still a lot of work to do over the next month or so, but so long as I stay feeling well, I should enjoy the hecticness rather than feel like I'm in over my head. We'll see.
I am not quite as far along in the data analysis for my thesis as I'd like to be. My dataset is not complex, but it's so huge as to be rather unwieldy. So I'm still working on cleaning it up and getting everything together before I actually jump into analysis. And as I've been going through this process, I realized that I needed two things for the part of my study dealing with community composition: habitat preferences for species and some information about their seeds (so I can make guesses about their modes of dispersal). As it turns out, the best way of gathering this data, after both the USDA Plants Database and the Kew Seed Information Database let me down, is to look up each species in the Flora of the Great Plains, and get that information from the species descriptions. Imagine that--it's 2009, and I still am relying on a hard, physical book for my information! It's not that bad of a task, except for the fact that it's slow--I have 700 species to look up!!--and as it hasn't been updated since 1986, I have to know which species have had name changes since then. So, I am not sure when I can expect to actually get through data analysis. I would not be nervous if I could stay in Kansas over winter break to work on it, but of course I have to go home and finish wedding plans during that time. (Besides, I miss my family! I may see them more often than most grad students do, but it's still more time away from them than I'm used to.)
Another good thing about this semester has been the amount of times Steve and I see each other. Of our two years getting our master's, this semester is the best. Steve visited me over Labor Day (right at the beginning of my illness which may-or-may-not-have-been swine flu), and we mostly took it easy, though we did go out for ice cream and Indian food, and had my friends over for board games and a birthday cake which Claire made it for me. In early October, Steve visited again due to a Wizard of Oz conference in Manhattan. The evening before it, we went to see the musical performed. It was enjoyable, although it had this strange disjunction of being a production by a community theater, with their limitations on stage space and the talent pool they could draw on, and being an event put on in conjuction with the annual Oztoberfest, providing them with (I'm assuming) funds necessary for highly accurate costumes and props and having some big people in the Oz world (Baum's grandchildren, serious collectors, and some of the Munchkins from the movie) present and introduced before the show. As a result of the festival being a celebration of the movie, the play stuck a bit too close to it for my tastes--I was highly disappointed that the Jitterbug scene was omitted.
In mid-October, we switched it up and I went to Connecticut for my fall break. As usual, we spent a good bit of time that was low-key and school-oriented. I went to campus with him one day and worked on my own stuff while he was in classes. Catherine, Steve's sister, had a fall break that overlapped with mine--and she also decided to spend it in Connecticut! So on Saturday, when we both were there, the three of us partook in some ice, custard, and happiness at Rita's, and later Steve invited his friends over for a board game event. (This was actually his suggestion, believe it or not.) The highlight was when we decided to attempt playing Once Upon a Time with everyone--about a dozen people. (I've usually played it with three or four.) Surprisingly, this was incredibly successful, and was one of the most enjoyable sessions of that game I've had. It remains to be determined if it would be that much fun with a group that size that were not mostly English students. I imagine so--at least among my friends.
I came back from break swamped with catch-up work, so the last two weeks of October are kind of a blur of constantly trying to get everything done, with a few breaks for Halloween-oriented activities. Liz, Sarah, Debbie, Lisa, and I had decided to go as a roller derby team, inspired by seeing the Kansas City Roller Warriors in September. Lisa came up with spectacular designs to print on iron-on sheets that we could put on t-shirts, and we had a get-together where we made the shirts and helmet covers. We each took on a persona: Knock-Up, Dr. Dissector, Rusty Blades, and Rainbow Frite. We found appropriate goofy accessories to add to our costumes--crazy socks and tutus and fake tattoos among them. On Friday, the day before Halloween, I wore my costume to work, since that afternoon we had a KBS Halloween party. I was dismayed to find that Sarah, Lisa, and Debbie all waited until the party to change--leaving me as the only person in the building dressing goofily the entire day. But it was highly amusing--I had put contacts in and dark eye makeup on, and blew dry my hair to make it super frizzy, and as a result I had a large number of people at KBS fail to recognize me--including my own advisor!
The next morning was our department's graduate student retreat, an opportunity for us to give presentations and talk about our research with students-only. It has never fallen on Halloween before, so in addition to an award for best presentation, a category for best costume was added. It was highly entertaining to see, for example, Cinderella talking about the anatomy of tapeworms. My presentation could have gone smoother--whenever I recycle presentations, I always seem to be overconfident and think I don't need to actually practice the talk again. But I had brought real rollerskates, borrowed from my roommate, to wear with my costume, and I tied for best costume along with Hannah, who dressed as a yak while she showed pictures of her trip to Mongolia.
And now? Hopefully I can buckle down and just work, work, work until Thanksgiving. There is still so much to do. One of these days, I will figure out my schedule for next semester. I probably will not be stretched so thin in the spring, which will allow me to really focus on getting my thesis done.
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| Back to basics |
[Nov. 7th, 2009|11:32 pm] |
So, you know when you get to talk to someone you were into, and get to hear what they were thinking way back when? Like after you've dated someone for awhile and talk to them about how it began, hearing what they were thinking and wishing you knew all that stuff at the time?
Well, on a similar note, apparently the hottest paralegal in the DAs office has wanted to seriously do me for a long time and I've had absolutely no idea. I mean when I worked there, I enjoyed the view for sure, and we traded sarcasm enjoyably, but I didnt even consider trying anything with her... and all that time I was wondering why I couldnt seem to stick a cute girl who was interested in me. So, well, it's good to know, but of course I hear this interesting information *after* she moves to a different city. Though I suppose that's just typical lady behavior at this point.
Seems to be a recurring theme with me... even when I'm wondering why lady business isnt working out, sooner or later I get confirmation that yes, hot ladies are indeed still attracted to me, and no, it still doesnt really amount to anything. More recurring variations on the themes of internet / long distance flirtations, drama filled nonsense, mini relationships before someone moves the hell away, etc.
Oh well, at least I learned something new today. Yay, I guess? |
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| Reading Roundup: October 2009: Nonfiction |
[Nov. 7th, 2009|11:48 pm] |
And this month's roundup draws to a close, with these two works of nonfiction. I'm making a concerted effort to read more nonfiction these days; we'll see how that goes.
 | Dark Matters: An Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Philip Pullman's internationally bestselling His Dark Materials trilogy
by Lance Parkin and Mark Jones
London: Virgin, 2005
mass market paperback, 277 pages
borrowed from the library (ILL)
I had thought that my journey through the world of His Dark Materials would be over when I read The Art of Darkness last month, but that was before I discovered this book, an unauthorized guide to the series. Of course, guides to bestselling book series are a dime a dozen, as limited-use books like What Will Happen in Harry Potter 7 attest to. But this was no ordinary guide: this one was co-written by Lance Parkin, whose Doctor Who thoughts I have avidly enjoyed on a number of occasions, so I decided to give it a spin.
The book is divided into four parts. The first is a biography of Philip Pullman, which I was initially unexcited about, but it actually turns out to be a pretty insightful little piece, warning against the dangers of biography-based criticism and also discussing the way the popularity of the His Dark Materials novels came to be.
The second part is a guide to "the stories". This is lead off with some fairly lengthy synopses (30 pages in all) of the novels, which I found pretty pointless: who is going to buy this book that doesn't already know this information? We also get a brief write-up on Lyra's Oxford. More interesting are the parts on the audio versions of the story (both talking book and radio drama) and stageplay, though the latter seems to have been written by someone who hasn't actually seen it. The section on the film suffers from the fact that this book came out a full two years before the film (I guess it was supposed to cash in on the stageplay?) and is thus full of guesses, many of which turned out not to be the case.
I was initially unexcited to realize that the third part, which at 185 pages takes up two-thirds of the book, was an "A-Z", a series of encyclopedia-like entries detailing every character, place, object, and concept to appear in the novels. Entries like "ALLAN - Lord Boreal's chauffeur in Will's world [SK, 161]" do not exactly scintillate. However, hidden between these examples of mundanity are actually some rather sharp little mini-essays. The entries on Lord Asriel, atheism, the Authority, and William Blake, among many others, chart quite well the way these ideas or people pop up throughout the trilogy, examining their uses, meanings, and potential contradictions. The nice thing about the A-Z is that it doesn't discriminate, pulling in information from the audio versions (such as pronunciations) and the stageplay (such as background on the church), though this information doesn't always gell, as the book is quick to point out. Also nice are the articles that provide comprehensive guides to things, such as the list of all known alethiometer symbols and meanings (across all media) or the list of all visited alternate worlds (though it's missing at least one that I can think of). It can be a bit boring to read through in order, as you have to slog through some short and uninteresting entries to get to the good ones, but then again, I suspect you're not supposed to read it that way!
The book's last section is a chronology of Lyra's world, piecing together the various historical references we get throughout the trilogy. The best part of this is that Parkin and Jones have done a day-by-day breakdown of all the events of the trilogy itself: the passage of time in those books is something I've always been a bit fuzzy on. The Golden Compass (or Northern Lights as it is consistently referred to, given this book's country of origin) spans a much longer period than I'd expected, from September 30th, 1996 to January 5th, 1997, a whopping ninety-six days! On the other hand, the last two books take much less time than I'd figured: The Subtle Knife runs just a week (from January 6th to 12th), while The Amber Spyglass takes fifty-five days (from January 13th to March 8th), though that includes the three-weeks-later epilogue. Hard to believe that such a massive war is waged so briefly! (This is something the authors themselves point out in the A-Z.) It's a nicely done piece of work, and probably the highlight of the book to me.
I don't think I've ever read a guide to a novel series before, but I have to imagine that this is among the higher end. It's occasionally a bit humdrum, but the moments of insight more than make up for this. It's a shame it couldn't have come out two years later, though.
|  | The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers
by Tom Standage
New York: Berkley, 1999 (1998)
trade paperback, 228 pages
borrowed from ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) valancy_s
I was loaned this after one of my frequent declarations of interest in technology and science and their impact on society, especially in the Victorian era. As one can tell from the title, this book covers exactly that, discussing the birth and death of the telegraph. The first half of the book is a history of the telegraph, from its origins as an optical French device, to the invention of the electric version, and the laying of the transatlantic cable. It's all information I knew little about, and like all the best scientific developments, it makes for good reading.
The second half of the book discusses the way that contemporary society actually used the telegraph-- as the title implies, there are a lot of comparisons to the Internet, and most of them are apt. (The occasional anachronistic use of "on-line" was rather jarring, though.) The section on love on the wires was particularly good-- Internet dating apparently has a long and venerable heritage! It's also interesting to see how a lot of the rhetoric around the Internet-- such as the creation of a global village-- surrounded the telegraph, too, and was proved false then! The telegraph didn't bring nations together, creating peace; it simply allowed messages to get to the battlefront quicker!
All in all, a nice little book, with a good overview of a fascinating topic. I've been talking of late about teaching a special section of Freshman English for engineering students; if I did, we'd certainly be reading this. |
( Summative Information for October 2009: Pick of the Month, All Books Read, All Books Acquired, Books Remaining )
Steve
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| The War of the Worlds: The Fall of Boston |
[Nov. 7th, 2009|05:09 pm] |
With Tom's Victorian lit seminar six months behind me, you'd think my investment in The War of the Worlds would be over, right? Well, you'd be wrong-- it is, after all, allegedly going to be my dissertation topic.
A few months ago, valancy_s told me about a stage show that a friend of hers was stage-managing: The Big Broadcast of October 30th, 1938. It was being put on by the Post-Meridian Radio Players, who I had actually fleetingly heard of before: they'd done a stage version of the Lights Out! episode that inspired Bill Cosby's famous "The Chicken Heart That Ate New York City" routine. This time, however, they would be doing something even closer to my heart: a stage version of Orson Welles's The War of the Worlds broadcast!
Unfortunately, we both forgot all about it, but on the 29th, Christiana suddenly recollected it, and I hastily made arrangements to attend. Even though it was nearly two hours away, in Boston, I couldn't miss this! You will recall that my seminar paper for Tom's class was on Fighters from Mars, an Americanized version of The War of the Worlds transposed to Boston. How could I pass up the chance to see this exact process carried out all over again?
I got lost going to the Somerville Theatre, but fortunately the theatre itself was able to guide me in over the phone. Parking was another matter-- I hate cities. But eventually I made it, meeting up with Christiana mere minutes before the show started. The Big Broadcast actually had two halves: the first of these was The Frank Cyrano Byfar Hour, This was presented as being a recreation of a contemporary radio show, though I can't find any reference to that actually being the case (from my admittedly cursory Google search). The Frank Cyrano Byfar Hour is a radio show about the making of a radio show; this initially seemd hopelessly confusing to me until I remembered the somewhat obvious example of TV shows about the making of TV shows, like 30 Rock. So, what we in the audience were seeing was a stage show about a radio show about a radio show. Talk about metatheatricality!
The stage consisted of an area in front with several mics set up, where the actors would read their lines. On stage left behind them was the band, and on stage right behind them was the foley artist and her setup, which included a door and a floor for stomping on. All the lines were performed by the actors standing at the mics, while the foley artist would generate sound effects. It wasn't exactly as a radio show would be put on, however, as most of the actors were in costume-- despite the fact that the idea people would wear costumes on air was occasionally mocked by the script! It was occasionally unclear what "level" things were happening on-- when a mysterious cloaked figure appeared, was it something that was happening in the "fake" radio show or the "real" radio show? It's seemingly in the fake one, as the foley artist provided the footsteps, but then why was the man actually cloaked and our character seemingly actually menaced?
The Byfar Hour part of the show was enjoyable-- mostly comedic and usually amusing, if not always laugh-out-loud funny. It spanned the first act and a half of the show; at the halfway point of the second act, a character comes running in saying they need to switch over to CBS because he's heard some dramatic news: aliens! Everyone is skeptical, but eventually they relent and patch their broadcast into CBS's, at which point we get a recreation of the opening of the Welles broadcast of The War of the Worlds-- done as before, with some reading it into a microphone. When this ends, we see that a group of mobsters are listening to the radio, themselves hearing the War of the Worlds broadcast.
This is where the metatheatrical element gets confusing again: for though the Welles broadcast is shown as being staged, with all the actors reading into microphones and the sound effects being given via Foley as before, the mobsters also read their lines into the mics and have their sound effects given via Foley. So are we watching a radio show about a bunch of mobsters listening to a radio show about the Martian invasion? And is this happening in the world of the Byfar Hour? Who knows. In any case, it's the Martian invasion of Boston: the Welles script is tweaked to refer to Boston locations and Boston people. The astronomer visited becomes Harlow Shapley, and at one point the real mayor of Boston appears as the historical one! I think the story's been expanded, too, but I'm not sure: it's been a couple years since I've heard the Welles broadcast. Does the Thunder Child incident happen in that version?
Though the different levels of narrative work well for comedy, I wasn't initially 100% sure it worked for drama. You can laugh at the antics of someone at a microphone telling you what's going on, but can you feel fear when you're just watching someone talk about the terrible things they're seeing, as you see a Foley artist bang a trash can into the ground behind them to simulate the stomping of a Martian tripod? Three girls who had been the "Putnam Sisters" in the Byfar Hour, singing the main theme, reappear here on one of the balconies as the voices of the Martians, being bathed in green light as they provide the occasional "Ulla!" Initially some of the audience even laughed at this, but soon, it's not so funny any more. The rest of the act cuts back and forth between the broadcast itself and the mobsters' reaction to it, as they try to take advantage of the situation or at least live through it.
The climax of the second act comes in what's the probably the longest uninterrupted scene-- there's a lot of cutting otherwise, which I wasn't convinced worked. It's a broadcast from a tower overlooking the harbor, as a reporter narrates the battle of the USS Wyoming against a tripod, culminating in the ship's destruction, of course. Then the tripod comes for him, and the combination of his desperate reportage, the chorus crying "Ulla!", and the continuous stomping combine to create what was actually a very chilling sequence. After this, we cut back to one mobster left on his own. Up until this point I'd been wondering if the broadcast was really happening in the world of the mobsters, or if they were falling victim to the hoax, but when a tripod destroys his nightclub-- and him-- I was left wondering no longer.
Once I got into it, I really enjoyed this section of the play, though sometimes the sound effects were rather too loud and drowned out the dialogue. That may have been intended, and it could work for short bursts to show the terrible situation the broadcasters were all in, but it happened for several decently-long speeches, and it was a bit annoying. But it was only three times, I think, so not too terrible.
The third act opens with Professor Bradford-- this play's version of Professor Pierson-- narrating from the ruined house. I wondered how they would expand that last short section of the broadcast to a whole act, but they do: Bradford soon encounters the girlfriend of the mob boss from the second act, and they fall in love before being captured by a group of "Oirish" actors, apparently from a rival mob. The rest of the play follows the uneasy alliance between the first group of Italian mobsters, the second group of Irish ones, and the National Guard as they try to survive in the post-Martian world. Like all adaptations of The War of the Worlds, it cops out-- the humans are able to strike back against the Martians, downing a tripod and reverse-engineering its heat-ray. This was ameliorated somewhat by the mobsters turning on each other, at which point the Martian tripods suddenly all collapse.
The last scene of the play is a party on the first anniversary of the Martians' defeat, which somewhat incongruously has the speech about God's wisdom putting microbes on the earth read over it. We then see the surviving characters; the professor and the girlfriend are now an item, and the mob boss has found a new girlfriend-- one of the Byfar Hour characters from the first half! A couple other ones show up, and then curtain.
The third act is really different from the first two: it has the most staging of any part of the play, though everything is still read into the mics. There's some good comedy, especially relating to the professor and the girlfriend's growing relationship, as well as to Boston itself. The whole thing is definitely a love letter to Boston, with lots of place names meticulously thrown in, and lots of local references. Shapley was at Harvard, and at one point, Bradford get the line, "I'm an MIT man; I never joke about engineering." I was trying to decide if the writers of this (Neil Marsh and Alicia E. Goranson) had any awareness of Fighters from Mars, and I didn't find any indication, but they do some similar things. And in both versions, the fact that Boston gets invaded serves as a validation of it: it means we have something worth invading! It's a far cry from the vast, cool, and unsympathetic Martians of H. G. Wells's version.
Interestingly, the program for the play refers to it as a "performance of Howard Koch's celebrated radio play WAR OF THE WORLDS... performed by Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the Air." Usually the play is simply referred to as being Orson Welles's work, but as they quite rightly pointed out by doing this, it was Koch's idea and he wrote the script; Orson Welles merely(?) directed and starred in it. The fact that the program also gives a special thanks to Annie Koch (a descendant of Howard, I assume) might have something to do with this unusual emphasis.
Though it was a bit long (three acts, as I said, totaling about 3.5 hours), I enjoyed the whole event immensely, even if it did remind me a bit of Mark Gatiss's Invaders from Mars! I made off with both a program and a fictional newspaper distributed at the event, material in hand. This can certainly make up a chapter of my dissertation...
Steve |
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| Reading Roundup: October 2009: The Green Arrow |
[Nov. 6th, 2009|06:14 pm] |
Usually I manage to read one or maybe two Green Arrow comics in a month, but this past month both the library's acquisition speed and my reading speed were high, letting me read three of them in pretty rapid sequence.
 | Green Arrow: Crawling through the Wreckage
by Judd Winick
New York: DC, 2007 (2006)
comic trade paperback, 143 pages
borrowed from the library (ILL)
This volume picks up a year after the explosive events of Heading into the Light, and it's been a heckuva year-- a wall has been built to separate the ghetto, Green Arrow (both of him) has disappeared, and Oliver Queen has become mayor of Star City. I enjoyed Winick's early work on Green Arrow, but I'm really starting to tire of his approach; this was a bit better than the preceding book, though. The lame villains don't help: I never particularly liked Brick, and I've always thought that Deathstroke the Terminator was just dumb. Dumb name, dumb costume. Also, drugs turning innocent citizens into monsters was done by Winick five volumes ago. The best part of this book is Ollie trying out his new role as mayor, and I wish that we had more of that. The bit where he combines his two roles of politician and superhero to outsmart Deathstroke was great. On the other hand, him refusing to let anyone bring down the ghetto wall makes absolutely zero sense; glad to see you're willing to let people die to prove some kind of point, G.A.
Scott McDaniel's art has the virtue of being consistently decent. His Ollie is especially nice, though sometimes his face looks really weird. I don't really care for the full lips and big boobs he draws on Mia.
|  | Green Arrow: Road to Jericho
by Judd Winick
New York: DC, 2007 (2006-7)
comic trade paperback, n. pag.
borrowed from the library (ILL)
After six years, the revived Green Arrow series that began with Quiver came to an end with the comics collected here. They have three distinct chunks. The first is a flashback to what Team Arrow got up to in the year between Heading into the Light and Crawling through the Wreckage, which is train on a tropical island with Buddhists and assassins. This is pretty good, especially for what it shows us of Oliver's new drive and determination. The second part of the book has Green Arrow and Batman teaming up to take down the Red Hood. I guess this guy actually used to be Robin, which would would explained why Batman is even more ticked off than usual, but the book never actually bothers to mention that-- thanks Wikipedia. Mostly this story is a lot of Winick's usual dramatic punching and hitting. There's a part where the Red Hood works on Mia psychologically, but the effect of this is half-hearted at best and never convinces.
The last part of the book brings everything from Winick's run together by pitting Green Arrow against Brick, Merlyn, Deathstroke the Terminator, and Constantine Drakon. This could be great, right? G.A. finally getting to beat up the villains that have bedeviled him for years, even if two of them are lame? Connor and Mia at his back, not to mention that Black Canary is finally back? Unfortunately, it's not great, as the Justice League randomly shows up and defeats them. And then tears down the wall in the Star City ghetto, even though Oliver didn't want them to do that a book back. That's the ending? Consider me underwhelmed. The political storyline ends up getting much less play than I'd've liked-- I think Ollie as mayor is a great idea-- but the way it's capped off is quite nice. And the book's very last moment speaks well for Oliver's development as a character (though I'd wish we'd seen more of it) and for the Green Arrow and Black Canary series that span off from this one. This series might be finished, but the journey's not over yet.
Though Scott McDaniel continues to not be out-and-out bad like some of the post-Hester/Parks artists on the series, I still can't say that I'm in love with his art. It's usually passable, but all his black characters pretty much look the same, and I hate his interpretation of Constantine Drakon. The man's short, but he shouldn't look like a dwarf.
|  | Connor Hawke: Dragon's Blood
by Chuck Dixon
New York: DC, 2008 (2007)
comic trade paperback, 144 pages
borrowed from the library (ILL)
One of my consistent complaints about Judd Winick's run on Green Arrow is that the other Green Arrow, Oliver Queen's son Connor Hawke, doesn't get the amount of play that he should, usually just getting beaten up to prove that the situation is serious. So it's nice to see him get a miniseries all of his own. As far as I can tell, this ran between the end of Green Arrow and the beginning of Green Arrow and Black Canary, so I decided to read it then. It's a good little story, seeing Connor drawn into an archery contest in China-- where not everything is quite as it seems. Chuck Dixon gets Connor in a way that Winick clearly never did, which makes sense given that he wrote for Connor quite a lot on the pre-Quiver Green Arrow series. It's nice to see Connor go through the wringer and come out all the better for it. The fact that there are two Green Arrows, father and son, is one of my favorite parts of the Green Arrow mythos, so I hope to see more of Connor going forward.
Steve |
Next up: nonfiction |
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| News from Madison |
[Nov. 6th, 2009|02:24 pm] |
Let me tell you a little bit about one of my high school teachers.
I had Mr. Mark Fickenscher for chemistry my sophomore year, and again for AP chemistry my senior year. Mr. Fick had won some big teaching award just before I had him, allowing him to get computers and nice electronic equipment for his classroom. There was a big write-up in the paper about him winning the award. While even in my advanced college chemistry courses we used mercury thermometers and stopwatches, in high school we had fancy electronic temperature probes hooked up to computers. It was quality that was a rarity in our funding-strapped school district.
He won that award for both his passion for chemistry and his devotion to his students. He's had real-world experience, having worked as an engineer and consultant prior to becoming a teacher. But he is really in his element in the classroom, and no more so than in his AP class. When I was there, he seemed to live for that class--he began encouraging sophomores early on to consider taking it, and he occassionally heard from graduates of it of how they were faring in college chemistry courses. (They always excelled, due to his teaching. I should know--I was one of them. My first semester of general chem at Miami, I rarely went to class and just studied my AP notes before every exam.)
If I saw any fault in him, it was that he is too good of a teacher--our AP course was first period, and he thought so highly of us that he would look the other way if any of us in that class were five minutes tardy to school. The heartless office ladies were starting to catch on, too, and tried to make sure none of us get away without receiving punishment of lunch detentions--but he covered for us. That was the kind of rapport he had with his best students.
Mr. Fick was one of the teachers I had when I got really sick, and he showed the most concern about it. He was excellent about meeting with me one-on-one so I could catch up on missed work and finish the semester. Other teachers were not so sympathetic, and I wished they could take a page out of his book in dealing with the situation.
Outside of the classroom, Fick was a dedicated track coach (and his two daughters had excelled on the track team), and he has a hobby of amateur car racing. Since I graduated, he's set up a rocketry team with students.
This week, Mr. Fickenscher was arrested for soliciting sex from a minor.
Needless to say, this news was stunning, and absolutely breaks my heart to hear it. The news reports say that he sent explicit photographs to a "thirteen-year-old girl," and that the two were making plans to meet at a hotel. Only thing was, the thirteen-year-old girl was a front for a state undercover agent.
I have to treat cases like this with a degree of skepticism. Recently, I listened to this episode of This American Life. It's about the operation that led to the arrest of Hemant Lakhani, alleged to be contributing arms to terrorists. Except Lakhani seems to be a guy who is less of a criminal and more a sufferer of delusions of grandeur, claiming that he has ties to influential people that he doesn't actually have. He was a salesman who would promise to sell you anything you asked for. He'd promise to find a way to give you the moon if you asked for it. So the government agents, posing as terrorists, asked for a missile, and Lakhani agreed. But there was no way he could actually get a missile. He had no actual ties to the terrorist weapons trade, and didn't even know where to begin. So to catch him, the government agents went a step further and provided Lakhani with a missile... that he could sell back to them.
Everything about that case strikes me as wrong. I understand the argument--given the right situation (no matter how unrealistic and unlikely that situation might be), with the right persuasion and temptation and the given the means, Lakhani might have committed a crime. But this is a conviction of character, not a conviction of actually breaking a crime, or even of having the intention to break a crime if an undercover agent didn't first ask him to. And humans are fallible--given the right situation and the right persuasion and the means, wouldn't we all convict some sort of crime?
Because I think so highly of him, I have to wonder if Mr. Fickenscher wasn't faced with a similar situation. Just how persuasive was this agent? How much enticement was required to fully take advantage of someone's desperation and loneliness?
But on the other hand, no matter how much of this was entrapment or persuasion by the agents, I can still find no excuse, no plausible situation, that would justify offering to meet a thirteen-year-old at a hotel.
I do not know the details of the situation. I do not know what was going on inside Mr. Fickenscher's mind, nor what personal demons he had to face. But in the very best-case scenario that I can make of this situation, there is an otherwise great guy who, when faced with overwhelming temptation, made a terrible decision. And the consequences of that decision are practically incomprehensible. Even apart from possible imprisonment and other legal ramifications, this is something that will shatter his career, his family, his place in the community. No matter where he goes in the future, this will follow him like a dark cloud.
And there is no silver lining.
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| Reading Roundup: October 2009: General Fiction |
[Nov. 5th, 2009|09:42 pm] |
Another month ends, another reading roundup begins. I read a lot less this month compared to last, which means that the categories have to become suitably broader.
 | The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Taken from Accounts by His Own Hand and Other Sundry Sources, Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves
by M. T. Anderson
Cambridge, MA: Candlewick, 2008
hardcover, 561 pages
Amazon.com purchase, April 2009
As soon as I finished The Pox Party, the first of the two Octavian Nothing books, I rushed to my computer to purchase the second. Of course, it took me six months to get around to reading it. It was worth the wait: Anderson continues to write brilliantly, and the tale of Octavian is as immersive as ever. It's especially great to have Pro Bono back in action, as he was probably the best supporting character from the previous novel. And the gruesome plight of the main characters, as "free" soldiers in the British forces during the Revolutionary War, is portrayed with just the right amount of reality, becoming quite uncomfortable at times. It's a fair bit longer than the first volume, and I feel like that's where the problem lies, as there's a lot of time where the characters just all seem to hang out a ship together, waiting and waiting and waiting. I just felt like it went on and on and on. To be fair, so did Octavian, but continual diary entries about boredom are not exactly compelling Still, the end is fantastic, and the last page of Anderson's epilogue is a poetic as anything else in the book, too.
|  | Villette
by Charlotte Brontë
London: Penguin, 2004 (1853)
trade paperback, 611 pages
Amazon.com purchase, August 2009
I don't get the love for the Brontës. Okay, Jane Eyre is a classic, but everything else I've read thus far reads like it was written by a teenage girl suffering from a massive inferiority complex. Actually, so does Jane Eyre, but it rises above it. Villette does not. This is the story of Lucy Snowe, a girl who no one understands-- because she's just too deep and complex for them! And too good for them. And no one loves her, but maybe that's because she never gives any of them any signs of affection herself. Also, she's an annoying narrator, holding back information for no readily apparent reason. Also, the story contains an absurd amount of coincidence which makes Jane Eyre falling asleep on the doorstep of her cousin positively plausible. Maybe no one likes you because you're stuck-up and obnoxious, Lucy, did you think of that? And anti-Catholic, that's really endearing too. And racist. Though for someone who hates the French, Brontë sure does put an obnoxious amount of the dialogue in French. Thank God for the endnotes.
Or not, as Helen Cooper's editing of this Penguin Classic edition is not the greatest; I question the value of any scholarly edition that feels the need to tell me what the House of Commons is. Or the Garden of Eden.
|  | Surfacing
by Margaret Atwood
New York: Anchor, 1998 (1972)
trade paperback, 218 pages
used bookstore purchase (online), August 2009
I don't know what to say about this book other than that I found it beautiful. Margaret Atwood knows people, and all their messed-up ways; the ones in here are often annoying, but always people you know-- probably because you could become them very easily. Or at least that's what you fear. How do we become complicit in terrible things? One of many questions Atwood tackles here, though on a much smaller scale than in The Handmaid's Tale. I could read her all day; every sentence is a gem.
|  | Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time
by Fanny Fern
London: Penguin, 1997 (1855)
trade paperback, 281 pages
Amazon.com purchase, September 2009
"Fanny Fern" was the pen name of Sara Willis Parton, who wrote this fictionalized version of her life and career. Fern was primarily a newspaper columnist, and this book chronicles her journey from dependent young woman to married wife to bereaved widow with children to successful entrepreneur. It's written like a series of newspaper columns, with short choppy chapters, jumping from location to location. It's a little over-sentimental at the beginning, and it takes a while to get going, but once Ruth becomes a newspaper columnist and starts navigating the 19th-century business world, it becomes very entertaining, even if most of the characters, Ruth included, are somewhat one-dimensional. And unlike so many 19th-century novels, it doesn't end with a marriage, it begins with one, and for Ruth that makes all the difference.
Steve |
Next up: the Green Arrow
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| James Swallow |
[Nov. 3rd, 2009|01:06 pm] |
Never content with the low amount of work I have to do, this month I've turned my pen to another feature at Unreality SF, interviewing. In this case, Jens Deffner (USF's primary Star Trek reviewer) and I interrogated James Swallow, author of various Star Trek and Stargate fiction, especially the upcoming Titan novel Synthesis and the SGU novelization Air. Most importantly, however, he wrote the upcoming audio drama Cyberman 2 (the sequel to Nicholas Briggs's amazing 2005 miniseries), which is what all of my questions were about-- Jens did the bulk of the heavy lifting here.
"For Cyberman 2, I used the Cybermen as almost a force of nature; they're this terrible storm bearing down on the human and android characters in the story, unstoppable and apparently impossible to defeat-- so how do you prevail when faced with something like that?" Now that's how I like my Cybermen! You can read the interview here.
Steve |
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| HH |
[Nov. 1st, 2009|05:51 pm] |
Happy Halloween. I was a ladybug:
I ran out of time and resources so that's why it's lame. I think I've been some insect or another for at least six Halloweens. Not one child demanding treats or performing tricks stopped by my cul-de-sac. Went to 2 parties and danced the night away. |
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| Faster than a DC Bullet, Issue #15: "Identity Crisis" |
[Oct. 31st, 2009|05:20 pm] |
 Identity Crisis
Writer: Brad Meltzer
Penciller: Rags Morales
Inker: Michael Bair
Letterer: Ken Lopez
Colorist: Alex Sinclair
DC Universe Timeline: 2 Years Ago
Real World Timeline: 2005
(Like most comic stories, to be honest, this seems to take place contemporary to its release date. At this point, the Infinite Crisis is rapidly approaching; it's about five months away.)
Brad Meltzer is apparently a famous (or at least best-selling) thriller novelist. He made his comics debut with Green Arrow: The Archer's Quest, which I found fairly good, but there was one real reason I was looking forward to this book: Elongated Man. (Well, sort of.)
Anyone who has the misfortune of discussing comic books with me for a sustained period of time will rapidly learn that one of two ongoings I own a complete run of is Justice League Europe and then proceed to roll their eyes and stop talking to me. But the truth is that JLE introduced me to many of DC's second-string characters... and I love second-string characters, which is probably why Nite Owl is my favorite Watchman. Ralph Dibny, the Elongated Man, has a fairly good run in JLE: he's treated decently by Keith Giffen and his various collaborators, he really comes into his own when Gerard Jones takes over the title; his role in the Red Winter storyline is excellent. (Someday, I'll pick up the miniseries Elongated Man: Europe '92, his only-ever title, which was penned by Jones.) But how can you not love him? He's goofy, he's got a fabulous wife, his nose twitched when he smells a mystery, and he doesn't even bother with that secret identity malarkey.
( Let's be honest, though; Elongated Man is actually barely in this book. )
The title of the story is Identity Crisis, but despite that, it's not about protecting secret identities, it's not some story that could only apply to superheroes. It's about personal identities: who we are and what we stand for and what we're willing to do. And most of all, how our identities derive from those around us, lovers, parents, friends, enemies, and spouses alike. Which is why that final panel of Ralph Dibny, like so many others in this book, just hits you in the gut.
Steve
Next up: Superman: For Tomorrow, Volume One |
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