over the cliff

James Maxey recently posted an entry on his blog about remembering the events in his life with arcs and storylines. I used to be obsessed with memory, perhaps because I was frequently praised for having a good one. I remember feeling frustrated with my parents if they ever told a story wrong, and bless my own heart, I often tried to correct them.

Since then I’ve realized that memories (even mine, perish the thought) are imperfect and while it may be comforting to believe that somewhere locked in our brains is the perfect recollection of dates, events, smells, tastes, and feelings, scientific studies suggest otherwise. I would point you to those scientific studies but alas I can’t remember where to find the link.

What I find interesting, or perhaps troubling, is given that our memories are imperfect, and at best all we can remember are collages of perceptions, all of our future perceptions, actions, and thoughts are in turn influenced by those perceptions. In essence we take flawed data, assume it to be not flawed, and then use that data to collect more flawed data. Occasionally we become self-aware of this flawedness and try to adjust, but lacking the capacity to calibrate to 0 makes it very difficult.

When I taught English at SIU I tried to get my students to question whatever it was that we were reading or discussing. How is the reasoning flawed, the support biased. To whom is the article addressed and why is that important. At the other end of that spectrum is the world view that because everything is flawed, biased, ignorant, we must tear it down or worse, believe the opposite. To use an extreme… ‘This scientist misrepresents his data about global warming, and he doesn’t disclose his inherent self-interest THEREFORE he is wrong and global warming doesn’t exist.’

Well, that’s not *exactly* what they say, but my perception of many arguments on the subject given to me by 102 students boils down to that.

Conspiracy theories seem to operate on the same premise. 9/11 triggered a series of events that led to the invasion of Iraq. President Bush wanted to invade Iraq in the first place, therefore President Bush planned 9/11.

What?

And again, that’s a bastardized imperfect distillation of 2 hours of nonsense, but most of it all seems to echo the idea of ‘Because I can conceive of another reason that is based on the premise that everyone lies, serves their own self-interest, and nothing is what it seems, my conception of what could be true therefore must be true.’ I always liked that line from Sherlock Holmes by way of Star Trek: After we eliminate the impossible, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth.’

Oh irony, thy name is internet! I was afraid of misquoting the line, so I typed in a few phrases from it and did a google search. The first link? An article about 9/11 conspiracy theories which ends with the phrase, “Most importantly, they need to ask and seek an honest answer to the question: who benefited from the catastrophe that killed thousands on September 11, 2001?” I won’t read the article, nor will I link to such hogwash, but after skimming a few paragraphs it seems to suggest that Israel is responsible for 9/11. I think it’s very important to keep an open mind for possibilities. But at the end of the day, if you’re going to cling to one of those possibilities you better believe in it for more than a love of old quotes!

What’s frightening to me is the short memory of the world. If someone spouts nonsense for long enough, eventually people start to repeat it and it repeats and repeats until eventually you forgot that it was nonsense. There’s an excellent video on Ted.com where a woman talks about memes. I happened to watch it after discussing the movie Religulous with my brother in which he was trying to reason through the evolutionary process that led to religion. After watching the video I started to look at information as an amoral entity, stripped of value judgments of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ or ‘more right’ or ‘more wrong’. Information spreads and adapts itself in such a way as to foster its being spread.

When did we start saying ‘So help me god’ after the Presidential oath? It’s not in the constitution. Why do we say ‘under god’ in the pledge of allegiance? It wasn’t added until the 1950s but listen to some right wing whacko talk about it and you’d think that all the founding fathers carved it into their skins.

Why do some denominations think Catholics aren’t Christians? Where do they think the Protestants came from? Why do Christians forget that Jesus was Jewish? And that for a time, in order to become Christian you had to convert to Judaism. Why is the Catholic church suddenly against abortion? They didn’t have a problem with it for the first 8 or so centuries of their existence. Mary Magdalene is a whore? Since when?

I hate to pick on religion so much, but it’s one of the quickest and easiest examples of where information has deviated so much. Groups cherry pick Leviticus to support some bigotries, but not others, yet stomp and holler with righteous indignation they’re just being true to the source material. Stone your leaders to death every time one of them has an affair, then I’ll let you keep that argument.

I take it back, I love to pick on religion so much. I can think of nothing more emblematic of the problem with flawed perception as the idea that we should structure our laws, our schools, our way of life around the notion that god exists. God may exist. I sincerely hope he does. But every time someone says “God is watching over us and he has plans for us and he blesses the United States” and blah blah blah I want to tear my hair out. God is the safety net of the willfully ignorant. Why should we worry about the environment? God created the earth and he’ll take care of it. Why should we explore space? God created the earth and we shouldn’t leave it. Why should we worry about anything other than justifying our actions with ludicrous interpretations of a text that God himself, if he exists, did not write.

If we perceive fortuitous circumstances in our life as the work of guardian angels, who consciously and deliberately intervene on our behalf, then don’t we begin to expect that intervention? Wouldn’t it be far more productive to recognize them as random acts? Appreciate them yes, but don’t plan on them. You don’t think that when you wake up Christmas morning some immortal man with gravity defying reindeer has left you a plasma TV downstairs do you? No, you have to go out and buy your own TV. And your own Red Ryder BB gun.

That said, information, even ridiculous information, can serve a purpose. Another Ted.com video features a man who spent a year living Biblically. He ate, wore, and acted purely according to the rules of the Bible. He had to make some exceptions of course (New York law is a stickler about stoning), but overall he said that doing things because the Bible told him to, eventually became doing things because he realized they were good things to do. I’ve always been a fan of Karma even though I don’t believe in the religious aspect of it. If you do good things, good things will come back to you. Do bad things, and bad things will come back to you. I mess up all the time, but I always tip my waitress.

Given our own self-centeredness, it’s not particularly surprising that we become most irritated when people do things we don’t like about ourselves. Last week during dinner I corrected someone twice about referring to George Bush as President Bush and emphasized that while we may vehemently despise many of his actions, we still need to respect the office. I’m disrespectful all the time. Where do I come off calling someone else on it? But if I don’t call her on it, even though I don’t have the moral standing to do it, how can I make the mental connection half a beat later that says ‘Moron, you do it too. Stop it.’ Just because you shouldn’t do something, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.

That made more sense in my head.

In an internet meme called ‘25 Random Things’ I told a story about how I bought a guitar after saving my brother from drowning. At the time I thought it was important to have a revelation about the preciousness of life and fulfilling your dreams. Over the years I’ve tried to learn to play the damn thing, but all in all it’s easier to have the epiphany than to do something about it.

That doesn’t mean we should stop trying to have epiphanies. I know that memory is hopelessly flawed, but since there’s not a whole lot I can do to turn my brain into an internal hard drive complete with Google search capabilities, the best thing I can do is crawl down off the cross, use the wood–you know the rest.

Sorry Mr. President, but only 43 have taken the presidential oath. Grover Cleveland was the 22nd and 24th President, which has confused many for decades.

I tried to find a technicality for you, but Dick Cheney, though having served as acting president twice, did not take the oath during the invocation of the 25th amendment.

To me there seems an intrinsic irreverence to randomness. A straight world is boring. I shall put a donkey in pinstripes and it shall smoke the proverbial frying pan.

A few months ago I came across a review for the Twilight movie and in the comments, someone referred to the main character as a special snowflake. I showed the post to some of my friends and we’ve been using the word as a verb ever since. Then, in a beautiful moment of blizzard serendipity, my friend came across a YA Vampire Boarding School series (House of Night by P.C. and Kristin Cast).

Vampires. In boarding school. In Tulsa, Oklahoma. It’s Twilight meets Harry Potter meets a Kenny Chesney concert (on a related note, in this series Kenny Chesney is a vampire which I suppose explains all those latent homosexual vibes he exudes). The main character, Zoey Redbird is the quintessential Mary Sue: Oh so special pedigree (part Cherokee! That makers her exotic!), Oh so special powers (NO ONE IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD HAS EVER HAD POWERS LIKE YOU ZOMGZ!!112!!one!), has the burden of NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ME ON THE INSIDE!!! Syndrome (her mother and the “steploser” (clever teenspeak for a stepfather who is so unfair, like geez) are psycho religious nuts), and THECOOLKIDSHATEMEitis.

Oh, and for a little extra icing on the cake, they spell vampire with a y. For the extra authenticity.

I, naturally, read all four books in a weekend and can’t WAIT for the next installment (comes out in March).

As I was telling my brother about this series earlier, I realized that it’s entirely possible that the Squeeing Teen Audience for this book doesn’t actually exist. Rather the real readers of these books are people like me: those who find the squeeicity so incredibly amusing that we chug them down like pixie sticks. It’s like satire, or post-post-irony where everything becomes sincere again.

Speaking of sincerity, there’s some unnaturally awful poetry sprinkled in. I suggest skipping those sections in case they cause cancer.

The Batman preview was pretty good, and the end credits used a font I really liked.

I could try to explain why there’s been a 7 month lapse in posting, or I could launch into a review of the movie I saw last night.

I read His Dark Materials trilogy after seeing the preview for what looked, judging by all the pretty colors and the relative cuteness of polar bears, to be an excellent fantasy movie of the first installment. Surely this would surpass The Chronicles of Narnia which I found, despite the relative cuteness of talking woodland creatures, to be rather costumey and short on logic. And while I had complaints with the book (mostly with POV) I thought there was enough stuff–namely talking polar bears–to warrant an excellent film. Lyra, the main character, was not particularly well rendered in the novel, but I believed a good director would be able to smooth her out–or at least make her consistent. Mystery and bad guys and witches and flying mechanical contraptions abounded. And when you didn’t have a talking polar bear on screen, there would be more than enough talking other critters.

Hopeful, and dare I say enthusiastic, my friends and I went to the 10:10 PM showing of The Golden Compass. The best way to put our experience is with a quote from one Alex Lumans who said, “I don’t need an alethiometer to know that’s two hours of my life I’ll never get back.”

Another way to put it would be to say that in the great ranking of fantasy films, Eragon is no longer at the bottom.

Nor are the Star Wars prequels.

First off, the story had no pacing. In essence it felt like one really long trailer. Scene after scene of ominous foretelling and exposition. But the reason we go to movies and not trailers is so that we can, occasionally, and if it’s not too much trouble, get some development. Sections from the book that offered the best chance for this were skimmed. Characters appeared out of thin air–literally–to give crucial information that wasn’t that crucial just so that when the same character randomly showed up in the nick of time, we wouldn’t be too surprised.

Second, the script. How these actors managed to say their lines with straight faces, I’ll never understand. According to the trivia page from IMDB Tom Stoppard wrote a draft which Weitz, the director, rejected so he could adapt it himself. Idiot. I think the worst line was, “You mean to ride me?” But it was mostly bad in context.

Third, the logic. Or lack thereof. At one point in the film the giant talking polar bear claims that his armor is his “soul”. He becomes an alcoholic when the people of a certain town trick him and steal it from him. So what does he do as soon as he gets it back? Leaves it behind every chance he gets in order to carry Lyra to some random location. Right. And if Lyra is this ultra-special child for whom lots of bad guys are hunting, why is she left on her own so often? Apparently every adult character graduated from the Britney Spears House of Daycare.

Oh well, maybe the sequel will be better.

“In the religion of flame, heaven comes when all the world is ash.” -James Maxey, Bitterwood.

Bant Bitterwood is not a hero. For 20 years he has wandered the world slaying dragons fueled only by his hate and lust for revenge. He has no higher purpose, no lofty aspirations and when he tells people his name, they don’t believe him.

When Bitterwood kills the dragon prince, King Albekizan orders the slaughter of all humans. In any typical fantasy, this would be the point where Bitterwood rallies all of mankind in a fight for survival. There would be great battles and speeches. There would be an old man who gives guidance and is eventually killed off in order to harden the hero to his task and tell the reader This is really serious. And the dragons would be standard winged lizards who all look, sound, and act pretty much the same.

Fortunately for us, James Maxey is not a typical fantasy writer. Bitterwood is not a hero. Albekizan is not just a blood thirsty evil doer. And most of the novel is told from the point of view of other characters. The dragons themselves are artfully rendered and given specific characteristics to explain their function within dragon society. And Mr. Maxey is also not afraid to include biological specific effects of an individual’s death.

Mr. Maxey also has a singular talent for creating characters that are not perfect, nor does he try the old trick of making a mostly perfect person with one tragic flaw. They’re human, or in some cases, dragon. They make choices, some bad, some good and deal with the consequences. But they are always interesting and captivating and, even when they’re ordering the genocide of an entire species, sympathetic.

Unfortunately for you, this book won’t be published until July. But when it is, you should buy it and, if you’re like me, you’ll finish it in one sitting. Because to be quite honest, I think James Maxey could write a grocery list and I’d still want to read it.

To find out more (and read the first chapter), visit http://bitterwoodnovel.blogspot.com/

Sometimes the movie is better than the book. The Godfather, The Princess Bride, The Neverending Story, and, dare I say it, Lord of the Rings.

And so it is for Eragon.

First off, the dragon is just about the cutest damn thing ever created with computer graphics. Seriously. If you see her, you will want her. Trust me.

Jeremy Irons is the best Obi-Wan since Alec Guiness, and the boys who play Eragon and Eragon’s cousin (whose name is odd and therefore I can’t remember) could be Heath Ledger’s younger brothers.

The first half hour of this movie was shaping into a damn fine film. Then they ran into a little bit of a logistical problem. The plot from the book.

In the novel, Christopher Paloneyfancypants (as I have renamed him), sends his D&D group down the river of self-discovery and necessary swordsmanship lessons, has them stop in some random city on a quest for accounting books on trade routes (or something else equally boring), and then some stuff happens. They rescue an elven princess. Some more stuff happens. Obi-Wan dies. They reach some the rebel base, and there’s a big battle. The end.

There were a lot of things in the book the writers needed to cut because the book was stupid but that doesn’t mean that they needed to rush to end of the film like Peter Jackson and George Lucas were chasing them with fiery lightsabers. 30 more minutes of development establishing the characters of Murtagh and Gallbatorix (a name, which as one reviewer put it, sounds more like a drain cleaner than an evil King), the plight of the Varden, and other general world building matters would have gone a long way.

The movie and the book relied on the same basic premise: once a dragon enters the room, you don’t give a flying rat’s ass about anything else. While this may be true, it doesn’t make for a memorable film.

So instead of a really, really great movie… we’re left with pretty good one. It’s entertaining and fun and did I mention how cute the dragon is yet? Hopefully it’ll make enough money to justify the two sequels and the director and writers will remember that thanks to Peter Jackson, fantasy films can run longer than 90 minutes.

Mike Allen has updated the Mythic Delirium site with more info on Mythic II. It includes samples from the anthology and a direct link to pay pal to purchase the book from Mike.

Go forth and purchase

This evening ABC showed a special on how teenage girls are using cell phones and computers and other technological gadgets to destroy the lives of their schoolmates.

I’ve been preaching the meanness of girls for a while so this is nothing new to me. Hell I’ve done it. My cousin Ellen and I used to call our little cousin Caroline ’step cousin’. No reason. We just did. She didn’t like it; we did it more.

Neither of those cousins read this blog, so I’ll just apologize to the universe. It was cruel and wrong and what can I say. I’m a girl.

I’ve always said it’s because we’re socialized to be non-violent. If a guy gets mad, he’ll hit you and move on with his life. If a girl gets mad, she destroys you. Strips you of your friends, your self esteem, and sometimes gets you to switch schools. If women ruled the world, there would be no wars. Because there would be no people. We’d have killed ourselves off or we’d be so busy crying all the time we’d forget to populate the planet.

Another problem is parenting. (Not you, Mom) At a certain school that shall remain nameless, there was a clique of girls known as the Elite 5 (even though there were 7 of them… don’t ask). They didn’t like a particular girl in their grade, so somehow they managed to get the rest of the entire class to stop speaking to her. Now what I heard from friends, and some adults, the girls acted in a manner similar to their mothers. The same pettiness. The same tendency towards exclusion. The same attitude.

Not every upper middleclass woman acts as if she walked staight off the set of ‘Desperate Housewives’. But some do. So is it any surprise that there’s a generation of their clones going through school right now? Just watch an episode or two of ‘My Super Sweet Sixteen’ or ‘Laguna Beach’ (If you can stomach it. I suggest painkillers. Strong ones). Watch the teenager. Then watch the mother try to live vicariously through her daughter. Sad.

Fortunately my mother does not act this foolishly. Probably because quite frankly, a poet’s life is not that interesting. How many action flicks have you seen entitled ‘Poet Wars: Revenge of the Sestina’?

Anyway, back to girls. Are they evil because of society? Their mothers? MTV? Innate corruptibility of the double X Chromosome?

And in other news (wherein Hel completely ignores the need to conclude her thoughts), Stephen Colbert had the Ambassador from Hungary to the United States on his show regarding the vote (which he won… twice) to name a new bridge in Budapest. My life is officially complete.