Chimpanic

I was talking with a coworker yesterday,  and we got on the topic of chimpanzees, how scary-violent they can be, which led to much chuckling and laughing about just how horrible that is, like When Chimps Go Bad. I said that I could handle fighting zombies, but if a chimp ran at me, I'd take a swan-dive out the nearest window, because chimps do things like tear your face off and rip your limbs apart and beat you with them like you're a bongo drum. Victims of man v. chimp never, ever come out of it without horrible injuries. The combination of aggression and the biomechanics that make them terribly strong make them downright scary.

Of course, looking up "chimp violence" on YouTube gets me this...

Ricky Gervais on Chimp Violence

But seriously, chimps will fuck you up -- or, at the very least, are totally capable of doing so. I joked to my coworker "Any belief in a just, sane, and orderly universe goes immediately out the window when you've got a chimp literally ripping your face off -- one minute you're thinking 'I should get pizza for dinner tonight, maybe' and the next minute you're like 'AUUUGH! You tore off my face!!'" And chimps really WILL rip your face off. It makes a shark bite seem almost genteel and courtly by comparison.

I think it's kind of a variation on the "Uncanny Valley" that comes up with AI -- a shark bite you can relate to, because it's this big maw taking a hunk out of you, sufficiently monstrous and alien to be terrifying, but at least contextually logical; but a chimp tearing your face off is perhaps more unnerving, because it's using hands that are similar to yours, only much, much stronger and worse; and also, you might actually be unfortunate enough to survive it. And further, if a shark takes a bite out of you, odds are it thought you were a fish or a seal or a sea lion -- a case of mistaken identity. But lord knows what the chimp is thinking when it decides to rip off your face. Maybe it didn't like the shirt you were wearing, or the color, or you had a mustache (or didn't have a mustache), or you ate an English muffin for breakfast, and that pissed it off. There are any number of ineffable, incomprehensible reasons why a chimp might go off on you.

So, if you have a friend who has a "pet chimp" -- word to the wise: LOSE that friend. Find another friend. Then you won't even have to worry about getting a face and limb transplant.

Trunk Monkey

Really, Trunk Ape, but, you know....

Generation Why?

It's irritating that there's a show targeted to Generation Y...


http://www.slate.com/id/2268225/

As ever, Gen X gets screwed. Just because there are more Y than X, it's show-worthy. Demographics is destiny.

Never Let Me Go (2010)

I'm kind of intrigued by the movie, "Never Let Me Go." It looks like it might be a downer, but I might catch it, anyway. After the heart-rending "The Road," I don't know how many retro-dystopic quasi-SF tragedies I can bear, but it does seem intriguing to me.

Digitus impudicus

I was talking with a coworker about flipping the bird yesterday, which, of course, led to the sharing of this clip...

Flight of the Conchords, "The Bird"

He and I were talking about it, and we realized there was definitely an aesthetic preference where flipping the bird was concerned, and a handedness preference, too.

When's the last time you flipped somebody off, Gentle Reader? Which hand did you use? Did you opt for closed fist, open hand, or other? Did you flip somebody off "gangstah-style" (like a sideways flip-off), or a "flyin' the flag" (vertical, classic) kind of flip-off? Do you opt for a classic All-American bird-flipping (as in the video above), or a regional/ethnic flip-off?

One thing about the above picture that bugs me is that I think the kid is an English football fan; I think the sourcing of it is English (hence the red and white facepaint still evident, there) -- however, why is it flipping the bird? Why's he not doing the English "V" bollocks flip-off? A mystery maybe he can answer one day.

I love the long history of the Bird. Also, what an exemplary middle finger is included in the Wikipedia entry! That gal's finger is LONG, and so the Bird she's flipping is a grand gesture! Gotta love this, the first known photographed flip-off (back row, extreme left), circa 1886...

I love stuff like that -- silly pop culture apocrypha. I love the idea of a scholar poring through old pictures and determining "THERE! This is THE FIRST photographed 'giving of the finger'." And then writing a paper on it!

Hmph

I am still not getting why "Ghost Story" had received so many plaudits. I'm just not dazzled by it. Not the writing, not the story, nothing. I've got about 200 pages to go, and I'm still not floored or scared by it. I'm really hoping Straub delivers, but I don't think he has, yet. It's like when people would rave about Captain Beefheart's "Trout Mask Replica" -- I remember listening to it and thinking "WTF??" Whatever it's about, I'm not getting. And I try to be open-minded, to approach it without judgment or reservation. It's like the movie, "Inception." That movie was a grave disappointment to me, and I thought "How can people be thinking this is such a great movie?"

Strobe

The bus ride home had a strobe light thing going -- one of the lights in the back was flashing, made me think I was playing "Half-Life" on my commute home. Fortunately, I missed the first bout of stormage that hit.

I'm going to whip up some dinner in a few. Hungry!

Got free chocolate this morning -- some reps were giving away Dove Chocolates to passersby. It made for an ironic image, like assorted pedestrians with handfuls of chocolate, and derelicts eating Dove Chocolates from corners, down the path from the reps.

Telegraphy

*pant pant* I'm on page 300 of "Ghost Story," still soldiering on. He's doing it yet again, over the span of two pages...

"...craziness..."
"...saw the fractured light in his eyes..."
"...that underneath the 'stayin' sane' kind of craziness there was another, real craziness."
"...saw his eyes gleaming between the lashes..."
"...and his eyes gleamed..." (same paragraph as the first gleaming-eyed bit)
"...grinning maniacally..."

Book Report Voice: I think this character is going crazy.

(cue telegraph operator, dot dash dot dash dot dot dash)

Jumper v. Thumper

I had a scare this morning -- I thought I'd lost my 4GB jump drive, where I put all of my fiction (actually, it's only one of three places I vault it, but still, it's my mobile drive, obviously). I had thought it was lost, but it turns out, it was at home. I'd like to blame "Thumper," my nickname for the "ghost" in our place, who has a fondness for making things disappear (and reappear in places where you've already looked).

Many a story about Thumper, and not just from me -- Exene has her own share of tales. My favorite is her hearing a spoon clatter in the kitchen, and her, for a moment, thinking that it was me or the boys who did it, and then remembering that we were out of town. Then, in the morning, she checked in there, and saw a spoon sitting on the floor in the center of the kitchen floor. Anyway, the jump drive was okay, which was a big relief to me.

I call Thumper "Thumper" because of "her" tendency to knock things over. One of my own encounters had me wake up to hear "thud-a-thud" in the kitchen, and to think, at first, that it was maybe the cat. But then I saw him laying in his favorite spot. So, I thought "What the hell is Exene doing up at this hour?" and I went in there to look, but nobody was in there. Good times. Nothing like waking up to that!

Mmmmmonica Bellucci

I wonder what Monica Bellucci's been up to these days? Yeah, another Libra celebrity. What can I say? At least I'm consistent....

Stormy Weathers

Took B2 to the soccer match, but a thunderstorm came and soaked us before too very long. We had to retreat homeward, since the thunder and lightning was looming.

The Magic Number

Hey, this is my 666th post on this blog. Seems only fitting...

Slayer, "Raining Blood"

3 : )

a/c

I keep reading "Ghost Story" because there is some bleakness to it that is intriguing, even if the mechanics of the writing claw at me still. I'm giving him the benefit of a doubt, that the trip'll be worth the destination.

Got the a/c on tonight, as it's a bit warm this evening.

B1 cuted me out -- he said of someone he knows, "She's very reactive; she's just like magnesium!" That made me smile. He also said his name was "like an ocean." I loved that, too.

Ghostwriter

So, I keep soldiering through "Ghost Story." I have a problem with Peter Straub's writing, which feels sort of clunky to me, almost stodgy. And it doesn't have to do with the geriatric characters in the book -- it's his manner of writing.

One thing he does (repeatedly) that drives me bananas is his tendency to restate something. For example, in one chapter, he refers to a particularly character's passivity about seven times -- it keeps popping up while referring to the character, and it makes me want to say YES, I GET IT. SHE IS FUCKING PASSIVE. Same chapter, he mentions that character's "ironic smile" -- over and over again, maybe five times.

It wasn't just that one chapter -- it happens throughout. Now, this could've been fixed with better editing -- had I edited the book, I'd have queried the author and said as much: "Au: You mention her 'passivity' and 'ironic' smile 5-7 times in this chapter; is there another way to put this?" Or something like that.

Similarly, there was a point where he mentioned a group of characters drinking whiskey, neat. And less than a page later, one of the characters is drinking "another cognac" -- I'm like "Buh? ANOTHER? He was drinking WHISKEY." Again, it's an editorial complaint, although, had I written that scene, I sure as hell would've gotten that right.

But he has this elliptically leaden way of writing that goes something like this...

"Martin put his hands into his pockets and found nothing but bits of shredded paper that had been through the laundry, so they were more like paper pills. A car drove past him, splashing oily water in a pothole as it went. An old Lincoln. Martin gazed at the bits of shredded paper and wondered what he'd put on them. Laundry lists? Old receipts?

Martin looked at the old Lincoln at the stoplight, waiting for red to go to green. The pothole water stilled, oily-brown. Then he looked back at the paper pills in his hands, and wondered what he'd put on them, and how he'd forgotten to take them out of his pockets when he'd done the laundry. Because he was usually rather fastidious. The light turned to green, and the old Lincoln drove away, leaving Martin wondering what he'd written on those paper pills in his pockets that he'd laundered."

Now, I'm just winging that, but just imagine hundreds of pages of that, sort of looping and backtracking and looping, almost like Straub was trying to remember where he was going while writing it. Again, a better editor would've queried it and tightened up the prose. Given that the book was written in 1979, when fiction editing was still a credible profession, I'm sort of surprised by it.

Had to run through that one chapter, since I wanted to take a highlighter to it (but, it being a library book, I abstained, naturally, Gentle Reader)...

"Her mouth was bracketed by two faint lines of irony."
"...the faint lines beside her mouth twitched as if at a private joke."
"...to mark an intense passivity."
"...like a princess in a tower."
"...the ironic, tactful passivity of the beautiful..."
"...her passive self-sufficiency."
"...a soft, almost invisible irony..."
"...the princess locked in the tower of her own self-regard."
"...the veneer of disinterested irony."
"...essentially passive."
"...an androgynous quality to her passivity..."

And so on (and it does go on).

Now, Straub is writing as another writer in the scene above, so one might think he's adopting a "style" by inhabiting the novelist character, but the problem is that this kind of backtracking occurs throughout the book, where the reader is bludgeoned into submission by the repetition of those details.

I prefer not to force-feed the reader with literary foie gras. I think that everything in a scene should matter, every detail, and if you're forced to backtrack, it's a problem of the original setup of the scene. The above is like telling a joke repeatedly to the same audience member -- each successive pass of that same "joke" offers diminishing returns, until the audience gets frustrated and annoyed.

But the above is really an editing problem; the fiction editor should've noticed this tendency and queried it, tried to get him to get his point across without using the same words over and over again.

And, no, I'm NOT going to tell you what Martin put on those shredded bits of paper. ; )