Eleanor Arnason's Blog, page 58

More on Obsession

It's kind of embarrassing to be hung up on Marvel movies. But I wanted to break my unproductive obsession with news; and I wanted to get out more and see more movies...

The news (most of it) makes me feel helpless and overwhelmed and angry. It does not make me want to write or march. It makes me question writing.

I think obsessing about Marvel movies is more likely to get me writing than obsessing about the news. One problem with the news is -- most of the media give us only discouraging news. There is good news in the world. A huge number of people are trying to figure out how to change the world, and we mostly don't hear about them. With all their failings Marvel movies show us the good guys winning. They don't say TINA. Granted, the good guys are superheroes, and we can't win the way they do.

More Avengers

I am reduced to writing dialogue for the movie, which is sad. I can fix this, I tell myself. But I can't. There are too many explosions.

Loki says to Thor, "You don't know what happened to me when you threw me in that wormhole. You don't know what I've been through. I died in there."

Thor, the golden and dim, replies, "You are here and alive, brother."

Loki gives a little laugh and his sneaky Loki smile and says, "I am not the same." And then he adds, with an edge of malice, "Brother."

I'm not happy with Loki's reply. It needs work, and maybe he needs to repeat his blaming of Thor. You did this to me. You robbed me of Asgard and put me through hell. You killed me.

The Avengers

From facebook:

Well, I saw The Avengers. There were many explosions and much destruction of high tech equipment. Midtown Manhattan was wrecked. I liked Iron Man, Thor and Captain America better. I even think I liked Iron Man 2 better. Tom Hiddleston, who was a fine Loki in Thor, was completely wasted. Robert Downey Jr. was wasted. They were all wasted.

I've seen lots of rave reviews, so I am clearly in a minority. There was so much beating up, so much noise, so many clouds of dust and fire that I found it hard to follow the movie. Maybe there were characters in there somewhere.

More from facebook:

Well, maybe Tom Hiddleston was not entirely wasted. The explosions are fading from my memory, the adrenaline rush is almost over, and I'm trying to figure out the movie's plot. There are hints... When Loki appears, the skin around his eyes is badly bruised, and he looks as if he's been through hell. He's recently been through a wormhole, which is probably stressful even for a god. And he's also met the nasty aliens. My impression is, he's their puppet, though he thinks he's the puppetmaster. This is nice. This is irony. But I'm not sure. I wasn't given enough. I would have liked a bit of conversation with Thor. "You don't know what happened to me when you threw me in that wormhole. You don't know what I've been through. I died in there." Maybe the conversation was there, and I missed it amid all the explosions.

Loki is nastier and more desperate than he was in Thor, less in control. That is interesting, and I would have liked to know more. Again, I would have liked a bit of conversation with Thor to explain. The key to Loki is his relationship to Thor, the golden big brother. He's lost the chance to be king of Asgard -- he does mention this in The Avengers -- and now he wants to be king of Thor's Midgard, in part as revenge against Thor.

The aliens want the Tesseract, which is their motivation. Loki is willing to trade it for Earth. It's a lousy trade, another indication that Loki is not playing at the top of his game. Something has happened to him. I assume he was torn apart in the wormhole and blames Thor and is really mad now and more than a little crazy. Okay, now I have most of a plot, and most of it is in the movie. It was just hidden by the explosions.

Loki is what drives the entire movie. We did need more of him; and Thor -- the golden brother -- was dim in this movie. He's always dim in one sense of the word, but he needs to shine. He is the heir to Asgard, after all, and Earth is his world -- both in the Thor movie and in Norse mythology. Thor is "the friend of men." Envy of Thor is what drives Loki, along with a need to be loved.

Another NASA APOD

Exploring the cosmos at extreme energies, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope orbits planet Earth every 95 minutes. By design, it rocks to the north and then to the south on alternate orbits in order to survey the sky with its Large Area Telescope (LAT). The spacecraft also rolls so that solar panels are kept pointed at the Sun for power, and the axis of its orbit precesses like a top, making a complete rotation once every 54 days. As a result of these multiple cycles the paths of gamma-ray sources trace out complex patterns from the spacecraft's perspective, like this mesmerising plot of the path of the Vela Pulsar. Centered on the LAT instrument's field of view, the plot spans 180 degrees and follows Vela's position from August 2008 through August 2010. The concentration near the center shows that Vela was in the sensitive region of the LAT field during much of that period. Born in the death explosion of a massive star within our Milky Way galaxy, the Vela Pulsar is a neutron star spinning 11 times a second, seen as the brightest persistent source in the gamma-ray sky.

NASA APOD

No, they are not alive -- but they are dying. The unusual blobs found in the Carina nebula, some of which are seen floating on the upper right, might best be described as evaporating. Energetic light and winds from nearby stars are breaking apart the dark dust grains that make the iconic forms opaque. Ironically the blobs, otherwise known as dark molecular clouds, frequently create in their midst the very stars that later destroy them. The floating space mountains pictured above by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope span a few light months. The Great Nebula in Carina itself spans about 30 light years, lies about 7,500 light years away, and can be seen with a small telescope toward the constellation of Keel (Carina).

To Foxessa

The work you do in nonfiction -- or the real world, as we might call it -- is wonderful and valuable. And if you find an alternative to Blogger, please tell me about it. This format is going to make me crazy. They now tell you who has read your blog. No one read this today. There are some things we are not meant to know.

More on Culture

An earlier post was picked up by the Twin Cities Daily Planet. I tried to add a comment there and failed. (I have a lot of trouble with commenting. By the time I jump through all the hoops to prove that I am a human being, my comment has vanished.) Here it is:

I should add that I was writing in the context of an ongoing discussion of cultural appropriation in the science fiction community. When can we use other cultures in our writing? When borrowing shows contempt for other people or supports stereotypes, when we turn people's lives into products, then we into something bad. The example I just ran across was Urban Outfitters selling a hip flask as part of a line of so-called Navajo products aimed at groovy young white people. This kind of thing is pretty obviously offensive. The Navajo Nation sent its lawyers after the company.

On the other hand, I just learned that Pendleton robes were aimed at the Native market and the Pendleton Mill consulted with Native people and worked to produce a product that Native people would like. The article I read said 50% of Pendleton robes are still bought by Native Americans.

I should also add that Navajo silversmithing can apparently be traced back to a specific Mexican called Nakai Tsosi or "Thin Mexican," who taught the first Navajo silversmith. So I was in error saying silversmithing was learned from the Spanish. The Pueblo people apparently learned it from the Navajo.

More on Natalie Goldberg

I have continued to read Natalie Goldberg and think about her writing practice. I may be working my way to a real insight, or I may be wasting my time. I do a fair amount of unproductive mulling.

I have a strong feeling that I don't write the way she describes writing. I am not sure a need for self-expression drives me. Instead, I love stories, and I love to tell stories. I told stories to my brother before I could read and write. I don't think I was motivated by a desire to understand and express my inner self at the age of five. I think I wanted to tell stories, because I loved hearing stories.

Obviously, writers draw from their own experiences and emotions. But they also draw from the huge, long history of tale-telling. Like a child imitating its parents, I imitate folk tales, fairy tales, legends, Icelandic sagas, English language novels, all the science fiction and fantasy I have read...

As far as I know, all human societies tell stories. Why? I suspect to understand the world. The modern-day interest in psychology and self-expression is not universal and may come from the individualism and alienation characteristic of bourgeois society.

Having said this, I remember there are some pretty interesting psychological portraits in the 13th and 14th century Icelandic sagas. The best portraits are of people you would not want as neighbors: the great outlaw Grettir Asmundarson and the great viking Egill Skallagrimsson. Fabulous characters, but not good members of society. As Njall said in the Njals saga: "By law the land is established and by lawlessness laid waste."

The great question of the sagas is not "who am I and why do I feel the way I do?" but "what happened to the Icelandic republic? Why has the society established by the settlement of Iceland been destroyed?" Part of the answer was people like Egill and Grettir. The sagas describe how the republic's legal system was broken by greed and arrogance, individualism and a primitive sense of the family loyalty. Njall, the great lawyer, struggled to maintain the rule of law; but even his own sons turned against him in this struggle.

Nowhere in the sagas do we get a good sense of the author. We think we know who wrote the Egils saga, though not because it's signed. None of the sagas are, and almost all of them have no known author. Their style is so impersonal that it was mistaken for history or folklore until fairly recently. I use the saga style in my hwarhath stories. Any time one of my stories begins "There was a man (or woman) named..." it is an imitation of the traditional opening of the sagas: "Mathr het... A man was named..."

In the end, story telling is about other people, the audience that listens and all the folks -- living and long gone -- who have told good stories. I feel far more comfortable with this than the idea that story telling is about me.

Format

I think I don't like the new blogger format.

Reading Natalie Goldberg

I have been reading Natalie Goldberg's books on how to become a writer. One of the things that amazes me is -- she describes how her writing students are driven to tell their personal stories, record their lives. I have always wanted to describe what doesn't exist. I can't imagine anything more boring than writing down my life. I mean, I'm living it. That's as much commitment as I want to make. But the possible or impossible -- those are enticing. Those open the mind.

I've decided what I like about Natalie Goldberg is her enthusiasm for writing. For her it's life saving, transforming, the best thing ever, ice cream. I spent too much time around avant garde artists as a kid, and I picked up their angst. For them, art was not a way to make their lives better; their lives were a way to make their art better. And the process was not always pleasant for them or the people around them. But boy were they interesting; and their art was often breathtaking in its beauty and gutsiness.

I'd like to have Goldberg's enthusiasm, her joy in writing, and her relentless drive