Briane Pagel's Blog: Thinking The Lions, page 38

10 Minutes About Real Books, Science Fiction, Depression, And "Bridge To Terabithia,"

I really really don't like reading real -- nonelectronic -- books anymore, and yet I had to, twice, over the weekend.

The two real books I read/am reading are/were Hyperbole And A Half, the book of collected essays by Allie Brosh, and Footfall, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. The reasons I am/did read them as real books is because my electronics have let me down/been sabotaged over the past few days.

We have a lot of electronics in our house, because the boys demand a lot of them and we use them a lot, too.  And when we lose one, it causes a chain reaction that boils down to I have to read real books. What happened recently was that the tablet that Mr Bunches uses a lot stopped taking a charge, so I had to send it in for warranty coverage (which was frustrating, in that I had to insist, politely but firmly, that Dell pay for shipping; the guy on the phone kept insisting that we had to ship it ourselves, but I said, quote: "I am going to be polite but firm with you: No. I have a warranty, and if I pay for shipping that undermines the efficacy of the warranty." In the end, I won. Sometimes it's good to know consumer protection law.  ALWAYS it's good to know that.)

Which left Mr Bunches without a tablet. We were already down a computer because the old, OLD laptop, the one with the battery that doesn't keep a charge and it has to be plugged in all the time, is now downstairs in my home office, where it has to sit because it's the only computer that can work our printer, so if I want to print something I have to email it to myself downstairs.

We could get by on two phones and two laptops, though, except that yesterday morning Mr F got upset that I wasn't paying much attention to him -- I was working on an aid application to help get therapists paid for to come in and work with the boys, and it was LONG -- and so he got mad and dumped a soda on my laptop, surprising me because I hadn't known that he was behind me.

So it was into the bag of rice we keep handy just for stuff like that, and 24 hours of no laptop to try to salvage it. It worked -- I'm typing this on the soda laptop -- but for 24 hours I had no laptop, and Mr Bunches had to use my phone to keep himself amused/distracted from the rain that causes him to have panic attacks.

WHEW THIS WILL EVENTUALLY BE ABOUT BOOKS. So that's not why I was reading the real book of Hyperbole and a Half.



I was reading the real book of that because I've had it on request for the ebook version from the library for, I don't know, EVER, I think, and then when we were at the library the other day for superhero craft day,





 I saw the real book on the shelf and checked it out, because I really really wanted to read it.  If you haven't read Allie Brosh's work, you can check out much of it for free on her blog; she is hilarious and heartbreaking.  Her essays on dogs moving and her fixation on cake as a  kid and battles with spiders are so funny they make me cry with laughter; but her essays on dealing with depression are both funny and terrifyingly sad.  Worth reading, either way.  And her drawings only make them funnier/sadder.  As someone who gets down from time to time, I could relate in a way to her stories, both the funny and the sad ones. I read the entire book in a day.

I was reading the real book of ...

... I just realized I didn't start the timer on the 10 minutes, so I'll start it now...

Footfall



 for entirely different reasons: First off, I was reading it because of the lack of electronics for me to use yesterday around the house, so I couldn't read any of the ebooks I've been working on.  I decided to read one of the few real books I have in the house, and went to where I've been rebuilding my collection.  About 6 years ago I sold about 99% of my books to a used bookstore, and since then I've regretted selling only a few of them, those books that were my absolute favorites.  So I decided to buy used versions of those books and re-create my absolute favorite books in hard copy form, more like coffeetable books or art pieces than books I intended to read.

Footfall was one of those all-time favorites.  The story is an alien invasion story, from Larry Niven, who's superserious about science, and often spends too much time explaining it in a boring way (his Ringworld books, in my memory, go too far in explaining/discussing the science. His Integral Trees and Gripping Hand series, plus this book, get it about right.)  It's one of those sprawling epic stories that I love; I'm only about 1/5 of the way through it and there's already a plethora of characters and subplots: the astronaut's wife having an affair with the reporter, the congressman getting to go meet the aliens aboard the Russian space station, the degenerate biker with a good heart who's just trying to get by, and so on.  The aliens haven't even arrived at Earth yet and the story is every bit as good as I remember from reading it 25 years ago. (I can remember almost perfectly when I read it the first time: It was 1990, when I'd just moved out of my parent's house.  I remember my roommate, who didn't like science fiction much, laughing because the aliens in the book are similar to small elephants. "Baby elephants invade the Earth," he used to laugh.  I try to remember how annoying I found that whenever I am tempted to make fun of the glitter vampires in Twilight.)

Which leaves just Bridge To Terabithia.


 I was reading an article about kids' books everyone should read, and a bunch of the books I'd loved as a kid were on the list, including Beverly Cleary books and Bridge to Terabithia.  There was one scene in Bridge that I'd always recalled, the one at Christmas where the kid and his dad are trying to get his slot cars to work and they won't, and the dad is getting frustrated because he spent a lot of money (for this family, a lot of money is not very much money) on them and he feels bad, while the kid just wants his dad to feel good so he keeps pretending the toy is great.  It's one of those scenes, like the Billy Pilgrim-in-the-cave scene, that while not objectively as sad as many possible scenes, for some reason lodged in my mind as a terribly terribly sad thing, and has stuck with me for about 35 or nearly 40 years.  I probably read the book the first time in 3rd or 4th grade, so a long time that's been in my head, and when I got to that part of the story (I borrowed the book as an audiobook from the library) it was the same as I remembered it.

The book holds up really well; it's a book that's probably not a great read for an adult but not a bad one, either.  If I have one gripe about it it's that the two main characters seem a lot more mature and intelligent than fifth graders ought to be.  Fifth grade is about 10 years old, and these characters seem more like 7th- or 8th- graders, I think. That may not seem like much, but I think there's a world of difference between 10-year-olds and 13-14 year-olds in how they think and act. I'm not sure if the author made the kids be fifth graders for a reason, but I don't think the book would suffer if she'd changed them to 7th graders, and it might be better.

Also, I had to go make sure our refrigerator was shut, because Mr F keeps not shutting it and sometimes I do, too, and Sweetie is REALLY upset about that, so she's hung these signs all over the house:




And while I was making sure the fridge was shut the timer went off but I only just realized that, so this has been like 33 minutes about stuff.

Mr F, Chair Pioneer

Your best ideas, those eureka moments that turn the world upside down, seldom come when you're juggling emails, rushing to meet the 5 P.M. deadline or straining to make your voice heard in a high-stress meeting. They come when you're walking the dog, soaking in the bath or swinging in a hammock.Carl Honore

In In Praise of Slowness, Carl Honore wrote of the "Slow Movement," which seeks to do everything at its proper pace.  The Slow Movement now encompasses anti-homogenization movements, ecology and Christianity, fashion trends, local produce and goods consumption, a leaving of digital means of producing art, and even parenting: "slow parenting" is the practice of refusing to schedule as many activities for kids so that they can discover their childhoods themselves.

The general idea seems to be to take more joy in the moment: in the task of creating, in the process of getting there, in the minute-to-minute existingness of life, rather than on the goals.  To worry less about what we are achieving and more about what we are doing.

 Put another way: When was the last time you spent a few minutes just hanging upside down from a hammock?

Friday Five: Gangster Movies

For a while there I was doing regular posts of rankings, but it got too time-consuming to rank everything in a category so for now I'm going to try weekly posts listing just five things in a category.

And since I just re-watched Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels last night, I thought I'd start with gangster movies.  But not gangster movies like The Godfather, which I hated.  Gangster movies like

1.  Pulp Fiction.



Back when I used to take things seriously, by which I mean "I was young and stupid and thought it actually mattered who won the Superbowl or whether a team cheated in the NFL or which film got Best Picture," that being in the time before I had real worries like mortgages and building a business and kids and stuff, I thought it was terrible that this movie lost out to Forrest Gump for Best Picture.  Nowadays, I'm not so worried about dumb stuff like pop culture, and I save my righteous indignation (which emoticon I invented, and it looks like this:

: ( )
), but I still like this movie for the crazy fun and the interesting dialogue that would be ripped off by a million lesser movies, and for John Travolta before he got all scientology, and for Bruce Willis before he became BRUCE WILLIS(TM), which is how I think of actors once they stop acting and just start doing the same shtick in every movie (Bruce Willis, Robert DeNiro, etc etc).
2. Go. I don't really remember all the details of this movie, but what I do remember is it was a lot of fun watching; I favor twisty-turny movies with characters who have a lot of moral ambiguity: decent streaks in terrible criminals, and so forth.  This movie had that; it was like Pulp Fiction for millenials.
3. Drive.  

And speaking of morally-ambiguous stylish films, this Ryan Gosling movie is one of the best I've seen.  It's one of those movies where even full-sunlight days seem somehow tainted and dark, and you can feel the desperation behind every single thing every character does.  Watching movies like this make my life feel safe, even in the most stressful times.  BONUS POINTS: I once read an article that suggested using music to help your mood, and one of the ways to do that was to play techno- or punk music whenever you are under stress, because that will make you feel like you are the main character in a thriller, and since the main character always wins out (the article theorized) you will feel more in control and able to cope.  Sort of "pretend your life is a thriller," I guess, which never worked for me, really.  I don't want my life to be a thriller. 
When I get under stress, I imagine my life is a comedy, with a voice-over discussing what I'm doing in very British, dry wit.  That works wonders.  Try it the next time you are in a traffic jam or have a deadline and the copier jams or you were certain there was leftover pizza but there wasn't any.  Any stressful situation, really.
4.  Collateral.  In addition to our book club, Sweetie and I have embarked on a quest to watch every Tom Cruise movie, ever.  Collateral was one of those, and it's amazing how good that movie still is.  So many movies age badly, but this movie stayed great.  I always get the feeling that I wouldn't personally like Tom Cruise, but I also think that if I met him and he wanted me to like him, I'd have no say in the matter.  Seeing how awesomely winning he is on the screen, could you imagine that in real life? He even made me want to hang around with the cold-blooded hit man he played in this movie.
5. Blue Ruin.  This was a sort of real-life gangster movie.  You know how sometimes movies or books will try to depict what a real-life superhero might be like? This movie shows what would likely happen if just regular guys decided to become gangsters.  The main character's parents were murdered by a guy who just got released from prison, and so the main character ... I have to call him that because  I never know anybody's names in movies, any more than I do in real life.  If I don't interact with you on a more or less weekly basis at least, I probably do not know your actual name. Movie characters don't stick around long enough for me to remember who they are... and so the main character sets out to get revenge, and things go about as well as you'd expect them to go when regular people do irregular things like revenge sprees.  It's one of the saddest -- in a good way -- movies I've ever seen.  Totally worth watching.
Bonus Sweetie Pick: I asked Sweetie what movie she'd put on this list, and she said Goodfellas. When I asked why, she said "because it's good." I wouldn't know, I haven't seen it.  I asked her what it's about and she said "I don't remember, it was so long ago."  Then she added The Departed, which ought to be on this list, too.  
Sweetie's comment about Goodfellas brings up something I hadn't thought about until just now: There are many, many movies (like Go, for example) which I like, and which I can barely remember anything about other than it was pretty good.  That doesn't happen with books or songs, probably because unlike movies, books take longer to experience and songs you listen to over and over and over.  Movies are generally one-shot deals, over in 2-3 hours, and with rare exceptions, I don't remember the details of movies like I do books.  That probably says something about me, but I'm trying to keep these posts short so I'll deal with that some other time.

10 Minutes About "Summer House With Swimming Pool"

I've been going through a phase where nothing really excites me, book-wise. It's lasted about the last week or so, and began when I decided I didn't care much how Until I Find You turned out.  I've read that book, by John Irving, before.  But I'd listened to The World According To Garp and The Cider House Rules as audiobooks, and re-read A Son Of The Circus, and enjoyed both, and so I thought Until I Find You might be just as good a filler until my turn for It comes back around.

It wasn't. Being a more recent Irving work, I suppose I should've expected that.  After all, each of his books has I think been a bit worse than the one before.  That makes his more recent ones still tolerable, I suppose, given that he started at such a high point. But the more recent ones aren't really worth re-reading.  Or maybe, as I said, it's because I've been in a bit of a mood.

The mood broke, though, a bit at least, when I got a chance to borrow Summer House With Swimming Pool by Herman Koch last Saturday.  There was kind of an embarrassment of riches at the (online) library since both Summer House and The Bone Clocks were available to download, and I'd been looking forward to both of them.

I went with The Bone Clocks first, actually, downloading that and then cooking dinner (spaghetti) and getting the boys through their baths (splashy) and then sitting down to read, at which point I changed my mind and went with Koch's book.

I did that because the last Koch book I read was The Dinner, which was absolutely brilliant.  The Dinner took place (mostly) at a dinner party where the narrator was going to reveal a terrible secret to his brother (or brother-in-law?) who was about to run for prime minister, and it was just filled with this excellent sense of dread, and kept upping the ante the way Gone Girl did, too.  I know some people didn't like Gone Girl and those people probably won't like The Dinner, either, but for me there's a lot to be said for a book that moves from plausible to over-the-top so slowly and methodically that you don't realize just how far past believable you've gone until you're already way past that line.

So on the strength of The Dinner I abandoned To Rise Again At A Decent Hour, a book I'd actually bought, and also skipped over not just The Bone Clocks but David And Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell, too, all books sitting there on my Kindle waiting to be read while I tore through about 30% of Summer House With Swimming Pool in the past 48 hours.

It was worth it.  The story is told by Marc, a doctor who should be completely unlikeable, and who is, but who is also compelling -- the same way the narrator of The Dinner was.  Marc is a general practitioner doc in the Netherlands, and his method of treatment as well as his inner monologue while treating his patients is abhorrent, and compelling.

The story begins with Marc telling us that the next day he's going to be going before a medical examining board about the death of a patient, and blithely reassuring us that the trick is to make sure the board finds no reason to not decide it was simple "medical error," and with those alarm bells already going off in the background, the story moves from Marc showing up at the funeral to a flashback of when he first met the patient (a famous actor) and on to what obviously is going to be some ill-fated summer vacation.

Unlike last week's 10 minutes, where I ranted about flashbacks wrecking the story, here, so far, the device works: From assuming Marc just doesn't care about his patients and that's why the actor died, the story slowly unfurls, until (at the point where I am at, and SPOILER ALERT!) it seems like Marc had way too many reasons to want the actor dead.

It's the kind of book I don't want to put down.  And that's 10 minutes.

Scooby Doo: A Primer

This morning, as I got Mr F out of the car after our first calm-him-down ride of the day, this thought popped into my head:

Was his real name Scooby Doo, or Scooby Dooby Doo?

This was kind of a weird thing to be thinking about insofar as I never really cared all that much for Scooby Doo, and insofar as by "never really cared all that much" I mean never cared at all. But that is how my brain works, and I therefore had to immediately go read about Scooby Doo on Wikipedia, where I learned a lot about Scooby Doo, like how he is destroying America, and also a lot about monkeys and things.

Here's what you'll need to keep up with water-cooler talk about Scooby Doo:

-- Shaggy's full name is Norville "Shaggy" Rogers.

-- Originally, Scooby was a dog named "Too Much" who played the bongos.  Sometimes he was a sheepdog. Other times he was not.  The name changed between the first time the show was pitched, a bid that failed, and the second time.

-- Scooby's name comes from Frank Sinatra's song Strangers In The Night, where he sings doo-be-doo-be-doo. I would put a video of that song in here but I don't really care for that song, and besides you know how it goes, and also I'd rather put in this video for this song that I really like and have been listening to all week:



-- Scooby's character is based on the roles Bob Hope played in horror comedies.

-- Scooby, unlike other dogs (?) has opposable thumbs and a fully prehensile tail.

-- Animals with prehensile tails are predominantly Western hemisphere animals, with most of them in South America.  Some scientists think this is because the jungles of South America are more dense than elsewhere.

-- Porcupines and opossums have prehensile tails.  I thought the scariest possible thing I could imagine now was the idea of a porcupine dropping down on me from a tree while walking in the woods at night, but then I read that in other jungles where animals with prehensile tails are less prevalent, there are flying snakes.

-- Flying snakes can climb trees, and when they get to where they want, they push off with their tail and reshape their rib cage to form a pseudo-wing which helps it fly the same way frisbees fly, and I really can't read any more of that without starting to think things like "Seriously WTF God?"  But it is amazing, and terrifying, stuff:



-- Scooby, perhaps presciently predicting what would happen to 'traditional values' (i.e. they would go to Hell) once gay marriage became the law of the land, once fell in love with a  "large blue reptilian creature with a beak-like mouth," but he can be forgiven for that because the creature, an alien, was disguised the whole time as a golden retriever wearing a red bandanna.

I'm going to maybe alienate some people here when I say that if you put a bandanna around your dog's neck I judge you (and not in a good way, the way judges might judge "Obamacare," which is now the law of the land and which means we won't actually get a fix to our healthcare system, ever, because Republicans hate fixing things and Democrats think health care is fixed. It is not. People still cannot afford health care and now they cannot afford health insurance, and most insurance plans range from "crappy" to "really very bad it's not even 'insurance' at all." Judges, or at least the ones that count for now, think this is okay, because Congress intended this to be okay. Which is how the legislative-and-judicial-review process works, but in this case it worked really, really badly, and the key hallmark of Obama's tenure is not a very good one.)

The kind of people who put bandanna's around dog's necks are the kinds of people who will stand, knee deep in the water at the beach, drinking their 'hard cider' and wearing baseball caps that don't look quite right and play a game involving a frisbee and knocking beer cans off into the water, and I will have to keep Mr F away from them because he will want to see what they are knocking over, and really can't you leave that stuff at the frat house?

 (Note: that was based on a true story yesterday at the lake.  Also true: there were tadpoles in the lake and when people went by in their stupid boats and on their stupid jetskis, the resultant waves would toss the tadpoles up onto the beach, where a bunch of little kids noticed them and began what can only be described as a massive and heroic effort to save these tadpoles, pouring water around them and picking up clumps of sand with the tadpoles on them to carry them back to the water.  These kids did this for 30 minutes or so, and Mr Bunches even joined in:




-- That was not Scooby's only assault on 'traditional family values.' Scooby Doo attacks traditional values the way jetski-owning jerks attack tadpoles: often, and for no reason.  This one time, Scooby-Doo competed with one of his cousins, Scooby-Dum, for the "affection" of Scooby-Dee "who is also their cousin."

-- This other time, Scooby got Sandy Duncan to fall in love with him.  That Sandy Duncan, who once pretended to be a boy who abducted several young kids from their homes.

-- Antonin Scalia predicted exactly that kind of behavior and never has one man been proven so right so quickly.  Jiggery-pokery indeed!

Oh, and his name is neither. It's "Scoobert Doo."

Mr F Loves Water More Than You Love Everything In Your Life, Combined

You're never as original as you think you are...as I'm sure someone else has said.

A while back I read an article that talked about what a trope it is to put a close-up of an eyeball on your horror book cover. Which is exactly what I did on the cover for my collection of horror stories, "The Scariest Things, You CAN'T Imagine." 

I'd tried to put out of my mind how UNoriginal I was when it comes to cover design, because I still thought myself something of an artiste, like, say, when it comes to photographs.  Such as photos like the one on the right, a picture of an American flag I took outside of what used to be Mr F's kindergarten.

I love that picture; it's one of my favorites.  I was proud of the way I'd gotten it just right with the sun and the way the flag looks tattered and it's kind of see-through, etc. etc.

This morning I went to read Gawker and noticed that the picture on the top of the story about Greece missing an IMF payment blah blah blah Europe was this picture:


And I thought oh man someone totally copied me.  (In this case, the someone is the AP.)  But before I dashed off an angry email to Gawker, the AP and Greece (Dear Greece, Please do not place your flag in front of the sun anymore, I have a copyright on that) I thought about that eyeball-cover thing and googled images of flags in front of the sun and realized I'm not the only one who thought of that.

It's actually not that new of a thing, to realize I'm not the only person who thinks something is picture-worthy, but it happened twice in the last 12 hours, so I'm reeling a bit here.  We were at the library last night, and as we sat in the teen section (better, comfier seats and there's hardly ever teens at the library plus the teens who do go to the library are generally not the kind that scare me) I noticed pictures on the wall for a photography/art contest.  And in that series of pictures by teens were pictures of boats lined up outside the UW down on Lake Mendota, a couple sitting on a pier at sunset, and a bridge in the nature preserve taken from a low angle.

Those are all pictures I have taken, too.

It all reminded me, too, of the kerfuffle over the iceberg picture.  Maybe you already heard about this: a woman was accused of plagiarism after her photo of an iceberg:

won a contest, and another woman noticed that contest-winning photo and accused the winner of plagiarism and photo theft.

But it wasn't. Instead, the accusing woman had taken this picture:


Turns out they were on the same cruise at the same time and took the same photo from slightly different angles on the ship.  No plagiarism, a weird coincidence.

Also at the library, I walked past a book about a person who died and is now stuck in her afterlife until a guy comes along and offers a way to get her out of there.  The details are different but it's sort of the same them as my book the After.

And all this is going on while I have to keep hearing about The Martian, which is a book about an astronaut alone in space, and which is being made into a movie, unlike my own Eclipse, which continues to not be made into a movie despite obviously being perfect for making me rich.

Finally, there's this: I recently (as you may have heard) wrote this book about how a corporation has been cloning people and the clones are roving among society many of them without knowing they are clones, and there's a group of people trying to stop the cloning practice.  Maybe I mentioned it before?

Well, I heard about this series Orphan Black and thought boy a lot of people are talking about that, maybe I should hate it before I ever see it? So I checked it out on Wikipedia, and read this:

The series begins with Sarah Manning, a con artist by trade, witnessing the suicide of a woman, Beth Childs, who appears to be her doppelgänger. Sarah takes on Beth's identity and occupation as a police detective after Beth's death. During the first season, Sarah discovers that she is a clone, that she has many 'sister' clones spread throughout North America and Europe, and that someone is plotting to kill them and her. Alongside her foster brother, Felix Dawkins, and two of her fellow clones, Alison Hendrix and Cosima Niehaus, Sarah discovers the origin of the clones: a scientific movement called Neolution. The movement believes that human beings can use scientific knowledge to direct their evolution as a species. The movement has an institutional base in the large, influential, and wealthy biotech corporation, the Dyad Institute. The Dyad Institute conducts basic research, lobbies political institutions, and promotes its eugenics program, aided by the clone Rachel Duncan. But it also seeks to profit from the technology the clones embody. It has thus placed "monitors" into the clones' personal lives, allegedly to study them scientifically but also to keep them under surveillance

Anyway, I'm not complaining even though every single idea I've ever had was also had by someone else and all those people are making millions of dollars and living luxurious lifestyles in tropical islands.  HA HA I AM NOT BITTER AT ALL. *looks at desk held together by duct tape* NOT AT ALL.

10 Minutes About "It" by Stephen King

I've been listening to "It" on audiobook off and on this spring & summer.  "Off and on" because I borrow it from the library on audio and you only get it for fourteen days, tops. If someone else has requested it during that time you have to wait until your turn comes around again.  So the last time I listened to the book was at the end of April during my trips to and from my trial up north.  I got about 1/3 of the way through and continued this latest time, when I got through another 1/3 before my time expired.

I'm enjoying the book pretty well; I like Stephen King, and King has become sort of the de facto horror guy for me, to the point where I don't think much about other horror authors at all.  I like King's stuff so much that many horror books suffer by comparsion -- even those of his son, Joe Hill.  (I like Hill's collection of short stories, 20th Century Ghosts much more than I liked his novel Heart Shaped Box, which I found to be pedestrian in concept and execution.)  King tends to go for the gross-out too much (his "shit weasels" almost made me give up on Dreamcatcher) and when he's bad he's really bad (Dreamcatcher, again) but when he's good he's worth all the bad stuff.

Bad stuff like the current, interminable, part of It that I was slogging through when my turn expired for the book.  And bad stuff like the 'flashback nature' of the story.

First the slog: I'm at the part of the book where one of the main characters is recounting a story his dad told him back when he was fifteen (so it's the guy telling the story telling a story about how someone else told a story, which is never a good way to tell a story. You've heard show don't tell? If you're three removes from the action, it's always boring.)  But this story goes on FOREVER. And EVER AND EVER AND EVER. Seriously, I was on it for about three days of audiobook time (audiobook time is when I go for my occasional exercise walks, or driving).  And the point of the story apparently was to get to the part [SPOILER ALERT!] where the guy's dad saw the same "it" monster the guy did, only 60 years ago or something.

YAWN.  The whole point of the story has been that this thing is making the entire town evil, etc., so to say oh yeah it was around sixty years ago too? We get it.  If this part of the story is going somewhere, I can't see it.

PLUS, the other part of this flashback to a flashback that really stuck me -- jarred me right out of the story-- was that the kid listening to his dad had, about 4 years before, encountered the monster himself.  Then he's listening to his dad tell this story, and when dad gets to the I saw a monster part, the kid says how he had totally forgotten that he'd seen a monster until then.

Now, I am willing to suspend my disbelief to read a story and believe that there will be a monster haunting Derry, New Hampshire.  But 'suspension of disbelief' doesn't extend to "believe any old stupid thing thrown in for narrative purposes."  Am I supposed to think an 11-year-old has a run in with a giant monster that tries to kill him and he narrowly escapes and he forgot it entirely within four years?

Back when I was 18, I had a car accident in which I had a near-miss with a tree: a guy cut me off and I swerved and I skidded on ice and I nearly hit a tree off the road and came this close to dying.  I remember it vividly, 28 years later ... and there were no giant monsters there to help keep things fresh in my brain.

I'm assuming King was going for something there, with the Oh yeah I forgot until my dad mentioned a monster that I'd seen one too, but whatever it was, I don't get it and it was annoying enough that I can't believe it survived into the final version of the novel.

PLUS, another [SPOILER ALERT!]: the kid was sent to the place where he saw the monster by his dad.  So when dad spills the beans about having seen the monster earlier, the kid thinks oh yeah hey I saw a monster too, I forgot that! but not HEY WAIT DAD YOU KNEW THERE WAS A MONSTER AND SENT ME THERE?

That's 10 minutes, but I don't want to risk forgetting about the other part of the story that bugs me: the telling it in flashback part.  This has been bothering me all year, since I read The Last Summer Of The Camperdowns, which otherwise was a very good book, and now when I read It, and both of the stories do the same thing: they present a story in which the main character faces mortal danger, but the story is being told by that character in a flashback.

In Camperdowns, the main character is an adult and remembers when she was 11 and various terrible things happened, including a guy trying to murder her.  A kid goes missing in their neighborhood and she suspects the guy and the guy is harassing her and tormenting her and we are seemingly to believe that he means her no good, but the fact that she is an adult looking back removes every bit of suspense from the story.  And I thought well maybe suspense wasn't really the point except I'm pretty sure it was.

Then there's It, where I am sure suspense is the point.  The story is told in flashbacks back-and-forth: present day (i.e. 1985) Derry, and 1957 Derry, when the main characters first became aware there is a monster.  Each kid in 1957 is introduced also as an adult, and then we flash back to 1957 where they all ran into the monster, and there are plenty of scenes where the monster is after them, scenes which could be very suspenseful and terrifying except that we already know each of these kids survives their own particular brush with the monster in 1957, and now have to come back to fight the monster in 1985.

I keep thinking, as I listen to it, how much better the book would be if I didn't know the kids survive.  I mean, it's bad enough when you're reading a horror story or watching a movie and you know, intellectually, that the main character will survive, because they are the main character, but at least your face isn't rubbed in it by telling the story in flashback.

Anyway, this all makes it sound like the book is no good, and in fact it's really very good. I'm enjoying it a lot.  That's kind of a testament to how great King is when he's on, because a book with those kind of significant flaws has to be really awesome to make it over those hurdles.  Still, how much better would it be if I didn't have to work so hard to get to the parts of the book that don't suck?

That's 10 21 minutes.

I thought Mr F would like the one where they said he had to spread out like a starfish, but it turns out he'd rather not spread out like a starfish. Who knew?

Today we took the boys to yoga class.  It was Sweetie's idea, the yoga class, but (as we agreed on the way over there) it would be hard for her choice of outing to be less fun than two other loser trips I'd picked out this year, Festge Park and the trolley.

Festge Park was supposed to be a lot of fun.  Scenic overlook, playground, nature trail, the guide said, and also I'd driven by the park, which sits up on this bluff-type area, many many times over the last 17 years since I became a lawyer, and in particular a lawyer who had to drive periodically to Richland County, which is due west of us and which passes by the bluff where Festge Park is.  That trip -- to Richland County -- also used to include driving over my favorite bridge ever, only now the route has been moved to a new bridge, which is not my favorite.  You can still see my favorite, from the new bridge as you drive over it, but that is dangerous to do in that if you are driving over a bridge while trying to peer up the river at the other bridge, you're likely to drive into the Wisconsin River, which is one of the deadliest rivers around.  In all seriousness: people die in that river almost on a weekly basis.

Anyway, the real fun was in driving over the bridge, not in driving past it from miles away.

Festge Park actually had all three of those things. But the 'scenic overlook' was being monopolized by two teenagers who were making out, and that was hard to overlook.  (Get it?) while the playground was mostly under construction, except for an amazingly old set of horse-glider swings and a Merry-Go-Round, which you don't see much at playgrounds anymore, probably because of lawyers.  The nature trail, meanwhile, dead-ended in a cornfield and after that you had to walk back a half-mile along a road which led by a house that appeared to be all boarded up but which housed one of those dogs that emits bloodcurdling barks the entire time you walk by the house.  The kind of bark that sounds like the dog wants to kill you but has the last victim's femur bone stuck in its throat.

Not a great choice.

Yoga went better.  For Sweetie and Mr Bunches, anyway. It was yoga for special needs kids, and I was teamed up with Mr F despite Sweetie bragging that Mr F tends to listen to her more than to me.  It's true.  But she got Mr Bunches, so she got to do bridges and tree pose and "dragon," which is a real pose, while I got to try to wrestle Mr F into the roof pose and then chase him back when he wanted to go get his breathing ball again.

I am pretty sure you're not supposed to sweat as much as I did at yoga. You're probably also not supposed to wear plaid shorts, but we all have to make choices in life and I have made the choice to lead the kind of life where I only own one pair of athletic shorts, and those were still wet from swimming in Lake Mendota yesterday with Mr F and Mr Bunches when we walked out on Picnic Point, on a nature walk that was blessedly short of killer dogs, teens making out, and merry-go-rounds. It did have a beach labeled DANGER DO NOT SWIM, but that was okay because we found another beach and there were no warnings there, so SWIM AWAY.

Mr Bunches liked yoga, a lot.  He was not terribly good at 'tree pose,' where you have to hold your hands up in a "V" while balancing on one foot and tucking the other against your ankle, but he was able to do lots of them, and the rest of the group seemed to like Mr Bunches' sheer enthusiam, calling out the names of each pose and getting all excited.  Mr Bunches loves everything.  Even yoga.

We decided we'd go to the next one.  I can always use the workout, eventually Mr F might calm down and let our team do more than three poses in a row, and Mr Bunches liked it so much that we'd have signed him up for classes, if you had to sign up for them.

I've been really tired all this week which is why I haven't posted.

Here are some pictures.

Mr Bunches walking to the park with me, carrying his mango:




Mr Bunches with the doughnuts we bought last Friday morning, because we were going to have coffee WITH DOUGHNUTS.


 Mr Bunches learning to ride his bike:




Mr Bunches splashing in the river:




Mr F, enjoying some dirt:



Mr F climbing the slide at "Tall Park." He tried three times before he got the courage to go down, but boy was he proud when he finally did.




Mr F on the trolley ride last week. I'm with him: it was way more boring than I expected:



Mr F at the pond.




Crayons.