Michael Offutt's Blog, page 160

Up by Pixar

If only all stories, and all lives were this perfect. UP was a great film because of the age of its characters. Not only that though, it touched on issues of Ellie not being able to have a child, loneliness, and how two people can be so perfect for each other right from the very start. Whatever writers at Pixar came up with this story are absolutely brilliant. It's really the first movie I ever went to with my father where he said afterward, "I really liked this movie."

This is the octogenarian story that stole my heart.

Thoughts on Art and Criticism

I love the snippet I've included above. It is from Pixar's Ratatouille. It reminds me of the power that food has and that with a smell, a taste, and a touch, you can be transported to a time in your childhood when things were far less complicated. Below are thoughts on criticism and how we both give and receive.

“In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations, the new needs friends. Last night, I experienced something new, an extraordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source. To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions about fine cooking is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core. In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau’s famous motto: Anyone can cook. But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere. It is difficult to imagine more humble origins than those of the genius now cooking at Gusteau’s, who is, in this critic’s opinion, nothing less than the finest chef in France. I will be returning to Gusteau’s soon, hungry for more." — Anton Ego

Sam Harris

Rain

Quotes from 1Q84 book 3 by Haruki Murakami

I recently finished the mind-bending book, 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. Here are some quotes I want to share to see if they spark discussion. I'm still processing what I think of this book. I have given the quotations numbers to make them easy to reference. If you like, pick one and tell me what you think he is saying, whether you agree with it or not, and why you may think it is true or not.

1) Number one on the list now was a diet book entitled Eat as Much as You Want of the Food You Love and Still Lose Weight. What a great title. The whole book could be blank inside and it would still sell. 

2) Humans see time as a straight line. It's like putting notches on a long straight stick. The notch here is the future, the one on this side is the past, and the present is this point right here...But actually time isn't a straight line. It doesn't have a shape. In all senses of the term, it doesn't have any form. But since we can't picture something without form in our minds, for the sake of convenience we understand it as a straight line. At this point, humans are the only ones who can make that sort of conceptual substitution. 

3) There are always far more people in the world who make things worse, rather than help out. 

4) It was a well-known fact that certain members of the so-called elite had disgusting personalities and dark, twisted tendencies, as if they had taken more than the share of darkness allotted to them. 

5) Most people in the world don't really use their brains to think. And people who don't think are the ones who don't listen to others. 

6) I was confident that I was a special person. But time slowly chips away at life. People don't just die when their time comes. They gradually die away, from the inside. And finally the day comes when you have to settle accounts. Nobody can escape it. People have to pay the price for what they've received. 

7) If you do the same things everyone else does, in the same way, then you're no professional.

Murakami's book has been a heavy heavy read. I don't recommend it for everyone. But it has given me lots of pause to stop reading and just think about what he has said.

Prometheus Happy Birthday David

Oh my gosh...I just couldn't get past "P" in the A to Z challenge without another post where I gush about the movie I'm most looking forward to this year. The website io9 has a bunch of links and codes that you can go to and unlock David's emotions. You should try it if you're bored.

If you are new to my blog and don't know what this movie is, Prometheus is the prequel to the original Alien that Ridley Scott made almost 40 years ago.

They spent $200 million dollars on it before marketing.

That's just...wow!

The Oppenheimer Connection in SLIPSTREAM

SPOILER ALERT==> I'M CHATTING ABOUT MY BOOK SO GO AWAY IF YOU DON'T WANT TO FIND OUT WHAT PART OF THE STORY IS ABOUT:

I think that Robert Oppenheimer is a tragic figure. An American theoretical physicist, he along with Enrico Fermi, created the first atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer recalled after the detonation of the first atomic bomb (called Trinity) a verse from the Hindu holy book, the Bhagavad Gita. "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one..." Years later, he said he also thought of a second verse, "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Convinced that the H-bomb was a genocidal device that would cause excessive destruction, Oppenheimer believed an international agency should regulate nuclear weapons. He argued that the United States could secure its defense with a stockpile of atomic arms. However, at the height of the Cold War, defense hawks and anti-Communists saw Oppenheimer’s view as unpatriotic. Edward Teller and Lewis Strauss, two advocates for the hydrogen bomb, contributed to Oppenheimer’s humiliation in hearings that stripped him of his security clearance forever.

I've always thought that America behaved terribly toward one of our greatest minds. Fear of course was behind it, and Americans are some of the most afraid people in the world. I'm not saying that there isn't good reason to be afraid. But fear drives public policy, decision-making, and belief.
When I set out to write my book, I used the work that Robert Oppenheimer did and the Trinity bomb as a catalyst for the destruction of a parallel world in a mirror universe.
I posed this question: what would happen if there were two adjacent universes? We live in one. And people just like us live in the other. To keep these two identical universes apart, are two towers. One on Earth and one on the mirror world which I call Avalon.  These structures are big...really big. As tall as mountains. The one on Avalon was located in the desert of White Sands, New Mexico. So, what are these towers? I kind of picture the scale of the towers I envision as being similar to the
artist rendition of the Ultima Tower. This isn't a "fantasy" tower but something
that architects propose building someday on our own planet.
Think "the ultimate skyscraper" and you get the idea.Well I have an answer for that. These towers are just containers to keep a pair of boxes safe. The boxes are part of this whole idea that I had of a designer universe. In other words, the boxes are the most incredible super computer that you could possibly imagine and probably even a little beyond that. They have an unlimited unknown power supply self-contained within the towers. They run a computer program that defines all the laws of physics in mathematical terms for every thing in the universe.
You might ask...who created the towers? Who created the boxes? I name that being as simply "The Creator" and never go further into that. But the Creator would be a pretty amazing engineer.
So what is the Oppenheimer Connection in SLIPSTREAM? An atomic bomb produces an electro magnetic pulse. This thing disrupts electronics. The towers that house the amazing boxes that define how the universe works would have been immune to this. What I pose in my story (once I set up all these ideas) is that when Trinity was detonated on Earth, the effects of the EMP crossed the boundaries between universes inside the walls of the tower on the parallel world. It disrupted the computer program running in the box on the far side for a millionth of a second, and this was very bad.  It laid waste to an entire world, and the tower on that mirror planet that had stood for billions of years exploded.
This event set into motion everything that happens in SLIPSTREAM and in its sequels that I've plotted out, but have yet to write.

No Capes

I saw 1000 Ways to Die and stopped to watch. A man was impersonating a superhero, and he had the costume complete with cape. He saw some delinquents on top of a building smoking illegal drugs, and decided to interfere. He pushed one of the kids and the kids began to approach him. Outnumbered, he backed up. However, he tripped over his own cape and fell off the side of the building, landing in such a way that his ribs ripped his heart open.



I think any of us that write can understand how we sometimes include unnecessary details in our stories that really just gum up everything and basically, almost kill it. I've had to look long and hard at questions brought up by beta-readers and ask myself, "Is this a cape? Does this thing have any purpose? Or is it just something that's gonna drag me into a jet engine."

As an aside note, encouraged by feedback I got on my picture of Kolin that I posted a week or so ago, I decided to draw my protagonist, Jordan. This is 100% original artwork. I did it with Prismacolor coloring pencil on illustration board. Then I scanned in the original on my scanner and enhanced all of the colors, added effects, and redid problematic areas using Adobe Photoshop Elements. Please be kind, I am not a professional artist. I wanted to make sure that Jordan looks 17 and not how a "high school student played by 27-year-olds" looks (Think GLEE, SMALLVILLE, etc.). I'm happy with the result. Have a great Monday.

Monsters Inc and the important questions of life

For those days when you are on a diet, and see a hamburger... And for those days when you think Tentalus... Just might be the result if Celia and  Thaladius Bile from Monsters, Inc. had a baby... Then, my writer friends, you are ready for the ultimate truth.  Why something is "cool" depends exclusively on how well it is marketed. Have a great day!

Killsuits

SPOILERS: I'm chatting about my book. You have been warned.

At left is a drawing I worked on and never finished. Hence the "missing background". He's cartoony. I drew it probably ten years ago, I think (maybe longer than that). I honestly can't remember. Don't be cruel people!

Anyway, consider this my "concept art". I have other concept art sketches...some in color...some in black and white...that I've done over the years to help me visualize my characters.

This is what Kolin could look like (it's difficult to find the right picture in my mind). He's the guy that Jordan (my protagonist in SLIPSTREAM) falls in love with (yes there are gay people in my book...run away now). They do gay things together too...not just picking out window treatments.

Kolin kills people for money. He's really good at it too because he's had lots of practice. The suit he's wearing is called a killsuit. It's one of the gadgets that my friend Donna Hole alluded to that I use in my book when she reviewed it. So what is a killsuit? Well it's something that you wear when you intend to kill people. Kolin's a professional assassin. He uses guns, swords, knives...he's really good at murdering folks.

It's a very special piece of equipment that has many properties mostly associated with the metal it's made from.
It's tailor-made so that it fits like a glove. Rather than a boot, the individual toes are separated so that the person walking can get a sense of the unevenness of the ground. All the information is relayed up to the helmet which isn't pictured in the drawing. I imagine it looking kind of similar to the way a mantis-head looks, with a visor of glass. All the suits controls are chosen via a tongue pad in the helmet. You stick your tongue out and select buttons that sit right in front of your mouth.It's made of corobidian. This is a fictional Avalonian metal. It's a superconductor so you have to wear grounding arm and leg bands. Otherwise just moving around generates electricity. You run around and lightning coils around your body. Corobidian is really light...light as a feather...but stronger than any known metal. It takes tremendous heat and power to forge so suits are incredibly expensive. If it gets superheated, it can give off a fume which is a deadly poison.The arms are supposed to contain weapons. On one side is an energy net. On the other is a blade that can be ejected from a casing. All weapons are made of cibrian metal. This is another fictional Avalonian creation. Unlike corobidian, cibrian is extremely hard. It's heavy, so unsuitable for armor. But any wound it creates will never heal. Ever. If you get cut by a cibrian blade, you will bleed to death. It's just that simple. There are no exceptions. I don't even use magic or anything like that to get around this rule. Cibrian inflicts permanent damage. Period. End of story. Also a sword made from cibrian is likely to never break. I can't foresee a future where I will go around this rule. And thus far, I haven't explored using cibrian bullets yet. And cibrian cuts through all other metals EXCEPT another cibrian blade.Anyway, I use these suits extensively in the first book, SLIPSTREAM. Each suit has a color that is matched to the person and it alternates with the color black.