Matt Ruff's Blog, page 36

I’m 47 today

As of this morning I have been on Earth 17,167 days. And boy, are my arms tired.

The pilgrim’s progress

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I broke ten thousand words on a new novel this week. Still not certain it’s The Next One, but it’s looking promising. I’ll see what my editor thinks in another month or so.

Meanwhile, five things make a post:

* As part of the research for the new book, I spent some time earlier this summer poking through back issues of the Chicago Defender. The Defender archives are available digitally through ProQuest, which the University of Washington library subscribes to. If I were a UW student or faculty member I could access the archives from home, but because I’m not, I had to physically travel to the campus and use a guest computer. Which had me wishing, on more than one occasion, that I could subscribe to ProQuest directly. Unfortunately, they don’t sell database access to individuals, only to institutions. I’m sure with enough money there’s a workaround for this—e.g., get the home office accredited as a research library—but it’d be simpler if one of you Internet startup wiz-kids would just create a Rhapsody for newspaper and magazines. (I know a lot of publications, including the Defender, actually do sell individual access to their online archives, but it’d be great to be able to do one-stop shopping.)

* In a weird bit of synchronicity, the night before Neil Armstrong died, I rewatched Capricorn One, a 1977 movie about a faked Mars landing. There are some serious plot holes and plausibility issues (one of the most glaring being the use of an Apollo-style command module and lander for the months-long Mars mission) but if you can suspend your disbelief it’s a fun ride with some great character moments. I loved the banter between Elliott Gould and Karen Black, and David Doyle (Bosley from Charlie’s Angels) has a nice snarky turn as Gould’s boss.

* Along with the Neil Armstrong obituary, today’s New York Times breaks the news that dancer, artist, and writer Remy Charlip has died. Charlip was the author of one of my favorite (and most surreal) children’s books, Arm in Arm: A Collection of Connections, Endless Tales, Reiterations, and Other Echolalia. He also wrote and illustrated many other baby boomer classics.

* Speaking of surreal things, the mystery of the floating feet has been solved. (It’s been solved for a while, actually, but I was on book tour when the news broke.)

* Can you imagine a world with Hover Bacon?

Fool on the Hill now available on Kindle and Nook

A note for those of you who’ve been wanting an ebook edition of Fool on the Hill, it’s finally here. The Kindle and Nook editions have already gone live at their respective stores, and I expect other formats to be available shortly.

The trade paperback edition of Fool on the Hill should be back in stock shortly as well.

Notes from the ferment

Apologies for the long silence, but I’ve been in my head for the past month, trying to work out what book #6 is going to be. (Still getting there, but the road ahead is clearer now.)

Some random quick notes:

* Lisa and I saw The Dark Knight Rises. I feel like I need to see it again before making up my mind on what I really think about it. My initial impression was that there were some great individual elements, and on a purely emotional level it did work, but there were also some serious thematic and plot incoherencies that I couldn’t quite bring myself to overlook. This Film Critic Hulk essay touches on some of the issues that bothered me, and offers an interesting theory about what might have gone wrong.

* Speaking of Film Critic Hulk, if you aren’t already a fan, you should be. Here’s a nice archive post linking to all his greatest hits. Some good pieces to start out with: Why you should never hate a movie (applies to novels, too); Why the Campbellian “Hero’s Journey” is a lousy template for storytelling; and an amazing explication of What the hell is really going on in Mulholland Drive.

* If you’re looking for something different to rent on Netflix, check out Errol Morris’s documentary Tabloid, a bizarre true-life tale about a Mormon missionary kidnapped by a former beauty queen. If you’re not already familiar with the case, you may want to avoid spoilers—Lisa and I went into it cold, and part of the fun was guessing at what point the story was going to stop getting weirder.

* My pal Neal Stephenson will be appearing in Kane Hall at the University of Washington tomorrow night at 7:30 PM to promote his new book, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing. Paul Constant will be interviewing him.

* The Curiosity landed safely on Mars last night. It was fun following the collective nerdgasm on Twitter, but I have to confess, having experienced Viking as a kid, I’m feeling strangely jaded. The space probe I really want to see before I die is an ice-fishing expedition to either Europa or Enceladus. In the meantime, Hollywood, how about a remake of Capricorn One?

* Moose Snow leopard and squirrel. Bonus video: A goat smaller than a house cat. Thanks, evolution!

Alif the Unseen

“An ambitious, well-told, and wonderful story. Alif the Unseen is one of those novels that has you rushing to find what else the author has written, and eagerly anticipating what she’ll do next.”

That would be me, blurbing G. Willow Wilson’s awesome debut novel, which features an Arab-Indian computer hacker (Alif), his too-good-for-him-by-half sidekick Dina, a vampire named Vikram, and an ancient, djinn-authored text called The Thousand and One Days.

You can read more about Alif here and here. Or you can just show up tonight at Elliott Bay Book Company, where Wilson will be kicking off her publication tour with a reading and signing. (Event starts at 7 PM).

CLANG Kickstart update

My friends at the secret clubhouse are already more than halfway to their goal of $500,000 to fund a virtual sword-fighting game, and they’ve released another video to help draw in more investors. This one features a capitalist in a giant hamster wheel:

More info about CLANG can be found on the Kickstart page, here.

In other Neal Stephenson related news, Joe Cornish, the director of Attack the Block, has been hired by Paramount to do a film adaptation of Snow Crash. Woot!

Prometheus

Some assembly required.

Lisa and I saw Prometheus last weekend. I found it to be an incoherent hot mess, but an entertaining one. Lisa’s reaction was more one-sided. She came out of the theater quoting Ripley from Act 1 of Aliens: “Did IQs drop sharply while I was away?”

Some thoughts:

* Critics have had a field day pointing out the movie’s many plot-logic holes and absurdities (if you haven’t seen it yet, this video from Red Letter Media is hilarious), but there are a couple I noticed that I haven’t heard anyone else mention. Even without aliens, the discovery of an Earth-sized planet with an almost breathable atmosphere—practically move-in ready—is, or ought to be, an amazing find, and an incredible return-on-investment for the paltry trillion dollars that we’re told the Prometheus expedition cost. Yet nobody in the film seems to realize this. Corporate ice queen Charlize Theron, who should be plotting to secure the rights to this huge hunk of real estate, instead just wants to go home: “God, I hope we don’t find anything.”

There’s also the Luke-just-happening-to-crash-in-Yoda’s-backyard problem. Maybe I missed the dialogue handwave that was meant to explain it, but I thought it was awfully convenient how the ship entered the planet’s atmosphere within sight of the relatively tiny alien base. I was also struck by how everyone on the ship seemed to assume this was the only alien base. When they found the dead alien, and Charlize was all “Oh well, they’re extinct, mission failed,” nobody thought to point out that there was a lot more to the planet than this one valley.

One reason you get these lapses, of course, is that interstellar adventure stories, even the ones billed as “hard SF,” are almost always set in a radically scaled-down universe much closer in size to the pre-scientific Christian cosmos than the vast cosmos we actually live in. So planets become single-biome stage sets, and the gulf between the stars becomes just another long commute. A related irony is the tendency of such stories to evict God from the universe and then immediately replace Him with highly implausible God-like aliens.

* Speaking of highly implausible God-like aliens, “Tracking Down Your Creator So You Can Interrogate Him” is a rich story trope, but I think Blade Runner made much better use of it. My favorite part of Prometheus—and what could have been the core of a much stronger film—was Robot David’s repeated attempts to point out that humans are themselves Engineers (they even share the same DNA!), so if they want to know what their creators were thinking, they could just try introspection. I’d have done more with this, and I’d also have done more to tease out David’s true nature. It’s all very well and spooky to have Weyland say that David has no soul, but what does that really mean? Is it true David has no emotions, or is that just something he’s programmed to say so people will be comfortable treating him as an object? Also, slightly off-topic, but what’s David’s legal status, and how was that legal status historically determined? (I actually find it rather surprising that he wouldn’t be regarded as a person with rights.)

The biggest disappointment of the film, for me, was the failure to develop Shaw’s religious beliefs in any way. She’s nominally Christian (I’m guessing Some Kind of Protestant), but I have no idea what she actually believes about God or Jesus or the afterlife or her place in the universe, or how any of that relates to her obsession with the Engineers. One way to bring this stuff out would be to have her talk to David about it. A smart theological dialogue between a human anthropologist and an android would be very much in keeping with the theme of the film, and a lot more compelling than the shallow riff on Erich von Däniken we actually get.

* Re: the tie-in to Alien, I liked the idea of the Engineers being bioweapon designers who got killed by one of their own creations. But the “surprise” appearance of the alien at the end, besides contradicting what we know about the aliens’ life-cycle, is needless overkill. Trust the audience to get it: Let the black goo be one type of bioweapon, and leave it as an unstated conclusion that the alien is a different bioweapon.

* “This medical pod is calibrated for male patients only” is a great laugh line, but ultimately doesn’t make sense. And the last time I saw someone recover from post-operative shock that quickly was in Logan’s Run.

* Lisa asks: “Why do people in the future use big bandages for underwear?” My best guess: because Noomi Rapace and Charlize Theron had no-nudity clauses in their contracts, and wrapping women in gauze improv-wear that looks like it might fall off at any moment is an effective means of suggesting nudity. (See also: Milla Jovovich in The Fifth Element.)

“Hey, dude, my eyes are up h-… Oh, never mind.”

* Idris Elba: “Hey Charlize, wanna fuck?” Charlize Theron: “With you? Ew.” Idris: “Hey Charlize, are you a robot?” Charlize: “OK, let’s fuck.”

Look, they’re both incredibly attractive human beings, and I’d love to watch them have sex in 3D, but come on. He’s really going to hit on his boss, a woman who up to now has shown no sign of having a sense of humor or play? And she’s going to say yes because… she needs to prove she’s a real girl? Much more likely: She hits on him, because she’s in the mood, because she can do whatever she likes, and because she doesn’t care about those two idiots lost in the storm.

* Also on the subject of Idris, it’s nice that his men love him enough that they’re willing to die with him, but it’s ridiculous for all three men to sacrifice themselves. “All due respect, you’re not a very good pilot, captain,” haha, but how good a pilot do you need to be to aim for the big alien ship and step on the gas? Given that the gentlemen in question are all different ethnicities, and given the other quasi-Bibilical imagery in the film, I couldn’t help wondering if this was meant to be some sort of weird allusion to the Three Magi. (“And lo, after the Virgin Barren Mary gave birth via robotic C-section, the Kings of the East came bearing gifts of gold, kamikaze, and myrrh…”)

* I could go on, but most of my other observations/critiques (“Run sideways, goddamnit!”) have already been made elsewhere. Of the other Prometheus reviews I’ve seen, I thought this Film Critic Hulk piece was especially interesting. And I love this infographic.

Two cooking experiments from the cutting room floor

In working through my email backlog, I came across some photos I’d sent myself from IPad2 of a couple cooking experiments I did back in February while Lisa was away for the weekend. I’d meant to blog about them at the time, but got distracted by The Mirage book tour.

First up is squid-ink risotto, using the Risotto Nero Alle Seppie recipe from Judith Barrett and Norma Wasserman’s Risotto. I scored the squid ink packets at Uwajimaya.

The recipe is pretty straightforward. It’s a classic risotto incorporating squid ink and chopped up squid, and not much else. Which is ultimately the problem. The ink imparts a cool black gloss to the dish but not much actual flavor (or maybe it’s just too subtle for my palate), and while I love squid rings and tentacles they aren’t very substantial, so you end up with a dish that’s 98% arborio rice.

Compared to the risotto I usually make, which includes sausage and a slew of vegetables, it just doesn’t measure up. But I love the look.

Experiment #2 was stuffed lamb hearts:

I got the recipe from Fergus Henderson’s The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating. You start by trimming away the inedible bits of vein sticking out the top of the heart, then fill the heart chambers with a stuffing made of bread crumbs, onion, garlic, sage, red wine, and butter or duck fat. Wrap the hearts in bacon, and put into an ovenproof dish:

The dish is then filled with chicken stock, covered in aluminum foil, and put into a 350°F oven for two and a half hours.

Serve with appropriate music:

As I recall, it was almost ten o’clock by the time this came out of the oven, by which point I was too tired and hungry to get a better photo. Sorry.

Heart is muscle meat, so the flavor is about what you’d expect, but the texture has a weird uniformity to it, like something pressed in a mold. Also, the heart chambers are small and tapered, so if you start cutting from the bottom you have to go a fair way up the heart before you hit stuffing, and further still before you get a good stuffing-to-heart-wall ratio. So, not bad, exactly, but odd, and probably not worth the trouble unless you’re looking to check lamb heart off your bucket list. I do wonder whether beef heart would be different, since it’s so much bigger. Maybe next time.

In which my friends try to Kickstart a swordfighting video game

When I’m not in total writer introvert mode, I occasionally hang out with this Western martial arts group whose members gather in a secret location to (a) hit one another with blunt objects and (b) hack up innocent pop bottles with sharpened versions of those same objects.

Although hitting one another remains the group’s core mission, over the years there have been spinoff projects, such as The Mongoliad. One of the group’s long-term goals has been the creation of an accurate (and fun) Western martial arts simulator, aka a swordfighting video game that doesn’t suck. As group founder Neal Stephenson explains above, they’re finally ready to get to work on that, so they’re doing a Kickstarter campaign to raise $500,000 in funding.

The game’s working title is CLANG. You’ll find more details on the CLANG Kickstarter page, here. The funding period runs through July 9, and as of this posting they’re already more than a fifth of the way towards the half-million-dollar goal.

(N.B. As was the case with The Mongoliad, I’m not directly involved in the project. At least, not yet. But you can be sure I’ll be dropping by the clubhouse to help playtest the game prototype.)

Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles (and other recent Netflix picks)

Though the title makes it sound like a horror movie, Resurrect Dead is actually a documentary that follows three amateur investigators as they attempt to track down the source of a series of strange plaques that, beginning in the 1980s, were found embedded in the asphalt of the streets of Philadelphia and numerous other cities in the U.S. and South America. I found the trio’s obsession with solving this admittedly trivial mystery endearing, and I could totally relate to the mix of gratification and letdown they felt when, having finally gotten their answer, they were forced to ask, “OK, now what?” Recommended for fans of urban mythology and historical arcana.

Some other offbeat titles worth checking out:

The People vs. George Lucas — Ninety minutes of impassioned commentary from folks who are certain that Han fired first. I especially like the part where fans describe their five-stages-of-denial reaction to watching The Phantom Menace: “I saw it like seventeen times before I could finally admit how bad it was.”

Cropsey — Documentary about a real-life boogeyman who haunted the grounds of the abandoned Willowbrook Mental Institution on Staten Island. Bonus for Richard Price fans: Willowbrook is clearly the inspiration for the William Howard Chase Institute in the novel Freedomland, and there is a real “Friends of Kent” volunteer group (actually, it’s the Friends of Jennifer) that searches for missing children.

Between the Folds — A film about modern origami and its practitioners. My interest in what the interviewees was saying started to flag around the half hour mark, but the actual origami sculptures, some of which require hundreds of folds to produce, remained amazing throughout.

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame — And now for something completely different, a martial arts/sleuth story mash-up, set in 7th-century imperial China. Watch the trailer here.