“In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant…. My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known—no wonder, then, that I return the love. “
As you may have gathered from some of my past writing, I’m a big Neal Stephenson fan. He is one of my favorite authors. I was discussing with Marco the other day how when reading, say, the fifth Harry Potter book, it felt like Rowling’s editor needed to step in and convince JK to tighten it up a bit. But with Stephenson, even when he’s plowing into a chapter-long tangent, you don’t mind, because he takes you interesting places. That’s not to say that Rowling is not a talented writer, but the voice that Stephenson writes with is just on a different, more stylistic level. His sometimes indulgent asides are what make him so much fun.
I’d like to talk about a concept of punishment he puts forth in his novel Anathem. It’s called the Book. A brief primer: Anathem takes place in a world similar to our own, but where scholars live a quasi-monastic life of simple means behind the walls of big stone concents, cut off from the rest of society for a period of one, ten, 100 or 1000 years. This separation allows the “avout,” as they are called, to dedicate their lives to scholarly work without distraction or interruption. While there are your typical chores and kitchen duty that can be assigned to reprimand bad behavior, there is also the Book. When an avout needs sterner discipline, the administrators can “throw the Book” at them.
The idea of the Book, as the main character Erasmas explains it, is to punish the mind of the wayward avout. It’s 12 chapters long, filled with inane, inaccurate and possibly insane content that must be memorized and tested against. Imagine a mathematician being forced to learn and apply false proofs, or a writer who must memorize incorrect definitions. The Book is designed to poison the mind, taking a sledgehammer to the foundations of an avout’s critical thinking and logical faculties. And each chapter is exponentially harder than the one before. In the novel, it’s said that only 3 men ever completed all 12 chapters, which took a lifetime, and they were all thoroughly insane when they finished. That the avout have dedicated themselves to learning makes it all the more heinous a punishment to them, as they are forced to corrupt their minds and waste their time working counter to their own life’s work.
One example Erasmas gives is a chapter full of nursery rhymes that almost, but do not quite rhyme. Another is five pages of the digits of Pi. In the novel, he is assigned the first five chapters as penance, which takes him several weeks to complete. And the idea is that, if you get in trouble again, you could get assigned even more. It is suggested that going higher can permanently damage one’s ability to process and organize information effectively.
I mention all this as prelude to my latest movie review:
Surely, if the Book were real, Chapter 6 would be the shooting script to Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon. And the less said further the better.
So August Bravo tweets at me last night: “super 8 didn’t live up to my expectations but was still pretty good.”
It made me wonder, why do we go through life judging things based on our expectations? Obviously, there are a lot of low-level heuristic reasons for this in terms of everyday brain processing. But why do we do this for movies, books, events, personal experiences? It’s tempting to say this is a modern age phenomenon. That we didn’t do this before the internet. I mean, did people in Colonial America really walk around saying “man, that play didn’t live up to my expectations. The town cryer totally over-hyped it”? But I’m hesitant. Any time you start thinking that anything new is happening in society, you’re probably going to be wrong. Just ask the lorites. Still, the internet has a way of amplifying the echo chamber in ways that didn’t used to be possible.
The first time I can remember this sort of “didn’t live up to the hype” attitude permeating culture was when the Seinfeld finalé aired. Not that this didn’t happen beforehand, but this is when I started to notice. So Much Hype, they would all say, and the show had Failed To Live Up To It. Soon, this way of thinking seemed to spread to practically any form of entertainment or news event. Y2K? Overhyped! Star Wars Prequel? Didn’t meet my expectations. New Franzen book? HYPED! And so on.
But why does hype matter? Why do we go through life with the need to judge entertainment and events against our expectations? Why is it no longer sufficient to just say “I thought X was okay, but not great.”
The answer probably lies somewhere is the middle of modern internet shared culture, man’s fear of being made a fool, and the apparent need for everyone to have an opinion about everything. I guess it’s easier to talk about yourself and what you wanted from something rather than to articulate a critical viewpoint on it.
I would just posit this: it’s no way to live. Stop thinking about the hype. Ignore the hype. Don’t worry about whether your expectations are too high or too low, because in the end, nobody cares what you thought you would think, and you shouldn’t either. Just take it as it comes. (editor’s note: that’s what she said)
I really liked Super 8. Not a perfect movie by any means. Not a classic. And that’s okay. I can’t even remember the last time I saw a movie like this. Visual storytelling! Steady pacing! Kids who act like kids, not precocious one-liner machines or dead weight! People call this Spielbergian, but I feel like this is a disservice to both Spielberg and JJ Abrams. There was a time, lets call it “the 80s,” when this is what tons of movies looked like. They weren’t just a handful of CGI set pieces strung together by the weakest of scripts with lowest common denominator humor. Sure, maybe the idea wouldn’t be that groundbreaking or original, but at least they made some movies that weren’t remakes, reboots, sequels or adaptations back then. I miss this kind of movie. There should be more like it.
Also, Elle Fanning is ridiculously good in this. Worth seeing it just for her. Star-making.
This is what August Bravo thought. (editor’s note: no, we don’t know what he’s talking about either.)
August Bravo: Ok, I’ll get this off my chest first. The teaser for Super 8 had me really excited to see this movie. JJ Abrams could literally touch my bowel movement and make it into art, so I knew this would be an astonishing movie with some mediocre(ha) special effects.
The great thing about a teaser, especially like the one for Super 8 which I thought was just a working title, is that they say nothing. Ideas are populating your mind.
Naturally, I’m thinking Cthulhu.
Naturally, I’m wrong. How much is this guy going to fuck with us(me)? It’s cool, because it was still very awesome. Not as awesome as I’m thinking in my head because teasers let the mind wander. While most aren’t this broad, people can’t help but think of things beyond their imagination. Why else release a teaser trailer? Because they don’t have enough content to fill a whole trailer? Well yeah, probably. But they want to give the audience a ride. They want their expectations to be high.
And then with the full trailer, they want to smash all your Cthulhu-loving dreams and just show you it’s a movie about some kids with a camera. Albeit, still a very very good movie, with a very meaningful(aliens!!) plot. But audiences expect nothing and something. And I’m sorry that with Abrams I expect everything.
So what if it wasn’t Cthulhu, I still thought it would be something more. Yeah, it would have been cornier if it was more about (spoiler alert!) aliens, rather than having it very down to Earth. But I’m into bad movies. I think expectations are what get the movie going, the audience going. I’ll end it with this. Don’t put practically nothing in your teaser if you don’t want me to dream big.
As far as expectations go, I set mine at an all-time low and I’m generally never disappointed. Generally.
A bootleg look at the trailer for David Fincher’s upcoming adaptation of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Finally. Perfect timing too since I was just watching The Social Network again tonight with a friend. A NSFW work trailer (because of Rooney Mara nudity) for “the feel bad movie of Christmas.” I’m definitely excited.
Also, That’s Karen O’s voice on the cover of the Led Zeppelin song, which is an interesting addition to the soundtrack. And what do you think of Rooney Mara’s look as Lisbeth Salander?
That’s a short film entitled Ollie Klublershturf vs. the Nazis, written by Lost‘s Damon Lindelof and directed by Skot Bright. It features a few famous faces such Chris Hemsworth (who’s now Thor in Thor, and was Kirk’s dad in the Star Trek reboot), George Segal, Rachel Nichols, Norman Reedus, and Samm Levine. IO9 posted it the other day and I was excited because I hadn’t actually realized it had been produced. It’s about a little boy genius who invented a time machine and is trying to stop the Nazi scum who’ve infiltrated his family dinner in an attempt to steal his device. It’s silly but good fun.
Anyway, I had heard of it before because I remembered reading an interview with Lindelof about the origin of his being paired with J.J. Abrams to write the Lost pilot, which ABC gave them after it let go of Jeffrey Lieber (but kept his initial concept about a group of strangers crash landing on a mysterious island, hence his name appearing as one of the creator’s of the show). The gist of the story is essentially that Abrams was intrigued by the idea, and already had a deal in place with the network, but didn’t really want to do it on his own, so he needed to find another writer to work with and whom he could work with. Along came Lindelof, with the script for this short film being his audition piece, and history was made.
The pictures in this post are from this awesome collection of covers to the various editions of the novel and the two film adaptations of Lolita. Some really interesting design work there, ranging from the incredibly boring to the incredibly tantalizing.
“Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.”
-Vladimir Nabokov, interviewed in The Paris Review.
In the dream, it was the end of the world, or, well, it was the last night on Earth, and the following morning it was all going to end. In fire and flame, buried and suffocated in ash, or via instantaneous evaporation into total nothingness… the how I didn’t know. Things are vague in dreams. They change moment to moment and you just feel things, just know them. And I felt like it wasn’t this year, not 2011, but maybe it was next year, or maybe it wasn’t.
In the dream, some people had known that the end of was coming for a long time. The crazy people, we called them and always had, but they were the ones who had been having the dreams for years now. That’s how we all knew, every living thing on the planet, I mean, that’s how we knew that it was expiring the following morning: we had dreams. Most of us started having them about six months before that final night. In the dreams we were told that our time was finite and we woke up with the certainty of it. The sad, cold certainty of it.
We knew from the dreams and from intuition that most wouldn’t accept this, that there would be fights and attempts to stop it and plans concocted to spirit away or just generally save the human race, and that every effort must be made. But from the dreams we knew that all those plans would come up with nothing, all those efforts would be ultimately fruitless, and in the end… it would come down to the simple question of how would you want to spend your last night alive?
In the dream I had last night, I had tried to get in touch with my friends, but they were all on the other side of the world from me. Whoever they were and wherever I was, they were somewhere else. They had lives to finish living and people to wrap their existence up with. It was just me, me by myself, just as it had always been. And I was thirsty with nothing to drink in the house, so I went to a bar. There were strangers there living like there was no tomorrow, which was fitting because there would be no tomorrow, and everyone was laughing and talking and loud and very, very drunk. A band was playing. It felt like a celebration. The band wasn’t that great, but for the occasion, they were amazing. The music was so loud, so perfect. It felt like it wasn’t just coming from their instruments and their speakers and souls, but that it was coming from inside me. And they were playing this song:
This morning I woke up and the sun was shining. Dogs were barking down the street, my neighbor was mowing his yard, and car alarms were going off somewhere. And I had to pee really, really, really bad. For the briefest of moments, beyond anything else that could possibly be going on, it just felt good to be alive.
Mad linkage:
Above: Katie West summer print sale.
“In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant…. My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known—no wonder, then, that I return the love. “
Harry Potter’s favorite magic potion is booze.
from here.
Food prices will double
To the blogger who thinks
The man most likely to take top military job
Ayn Rand’s first love and mentor was a sadistic serial killer
