Back off, Montag!

Piss Tam off any more than she already is, and you might not live long enough to worry about the Mechanical Hound.

Personally, I have a large stash of old books of all stripes, including lots and lots of children's books. But what about the next generation? What are they supposed to read, Mama Voted for Obama! and a picture book with sissy, sparkly vampires in it?
Won't someone please think of the children?

Worst Book Ever?

Maybe.

My wife got me a pile of old books the other day. She often does this, because she knows I go through them rapidly and my tastes are eclectic to put it kindly. This means there are hits and misses and it's hard to predict which is which, but she's brought me some beauties over the years.

This is not one of them:

Notice anything odd there? She picked it up because it looked like an anthology of classics, which I'd bet is what it was supposed to look like . . . but notice how many classics. One hundred one? How many pages do you think are in this book?








Hmmm . . . . I think I'm beginning to
see how they managed it. Ten pages for Tom Jones . . . nine pages for Ivanhoe . . . and only eight pages for Anna Karenina. Now, I haven't read Tom Jones or Ivanhoe (yes, a blogger is allowed to admit that there is a classic book he has not read) but I really enjoyed Anna Karenina. What I'm having a hard time envisioning is how anyone could pretend to understand it when it's been cut down to eight pages in length. Tolstoy couldn't have written an eight-page description of poor Anna brushing her teeth without giving himself a stroke. How is this supposed to work?

I recently re-read Fahrenheit 451. I doubt many of my readers have not also read this work, but the quick version is this: in a dystopian future, Guy Montag is a fireman who is paid to burn books instead of putting out fires. People live mad, frantic, unthinking lives where nothing matters except fast, loud, mindless fun. But Montag can feel something missing . . .
When I was a child, I thought it was a good story with the fatal flaw that the firemen were a heavy-handed contrivance; they made the story hard to believe, because they were so unnecessary. What were they there for? Reading it now, I realize that's the whole point. As Captain Beatty says, the firemen really aren't necessary; they just make big fires in the night as entertainment for the people who need that "real world" edge to their drama. The censorship of any real ideas that might put people off their appetite for bread and circuses is accomplished by the people themselves, who choose to ignore those ideas so the fun can continue. The ideas they ignore so studiously could be expressed on their giant televisions or their tiny seashell radio earbuds (the technological aspects seem a lot more prescient today than the last time I read this, too, as I mow the law with an Ipod and my neighbors are carting out the box from their new 194" TV.) The whole thing started, Beatty said, with dumbing down the literature, the drama, the cinema and the news to a sort of bland pudding.

This book is an example of the bland pudding . . . and the weirdest thing is Armstrong's introduction, where he holds forth for several pages about the importance of being able to discuss Tom Jones and Moby Dick at cocktail parties. He's careful to note that the "false expertise" of the man who has only skimmed such works is useless . . . but his book is different, because it will keep you from wasting your time reading a bunch of junk you think you like. These are the novels that the collective wisdom of the great critics has decreed that you will enjoy . . . these are the novels that the collective wisdom of the great critics has decreed that you must be able to quote or at least nod knowingly about in order to get that middle-management slot at the insurance company. In short, if you're the sort of insufferable boor who has no chance of ever understanding why people enjoy any of these stories, you'll love this book.

Lineada, the New Blog on the Block

There's a new blogger out there, and, perhaps inevitably . . . . he's pimping a book.

He's also my son, Donovan, and he turned 13 yesterday, but don't let that fool you. He's got an epic novel under construction (working title: The Vampyre War Saga) which he'll tell you is "about love, betrayal, friendship, blood, war, and secrets." I should warn you that Donovan's vampyres are not sparkly, hunky, vegetarian teen idols. Donovan's vampyres live in the Shadow Realm, sort of an older Earth connected to our own dimension at only one point in London. They don't make friends with humans; they're quite clear on their place in the food chain, which may come from living in a place with a river made up entirely of human blood.

The "hero" of the book is Aethulwulf, both prince and sorcelock of the Vampyre race, and his antagonist is Theisis, a Vampyre traitor who turned against his royal family in one of those lineage disputes that so often ruin royal family reunions. Of course, when this happens in a Vampyre family, the stakes are a little higher than the standard "Everybody takes their own potato salad and leaves in a huff" that we humans face. The question is, can Aethulwulf and his friends get all the way across the Shadow Realm, cross in and out of the human realm, and make it back through the dragons, werewolves, zombies, giants and all the rest alive?

And if they manage that, and manage it quickly enough to give Theisis a battle before his army can take permanent control of the Shadow Realm . . . . is there any way they can win that battle?

Pirate Sneak Preview

From William: The Worst Pirate Ever, now available at fine booksellers nowhere:

“I do believe our newest volunteer is awake, Travis, and no doubt ready to serve King and country, eh? Run get the captain, that’s a good lad.” The grin more than made up for a slight lack of teeth with a heady mixture of tobacco and rum fumes.

More to come. This project has changed a lot in the last month, but it's starting to come out on paper in story form, so I think the changes have been for the best. We shall see.

Bleg: Domain Name Registration

All you NetLords out there: say there's a domain name I want to register, and I know it's available. Is there a best way to go about that? I see I can just go to GoDaddy and sign up, but I want the best mix of cheap and completely reliable. GoDaddy has commercials, but that's really the only reason I know them. They would let me register the domain in .com and .net for $23 per year. That sounds cheap, but are they reliable? Is anyone else better?

And don't go anywhere when you answer. I'll have hosting issues next.

New Project: Worst Pirate Ever

An idea came to me yesterday while I was sitting in a Hunter-Safety class with my son. I jotted it on my hand so I wouldn't forget it, then promptly forgot it. This morning I was washing my hands while making breakfast and it caught my eye . . . .but it was almost too faded to read. I panicked for a moment, but it did come back to me after some frantic turning-over and tossing aside of all the dusty junk in my head. Today I sat down to write a one-paragraph synopsis for My Bride to read and ended up with several pages of synopsis, notes, and character sketches. I think maybe I've really got a story here if I can execute it. Missy agrees that it's not terrible, although she did suggest that it needs a love interest.

My original concept was aimed at a picture book for very young children, (thus no real use for the love interest) but I think this is going to end up a novel. At the moment I'm thinking it will be aimed at the pre-teen audience, but that could change again. In any case, I was thinking along those lines, and when she said it, it seemed pretty clear what was missing.

Update:
Aw, crud. After I typed this post, I thought I'd better look around and see whether my tagline is in use in other places. Apparently, "Worst Pirate Ever" is a popular t-shirt by Roman Dirge. It seems that there's no book or graphic novel to go along with it, though, just a great image of a pirate skeleton that has clearly met with misfortune. My idea doesn't involve skeletons or the like, and it's a full story--I'm thinking novel--so I think I can safely say it doesn't infringe on his work at all. And apparently there's a line in Pirates of the Caribbean where one character says to another, "You are, without a doubt, the worst pirate I've ever seen in my life." I don't remember it, but OK. It's out there. I don't see how my story could infringe on it, since none of the other elements of POTC are in there except humor and pirates.

I can actually think of a way or two to do the story without that phrase, but that was what popped into my head to get the whole thing rolling.

Monster Hunter International

I got my copy back today; it was in my mailbox at work. I'm guessing that means my coworker is done with it.

That would be the guy I loaned it to last spring. . . . but in his defense, he told me he was very busy and it probably wouldn't get back to me very quickly. He tried to warn me, but did I listen?

You Guys Know Everything!

AmericanMercenary says in Comments that the patch I found in my copy of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man sounds a lot like the 4th Infantry Division's unit patch. I looked it up, and here it is--I guess I have the subdued version, shown here, because the others are bright green. Makes me wonder what the patch was doing there!

Needless to say, not having served, I won't be wearing this. But it's always interesting what you happen across at a yard sale (well, to me, at least) and thanks to my readers I now know what I actually found. Pretty cool.

Timing Is Everything

Joe Allen won the Guess the Book before I had decided what the prize should be. It worked out better than I'd expected, though. I sent him a hot new book from an up-and-coming author, a print-on-demand self-published work though you'd be hard-pressed to tell that from the picture, because the cover graphics and design are better than a lot of "professional" publications. Mr. Oleg Volk had a lot to do with that, although he had a lot of help from some good graphic artists.



When I sent it, though, I didn't know that it would be one of the last of that edition. Within days of my order, that up-and-coming author had been contacted by a major publishing house (I have a guess, but the name of the house is not public yet) and announced the end of production of the self-published edition.

This is not a review, but if you're thinking about getting Monster Hunter International, I recommend it thusly:

I find horror movies boring, I don't read books about monsters, but I love MHI.

I also note that the current version won't be out of print until next week sometime, and the next version may not be on shelves for quite awhile after that. I'm not sayin', I'm just sayin'.

But Joe doesn't have to worry about any of that, because he knew me better than I knew myself, which is a lot less creepy if you just don't think about it.

Whatcha Readin'? Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

I just finished a fascinating book yesterday that I'd never heard of before, and I feel like telling you about it. It's called Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson, and the first thing you need to know is that it isn't "real" autobiography. This seems patently obvious when you read the thing, but when I decided to post about it, I Googled the title and it appears that much very serious scholarship has been dedicated to discovering and explaining why the book was written as it was. I don't disagree with the scholars I read, although it does seem like their conclusions are pretty straightforward stuff.

Anyway, the book was published anonymously in 1912 (The edition I read was the reprint from 1970 and acknowledged openly in an introduction that the book was fictional--it also named Johnson as the author) and purported to be the story of a man born just after the Civil War to a young white Southern aristocrat and a former slave. The father moves the mother and child to Connecticut and the boy progresses to the middle grades in school before he finds out that he is one of the "negroes" in the class (I'll let you read the scene of discovery yourself--it actually mirrors a very old comedy routine, which only makes it nastier.)

I've read some autobiography from that period, like Frederick Douglass' account, but this one comes at things from a different angle. The protagonist has the option, right around the turn of the 20th century, of either using his considerable talents to bring credit to black people in America and thus help "build a race" . . . . . or, on account of his complexion, to pass as a white man and make a pile of money. Most good character-driven fiction comes from putting people into impossible positions like this and forcing them to make choices, and this one works.

The title is a grabber, to be sure. I'd never heard of this book or of Johnson, but I happened to notice the title as I wandered around the public library. If you read it in public, be prepared to discuss it with everyone you meet. I had a very good discussion my dentist between the time she expressed shock at the title and the time I couldn't talk anymore.

Aside from the racial questions he tries to address (always a big deal for an American audience whether it's 1912, 1970 or 2007) the most intriguing part of the narrative is the continuous thread of music--and this is something I haven't read any of the scholars addressing. Johnson was well-known as a composer and musician in New York, and so is his fictional counterpart. As a boy, growing up in Connecticut, he is known as a musical prodigy playing classical music. After he discovers that he's one of the "negroes" at his integrated school, he continues to play that music--but when his mother dies and he makes his way south and then to New York, he discovers rag time music and it becomes his total passion. He believes rag time is one of the only genuine American artistic innovations (it was--it became jazz--but saying so in 1912 was a bold prediction for Johnson) and is proud that it was developed by black musicians. He notes, for instance, that in Paris he heard rag time called "American music" more often than not, while in America it was still widely unknown outside large cities. During this time, when he's trying to make his way as a "negro" but still make a success of himself, he makes a name as a musician by blending rag time and classical music concepts, reinterpreting classical music in rag time style.
Near the end of the narrative, he makes his Faustian deal and decides to "pass." He'll become a white man. What finally seals his fate and makes it impossible for him to go back is falling in love with a beautiful white woman with an amazing singing voice--whom he woos by playing Chopin and his own classical compositions. No more rag time.
Even as the tale ends, the complexity of the choices he's made never lets up. It never becomes simple. At the end, he manages to be happy and regretful at the same time, in a believable way. This is something a lot of authors have their characters say, but it doesn't always ring true. You'll believe it in this story.

Anyway, this is a good read whether you really want to think about all the social implications or not. If you read it, though, he's going to break your heart several times. Don't say I didn't warn you.