STAR TREK Redux, part one.

(Introduction)

:: Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Following the amazing success that Star Trek: TOS became in syndication after the show's initial three-year network run, in the late 1970s the possibility of returning Star Trek to series television was explored, so much so that scripts were written (some of which would later be reworked for other Star Trek series) and casting was done. The entire original crew was to return, with the exception of Leonard Nimoy, who was then in his I Am Not Spock phase. The series, called Star Trek 2, was however abandoned in favor of a big-screen incarnation of the original series. The result was 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a film that overcame a lot of flaws to become a very successful launching of the film franchise.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture is actually a better film than its reputation would indicate. It is the most directly science-fictional of all the films, and aside from the also-much-maligned Star Trek V: The Final Frontier it is the only film in the series that actually deals with Trek's main premise of voyaging into the unknown (although in this case the unknown is voyaging to them). The film occasionally engages the "sense of wonder" that the best SF evokes, and its plot is suitably complex and cinematic in scope. There is actually a great deal of nuance to the story (even if it is a reworking of the idea first explored in the TOS episode "The Changeling"), and thus Star Trek: The Motion Picture improves on repeat viewings.

The film's chief strengths are in its character arcs, and the best parts of the film are the early scenes, which establish the mystery of the V'Ger cloud, the threat it poses, and the hasty gathering of the Enterprise crew. James T. Kirk, who has now become an Admiral, pretty much steamrolls his way into command again, with occasionally embarrassing results as it turns out that he doesn't know as much about the new Enterprise as he should; his clashes with the displaced Captain Decker form the backbone of the main plot's eventual resolution. The other main character arc is Mr. Spock, who as the film begins is attempting to complete the Vulcan ritual that purges all remaining emotion from him. He is contacted by an alien intelligence, however -- the V'Ger cloud -- which, like him, is seeking answers to unanswerable questions. Thus, Spock is very cold throughout much of the film -- until the end, when he reaches a kind of epiphany. At one point, he weeps openly, a startling character moment for the steadfast Vulcan.

The film's other strengths are in its special effects (except for one terrible effect, the "shaft of light" probe that appears on the bridge of the Enterprise and kills Lt. Ilia) and in its music score, an epic creation by Jerry Goldsmith. Goldsmith's music more than makes up for a number of effects sequences that go on too long....which leads to the film's biggest fault, its pacing.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture is one of the most unevenly-paced films I have ever seen. (Pacing problems would become something of a theme in the remainder of the Star Trek series; from my point of view, only two of the films don't suffer from pacing difficulties.) The opening is tense and dramatic, with palpable sense of menace and mystery; but then we almost forget about the mystery entirely as we watch the Starfleet Command scenes, with the five-minute Enterprise flyover which, despite all of his love affairs, is the closest we ever come to witnessing James T. Kirk having an orgasm. The tension is re-established somewhat when the V'Ger cloud destroys the Epsilon Nine space station, but then we're back into Enterprise test-flight stuff, in addition to the introduction of Lt. Ilia (Persis Khambatta, whose performance in the film improves later on when her character is actually replaced by a robot). There is a failed warp-drive incident, confrontations between Kirk and Decker, Kirk and Dr. McCoy, Kirk and Decker again, Spock's arrival, another warp-drive test -- and only then does the Enterprise reach the mysterious cloud. This is followed by some really interminable effects shots as Our Beloved Starship flies into the cloud, interspersed with reaction shots of the crew. There is some sense-of-wonder here, but the effect dissipates under the weight of continual effects stuff. The film's story does not so much ebb-and-flow as it starts-and-stops. It proceeds in fits, with "character" scenes taking place when the plot should be moving forward quickly (another fault which would rear its head in later Star Trek films). The film does not necessarily need to be shorter, but its structure should have been more evident. The result is an entertaining, but maddeningly meandering, film.

:: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Despite the somewhat frosty reception that Star Trek: The Motion Picture received, it did enough business to generate a sequel, although the reins were turned over to a new producer, Harve Bennett. Bennett knew nothing about Star Trek, so he did what a good Vulcan would do under the circumstances: he watched every single episode of Star Trek: TOS. One episode in particular intrigued him: "Space Seed", in which the Enterprise encounters a prison-ship in deep space that had been launched from Earth in 1996 with a group of genetically-engineered criminals on board, whose leader was a charismatic and megalomaniacal man named Khan (played by Ricardo Montalban). After averting a near take-over of the Enterprise by these people, Captain Kirk decides to deposit Khan and his followers on an unexplored planet, Ceti Alpha V, where they will be allowed to do as they will with the resources that they can coax from the world. After they are taken away, Spock says something like, "It would be fascinating to return here in twenty years and see what has sprouted from the seed planted today." That's literally what Star Trek II does. Unfortunately, it is revealed that Khan's exile took a disastrous turn when the planet next door exploded, causing his own planet to shift orbit, thus destroying the planet's ecosystem except for a rather nasty beastie with a taste for the human brain.

So, Star Trek II is a revenge story that begins when Khan manages to do what he failed to do twenty years before: take over a Federation starship, the Reliant. He then begins a hunting mission, with his prey being the Enterprise -- which is now an old ship being used only for training purposes. Also stirred into this mix is "Project Genesis", a scientific project whose aim is to create a torpedo which can convert a dead planet into a planet with a viable biosphere -- supposedly a device to be used to alleviate problems of population and food supply, but can also be used as a doomsday weapon. Thus begins a long cat-and-mouse game between Kirk and the Enterprise and Khan on the Reliant, ending in an extended sequence inside a nebula as the two ships seek each other out. I don't think I'm revealing anything shocking when I disclose that Mr. Spock ends up sacrificing his life so that the Enterprise can escape destruction.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is often ranked first in the series, in terms of quality. I don't rank it that high, but it is definitely a much stronger film than Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Its story is tighter, its characters more sharply drawn, the performances are all first-rate, and it features some crackling action sequences. (Who doesn't feel a thrill when the Enterprise finally gets the drop on Khan in the end, by taking advantage of his failure to think in terms of three dimensions in space?) It also features an excellent music score by James Horner that uses melancholy, sweeping melodies to suggest a kind of "seafaring" tone, which is in keeping with the film's nautical literary subtext (Khan keeps alluding to Moby Dick, for instance). The character arcs focus squarely on Kirk, who is suffering a mid-life crisis. We also meet the one woman -- aside from Edith Keeler -- whom Kirk has ever truly loved, Dr. Carol Marcus, who also happens to have Kirk's son working with her on the "Genesis Project". Star Trek II gets a great deal right: the introduction of the new character Saavik, for example; Kirstey Alley plays her with a wonderful sense that she does not know what her proper place really is. Half Vulcan and half Romulan, she had the most potential of any new character ever introduced in the Star Trek films. I also cannot say enough good things about Spock's death scene; from the moment when Spock considers his options and concludes there is really only one option and accordingly leaves the bridge to the conclusion of his funeral, everything is perfectly played -- and the final conversation between Kirk and Spock is a sublime moment, a wonderful synthesis of good writing and pitch-perfect acting by Shatner and Nimoy.

I do have a couple of difficulties with the film, though. Although its pacing is far better than that of its predecessor, it still suffers from a bit of uneven-ness -- especially in the scenes in the tunnels of the Regula planetoid, scenes which meander a bit (although they do feature the most wonderful Shatner moment in Star Trek history, when he nearly pops a vein from his forehead as he screams "KHAN! KHAN! KHAN!" into his communicator). The scene where Captain Terrell and Commander Chekov happen upon Khan and his followers really takes too long to play out, even if it does end in surprisingly horrific fashion.

My other problem with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is that it really isn't that good a sequel. Not to Star Trek: The Motion Picture, that is, but to TOS episode "Space Seed". The Khan in the episode is a man who believes he is destined to build an empire and to rule it; he even quotes Milton: "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven." I find it highly unsatisfying that he should end up being an obsessed and homicidal man, bent on nothing more than killing James T. Kirk. I would have liked it better if Khan had actually been able to build a society from nothing, perhaps a society that would come eventually to threaten not Kirk by himself, not just the Enterprise, but the entire Federation. Better, maybe, if the story had been followed up not by the TOS crew, but by the Next Generation crew. I would rather have seen what the seed Kirk planted in "Space Seed" bore at maturity, rather than seeing what happened when it was stunted shortly after gestation. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is, by itself, a good film; but taken as a follow-up to one of TOS's best episodes, it is curiously lacking.

Stay tuned for Part Two....

So now the sniper is threatening children. This is one of those terrifying moments when the disconnect between reality and the world as depicted on television shows is revealed in all its awful glory. It's hard, being spoiled on shows like Millennium and Profiler and CSI, to look on the hunt for this terrible killer and not be utterly incredulous at the apparent lack of any idea of who this person is on the part of the police. He has killed all of these people and still has not committed that "one big mistake" that we're told all criminals eventually make. I still believe that he will make such a blunder, if he keeps killing; but that in itself is the terrible part. We can only catch him if he keeps killing.

I've done a bit of maintenance on the permalinks at left: two blogs that have not been updated in more than two months have been removed (It's All About Books and Dear Owen), and I've added a link in "Notable Dispatches" to my post a few months back about controversial film composer James Horner.

STAR TREK REDUX, introduction.

In the wake of my enormously successful James Bond Redux series of posts (see "Notable Dispatches" at left for links), I've decided to do the same thing with another long-standing film franchise: the Star Trek films. (Of course, "enormously successful" is a relative term for a blog that averages 33 hits per day....)

I've loved Star Trek pretty much all of my life. Some of my earliest memories are of watching episodes of the original series (hereafter referred to as TOS). I used to be so well-versed on Trek: TOS that I could name all of the episodes and give small plot summaries. Sadly, I have forgotten many of them over the years, especially since TOS has vanished from syndicated TV except for certain cable-stations. I was thrilled when The Next Generation came along and I loved it, although I don't think that TNG hit the heights that TOS did on as consistent a basis. TNG was more consistently good than TOS, but while TOS had some amazingly painful episodes (particularly late in its run, with such abominations as "Spock's Brain" and "And the Children Shall Lead"), it had more truly great episodes than TNG. I'm thinking of amazing stories like "Journey to Babel", "The Trouble With Tribbles", "The Menagerie", and of course, the towering classic "The City On the Edge of Forever". TNG was, though, a very worthy addition to Trek lore. TOS was less an ensemble show than the subsequent series, but the whole Kirk-Spock-McCoy dynamic continues to amaze. TNG did more as an ensemble, which has hurt the TNG films somewhat in my view. (I'll say more about that when I get to those films.)



Then, of course, came Deep Space Nine. I just may love DS9 most of all, with the edgy tone that it often achieved and its structure, with long story arcs as opposed to stand-alone adventures. I've always felt that DS9 was tremendously underrated. It achieved a character dynamic that was unique in Trek, even when it added Worf to the mix halfway through its run, and it experimented quite boldly with its storytelling in a way that TNG and Voyager really never did. I'd love to see a DS9 feature film.



Voyager, though, was the least of the Trek shows. Its concept was an interesting one, but it was never employed to tell daring new stories, and was thus a tremendous disappointment. Voyager was probably the purest evocation of Gene Roddenberry's original conception of Trek: "Wagon Train to the stars", with the biggest reliance on the whole "Boldly going where no one has gone before" bit that Trek was about in the first place. How disappointing, then, that Voyager pretty much served up more variations on the "aliens who are really nothing more than humans with odd-looking latex prostheses" bit, along with the worst villains Trek ever conceived: the horrible Kazon, whose hair (or whatever that stuff atop their heads was) never failed to put me in mind of Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons. The lead characters, also, were never really drawn sharply enough to become interesting to me.



(To date I have not been able to see a single episode of Enterprise. I have heard mixed things about it: from what I have heard it is very blatant in its deviation from established Trek history, but then I have also heard that setting continuity aside, it's a fine show. Unfortunately, it was only available on cable channels in Buffalo, and the same applies in Syracuse. As my family has opted out of cable for now, I cannot watch Enterprise.)

Before I get on to the films themselves, I should name my favorite Trek episodes of all time. In no particular order:

TOS: "The City On the Edge of Forever", "The Menagerie", "A Piece of the Action", "Metamorphosis", "The Trouble With Tribbles", "The Gamesters of Triskelion".

TNG: "Yesterday's Enterprise", "Tapestry", "Redemption" (both parts), "Best of Both Worlds" (part one), "Disaster", "The Pegasus", "All Good Things".

DS9: "Emissary", "The Visitor", "Trials and Tribblations", "Blood Oath", "The Quickening".

Voyager: "Caretaker", "Phage".

To be continued….

I watched the first sketch on Saturday Night Live the other night. This was the episode hosted by Senator John McCain. In this one sketch McCain played Attorney General John Ashcroft, appearing on that Chris Matthews show Hardball. The whole thing was funny, with the best moment coming when McCain-as-Ashcroft announced that "Every American will have a barcode on his forehead and a chip in his brain, and those chips will be controlled by this remote control!" whereupon he produces one of those gigantic remote controls that TVs come with these days. I wish I could agree with McCain on more issues, because I genuinely like the guy.

According to this MSN article, the recent troubles in the stock market may signal a boom in the art market, with paintings by the masters going for even more outrageous sums than ever before.

I hadn't planned on taking a weekend off from posting (except for a couple of items that I put up over on Collaboratory); it merely happened that way. Anyhow, my Monday reflections on the NFL and MLB:

:: I actually did not watch the Bills game this week; instead, I went out with the family to enjoy a rare Sunday off together. I did listen to the fourth quarter on the radio, and my jaw dropped when I heard the score: at the time it was 20-10 in favor of the Bills. (The Bills went on to win, 23-10.) I had noted earlier this very week that I did not think that the Bills were in the same class as the Dolphins, and that I expected their lack of strong defense -- which has neither stopped most opponents' running games nor forced turnovers -- to be the major reason why they would lose this week. But, in the immortal words of Chris Berman, "That's why they play the games." The Bills forced six turnovers yesterday (versus four in the previous six games combined), including four interceptions (versus zero in the previous six games combined). They held Ricky Williams, one of the NFL's top running backs, under 100 yards and didn't let him break any runs longer than 14 yards. The one thing they could have done better was move the ball in the fourth quarter with a power running game. All in all, though, a totally surprising and welcome victory. Next week, Detroit -- a bad team that can kill you if you overlook them.

:: There was a lot of scoring in yesterday's games. There were five games in which both teams scored more than twenty points; seven teams scored more than thirty points; and there were four overtime games. Wow. (Of course, one of the games decided in overtime was the Cardinals-Cowboys snoozefest, which the Cardinals won, 9-6.)

:: My pick for NFC Champion, the Philadelphia Eagles, won 20-10 over Tampa Bay. Tampa has a very good defense, but the Eagles' back Duce Staley put up 152 yards rushing, and the Eagles are now a healthy 4-2, leading their division but trailing Green Bay and New Orleans for overall best record in the NFC. (Both those teams are 6-1.)

:: As for my other Super Bowl pick, the Piitsburgh Steelers, tonight's game may make or break their season. Their division doesn't seem to be very good (although Baltimore is showing some real signs of life right now), so this may be a year when 9-7 is enough to win it and get into the playoffs, but the Steelers are 2-3 as they host the 4-1 Indianapolis Colts in tonight's game. The Colts will be a tough test for them. If the Steelers want to be a playoff team and prove that they can beat someone other than the Bengals, they have to win this one.

:: Baseball now. Two games have been played in the World Series. The series is tied at one game apiece. Each team has scored fourteen total runs thus far in the Series. Both games were decided by one run. This Series could end up truly being a Fall Classic.

:: What exactly are those red things the Angels' fans keep banging together, anyway? Apparently they make an amazing amount of noise, but the noise they make doesn't seem to translate well to the TV speaker, because it didn't sound that loud to me.

:: Win or lose, Barry Bonds is having an excellent Series thus far. I hope this silences all his critics who claim that he can't get it done in the postseason.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK





Autograph copy of the Piano Trio in D-Major, op. 70 no. 1, by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827). Currently in the Mary Flagler Cary Music Collection at the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York City.

There is a scene in the film Amadeus where Mozart's wife, Constanze, in a fit of some desperation takes a portfolio of her husband's musical works to Antonio Salieri, the court composer for Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria. She does this because they are in dire need of money, but Mozart is too proud to present his works to the musical "authorities" as is required for certain types of employment. Salieri glances through them and asks if he can keep them, thinking that they are copies. Constanze replies, "Well, he'll miss them. You see, they are originals." Salieri's eyes widen as he looks again at the works in the portfolio: page upon page of handwritten, original music, perfectly laid out in a hand neater than that of some copyists, such that the music could be performed on the spot if need be. As Salieri whispers in his voice-over narration, "It was as if he had been merely taking dictation from God."

How interesting, then, to compare that image -- Mozart's music, perfectly conceived and written on the page with not a note out of place -- with a page of manuscript in Beethoven's hand: Beethoven, who may be the most famous musical figure of all time and the greatest of all classical composers. For Beethoven there was no direct link to the divine; music did not pour from him, already complete and perfect. Beethoven had to experiment. He had to test musical ideas. He had to sketch them out. If Beethoven realized that his music had gone awry, he would heavily scratch out the offending passage and continue composing on the same page. It fits in with the image we have of Beethoven: the tortured soul on the leading edge of Romanticism, trying to defy his growing deafness, conducting his epochal Symphony No. 9 and having to be physically turned toward the audience to see that they were applauding, tearing off the cover of his Symphony No. 3 in rage upon learning that Napoleon had declared himself Emperor, amakening from his death-coma just long enough to shake his fist at the heavens before succumbing in the end.

How miraculous Beethoven's music seems, in the face of such struggle merely to create it.

For some reason, I've been getting a ton of hits lately for people searching Google for explanations of Poe's poem "Annabel Lee". If any of these searchers are college students looking for an easy out on a homework assignment, well, I should say a couple of things:

:: I am a voracious reader who doesn't read enough poetry, which is why I do the "Poetical Excursions". The thoughts that I post there are fairly immediate impressions of a poem that I read (although, in the case of "Annabel Lee", I'd been nursing those thoughts literally for years). I am a lover of the written word and the English language, but those two things do not a scholar make. Do not assume that what I do here poses for scholarship, please oh please.

:: One person actually found me using the words "Cliff notes" in his search terms. The poems that I choose to write about aren't especially difficult works, so I suspect that people searching for that reason might be better served by actually reading the poems and doing their own thinking. Despite what some more brutish teachers of English may convey, the reading and consideration of poetry should be a pleasure, not a pill to be taken before bedtime.

:: Anyone who has any aspirations of being a fiction writer at all should read novels and stories to learn what storytelling is all about. That seems fairly obvious. Less obvious is that anyone who has any aspirations toward writing at all should read poetry -- to learn what the English language is capable of doing.

Weird Convergences:

Sometimes in the course of my weekly TV viewing, I will notice an odd bit of coincidence involving a guest star on a show, or even a bit player in the background. A case in point happened on this week's episode of NYPDBlue, in which Detectives Jones and Medavoy arrive at a murder scene outside a small market run by an Asian-American man. I probably wouldn't have taken any notice of this Asian-American store owner, except for the fact that this actor also appeared in last year's season finale of The West Wing -- in which he played an Asian-American store owner. It was the store where the Secret Service agent played by Mark Harmon was gunned down when he walked into an armed robbery. So, I end up wondering if it's not just the same actor, but maybe even the same store owner, and I'm thinking, "Man, that guy's seen a lot of violence in and around his store lately."

(I believe that this is evidence of my recent increase in my caffeine intake.)

I've joined another community blog, SportsFilter. It's just what the name implies, a grab-bag of sports-related posts and Web-stuff. My first post was a link to this Slate article that is rather harshly critical of college football. Last time I checked, the SportsFilter denizens were giving the article a pretty decent roasting. I'm glad I didn't write it....

Hooray and huzzah! A problem of structure for the next chapter in The Welcomer (a.k.a. "The Novel-In-Progress", "My Current Effort", and "The Damned Thing") finally resolved itself last night. I've been stewing over this for a couple of weeks now. The problem in question whose solution I finally realized was of sufficient annoyance that I was giving serious consideration to omitting the chapter entirely, although I believe the information it contains is really essential to the climax of the story. It's always exciting to overcome a bump in the road.

Steven Den Beste has written an interesting article about how he decides to write about some matters and not about others. It's got me thinking about my own such process.

SDB notes that he often receives e-mails from regular readers of his site who have come across something online or have discovered some issue, and they want to hear his personal take on that subject. (I confess, I did send him an e-mail once, pointing out something that I thought might engage him, but he didn't write about it. I chalked it up to the large number of requests he probably receives, given that his is a fairly high-traffic site, and that he probably didn't find the item I'd sent him particularly compelling.) He offers one particularly telling sentence as to why he writes about the things he does, and why he does not write about the things he does not:

"I don't pick what I write about, it picks me."

I found that fascinating, because it's the same for me. And not just here on Byzantium's Shores, but -- and this may be more important -- for me as a fiction writer.

I am told that a question that nearly all writers get is, "Where do you get your ideas from, anyway?" (Maybe when I'm actually successful someone will ask me that....) My experience is quite a bit like the process that SDB describes in his article: I will happen upon some small thing, maybe an image or an event in everyday life, and a story will spontaneously appear in my mind. I don't sit down and say, "Today I think I will write a ghost story in the M.R. James vein." It's not something that can be turned on or off. Instead, the story will find me -- it will actually present itself, or at least a fairly representative portion of itself, to me and I will write it. The metaphor that Stephen King uses in his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft is that stories are fossils, and as writers we are the paleontologists whose job it is to extricate the fossil from the ground. Keeping the metaphor, a writer's craft isn't taking a blob of clay and shaping it into a dinosaur skeleton, but rather getting that dinosaur skeleton -- already intact and complete -- out of the ground without, say, snapping the shin-bone in two or crushing the skull. So when I reach a point in a story where I realize I've made a wrong turn somewhere, that the story in its current state is not going to work (or even be finishable), I'm like the paleontologist who realizes that further prying on the skeleton from this particular angle with this particular tool is going to cause the thing to break down the middle.

So I don't think that I "create" my stories; instead, they find me and demand that I tell them. The ways that stories have presented themselves to me in the past are interesting. (At least, I like to think that they are.) Here are a few:

:: Once while browsing in the library, I opened some book and a slip of paper fell out. When I picked it up, I saw that it was just one of those little slips that libraries provide for writing down call numbers; some patron had been looking for this book and left their little call-number slip inside it. Nevertheless, I wondered: "What if this slip was actually a letter from someone who died mysteriously many years ago?"

:: I've been a big fan of Gary Larsen's The Far Side for years. In one installment, a man stranded on a desert island has just rubbed Aladdin's lamp. (How he got it is a mystery....) The Genie is standing there, looking annoyed, while the man rubs his chin and says, "Let's see....I've got rhythm, and I've got music....how could I ask for anything more?" I liked the idea of a lamp with a Genie inside coming into the possession of a man who already has his heart's desire, and I wrote the story.

:: My most ghoulish story came about from my connection of the fact that the Nazis conducted terrible experiments on humans in the concentration camps with the fact that the Nazis were also bizarrely interested in the occult.

:: There's a wonderful episode of The Simpsons where Springfield adopts Prohibition and later abandons it. The episode ends with Homer Simpson saying, "To alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, life's problems." So now I'm writing a story where alcohol is really the solution to a town's problems. (Or maybe it isn't; I'm deliberately hedging on the moral POV in this story.)

:: My novel-in-progress is an Arthurian story, which I decided to write when I realized that many authors have treated the "once" part of "the once and future King", but not very many have tackled the "future" part. (It's a two-part work called The Promised King, of which I am nearly finished with the first part, called The Welcomer.)

These are just a few of the stories that have chosen me, out of the infinite possible ones that did not choose me. "Write what you know" is an oft-quoted rule, but it doesn't work very well for me, as it leads me to seeking out the stories instead of allowing them to find me. I don't write all of the stories that knock on my door or whisper in my ear at night. There isn't enough time to get to them all, they're not all equally compelling, and they don't present themselves to me exclusively. (One idea I've been considering for a few months actually shows up in the current issue of Realms of Fantasy, and it's executed beautifully by its author, so I don't know if I will ever tackle that one.) It occurs to me, also, that perhaps the lengthy period of rejection that all writers endure (and which I whined wrote about a few weeks back) is something of an audition period, but not in the usual sense where I'm continually auditioning for editors and first-readers. Maybe I'm continually auditioning for the stories. Maybe all the good stories are gathered somewhere, in some Platonic realm, watching me write and saying amongst themselves, "So, should one of us go let him write us yet?"

I like that image. So, maybe I'll indulge it for a while, and see my daily efforts as my way of putting out the welcome mat and seeing what comes knocking.

BARRY BONDS IS IN THE WORLD SERIES!!!

I don't think that Carl Lewis could have outrun Barry Bonds last night, when Bonds led the charge from the dugout onto the field last night after his San Francisco Giants scored the winning run in the bottom of the ninth to win the National League pennant. It's wonderful moments like that -- watching Bonds finally go to the World Series -- that challenge my cynicism toward Major League Baseball. For one moment last night I was able to forget my fear that baseball will say, "See, this season proves that the small-market teams are able to compete just fine," and that a team that was almost eliminated altogether nearly won the American League pennant, and that baseball's economics have reached a point that one of the richest teams, the Atlanta Braves, could be on the verge of a small fire-sale. For one moment there was only the game's best player, a player who is surely one of the greatest to ever play the game, basking in the joy of attaining a goal that has eluded him through his entire career. Baseball is a game of moments, and this one was wonderful. I only hope that baseball heeds one of the many bits of wisdom from the classic film Bull Durham:

Nuke: Why can't you just let me enjoy the moment?
Crash: The moment's over.

I've been on a weight-loss regimen since the beginning of 2002, combining regular exercise with healthy eating. (None of that goofy "Eat nothing but protein" stuff for me, thank you very much!) I'm happy to report that I've had success with the regimen, which I consider a shift in lifestyle as opposed to "a diet". I've reduced by BMI five points so far, with more to come.

(But just to demonstrate that BMI is a guideline but not a perfect indicator of reality, on a lark I plugged in Bruce Smith's height and weight into the calculator linked above -- and he's got the same BMI as me, right now. Now, if Bruce Smith's total body fat can even be measured in pounds, I'd be surprised -- but a strict reading of his BMI, without regard to his body-type, says that he is "obese". Just a little food for thought....but hey, I've got something in common with Bruce Smith!)

Baseball playoffs, an NFL season starting to take shape and develop its storylines, leaf-peeping, a pumpkin on every doorstep....is there any question that October is the best month of the year?

Anyway, time for my Monday sporting thoughts, in no particular order....

:: I love watching Travis Henry run the football. He's not a "squirming" type of running back, like Thurman Thomas or Barry Sanders were. When those guys broke tackles, it was by some kind of weird contorting process that reminds me of the T-1000 in Terminator 2. When Henry breaks a tackle, though, I'm more reminded of Emmitt Smith in the way he simply keeps his powerful legs churning forward all the time, and he has an amazing sense of balance. Henry is only going to get better as the Bills' young offensive line improves, which it's doing already.

:: However, I have to wonder: what on Earth ever happened to cradling the ball close to your body as you run? Henry's biggest problem is that he fumbles a lot. He's fumbled in every game this year, and it's because he insists on holding the ball at arm's length, windmilling both arms as he runs. This makes for a schizophrenic experience, watching him run: "There he goes! He's through the hole, wow, what a back....OHMYGOD, hold on to the ball!!!!"

:: Another game, another doughnut to pencil into the "Turnovers forced" column for the Bills. When you can't even force an expansion team to turn the ball over, even when that expansion team is starting a rookie at quarterback, you know your defense is in some serious trouble later on....

:: ....with "later on" being next week, when the Bills travel to Miami to play the Dolphins, who I think are the best team in the AFC right now. Buffalo-Miami is one of the better rivalries in the NFL, and right now the pendulum is definitely on the "Miami" side of the clock. I don't see the Bills winning this one.

:: The Vikings are finally in the "win" column, along with the Rams. Hooray. Too bad it took losing Kurt Warner for two months before Mike Martz decided to rely on the best back in football.

:: The Steelers are now on track for the AFC Championship! They blew out the Bengals, and not just anybody can blow out the Bengals. Start paving the road to the Super Bowl, because the Bus is on it! (Oh wait, anybody can blow out the Bengals....)

:: Before the season began, I read some sportswriter's comment to the effect of "Sure, Patriots fans are in love with Tom Brady now, but wait until he has his first three-interception game while Drew Bledsoe is setting passing records for the Bills." I can't remember who said that, but it came to pass yesterday. It's funny how it took NFL teams three years to figure out how to beat Kurt Warner: give him pressure, bump his receivers so the timing routes are screwed up, upset his rhythm, and watch him come back down to earth. It's taken teams under a year to figure out that maybe the same theory could work on Tom Brady. Now that the Patriots are in second-place by a couple of games, they will again have to rely on the late-season swoon by the Dolphins if they want to capture the division. The bad news for the Pats (and the good news for people like myself, who don't like the Pats) is that if there has ever been a year when the Dolphins are unlikely to fall apart in December, this is that year.

:: It looks like the Chargers are for real. The AFC West is a hell of a division.

:: I love gonzo sports statistics. In yesterday's game against the Saints, Washington's first scoring drive covered 75 yards -- 36 yards more than New Orleans' first four scoring drives combined.

:: The Anaheim Angels are in the World Series. I was pulling for the Twins, but....well, the Angels are one of those teams that has been down-on-its-luck for years. This is a team that was one strike away from going to the World Series the last time they made the postseason, in 1986 -- only to have their closer, Donnie Moore, surrender a two-run homer that eventually propelled the Red Sox to the Series against the Mets. In 1992, a character on Seinfeld observed that with all of those planes carrying major league baseball teams all over the country every year, there has never been a crash -- and then the Angels' bus crashed, injuring a bunch of players. And it goes on. This franchise deserves a pennant, and I'm glad they got one. (Although, if they end up facing the Giants, I'll be rooting for them and not the Angels. It's a Bonds thing, you know....)

:: The NHL's seven-month, eighty-game preseason has started, in anticipation of the two-month regular season (which they paradoxically call "the playoffs"). The Buffalo Sabres are off to a thrilling start! I'm not much of a hockey fan; I root for the Sabres out of loyalty to All Things Buffalo, and when they are eliminated I stop paying attention to hockey altogether. Anyhoo, go Sabres!

:: I don't know if this qualifies as sport, but....let's hear it for the new champion of speed crochet!!!

I have added a couple of new blogs under "Other Journeys", at left. I have also added a new section, called "Other Voices Around the Fire", denoting community blogs. Currently I am linking Metafilter (of which I am a lurker) and Collaboratory (of which I am a participant).

Stephen King explores themes of the 1960s, and the effects that decade has had on subsequent years, in his book Hearts In Atlantis. This book is a kind of hybrid work: it is part novel and part short-fiction collection. I use the term "short fiction" loosely; two of the five stories collected here are long enough to be books on their own right, especially the introductory work, "Low Men in Yellow Coats", which apparently forms the basis for the recent film called Hearts In Atlantis. The five stories are fairly self-contained, each having a different protagonist, but those protagonists all share in common some of the same characters who move through their lives. One effect of this construction is that while we often identify the effects that others in our lives have on our own, we don't often consider the effects that people we have never met -- or even known about -- can have on the shape of our lives. So, if the first-person narrator of the second novella ("Hearts In Atlantis") never meets Bobby Garfield (the protagonist of "Low Men In Yellow Coats"), his life is still affected by things Bobby did as a child. This interconnectedness of all our fates seems to be a theme of King's in the entire work.

The stories here are not typical King horror; in fact, only three of them deal directly with any kind of supernatural event. "Low Men In Yellow Coats" is one of those stories where the young kid, whose life could be tilted in any of several directions, is profoundly shaped by the arrival of a somewhat mysterious stranger. Young Bobby Garfield lives alone with his mother, a woman who for one reason or another isn't totally capable of real emotion (his father has passed away as the book begins). He desperately wants a new bike for his birthday, but his mother instead gives him an adult library card -- which he uses under the increasing tutelage of his new upstairs neighbor, Ted Brautigan, one of those older figures who knows many things and is also haunted...both figuratively and literally. I enjoyed this story, even though it is basically The Man Without A Face with a supernatural element; but I must note that the supernatural element is a bit disappointing. The book appears to be a tangential part of King's ongoing Dark Tower series, none of which I've read, so the bits that deal with that part of his story lost a great deal of their significance to me. Better, though, is the fact that Mr. Brautigan's effect on Bobby is not totally positive. In many stories like this, the young kid goes on to be a fine, upstanding young man after the itinerant teacher leaves his life. That's not the case here. The dark forces that King employs so often are not done with Bobby, not at all.

The second novella, "Hearts In Atlantis", has no supernatural element at all. It's the story of a group of college students and their bizarre obsession with the card game "Hearts". These young men want to do nothing but play the game, which takes over their lives even as the events of the 60s -- the Vietnam War, peace protests, et cetera -- spin around them. This story has the kind of feel that King achieved in "The Body" and "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption", and it is quite successful.

Less successful are the remaining stories in the book, although they are not without their charms. "Blind Willie" is the story of a Vietnam veteran who may -- or may not, it seems -- have figured out a scam by which to earn a lot of money, although his reasons for carrying out the scam are not, it turns out, based on selfishness. "Why We're In Vietnam" is a strange kind of ghost story -- I'm not sure I understood it, but I enjoyed its tone and surprising ending. The book ends with "Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling", in which two characters are reunited after many years. Not, as it happens, the characters that I wanted to see reunited; but it's an interesting reunion nonetheless.

Hearts In Atlantis is not a perfect book; its very structure makes it feel uneven, with the three brief tales feeling somewhat insubstantial, following as they do two longer, more "complete" stories. But it is an interesting analysis of the time of the 1960s and the feelings that decade still evokes on those who lived through them. (I missed the 1960s by two years, it turns out.) King writes at one point: "Although we've forgotten the language we spoke in those years...sometimes a word or two comes back....And sometimes, in my dreams and memories..., I smell the place where I spoke that language with such easy authority: a whiff of oranges, a scent of oranges, and the fading smell of flowers."

The greatest offensive player in football history (and a freak-of-nature worthy of an X-Files episode) turns 40 today. Happy birthday, Jerry Rice!

(WARNING: Blatant defiance of my "no politics here" pledge coming up.)

So, for the second time in my life, a President named George Bush is going to take my country to war against Iraq.

I am no expert on such matters, but I see little reason to expect America vs. Saddam, Release 2.0 to be much different than the first. I expect our military to pretty much clobber the Iraqi forces. A worst-case scenario would involve a lot of close-quarter combat within the streets of Baghdad and Iraq's other cities, with the Iraqi military actually deploying the chemical and biological weapons already in inventory against our troops. A best-case scenario would involve the Iraqis themselves, whom some maintain are not as enamored of their dictator President as he would have us believe, rising up to provide our forces with some kind of assist, if not a full-out coup or revolt. In either case, I expect fairly swift victory for US forces -- being secured in less than three months, say -- with the main difference between the best and worst case scenarios being the number of dead Americans and Iraqis.

I've been reading a lot about the coming war, in the Blogosphere on both sides and in newspapers and magazines. I listened a bit (though not much) to the Senate's debate on the war resolution. It's not inaccurate to say that on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I have been pro-war, while I've been anti-war on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. (Sundays, I'm a Bills fan.) The anti-war arguments have struck me as being fairly ineffective -- clinging to an unrealistic view of the world and America's role in it; more derivative of anger at President Bush the Second than anything else; curiously bankrupt in terms of offering options other than outright war. Being anti-war seems to have become something of a reflex for some. (And I'd be dishonest if I didn't admit to sharing that reflex, at least in part.)

The problem I'm having is that if the anti-war arguments are striking me as hollow, the pro-war arguments are not proving convincing, either. It seems to me that the burden of proof should always reside with the people who would send American soldiers into battle, and yet the burden of proof has not been met, not by a longshot. The Administration insists that Saddam is very close to nuclear capability, and yet no real proof is offered -- instead we're shown pictures of places that we think could possibly resemble nuclear bomb-making facilities, or we are given cloak-and-daggerish type arguments (like the inspectors who saw Iraqi soldiers removing boxes of something from the facilities....). The pro-war side constantly invokes 11 September 2001 as a justification, and yet no concrete link of Iraq to Al Qaeda is ever forthcoming, so instead the entire rationale for sending Americans into war is changed: no longer do we require a smoking gun to go to war; instead, it is now sufficient that we suspect the existence of a gun in the first place. The implications for such a paradigm shift regarding war are better examined by persons better versed in such things than I; suffice it to say that I don't find "We have to go to war to stop what we think could conceivably happen at some point in the future" particularly convincing, because there is still no guarantee at all that even if we go to war, what we think could conceivably happen if we didn't now won't happen. We are told that we must go to war because it is the only way we can keep, say, Philadelphia from being obliterated by a terrorist nuke. But what if we go to war, defeat Saddam, destroy every weapon of mass destruction that we find, and then a year or two later Al Qaeda strikes us all the same? Our war with Iraq will have turned out to be useless -- and we will be faced with another war, somewhere, somehow. And I am forced to wonder if we are really, truly prepared to go to war against any country that has any dealings at all with Al Qaeda or some other terrorist state.

So, I am unconvinced that war with Iraq will in any way prevent future September 11's. I am unconvinced that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction are as numerous or as present a threat as the Administration is claiming. And I tire of the Administration's cagey insistence that they have the information, and that we have to take their word for it. "Trust us, we know what we're talking about" is simply not reassuring when we're considering war; and when we ask for the information that would convince us, we shouldn't be satisfied with "We could tell you, but then we'd have to kill you." The burden of proof must lie on those who want to go to war, and it doesn't help when the CIA itself is releasing reports that call into question just how big a threat Saddam really is.

It also does not help when President Bush the Second publicly says things like, "This is the guy who tried to kill my dad." And it doesn't help when Ari Fleischer, the President's spokesperson, publicly states that the whole thing could be avoided if some Iraqi would only assassinate Saddam Hussein. Statements like that make me question our Administration's motives: is this really a war to "make the world safe for democracy" (so to speak), or is this just a bit of unfinished personal business on the part of the Bushes? If our goal is to remove from the scene a possible source of weapons of mass destruction, why would an Administration official publically say things that imply that the real goal is simply the death of Saddam Hussein?

And for that matter, I've seen precious little discussion of what our post-war strategy would entail. I would like to see some assurance that the void in Iraq left by Saddam's death would be filled by something safer...but then, even that wouldn't be entirely convincing, considering how Saddam is a product of the United States in the first place. It certainly wouldn't be convincing given the conflicting signals coming from Washington as to just how big a threat Saddam is in the first place. And given our relative lack of concern with Afghanistan once the Taliban was removed from power a year ago, I wonder how well-equipped we are to run things in Iraq once we create a power-vacuum there.

Finally, I want to know who's next. Who is our next target in the war on terror? Where do we go from Iraq? Iran? North Korea? Saudi Arabia? And what do we do if and when Al Qaeda strikes again, as nearly everyone I've read is convinced will happen?

These are not arguments I am advancing against war in Iraq or anyplace else. My country was brutally attacked on 11 September 2001, by agents of a stateless terrorist group. I don't believe, not for one second, that we should adopt a pacifist stance in hopes that this will mollify the terrorists. But I am also not convinced that war in Iraq will have anything to do with a larger war on terrorism, despite the description of Iraq by many as the next logical phase of "this war". We are told that there will be more attacks on American soil and more Americans will die, but that war in Iraq is necessary to prevent these attacks. We appear to be damned if we do and damned if we don't. I don't think I'm asking for much here: I just want to be shown that the lives of Americans will be safer for having gone to war in Iraq. Not "might be", not "trust us", not "he's evil and we should do it anyway". Especially not that last, if it later turns out that we're still willing, as we've been all too willing in the past, to ignore evil when its existence is in such a place that does not particularly engage our sense of urgency. I don't object, on principle, to the United States being the world's policeman. I do object to the United States being a bad policeman.

What it comes down to, I suppose, is that I fear that in the case of the coming war against Iraq (and I cannot in good conscience consider the war against Iraq to be another theater in the war against terrorism....yet) just might be an instance of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, because next time it will be all the easier to fall victim to the same reasons. I am not against the war on a priori grounds, as most of the anti-war folks seem to be. And I am most definitely not for the war on a priori grounds, either...and neither side has made a strong a posteriori case.

One of William Randolph Hearst's newspapers, in exhorting the United States to fight the Spanish-American War in 1898, used the headline: "War? Sure!" The feeling I'm getting now is, "War? I guess so...." Somehow that just doesn't seem like enough.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK





Detail from the "Gypsy Girl" Mosaic, possibly originally meant to be a likeness of the goddess Gaea.

This mosaic is one of a large number of masterpiece mosaics discovered during an excavation of the ancient city of Zeugma, on the banks of the Euphrates River in present-day Turkey. Tragically, much of the city's ruins have been lost, unexplored by archaeologists, due to the creation of a reservoir after the Euphrates was dammed for hydroelectric power. A large portion of the site is now underwater. Part of the site's excavation was covered on an episode of NOVA on PBS (click image for link).

Zeugma is not the only site to have either been lost or threatened with inundation by damming projects. An overview of some other such "hotspots" can be found on the PBS site.

Oh, how I would love to have been alive in New York City during the forties, fifties and sixties, when the American musical theater was at its peak. I would love to have been able to see all those wonderful stage productions. I would love to have been able to see Show Boat, for instance, and Oklahoma!. In the home of my childhood, my parents were always playing records of Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter -- performed by the likes of William Warfield, Julie Andrews, Maurice Chevalier, Rex Harrison, Richard Burton...if I could transport myself back to any time and place in American history, I might well choose the Broadway of the middle twentieth century. To attend a production on opening night; to await the rising of the curtain on a new production with an audience that has never seen it; to drink martinis at Sardi's with the cast afterward, tensely awaiting those first notices in the morning edition newspapers...how wonderful that must have been! All those wonderful songs, with their glorious lyrics, composed by those magnificent composer-lyricist collaborators for whom urbane sophistication and wit were the coin of the realm, and to whom our own age of ironic detachment would be as alien an environment as Broadway itself would be to a Peruvian alpaca farmer...how amazing a time, indeed. I wish I could have seen it, in all its glory, as opposed to catching glimpses through film versions of those plays (some of which are magnificent in themselves) and compact discs of those original cast albums, which were recorded on the plays' opening weekend.

This bit of nostalgic reverie on my part is brought on by my reading of the book The Street Where I Live, by Alan Jay Lerner. Lerner was the lyricist to composer Frederick Loewe in my favorite of those great theatrical collaborations, Lerner and Loewe. These men were the geniuses behind Gigi, Camelot, Brigadoon, and for me the greatest musical of all time, My Fair Lady. (As far as I am concerned, the film version of My Fair Lady eclipses all other musical films -- with the sole exception of Singin' In The Rain.) This book is not a comprehensive memoir of Lerner's life, or even of his work in the theater. It is, instead, an account of Lerner and Loewe's last three collaborations (My Fair Lady, Gigi, and Camelot), which are also contemporaneous with the end of what Lerner calls the "belle epoque" of the American musical theater which ended in the early 1960s. Lerner's first sentence sets the tone for the book, and a wonderful sentence it is:

This is the story of climaxes and endings and the sundown of a decade that blazed with joy, excitement, and triumph: so much, in fact, that as I look back I am haunted by the fear that perhaps I drank the wine too fast to taste it and instead of slowing down to look at the scenery, kept my foot on the accelerator and my eyes on the road ahead, gazing only occasionally from side to side and waiting far too long to glance at the rear-view mirror.

After a brief prologue (which Lerner, not unexpectedly, calls the "Overture") in which Lerner describes his own biographical background including a very touching portrait of his father, the book launches into the whirlwind that must have been Lerner's life as his last three projects with Fritz Loewe took shape. For me, the best chapter is the first, because that is the chapter dealing with My Fair Lady. The challenges Lerner and Loewe faced in converting George Bernard Shaw's classic stage play Pygmalion to a stage musical are fascinatingly chronicled -- where to put the songs, what dialogue of Shaw's to retain and which to exclude, how to bridge the scenes in a more convincing manner for the musical theater. The problem with the original play's resolution -- in which Shaw pointedly insists that Professor Higgins remained a bachelor, while Eliza married Freddy -- is dispensed with. A lot of this matieral actually flashes by, as Lerner is more interested in detailing the actual creation of the production itself once the show's writing has been mostly accomplished. Now the book becomes more engrossing, as a series of "supporting characters" move onto Lerner's stage. There is Moss Hart, the accomplished director who is apparently one of the most diplomatic men of all time; there is Julie Andrews, the talented young singer tapped to play Eliza Doolittle even though she has never starred in a major production; there is Rex Harrison, the accomplished stage actor who has also never done a musical and who is prone to hilarious and brief outbursts of temper:

On another occasion, much more recently, Rex was visiting my wife, then Sandra Payne (she is still Sandra Payne, but no longer my wife) and me in the country, and sitting around the fire one evening he was discussing, most sympathetically, how difficult it was for his wife, then Elizabeth (still Elizabeth, but) to put up with his past which, time after time, kept cropping up either in the press, social conversation, or in the shape of children. I said, also sympathetically, that I could understand that. Sandy said, also sympathetically, that she could, too. That is all. She could, too. "God damn you, women," screamed Rex. "What about Alan and me? It's bloody difficult for us, too, but none of you ever thinks of that." Looks of bewilderment. Change of topic. Scene around the fire continues pleasantly.

Also hilarious is Harrison's self-appointment as the guardian of the spirit of Shaw's original play, to the point of keeping an edition of the play on the set at all times and the mistake Lerner makes when Harrison asks about the source of some material not in the original play:

There is a speech just before "The Rain In Spain"....when Rex got to that scene he said to me: "That's a damn fine speech. Where in Shaw did you find it?" Like a fool I told the truth and said: "I wrote it." From then on he lost respect for it and seldom got it right. But it taught me a lesson. Ever after, if he came to a line I had written and inquired: "Is that yours?", I would always reply that I had found it in one of Shaw's letters or in a preface or an essay. That seemed to satisfy him and we had no more difficulties. I must have been so persuasive that in an interview with the London Times two weeks before the English opening, he said that in the entire play there were only six lines not written by Bernard Shaw.

Lerner does not do a lot of editorializing in this book, but a theme that does bubble to the surface now and again is his feeling that (at his writing) an age is ending. If the Age of Irony has not actually dawned at the time that Lerner is writing (1978), he does seem to feel it coming. We see this when he describes the recording of the My Fair Lady cast album, because that album's producer -- a man named Goddard Lieberson -- had been a beloved friend of Lerner and Loewe, and he had died just before Lerner wrote the book. "With his passing," Lerner writes, "went another drain on the world's fast-diminishing supply of charm....pleasure without joy is as hollow as passion without tenderness, and the pleasure of Goddard's company was the joy he brought to others. We call it charm and I weep for a world without it."

This theme of Lerner's, the passing of the musical theater's hey-day and the passing of charm, becomes more evident in the chapters on Gigi and Camelot. Whereas many musicals start as stage productions and are filmed later, in the case of Gigi the process is reversed, because of some contractual obligation Lerner owed to MGM. As he recounts his work with the legendary musical producer Arthur Freed (who also made Singin' In The Rain), he notes the passing of the great studio system.

For so many years the most derogatory critical epithet that could be hurled at a film was to call it "Hollywood". It still happens, but to do so today is like joining a protest march against Pompeii. I entered the Hollywood scene shortly before its demise, but I saw enough to make me wish it were still there.

This sense of a passing time is more evident in the last chapter, about Camelot, which was Lerner and Loewe's last production together, as well as their most problematic. (Loewe retired after Camelot, while Lerner went on to do work with such composers as Andre Previn.) Camelot is, of course, the King Arthur musical, based on T. H. White's novel The Once and Future King. Lerner recounts the heavy reworking the play received as its troubled production moved from Toronto to Boston and finally to Broadway, with a new song at one point being written the night before the play's New York opening. He describes the play's not-disastrous, but not-overly-enthusiastic reception, and the way it did not become a hit until its songs were featured on an episode of Ed Sullivan's variety show. (I should note that while I love the songs and music in Camelot, and have never seen the stage production, the film version is nearly unwatchable.) Of course, no chapter on Camelot would be complete without a mention of how the play became something of a metaphor for the presidency of John F. Kennedy after 22 November 1963. Even that, to Lerner, signifies a sea-change in the arts: "The death of the president opened the door to the chamber of horror called the 1960s. As the national compass began to go mad and the nation began to lose its sense of direction, no less did the performing arts." And Lerner reserves his most damning condemnation for the aimless drift he sees at work in the arts, and the way the youth in whose hands the arts now reside lurch from one fad to the next: "Youth has many glories, but judgment is not one of them, and no amount of electronic amplification can turn a belch into an aria."

Lerner's condemndation of rock-and-roll rankles a bit, although it's not hard to understand his point of view, writing as he does from his perspective as probably the last living exponent of the great tradition of the American musical theater. If he was not in a position to appreciate the works that were to come later on (particularly, the "British invasion" of Broadway of the 80s and 90s), he should still be noted for his defense of beauty and joy -- and charm -- that really do seem to have dropped off our cultural radar screen. The Street Where I Live is magnificent.

I'm both excited and scared right now: in the novel-in-progress, I have reached the chapter where the climax begins. Like any good epic fantasy, the thing ends in a pretty large battle that actually takes place in two different locales, with the two locales becoming one in the end; and while that battle is taking place, my main character is alone someplace else, achieving her unique mission. (When I describe it like that, the thing sounds disturbingly similar to The Lord of the Rings. Maybe I shouldn't have my heroine having a change of heart on the brink of a volcano....)

The problems that have me worried are pacing and sequence of events. With the denouement transpiring in this way, I have to make sure that I don't intercut from one bit of the action to another at inappropriate moments and that the sequence remains clear. I think I have most of that problem figured out already, as one portion of the battle really isn't initially as important, from the standpoint of the novel's main story, as the other, so that part of the battle can remain in the background, so to speak, until the other battle and the heroine's solitary mission are done. Then the other battle can move to the forefront.

My other concern is to avoid having the whole thing become a morass of dull-to-read carnage. I plan to dip into the battle scenes in Malory, Tolkien, Kay and others as I write this material. If I'm going to steal, I might as well steal from the best, n'est-ce pas?

Via ESPN, a nifty article by Jayson Stark compiling some nifty statistics about this year's MLB playoffs thus far. My favorite nifty stat is this bit about the Yankees' pitchers in the series against Anaheim: in games two and three of that series, Yankees pitchers worked the count to 0-2 against sixteen different Anaheim batters -- and surrendered hits to eight of those batters, versus securing only four strikeouts. Ouch.

Also interesting is the fact that since the Braves began their postseason run in 1991, they have played every National League team at one point or another in the postseason, save only two -- and those are the only two National League teams that never made the postseason in that span. Read the article to see which teams.

It's October in the Metrodome, and the Homer Hankies are back in full force. What a sight!

IT'S ALL IN THE DETAILS, part two.

(A sporadic series of appreciations or deprecations of those little details in movies that either enhance the story or evict the viewer from it. Read Part One.)

GOOD: In the Line Of Fire. This underrated thriller stars Clint Eastwood as an aging Secret Service agent who becomes personally involved when a brilliant assassin announces his intention to kill the President of the United States. He has a love interest in another Secret Service agent played by Rene Russo. In one scene where they seduce each other, the camera tracks the movement of their feet across the hotel room carpet as they undress each other -- but as they move, one by one all of those gadgets Secret Service agents carry thud to the floor. Handcuffs, their guns, their holsters, their radios, those little ear-buds that come up the back of the neck, all of it. That's a good touch in itself, but it actually is the set-up for a joke. Eastwood and Russo have barely begun when the phone rings. It's their boss, of course, telling them that there's been a change in plans and they're to report immediately. Russo jumps up and starts getting dressed, leaving Eastwood alone in bed for a second, at which point he groans, "Now I gotta put all that shit back on."

GOOD: Die Hard. This film is actually full of good details, but two favorites of mine occur during the scene where the police are about to attempt to raid the Nakatomi Building, ignoring the protests of John McClane (Bruce Willis). As the policemen make their way through the building's surrounding landscaping, one of them catches his hand on a bush's thorns, and yelps, "Ouch!" Meanwhile, the bad guys prepare to receive the cops in the building's lobby, with one of them taking his position behind a candy counter. As this guy waits for the shooting to start, he reaches into the counter and swipes a candy bar.

BAD: Die Hard 2. I love all of the Die Hard movies, but Die Hard 2 has its share of goof-ups and errors. Two of them are most notable. Early in the film, Detective McClane is in Dulles International Airport, which is in Washington, DC. He uses a payphone to call his wife on her plane (she is flying in, and he is there to pick her up). The problem with the scene is that the payphone he uses is clearly marked, "Pacific Bell". The other bad detail in the film comes when the terrorists intentionally cause the crash of a jetliner. This is a very horrific scene, complete with a shot of the passenger cabin before the crash just so we know that this is a fully-loaded jet whose passengers are all going to die. When the plane crashes, it goes up in an immense fireball. The problem with this is that we've already been told that this particular plane has almost no fuel left. It simply would not make that big of an explosion upon crashing.

BAD: Air Force One. Speaking of airplanes, there's this film which may be the most disappointing film I have ever seen, when I compare my expectations based on a description of the plot versus the finished product. Harrison Ford plays the President of the United States who must fight armed terrorists when they hijack Air Force One -- how could a movie with that story go wrong? Well, I won't list the ways in which it goes wrong here, except to note one glaring detail. Air Force One contains the single worst visual effect I have ever seen in a big-budget Hollywood movie: the final crash of Air Force One into the ocean. This effect looks every bit like the lousy piece of computer animation that it is. I am astounded that the filmmakers looked at this effect and said, "Yep, that's good enough".

GOOD: Pinnocchio. You have to admire a Disney film with as cheerful a dark side as this one has. The scene where the pool-shooting ruffian Lampwick metamorphosizes into a donkey is a perfect bit of horrific film-making.

BAD: The X-Files. Just how did Mulder and Scully manage to get back from the South Pole, anyway?

Perhaps it's a result of conditioning by reading Tolkien at an early age, but it bugs me when I encounter an imaginary-world epic fantasy with no map of its world. Such was the case with Sean Russell's The One Kingdom, a book which I set aside the other day after it failed to really grab my attention after 90 pages or so. I'll try it again another time; I've had the experience many times of bouncing off a novel only to return to it some time later -- years later, even -- and come to love it immensely. But the lack of a map seriously rankles, especially in a book where geographical features play an apparently important role (in this case, a river).

For vintage fountain pen collectors, one of the most popular items is a Parker 51. These pens are noted for not just for their apparently excellent construction (I don't own one yet myself, but I have never heard a negative comment about them) but also for their non-traditional look, in which the nib is mostly concealed under a hood. Parker 51's are fairly easy to find, as vintage pens go, and thus they tend to be reasonably priced (again, as vintage pens go). Nevertheless, Parker 51s are once again in production. They are available at Levenger. I know that vintage 51's can be found that are cheaper than the new model, but it's still neat to see the return of a classic.

Weird post-moving observation: when watching weather reports on the TV news, I still catch myself looking on the weather map to see what's happening in Buffalo -- despite the fact that I now live 130 miles east of Buffalo, which is far enough that a frontal system moving through there takes at least another two to three hours to get here. I still have to recalibrate my geographical sense of place.

Guilty Pleasures.

From time to time it's fun to list one's guilty pleasures. These are things that we like, even though we know that we shouldn't; things that we indulge in from time to time, knowing that other people will look on with dropped jaws and say, "Why on Earth are you doing that?" Here are a few of mine.

(A quick note: By my definition of "guilty pleasure", I do not include The Phantom Menace. That's because a guilty pleasure is something we like even though we know it's bad. That doesn't apply here: despite the fact that most of the world considers Phantom to be a bad movie, I do not. I don't like it in spite of knowing that it's bad; I like it because I genuinely believe it's good.)

:: Ramen noodles. I've almost been out of college for ten years, so why am I still eating these? Not out of any sense of thrift (although you can't beat eight-for-a-buck). No, I actually like them. It's probably one of those food-as-memory things, because I was actually eating Ramen noodles way back when I was a kid. My father liked to eat them with a piece of rye-crisp on which he'd spread a bit of butter; you dip the buttered rye-crisp into the broth before eating. Great stuff, that. I don't eat Ramen noodles very often -- their sodium content is staggering -- but I always keep a few packages around. (And there are some nifty flavors now, like "Chicken Picante". No, it doesn't taste particularly like chicken, but at least it's something other than beef, pork or Oriental.)

:: Clint Eastwood's "Philo Beddoe" movies, Every Which Way But Loose and Any Which Way You Can. How in the world did anyone conceive of these two movies? A truck-driver who is also a bare-knuckle boxer; his two best friends, one of whom is an orangutan; a beautiful country-western singer who is on the run from her abusive husband; Ruth Gordon as the foul-mouthed mother; an incompetent motorcycle gang; many a bar-room brawl; bittersweet love affairs; loads of country music. There is really no way to describe these movies in such a way that they don't sound absurd. But damn, they're fun.

:: Independence Day. I've never in my life seen a film with more plot-holes and implausibilities than this (well, except Armageddon). And yet, the thing has such a sense of goofy fun that I still have a good time every time I watch it.

:: Buffalo-style chicken wings. 'Nuff said, I think. I doubt there's a single food that is less healthy than these...or more perfect.

More another time....

For me, the sweetest part of the baseball playoffs is the annual demise of the Atlanta Braves. (Except in 1995, when no one bothered to beat them.) The pleasure this year is so much the better, as their demise comes at the hands of Barry Bonds, a man whose number has been in Atlanta's lockbox for ten years until now. I remember Bonds's disastrous performance in the 1991 NLCS, when as a Pittsburgh Pirate he fell into such a slump that Atlanta pitchers in that series would actually walk Bobby Bonilla intentionally just to pitch to Bonds, who would then play his part by popping up to short. Then there is the pain of the 1992 NLCS, when Bonds awoke from his slump with a home run in Game Six, only to have Sid Bream -- the slowest player in MLB history -- beat his throw to the plate in the bottom of the ninth in Game Seven, scoring the winning run. I remember Bonds's amazing 1993 season, when he led his new team -- the Giants -- to 103 regular season victories, only to see the Braves notch 104 wins and take the NL West (the two teams were division rivals at the time).

Last night, Bonds scored two runs, which was all the Giants would need (although they later added a third) to defeat the Braves in Game Five of the divisional series, thus sending the Tomahawk-chopping Atlanta fans back home to watch the Falcons and the Hawks.

So, now that the matchups in both LCS's are set, I can actually say that it won't bother me at all if any of the remaining teams win it all. I'm personally rooting for the Giants (and I will be forced to do so even if they play the Twins in the World Series, which will annoy a certain Minnesota sports-crazed fan I know). But it's great to see all these underdogs stepping up to stake their claim for October glory.

I've removed the permalink to Arts and Letters Daily, because that fine site has closed down due to some legal stuff apparently involving bankruptcy with the site's owners. A&LD's demise is a shame. I had only recently discovered it, and now it's gone. Ah well....

Football, baseball, and the Meaning of Life....

:: In the voice of Paul Reiser: "That's what I'm saying!" The Buffalo Bills' combination of awesome offense and lousy defense finally added up to something other than overtime; instead, the Bills kept it close until the fourth quarter, when the Raiders finally blew them out. I've been pointing out the fact that the Bills' defensive deficiencies are going to cost them this season, and it's certainly coming to pass. Next offseason, the defensive side of the ball must be the first priority. There is talent on the young secondary, but like all young secondaries they really need for there to be an effective pass-rush, because these guys simply can't play man-to-man all day and not get burned. The Bills' pass-rush, though, is nearly nonexistent. They had one sack yesterday, and the combination of no pass-rush plus a young secondary means that the Bills are the only team in the NFL without an interception so far this year. So, they don't make turnovers, and they don't stop opponents....ouch. Drew Bledsoe tried to accept the blame for the defeat after the game, talking about his three interceptions, but as Butch told Sundance: "It's the fall that's gonna kill you!" (Still, it's nice to see the Bills' offensive line starting to come together. Despite giving up five sacks, Bledsoe generally had more time to make his passes -- until that fourth quarter, when the entire game ended up on his shoulders.)

:: The Steelers are 1-3. And the Steelers are my pick for AFC Champion. I'm not giving them up, yet. In the "Tortured rationale as opposed to acceptance of error" department, I shall now argue that the Steelers are actually more likely to get to the Super Bowl having started 1-3, because now they are virtually guaranteed to not have home-field-advantage in the playoffs. Insane, you think? Consider, though, that in the last ten NFL seasons, the AFC team with home-field-advantage has failed to advance to the Super Bowl eight times. Home-field is the kiss of AFC playoff death, and since the Steelers won't have it....they're going to the Super Bowl!!

:: In the NFC, I'm still sticking with the Eagles, even though they lost a close one to Jacksonville. I'm a bit worried, though, whenever a team's leading rusher is its quarterback -- but at least McNabb had 100 yards.

:: How on earth can the Rams be this bad?! There is an expansion team that has a better record than the Rams. Amazing.

:: All through the Buffalo-Oakland game, TV commentator Randy Cross kept insisting that the Raiders are the best team in the league right now. Maybe their offense is that good, but their defense looks a bit suspect to me. It'll be interesting to see what happens when they encounter the Chiefs' Priest Holmes and the power-game that the Chargers are running.

:: So, in baseball, we're down to the Twins and Angels. I'm pulling for the Twins -- a certain person I know will likely kill me if I don't -- but I won't be upset if the Angels win it, either. As for the National League, well....Lord, I hope the Giants can win. (But shouldn't Barry Bonds have a good postseason just once in his career? Amazing....)

Oh, wow....look at the ratings that Spirited Away is receiving over on Rotten Tomatoes. Will this movie play in Syracuse? Oh, pleasepleasepleaseplease....

POETICAL EXCURSION #8

"Channel Firing", by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928).

That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
We thought it was the Judgment-day

And sat upright. While drearisome
Arose the howl of wakened hounds:
The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,
The worms drew back into the mounds,

The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, "No;
It's gunnery practice out at sea
Just as before you went below;
The world is as it used to be:

"All nations striving strong to make
Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters
They do no more for Christés sake
Than you who are helpless in such matters.

"That this is not the judgment-hour
For some of them's a blessed thing,
For if it were they'd have to scour
Hell's floor for so much threatening ....

"Ha, ha. It will be warmer when
I blow the trumpet (if indeed
I ever do; for you are men,
And rest eternal sorely need)."

So down we lay again. "I wonder,
Will the world ever saner be,"
Said one, "than when He sent us under
In our indifferent century!"

And many a skeleton shook his head.
"Instead of preaching forty year,"
My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,
"I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer."

Again the guns disturbed the hour,
Roaring their readiness to avenge,
As far inland as Stourton Tower,
And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

:: This is one of the more cynical poems I have read on the subject of war. Anti-war poems are fairly common, but in this one Hardy conveys the distinct belief that war is an inevitable result of human interactions. God's assurance to the dead that "No, it's not Judgement Day, it's just your brethren making more war." Worse than that, they are making "red war yet redder" in their madness, as though men have no better pursuit with which to occupy themselves. God even goes so far in this poem to joke about the timing of when shall call Judgement Day, because if we here to call it on a day such as this -- when the cannons are thundering -- one gets the feeling that the majority of men would come up wanting.

A couple of other interesting details in the poem should be mentioned. One of the dead asks if the world will ever be any saner than it was in their century. I am not certain, but I suspect that this poem was written in reference and response to World War I, which was itself the beginning of a bloody, "indifferent" century. Another of the dead, a clergyman, openly wishes that he had spent less time preaching and more time on the pleasurable things in life, naming pipes and beer specifically. By "pipes" I take him to mean music, but I suppose it is possible that he is talking about smoking. And finally, in the last stanza, the guns are heard in places far inland -- Stourton Towen, Camelot, Stonehenge. These landmarks are not only named by Hardy for their physical distance but for their distance in time, from youngest monument to oldest. Hardy is telling us that war is almost an eternal part of the human condition, having been with us from the very beginning.

FilmWise is one of the more devilish places I've learned about since I started lurking on Metafilter. If you're bored and need to kill some time -- or if you need something to do at the office when the boss isn't looking -- check out FilmWise's quizzes, particularly the visual ones. Great stuff.

As a genre, science fiction contains so much breadth within its borders that sometimes it's hard just keeping track of all the various subgenres inside SF. This becomes a problem when one reads a SF book that one really enjoys, and then has a hard time finding other books similar to it. Yesterday I happened upon a webpage that helps in that regard: the If You Like This, Then You'll Like That page. The page hasn't been updated in two years, but there's still a wealth of information here.

It's official: for the first time since 1997 a team other than the New York Yankees will win the American League pennant, and for the first time since 1993 (or 1994, if you count that strike-terminated year) a team other than the Yankees or the Cleveland Indians will represent the AL in the World Series. I didn't get to watch much of the Yankees' divisional playoff against the Angels, but I wonder if their loss has something to do with the age of their pitching staff. These guys -- Clemens, Pettite, El Duque and David Wells -- are all getting up there in years, and with all of the Yankees' postseason play the last seven years, they've piled up a lot of innings. Assuming the Yankees retain pretty much the same lineup next year, they might want to look into adding some youth into their starting rotation.

As for the Angels, they seem to be an exciting team to watch. I expect them to be a handful for either the Twins or A's.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK





Pittsburgh Pirates second baseman Bill Mazeroski, approaching home plate, after hitting a home run in the bottom of the ninth inning in Game Seven of the 1960 World Series, giving the Pirates the championship over the New York Yankees.

Bill Mazeroski is considered by many to be the greatest defensive second baseman of all time, but his single greatest play was at the plate when he became the only player to ever end a World Series by hitting a home run. (He was eventually joined in this club by Joe Carter, who ended the 1992 World Series by hitting a three-run shot for the Blue Jays.) Mazeroski's homer is one of baseball's greatest moments, and is probably the greatest moment in the history of the Pirates franchise.

(An interesting bit of trivia is that Mazeroski's shot made Harvey Haddix the winning pitcher of that World Series game. Haddix is known in baseball lore for a game he lost: a 1-0 defeat at the hands of the Milwaukee Braves, that one run coming in the 13th inning -- after Haddix had pitched twelve consecutive perfect innings.)

The new James Bond movie, Die Another Day, has a new trailer now. Like the previous trailers for the film, this one gives very little idea of what the film is about, except that Bond is apparently betrayed and "set up" for something. Judging trailers is dangerous business, but so far all three trailers for DAD have me thinking that the new Bond film doesn't look much like a Bond film.

One thing that intrigued me, though: a snippet of Bond interacting with John Cleese, the new "Q". Bond says something like, "So this is where the old things are" -- and we can see, in the background, the one-man jet plane that Bond used in the teaser-sequence to Octopussy, and we also see another brief shot of Bond slipping underwater with something in his mouth that looks like the miniature rebreather that he used in Thunderball. I rather like the idea of Bond using an old gadget or two, if I've read the signs in the trailer correctly.

I finished reading Eternity's End, by Jeffrey A. Carver, yesterday and found it a frustrating read. This is a stand-alone novel set in a universe that Carver has written about before, called "The Starrigger Universe". A Starrigger (or "Rigger", as called in the novel) is a specialized space pilot who has the ability to navigate starships through "the Flux", which appears to be a kind of "warp space" or "hyperspace" or something equivalent. Each ship has a team of Riggers who are responsible, therefore, for the ship's faster-than-light transit, by delving into the Flux. The Riggers work the Flux by actually shaping it so that it becomes a visual metaphor for them to work with; at times, the Flux appears to be a cloudy sky, at times it appears to be deep underwater in the ocean, at times it appears to be something else entirely, depending on the needs and abilities of the Riggers. (All this is explained in the novel, which is the only one of the "Starrigger" novels that I've read.) Of course, navigating the Flux has its own perils, one of which is that if one strays into the wrong part of the Flux, one's ship can seemingly vanish out of space-time entirely and only reappearing sporadically, becoming something of a "ghost ship". The search for just such a ship, the Impris, forms much of the backbone of this novel, which can be partly described as "The Flying Dutchman in space".

That also describes the main problem I had with Eternity's End. The idea of a ghost-ship in space, and the search for that ship, is a very interesting one, and those parts of the book which deal with that search are fascinating and even gripping. However, that whole plot is part of a larger one, involving some kind of vast interstellar conspiracy into which one man, a Starrigger named Renwald Legroeder (that name didn't help matters any), falls unaware. Legroeder is on the run almost immediately in the book, and he doesn't know why. He is also tagged as the fall guy for a ship that was captured by pirates before the events of the novel; his insistence on the reality of the lost ship Impris, which he sighted during a pirate-encounter, is suppressed; he is framed for murder; he is enlisted by the intelligence apparatus of an alien race....and after all that, he goes in search of the "ghost ship". The total effect is that I was never exactly sure of what story I was being told. Is the novel about the ghost ship? is it about humanity's stalled colonization of space? is it the Ludlumesque espionage thriller where a normal man tumbles into something that marks him immediately for death? is it a story about space pirates? is it a vast space opera? is it a legal thriller?

Eternity's End turns out to be, in some measure, all of those things -- so much so that the novel feels schizophrenic. The focus is constantly changing, so that there is no one central conflict that drives the novel forward. There are times when, as one conflict is beginning to gather steam, Carver steps back and forcefully reminds us of the earlier conflicts that are still simmering on the back burner. One would expect all of these conflicts to boil together into a single, explosive climax, but they don't; instead there is a series of climaxes that take place over the novel's last 150 pages. And there are so many plots going on that some of the most interesting ones are shortchanged, and some of Carver's most interesting ideas are introduced and then completely ignored. One such idea is that on the stranded Impris, time actually moves at different paces at different parts of the ship -- so one married couple has found a closet where time moves slowest, and that's where they stay, so they can be together. Of course, the ship's eventual rescue would have implications for that couple -- in fact, for everyone on the starliner that has been stranded for 120 years -- and yet, none of those implications are ever explored, much less even mentioned. The plight of the Impris could have been a harrowing novel of its own, but here it is merely a giant MacGuffin to drive the rest of the plot. Other ideas are also left underdeveloped: the secretive military organization whose commanding officer is not even named until the book's last 75 pages but who becomes the main villain behind it all, the competing pirate societies, Legroeder's coming to terms with his neural implants, the fact that the implants themselves seem to be sentient beings -- all of these ideas are left on the table, mentioned but never expanded.

Eternity's End, unfortunately, reminds me of a dish that should be baked in the oven at 400 degrees for 45 minutes, but is instead baked at 325 degrees for 30 minutes. Parts of it are undone, and as a whole it doesn't come together.

But what if you write and write and write and you don't seem to be getting any better and all you collect are printed rejection slips? Once again, it may be that you are not a writer and will have to settle for a lesser post such as that of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

--Isaac Asimov

I love writing. Except for those days when I hate it.

This is one of the latter days.

Before my move, two weeks ago, I had four stories out at market. In the last three days, that number has dropped to one. Opening the mailbox to find an envelope inside, with my own address written in my own hand, is always disappointing. To see my SASE sitting in the mailbox three days in a row is positively disheartening. You can try to brace yourself for it; you can tell yourself every time you put a story in the mail that it's going to be rejected; you can plan the next market for that story's submission for when the rejection comes; you can even print out the next submission copy for that day....but it still stinks. Those rejections have cumulative weight. Each one hurts more than the last; each one lets a little more air out of the bubble. With each rejection in the mailbox, the doubt grows: I should have sold something by now....someone should have bought just one of my stories by now.... I know that this is irrational, that every writer endures it, that in some cases the rejections pile up for years before that glorious day when the SASE contains a contracts instead of a form-letter. So now it becomes an exercise in masochism: how strong is my conviction that writing is my truest, best destiny? I want to say it's as strong as ever. The stories are still inside of me, and I still write them because I have to. But at what point does the wellspring taper off to a trickle, and then stop entirely? Never, I can only hope.

My first rejection letter ever came two-and-a-half years ago, for a vampire story called "Graveyard Waltz". It was actually encouraging to get that first rejection letter, because at the time I took it to mean that I was officially "in the game", that my hat was in the ring. Someone once said that "Ninety percent of success is just showing up"; that first rejection was my first official indication that I was showing up. (Of course, it helped that the editor of the magazine in question had scrawled a personal note at the bottom of the form-letter, telling me that it was despite the rejection a good story, and she looked forward to my next submission. Unfortunately, I've never submitted to that market again, because it's a vampire-story only market, and I haven't written any vampire stories lately. I can't force myself into genres that easily; I take the stories as they come.)

I like the rejections from Weird Tales most of all, because the editors there (George Scithers, Darrell Schweitzer, and a few other assistants) actually take the time to tell you something of why they rejected the story. In the case of the one that arrived today ("The First Wish"), they noted both the story's length (it's at the outer limit of their standard word count) and its lack of a strong plot (not a surprise at all; the story in question isn't plot-driven at all). It's also not really in their genre. So why did I submit it to them in the first place, with all those cards stacked against me? For one reason, basically: word-count. With the exception of "The City of Dead Works", "The First Wish" is my shortest story -- at 8,750 words. Brevity consistently eludes me in my "short" fiction, which has the side effect of severly limiting the number of markets to which I can submit. There are simply few markets that are open to works of novelette length, so after a story of mine has been rejected three times -- maybe four -- it's pretty much out of commission, unless I become aware of a new market accepting stories of that length. This also rules out just about all of the smaller markets that I know of. I'd love to be able to send my stories off to the smaller markets, the ones that pay a tiny amount plus a few copies, just to see my work in print somewhere. But I don't know of any of those markets that deal in the lengths at which I work.

I've wondered for a long time if I should do anything about this: whether I should keep writing my stories at what feels to me to be their natural length, or whether I should try to "teach myself" to write actual short stories. Most days I lean to the former; some days, though, I wonder if I shouldn't attempt the latter. The story that I'm writing now is shaping up to be another long one. I have a few story ideas that probably could be short ones, but I won't know until I get to them. And of course, all of this has nothing at all to do with the big project: the unfinished novel that is getting quite close to completion.

The last chapters of Dr. Asimov's Second Foundation are called, respectively, "The Answer That Satisfied" and "The Answer That Was True". My answer, for now, is to keep on writing. I'm not sure if that answer satisfies, or if it is true. I hope it's both, because it's the only answer I have right now.

Back to the desk.

I hope that when I am 94 years old, I am as active as Jack Williamson. This SF Grand Master is still spinning out fine tales and novels, and he's still winning awards. This is a man who started writing SF when the term for the genre was "scientifiction", and his earliest submissions were to Hugo Gernsback (for whom the Hugo awards are named). He is also credited in the Oxford English Dictionary for coining the word "terraforming". There's a good interview with Williamson in this week's Science Fiction Weekly.

Strange things are afoot: the Minnesota Twins won a postseason game outside the Metrodome. Wow. (The Twins have the distinction of playing in the only two World Series -- 1987 and 1991 -- in which the home team won each game. Both times the Twins were the team with four home games, so they won both Series.)

A small complaint about my recent move: my chances of seeing Spirited Away in a theater may have gone down quite a bit. The film is in a slow, gradual release. I have no idea if it was even going to play in Buffalo, and now that I'm in an even smaller town than Buffalo, I may miss out entirely.

But I have high hopes. One bit of niftiness came at our new local grocery store, which has a typical Halloween-type display with big cutouts of cartoon characters in Halloween outfits. This place actually included Kiki from Kiki's Delivery Service, a Totoro from My Neighbor Totoro, and the dragon from Spirited Away. To see these characters in a grocery store display was somehow deeply satisfying.

The tallest building in Syracuse is 21 stories (or so). That's apparently about to change, as construction is about to begin on a 47-story hotel that will be part of the gargantuan shopping-entertainment-restaurant-hotel complex that is in the planning stages. They're building the hotel first, even though the rest of the project doesn't exist yet, because the company involved believes that the construction itself will be a tourist draw. I'm not sure about that -- did people go to Boston to see the Big Dig being dug? Maybe they did, I don't know....anyway, the whole shebang is called Destiny USA. I'm still a bit fuzzy on why they want to build something like this in a fairly small town in Upstate NY, but it still sounds interesting to me. Too bad they couldn't do it in Buffalo.

My level of anticipation for The Two Towers has officially been upgraded from "Really looking forward to it" to "Nearly drooling", on the basis of the new trailer. In this day and age of junky marketing for junky movies, it's so amazingly refreshing to see a film project where everyone involved is saying, "You know, let's get this one right, shall we?"

In the "That's what you get for asking the pertinent question after writing the chapter in question" Department: I posted a question to a Usenet group today, pertaining to an injury that I inflicted on one of my characters a few chapters ago. It turns out that I have mishandled it slightly, and I may need to go back and fix it -- unless I can graft on a fix in the coming pages. That, I fear, would be a bit of a cheat. But of course I'm going to try it anyway, because as the Bard himself once said to no less a personage than Queen Elizabeth the First, "Rewriting sucks."

I've noticed that other bloggers like to note, with amusement, the incredibly odd search-engine results by which their blogs are located. I've been a bit disappointed that I haven't had any good ones to report, except for the fact that I have a permalink at left to the film music website "Scoreland Soundtrack Reviews", which apparently shares the name "Scoreland" with some kind of....site with pictures of scantilly-clad women. But, I finally got a nifty hit from a "naughty search" today: someone was using Yahoo! UK & Ireland to find sites matching this search term: women and underwater and sex and video files. I'm sorry this particular person no doubt went away from Byzantium's Shores unsatisfied. I'm reminded of a scene in the book Time After Time (based on the film of the same name), in which H. G. Wells, having traveled forward in time from 1898 to 1979, wants to impress a lovely woman in San Francisco by taking her to a wonderful Scots restaurant he's discovered, named "McDonald's".