More Than Once Upon a Time

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This should have been great. Man, what an idea. I mean think of the cool science fiction fun you could have with shipwrecked aliens on Earth, and they breed, so Earth ghettoizes them, and then, really, what are you going to do when they start competing with an overcrowded earth for resources? Very, very cool.

But no. That’s not where District 9 runs with it. Instead we have to belabor an already obvious metaphor by sticking the aliens in an already apartheid South Africa, and all the humans have to be venal brutal militarists, and the hero is an oblivious moron who’s as racist as everyone else till he has a catharsis for no reason at all at the end of the movie and helps the aliens get away. Oh, and the Blair Witch thing at the beginning and the end was really, really annoying. What, you’re not a good enough writer to work the exposition into the story?

But it was SF, and some of it was pretty cool, especially the smart alien.

Why is it so many American holiday and children’s movies have endings that reek of false sentimentality? I have nothing against sentimentality - I weep at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life and A Charlie Brown Christmas. But those are movies where most of the people involved actually believed in the sentiment they created. The people who made Elf and the Jim Carrey version of How The Grinch Stole Christmas don’t.

And it shows.

I thought the first half was hilarious. I love crazy Will Ferrell. But then they had to have the message, and reform the scrooge figure, and it was all just going through the motions without any of the spontaneous sweetness of the beginning. It was false, and it was dull, and it showed.

Bah, humbug.

A classic Paul Krugman column in the NYTimes today. He complains that the mismanagement of the AIG bailout is contributing to the continued downturn in the economy because it means the country has lost trust in its financial officials. This is complete hogwash. The continued economic downturn has nothing to do with a lack of confidence in the government and everything to do with an eight year orgy of debt and consumerism that has to be gotten through before things can get better, like losing the ten pounds you gain over the holidays before you feel like yourself again. Krugman is simply using this to bash the administration into doing what he wants them to do - which is more fiscal stimulus. He’s been ranting about more fiscal stimulus for months.

This is the trouble with Krugman. He may have been a good economist once, but now he’s a columnist with a big ego who wants to be right all the time. He’ll twist anything to fit his opinion du jour. He may well be right about the need for fiscal stimulus, though he knows as well as any economist that fiscal stimulus has a twelve to eighteen month drag before it starts to have an effect (which means we’re only starting to feel the effects of the stimulus now). And he’s right about the mismanagement of the AIG bailout, where AIG’s creditors inexcusably got one hundred cents on the dollar at taxpayer expense. But the two have nothing to do with one another. Krugman knows that. But he’d much rather play stern schoolmarm than be honest.

I could have watched Charlie Stross interview Krugman at WFC this summer, be decided to eat Duck-In-A-Can instead. An excellent decision.

And I didn’t even have to watch it.

And here I am, ostensibly a writer of YA. Bah, humbug.

I actually don’t read much YA, but I just finished Little Brother so YA is on my mind. I didn’t much like the book, not so much because of the book itself but because it’s YA. I know, I know, YA is the hot thing right now, but that still doesn’t mean I have to like it.

The main reason I don’t like YA is because of the way it’s often written. It’s just not to my taste. The POVs are generally too tight; the narrators are too often Mary Sues; the issues are far too simplified; the adults are all idiots. Even more importantly, I have a built-in bias that makes me wince at the word YA. When I grew up in the ’60s you went from children’s books to adult books whenever you were ready. For most readers that was about the time they hit adolescence. YA at the time was a new marketing niche being promoted as books with adult themes written for teens who weren’t yet ready (or able) to read adult books.

Needless to say, as a teenager I turned my nose up at the idea of reading anything that was described as being written for teens not yet ready to read something harder.

I don’t really have anything against YA per se. Hey, the more books people like, the better. But most of the techniques I don’t like in YA are the sorts of techniques used to make books easier to read and more accessible. Which means that, unless the writer is really, really good, books written with those techniques often end up being simplistic and banal. In Little Brother, for example, the interpretation of the Declaration of Indepence given in the book is one that literally justifies all acts of defiance against the government as being justifiable, which is, of course an impossible simplification. But it’s just the sort of impossible simplification that finds it’s way into a lot of YA.

Which is why I don’t like YA.

We’ve watched the first four episodes so far, and the pace is glacial. Which leads me to conclude that I’m just not that into vampires. Which in turn raises the question of why I like Buffy so much. But my wife figured that out. Buffy isn’t really a vampire show, it’s a superhero show, and I love superheroes.

Besides, I’m not so sure that what I’ve seen of True Blood qualifies as a vampire show. More like softcore porn, if you ask me. And if it’s softcore porn I’m looking for, I’m much more likely to dust off my old copy of The Cheerleaders starring the immortal Stephanie Fondue, than I am to turn on Showtime or HBO or whatever premium channel True Blood is on.

I’m just not into vampires.

Not a fantasy novel, The Black Swan is a non-fiction polemic about randomness and the inapplicability of the bell curve to the real world. Although I completely agree with the premise, this 300 page book could have been as well done in about 50. Taleb is actually much more interested in showing off how much he knows about everything, and making up metaphors and thought experiments that make no sense, and never really explaining what he’s talking about (except in three late chapters which he actually suggests non-technically inclined readers should skip), than he does in actually making his case.

Which is a good one. The bell curve doesn’t work in assessing risk at all. As the fincial markets proved last year.

I used to like this movie. Not any more. I just get crankier and crankier as I age. Never realized Welles could be so much like David Lynch, and if you think I like nothing, some day I’ll tell you how much I don’t like David Lynch. Art Noir is not my cup of tea.

In the end, that’s what The Magicians is really about. Nasty, sulky, selfish Edmund wandering around being envious of everyone else for the entire book, with no reformation. And then he gets to be King anyway.

The NY Times reviewer who panned this book may have been completely wrong in what he said about fantasy in general, but he’s completely right in what he said specifically about this book.