The more liberated we become, the more wacky measures we have to take to protect ourselves... from ourselves. Touchstone mentions a new feature that tries to minimize the unfortunate side effects of getting stinking drunk over the weekend. Considering that I'm likely to bomb five math problems even when sober, well-rested, and eating a balanced diet, my policy will be to avoid getting drunk.
Also, parents of preschoolers in New Jersey have been up in arms over a mandatory flu shot. I like the part where one of the organizers says, "This one-size-fits-all approach is really very anti-American." Um, do you know why the public school system was created? Hint: it wasn't to foster individuality and nonconformity. One-size-fits-all is actually a revered American approach.
-- SJ
Showing posts with label Rants. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rants. Show all posts
Monday, October 20, 2008
Friday, September 19, 2008
An Odd Sort of Request
I'm working on an idea for the Christmas season, and wondered who wants to help me. Okay, okay, calm down, one at a time! *chuckle* (1).
The help would require a bit of information from you, and some helpful feedback (2).
Email me at the juno account or the address above our picture at the left and I'll explain more.
-- SJ
Notes:
1. It's entirely a matter of taste, but I really dislike it when I'm reading a book and encounter a character who chuckles. Nancy Drew was always chuckling, as did the parents in the pre-teen books I read. It always seems like a chuckle should be followed with dialogue like, "Oh, gee gosh willikers!"
2. Since when did "feedback" ever become "helpful"? Isn't feedback that awful squealing noise you get when you put a microphone too close to the speaker? How on earth can that ever be "good"?
The help would require a bit of information from you, and some helpful feedback (2).
Email me at the juno account or the address above our picture at the left and I'll explain more.
-- SJ
Notes:
1. It's entirely a matter of taste, but I really dislike it when I'm reading a book and encounter a character who chuckles. Nancy Drew was always chuckling, as did the parents in the pre-teen books I read. It always seems like a chuckle should be followed with dialogue like, "Oh, gee gosh willikers!"
2. Since when did "feedback" ever become "helpful"? Isn't feedback that awful squealing noise you get when you put a microphone too close to the speaker? How on earth can that ever be "good"?
Saturday, August 16, 2008
What We Think -- "School for Sorcery"
E. Rose Sabin's "A School for Sorcery" is like a glass of sparkling apple cider that's been left in the fridge for three days.
The book is set is some imaginary country with a 1900s-American feel to it: railroads, middy blouses and long skirts, trunks instead of suitcases. (The author does, however, bestow modern indoor plumbing on her inhabitants.) Tria is a poor farm girl who is magically gifted. Her mother scrapes together the money to send her off to school. Tria is very disappointed when she arrives: the school is dirty and ramshackle, the food almost inedible, and she's stuck with an unfriendly roomate who shape-shifts into a panther when she gets angry. Tria discovers that she has a depth of power she didn't realize, but the only classes she's allowed to attend focus on theory -- especially dry lectures on the ethics of magic use. When one of the other students starts to go bad, contacting the evil Dire Women to increase his power and take over the school, it's up to Tria to rescue her friends and save the school (and, ultimately, the country).
With such a zinger of a premise, it's really too bad that the author, instead of writing the story, simply compiled her notes into prose form.
A good school-of-magic author (see: J. K. Rowling) knows how to emphasize the important events of a story, and fill in the background with the smaller events. Sabin never gets that knack. She devotes one paltry line to the fact that the catgirl roommate agrees to ally with Tria to defend against the enemy, while giving two full paragraphs to describing how Tria and a friend give away sweets to two boys during a town trip. The after-effects of a deadly magic duel are completely overshadowed by the breathless question of who will be asked to the Midwinter Ball by whom. Even the most horrifying and dramatic scenes -- involving living corpses and grisly torment -- are rendered flat by passive writing. I continually found myself re-reading passages to find out, wait, how did that character get hurt so badly? Oh, here it is in the middle of this block of prose.
So much of the text (you know a story's in trouble if the reader thinks of it as "text") exists simply to get the reader to the next part of the story. Sabin utterly neglects the interesting bits of her world, like how the shabby school gradually changes appearance as Tria attains higher levels of magic. The author does, however, linger over elaborate descriptions of inter-demensional worlds that have nothing to do with character development or plot. Some readers might actually skip that entire section of the book.
Then, to rub salt into the wound, the last two chapters span two years in a chunk. There's enough information here for another book. Characters are disposed of in a line or two, and the ultimate fate of Tria herself rings hollow. You feel as if Tria hasn't emailed or called in two years, then invites you to celebrate how much she's accomplished all that time she wasn't speaking to you.
I admit I'm a hard reader to please, but I did open this book with a willing heart. Unlike the last disaster I encountered, I read this one all the way to the end. It had good stuff in it, just not much skill in execution. There are two more books in this series, and I want to get the second one to see if Sabin's writing has improved any (it worked with Sanderson's "Mistborn"). But I'm afraid this book isn't a promise of great things to come.
-- SJ
The book is set is some imaginary country with a 1900s-American feel to it: railroads, middy blouses and long skirts, trunks instead of suitcases. (The author does, however, bestow modern indoor plumbing on her inhabitants.) Tria is a poor farm girl who is magically gifted. Her mother scrapes together the money to send her off to school. Tria is very disappointed when she arrives: the school is dirty and ramshackle, the food almost inedible, and she's stuck with an unfriendly roomate who shape-shifts into a panther when she gets angry. Tria discovers that she has a depth of power she didn't realize, but the only classes she's allowed to attend focus on theory -- especially dry lectures on the ethics of magic use. When one of the other students starts to go bad, contacting the evil Dire Women to increase his power and take over the school, it's up to Tria to rescue her friends and save the school (and, ultimately, the country).
With such a zinger of a premise, it's really too bad that the author, instead of writing the story, simply compiled her notes into prose form.
A good school-of-magic author (see: J. K. Rowling) knows how to emphasize the important events of a story, and fill in the background with the smaller events. Sabin never gets that knack. She devotes one paltry line to the fact that the catgirl roommate agrees to ally with Tria to defend against the enemy, while giving two full paragraphs to describing how Tria and a friend give away sweets to two boys during a town trip. The after-effects of a deadly magic duel are completely overshadowed by the breathless question of who will be asked to the Midwinter Ball by whom. Even the most horrifying and dramatic scenes -- involving living corpses and grisly torment -- are rendered flat by passive writing. I continually found myself re-reading passages to find out, wait, how did that character get hurt so badly? Oh, here it is in the middle of this block of prose.
So much of the text (you know a story's in trouble if the reader thinks of it as "text") exists simply to get the reader to the next part of the story. Sabin utterly neglects the interesting bits of her world, like how the shabby school gradually changes appearance as Tria attains higher levels of magic. The author does, however, linger over elaborate descriptions of inter-demensional worlds that have nothing to do with character development or plot. Some readers might actually skip that entire section of the book.
Then, to rub salt into the wound, the last two chapters span two years in a chunk. There's enough information here for another book. Characters are disposed of in a line or two, and the ultimate fate of Tria herself rings hollow. You feel as if Tria hasn't emailed or called in two years, then invites you to celebrate how much she's accomplished all that time she wasn't speaking to you.
I admit I'm a hard reader to please, but I did open this book with a willing heart. Unlike the last disaster I encountered, I read this one all the way to the end. It had good stuff in it, just not much skill in execution. There are two more books in this series, and I want to get the second one to see if Sabin's writing has improved any (it worked with Sanderson's "Mistborn"). But I'm afraid this book isn't a promise of great things to come.
-- SJ
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
Rated G for Bland
For Addie's birthday, we tried a wildly new and different thing: I took her to a movie. All three of our kids are oversensitive to onscreen tension. Seeing as everything in the theater is large and loud, it's definitely not Addie's ideal retreat. (Rachelle can sympathize.) But I read up several reviews, and decided to risk it. She and I went to see "Kit Kittredge."
It was not an interesting movie.
Granted, we were the wrong ages: Addie should have been older and I should have been younger. And two or three of the actors, including Abigail Breslin as Kit, were fun to watch. Still, the movie was terribly earnest. The scriptwriters were concerned with the plot, the message, and Kit's adorable color-coordinated 1930s outfits. Anything else, like enjoyable dialogue or entertaining sequences, was obviously very low priority.
Two aspects of the movie annoyed me. Firstly, that less-fortunate people are innately good. The scapgoats in "Kit" were the hobos. Only Kit and her mother could look past the ragged clothes and see the hearts of gold underneath. Everyone else was presented as holding completely unreasonable prejudices against these poor hobos.
Yes, there were some heart-of-gold people thrown into the hobo life, and wrongly shunned by society (although I didn't realize it was such a brand of shame of that era). But hobos were also depressed and desperate people. It wasn't a safe society for obviously well-to-do young children to move in. I was in full sympathy with the mother who forbade her son from returning to the "hobo jungle," even though the movie villainized her for it.
Now I've made myself out to sound like a good middle-class uncharitable snob. My point isn't that we decent folk should sneer at the less-fortunate. My point is that judging anyone by their clothes and circumstances is wrong. The accepted Hollywood maxim that Poor People Are Nice and Rich People Are Mean isn't any nobler than the more usual assumption that nice clothes equals a nice person.
The second irritation was that the movie was set in the jolly Depression. Sure, people lose their jobs and houses. Sure, Kit's father has to leave to find work, leaving Kit and her mother to take in boarders. But everybody has such a good time living together! Even the hobo jungle looks cool! Further confirming the impression that we don't really understand what the Depression entailed were all the reviews I read beforehand. At least three of them mentioned that the setting of the movie "reflected current times in America." Okay. You're saying that high gas prices, an increased rate of foreclosures, and high food prices "reflect" a time when 25% of the popoulation was jobless? When kids put cardboard in the bottoms of their shoes because the soles were wearing through? When you ate oatmeal every day, not for the fiber, but because you had nothing else? Not one reviewer said, "The movie reminds us that our times are a pale reflection of what our grandparents went through." Poor struggling moviegoers, who just blew $20 for a movie and snacks!
Possibly the movie improved when it got into the second half: we didn't make it that far. Addie was slumped down in her chair, moaning about boredom, so we left halfway through. She got back to the van and snatched up one of her new books, and was happy again.
Next week: Sara, who always takes movies too seriously, comments on the cultural ramifications of the Three Stooges!
-- SJ
It was not an interesting movie.
Granted, we were the wrong ages: Addie should have been older and I should have been younger. And two or three of the actors, including Abigail Breslin as Kit, were fun to watch. Still, the movie was terribly earnest. The scriptwriters were concerned with the plot, the message, and Kit's adorable color-coordinated 1930s outfits. Anything else, like enjoyable dialogue or entertaining sequences, was obviously very low priority.
Two aspects of the movie annoyed me. Firstly, that less-fortunate people are innately good. The scapgoats in "Kit" were the hobos. Only Kit and her mother could look past the ragged clothes and see the hearts of gold underneath. Everyone else was presented as holding completely unreasonable prejudices against these poor hobos.
Yes, there were some heart-of-gold people thrown into the hobo life, and wrongly shunned by society (although I didn't realize it was such a brand of shame of that era). But hobos were also depressed and desperate people. It wasn't a safe society for obviously well-to-do young children to move in. I was in full sympathy with the mother who forbade her son from returning to the "hobo jungle," even though the movie villainized her for it.
Now I've made myself out to sound like a good middle-class uncharitable snob. My point isn't that we decent folk should sneer at the less-fortunate. My point is that judging anyone by their clothes and circumstances is wrong. The accepted Hollywood maxim that Poor People Are Nice and Rich People Are Mean isn't any nobler than the more usual assumption that nice clothes equals a nice person.
The second irritation was that the movie was set in the jolly Depression. Sure, people lose their jobs and houses. Sure, Kit's father has to leave to find work, leaving Kit and her mother to take in boarders. But everybody has such a good time living together! Even the hobo jungle looks cool! Further confirming the impression that we don't really understand what the Depression entailed were all the reviews I read beforehand. At least three of them mentioned that the setting of the movie "reflected current times in America." Okay. You're saying that high gas prices, an increased rate of foreclosures, and high food prices "reflect" a time when 25% of the popoulation was jobless? When kids put cardboard in the bottoms of their shoes because the soles were wearing through? When you ate oatmeal every day, not for the fiber, but because you had nothing else? Not one reviewer said, "The movie reminds us that our times are a pale reflection of what our grandparents went through." Poor struggling moviegoers, who just blew $20 for a movie and snacks!
Possibly the movie improved when it got into the second half: we didn't make it that far. Addie was slumped down in her chair, moaning about boredom, so we left halfway through. She got back to the van and snatched up one of her new books, and was happy again.
Next week: Sara, who always takes movies too seriously, comments on the cultural ramifications of the Three Stooges!
-- SJ
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