Miscellanea
Mar. 29th, 2009 12:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerFirst, links: Trouble with Twitters.As I have never actually used Twitter I don't know if this is true or not, but I think it's hilarious.
Also: They fight crime!, home of ridiculous three sentence story pitches. "He's an old-fashioned arachnophobic dog-catcher looking for 'the Big One.' She's a hard-bitten gypsy archaeologist from beyond the grave They fight crime!" "He's a suicidal ninja astronaut who dotes on his loving old ma. She's a tortured nymphomaniac museum curator with only herself to blame. They fight crime!" Etc.
I am almost - almost - tempted to try to write one of these, just to see if I could fit all those characteristics in there somehow.
***
Speaking of things that tempt me to write stories I shouldn't write: I'm reading Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler for my History of the Book class (both book and class have the potential to be insanely awesome), in which each chapter is essentially the beginning chapter from a new book.
This is fascinating and meta and probably postmodernist like a postmodernist thing. This is also going to drive me insane, because so far they've all been the beginning chapters from interesting books, which unfortunately do not actually exist.
Did anyone read Chris Van Allsburg's The Mysteries of Harris Burdick as a child? It's quite similar - it's a book of lovingly detailed and faintly creepy pencil drawings, accompanied by a mysterious title and a sentence supposedly drawn from a story. One of these pictures involved a flying chair (evidently one of a set of fourteen), and it stuck with me for years until I finally write a story this year involving flying chairs, although only six of them.
Did anyone else read Chris Van Allsburg, period? I loved his books when I was a kid. I still love them. His most famous book I think is the The Polar Express.
***
Lastly - speaking of stories within stories - this week I saw the movie The Fall, which stars Lee Pace - the Piemaker on Pushing Daisies - and, if that isn't enough to make you watch it (although I can't see why it wouldn't be), is totally awesome.
Pace plays a silent film stunt man, Roy, who is laid up in a hospital after a nasty fall (actually, the film involves several nasty falls, both real and metaphorical; it's an excellent title). He befriends a little girl named Alexandria (she's in my icon here; I decided I had to watch the movie after seeing![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
visualthinker11's icons of it) by telling her a story, stopping at the exciting parts to tell her that he needs her to steal him some medicine - some morphine, to help him sleep.
Roy is an excellent mix of charming - it's totally believable that Alexandria would befriend him so rapidly - and despicable, given he's using her friendship to get her to unwittingly help him commit suicide. The scene where he realizes he's despicable - marvelous; it's appalling that Pace's shows keep getting canceled, he's an excellent actor.
And the story Roy tells Alexandria is fantastic. It's slightly incoherent, in the best possible I-am-totally-making-this-up-as-I-go-along sort of way - the kind of story you make up to entertain a kid on a long car ride - the costumes and settings are richly colored and beautiful, the characters are intriguingly quirky Darwin! With his fur coat and his monkey! And The Indian. Roy isn't quite aware that there's a difference between India Indians and Native American Indians, so The Indian looks like he stepped out of an Orientalist painting, but vowed never to look at another "squaw" after Governor Odious killed his wife.
Governor Odious, besides killing The Indian's wife, sent Darwin a dead butterfly, which was enough to make Darwin vow Eternal Revenge, because Roy's Darwin is evidently rather more St. Francis of Assisi than naturalist who taxidermied piles of Galapagos finches. He also - oh, just watch the movie, it's wonderful, I've gone on about it long enough. It's a wonderful blend of serious, comic, absurd; it's beautifully filmed, just enthralling.
Also: They fight crime!, home of ridiculous three sentence story pitches. "He's an old-fashioned arachnophobic dog-catcher looking for 'the Big One.' She's a hard-bitten gypsy archaeologist from beyond the grave They fight crime!" "He's a suicidal ninja astronaut who dotes on his loving old ma. She's a tortured nymphomaniac museum curator with only herself to blame. They fight crime!" Etc.
I am almost - almost - tempted to try to write one of these, just to see if I could fit all those characteristics in there somehow.
***
Speaking of things that tempt me to write stories I shouldn't write: I'm reading Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler for my History of the Book class (both book and class have the potential to be insanely awesome), in which each chapter is essentially the beginning chapter from a new book.
This is fascinating and meta and probably postmodernist like a postmodernist thing. This is also going to drive me insane, because so far they've all been the beginning chapters from interesting books, which unfortunately do not actually exist.
Did anyone read Chris Van Allsburg's The Mysteries of Harris Burdick as a child? It's quite similar - it's a book of lovingly detailed and faintly creepy pencil drawings, accompanied by a mysterious title and a sentence supposedly drawn from a story. One of these pictures involved a flying chair (evidently one of a set of fourteen), and it stuck with me for years until I finally write a story this year involving flying chairs, although only six of them.
Did anyone else read Chris Van Allsburg, period? I loved his books when I was a kid. I still love them. His most famous book I think is the The Polar Express.
***
Lastly - speaking of stories within stories - this week I saw the movie The Fall, which stars Lee Pace - the Piemaker on Pushing Daisies - and, if that isn't enough to make you watch it (although I can't see why it wouldn't be), is totally awesome.
Pace plays a silent film stunt man, Roy, who is laid up in a hospital after a nasty fall (actually, the film involves several nasty falls, both real and metaphorical; it's an excellent title). He befriends a little girl named Alexandria (she's in my icon here; I decided I had to watch the movie after seeing
visualthinker11's icons of it) by telling her a story, stopping at the exciting parts to tell her that he needs her to steal him some medicine - some morphine, to help him sleep. Roy is an excellent mix of charming - it's totally believable that Alexandria would befriend him so rapidly - and despicable, given he's using her friendship to get her to unwittingly help him commit suicide. The scene where he realizes he's despicable - marvelous; it's appalling that Pace's shows keep getting canceled, he's an excellent actor.
And the story Roy tells Alexandria is fantastic. It's slightly incoherent, in the best possible I-am-totally-making-this-up-as-I-go-along sort of way - the kind of story you make up to entertain a kid on a long car ride - the costumes and settings are richly colored and beautiful, the characters are intriguingly quirky Darwin! With his fur coat and his monkey! And The Indian. Roy isn't quite aware that there's a difference between India Indians and Native American Indians, so The Indian looks like he stepped out of an Orientalist painting, but vowed never to look at another "squaw" after Governor Odious killed his wife.
Governor Odious, besides killing The Indian's wife, sent Darwin a dead butterfly, which was enough to make Darwin vow Eternal Revenge, because Roy's Darwin is evidently rather more St. Francis of Assisi than naturalist who taxidermied piles of Galapagos finches. He also - oh, just watch the movie, it's wonderful, I've gone on about it long enough. It's a wonderful blend of serious, comic, absurd; it's beautifully filmed, just enthralling.
