So, about VIDEO GAMES

I have not said much about video games here on this blog. I kept it kind of book-centric, possibly in order to impress myself with a sense of prestige, but the fact is that I play a large number of video games, particularly PC games. I particularly like to keep my eye on the indie game world– not the world of games with indie-music soundtracks, or the world of games featuring characters in plaid collared shirts and thick glasses, but the world of video games that have been designed and coded by individuals outside the major game-design studios. Some recent notables include World of Goo, Mount and Blade, Braid, And Yet It Moves, and a few others.

There has been some controversy over the past few years about whether or not the narrative of a video game is comparable to other narrative-based art forms, like books or movies. There has also been some controversy as to whether or not video games are art. For me the question is pretty simple: they ARE art, undoubtedly, and there are some games which carry a narrative of a quality matching or exceeding that of most typical movies or books. These strong-narrative games include the Half Life series and various RPG games like Knights of the Old Republic or Mass Effect or Baldur’s Gate. Portal has recently been lauded for its professionally-written storyline and its hilarious scripting. Dead Space, I hear, had a pretty neat plot, but I haven’t played it. The games I’ve mentioned here, besides Balduir’s Gate and KOTOR, are more-recent games, but there are plenty of older ones that have plenty of excellent narrative. There are also, of course, all those old 90s point-and-click adventure games, like Myst or the old Lucasarts adventure games. They always had to rely on stories to remain even vaguely playable.

Past years have shown that the games that do best are the games with the best storylines. Half-Life, Bioshock, Mass Effect– the big-sellers are nearly always also the ones that go beyond game mechanics (which, by the way, have to be excellent) to tell a serious story. Braid, for example, was a bitty little platformer with neat mechanics, but it also did experimental, nonlinear things with story that just blew everyone away, and it’s since become one of the best indie success stories in the past five years. Mount and Blade, one of my favorite indie games, has beautiful mechanics and a great feel, but no story whatsoever. It’s a half-baked cross between a fighting game and an RPG, and because the role-playing part is so dreadfully atrophoed– the missions are incredibly dull and repeat endlessly– it’s never done particularly well ratings-wise, despite the fact that the fighting aspects of the game are wonderfully fun. This is partly due to the fact that it’s an English-language game designed and written by a Turkish couple, but it’s still going to need to find a way to overcome that in order to make anything of itself.

So: will video games come to rival books in the future? Only to the same degree that movies do, I think. Any artistic experience which we are inteded to absorb over any period of time– radio plays, theater productions, novels, nonfiction works, movies, television shows and series– the ones that do well always have a story. So why not video games? PC games in particular have gone a long way towards plot-driven experiences, since the market for PC games is a bit more cerebral (also, this is one of the reasons why the market is doing so poorly: the games require mental effort in order to be enjoyed). Roger Ebert wrote a year or so ago that games could not be art. He’s since retracted his opinion, slightly: according to Ebert, games CAN be art, but they’ll never be as good as older, less-tech-y forms of art, like plays (or movies, I assume?), and they’re only art in the sense that anything can be art. Well, Ebert is part of the generation that will never catch on to games-as-art because the medium is simply to alien for them. Give us fifty years. By then, the games will not only be much farther down the road towards narrative and artistic perfection, but the world in which they are created will consist of several generations of long-time gamers. By the time our kids grow up, games will be as typical as movies, and as respected. And they’ll be telling much better stories.

God I have been UNDILLIGENT

I have not been doing anything in particular that would make me stop posting to this blog for so long. Chiefly, I have been:

• Writing a lot of abortive short-story openers
• Writing two short stories
• Writing two (only two! God!) poems
• Winning a poetry contest at my college
• Reading an obscene number of books (seventeen) since I have come to Boston for my off-term
• Playing the entire Half-Life 2 franchise over from beginning to end (Half-Life 2, Episode 1, and Episode 2, and some futzing around in Garry’s Mod) in nine days
• Watching the new Star Trek movie twice, then watching an inexcusable number of old Star Trek episodes (practically all of season two, a good amount of season three)
• Being listless
• Taking the bus to visit friends and family in other states
• Purchasing books from used-books stores

Clearly, none of this is enough to excuse what I have done. However I do not apologise because I am perfectly aware that I do not have an audience.

What should I do witht his blog? Should I publish my poems on it? No, I do not think I should. I need to find someone to read my poems but I cannot find anyone I trust enough to give me well-reasoned criticism and to simultaneously not be an asshole about it. Times are difficult. I am all alone in the world and whatever, possibly.

Here is a list of the books I have recently read. Some of them are respectable and some of them are not. I feel that if people do not read respectable and unrespectable books in equal measure, they will turn into elderly female college professors before they realize what has happened, and they will be consumed by feelings of waste and abandonment. This is the end result of overintellectualization, friends. It is no good.

The Unknown Shore (by Patrick O’Brian)

Einstein’s Dreams

The Road to Samarcand (by Patrick O’Brian)

Introducing Bertrand Russel

Introducing Jung

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

The Crossing

All the Pretty Horses

Brideshead Revisited

Issac Newton (by James Glieck)

St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Rised by Wolves (by Karen Russell)

Christine Falls

The Gun Seller (by Hugh Laurie)

This is a partial list; some of the seventeen books I have recently read I wrote about here before disappearing (Snow Crash, David Foster Wallace, etc) and so I do not bother to cover them.

The worst book on the list is The Gun Seller by Laurie; it is a waste of time. The best book was possibly The Crossing or Brideshead Revisited or Kavalier and Clay. I cannot decide. At any rate, they were fantastic. I have been absorbing all of this literature! I feel smarter by the day.

Currently I am reading TWO different books: Under the Volcano b y Malcom Lowry, a modernist tale about what it feels like, exactly, to be a drunkard; and (OH NO WATCH OUT) one of the Star Trek novels on which the new movie was based, Spock’s World. Why am I doing this? Because I have never before read a franchise novel based on a television show (except for a single Doctor Who novella about two years ago) and because the book was written by one of my childhood idols, Diane Duane, author of the So You Want to Be a Wizard series. Apparently, though she had what I would consider ‘chops,’ she spent her entire life writing obscure science fiction books as well as about twelve Star Trek novels and at least three Spiderman novels, which I had not previously known existed. Her Wikipedia has an extensive Works section which you might find interesting to peruse.

Anyway, in order to guard myself against excessive literaryness, I am reading this book at the same time as Under the Volcano and I hope they will balance each other our. Spock’s World has relatively good prose in it but it is still a Star Trek novelization and I don’t know if any amount of repressed writing chops on the part of Duane could ever overcome that fact. At any rate, if it’s good enough for Orci and Kutzman (screenwriters for the recent Star Trek movies and, now officially, the people I want to grow up to be) then it’s good enough for me.

When I was at an awards dinner for the English department last night I was asked by the head of the department what books I was reading. I mentioned Under the Volcano but I did not mention Spock’s World, obviously. I wonder what would have happened if I had. They might have taken my prize from me or something. Cast me out on my ear. I don’t know. It’s an interesting thought. The alternate universe where I actually DID say that is probably all gone to hell by now.

So I read CHRISTINE FALLS and I liked it

So. Why, exactly, did I like this book? As a mystery it certainly has its failings– not enough clues are given, and as a reader you constantly feel either bewildered or stupider than the other characters, neither of which is a good feeling for a mystery to inspire. Certain key moments or developments in the story are, I feel, handled poorly. But I actually enjoyed the book, and I enjoyed it a lot. Why, then? 

Because the characters and the places are so excellent, really. The characters are all very well-done, are all out of the ordinary– no cliche personality types here. When we get inside their heads– and that’s something about this book I didn’t like, the merciless head-switching, often several times in the same scene, can get a little wearisome– when we do get inside their heads, they are engaging and realistic. They were all capable of surprise and nothing they did seemed forced. It was the satisfaction of reading perfect characters, I think, that kept me going– that and the job Banville did with the setting. Anyway, nothing to disappoint from the characters and setting aspects of his style. 

Even though the mystery is very slow to develop, however, and even though there were no rewards for the attentive reader– no way to feel as if you were figuring the plot out, anyway– Banville managed to keep me feeling as if I were in SOME state of suspense, and I put that down entirely to his above-mentioned craft. That and the fact that he did allow himself a few plot twists, yes. They were pretty good ones. 

Here’s the thing, though: winner of the Man Booker Prize, like a hero, decides to write what he considers a piece of genre fiction. Good for him, I say! Breaking down the boundaries of the elitist literary establishment! As good as Chabon! Huzzah! But he goes and writes it under a PEN NAME, and then puts the fact that it IS a pen name right there in the text, no hiding it, in order to ALSO mention that he has won the Man Booker Prize. What exactly do you want, Banville? Do you want the secrecy of a pen name, the kind of cover that will allow you to go write commercial fiction despite the fact that you’re supposed to be ‘literary,’ or do you want the plaudits and praise of a literary career? This market and these harsh establishments are not exactly going to want to give you both. The fact that you’ve written what amounts to a literary crime novel– not a proper crime novel in itself, since it doesn’t have a good enough plot, but not a proper literary novel either, since it’s got this skeleton crime-plot sitting there– is going to make it hard for people to know what to make of you. You’re being MARKETED here in the hardback edition I have as a crime novelist, but you get your trade paperbacks printed like you’re a literary novelist. So who is going to read you? Crime readers will be disappointed by your amateurish stab at trying to be ‘gripping.’ Literary readers are going to wonder why, when you’ve clearly got your chops down, you have stuck old Quirke and his conundrum into the find-what’s-hidden formula that a crime novel should have. You can’t make everyone happy, Banville! 

Well, you can certainly try, and if more people gave it a good try then literary fiction would quite being so shitty and stop being almost exclusively about boring nonsense. There would be fewer books about small-town New England and more literature about, say fighter pilots! Or astronauts! Stuff, basically, that I would actually find interesting to read. That’s the problem with the modern literary/genre fiction bifurcation: I don’t like reading about boring stuff, so why would I want to read most of the literary fiction that’s out there? But, simultaneously, I don’t like reading shitty writing, so why would I want to read any of the genre fiction that’s out there? There’s no happy medium, except for when people like Banville and Chabon try to bridge the gap by writing well about topics that have usually been considered the purview of genre writing. So keep it up, Banville, I say: get better at this and you could knock everyone flat. This is the kind of direction I want to see writers going in.

Also, this book is begging to be made into some kind of a movie. It’s the dour 1950s-Dublin setting, I think. Good for a lot of foggy shots and ‘atmosphere.’ Could somebody get on this quick, please?

‘A Room With A View’ is rather CHARMING

I am generally not a reader of romance-related stories, period. I like books about people doing atypical things in unusual place and circumstances, and for some reason, I can’t explain why, practically none of my favorite books have to do with romance or love in any way whatsoever. Not erotic love, anyhow. I adored The Road and that’s all about the love of a father and a son; I thought Kim was brilliant, but that’s all about love of a very different sort, not romantic in the least; The Siege of Krishnapur has love IN it, but the real urgency of the story is in a different place altogether; and Riddley Walker is about a hunter-gatherer society so patriarchal that women barely factor into it at all. My favorite book of all time, Watership Down, treats love– as the rabbits treat it– as a procedural thing, something that must happen for a species to survive. My favorite series of all time, the Patrick O’Brien Aubrey/Maturin books, have a great deal of romantic angst in them, but that’s never the whole point of a book, and I did always get frustrated at Stephen Maturin’s interminable yearning and warbling about that one true love who would never have him. I do enjoy Pride and Prejudice a great deal, but that seems to be the exception that proves the rule. I’ve been working on Wuthering Heights now for over three months, and I am still having trouble getting myself to finish it. I simply find it boring.

So what is it with me and romances? Why do I avoid them? Why does romance in a story bother me so? Usually, I think, it’s because it’s poorly done. All of the romance in Wuthering Heights, for example, has always struck me as particularly unrealistic and extremely boring. I know it’s a classic, but I find it unspeakably dull. With love stories, there’s one of two endings: either they end up together or they don’t. Along the way there will be a whole lot of  waffling back and forth, and some things will be very sad or very happy, and I won’t be able to predict all the vagaries, but they’ll either end up together or they won’t. Boom. That’s it. To me, love stories, out of all varieties of tale, are the only ones that feel as if they have a goal: they are the only ones which the characters can really ‘win.’ And because I see them as having a specific goal, all the nonsense in the middle seems rather irrelevant. Who cares how much the characters change in the course of the tale? Either they end up together or they don’t. In the same way, the score at the end of a soccer game almost invalidates all the struggle that took place during the game. Once you know the score, it barely matters anymore what was happening at any given moment during the struggle. Either your team won or it didn’t, and that’s that.

And why would I read about people being in love, I’ve always wondered, if they’re not doing something more interesting at the same time? This is why Wodehouse stories please me. Though Jill the Reckless is just a love story, it’s simultaneously an expose on the lost world of early twentieth century musical theater! Isn’t that exciting? I don’t mind all the shameless Wodehous self-insertion or the charming-heroine nonsense because there’s something else there– something very good. Hilarious characters to keep me occupied; weird procedural stories about what it’s like to live in that kind of world during that particular time period. Because the rest is so clever, I actually enjoy the love tale at the heart of it. But if there hadn’t been so much packed in around it– if, like Wuthering Heights, it had concentrated on the love alone– I would have just rolled over and died out of boredom.

So: why did I just enjoy reading A Room With A View? Because, I think, it was short, and because it was realistic. It is in no way boring. It is also in no way clear what will happen to our dear Lucy, and she and her friends all behave in such a human, realistic way that I stopped wondering what the end of the story was going to be (but I could obviously guess, it being so tender and kind a tale) and started worrying for her moment by moment.

Now, the characters behave realistically emotionally, but the Emersons– the love interest, George, and his father– are not particularly realistic themselves. They behave like a bunch of wandering philosophers. No people in the world actually have the kind of conversations about life and the universe that they do. George and his father do not have one single typical human conversation in the entire book. But thier actions– the things they’re doing, the things they’re trying to do to other people through thier unrealistic words– those are realistic. The whole way the story was plotted reminded me very strongly of my Screenwriting I class from several terms ago: everyone had secret and non-secret motives at play at all times, and nobody was a caricature or a stereotype. The actions were real, so the story was compelling.

I think A Room With A View is the first book I have read since Pride and Prejudice that has managed to interest me despite its being only about love. Clearly, this is a very difficult thing for a story to pull off. Romeo and Juliet is only interesting because everyone is so committed to killing everyone else; the story would have no tension otherwise. It’s very hard to get tension into a love story if you expect the story to stand on love alone. Forster and Austen figured out how to get this to work, and they get it to work beautifully. Clearly, it takes a master.

This is why I will not be writing love stories anytime soon.

FINAL VERDICT on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

So. I’ve done it at last. I have actually read a book called ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.’ Am I better for it? 

Yes and no, really. The bits that are zombified are pretty funny, but there’s not enough of them, and near the end of the book– the time when Elizabeth spends about a hundred pages moping and being in emotional agony over her guilty behaviours of the past– THAT got tedious pretty quick, because there were practically zero zombies there, and I’ve read the zombie-free version of the book so many times that none of it was a surprise. 

That’s the problem with this kind of prank. And I’ll call it a prank, yes, because that’s basically what it is. It can only work if the added bits are SO plentiful and SO over-the-top that the reader is utterly astonished. Here and there it goes over the top, yes, but not far enough. As I said, the end is practically zombie-free. A good step that Seth Grahme-Smith took TOWARDS excellence was his decision to make the Bennet family, Darcy, and Lady Catherine all NINJAS, but there was not enough nija awesomeness versus zombies. All in all, because I approached the book with an eagerness to see the DIFFERENCES in the text, not the similarities to the original, the overall deficit of differences made me impatient and slightly bored. 

Now, he MENTIONS zombies or ninjas on practically every page, but the number of original scenes– the number of substantial changes, of paragraphs added or subtracted or totally transformed, is lower than the threshold of captivation. They’re everywhere, yes, they’re just not ENOUGH of everywhere. 

So, that’s my verdict on this book. I’d suggest it as a casual joke gift-item, certainly, and if you’re a real fan of zombies or of Austen’s work you’ll get a kick out of it, but I wouldn’t suggest that anyone try to read the book ALL the way through if they don’t want to. It can get a little tiring. Otherwise: fantastic idea that could have done with a bit of a better 
execution.

Just bought Pride and Prejudice and ZOMBIES

I’ve known about this book for a while. It was all over the internet some months ago, and I and the other members of the college humor magazine for which I write have all been eagerly awaiting its arrival. So yesterday I went and bought it, naturally.

“I can’t believe you’re actually buying this,” the guy at the register said. It’s an independent bookstore, and they obviously need all the money they can get these days, so I have no idea why he decided to say this to me, the willing-to-pay customer.

“Jame Austen is spinning in her grave,” the second register-man said, peering at my book. He made a lot of circular motions with his index finger while widening his eyes significantly.

“Yes,” I said, irritated. “She’s spinning so fast she’s creating her own magnetic field.”

The other two were silent for a moment, and then the younger one, the one with the finger and the eyes, started to make these explosively-suppressed snorts of laughter. So I just handed over the money and left. I’ve got about 50 pages into it so far. The dissonance between the bits that are obviously Jane Austen and the bits that are added by the author is hilarious. Sometimes he’s got the tone dead-on. Other times, it’s less so. There are times when you want to say, “Now, even in a ZOMBIE film, that’s unlikely,” but a few pages later you realize that he’s thrown these very-unlikely, totally-constructed plot elements into the story just to prepare a set piece, like an explosion. And then you laugh and laugh.

He also does a good job adding single words or changing parts of phrases. So far, the lesson I’ve derived is this: it is disturbingly easy to change a two-hundred-year-old text to be about the waking dead. It is also hilarious to invent possible antiquated constructions of zombie terminology. The ‘unmentionables’ are sometimes the subject of outlandishly ornate outbursts from Mrs. Bennet, and Mr. Bennet’s crisp sarcasm has now changed its subject from intelligence and the usefulness of learning to combat and the usefulness of being trained in ‘the deadly arts.’ Lizzie isn’t a clever wit so much as she’s a red-eyed killer.

Anyway, please buy and/or read it. In tough times like these, it is kind of your DUTY to support such ventures.

http://www.amazon.com/Pride-Prejudice-Zombies-Classic-Ultraviolent/dp/1594743347

There is a RABBIT in the place where I live

I had not been aware of this fact previously. It seems that the people from whom I sublet decided to conceal it from me, lest my fear caused me to pull out of the deal before giving them any money.

It is larger than the average housecat and it moves like a lynx. I do not know what to think about it. It has been hiding here this whole time. Apparently it is not supposed to be this big. It is the size of a small shopping-bag stuffed with oddly-shaped, oversized accent pillows. I have heard it loping past my room.

What counters rabbits? In Watership Down, my favorite book of all time, rabbits are killed by

• Cats
• Dogs
• Fatigue
• Ear Lice
• Other Rabbits

If I want to protect myself from this monstrous thing–”Don’t put your hand right in front of his face, because he will bite it,” as one of my roommates has told me– I ought to employ one of these weapons. I think I might buy it a treadmill and wait for it to run itself to death. This seems a more-hygenic approach than the ear lice.

And they told me Watership Down wasn’t relevant to daily life! Hah! But it is, seriously. That book is, in my opinion, the epitome of Art in the abstract. Why? It has a cogent message AND it is pleasing to read. There is no book I have yet read that has such a wide array of cogent and moving messages in it. It’s like Concentrated Extract of Message. With rabbits. This is a fantastic combination.

So, I was not previously aware that DFW is kind of UNBEARABLE

I just finished reading Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. This book is some kind of a literary masterpiece, yeah. I just didn’t enjoy reading it that much. 

I understand what this book is supposed to be, and it’s very eye-opening to note what he is doing/trying to do/succeeding to do in any one of these stories, but it is simply not enjoyable to read. It is rather like– as a child does in one of the earlier stories in this book, the only story I enjoyed– finding yourself forced to leap off of a high-dive. Post-leap, there are several different ways to consider yourself as having grown somehow, but during the dive it is not at all entertaining. You may find yourself feeling harassed, terrified, bored, or any other of a number of unpleasant emotions, and when you are finished you will cry GOD I AM GLAD THAT IS OVER and you will go on living some kind of expanded life and cease to think much about said high-dive UNLESS you are one of those people who find themselves compelled constantly to do unpleasant things and therefore suddenly find yourself compelled, through this unpleasant childhood experience most other people are busy forgetting, to become a world-class high-dive leaper. 

The big thing is this: yes, it is clever to be all sorts of postmodern, and yes, those who can pull it off well are all geniuses and deserve much praise– and DFW can pull it off well, frequently– but this is still not the kind of thing that books were invented for. They’re not enjoyable as short stories. I don’t care if they are a ‘delight’ and a ‘harassment of the short story form’. I am not going to want to read short stories if the writer of the short stories wrote them in order to harass me. In the same way, though I would credit laudable creativity to an artist whose form of sculpture involved aethetically lining the walls of a room with inward-pointing knives, I would not particularly enjoy being in that room, and would instead feel a degree of tension or be a little bit upset.

The only one of these stories I actually enjoyed was ‘Forever Overhead,’ a brilliant piece about a boy on a high-dive. I think it is stunning. Other sections– the first of the ‘Hideous Men’ sections, for instance, or ‘Church Not Made With Hands’, a story about a young family in a tragic situation– are wonderful also, but are, in the case of the first, not as easy to enjoy, or, in the case of the second, so buried into the abrasive unpleasantness of the rest of this excellently-written book that by the time the reader gets to it he or she is simply too mentally exhausted to even recognize that this story is well-done and pleasant instead of abrasive. Putting the book down does not help– remembering prior sections can so trouble or bore that reading onward simply becomes as unpleasant as they were, regardless of whether or not the bit you are actually reading is itself unpleasant. The writing gets to be its least-bearable when he starts to write totally ironically about how stupid it is to always be totally ironic. I don’t know if it’s possible to sarcastically criticise sarcasm without sounding like a jerk, even if you ARE DFW. 

The fact is this: when DFW wants to make you experience, as in ‘The Depressed Person,’ what it is like to enter the mind of a severely depressed person, he does it in such a way and with such accuracy and force that there is practically no room for the reader to reflect. That’s how genuine it gets. It is the same, though less so, with the bit about an honored playwright’s father who, on his death bed, insists on going on and on a bout how much he hates his talented son. DFW simply presents these relentless neverending trauma-filled paragraphs one after another as if he is pounding the reader’s head with a bloody brick, and the reader must shout ‘God, this is spectacular, DFW! Now please get the brick out of my eye!’ The question we should all be asking is NOT ‘Is this good?‘ The question should be, ‘Am I having a good time reading this?‘ It is a totally inescapable fact that wholly unpleasant things are rarely saved for posterity. Even upsetting or pathologically-focused books, like Crime and Punishment, are saved because there is something accessible or somehow pleasant about the reading experience that makes at least some of us refrain from hurling it out of a window. There is barely any such redeeming factor here.

So. DFW is some kind of literary god. But it is now perfectly self-evident to me why more writers are not running around trying to be as horrifically postmodern as he was. It is soul-crushingly unhappy to be so postmodern. I do not mean to be crass, but these stories make it clear that DFW understands human agony and disgrace and depression. And he killed himself. So, I say this: it is okay not to like this book. Read it and perhaps admire it, but it is okay to dislike it. The reason you dislike it so much is that you have understood what DFW was trying to do. And the thing he was trying to do was not to write an accessible, edifying book, but to conduct ‘a harassment of the short story form,’ which is the opposite of what short stories are for. One does not go around trying to become a successful baker by baking breads which are a harassment of the mouth. There is a reason for this.

FRENCH FILMS are pretty whimsical

I have not seen a heck of a lot of French films– for some reason, I have failed to ever get my claws on Amelie, if that is how you spell it– but I have recently seen Delicatessen, and it is good.

This may be because I like all things post-apocalyptic pretty indiscriminately (except those written before 1950) and because I make an effort to like a story more the wierder it is, but this one is extremely well-done. It takes place in an apartment building above a butcher shop in a world so ruined we never see any more of it (in all exterior shots, this building appears to be the only one left in the world, though the characters say this isn’t so) and so blasted that the outer envirnoment appears to be made of solid orange dust and the inner environment of solid crazy. There’s a basement-dweller who raises frogs and snails in his half-flooded room– algae hangs from the walls and snails cling to his bedspread and his face– so he can eat them at every meal. There’s a pair of middle-aged men who make groan-tube toys out of empty food cans. There’s a woman who makes the most outrageous Rube-Goldberg-like suicide machines for herself. And there’s the butcher, who, based on a grim agreement with his tenants, supplies them all with fresh human meat.

See, in the future, after the nuclear holocaust, there are no more animals to eat for meat, so if you want that kind of protein in your diet, you are going to have to eat other people. The butcher lures in handymen and kills them off after a week or so, one after the other, all the time. The movie centers around the one handyman he’ll have a hard time killing, namely becuase his daughter is in love with him and he’s the charmingest ex-clown you’ve ever met. And also because they’ve hired a posse of vegetarian commandoes who live in the sewers to help them escape to safety.

Anyway, it’s shot excellently, it’s hilarious, the colors are all totally super French-film-saturated, and there’s a million crazy little details– the frog-man in the basement, a great scene involving synchronized bed-bouncing set to music, and a wierd subplot involving the voices the suicidal woman hears in her head– that are also pretty awesome. I recommend it highly to basically everyone– though it’s about cannibalism, it’s not gory at all, and everything is just so charming and well-put-together that there’s little not to like about it.

In fact, I can’t think of anything to complain about it at all.

Just finished reading SNOW CRASH

This book has, officially, the coolest opening chapter of any book ever written in English within the last thirty years.

The screwed-up world Stephenson has created here is so intensely detailed and so outrageous, and presented with such an appealingly enthusiastic attitude, that it’s impossible not to have fun reading it. The first chapter throws the reader headlong into a vernacular and an atmosphere that, though basically totally unexplained (like most of his characters, Stephenson is not going to slow down to lead a reader by the hand), is very fresh and engaging– it’s difficult not to have your own hallucinatory flights of imagination about this future-past America where franchised businesses rule on their own laws and the ‘Metaverse’– a kind of 3-d, interactive, Second-Life-meets-Internet– can substitute entirely for real-world interactions.

Stephenson has a great way of describing his grimly-hilarious imaginings from the viewpoints of characters who accept these wacky ideas as normal. There’s the excellent opening chapter about pizza-delivery, a few great segments told from the point of view of a local Mafia lieutenant who runs his territory with the attitude of a dedicated McDonald’s manager, and a description of the daily routine at a Federal office where cavity checks are a way to prove loyalty and bring-your-own-toilet-paper-rolls– or BTDUs (bathroom tissue distribution units)– are the norm. It’s great stuff.

Not so great is Stephenson’s charmingly nerdy obsession with Babylonian myth. It forms the core of the novel’s mystery– and, therefore, of the plot– but because it’s so complex, and because the characters are supposed to be constantly discovering more about it, he sometimes spends a hell of a lot of time traipsing back and forth over the same well-worn ground. Then, in order to avoid boring us with even more repetitions of the same obscure material, he has certain characters– whom we have been following constantly throughout the plot– suddenly appear to know much more about absolutely everything without having had time to learn about it– either that, or the characters are much more observant and clever than the reader is. Which is, of course, an irritating thought. The mystery works well, though, despite the fact that, under Stephenson’s treatment, the substance of it constantly seems to have been pulled straight out of his ass.

That’s the effect, I suppose, of his attitude throughout the book. Everything is AS EXTREME AS POSSIBLE, from the characters to the environment to the weapons and the explosions. Consequently, the history is treated with extreme and astonishing terms, and the mystery is filled with extremeness and super-intense nuttiness. This is a book for people who like things that are exciting and intelligent and weird and MAD COOL. It is a book for people who don’t mind reading over 450 pages of crazy improbability wrapped in flashy style. It is not a book for people who like their science fiction hard and it is not a book for people who like their speculative fiction to resemble reasonable possibility in any way whatsoever. It’s like what Steve Jobs might have cooked up during a brainstorming session held in the late 1980s– had he been on speed, had he been a linguistics major, and had he recently been forced to watch Enter the Dragon about ten million times in a row. It’s good stuff, basically. But it’s SUPER INTENSE and it’s not for lameasses.