Sometimes a girl needs a little fun in her life. A moment to enjoy some good old fashioned science-fuled ass kicking. A happy ending would be nice too. So, what’s a girl to do? I got my hands on volume 2 and 3 of the Atomic Robo trade paperbacks.

If you haven’t heard of Atomic Robo, go read my review of the first book.

This series is written like someone handed Brian Clevinger a list of all the things that make my heart sing. Tesla, mad science, heroic action, Carl Sagan, giant robots, evil Nazis, and Scott Wegener’s adorable art style? Oh, pitter patter.

Vol. 2, Atomic Robo and the Dogs of War, collects the five-issue mini-series, complete with cover gallery, pin-ups, and bonus stories. It shows more of Robo’s adventures in World War II, introduces a plucky British heroine, and there’s some evil genius-designed weather cannons.

It also has a brief appearance by James “Scottie” Milligan, a Scotsman and a hero. He was Scott Wegener’s grandfather.

That the creators of this comic wrote in Wegener’s grandfather, in order to allow him to live again in Atomic Robo, is the biggest part of why I adore this book. It’s written and drawn by people who want to be a part of this world, so much that they will populate it with their favorite things, their joys and sorrows and loved ones. This is he one great power we have as writers – the ability to remake the world in whatever image we want, to fix its flaws, to ressurect the dead, to make it right. When it’s done well, as it is in this case, it’s breathtaking.

Vol 3, Atomic Robo and The Shadow From Beyond Time, combines AR with my other great love: HP Lovecraft. I did tell you they write this series just for me, didn’t I? Let’s start with the fact that “Tesla Heavy Industries” had, in 1926, a storefront office with “Science While You Wait!” painted on the window. Throw in the Tunguska blast, Howard P Lovecraft babbling like a mad man, Carl Sagan, lightning guns, tentacles, and … I don’t want to give away the rest of the story but if you like that sort of thing, this is the book for you.

Oh, and Robo’s wearing argyle socks. I’m just saying.

We’re moving on to The Conference of the Birds (link goes to Wiki) in tomorrow’s class. Before I switch gears, I wanted to share some facts and thoughts on a misunderstood genre of writing: Aesopic fables.

The word “fable” comes from the Latin ”fabula” (a “story”), itself derived from “fari” (“to speak”) with the -ula suffix that signifies “little”: hence, a “little story”.

Aesop’s fables have grown from an early group of Greek stories – attributed to a single source – into a genre, describing a type of stories, regardless of author. We now refer to this body of stories as the “Aesopic tradition”. Fables are generally short, insightful, tales, meant to convey a message in only a few sentences. There are several parts to a fable, not all of which are required but most of which appear over and over again. These include:

• the moral, with or without an explanatory promythium or epimythium
• using animals or gods as main characters
• often explains acts of nature, such as why an animal is of a certain color
• not (originally) meant for children

A promythium is an explanation of the fable’s moral placed before the story, just as an epimythium comes after the tale. It became very common to add these notes to fables, particularly in the middle ages, in case the reader didn’t get quite the same message that the author intended. When a fable doesn’t have these notes, it’s said to have an endomythium – the moral of the tale is inside the story, and we’re supposed to know what it is.

These moral messages go back to the beginning of fables and speak to the point of having a fable in the first place. Early scholars talk about the original Aesop, who cannot be proven to have existed at all but who may have lived in the 6th century BC, as an angry, sarcastic, stumpy, misshapen, dwarf of a slave*. He was born deaf and mute, but – after helping a priestess – was granted speech as a gift by her goddess. He promptly used his new gifts to denounce his master, the slave system, and pretty much everyone and everything he ran into. He told allegorical stories in order to explain his meaning to people he assumed weren’t as smart as he was, and eventually so angered the people of Delphi that they framed him for stealing in order to have an excuse to shove him off of a cliff. Moral of that story: being smart and clever won’t help you if you’re still an ass to everyone around you.

His stories lived on long after he did, through the oral tradition. Socrates and Aristotle wrote about him; Babrius wrote his fables down for (possibly) the first time; and Pheadrus, Hesiod, Epicharmus of Kos and Phormis all wrote their own fables. The tradition carried on through the middle ages (the Church had several of its own fable writers), found popularity again in 17th century France, and into modern day. There’s significant evidence that the fables didn’t originate with Aesop but that he was himself carrying on an earlier Sumerian tradition of story telling using animals**, but it’s Aesop who gets the fame.

The use of animals and gods is extremely common in fables, but perhaps not for the reason you think. Humans are also common in fables, but it’s never specific human beings. It’s “a man” or “a slave master” or “a wife”, sometimes with unappealing adjectives, but never with a name. The characters in the fables are all archetypes, so that the story can be transposed onto different situations and still have universal ability to get across a message. There are stories of Aesop telling about a fox choosing to live with the ticks it has rather than flick them off and get new ones in order to convince a town not to cast out their politician, because while he was corrupt the next one might be worse. He’s also been said to have told stories to save people in court, insult the rich, and mock the stupid, all without saying precisely who he was referring to. Given that he was eventually executed for being so annoying, the generic content of his stories probably kept him alive a little while longer.

Not every fable was meant to point out someone else’s flaws. Some of them were meant to explain what Aesop considered to be obvious facts about the natural world, such as why a bird has no crown feathers, of why another animal hunts at night. It’s these fables that get handed down as teaching instruments, and what gives rise to the incorrect assumption that Aesop wrote from children. It is only in the last century or so that writers have been adapting fables for children’s books, because before that they’re considered the privilege of educated men to know and discuss (and get the “joke” of”). Nowadays you can find illustrated versions of such “children’s classics” as The Ant and the Grasshopper. We all know that one, don’t we?

1919 illustration of Aesop's Fables by Milo Winter

Except that there’s also a version where the ant was a farmer who stole from his neighbors at night because he couldn’t stop working and enjoy life … but that fable isn’t told as often as the one which extols hard work and mocks the artists and muscians of the world.

Because there have been fables written for thousands of years, the assumption is that only the important ones are preserved or are being presented to the reader. Modern authors often write in an archaic or poetic meter in to give weight to their creations, just as people often use a quote from an ancient or respected source to present our own opinion in a way that others will take more seriously than if we had used our own words. While it’s important to know the history of your stories, I do like some of these new stories quite a bit.

We were asked to bring in to class an example of Aesop in our time, and my example was Aesop Cop. Haven’t heard of it?

Aesop Cop is a collaboration between Franklin Crawford, who scans police logs around the world (mostly in his hometown of Ithaca, N.Y.) and writes an Aesop-inspired morality poem about notable crimes, and Rigel Stuhmiller, a Berkeley, CA-based artist, who illustrates the poems.

How fun is that?

Like any other genre of writing, we can respect its origins and preserve the style while still adapting it to our own needs. Try writing your own fable and see what you come up with.

* Recent scholars have reinterpreted Aesop as a black Ethiopian, and suggest his “deformity” was just a case of the early Greeks being really, really, racist. Which is entirely possible.

** Within a few hundred years we have recorded fables from India, Asia, and the Middle East, and some of the stories in the Hebrew bible could be considered fables as well, so it’s difficult to say where the genre actually started.

Just for a week, let’s say, so you don’t get lonely or miss anyone or feel guilty about taking the time off. One week to live in a vacuum, to spend with yourself. The question is, who would you be?

This might seem like a silly question, but the truth is a big part of who we are is based on what we think we have to do. How we act around others when we want to attract or repel someone. It’s only when we are alone – and specifically when we drop everything that we’re doing for anyone else – that we can see clearly what we want for ourselves. Most of the time we don’t even think about what we lose when we lose the people in our lives. Of course, we think we’ll miss them. But we don’t think, will I still make pancakes for breakfast if my son isn’t here to eat them? Or, would I get up at 5 am and go running if the dog didn’t need to be fed? 

Part of the problem is that we do so much to get other people interested in us – in hiring us, dating us, buying our writing – that we forget that we can be ourselves and still get those things. Maybe from different people, but what we’d have then would be truer and better. It’s tempting to cave, though. It can feel as if not pretending means we’ll be alone forever. We tell ourselves that being a little fake is what we all have to do to get by. Tiny things, like no longer eating bacon because your new boyfriend is a vegetarian and you want him to like you. That’s not a big lie, is it? That’s a compromise, right? Well, it might be, if he’s also giving something up for you. If you two can agree that living your lives in a curtailed way is better than being apart. It’s the same as following a dress code when you go to work, because you want that job and it’s a small (in your mind) price to pay for being employed.

Well, it’s similar, except that we don’t expect our boss to love us for who we really are. And those compromises add up, one after another, until you don’t how you got stuck with someone who isn’t anything like you at all.

Some people are as honest as they can be. Walking truths, clear in who they are and what they want. They realize that life is short, and we shouldn’t waste time on dishonesty in the naive view that it will get us a writing contract, or a husband, or a new career. Because the truth is that those lies will eventually strangle us. Eventually, all of the things we’re not getting will pile up. Everything falls apart then.

I try to be myself as often as I can. Sure, I have areas I want to improve on, but that’s not because of anyone but myself. I have an idea of who the best version of me is and I’m heading in that direction. The beauty of this is that if you like me, then I know it’s because you know me, and you like me anyway. There’s a better chance, then, that if we are friends, we’ll stay friends, because you won’t wake up one morning and realize I’m an illusion. I am just me. *waves* Hello!

Recently I’ve had so much going on, I haven’t spent a lot of time with other people. I have spent a lot of time riding on trains, staying up late at night by myself, working, and thinking. I need to do that sometimes, to push the reset button on my life and just breathe in and out for a few days. I’m more of an introvert than most people realize, because my desire to say things honestly comes across as brave or loud or strong, but I’m not those things as often as I’d like to be.

Given all of this time alone in my own head, what have I figured out? Other than I still think being honest is the right path for me? I know that I would rather buy comic books than food, that I like spending time alone more than I would have expected a few years ago, that I prefer coffee to soda (but sometimes forget to make it), that I have completely stopped watching American television, that I like jazz even when I’m the only one listening to it, that I feel weird if I don’t get out of the house every single day. Even if it’s just to take a short walk.

I like sushi, and flannel sheets, and reading every single day. I like discovering new things, and hanging out with people who know more than I do, so I can learn something. I think I’m over zombies, but I still like dinosaurs. I like it when my house is completely silent, not every minute but sometimes, yeah. Quiet. I like to keep to oranges in the fridge so that they’re cold when I eat them.

And no boyfriend would get me to stop eating bacon.

But those are my things. That’s my life. What’s yours? Whatever it is, what you like and whoever you are, don’t be afraid to be that. Don’t think you have to hold on to friends or lovers or even family that doesn’t like those things, doesn’t respect who you are and what you need. If you are yourself, and you’re happy with yourself, other people will be happy with you too. You’ll find those people, doing the things you love. You know who you don’t need in your life? People who don’t support you, who aren’t honest with you, who only want to be with you if you change into someone else. There are 6 billion people on the planet – you don’t need the wrong people in your life.

I suppose that I should tie this into writing, because that’s what I do. I give you analogies and helpful hints and book reviews and story ideas. I think this time it’s ok to leave this blog post as it is. Will your writing improve if you’re true to yourself? Probably. Will your fan base grow if you’re honest? Definitely. They love to know who we are, under the words, and they hate to find out they’ve been misled.

That doesn’t matter as much as how you feel about yourself when you wake up in the morning.

Don’t settle. Don’t live someone else’s life. Find the people who love you for you, exactly as you are, and who allow you to grow into who you want to be.

Those are the people you don’t let go of.

Set in a near future where a second American civil war rages, a lone journalist is stranded in the middle of New York City, now a brutal no-man’s-land. Mirroring current events, DMZ is an unforgiving look at what a ‘war on terror’ can do to a civilian population.

I’ve been told that I need to start reading Brian Wood’s Vertigo series, DMZ. I meant to, I really did. From what I heard, it was exactly the kind of book I like: dark, gritty, urban, bleak, yet full of unexpected hope. I looked forward to it, but wasn’t certain when I’d find the time. Now that it’s coming to an end, I finally picked up the first three graphic novels, which collect issues 1 to 17, and … it’s everything I was told to expect.

The story begins with Matty Roth, photo intern, being dropped into the middle of a war zone. As if being left behind weren’t bad enough, he’s got people shooting at him and strange girls pointing guns in his face and an alarming tendency to faint under pressure. Poor Matty. He can get out or he can bunker down and turn his misfortune into a chance at the big time, a chance to be the only working journalist in the DMZ. Which just happens to be Manhattan, caught in the crossfire between what’s left of the USA and the “Free States” currently occupying New Jersey and points west.

Wood shows a NYC we can imagine without having to squint too hard. It’s a brilliant premise, turning a city with as much cultural weight as NYC has into a hotly contested battle zone. It turns familiar territory into a whole new world, an alternate history two steps to the right of where we are now. To say that Wood loves this city is an understatement – it serves as both backdrop and character for two of his other titles, New York Four/Five and The Couriers, and he lives in Brooklyn - but in DMZ it’s transformed.

There are all kinds of little bits of fun in the book too, meant for people who have a vague idea of what New York is, as both a historical landmark and a place where the cutting edge is sharpest. Central Park? The Zoo? The Flatiron Building? They’re in the books. Art installations and vegan restaurants and Chinese gangsters and tattooed girls whose thong underwear is visible over their low-rise jeans? Here. All the bits of truth that become ideas when they filter out of the city and into popular media can be found, eventually, in DMZ, but they serve as anchors, pulling the book back into our world, and giving us landmarks to guide us along the way.

Wood has to be given credit for another bit of world building – even though the book is marketed at an arguably male (and white male, at that) audience, because that’s still the bulk of the comic book buying population, his characters are not only white or male. His main character is, sure, because we have to give the reader a person to identify with, but most of the other white males in the book are military, soldiers. Matty’s friends and neighbors are the people you’d expect to see living in New York today. To have whitewashed the city would have been an unforgivable sin, and one I’m glad Wood didn’t make. In addition, he gives us the full range of humanity’s potential, so that it isn’t just the white men who save the day, but the black architecture student, the hispanic female med student, the elderly Chinese “grandfather”, and so on.

Yes, of course, there are the punks and the thieves and the whores. It is still New York.

What makes DMZ work for me is that while there is a big war going on, and Matty, as the “outsider” does have to reflect on why it started and where it’s going, the bulk of the people in the story don’t have time for that kind of philosophizing. It’s not a book where people sit around a diner talking out their big ideas on long swathes of dialogue. There’s running and hiding and exploding bombs and dying children and conspiracies and fucking and making mistakes and trying not to die. A lot of simply trying not to die. It gives the story a frenetic layer of action on top of which can be thrown a little heavy thinking, if there’s time.

There are 72 issues in the series, before it ends, and I think I’m going to have to read them all.

Cover illustrations: Brian Wood, John Paul Leon
Colorist: Jeromy Cox 
Lettering: Jared K. Fletcher
Published by DC Comics/Vertigo
DMZ is co-created by Riccardo Burchielli

On the Ground. Collects Issues 1-5. ISBN 1-4012-10627
Body of a Journalist. Collects Issues 6-12. ISBN 1-4012-12476
Public Works. Collects Issues 13-17. ISBN 1-4012-14762

In January I started my final semester at UPenn – I’m taking 5 classes, including one on Great Story Collections, and I’m writing about that class for the blog. So far, I love my classes and my professors, but it’s massively time-consuming. Juggling everything has been a bit tricky but I think I’m getting the hang of it. Besides school, what else did I do in January?

I …

• Watched 16 movies, and wrote about them here and here (and I’m due to write another review post for the rest).
• Ranted about less-than-honest book reviews.
• Wrote a 1475 word SF piece, submitted it, got rejected, did a major rewite, and submitted it to a different market.
• Was invited to submit proposals for non-fiction essays for an anthology about a major comic book line; I pitched two ideas, the editor liked both, so I wrote formal proposals (200-300 words each) and submitted them.
• Wrote an 800 word post for my Tech Nerd column over at Functional Nerds (I’ll link to it once it’s live).
• Wrote a 1075 word review of Chicks Dig Time Lords for Functional Nerds (also due to be posted soon).
• Wrote a letter for the Dear Teen Me project, which is due to be posted on February 2, 2012.

I’ll admit that most of the writing got done in the last few days of the month, in one great push to not have wasted all of January. Considering everything else I had going on, I’m happy with what I did finish, but I’m still hoping that February is a much better month. Cross your fingers for me.

So you want to get your book sold, do you? And you think that a glowing review of your work will get readers interested? I have to agree with you there. There have been several books that I purchased based on a strong review by someone whose opinion I trusted.

Oh, you don’t want to show anyone the reviews where the reader thought you could have used a better editor, or thought your female characters had no agency, or bemoaned your complete lack of a believable plot? Well, sure, I can understand that. A good review tends to sell more books than a bad one. Your only choice is to keep sending your books out until you’ve found your market, and then post the good reviews you do get.

What? That takes too long? And no one likes your book? And you’re going to do what now? Buy a review?

Hello, jackass. This one’s for you.

First off, if you couldn’t be bothered to have your book edited, or didn’t want to spend the money on a cover by a professional artist, or included in your anthology stories by people you know (as opposed to people who could actually write), chances are you deserve that bad review. You can’t just throw a $50 cover on a first-draft novel that your Grandmother thought would be a “big hit” (but no one else would publish) and expect that mess of a manuscript to make you rich.

But you’ve done it, you’ve gone and gotten it published, and now you realize it’s going nowhere. Your solution is to turn to one of the many pay-for-play review services and throw money at them until they put stars next to your name. Do you honestly think that we, other writers and readers, don’t realize that Kirkus* is letting people buy positive reviews? So what if they said that you were going to be the next Tolkien. What they meant was that your check cleared.

Perhaps you think that the answer is to hold on to your money and just have a friend or relative review your book. Authors, editors, and even small presses do this all of the time – when they have no self respect or respect for their readers. As another example, I know an editor/author whose assistant writes glowing reviews of every book she’s worked on or written for. Now, it’s possible that the assistant genuinely loves her boss’ work; after all, she’s got a choice, doesn’t she? I mean, there are millions of well respected, famous authors dying to take on a young, inexperienced intern and make her a star, right?

Right.

What’s worse than the person writing the reviews (for money or other gain) is the fact that small press publishers link to these reviews on their websites, Twitter feeds, and so on, hoping that no one will notice the questionable provenance of those kind words. They’re assuming that we’re stupid. That we, as readers, won’t know any better, and will fork over our hard earned cash without caring where the review comes from.

Now who’s the jackass?

* For example. Not to single them out, as other magazines do this as well. Pro tip: if a magazine sells its review services, don’t bother reading their reviews.

** As a publisher and as a writer, I only post reviews of my books or stories when I feel they come from unbiased sources. Plenty of my writers talked about Cthulhurotica, for example, but you won’t find those on our Reviews page. Hell, my mom loves pretty much everything I write, but do you trust her opinion to be unbiased?

*** I should point out that my mom is bound to read this. I love you mom! #coveringmyass

In addition to the math and biology lecture class and bio lab I must take to graduate, I also got to pick two others to round out my semester. I went with World Music (I’m writing a paper for that class that I’ll probably post here when it’s done) and Folklore: Great Story Collections. With my work in anthologies it seems like a perfect fit, and I love classes that have interesting reading lists.

Behold, the books. For this class we’re reading seven texts:

• Aesop. Aesop’s Fables. Trans. by Laura Gibbs. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
• Attar, Farid Al-Din. Conference of the Birds. New York: Penguin, 1984
• Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron. Translated and edited by G.H. McWilliam. New York: Penguin, 1996
• Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Trans. by Jack Zipes. 3^rd edition. New York: Bantam, 2003
•  Hurston, Zora Neale. Of Mules and Men. New York: Harper Perennial, 1990.
• Kalevala: an epic poem after oral tradition. Comp. Elias Lonnrot, trans. by Keith Bosley. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Randolph, Vance. Pissing in the Snow. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1976.

Of these, I’ve read parts of the Decameron, many of the Aesop fables, and maybe half of the Grimm’s. This is a huge amount of reading to do for one class, especially when I’ve got four others to read for, and work and life besides. But I’m excited about all of them, and it’s a nice excuse to go back and re-read and finish the books I only started.

The object of the class? From the syllabus:

Each collection displays various techniques for collecting folk materials and making them concrete. Each in its own way also raises different issues of genre, legitimacy, canon formation, cultural values and context.

So we’ll be looking at each text in terms of how the stories within fit together. We’re also going to have to write five papers and do a “collecting” project where we ask people for stories on a certain topic, group them together, and then write a paper analyzing our collection.

The first class was mostly an introduction. The professor is one of the few left at UPenn that actually teaches Folklore, which has been absorbed into the English department, and he holds a PhD in the subject. He’s older, prone to jokes and swaying from the topic at hand (I had to stop him from finishing the Aristocrats joke in class) and loves the folklore of sexuality. Bawdy stories, he says, are the best. With the Decameron on the list, I’m not surprised.

I’ve already agreed to help out one of the students, an Econ major who’s also an immigrant from China – he’s worried his English won’t be up to the task of analyzing these works. He was actually thinking of dropping before the 1st class started, but he needs it to fulfill a requirement. I explained to him that in Econ you’re looking for patterns, looking at the available data and how it fits together, and he agreed. This is the same, I said, only the data is stories instead of finance, but he’s still looking for the pattern in it all. He stayed through the class so I hope I can help. Anyone smart enough to learn a second (or third) language, find work here and get into a school like UPenn shouldn’t be made to feel dumb just because his grasp of the “classics” in one language isn’t as strong.

I’ll try to post each week about what we’re reading, and what we’ve discussed in class. This week’s reading is 100 of the fables (50 assigned, another 50 of our own choosing). Here’s one of them:

The Birds, the Beasts, and the Bat

THE BIRDS waged war with the Beasts, and each were by turns the
conquerors. A Bat, fearing the uncertain issues of the fight,
always fought on the side which he felt was the strongest. When
peace was proclaimed, his deceitful conduct was apparent to both
combatants. Therefore being condemned by each for his treachery,
he was driven forth from the light of day, and henceforth
concealed himself in dark hiding-places, flying always alone and
at night.

Moral: He winds up friendless who plays both sides against the middle.

Thank the Elder Gods for that.

I love a good Hollywood action/adventure type flick as much as the next person – and being a comic book geek, it’s possible I like them even more than most. But as a writer I’m always, always, looking for the story in everything, and much of the mainstream offerings lack witty dialogue, charming character building, or even something as essential as a workable plot. When you take away the car crashes and super powers and music montages, and just show us some people talking their way through a story, we can see the writer at work. Those are the movies I prefer.

I did squeeze in two more Hollywood movies – the romcoms Crazy Stupid Love and Friends With Benefits – before slipping back into familiar territory with One Day, The Art Of Getting By, Beginners, and Another Earth.

First up, Crazy Stupid Love. Do you like Ryan Gosling? If not, don’t bother. He’s the strongest and most interesting character in the film, and the only one that actually changes (the other characters, esp the parents played by Steve Carell and Julianne Moore, make overt gestures which appear to be attempts to change but they simply settle back into who they were). Now I’m not a Carell fan but I do really like Moore’s work in films like Blindness (which I loved!) and Children of Men (which was decent but not great). This film suffers from the usual plot holes and clichés and somehow ends up thinking that it’s a good idea for a 17 year old to give naked pictures of herself to a 13 year old boy that she babysits – after taking them for the kid’s dad (unknown to him, of course, because we can’t have Carell playing a pervert, now can we?)

Surprisingly, Friends With Benefits was much better. It gains something from the fact that two very pretty people spend more than 50% of their screen time mostly naked and simulating sex. But it’s also very heavy on the quick step give-and-take dialogue that makes up some of my favorite films. I wouldn’t recommend it over, say, People Will Talk, or even over the Star Trek reboot, but it’s fun and has a happy ending, which sometimes is all you’re looking for in a film.

One Day: Billed as a romantic comedy kind of film, it’s so much deeper and darker than that. I’m not an Anne Hathaway fan (though I don’t hate her) but she pulls off geeky writer chick, and even a passable English accent. Jim Sturgess is better – he gets to be complex, brilliantly acted, with a strong character arc and even ages believably for a movie which takes place over 20 years. But it’s Dexter’s story, ultimately, so it makes sense that we see more of him as a person. It’s a romance if you’ve never been truly in love, if you’ve never lived and breathed and ached for someone, made yourself better to be closer to what you think they deserve. Because then you can see it as, “At least they were happy for a little while,” and that’s true. That’s good. But the movie is really about trying to live again after you’ve lost your best friend, the love of your life, and that isn’t happy. That isn’t romantic; it’s tragic and painful and dark. The film is still well done, worth watching.

It’s also a reminder that you can’t wait forever. Love lasts, but life doesn’t.

The Art Of Getting By: High school outcast kid with art talent manages to turn his slacker life around and get the girl. Thankfully the film is more than that. Being about a white boy in a prep school paid for by his rich father, there’s a bit of a “first world problem” kind of feel, and the love object is kind of a strange prize – a teenage girl who doesn’t seem to have any skills other than sleeping with older men – but it’s a crisp look at one very particular kind of life. As a character study, I liked it.

Beginners: Great actors will always improve a mediocre film but in this case the writing and editing create something special, on top of the great performances. Two different stories, that of a man falling in love and of his father dying, are told at the same time, cutting back and forth, even though chronologically the father has already passed before the movie begins. It ultimately has an if-not-happy-at-least-hopeful ending that works for the story and for the characters. It makes sense that these broken but hopeful people would have these lives, these problems. I adore movies that make sense, so that even when I think, “Oh, why are you doing that?!” at least I have the comfort of knowing why.

Another Earth: Not cheerful, and without a clear-cut ending, it’s another character study film, arguably science fiction because of one detail – the appearance in our sky of another Earth, with other versions of ourselves. But the story takes place on our Earth, and centers around one teenage girl’s phenomenally tragic mistake, and the wrongs she tries to right in her own misguided way. It’s painful, in the sense that you can feel the pain of nearly everyone with any dialogue in the movie, but I definitely recommend it.

Oh, and I’d completely forgotten I’d also watched Green Lantern! It was so terribly bad, on so many levels, that blocking it out of my mind is probably for the best. As much as I love comic book movies, just don’t. Pretend it doesn’t exist.That’s better for everyone.

While the evolution of book history means that the construction of most books has been industrialized (for large print runs, though there are still amazing artists making hand-crafted books, and I’ll talk more about them later) and even removed as we move into digital reading, the two places that you can still find art in a book are in the font choices, and in the cover. Some books go farther and incorporated art and design into the layout, but even the most minimal of interiors uses a font, and probably has a cover.

Book cover design is its own kind of art. It can be, when done well, its own kind of beautiful. Here are a couple of resources to get you introduced to the possibilities:

Some recent examples at The Book Cover Archive

The Book Cover Archive, “for the appreciation and categorization of excellence in book cover design”. Not only do they post their favorite new book covers, but they also offer up a blog about book design news (it doesn’t update often but I love the very visual aspect of their posts). The whole site is built around the visual so you won’t get too much design discussion but they 1300+ pages of material to scroll through give you an immersion into cover design that can’t be beat.

A sample of the Old Timey wonderful

If you’re looking for old covers, the Flickr pool for “Old Timey Paperback Book Covers” has 13,300+ images and is still growing.

Pick a decade and start browsing

Things Magazine has two cover galleries worth checking out: first is the smaller “Cover Project“, and the bigger/better “Pelican Project”, which shows off Pelican Publishing paperback covers from the 1930s through the 1980s, sorted by decade.

Tal Goretsky talks about his favorite designs at Tal Designz.

Book Covers Anonymous also shows off covers, a few at a time, and usually has a blurb to go with. Doesn’t update often.

Jacket Mechanicalis a much better blog in that the author (Peter Mendelsund, an associate art director at Knopf, as well as an art director at Pantheon and Vertical Press) actually talks about the design of his work and other people’s. His discussion of how to jacket works of fiction (start here for part 1) is quite brilliant and you should read it if you care about cover design at all.

The Casual Optimist is one of my favorite book design blogs, and the author makes many links happen. We love this. It’s frustrating when someone mentions something awesome they loved but doesn’t link to it so you can share the joy. I’ll leave you with something I discovered only by reading TCO: a short (9 minute) film about a small paper company and the letterpress printer next door.

ink&paper from Ben Proudfoot on Vimeo.

When I went to UPenn I studied mainly Art History – which is one of the best degrees for a writer in terms of teaching you about art, culture, history, and how to think – but I also got a chance to take a couple of film criticism classes. I loved them! I’ve done classes on Japanese film, both pre-WW2 and post, noir films, and adaptations, and those four classes together showed me most of what is being put back into (recycled, adapted, homage’d) modern movies. Over the years I have learned to write screenplays, see a script cinematically, and think critically about film. But the biggest thing that informs my view of film is that I have watched so many of them. I’ve even worked in movie theaters in order to have access to all the celluloid I want. This has led me to watch a lot less “Hollywood” blockbusters, because I can see the predecessors in the work. Which is to say that I’ve watched enough classic, indie, and foreign films to know all the myriad ways that Hollywood is ripping them off. Why pay to see what’s already been done, and often done better, by someone else?

I ended up only seeing one movie in theaters in all of 2011, my all time low. I saw Contagion, which was wonderful, and that was it. This had, honestly, more to do with my year than with what was available, and so I started off 2012 by renting a handful of “hit” movies that I actually had wanted to see. In the last three days I have watched the final Harry Potter film, Super 8, Captain America, Thor, and Fright Night. What did I think?

Overall, there was no reason that I had to see these movies on the big screen. I can see in some places where the effects would have been bigger and therefore bolder – which is often the only reason to see a movie in theaters – but I don’t think I missed much. Of these, Super 8 was the one I think I should have seen on a larger screen. It works without it, but I would have paid to see it and not been disappointed.

I picked these movies for reasons not having much to do with the potential for good film making (again, Super 8 was the exception). I’d seen the other HP films and read the books, and I thought the movies were good for what they are (I have huge issues with the way the novels are written, but the films work on their own and even cut out some of Rowling’s awful slapped-together world/magic rules). I’m glad I finished the set, because I like to have completed things, and there are some moving moments in the film that basically have to do with the universal ideas of banding together against a common foe and protecting children. The rest of the story falls flat, and there are plenty of moments which are meant to be emotional that aren’t given the weight or screen time they should have got. It is a fight movie, with action scenes, and a little acting in between.

Captain America and Thor I rented because I want to watch the Avengers movie this summer and I wanted to be caught up (I’ve already seen both Iron Man movies several times). Neither of them are as good as the IM films – which, to be fair, are allowed to center on Robert Downey Jr.’s acting, and he is a dynamic actor – partly because they both feature handsome blond men with big muscles who are expected to be merely pretty and strong. Neither Thor nor the Cap’n have the range of personality that Downy’s Stark has. Even Daddy Stark, as portrayed in CA for a few moments here and there, is a more interesting character than either of the two heroes. Ignoring that, because we all know the Starks are Marvel’s brilliant bad boys, Captain America and Thor are very different films from each other. Hands down, Thor is better. It’s still not great, but it’s watchable, especially in the context of introducing characters for another film. CA is … bad. It starts off well, very much in keeping with the Marvel movie set, and then – I don’t know, did they run out of time? 2/3 of the way through the movie, the Captain assembles his group of heroes, and then there’s a five minute action sequence meant to give you the impression of battles never explained or shown, and then – dramatic ending. That’s it. Smushed together. Pointless.

Thor has a slower pace, unfolds evenly, and while there are no surprises in the film, it takes you along the arc of one story and does it well. One thing I noticed is Marvel’s new and politically correct “action hero pack”, which seems to consist of a buddy/white guy, a black guy, an Asian guy, an Irish guy, and a white woman. Captain America’s ace hero team – a white guy friend from back home, a (british) white woman, an Irish guy, a black guy, and an Asian. Oh, and some French guys who basically exist so the black guy can speak French to them and thus show he’s educated, and not just stuck in the movie to be strong/black. I do like the one moment where the Irish guy shows a bit of racism and the Asian guy points out he’s from Fresno, CA, but that’s the end of that character being interesting.In Thor we have … a black guy (the gatekeeper), an Irish guy, a white woman, another white guy, and an Asian guy. C’mon, really? I love that we’re trying to show there are more people in the world than just the handsome white guys who are EVERY OTHER CHARACTER IN BOTH MOVIES, but sticking in a few minorities doesn’t actually make your film diverse unless those characters get to DO STUFF. Not just fail and have to be saved at the right moment by the oh so blond hero. Also, if there’s only one black guy and one Asian guy in Asgard, how did they get there? Where are their not-white parents, siblings? Are they dating anyone? Is their only choice the legion of white folks?

I wonder these things.

One note: I had heard criticism of both films for having woman who swoon over the hot romantic leads (aka, the heroes) as if that somehow negates the awesome parts of those women. I don’t think that’s fair, because I’ve had those moments where someone I was attracted to was standing very close and your heart races and your pheromones start interacting and you get … distracted for a moment. It happens, and it happened to those women, and then they spent the rest of the movie being strong or smart, depending on which girl we’re talking about. Given how often men men get distracted (in films) when a pretty woman walks by, it’s actually sexist to try to pretend that women don’t have the same ability to be temporarily distracted.

Super 8 was, right up until the end, pitch perfect. The story, sets, actors, all great. But this hinges on being able to recognize what story is being told here, and it isn’t’ the obvious one. Super 8 is an homage, and it’s telling the story of a train crash and an escaped alien monster, sure, but it’s also telling the story of the movies we watched and the people we were at the end of the 70s. It’s talking about the generation that grew up to create ET for kids like me. It feels like a classic film telling a classic story, getting darker and darker, crawling into desparation, until suddenly all is right with the world. I wish the end hadn’t been quite so nailed on. Maybe I’m just a little too jaded for happy endings. I would watch this one again.

Fright Night is a remake of the 80s movie of the same name, and if you’re a fan of David Tennant (aka the 10th Doctor, aka Barty Crouch Jr., aka Hamlet), this movie is for you. He doesn’t actually appear until 1/2way through and he’s a supporting character at best, but just when you start to get a bit bored at essentially re-watching a not-too-scary, not-quite-serious vampire flick we’ve all seen before, there’s Tennant to be sarcastic and cowardly and sexy and foul mouthed and wonderful. He saves the film on a couple of different levels.

I liked getting to rent a few movies and catch up on a year in Hollywood filmmaking. There are a few other films I plan to view this way when I get another batch of free time. Feel free to leave recommendations in the comments.