Authors...

On Facebook, gillo sent me the following challenge: The Rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen authors (poets included) who've influenced you and that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag at least fifteen friends, including me, because I'm interested in seeing what authors my friends choose.

I thought I'd do it here. No tagging, but I'd love to hear your choices. Mine:

1. Dorothy Dunnett
2. A.A. Milne
3. Megan Whelan Turner
4. Mary Doria Russell
5. Antoine de Saint-Exupery
6. William Shakespeare
7. Terry Pratchett
8. Charlotte Bronte
9. Lois McMaster Bujold
10. Charles Baudelaire
11. Raymond Chandler
12. Charles Dickens
13. T.S. Eliot
14. Don Marquis
15. Stan Lee

There you have it, in much less than fifteen minutes. Yours?

Andf I thought Hillary Clinton was supposed to be okay...

American values are not just about America, but they speak to the human dignity, the God-given spark that resides in each and every person across the world. - Hillary Rodham Clinton


Seems to me that's one of the stupidest quotesc,and possibly one of the most arrogant and chauvinistic, I've read in years. Just the kind of thing that fosters anti-American feelings! (And the 'god-given' is the horror that clinches it for me...)

To be or not to be the Doctor...

From Matt Smith: "I try not to rest on my laurels really, I'm trying to keep pushing the boundaries. It's kind of like Hamlet but for television because it's boundless and you can reinvent it every day."

I'm not sure I like that. Hamlet isn't boundless: he's bound by the words he utters. The Doctor isn't boundless either, because a personality with no boundaries at all isn't a choate being - there has to be consistency on some level for there to be a meaningful story.

Or maybe I'm just disappointed that he wants to be the Doctor for years and years, because he doesn't interest me as Eleven the way Nine and Ten interested me. And maybe part of the reason for that is that he sees the Doctor as a boundless template, and I want to see him as a person.

Katniss in Mockingjay...

kitgordon sent me the link to an interesting article that compares the Hunger Games trilogy to the Twilight books. My first thought is to wonder what links them: their fame and popularity? Teen-aged female protagonists? That they are - in very different ways - fantasies?

I haven't read anything by Stephanie Meyer, so I'm not in a position to compare them. I liked Suzanne Collins' writing very much: her talent for fast-paced action, both emotional and physical, is what kept me riveted. There were things I didn't like about the trilogy, but that didn't matter: it was the writing quality that kept me reading and enjoying every word.

Seems to me that the author of this article, Laura Miller, took some of the irony of the books at face value - then presents them as extratextual ironies when they are very much part of the text. Katniss is successful because she never buys into the myths she is forced to live - which includes the dramatic costumes (which I loved as much as any reader) and the manufactured romance with Peeta.

I thought this paragraph oddly ingenuous:

"I'm not just a piece in their game," is her habitual refrain, but except for a few climactic and highly circumscribed moments, she's often just that. What does Katniss really want? It's hard to say.

I thought it was blazingly clear what Katniss wants: she wants freedom, she wants enough to eat, and she wants to protect her loved ones, she wants a life without oppression or violence. Survival and success are secondary to that. By becoming a piece in 'their' game, she gained enough power to fight back - I didn't think there was anything subtle or unclear about any of that. And I think Miller is simply misreading the text if she thinks Katniss's passivity or ambivalence implies she wanted the clothes and the fame. They were a price she had to pay - weapons or tools, not rewards. The reader may like or want these things, but the reader (thank goodness) is not Katniss.

"Part of this," says Miller, "is a classic American ambivalence: We love violence, fame, the media and wealth -- all of the apparatus of power -- even if we claim to disapprove of these things." Yes. That's the point; and she seems to think Collins was making a different point, or making it by accident. I don't think so. She's ignoring or denying a whole level of social criticism. Katniss wasn't ambivalent because she really wanted incendiary clothes and gourmet food. She was ambivalent because her only alternative to luxury was outlawry and starvation. Perhaps Miller skipped the subtext in Finnick's more explicit whoring?

I'm not sure about Miller's paragraph on romance novels, either, which sounds a bit like a random attack on romances - and the Collins novels, whatever happens in the plot, are not romances by any stretch. They come perilously close to anti-romance, with a heroine who'd rather have friendship than love.

Katniss hungered for freedom. I thought that was clear in every paragraph.

Annoyances...

One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read. - John Kenneth Galbraith, 1908 - 2006