2007

Long weekend with limited Internet access… I felt so… disconnected.

However, my family and I once again went to that big used bookstore and bought bunches of books. I bought Orson Scott Card’s Xenocide and Children of the Mind, so I now have all eight books of the two quartets (and I’ve read half of them… still need to start Speaker for the Dead). I also bought two short story collections edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois called A.I.s and Beyond Flesh. (I searched forever for a collection that might include Mimsy Were the Borogoves, but alas, my search was fruitless.) I bought T. H. White’s The Once and Future King and The Book of Merlyn. (I love the idea of writing an epic symphonic suite for those books!) I got Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. Lastly, and non-fictionally, I got Aaron Copland’s What to Listen for in Music, which is at least refreshing. He sometimes says things I completely agree with, and other times I just want to knock his head for his choice of words. I guess it’s written more for listeners than composers, but I’m sure I’ll learn something when he starts talking about the musical forms/structures.

Oh, I also got the DVD of The Prestige, which I enjoyed in theaters and haven’t seen since (though I did read the book over Christmas break). I look forward to watching it again.

I finished reading The Name of the Wind, so hopefully I’ll put up a small review of it here tomorrow. I’m now reading Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, which is fun so far, I love his style. (This is the first book I’ve read of his.) I could probably never write in such a style, but I love reading it, it just flows quite poetically. And it seems pretty unique to me. I can easily imagine some lesser writer trying to mimic the style but losing too much meaning. It’ll probably be a much shorter read than The Name of the Wind, which took me forever to get through.

Well, I gotta go to bed, I have much work to do tomorrow.

I guess this won’t be a “daily” blog again for a while…

Pulled out our living room sofa today to find a small pile of dog food and a wee little nest made from scrap pieces of frabric and paper crayon wrappings. My sister’s hamster, which died a few months ago, had escaped for a few days and it looks like its hideout had been under the living room sofa. It’s hard to imagine the creature scurrying around at night somehow getting into the dog’s bowl and shoving dog food in its cheeks… anyway, it made a mess on the carpet.

I missed a day again! It was storming quite a bit yesterday, so I had to keep my computer off… gotta keep all my precious data safe.

I saw The Last Mimzy the other night. Firstly, I must say that the 1943 short story Mimsy Were the Borogoves is just about my favorite short story of all time (not that I’ve read that many). The story’s got everything I love: humor, psychological ideas to ponder, and a sort of surprise twist ending. (By the way, I first heard about the story in a Martin Gardner book, probably because of the Lewis Carroll link? Martin Gardner’s the man!) Unfortunately the film introduced a bunch of pointless plot points (I guess they had to expand the story somehow, but I could’ve done better) and the ending was corny. But it did have some things that I liked, mainly the point about the children seeing the toys differently than the adults and learning from them so that they don’t become trapped in the “adult” way of thinking (though I’m not sure the point came across as well as it did in the short story… it needed someone saying “X logic and Y logic!”). (By the way, that psychological fact about the neural connections slowing and the brain becoming more specialized sort of makes me angry, you know? I want learn more easily… but not be too dumb at the same time.) I’d give the film 6 out of 10 stars. (Geez, that’s the number I seem to give most movies these days… “I like it some, but not too much.”)

After seeing the movie, I pulled out my August edition of Fantasy and Science Fiction, for I remembered Kathi Maio had a review of the film in it, which I didn’t want to read until I had made my own judgments. (Check it out here.) At first I thought her review would be too picky when she writes about the change in spelling of “Mimsy”, but then she says she was pleasantly surprised which made me think she liked the movie more than I did, but in the end, I think I agree with all of the points she made (although I don’t think A History of Violence was “interesting and intelligent” … it was horrible! Horrible, I say!) but she didn’t say as much about the portrayal of the psychological aspect of seeing the world differently and learning differently. For me, that seemed to be the heart of the short story, but was only a plot element in the film. I was happy to see that it was a plot element in the first place, but I wish that aspect had been more focused on, there’s so much potential there for a movie… and the talking to spiders and telekinesis were just… erm… stupid. They weren’t in the short story, were they?

Ok, enough blather. If you’re a science fiction fan, the movie’s worth a try, you might like it more than I did, but you must find that 1943 short story and read it. It’s a classic work of genius.

I started writing what will be my 40th piece of music tonight (not counting reorchestrations of Christmas tunes and not-so-good pieces). I’m not sure what I’ll call it, but probably something with the word “Battle” in it… which of course means you know it’s gonna be a good one. I’ve got this awesome triumphant/dangerous melody that I just can’t wait to orchestrate, it keeps playing over and over again in my head. Oh… it’s so beautiful…

Today I got my self-published book (The Game of Gynwig, Part 1) in the mail from lulu.com. Of course I’m not planning to do anything serious with it, I’m not trying to market this self-published book, I just published it for the fun of seeing it in book form, as I already said in an earlier blog post. It’s really cool. I love how… book-ish it is. Everyone should write something and self-publish it just for fun, and lulu’s prices are great, I paid just about the same price I would if this were a normal book. (Well, just a few dollars more I suppose. Still, it’s quite a deal!)

Anyway, I want to read through the book, which includes the first twelve chapters, to refresh my memory on all I’ve written so far since I keep changing the outline of what is yet to be written. In book form, the errors are much easier to notice as well. I sure made a lot of typos…

Here’s my 100th post to this blog… quite a lot of blathering being done by me. And so today I’d like to blather about changing the world. Don’t just sit there! Get up and do something, go change the world with ideas and stuff. Do your part to make the world a better place. I’m doing my part by telling you to do yours.

Now on to something more important. Movies. At Quicktime.com I caught a glimpse of the Beowulf trailer. At first I thought it was live action and thought “huh, I thought this was supposed to be computer animated.” It is… wow, it looks quite real. Pretty amazing, they actually have live actors playing animated roles that look like themselves. The graphics are amazing. It almost looks like a cut-scene from an RPG computer game… which is just cool. Woohoo! Can’t wait to see it. Hope it has some swashbuckling music.

Now to something even more important. Just kidding, there is nothing more important. Bye.

As promised (well, not really promised):

It’s a Saturday, I hardly ever get anything interesting done on weekends anymore. However, I do have an idea for a podcast… I’m thinking about registering the domain for it. Also, all those notes I had about the plot for my musical… well… I think I might’ve thrown them out when I cleaned my room… and I don’t think I ever typed ’em up. So I’ll probably have to replan it if I ever actually start working on it.

I’m making a YouTube video for my second trio for harp, flute, and oboe, so I suppose I’ll post a link to that here tomorrow if I remember. Another Monk came on tonight, but I missed it because I was watching Spongebob, but the Monk rerun comes on in an hour so I’ll have to catch that. I guess that’s all for today.

I recently finished watching the science fiction film Serenity. I have to ponder its themes a bit more before giving it a rating (because that’s so important), but I liked it. The dialogue was a bit… unrealistic at times in my opinion, but I guess that’s why it’s fiction. Still, some characters just seemed too blunt in expressing their opinions. But, especially compared to all the other science fiction films I’ve seen, this is definitely one of the best. (And that’s from someone who has no idea what Firefly was.) Fun stuff. Makes me want to work on my novel, which I’m now too tired to do, so good night.

My sister and I saw Phantom of the Opera last night during my third trip to the Kennedy Center (it was awful driving around DC trying to find the place, but at least my sister was driving). We had great seats, and I do love the music and the… live-ness of the production. I’m surprised the conductor didn’t go deaf with the loud fire-cracker effects. Ah… what a fun time. It looked like quite an expensive production, with all the special effects, props, sets, etc, but it made the overall musical that much better, quite a change from seeing more… “minimalist” productions in which the audience has to use just as much imagination as the players on stage.

As much as I loved the performance, I must say, it does make me partly very envious of Mr. Lloyd Webber for all his success. Surely I could write catchy tunes like that very easily… anyone want to produce my musical?