Breakfast with Pandora

"Immortals" are coming

This spring I told my advanced Latin students that there was only really one true epic story left to tell from the ancient world, the "Aeneid." So logically, that had to be the next big-budget ancient epic film.

 

Turns out that wasn't true.

 

movie poster from here.

I forgot about Theseus and the Minotaur, which is a very popular and enduring story. "Immortals" is the new feature film, done by the folks who brought you "300," that has taken that myth and run with it.

 

This is not apparent from the trailer, by the way, which I saw last night with stepson and beloved before "Captain America" (nice movie, nice Hayley Atwell). The trailer shows lots of yelling, lots of swords being banged on shields, lots of CGI, and one reference to a guy named Theseus.

 

Turns out "Immortals" is only loosely based on the classical story of the hero who goes to Crete with a bunch of Athenian youths, falls in love with princess Ariadne, kills the half-bull, half-man monster while in a maze in the basement of the royal palace, and sails home to the tragic death of his father.

 

No, in this one the Titan Hyperion has declared war on humankind and Theseus is the only one who can save the world. Another myth, the "Clash of the Titans" or Titanomachy is also referenced here. Which goes to show that you can do Greek myth over and over just like the Greeks did.

 

This is going to be big. Big big. Bigger than big. The CGI is going to be beyond amazing.

 

I don't know that smaller stories such as the "Aeneid" can be made in this day and age. After the destruction of the world, a tale about a hero caught by destiny who must leave the woman he loves to fight a war in a land that doesn't want him just isn't going to wash.

 

Sad.

A lovely read from a talented author

Tiramisu for Susan Byrum Rountree for her blog post on the recent announcement that her alma mater, Peace College in Raleigh, NC, will begin admitting men next year after over one hundred years as a college for women.

A beautiful appreciation. Bravo, Susan.

Picture found here.

Farewell, Harry, and hats off

With the release of the last Harry Potter movie we have come to the end of an era, one that author Lyn Fairchild Hawks might call the Dark Ages of Nought: the age of Harry Potter, the first decade of the 21st century.

It also corresponds to the true first blooming of the Internet and its transformation of our lives. It is a time of tragedy, uncertainty, and pessimism.

To me, the years 1988-1992 were the golden age of the 20th century. At this time, the Cold War was ending. We were optimistic about the future, because the age of nuclear terror was finally behind us. We weren't worried about Al-Qaeda, global warming, or the Great Recession.

 

Technology was relatively advanced, but not overwhelming: we had MS Word and HP laser printers (though dot-matrix was much more prevalent); we had car phones for jetsetters, pagers for doctors and repairmen, and public phone booths for everyone else. For information and entertainment, we had feature films, cable TV and newspapers and magazines.

 

Life like this could go on forever, or so I thought.

 

Today, there is an end-of-the-world feel to life, much more than when politicians insisted that any day could bring a nuclear war. During the Cold War, there was a sense of stability, of knowing that destroying ourselves with nuclear warheads was just stupid, a very remote possibility.

 

The anxieties of today hit way closer to home: global terror, global warming, the great global recession, are all embedded in our lives, everyday, reinforced by the ubiquitous World Wide Web.

 

The Dark Ages of Nought, indeed.

 

Does Harry Potter have anything to say about this doom-filled age of ours?

 

I must say I don't think so. I don't think Rowling is an extraordinary author with a contemporary message that hits home for our generation. I think she wrote a good story and got lucky, and she had the persistence and work ethic to exploit and mine every last farthing she could from the vein she hit.

 

I bought the last Harry Potter book and read the conclusion of the series, wondering if there would be something Rowling had held in reserve, something our imaginations had not yet conceived, something mindblowing that would cap off and confirm the billion dollars the world had spent on Harry. But the end was a confirmation for me. It was Harry Potter, by J.K. Rowling. It was itself. Which is all we can ask of any author.

 

Rowling was extraordinary in this, that she kept working. That is her genius, and my hat's off to her for it. Recently, The Independent (UK) newspaper reported that an acclaimed fantasy author, Steph Swainston, has decided to call it quits and become a teacher. She can't take the demands of being a popular author, and wants to have a job where she's not sitting in her pajamas 12 hours a day by herself. "I suffer terribly from isolation while writing," she told the Independent. "I really need a job where I can be around people and learn to speak again. It's much, much healthier to be around people. Human beings are social animals."

 

That's a good message for me, writer and teacher that I am-- to remember that people, people who need people, are the luckiest people in the world. In the middle of summer, at my most isolated, as I look towards a school year that seems far away but is roaring down upon me hour by hour, it's good to know that in this world there is such a thing as school, and we still meet there and learn, and that isn't likely to go away. At least I hope not.

 

After all, isn't that most popular of books, Harry Potter, set at a school?

 

Maybe there's a message there after all.

Raiders of Castillo Del Mar: Call the Coens

I have come to the conclusion that writing a novel is pretty easy.

 

Image from here.

I have also come to the conclusion that crafting a novel is one of the most difficult things you can undertake.

 

Writing a novel is like going to the playground for a day. If you have imagination, time, and have read a hundred novels, you can write a 50,000 word draft, no sweat.

 

Crafting a novel is like trudging through an endless desert. You inch forward, questioning every comma, deleting every bit of preciousness, weighing every character motivation. And all with the fleeting mirage of publication on the horizon.

 

I was reminded of these truths ever more forcefully by Shane and Tristan Lindsay’s “Raiders of Castillo del Mar,” a YA novel submitted to the 2011 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest, and now available on Kindle.

 

“Raiders” has not found its way through its entire crafting desert, with apologies to the authors for all the work they have already put in to this thing.

It is alive, like a big, overgrown, slobbering puppy. It’s full of rambunctious potential in an in-your-face type of way. And if you don’t mind the lack of discipline, you will have fun with it.

 

The novel tells two stories in parallel fashion. The first is about pirates in 1746; the second, set in 1954, is about Johnny Socko, a superhuman teenage detective and all-star football player with Betty and Veronica-style girlfriends, a dog who likes to fetch bowling balls, and a magnetic attractor gun he sent away for in the mail.

 

Johnny's story is a postmodern romp through all the clichés of 1950’s teenage boy wonder novels, something that would absolutely make sense for the Coen Brothers to do (and maybe will, since this novel started out as a screenplay, according to the Lindsay brothers). I love the part where Socko and one of his girls, Vivian, break into a museum storeroom and meet “Hardy,” the scholarly character who will fill them in on the pirate mystery Socko is pursuing. “I know you,” says Johnny. “You’re the professor.”

 

The pirate story, for its part, is darker, gore-filled and heavy with sailing lingo and dreadful description (“A crisp scent of danger lingered on the breeze”). In this one, the superhuman pirate lady Anne Dubois falls in love with the English first mate turned pirate E.F. Titus as they seek a mysterious treasure that seems to recede ever farther away as the plot complications and new characters pile up.

 

For me, the self-consciousness wackiness of the Socko story clashed with the overwrought pirate yarn, making for quite an uneven read, especially at the end when the two threads get woven together in a burst of unlikeliness. There is a lot of imagination and cleverness here, which could be restrained and refined in a revision.

 

But maybe a revision is not in order. "Raiders" is very comic-booky, and it might do well as a graphic novel. There’s plenty of action, and I think it would be easier to take visually than written.

 

As a movie? Call the Coen Brothers. I'm dead serious: they really need to take an option on this one. The combination of period gore and affectionate, twisted nostalgia is absolutely up their alley.

 

Good luck, Lindsays. Tell me what those other brothers said.

 

PS: You have a Kindle novel you'd like to get virtual ink? Send it my way. I still have $6.02 left on my Kindle budget this month.