Dave | unobtrusive lucidity

Climbing the Walls…Again…

It happened on my last outing to the movie theatre. I scratched my head. I couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t alone. Several members of the audience turned to each other, and asked out loud things like, “Didn’t they just do that?” or “Again??”

These comments weren’t in response to the movie. They were in response to the trailers preceding the movie. Specifically, a trailer for Spider-Man. A new Spider-Man, telling the origin of Spider-Man. Except, we’ve only just recently been treated to three excellently-written and filmed Spider-Man adventures, all of which more than took us on a journey with the iconic character. Now, while the trailer was shot from an interesting perspective (i.e.: the point of view of Spidey as he swings and climbs), the fact remains that Spider-Man’s origin story is already well-developed. And, while I’m all about new explorations, I simply don’t see the draw of exploring it again, however well done. Even Batman wasn’t done better until several years after the fact.

And Spider-Man isn’t the only blast from the proverbial past to which we’re being treated. Take the Smurfs, for example (like we needed them the first time around). Or Winnie the Pooh. The explorations of origin stories began some time ago; I actually first noticed the trend with Batman Begins, then Superman returned, then we were treated to Wolverine’s backstory, then the X-Men’s…and that’s just within the context of the superhero genre. I can’t help but be curious as to why. Jeffery Overstreet attributes the phenomenon to nostalgia, which, I agree, can’t be underestimated as a moving cultural force, especially during a time of (perpetual) war.

I also wonder if there’s really a shortage of original ideas in the medium of film. Or, if business interests are driving writers and film-makers to produce origin stories. Perhaps to capitalize on our nostalgia? Whatever the case, I’m going to be honest: I’m sort of over the origin story concept. I’m as nostalgic as the next guy, but not nostalgic enough to watch Spider-Man’s origin again so soon.

Do you think the new Spider-Man film is capitalizing on nostalgia? Are we out of new ideas? Are you tired of re-makes of classics? Tell me…I’m interested to hear.

Photo Attribution: JD Hancock

Paper Treasures

I grew up in a small town. There was this little, locally owned store there, a craft store, as I recall, that my mother frequented, as she was a creative, arts and crafts type. I don’t really remember so much about that, because I remember the second half of the store, in which, in the back, was a section composed of bookshelves that took up two entire walls. Each shelf was crammed with books, floor to ceiling. They formed a corridor of books. These were old books, books or editions of books that you didn’t find in the new book chain stores. I found some treasures there.

A few months ago, I was walking around a local bookstore. In the back, in the pre-owned section, lost in a similar floor-to-ceiling book environment, I found an old copy of a Pulitzer-winning play by one of my favorite playwrights.

I suppose I’m sort of tackling a subject yet again that I’ve talked about here on more than one occasion, but this is back on my radar, so to speak, after this poignant article that I read Monday about the closing of Border’s first bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan. You should take the time to read the article, because it says something that’s worth saying. I found myself appreciative of the public’s sense of loss, about how the passion for the knowledge of literature became lost as the company transitioned to a “big box chain store.” I particularly love the story about how someone could stand in a spot at the front of the store, and call out the sort of question that we would type into Google today, and someone within earshot would know the answer. I’m left thinking of the loss of knowledge and growth of illiteracy in our culture.

I’m also finding myself re-exploring this conundrum, though. I love that, as ebook selections grow, I can find more and more obscure titles that I can read wherever I happen to be when I have time to read, without having the physical book with me. I love that I can find most of my book club’s monthly reading choices and download them virtually instantly. I’m enamored with the idea of being a doctoral student and having a semester’s worth of textbooks in a slim little device weighing less than a pound.

Yet, all the while, I remember my undergraduate days. There were no Borders in my college town…there, it was their imprint, Waldenbooks. I knew the manager of the Waldenbooks well, because I spent a lot of time there. He nearly always found the books I needed for papers and my own reading. He loaned me books that I needed for papers but couldn’t afford on his own account. I even got a friend a job there on my recommendation. Being connected to that bookstore was part of an experience. Regardless of how much I love the convenience of digital reading, part of the experience is missing. Even though I use a Nook, and thus receive special incentives to go to my local Barnes & Noble, there’s still something missing from the complete experience. It’s more present than Amazon, but still not totally complete.

So, here I am again. I love the progress of technology, but somehow I see more to lose as we move books to our digital realm. I have a friend who insists that you should treat books like friends. I think what he’s saying there is that there’s a different sort of relationship that we have with books than we have with music, for example. The time commitment is different, the intellectual engagement is different. I’m not placing one over another, I’m just saying that it’s different.

I’m sort of in this place where I want to have my proverbial cake and eat it, too. I want to buy books by downloading them to my Nook, but I want to go to local bookstores and find treasures in back corners in which I’ve lost myself. If the transition that the music industry made is any indication, this will likely not be the case. Record stores, after all, have vanished. I just don’t think we’ve lost with that what we stand to lose if bookstores suffer the same fate.

I’d like to see this ideal solution: Frequently, special edition DVDs include a code that can be redeemed for a download of the same film via iTunes. What if publishers included a code with new, hardcover books, that would give me an ebook edition to accompany the physical purchase? As a writer, I plan to publish my first novel as an ebook, and I’m thrilled about the self-publishing opportunities that are available now. I don’t want to do that exclusively, though, because I really want there to be physical copies of my book to pass on to my daughter.

Sort of like how Karen and I spent time in a local bookstore this weekend…the same bookstore in which I found that old play…purchasing physical books for our soon-to-be-born daughter, carefully choosing the editions in anticipation of when she’s old enough to read.

Sort of like how, some months ago, I entertained the idea of one day buying a Nook Color for our daughter, so that could enjoy multi-media children’s books. Karen scoffed at that idea, thinking that there’s just too much to lose. Somehow, I think she was right.

Psychological Tweeting

I think I’m about to coin a new phrase, here. I say that because it hasn’t been coined elsewhere, to my knowledge. And, though I’m sure I’m not the first to wonder about this, I’d like to think that I’m the first person to label it. So, get ready. Seriously, this is going to be monumental. Here’s the new term that I’m sure will leap from the pages of this blog and into the dictionary by next year:

Psychological Tweeting.

Okay, well, that sounded a bit more magnificent in my head, but there you have it. In any case, here’s my idea behind the concept.

I was entertaining a family member who’s visiting from out of town this week, and we were outside of a major business that has a presence in our city. She commented on the landscaping. You see, she’s from New England, where there’s a different approach to landscaping. Here in the Southeast, landscaping is done for more aesthetic reasons, I think, to improve business and make something look like something more than a business. Her point was that this landscaping was not done with the health of the tree in mind, and she launched into a long explanation about how the mulch had been heaped around the base of the tree too high…I’m not even going to pretend to understand.

My point is that there’s a culture of appearance management here, and its not just confined to the Southeast, but present throughout the U.S. Its about the surface gloss, the veneer, the appearance of a thing, or of a person. Style over substance, and maddeningly so. That’s why we do things like “create brands,” and “control our social media presence.” When we’re trying to emphasize certain aspects of ourselves, we phrase our resumes a bit differently. Our LinkedIn profiles may look more like what we want to be doing than what we actually are doing. This isn’t new, but its exaggerated to an exponential degree, now. With a bit of snazzy verbal manipulation, I can make a reader think that something is much cooler than it is. I’m not saying that’s ethically correct in a marketing sense…certainly, I believe otherwise. However, in a culture where absolutely everything is for sale, we’re marketing ourselves to each other. So, for example, writers tweet about writing. Even though I still have a work in progress and not a finished novel, I tweet about writing it. This is because, the reasoning goes, when I’m ready to begin marketing the novel, I’ll already have followers interested.

Of course, that’s not the only reason…or even the primary reason…artists and creatives use social networks. In fact, I think a lot of it is to help assuage our own fears. The first time I sat down and typed out my entire CV, I thought, “I don’t look bad on paper at all once you have everything there!” That was important for me, because I needed to see that for myself, to be encouraged like that. When I put together the list of works I’ve had published lately on my LinkedIn profile, I remembered little publications and projects that I had forgotten, but that add to my experience. So, when I’m writing, sometimes its very important for me to tweet that I’m writing in order to feel like I’m truly engaging in the activity. And, because I’m human, sometimes I make it sound more glamorous than it is…not because I’m trying to wow somebody with how cool I am (writing is entirely unglamorous, I assure you), but rather because I need to believe for myself that this is really cool, and not just the hopeless feeling that gets wrapped in the monotony of trying to work through the scene that is suddenly giving me fits.

So, my tweet about “solving a plot inconsistency with a bit of world building” really amounts to the fact that I realized the setting wouldn’t let my characters get from point A to point B, but that the plot revolved around them succeeding, so I needed to ease up on the setting restrictions. Still, saying it the way I tweeted it just sounds…cooler. It makes me feel better about what I’m doing. You know, like positive self-talk. Self-validation. Psychological things like that.

So, its psychological tweeting. Because I need to feel like what I’m doing in that moment is worthwhile, because sometimes I don’t, even if I know cognitively that it is, in fact, important.

Psychological tweeting. Another way that social media has altered our cultural landscape, both internal and external.

Psychological tweeting. You heard it here first.

A Review of “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children”

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The advantage to being in a book club with a group of friends that have widely eclectic reading tastes is that you find yourself exposed to books that you probably would never have heard of otherwise, to say nothing of actually reading. This is the case with “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,” a book that I didn’t know existed until it became my book club’s reading choice for September. I feared it was a children’s book at first blush, and it is, in fact, a young adult novel. A close inspection of the cover told me this would be a suspense story, and a scan of the synopsis told me it would a mystery. So, we have a mysterious suspense story. Or so I thought.

This novel was absolutely nothing like I expected. And I loved every page of it.

We’re introduced to our protagonist, Jake, the son of a wealthy family in Florida who really has no friends to speak of. His uncle is a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, and tells Jake stories about his time in a home for peculiar children, where his companions held mysterious and altogether odd abilities, and were chased by monsters. Jake spends his childhood looking at old photos that his uncle shows him, photos that are too strange and mysterious to believe. He grows up knowing, as does his family, that his uncle is senile. Until one afternoon when his uncle makes a frantic phone call that “they” have found him, and Jake goes to see what is wrong, only find his uncle brutally murdered. Then, Jake sees the monster. From there, we’re propelled into a search for a home for peculiar children as Jake realizes that the fantastic stories were true, exploring themes of acceptance and heroism along the way, along with love interests and a good dose of time travel thrown in, as well.

What Riggs does that is ingenious is that he takes authentic photographs, black and white images from collectors that he has painstakingly researched, and compiles them here as central to the narrative. These are the sorts of old photos that we’ve seen, and at which we’ve laughed: a teenage boy lifting a huge stone with one hand, a young girl levitating above the ground, a girl standing over a pool with two girls reflected below her. These are the sorts of photos that make the hair on the back of your neck stand up when you first see them. They make you question, “that can’t be real, can it? They didn’t have the means to alter photos back then…did they?” Then Riggs builds a story around the photos (which are reproduced strategically throughout the book, and credited in the end, if you’re interested), asking “what if?” What if those images were real, and weren’t altered? What sorts of events…what sorts of people…would make up the story behind that? That story, as Riggs sees it, is the novel. While none of his ideas here are particularly new or groundbreaking, combining them under this premise is one of the most creative exercises I’ve seen in recent memory.

To make the novel more fascinating, Celtic mysticism lies hidden throughout, with veiled references to “thin places,” as well as a Celtic holistic view of Creation that runs as an understated through-line to the time travel plot device that Riggs uses so adeptly. In fact, the portal between realms lies inside of a cairn…and, while this felt a bit like he might have taken the idea from Stephen Lawhead, the fact remains that you can’t get much more Celtic than that.

Riggs has done his research, not only with the photographs, but also with the species of birds that develop into character types (no more on that lest I leave you with spoilers). While his writing is not astounding in its complexity, keep in mind that this is a YA novel, and he’s writing to that demographic. Still, his prose is punctuated with a dry wit that will leave you laughing, and occasional flashes of descriptive brilliance that made me stop to re-read the sentence.

As much as I’ve read critiquing how the plot devices are not overly original, the book still moves the reader through an unpredictable arc, and what I particularly love is that it doesn’t tie up all of the loose ends. In fact, the journey is only truly beginning for these characters by the final chapter, leaving me wondering if another novel might follow. Fans of the superhero genre will appreciate the exploration of duty to others and responsibility that comes with power, and fans of the suspense genre won’t be disappointed with scenes that are outright creepy if you’re reading late at night with only a single light in your apartment.

Whether or not YA generally suits your palate, “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” is a book that I would recommend to anyone. A delicious read that just leaves you smiling in the end…and perhaps wanting more…it is not a book that pretends to be more than it is. But it does what it sets out to do well, and is a refreshingly original way to construct a novel. Add this book to your shelf…and please let me know what you think.

View all my reviews

You can purchase the book here.

Intermission #1

In the last 24 hours, give or take, a lot has been going through my head. Bemusing at best, contradictory at worst, I’ve been looking for balance, that in-between place that covers the gap between what Karen calls “organic matter” and technology.

Working with people instead of gadgets, the latter of which is a hobby and semi-professional interest, and fascinated by the academic thoughts that this brings about.

Enjoying e-books, while missing paperbacks.

Astounded by new life, and how this whole process works, and comforting myself by buying new toys.

Wishing for missing dreams, and being disturbed when they return.

Sometimes you just need an intermission, you know?
A free-verse groove to alleviate the risk of entering a routine…
Not poetry, but not quiet prose,
Just to get this out of my head, to try something different, and see what happens.