Back to the world of meme

The Mumpsimus has created the Mumpsimus Cultural Concurrence Index. Basically, it's a listing of likes vs. likes more that will, in theory, show how close my tastes are to Matthew Cheney. The idea for this began with Terry Teachout, but his version was too filled with classical, jazz, dance and other people I didn't know. The Mumspsimus sticks closer to my part of the world. So here goes, The Mumspsimus's likes are in the left hand column, my likes will be in bold:

1. Isaac Asimov or Robert A. Heinlein
2. Stanley Kubrick or Steven Spielberg
3. Bach or Mozart
4. Ubik or Valis
5. Mieville or Tolkien [Ugh, this one was too tough. I think I'd rather read Mieville, but Tolkien was too important in my life to ignore.]
6. van Gogh or Monet
7. John Clute or Paul di Filippo [I realize Cheney is probably referring to criticism, in which di Filippo clearly loses, but man I love "A Year in the Linear City."]
8. Edward Albee or Arthur Miller
9. Ani DiFranco or Alanis Morissette
10. "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" or "Friends" [I'd rather not watch either, but "Queer Eye" wins because I've never seen it.]
11. The Nation or The New Republic
12. Truffaut or Godard
13. Peter Straub or Stephen King
14. Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman
15. Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet or Asimov's [Another winner because of its importance in my life. I've only read one issue of LCRW and already it threatens Asimov's.]
16. Bartok or Schoenberg
17. Brazil or Blade Runner
18. Aristotle or Plato
19. E.E. Cummings or Ezra Pound [Wins for brevity. I've never read much of either.]
20. "Mork & Mindy" or Mrs. Doubtfire
21. Talking Heads or The Police
22. John Gielgud or Laurence Olivier ["Clash of the Titans" rules dude!]
23. Anton Chekhov or Ivan Turgenev
24. cats or dogs
25. Thomas Pynchon or Arthur C. Clarke
26. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Adaptation
27. vegetarian or carnivore
28. Max Ernst or Jackson Pollock
29. The October Country or Dandelion Wine
30. Philip Glass or Yanni
31. Texas Chainsaw Massacre original or remake
32. Samuel Beckett or Neil Simon [I feel stupid here, but I've only read "Waiting for Godot," whereas I've seen a ton of Neil Simon movies.]
33. Faulkner or Hemingway
34. Bakunin or Marx
35. Adrienne Rich or Robert Bly
36. Duck Soup or A Night at the Opera
37. R.A. Lafferty or Connie Willis
38. Hawthorne or Melville
39. Tom Lehrer or The Capitol Steps
40. Susan Sontag or Harold Bloom [Bloom pisses me off, but he's always interesting. And, sadly, I've never read any of Sontag's stuff.]
41. NPR or CBS
42. Gomez or Wilco
43. Samuel R. Delany or David Foster Wallace
44. Mac or PC
45. Frida Kahlo or Diego Rivera
46. In the Bedroom or A Beautiful Mind
47. David Sedaris or Garrison Keillor
48. Ursula LeGuin or Charles DeLint
49. Pauline Kael or Roger Ebert
50. Paul Celan or Pablo Neruda
51. The 1960s or The 1940s
52. Tom Waits or Leonard Cohen
53. Philip Pullman or J.K. Rowling
54. Basho or Jack Kerouac [Although I never would have know who was if it wasn't for Cheney's essay on haiku, which I'm sad to note doesn't seem to be online anymore.]
55. Stephen Sondheim or Andrew Lloyd Webber
56. Frank O'Hara or John Ashbery
57. Paul Bowles or Graham Greene
58. Schubert or Schumann
59. Dostoyevsky or Dickens
60. Orson Welles or John Ford
61. August Strindberg or Eugene O'Neil
62. Keaton or Chaplin [I suspect I'd like Keaton better, but I've never seen any of his movies.]
63. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction or Galaxy
64. Short novels or long novels
65. Castle in the Sky or Princess Mononoke
66. Patricia Highsmith or Jim Thompson
67. David Lynch or Spike Jonze
68. William Gaddis or Saul Bellow
69. Bob Dylan or The Grateful Dead
70. Nebulas or Hugos
71. Fence or The Gettysburg Review
72. Jonathan Lethem or Dave Eggers
73. Toni Morrison or John Steinbeck
74. They Might Be Giants or Phish
75. Philip K. Dick or Frank Herbert
76. Sylvia Plath or Robert Lowell
77. coffee or tea
78. Rear Window or Vertigo [Only because I've seen it more recently. Both are awesome.]
79. Rodgers & Hart or Rodgers & Hammerstein
80. Gore Vidal or Norman Mailer
81. tragedy or comedy
82. Angels in America or Rent
83. Swift or Pope
84. George Carlin or Howard Stern
85. Theodore Sturgeon or Hal Clement
86. Seven Samurai or Rashomon
87. Vladimir Nabokov or John Updike
88. Edward Whittemore or John LeCarre
89. Radiohead or The Cure
90. Goya or El Greco
91. Alice Munro or Raymond Carver
92. James Baldwin or Truman Capote
93. New York or Paris
94. J.M. Coetzee or Nadine Gordimer
95. H.P. Lovecraft or Robert E. Howard [You are a cruel, cruel man, Matthew Cheney.]
95. Roald Dahl or Beverly Cleary
96. Annie Hall or Sleeper
97. Jello Biafra or Ralph Nader
98. Virginia Woolf or Arnold Bennett
99. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" or "The Wasteland"
100. Weird Tales or Amazing Stories

When I was completely out of my league on some of these (Kahlo, Strindberg, Schubert) I took Cheney's pick because I would be interested in it if he recommended it to me.
To add up my score: "At the end, count up the left column (my choice) and subtract the sum of the right column from it, thus creating your MCCI." So that comes out to 36 percent MCCI. (Actually, there are two #95, so it's actually 37 percent. Although I'm not sure it's a percentage with 101 questions.) Wow, I thought that would be much higher.
UPDATE: OK, now that I understand math a little better, I find that I'm at 68 percent. Much closer to what I expected.

Oh, no, Hogzilla!

A Georgia man claims to have killed a 1,000-pound feral hog, but all the proof he has is one picture of the dead pig hanging. If it's real, that is one scary pig. As the plantation owner points out:

"They say bears get mad when you mess with their babies," Holyoak said. "Hogs don't need a reason to get mad and come after you."

And readers of William Hope Hodgson's House on the Borderland know how scary even normal sized pigs can be.
Link found at Shaken & Stirred.

25 Sci Fi Legends according to TV Guide

According to sources, here's TV Guide's Top 25 Sci Fi Legends:

25- Captain Video
24- Dick Solomon (3rd Rock From the Sun)
23- Ultraman
22- Doctor Who
21- Starbuck (Battlestar Galactica)
20- John Crichton (Farscape)
19- Steve Austin/Jamie Summers
18- Capt. Malcolm Reynolds (Firefly)
17- Max Guevara (Dark Angel)
16- Allie Keys (Taken)
15- The Coneheads (Sat. Night Live)
14- Robot (Lost in Space)
13- MST3K Crew
12- Sam Beckett (Quantum Leap)
11- Duncan MacLeod (Highlander)
10- Jack O'Neill (Stargate SG-1)
09- Capt. John Sheridan (Babylon 5)
08- Alf
07- Fox Mulder (X-Files)
06- David Vincent (The Invaders)
05- Diana (V)
04- George Jetson
03- Uncle Martin (My Favorite Martian)
02- Star Trek Crews (all in one big lump)
01- Rod Serling

Despite some qualms about this list (no No. 6 from the Prisoner and Alf at No. 8!!) I like that it makes some unusual choices. Rod Serling at No. 1 is cool. Diana from V and David Vincent from The Invaders, both played so high, is awesome. They're not well known characters to the general public, so to even appear here is great. And, best of all, Ultraman made the list! Nice to see a Japanese show that hasn't appeared much since the early '70s appear on the list.

Carl Hiaasen on Warren Zevon

In this interview with Carl Hiaasen, the mystery writer and Miami Herald columnist, he talks a bit about his late friend Warren Zevon.

Warren was such a great writer. I think his lyrics are so unique and so literary, and if you met him and talked to him, you would find out immediately, at least in my case, he read 10 times more than I had time to read.
He was just extremely literate and well-read, and much of his song-writing was nuanced with literary references. And he also agonized over every single adjective and adverb and every line of his lyrics. He went through the same sort of agony that writers go through, if they're serious writers, when they're writing. And I think that's why he had so many friends who were writers and so many were drawn to him. ... And he was a great character on top of it. I think that's the other thing you have to remember from a novelist's point of view. He was a true character. He was larger than life.

Hiassen is a good writer in his own right, so go check out the interview.
Link found at Syntax of Things.

A diamond is equal to ...

You know those DeBeers diamond ads? Well, here are the ads in a language all guys could understand.
Link found at The Minor Fall, The Major Lift.

Quick, get the Millenium Falcon fixed!

The Cassini satellite orbiting Saturn has caught a picture of the Death Star. God, I hope we don't have a princess captured on that thing. We're a peaceful planet, really!

The Virtual Anthology returns

Jeffrey Ford has announced he's bringing back The Virtual Anthology.

I began The Virtual Anthology with the inception of Gabe Chouinard's S1ngularity Webzine. The idea was to compile the Table of contents for an anthology of the Literature of the Fantastic that would suit my own tastes. In other words, I got to play virtual editor. What I did was write little pieces, not critiques or reviews or essays really, appreciations of those stories I chose to be included.

Ford had only just gotten started when the e-zine was shut down. The potential for the series was obvious, especially for a big Jeffrey Ford fan like myself. But also for anyone who is interested in fantasy literature. Ford was looking across the fields of stories to find his works. The first three stories he chose were from Henry James, Ray Bradbury and Akutagawa. Imagine where he'd go from there. So I'm cheered to hear it's coming back.
Fantastic Metropolis will be the host for the anthology. Apparently, the site is preparing for a redesign and The Virtual Anthology will be part of that.

Minor adjustments

Due to some inquiries by powerful people, I have made some changes along the right. I've added a link to my other blog, Giant Monster Blog, and I've updated the links. I took out a few that were dead and more importantly I added some new people. Please, check it out, all the people along the right are worth visiting at least once.
In particular, I added Project Pulp, which is a great outlet for fiction zines like Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet and Say... ? and unusual books like Nick Mamatas' 3000 MPH in Every Direction at Once and Paul di Filippo's A Mouthful of Tongues.
And while I'm talking administratively, let me apologize for the lacking of posting for the past month or two. A mix of summer malaise and life things have been keeping me away. I'll be heading out on a vacation soon, so don't expect much exciting round these parts until September. Check in irregularly in the meantime and I should have an interesting post or two, I hope. (I should probably take Ed Champion's novel idea of asking a whole bunch of other bloggers to do my work for me.)

Trawling the blobosphere

The New York Times looks at sea blobs, especially the blob in Chile last summer. The article goes back over the same territory, that the blobs are most likely the bodies of dead whales (although it doesn't include the description of whale deaths that previous articles had), but it encompasses a lot of different blob sightings, so it's pretty cool.

The blobs were made of almost pure collagen, the fibrous protein found in connective tissue, bone and cartilage. The scientists concluded that it had come not from giant squids or octopuses or any other kind of mysterious invertebrates. Rather, the Bermuda blob arose from a fish or a shark, and the St. Augustine one from a whale.
The Florida sensation, they said, had probably consisted of a huge whale's entire skin.
"With profound sadness at ruining a favorite legend," they wrote in the April 1995 issue of The Biological Bulletin, published by the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., a distinguished research institution, "we find no basis for the existence of Octopus giganteus."

Link found at Professor Hex, who coins blobologist and, best of all, blobosphere.

Shatner's new music

Right now, I'm listening to William Shatner and Ben Folds sing Pulp's "Common People." It's fantastic. I don't know the original song, but I suspect it would be even better if I did. Anyway, Neil Gaiman posted the link to the song among many other good things. Check it out, download it. It's all fun. And you do know that Shatner is putting out an album produced by Folds, right? I'm sure I posted about it. Shatner will soon take over the pop charts, count on it.

Constantine: As bad as it wants to be

Well, there's a trailer for Constantine up and it looks to be as bad as expected. It's a little early to say for sure, but there is nothing in the trailer to make this look any good (well, maybe Rachel Weisz, but I'm not going to sit through this whole movie just to look at her). Keanu isn't using a British accent, but he's doing something strange with his voice. I've pretty much written this off as something I won't see.
Link found at Bookslut.

Donnie Darko answers

Salon answers questions about Donnie Darko (and being Salon, you have to watch a 15 second ad to read the article.) The article basically proves to me that the director's cut of the movie will explain too much. However, none of it will be stuff I didn't already know from the Web site, the Donnie Darko Book, and the DVD commentary. And seeing it all written out this way, I have to say I think the movie is better ambiguous. (Not that that will stop me from seeing the new version.)
Here's one of the more interesting q&a :

Couldn't you interpret this whole movie in another way, without any sci-fi stuff at all? As sort of a subjective rendition of Donnie's descent into paranoid schizophrenia?
Absolutely. A number of my friends read the film this way and feel it is a far more interesting interpretation of the events of "Donnie Darko" than the dominant sci-fi narrative. Certainly aspects of the film -- the flatness of affect in Donnie's meetings with Frank, Donnie's increasing menace and the way the mechanics of the plot revolve so explicitly around typical teenage sexual hang-ups -- support a reading of the film as Donnie's Descent, shown from inside his head. Even the careful tying-together of the plot doesn't necessarily negate this read; one trait of the budding schizophrenic is the creation of coherent, if unlikely, narratives tying together the hallucinations and paranoia often manifested as part of the illness.
That said, I'm not dealing too much with this read in these Cliffs Notes because it seems to me that through his supplementary materials and his director's cut, Richard Kelly is pushing viewers to accept the primary narrative -- the sci-fi, Tangent Universe narrative -- as the "proper" way to interpret the film. We can argue all day about whether Kelly's decision is clarifying or foolishly reductive. Many of my friends think that the film is far richer as an exploration of madness than as an "Escher thriller about freaking wormhole bullshit," as one friend so succinctly put it. Conversely, I myself am much more interested in watching a clever sci-fi flick with good '80s tunes than another inside-the-nutcase's-head movie, and so I'm perfectly happy to have Kelly attempt to clarify the intentions of his plot a bit. Kelly himself has spent years crowing about his film's careful ambiguity, so I'm interested in why he made the additions he did to the director's cut, additions that serve primarily to make the film far less ambiguous.

Personally, I don't care for the crazy teenager version of DD either. I like the science fiction better, but it still doesn't do it for me. I think there's a third interepretation out there that no one has mentioned yet. I'll have to watch the film again and contemplate. (That's what makes it so fun anyway.)

Casually catching giant squid

Can this possibly be right? This article, about improved salmon fishing, has a one sentence statement that just doesn't seem correct:

A commercial boat brought in two tons of giant squid Sunday, the smallest 8 pounds, the largest 40.

What? Wouldn't that be a huge scientific event? It has to be a typo, it just can't be right.

Film composer Jerry Goldsmith dies

Film composer Jerry Goldsmith died at 75 after a long battle with cancer. Goldsmith composed lots of great movies, two in particular that spring to mind "Planet of the Apes" and "The Omen." But he did lots of films and more than a few science fiction films, including Star Trek and all the Alien films. He will be missed.
News found at Pullquote.

Jeffrey Ford interview excerpts

LocusOnline provides excerpts from the Locus interview with Jeffrey Ford. He mentions his latest work in progress:

Currently, I'm finishing a novel, The Girl in the Glass. It takes place in 1932, the Depression, along the Gold Coast of Long Island, and is about con men who put on séances for the grieving rich. The head of the confidence operation is quite cynical, but during one of the séances he believes he sees a real ghost of a girl whom he later discovers has been murdered. The ensuing mystery involves the Ku Klux Klan (huge on Long Island throughout the '20s) and a eugenics lab in Cold Spring Harbor, funded by Henry Ford (a major anti-Semite) and prominent US banks. The writing is a departure for me — much more pared down, more dialogue, less florid. I was very influenced in writing this by Dashiell Hammett, especially The Thin Man.

He also has some interesting comments on genre:

I also have a hard time delineating the difference between SF and fantasy. Both attempt to transcend everyday perceptions. I do recognize that classic difference between a scientific method where you're going out and collecting empirical data and Plato's concept where you contain all the information of the universe and you look inward for answers. It's not that one mode of inquiry is better; they both genuinely work. But the best is when they meld together. I like to get an idea that has some kind of metaphorical resonance to the characters' lives or their situations. If you make the connection between these two, it makes for a good story.

It figures this is the one issue of Locus that hasn't turned up at my local bookstore.

Memorizing poetry

Our Girl in Chicago, over at About Last Night, posts about memorizing poetry and whether it should be taught in school. She argues that it should be. She argues that it does not make people look at poetry by rote, instead it gets them closer to the poetry and makes them understand its inner workings.
She makes a convincing argument. I wish I had been forced to memorize a poem or two. Or even the Gettysburg Address. I didn't have to memorize anything in school. While I was probably happy about that then, I regret it now.
But I wonder if this is something worth doing at my age. I would like to know poetry better. I own many collections of poetry, but I spend little time with any of them. Most of my time is spent on novels and short stories.
I think I'll take OGIC's advice and start memorizing Kubla Khan, a poem I've always loved anyway.

Giant Monster Blog

I created a second blog a while back. It's called Giant Monster Blog and it's where I will be putting all my giant monster news and views on the movies, fiction, videogames and music that feature giant monsters. I just posted there about the death of Noriaki Yuasu, the director of the original Gamera films. If giant monsters interest you, that's where to look.

I, Robot and the betrayal of Isaac Asimov

Slate looks at Isaac Asimov and how I, Robot gets the science-fiction grandmaster wrong. They do a good job of articulating the essential meaning of Asimov's work and how the movie betrays it. In short, Asimov hoped to promote reason over emotion, to show that robots could make not only mathematical choices well, but moral ones as well. The movie, on the other hand, aims to put emotion over reason and show how evil the unemotional robots are.
It's too bad. I expected so much from Alex Proyas after Dark City. But that's what Hollywood does.

About Last Night has a birthday

Terry Teachout's blog, ArtsJournal: About Last Night, is now one year old. Congratulations Terry. If you haven't read the blog by now, you should. It is wonderful. He writes about the arts, pretty much all the arts from classical music to Looney Tunes. And he knows a lot about all of them. And he doesn't talk down to those who don't understand. He wants you to know about this stuff. He's enthusiastic and he wants to bring you along for the ride. If you haven't read About Last Night, now is the time to start.
Here's a good starting point, Teachout's blog entry on growing up highbrow in a lowbrow place and how uncomfortable he was with that.

All Music changes

So the All Music Guide has redesigned. I'm not sure I like it. All Music has been a good resource for finding out about albums and biographies of singers. I've rarely seen much wrong with the info and the reviews at least give you a picture of what the album is like, even if you disagree with the author. But now, I have to register for the site and there always seems to be two or three clicks before I can get to what I want to see. On the other hand, they are also offering sound clips and other additions. It seems less handy, but more thorough. I'll hang in there though and see if things improve at all.