 |
|
|
|
Disks in Rotation: Books Lying
Open • Post-Impressionism: From van Gogh to Gauguin, John Rewald • Grimm's Fairy Tales • Great Expectations, Charles Dickens • Dreams of Terror and Death, H. P. Lovecraft • Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre H. P. Lovecraft What's For Lunch? Soul-Devouring
Worry When I Grow Up:
|
Friday April 19, 2002 |
| Quote
of the Day If people are allowed to wear bracelets that say, "What would Jesus do" they should be allowed to say, "What would Satan do". -- Ashley Williams of Kaimuki High, Honolulu, on the school's ban of clothing promoting Satanism |
|
Daily
Blog
This sort of thing is really the main "benefit" of smaller home video cameras. • Deep linking may be outlawed, at least in Denmark. What's "deep linking"? Well, the link in this paragraph, for instance. Linking to a particular content page on Wired, rather than to their front page. This would obviously ruin the vast majority of links; imagine if I could only link to wired.com and along with that had to say, "scroll down to the "search news", go to April 15th, then scroll down to the 8th story." Just a hypothetical there. Who would click on that? Too much trouble. And lots of times there is some older item on a page that you can't find any way to access from their navigation at all. Any well-designed site will have navigation on every page, so visitors can easily backtrack to the rest of it if they want to. It's one reason frames suck, they make deep linking a pain, and make it so if you circumvent their crappy frames navigation system with a deep link, there isn't good navigation to get back to the rest of the site. I think the whole concept is short-sighted; if some site said no one could deep link, and could only point visitors to their front page, I would hope that most every other site would just boycott them. No links at all if they're going to be like that. • So I finally got to the library yesterday and picked up several of the Brian Lumley Necroscope novels, which were recommended to me over a month ago by a reader email from Chris.
I had yet to read any of them, but had posted another note about it when this email came in just recently from Jim:
So anyway, last night and today I read the 3rd book in his Necroscope series, Deadspeak. It's about 300 pages, of which the first 25 or so are recaps of the first two books in the series. Which is convenient, since the library didn't have either of the first two books, and I didn't care enough to wait and hunt them down elsewhere. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't real good either. He's not a great writer by any stretch of the imagination. Tolerable, but no real gift for prose at any point, and the character dialogue was often laughably bad. No one really has a conversation; they sort of take turns making soliloquies. There is no tone to it as of real people talking. One basic writing technique is to read your dialogue out loud, either as you write it or in proofreading. It's hard to get a feel for realistic-sounding speech on the page, but if you read it out loud it's much easier to judge. The dialogue by Lumley has no rhythm to it, and he mostly uses it for exposition; one character explaining something, often paragraphs at a time, even in crisis situations. Obviously no one would speak in long, complete sentences when they are running for their lives. He also has 500 year old vampires saying, "ok" or "gotcha", or other modern slang. Everyone talks the same too, there's no individual voice to the characters. The vampire from 800 years ago talks just like the 22 y/o asian government agent. It's a small thing, but I noticed it repeatedly. Lumley does seem to have a very good imagination for his whole world. There are tons of long, involved historical events, parallel worlds, space and time travel, magic, etc. I don't get the feeling it's all really well-planned out; like characters can just sort of do whatever they need to do to move the plot along. If someone needs to read a given mind thought, they'll do it, and if they need to miss it to keep some bit of suspense going, they'll miss it. There aren't any real checks of balances either, some characters have miraculous powers that don't seem to tax them in any way to use. I like systems of magic in book worlds to have some "reality" to them. I.E. doing X requires Y, effort or learning or it's mentally taxing, or something. When characters can just do their magical tricks constantly with no difficulty it's not real suspenseful. It's more like a video game. Anyway, I've got the 4th book also, so I guess I'll give it a look tonight. His writing is very sparse and not of a very advanced vocabulary level, so I can read it very quickly. Not that big words slow me down, it's not like I'm getting up and checking them in a dictionary, but generally writers that have more advanced vocabularies create more advanced sentence structure and more detailed descriptions, and have some ulterior motives or foreshadowing in the details, so you want to not miss a word or you'll miss something good. Simpler writing you can just skim, since getting the gist is all there is to get. I read the last 200 pages of Deadspeak today in about 90 minutes in the tub, for example. If you want a real comparison, read some Dickens. You often have to read paragraphs 2 or 3x to really see what he's saying, and often it's very funny. Virtually anything becomes interesting when it's well written. A scene with a character eating a slice of bread with a lot of butter from Great Expectations is a more engaging description than the whole final battle in Deadspeak. Dickens is and old-style of writing, but even modern writers can put a lot more description and interest into their prose, rather than just sparse physical descriptions. The other weakness in Lumley's writing, at least from the one book I've read, is that the characters or so static. They don't have any layers, what you see in the first description is what you get. The bad guys are bad, robotic in behavior. The good guys are good, equally robotic. No one ever does anything that seems out of character or surprising, and no one changed at all in the course of the novel, in their attitudes or philosophies. In fact they really don't have such things, for the action is almost entirely plot-driven. There's no real contemplation of why or what or who, it's just point A to point B. That being said, it's not a bad read. There wasn't really that much sex/violence of interest. Some sex, but mostly conventional, and lots of violence, with dozens of vampires getting their heads chopped off, but it seems very mechanical. The other thing that annoyed me was that like most action movies, the good guys who might be slow and clumsy humans are nevertheless able to slaughter the supposedly faster, stronger, supernaturally powerful vampires, in hand to hand combat, nearly every time. It's really video game-esque in places, as the people walk up, the vampires run out like idiots and get shot. You wonder how they live to be 500 years old when the first time they ever face anyone hostile they walk right into their spear gun and get decapitated in two minutes. The writer it reminded me most of is William Johnstone, who is utter pulp, really just slasher porn, in his Devil's Heart series. I don't know how many books he's done in it to this point, but I read the first 5 or so, the last of them in probably 1992 or thereabouts, before getting sick of it. Pulp bin stuff, certainly none published in hardcover. It's a sort of Christian series, in that it's a whole battle between God and Satan, but entirely carried out by humans. Every book is the same thing; some huge coven of Satan worshipers appears in some small town, Satan sort of walls off the town from outsiders, the Satanic people orgy and crucify a bunch of weak-faithed Christians, before the main character, Sam Balon, who is all righteous and a holy warrior guy, goes Rambo and kills almost all of them by himself, with the help of a few locals of stronger faith. There is always a ton of sex, porn style, with Satanic higher-ups seducing or raping the Christians, who eventually shake it off and kill them. As well as lots of sex as the Satanic forces take new converts, rape their enemies, etc. Various demonic monsters pop up from time to time, there are "Beasts", sort of God's mistake creatures that live in stinking holes in the ground and eat people, etc. It's all very formulaic and silly, but if you want really pure horror crap, that's what you want. The amount of sex and violence leaves Lumley miles in the dust, though the writing quality is even less advanced. I'll read another book or two by Lumley and add something on him to the horror fiction overview page, and throw in some Johnstone also, I suppose. I was just going to cover famous authors, or authors I really liked myself, but I should probably do every author I've read enough of to have a valid opinion on, as a sort of reader service, as well as excuse for me to go on and on about writing. Which is a gift of mine you might. *cough* |
|
|
In Venezuela, the elected president, Chavez, is essentially a socialist. He was elected by the teeming, impoverished masses a couple of years ago, and has heavily taxed the magnates, broken up monopolies, not allowed the oil companies to continue their profiteering and environmental destruction, etc. The US gets like 15% of our oil from Venezuela, so "we" have a vested interest in their economic output, mainly in the oil continuing to flow. US businesses make enormous profits off of it, of course. And if you don't know of the heavy oil-industry bias in our current presidential administration, you've not been paying attention. The administration is composed largely of ex, current, and future oilmen, and this shows up in policy in such things as cutting research into alternative energy sources, reviving nuclear power strategies, trying to drill in the Alaskan national parks, blocking laws that would force auto-makers to increase fuel efficiency and cut our dependence on terrorist-financing foreign oil, etc. Anyway, there was a coup by the military in Venezuela. They jailed the democratically-elected president, and installed their own dictator. Keep in mind this isn't some revolt in Cuba; Chavez was the winner in a fair, popular vote, despite most of the media and establishment opposing him at the time. Which is more than the US can say, you'll note. Anyway, last week the military, with their allies in big business, overthrew the head of the country, threw out all of the congress, immediately overturned most of the laws regulating the oil companies and other big businesses, repealed the higher taxes on the rich, etc. Newspapers (there and in the US) and other media gave this glowing coverage, totally approving the change, ignoring the fact it was a military take over. The public was a lot less happy that their elected leader had been jailed, and massive demonstrations broke out immediately, and continued for two days until the people triumphed. They threw the dictator into jail, freed their president, and made merry. As the coup fell apart the Venezuelan media did everything they could to cover up the fact, and didn't report on the democratic forces marching. The article gives numerous details:
Furthermore:
There is a much longer article about the coup and events leading up to it, as well as analysis of the country and forces in it here. Where it gets interesting is that the US state dept was obviously involved with the coup plotters. They of course deny this:
What I find interesting about this is how clearly it shows the US government's real priorities. Another quote from the above linked article:
Keep this in mind the next time you hear someone in the US leadership decrying the terrible repression and lack of democracy in whatever country we're opposing at the moment. We're all for democracy when the current leadership isn't democratic, and opposes our goals. Iraq is horrible, Ghadafi in Libya is horrible, the Taliban in Afganhistan was horrible, etc. I wouldn't disagree with those assessments, but where is our official condemnation of the repressive tyrants ruling Saudi Arabia, or Kuwait? Where the citizens and media have as little or less freedom than they do in Iraq or Libya? As long as those countries are more or less in line with what we want them to be in line with, we're fine with their repression. This is a realistic viewpoint; foreign policy is no place for idealism. Our vested interests are more important than the quality of life or degree of freedom people in other countries across the world may or may not enjoy. My objection is the hypocrisy that the US government shows about this sort of thing, the 1984ish lying and backtracking and denying of the obvious. If some Bush spokesman came out and said, "Yes, Chavez was elected, but his policies are raising oil prices and he's kind of a dick, so we tried to get him booted." I'd have a lot more respect for the administration. Instead we see a coup that was exactly in US policy interests, taking out a leader they very much dislike, and the coup leadership having contact with the US Embassy, and once it happens the US is very supportive, virtually the only country in the Americas to recognize the coup government. But no, of course they had nothing to do with it! The very idea! |
|
|
<-- Previous -- Daily Main Page -- Next --> |
|
All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007. |
few more things on the Venezuelan coup I mentioned yesterday.