Links! Why Writers Drink, Let's Rush to Judgement, and more

Sharon Lee (coauthor of the excellent Liaden books) writes about "Why Writers Drink, Part Whoknows", a post about intellectual property rights and the villains who don't know what those words mean. I like:

The whole Orphan Works Issue that we all hear so much about and which is the total justification put forth by universities and Google and proselytizing professors? Is a red herring. There are NOT millions or even hundreds of thousands of Brilliant! Works! Still! In! Copyright! just lying around the place whose authors-or-rights-holders have fallen off the face of the earth and cannot be found, that in-force copyright therefore Robbing! The! Ages! of those gems.

Fellow fans of Georgette Heyer will enjoy this interview with the author of a new biography on the grand dame of the Regency romance. Plus, the author's giving away a copy of the book!

NPR's Monkey See blog has a great feature called "Let's Rush to Judgment" which critiques movies solely based on their trailers. The post for the new Breaking Dawn trailer is hilarious, including sentences like this:

As if that weren't enough, MONSTERBABY is not a very easy pregnancy, since it is attempting to devour Bella in a "trapped in a giant pile of M&Ms, I could only try to eat my way out, nom nom nom" kind of way.

Oooh! "Om-nom-nom danger!" Seriously, this is going to be the most unintentionally hilarious movie every made. It's so, so sad.

(But read the NPR post. It's funny.)

Links! reading, voting, writing & more! (like Austenland, Potter & ungrammatical vampires)

I'm sorry for the lack of posts, folks! I've been following through on my summer ambitions and doing lots of writing and cleaning. :D But here are some fun links, from the (not insignificant) time I've also spent reading:
Willa writes about having "landmarks" in the history of literature - those authors and eras you know really well, and muses about whether it's good to make a vast, shallow survey of literature or to really dig in to one particular area. (I think you probably need to do both - and she has a great Lewis quotation about how the latter will naturally lead to the former.)
Hey, this is why I vote for those "gutless, unreliable, ineffectual Republicans" too!
Oooh, Shannon Hale's "Austenland" is being made into a movie!
This interview with Jason Isaacs (who plays Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies) is great. An excerpt, when he was asked if he expected his character to take the journey he did:
I mean, most of us would run to the bookshop at midnight when the books came out, partly because we’re fans, and partly to find out if we had a job next year.
And I like this part where he describes how actors work:

Every single actor who plays a part that is on screen even momentarily can talk like this about their own characters, because you’re always there. You may not be speaking or the camera may not be pointing at you, but you create an entire life for yourself so that when the camera does catch you, you’ve got something to bring to the party.
It reminds me of all the work I do on my own characters' backgrounds. I need to know more about them than the reader ever sees, or they're not going to act like actual people when they're on stage (on page?).

And this is a helpful little collection of analysis on the Church and homosexuality. An excerpt, from Albert Mohler:
In this most awkward cultural predicament, evangelicals must be excruciatingly clear that we do not speak about the sinfulness of homosexuality as if we have no sin. As a matter of fact, it is precisely because we have come to know ourselves as sinners and of our need for a savior that we have come to faith in Jesus Christ. Our greatest fear is not that homosexuality will be normalized and accepted, but that homosexuals will not come to know of their own need for Christ and the forgiveness of their sins.

This is not a concern that is easily expressed in sound bites. But it is what we truly believe.
And an excerpt from John Piper:

What’s new is not even the celebration of homosexual sin. Homosexual behavior has been exploited, and reveled in, and celebrated in art, for millennia. What’s new is normalization and institutionalization. This is the new calamity.
"Normalization and institutionalization." A-yup. There's also a video at the link that I haven't watched. (Just to let you know. I'm sure you wondered.)


Finally, if you want a fun way to brush up on your grammar, try this site, where the Twilight books are picked apart, comma by comma, with a very sardonic hand. (Can you have a sardonic hand? Oh well.)

It wasn't entirely our fault

So, among the many blessings of my life, I have a very cool brother, Josh. He's six years younger than me, but since we've stayed in the same city as each other in our adulthood, we've been able to develop a peer relationship over the last few years.
Which is not to say that we can't be kind of juvenile sometimes.
Anyway, there's a dollar theater in my city, and my brother and I hatched a plan. We decided to go and see a certain popular movie aimed mostly at tween-teen girls (I won't name it here, because I don't want its fans discovering my blog via Google alerts and hating on me, but this particular installment rhymes with Why Fight: Glue Soon) solely for the purpose of laughing at it.
We weren't planning on being jerks; we knew some folks take this thing very seriously. But our honest emotional reaction to the franchise has largely been laughter, and so we thought if we kept our snickers very quiet and waited to see it till it was at the second-run, cheap theater, we wouldn't really ruin any fan's experience of it.
Though we did joke about how annoyed the fangirls might be at us.
Anyway, it eventually did come to the dollar theater, and my brother and I kissed our respective indulgent spouses goodbye and bought our tickets and settled in for a (quiet) laugh-fest.
It was pretty clear from the start that we weren't the only people in the theater that thought there was more humor than pathos in the story. The guy behind us was snickering too. Sadly, our muffled laughs seemed to encourage him. It didn't take long for our side of the theater to be shushed.
So we shushed. We nudged each other occasionally, when the melodrama got just too soaring to resist, but we were pretty quiet.
Then it happened. During the most (intended-to-be) harrowing part in the drama - when the hero is telling the heroine that he's leaving, like, 4-EVARS - my brother reached for some candy from his bag and . . . the bag spilled.
This wouldn't be so bad, except that he was eating Gobstoppers. And we were sitting towards the back of the theater. So they had a loooooooong way to roll. And they hit every seat post on the way down. Kerplink, kerplank, kerplunk. Over and over and over. Think of marbles rolling downhill through obstacles over a concrete flooor. It was very noisy.
We froze. Goodness. Not a happy accident. Okay. It'll be okay. They've almost stopped rolling. They have to reach the bottom soon.
And then, into the shocked silence, comes the voice of the fellow behind us. Loudly, irrepressibly, and with great glee, he declares: "That was AWESOME!"
And the sore oppressed teen in front of us stood up, turned around and said, "Can we WATCH the movie, PLEASE?"
It didn't help matters that his voice cracked. (His. I know. What was he doing there? Hopefully trying to impress a girl.)
Josh and I sunk down into our seats, abashed.
And a few moments later, after a whispered conference, that whole group of people left. Obviously, they wanted to see the movie with a crowd that took Ella and Bedward's pain seriously, as it should be taken.
It sort of ruined it for us. We felt badly for them. But the candy wasn't our fault. Nor was the guy behind us. We really had intended to have our honest emotional reactions without being jerks. But it didn't work out that way.
Still, it was a very, very funny movie. And we did laugh long, loud and hard . . . AFTER we left the theater.
I love my brother.
And, sadly, I'm not sure we've learned our lesson. I, at least, am looking forward to going with my brother to WHY FIGHT: EAT CHIPS.
But only once it's been out long enough to only cost me a buck.
And this time, we'll eat gummy worms.

Book Review: the Twilight Series

Before I publish my next What I’ve Been Reading list (see previous entries here, here and here), I’m going to review a few books that deserve their own posts. I'll take the week to do that, and then publish the next What I've Been Reading list at the end of the week, with shorter reviews on the books that don't get individual posts.

I'm starting with the Twilight books. I wrote a bit about them already here, and now I’ve finished it. I have to say, I like the first book best of the series. I think its strength is the interesting tension between the normal high school world and the weird parallel world of the vampires. In subsequent books, there’s less and less normal world, and so less and less contrast. By the last book, you’re almost totally enveloped in the parallel world, and you suddenly see why Edward didn’t think eternal undead existence was such a prize (“oh, he was . . . right.”).

Props to Stephanie Meyer for writing a fun series. It’s engrossing and fun to read. I couldn’t write an honest review without saying that first.

But I still come back to what I thought at the beginning: this series’ prime virtue is its entertainment value, not anything else. And I have to admit, that though I see what she was going for, I found the Cullen family progressively creepier the more they were explained. Their lack of bravery in taking on the evil vampires (“go ahead and kill everyone else – just leave the people we actually care about alone”) was understandable and even sympathetic, but made them somewhat less than heroic. Yes, in the world as presented, going on a crusade would be a hopeless cause, but wouldn’t it have been glorious? I mean, it’s fantasy after all . . .

Also, I couldn’t get past the problems in Bella and Edward’s relationship. I know it’s been exhaustively critiqued elsewhere, and I’m not saying anything new, but I found it emotionally abusive and semi-stalkerish. Again, it works within the world-as-created, but you can’t make it happily parallel anything in real life, and that’s problematic, I think, for books aimed at teenagers.

The last book was my least favorite. Bella’s experience of motherhood wasn’t anything I recognized from reality (and the author did, to her credit, acknowledge this within the story) and despite the rules of the universe, I found the resolution of Jacob’s plotline really creepy. Also, (SPOILER) I don’t understand having an entire book build up to an epic fight at the end, and then having the epic fight never actually take place.

So . . . I feel awful doing this, because it’s a rip-roaring yarn, and I honestly admire any author who can write so compellingly, but I have to admit that I think the flaws outweigh the virtues in these books, at least for young audiences, even though the first book, at least, is great fun.

peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Harry Potter vs. the Cullens

I'm having a very weird literary experience right now: I'm reading both the end of the Harry Potter books and the end of the Twilight books - first time through, on both counts.

I'll follow with a fuller review of both later, but just now I have to say that they've very different from each other, despite both being YA fantasy.

I've read Stephanie Meyer says her books are about love. And I've read that J. K. Rowling says her books are about death. And I can see why they'd each say what they've said.

But here's the thing, as I go back and forth between the two series: I think they've got it switched. For one thing, Meyer's love reads a bit more like lust to my eyes, and I can't help but twine that with the theme of death, as in "the wages of sin is". (Despite her best efforts - and her stories are very compelling - the "undead" never lose their creepiness. If you think about it, that's probably a good thing.) And there is death aplenty in the Rowling's books, but I keep thinking of, "No greater love has a man than this: that he lay down his life for his friends." For all about her stories that makes me uneasy, in their best sections, they're about that kind of love.

And then, when I think about that verse, the "no greater love" one, I think about what Jesus said next, that he has called us his friends . . . and then I'm not thinking of Rowling's books or Meyer's books at all, but rather about Jesus.

There's only so much you can say about death and love in fiction before your mind forces you back to the bright light of the real world in order to sit and contemplate the victorious One who by dying conquered death, and that because of the great love He has for mankind.

And so I'm back to wondering why I read fiction at all. Perhaps because even in its imperfection, fiction prompts us to ponder reality in deeper and deeper ways. Perhaps it's even the imperfection itself that prompts us toward meditating on God and his mercies. When we read world-building exercises that are lacking in some areas, it makes us think about how they're lacking, and what is really true, in the real world, the one God Himself made. The good parts of the fiction show us the glories we might, for our blindness, have missed on our own (like how Aslan makes you realize what joy really means) and the imperfections make you yearn for the real, God-created world again (like how Edward Cullen makes you shiver at the idea of an all-human eternity).

I don't know - and I'm not trying to start a Harry Potter fight or a Twilight fight. I think in both cases you can make a decent argument for reading them and a decent argument against. (Though, disclaimer: I'm pretty sure Twilight would be bad for teenage girls full-stop, and not because of the vampires, but because, though the heroine saves herself for marriage, she acts nothing like the way a real girl wishing to be chaste would need to act. If you want to be chaste in the real world, you have to flee temptation, not wallow in it. That's just the reality of making the decision to wait till marriage. You have to be like the little sister in the Song of Songs, you have to be a battlement. And in terms of how virtue is practiced, Twilight is wildly unrealistic, and I don't mean unrealistic in the "there are no werewolves in real life" kind of way. Fantasy is supposed to be unrealistic in that way. But virtue is supposed to translate pretty directly in fantasy; that's the point of the genre, really. Bella's actions are just bad modeling, and Meyer is so good at making her situation emotionally appealing that I think the book hangover could be very damaging at that stage of life. I'm sure there are exceptions, but fifteen-year-olds aren't known for their objectivity, you know?)

Okay, I got way off track there. Anyway, anyone else read both series and have the same impression? Oh, and am I going to change my mind when I read the last few books?

peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

p.s. Touchstone has an article in its upcoming issue about Twilight that sounds absolutely fascinating.