Eccentric Flower:199911/One month and nearly 4000 words

A very long entry tonight. Very long. I'm warning you now. I didn't write it all at once - it's a series of notes in bits and pieces.

I have been reading journals off and on all day. I had over a month's worth of back reading to do, and the editing was going so well on Quarter Moon that I decided I could spare the time - a month is about my limit - after that I just give up on ever trying to catch up and I stop reading other journals, and while that would arguably be a good thing for my workload, I'd be sad.

So I am now mostly caught up, and I have a goodly number of comments and musings inspired by what I found. Which, of course, I will share. Whether you like it or not.

Of course, there's nothing that says you have to read this.

Since I took these notes on paper, I'm not linking to the entries as I mention them - too much of a pain to go back and get all those URLs. I am only linking to the top page in each case. There's enough information for you to find the relevant parts, should you so choose.

Oh, yes. Not just in little ways. Various nouns, verbs, adjectives and figures of speech have been changed throughout. I find this incredibly offensive. Do they really think that the American readers are too dumb to figure out what a lift or a flat or a lorry is ... or that even American kids who are stumped can't look the words up???

So until someone drops the UK editions on my desk, I'm not budging.

I'm also annoyed with what they've done to the Narnia books. What have they done? They've released a new edition with The Magician's Nephew as the first book of the sequence. Never mind that this completely ruins some of the things in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe that are supposed to be mysterious. Unfortunately, according to Lisa, C.S. Lewis may have wanted it this way. Proof that sometimes even the author can be wrong, if you ask me.

I surprised Lisa in Colorado by explaining to her that the Nancy Drew books had been completely rewritten in the late Fifties (and, I believe, again in the Seventies) - to keep the dialogue and situations current. (The original 1930's texts are in the process of being released in facsimile editions, with the original art - if you see them, have a look and compare.)

Frankly, I'd rather explain a 1930's figure of speech to my kid and have the originals. But then, I'd rather explain to my kid what a lorry is too. Call me crazy, but I think the books are usually not improved by this silent tinkering.

So. Kymm writes about Iron Chef on 11 October - nice to see someone else besides myself and Nonelvis who thinks that Kaga is completely scary, especially when he's biting into various pieces of food. Kaga's the only professional actor on the show, Kymm, and apparently he's a flake - or couldn't you tell? (The outfits, for example, are his own personal taste in clothing.)

Oh, and there is a pattern to the dubbing. They use subtitles when the speaker cannot be seen speaking, and dubbing when they can be - or did I get that backwards? The answers are on the Iron Chef site, but I can't remember the URL. (No, I don't think it's www.ironchef.com.)

Al writes about all sorts of interesting philosophical topics. So, of all the things he's been discussing this month, what gets my attention? Edward Mordake.

I had heard of Mordake years before, in The Book of Lists, and it's not the kind of thing I would forget. Mordake had another face growing on the back of his head. I could give you the standard paragraph about him ... but I won't ... because if you follow any of these links, you'll get sick of seeing it.

Al linked to - hmm, was it the SF Weekly? I forget now, but their article on circus sideshows is the only thing you'll get in most search engines if you type "Edward Mordrake." That's partially because they misspelled his name - note the extra R - a red herring that Al passed along. When I went back to my battered copy of The Book of Lists, I not only realized that, but realized that the URL Al cited had used virtually the same paragraph of prose as the book - perhaps even verbatim. I didn't go back to the site to check.

RE/Search, a press that puts out books on a wide variety of fringe subjects, has a paragraph on Mordake in its book on freaks. It's not much better. Same information, but they had the good grace to change the wording a little.

What was I looking for? Two things. A date, and a photo. This whole Mordake thing strikes me as spurious. I mean, the face could move its eyes and make expressions, so the Usual Paragraph goes. Neurologically, that seems doubtful to me - it would require a whole lot of extra wiring to be crammed into a single cranium, right? Given that the same information is obviously being parroted from source to source, and no dates are given, I smelled a myth.

I finally found a dated citation - on the Mammoth Page - but the citation also has the note that this is one of the few pieces of "lay information" (i.e. not medically verified) in that collection. The date for the citation is 1896, making the chances of my finding a photo fairly slim.

Just in case, I managed to find the original source for that citation, Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, which is in Project Gutenberg. (Careful - it's a very large download and the paragraph on Mordake is not much larger than the excerpt at the link above.) From this, I learned that not only is it one of their few lay cases, but that Mordake conveniently requested that he be buried in a "waste place," with no tombstone, so distraught from his nether face (he committed suicide) that he couldn't stand having a grave marker.

I am suspicious.

I wouldn't exactly call this a lighter note, but Al comments in his 1 November entry about the stupidities of auto racing. Al, think of it this way: Anyone foolish enough to race autos for a living is statistically more likely to eliminate themselves from the gene pool.

There's also an interesting survey on 21 October, but I'm debating whether to take it - it's provocative, but it's also old news by now. Isn't it?

On 8 October, Diane relates a truly useful piece of advice from someone named Scott Franks, whom she apparently respects greatly - myself, I have no idea whether he's a writer, producer, et cetera, but I can get behind this:

One of his recommendations was to write a scene with the most on-the-nose dialogue you can. On-the-nose dialogue is obvious: it's having a love scene in which the participants say, "I love you." Or during an argument having someone say, "You make me angry." So he recommended writing the scene with on-the-nose dialogue so that you know what the characters are saying to one another. Then you rewrite the scene without using one thing said in the first draft. You definitely avoid cliche writing that way.

This is one of many pieces of advice which I already follow fairly well for a lot of my writing. Unfortunately, for Exchange Student I had reason to suspend most of the rules - and what I was trying to do didn't work. Not obeying the paragraph above is one reason "Show, don't tell" is scribbled on nearly every page of the MS.

Poor Melissa. Comparing the 4 October and 12 October entries was painful. On the other hand, if one is going to find out the awful truth about one's romance, best to have done two months into the relationship, rather than two years.

Not that that's much consolation.

I always read Lucy's entries fairly quickly, skimming past them, because - through no fault of hers - a lot of what she writes about just doesn't thrill me. Then I stop as something she says catches up with me and I have to go back a few entries and read it slower this time and then I remember why I keep reading.

Her entry #612 has a Song to Pacify the Driving Gods which made me giggle aloud.

Rob is very thoroughly caught up in the whole childbirth thing right now, and that doesn't fascinate me either (no offense, Rob), but he has a talent for making the mundane seem provocative ... and, um, occasionally vice versa.

On 30 Oct he writes about spanking your kids. Now, this subject came up in another forum recently, and I kept mum (my anti-child sentiments are on public record, and disqualify me). But maybe I can get away with it by speaking as a child and not a parent: I believe in spanking your kids on rare occasions. I certainly was spanked, and if I got spanked, believe me, I deserved what I was being spanked for. And I don't seem to have any psychological scars from it, nor physical ones.

But there are limits, and they are easily overstepped: Three years of verbal and physical abuse from my former stepfather while I was in high school did leave a few scars ... of both types ... some of which I never have quite recovered from.

So, perhaps for parents who don't know their limits or can't keep their temper in check, the whole corporal punishment idea is best avoided? I'd certainly rather see too little spanking than too much. However, I also believe - having been a rather willful child - that sometimes nothing else will work.

I have very little to say about Mary Anne except that she's working too hard, and I miss her. (One of her recent entries read, in its entirety, "I ain't dead.")

Oh, actually, I think I wish she hadn't decided on kinder, gentler grading for her students, but I don't have enough information. I mean, yes, sometimes when everyone in the class gets D's it means the teacher's too harsh, but given your sweet gentle nature, Mary Anne, I suspect it means that the students are underperforming. (My sentiments against dumbing down of educational curricula in exchange for feel-good values, like my anti-child sentiments, are on public record. Ain't I a crab?)

Ozy and Millie isn't a journal, it's a comic strip - and it's on hiatus while Rain gets his book together (hooray!) - but it's in my ring, and besides, don't you need an intermission at this point?

Zen, the Game
More Closure
Being Unique

I don't really have anything new to say about Molly, but then, I mention her just about every other day anyhow.

Shmuel, as you may know, suffered a Violent Unknown Event - a sudden, unexpected, life-changing experience (the term comes from director Peter Greenaway).

I write about people experiencing VUE's all the time - it's the main subject of my fiction - but it's a lot harder to take in person, of course. Shmuel writes that now he is beginning to see everything in his life in two categories: Before Accident and After Accident. I am not surprised.

But he is recovering well - well enough to give a nicely formed rant about Mayor Rudy's Museum Follies on 24 October (which, by the by, I agree with resoundingly).

Patrick has finished a script. Arrgh. Okay, okay, I'm very glad for him (he always sounds so glum normally), but I can't entirely suppress that little twinge of jealousy: Hey, someone else finished something! Wouldn't it be nice if you did that?

Of course, I am a little too anal - I don't consider a book "finished" until I get my author's copies, and that (obviously) hasn't happened yet.

I do get happy over finishing drafts - for about ten minutes. Then the postpartum depression sets in. Writing is such an emotional touchstone for me. There is literally nothing else in my life, no, not even Nonelvis, that can provoke such high highs and low lows.

But, we were talking about Patrick, who finally explains why his email name is 'xingcat' (on 18 October, and it isn't happy news), and rants about Fight Club on 16 October.

I saw Fight Club several days ago. I haven't written about it, just as I haven't written about American Beauty again (despite lots of new input and information). On Wednesday we have to write about both films in conjunction with a mouth organ topic, and I'm trying to save myself, because I hate writing something twice.

But I will say this about Fight Club, because it's material that's not germane for mouth organ anyway:

First off, it is hard to like David Fincher films. Either you adore his peculiar mentality - his twisted worldview, his selection of scripts that play to his dark sense of humor, his corrupted rainy barely-lit sets - or you don't. I do. And even so, even being a fan of his, liking everything he does, I will be the first to admit that Fight Club is both a hard movie to like and a movie that isn't sure what it has to say.

However, to pick on it for misogyny is not a good idea. This film doesn't hate women - it doesn't even notice them. Women are completely off this film's radar. Helena Bonham-Carter's character is a red herring and a plot device, nothing more. She is needed to trigger the film's revelation, to come between the two real lovers in this movie: Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. The homoerotic tension between the two leads is so deliberate that I am surprised Patrick didn't mention it.

I didn't get much further back than that because the Spies server had one of its periodic fidgets. I'll have to catch up on Patrick later.

Pamie indicates on 28 October that she is as annoyed by those "Tampax was there" ads as I am. I haven't had enough material to write a Stay Tuned item about them, but you can assume that her entry is what I would have written if I could have managed to be that funny.

She also gets some tough love from Billy Blanks on 25 October. There are other entries (such as the Message from Coffee) that made me giggle, but her conversations with Billy never fail to make me laugh out loud, so that's this month's clear winner.

Although ... there's an entry on 11 October which covers a difficulty of meeting other journallers in the flesh that no one warns you about. For example: I know Pamie's last name. Do you? Would you be able to call her at her hotel?

I met a person at Susan's Hallowe'en party who wrote me two days later and basically said, "I went the whole night without realizing you were Columbine!" Susan had introduced me to everyone under my right name. Well, I can understand it's hard to look at me in person and call me "Columbine." Even when I'm wearing a dress.

It was after getting that email that I realized I never have learned Susan's last name. Oddly enough, no one ever has trouble finding my real name, even though it has appeared in my journal entries exactly once.

(And Pamie gives her last name on 29 September, but she normally doesn't.)

On 25 October, Jette reveals that she likes Bert. And Bert likes linoleum.

I've read more of the books on her 18 October list than she has. Some of them are outstanding. A few of them should be required reading for all humans.

Toni really is like Jette describes on 11 October. Don't believe anything Toni says about herself. She lies.

Oh, and I swear I am going to steal the format of her 5 October entry (which she stole from Pamie, who stole it from someone else ... and they all probably stole it from Jean Kerr originally).

I don't have much to say about Dean, but that doesn't mean I don't read his pages. It's interesting because he lives in my general area, is often talking about the same sights and landmarks, but he has a very different lifestyle from mine. For one thing, he goes outside a lot more often. For another, he appears to have boundless reserves of energy.

Toni,too, has been finishing her script (damn it, you folks have got to stop hogging all the productivity!), although in her case it may have happened at the temporary expense of her sanity. So maybe it's not a good idea for me to tell her that I giggled throughout the "Houston, we have a problem" exchange on 26 October.

By the time I got to Karen, I decided I needed a change of pace, so instead of reading backwards from Now, I started at 1 October and read forward - and immediately got hit with a very serious and very interesting pair of anecdotes on the way some men approach (or don't approach) women.

She also comes to grips (yet again) with the very down-to-earth nature of Swedes, on 8 October - but manages to stage a massive surprise anyway, two days later. Good for Karen! Pär is too complacent.

It's also interesting to compare Karen's thoughts on Hallowe'en costumes (29 October) with mine. Also, the Empire State Building was a great idea, but I still want to see Pär dressed as a very bad allegory. (I wonder sometimes how Pär feels about some of these anecdotes being retold.)

I can't remember whether I actually used Iain-Padraic's story about the two overheard little old ladies (13 October) in mouth organ, or whether I was going to use it and Nonelvis made me kill it. But it still makes me grin.

He really does overhear things like that, you know.

And on 10 October he has exactly the same problems with the Xena season opener that I did. I kept shouting at the TV, "That's Christian mythology! Christians barely existed then! This should be in the Greek tradition if anything!"

Not that Xena is known for being mythologically consistent ....

On 5 October Iain talks about how being gay has, at several points, allowed him to see a side of women that they generally don't show straight men - and how, rather than making women more understandable to him, this actually makes him somewhat more confused by their behavior.

The basic idea is that, they realized he was harmless and were therefore willing to show another face to him - as opposed to the "on-stage" behavior they used around the rest of the males.

I don't see why that's confusing, Iain. Of course, a bystander comparing my behavior around women to my behavior around men would conclude I'm schizophrenic ... so perhaps I'm not the right person to speculate on this.

The journals have defeated me.

A saner person would conclude that I should read fewer of them. I think that's a bit extreme.

But it is clear that I should get to them more often than once a month.

Memo to myself: Don't do this again.