Puttering in the Study

The Shroud of the Thwacker - Chris Elliott

I had hopes this would be a Hitchhiker's Guide / The Eyre Affair sort of send up of Caleb Carr historical crime fiction, but it actually had the unexpected effect of making me realize how good Jasper Fforde's books really are.  Because even if they now have no discernable plot, the jokes are always funny.  While I like the idea - Caleb Carr's The Alienist is a terrific basis for a send-up - the execution is just way over the top.  The jokes are only funny about half the time, and the humor is just so out there that you can't take the book seriously.  There's no internal logic to it because you can't figure out what the rules are.  yes it's the nineteenth century, but with later events continually being included, to the point that you don't have any frame of reference to be able to fit any sort of suspense into.  Now if the point is a nonstop set of gags, say Monty Python style, that's fine, but the jokes have to be funny, and often these aren't.  It reminds me of something a reviewer once said about some Stephen King book - that the characters don't act consistently with their setting - people fighting with swords can't pull out a gun when it suits them - and that was sort of the problem here.  not a really bad book, and I did laugh out loud a number of times, but still, a disappointment.

Grayson's pinewood derby car

Grayson competed this morning in his first Cub Scout pinewood derby.  He placed fourth, which makes him an alternate for district in two weeks.  It's not real clear in this photo (and they took the car till after district so obsessed dads don't keep tweaking it) but he designed a bat-mobile that has wings on the back and a bat face on the hood, complete with "googley eyes".

I didn't post on it when it happened, but you'll also notice that Grayson now has his Tiger Cub patch - he finished his requirements for the first level of Cub Scouting and replaced his paw badge with beads for his orange Tiger Cub patch.  By the way, he wasn't feeling real well this morning and felt worse after he realized that he didn't get a trophy, so he's pretty sad here.

Making S'mores

We got a home s'mores machine the other day and the boys enjoyed making themin front of their imitation camp fire in the kitchen.

Campaigning with Mama

One of the things you get to do if you're one of Jamie's boys is ride in parades.  All three rode with Jamie in the Democratic Party float in this year's MLK Day parade. 

Grayson's first tooth

  Grayson just had his first tooth fall out the other day - was all excited when he had a visit from the tooth fairy!

Grayson at Lowes Workshop

Grayson and his papa have been going to the Saturday workshops at Lowe's, learning how to build woodworking kits.  Angi ran into him there this past Saturday and took this for me.

Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire - Goodwin, Jason

If you're looking for a good starting history of the Ottoman Empire - this isn't it.  Lords of the Horizon is a dense travelogue-type book that wanders through the 600-odd years of the history of the Ottoman Empire.  It begins with a puppet show and ends with the removal of the wild dogs of Istanbul, and in between is organized in chapters based on some characteristic of Ottoman life.  Reading it is like looking through a telescope - you know you're seeing something, but you don't know exactly what it is, and rarely have any context for what you're seeing.

The principal problem I have with the book is the writing.  Goodwin makes extensive use of metaphor, but often his metaphors are unreadable, so that you have no clue what he means to convey. In other words, you have to decipher the metaphor or comment to know what happened, and whether it was a good thing or a bad thing, and frequently, you just can't.  I am reasonably well-read, and I couldn't tell what many of his allusions were meant to convey.

But more troubling was the difficulty of deciphering what even ordinary sentences meant. Since there is no narrative to help carry you through less-than-clear sentences, I frequently (and by that I meant virtually every page) had to stop and retrace my steps through a sentence to locate the subject or verb or direct object.  I could tell what had happened, but not to whom.  And if the sentence contained one of the aforementioned metaphors, all I could tell is that something had happened, but not whether it was good or bad, expected or unexpected. 

This isn't always the case, of course.  When Goodwin lets himself tell a story - the siege of Vienna for example - the imagery contributes to the story.  There are good word sketches of the people and the scene.  But this may also have been because I already knew the scene, through Tim Powers' (admittedly twisted) version of the siege in The Drawing of the Dark.  But my intent was to get a short, basic history of the Ottoman Empire to bring my knowledge of the environs of Istanbul up to date from the fall to the Romaian Empire to Mehmet in 1453 to the creation of the Turkish state by Mustafa Kemal after World War I.  But the description of the origins of the Ottoman state was better (or at least more clearly) told in 1453, and comparing this narrative of the history to 1453 to that book, I prefer that one.  The character of the pivotal figure of Mehmet the Conquerer was clearer there, at least as far as it went.

Now this may all make a lot better sense after I have a historical framework to hang it on, in the same way that extensive reading I've done on Greek culture built on a foundation of a basic understanding of the history and origins of the culture.  And based on the reviews I've seen of this book, I am clearly in the minority in thinking it was damn near unreadable, but at the moment, it's like dessert before dinner.  It was just too much too soon.  But it may make a lot more sense after reading, say Lord Kinross' book.  I just needed a framework before you start slicing and dicing dates, people and events the way Goodwin does.

Dune - Extended Edition

David Lynch's Dune has always been a sort of guilty pleasure of mine.  I love the visual sweep of it, and if it had some flaws, well it had some high points as well.  I recall seeing parts of the extended version on a tiny TV in Washington in 1988, and always wondered what else was in it.  Well, now I know, and it's not good.

The "extended" Dune is apparently the 1988 TV cut, which butchered Lynch's original film by adding a cheap, cheap introduction, and numerous scenes - whether they fit or made sense or were any good or not, and lathered the Toto soundtrack on top, without any attempt to get the music to fit the scenes.  The disastrous electric guitars are everwhere now.  On my copy, I only weatching about a third of the way through because the DVD started messing up, and I couldn't watch at regular speed - only in fast forward.  I was actually relieved - after half an hour of disbelief at how bad it was, I was happy to just scroll through and see what new scenes had been added.

What the extended cut did do was made Lynch's original theatrical version look like Lawrence of Arabia.  The cinematography was gorgeous, the narrative by Princess Irulan (okay, you can't lose with Virginia Madsen, granted) was understated and limited to the essentials (the outtakes show how much was cut out), and the music fit so much better I could almost forgive the guitars when they did come - Lynch made so much better use of the really great, almost ethereal work that Toto did.  And if you thought that Jurgen Prochnow's accent and Jose Ferrer's obseqiousness were annoying in the movie cut, well, it could have been infinitely worse.  In the extended cut Prochnow comes across as psychotic, and Ferrer as smoking some serious pot between scenes.  What was added was likely (I'm  guessing) experimental takes to see how different moods played, but they bear no relationship to the final performances that Lynch used.  I have only made it through the first few scenes of the original, but it is already a far, far better movie than.  Lynch is not well-known for making a lot of sense, but it clearly could have been far worse.  And was.

One nice feature was the quality of the extras.  Given that the movie is over 20 years old, they did a really nice job showing how things were done.  What would really have been nice is if there had been a discussion of the script - why it was written the way it was.  Why parts of the book were deleted and new parts added.  Those ended up being my favorite part of the Lord of the Rings Extended DVDs because the writers explained how the book was turned int the script, and why various decisions were made.  Obviously that took place here too, and with a book that was almost as revered, but there's no indication why. 

The edition was alos marred by not ebing a very good release.  The sound is muddy, and the picture not a lot better.  It's probably better than the DVD I already had, but not by as much as I would have liked.

Titanic (Special Collector's Edition)

I didn't remember two things about Titanic.  First, how good it was.  Okay, three things.  Second, how good Kate Winslet was.  And third, how long it had been since I'd watched it - I could tell precisely by the end of the movie.  First, it was so good seeing it on the big movie screen in the movie room - I had totally forgotten how good the movie is, and how well the big scenes filled up the screen.  From the story to the visual grandeur to the acting to the script - it was all there.  Surprisingly, I had completely forgotten how good Kate Winslet is in it.  I hadn't noticed before what a littl prig she is at the beginning, and she gradually changes into something else.  As Cameron notes in one of the commentaries, they ended up dropping a number of scenes because "you just get it" watching her reactions.  She's quite a piece of eye candy at the beginning - no doubt about that - but when the emotions start flitting across her face, you just can't stop watching her - she dominates everything she's in.  Finally, while I couldn't remember when I saw the movie last, when the sinking started it became abundantly clear that it was before Grayson was born, because what got to me had changed dramatically.  When I first saw it the love story between Rose and Jack really, really got to me.  But this time, it was an afterthought compared to watching the immigrants' children about to die.  I didn't remember seeing the little boy left in the corridor crying - now that became the most important thing in the world.  And the scene where the mother tells her children a bedtime story in their cabin while waiting for the end - sad eight years ago - became the most emotional part of the entire movie.  Why?  Because the loss of those children, or the inability to save one's children in the face of what was coming, caused the loss of a beloved spouse to fall right into context.  Eight years ago I was thinking "what could be worse?" than what Rose went through.  Well, now I know what.

Anyway, a tremendous film, and if the extras are still rather thin -  I prefer detailed studies of all aspects of a film's making, and this is more of a sampling.