Weekend Video: The Nether Regions

We all have problems, at least sometimes. I'm taking care of some things in storage. Enjoy some crabbing from the universe's crabbiest crabcake.


The Nether Regions from WÖNKY Films on Vimeo.

Also enjoy the long weekend.

200 Words on Doctor Who

Here's what I like. Pizza.

Once a week we have pizza for dinner. We get our pizza, and we sit around figuring out what to watch on Netflix.

Here's what's great about pizza. You can get any kind of pizza you want. Everything from just plain cheese on a wafer-thin crust, on up to what might be characterized as a cheesy meat stew in a crust so constructed as to practically be a bowel. Or ethnicize your pizza, like Hawaiian or Mexican. Or you can just go wild on your own, no red sauce, bleu cheese, apple slices.

You know? Anything can be a pizza, just put it on a crust of some sort. I'm surprised we don't call apple pie with a slice of cheese on it a pizza.

And yet, every week our pizza is a pizza. Sometimes it's a fantastic pizza. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's a strange pizza, and sometimes if Raffaele Esposito saw it, he'd be all, "hey! Get out of my recipe book!"

And I always like pizza, and I always will. But no matter how much I like pizza, sometimes when pizza night rolls around, what I really want is a patty melt. 

200 Words on Short Stories

I love these. Short stories. Around the almost ten thousand word I feel like things are getting bloated. Genre stories lord over realistic stories.

I get enough realism daily. I like my life, and a lot of it is a lot of fun. But some parts of it are pretty sucky. The "pretty sucky" umbrella covers parts of everyone's life.

Which is why genre short stories are so great. Being short means they don't have to linger over pages of detailed world building. They can just sketch out the parts that they need. There's magic, or space aliens. These details don't have to make sense like a geometric proof does. They just have to feel right. Feeling right is better than "pretty sucky."

Also great about genre short stories is they can serve to gloss "pretty sucky," without making a show about it, because the suck is wearing a mask, like werewolves or spacesuits. The story of the people, or the things, who are, as Ford Prefect once pointed out, "are also people," is dancing in front of you, and only later do you realize that the suck is in there, and I feel like suck shared is suck diminished. 

Weekend Video: Time Travel Lover

What a sweet use of the time travel "when I get back I'm going to put the key right here/no, I'm going to put a magnet over here and pull the key/nope, then I'm going to..." trope. Also, there's a great character who really, really wants things to be different. 

Time Travel Lover from Elisha Yaffe on Vimeo.

Not safe for work. Seriously. But then, you probably shouldn't be watching ten minute videos at work anyway.

The Most Useful Parenting Advice I Can Offer

When a little one goes for something inappropriate, gently take her aside, and say, "that's a tool, not a toy."

Don't bother with a big ol' buncha talktalk about what a tool is. Not necessarily. Gauge things. The important part is that there's a simple difference between tools and toys. What that difference is, and the nuances involved, will become clear with time, just like with anything. 

200 Words on a Squandered Education

Oh crap. Here are some authors I read in the course of my education. Toni Morrison. James Joyce. Carl Jung. John C. Calhoun. Publius. Adrienne Rich. James Burke. Jane Addams. Pearl S. Buck. Gabriel García Márquez. Adam Smith.

You get the idea.

For pleasure I read Annie Dillard. John McPhee. Scott Russell Sanders. Wendell Berry. Gabriel Jospovici. Benjamin Hoff. Stephen Mitchell.

I also read some James Blish (the Star Trek material), some Arthur C. Clark. A little bit of Larry Niven. A couple of the Star Wars novels. A lot of mainstream comic books, and some not-so-mainstream comic books. Too much Douglas Adams. Probably the right amount of Neil Gaiman, with a touch of Terry Pratchett.

I told someone once that they couldn't pay me enough to read the Earthsea books. I regret that. I should have read Octavia Butler, Alfred Bester, Ursula Le Guin, and the list is, nearly, endless.

I finally managed to read The Lord of the Rings, and The Hobbit, shortly before the first movie came out in 2001, which is about 20 years late. I mean, considering how much time I spent playing D&D and so on.

Of course, there's always a lot to read. 

Weekend Video: 2001, man, It's a Trip. Or, you know, a movie about a talking computer.

I love this movie, so here are a couple of clips which both claim primacy. One is "official," and the other is "original."

Here's the original.

Among the things about this I really enjoy is the fact that it's open to the accusation that "the preview shows you the whole movie!" Welll..... yes. And no.

Here's the official one because it just looks cool.



Enjoy your weekend, ok?

200 Words on the Dishes

Do you meditate?

Really meditate as a serious practice? Under the guidance of a master, a program, or even some book you grabbed used when you were an undergrad and poking around the back room of some herbalist store while the person you were dating stood with a fistful of incense and a face of uncertainty about whether the burner shaped like a highly polished little plank would be better than the one that looked like a little dude with an elephant's head?

Me neither.

But I do wash dishes. I particularly wash bottles because the rate the littlest one drinks demands the practice. Sink. Water. Dish soap. Bottles, and bottle parts. Scrubber. Towel. Time.

It is the time that goes into this that turns this from a chore into a practice that is to meditation as balled up printer paper tossed into a trashcan is to basketball. 

It’s a popular thing to say that it takes 10,000 hours doing something in a really focused way before you’re actually good at it. I have three children, and I have become actually good at it more than once.

When the littlest one is weaned, I may have to take up scrimshaw. 

Self publishing? Everything is work.

This is not a complaint. But it is true that there's a lot of work.

In the last few days, I have set up my author accounts with Kobo, Nook, and Kindle. I have explored additional options. I've futzed around with the settings for this blog, in hopes of improving the way it looks on mobile.

I have worked with my team getting the actual story ready to be set up on the distribution channels. Fancy talk. The reader and cover designer have asked me for additional guidance on what I need from them before I upload the text and image for you to read. I feel like things are on track for my "by the end of August" deadline.

And I've written. This is important.

And I've been a dad, husband, and other stuff that goes along with being me.

Weekend Video: Charlie Brown

I have a three year old. This is her favorite video.




This song is slightly more than ten years older than I am, and this performance is slightly less than ten years older than I am. My daughter marches around the house with a plastic funnel, alternately singshouting through it, "he's a clown, Charlie Brown!," and wearing it on her head.

I love Jones's glasses.

Hope, Not Confidence. Kurt Vonnegut Talks to Women and Men

You know who I like to read? Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. I especially like his nonfiction, and when his late fiction veers into semi-autobiography hidden behind his alter, Kilgore Trout, I like that, too.

I picked up the recent collection of Vonnegut's commencement addresses, If this isn't Nice, What Is? 

For the avid Vonnegut reader, very little of the material here is new. Either parts of it have already appeared entirely in previous books, or anecdotes get recycled, or the general tone is already familiar.

However, this is a worthwhile volume because it collects the addresses as delivered, and allows readers to see how Vonnegut's concerns, and his attitude toward young people and eduction stayed constant, while deepening. Familiar anecdotes become fresh as Vonnegut's speaking voice jumps off the page, and as the stories illuminate his abiding humanity in all its conflicted love for who we are, and trepidation about what we do.

In talking to Fredonia College grads in 1978, this is what he had to say:

I am being so silly because I pity you so much. I pity all of us so much. Life is going to be very tough again, just as soon as this is over. And the most useful thought we can hold when all hell cuts loos again is that we are not members of different generations, as unlike, as some people would have us believe, as Eskimos and Australian Aborigines. We are all so close to each other in time that we should think of ourselves as brothers and sisters...

We are all experiencing more or less the same lifetime now.

What is it the slightly older people want from the slightly younger people? They want credit for having survived so long, and often so imaginatively, under difficult conditions. Slightly younger people are intolerably stingy about giving them credit for that.

What is it the slightly younger people want from the slightly older people? More than anything, I think, they want acknowledgement, and without further ado, that they are without question women and men now. Slightly older people are intolerably stingy about making any such acknowledgement.

And so it goes. This is not a book full of advice designed to give people much confidence. Vonnegut isn't in the confidence game. He's in the hope game, and these addresses are full of hopeful tips on getting along in a world where wildly bad things happen, so why not take a moment when things are nice and say, out loud, "If this isn't nice, what is?"

If you think about buying this book, why not buy it from an independent book store, like Schuler Books? Here's a link.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Guardians of the Galaxy

We saw Guardians of the Galaxy last night, Sunday of opening weekend. Maybe you did, too. Maybe you have zero interest in seeing a movie with a CG tree and raccoon steal the scenes they’re in.

This is not a review of the plot, or the fact that it’s a comic book adaptation, or how this movie fits into the larger project that is the Marvel cinematic universe.

This is me saying, “Oh, this is a neat looking movie.” The character design is good, but what I like best of all is the color, and the shapes of things. These are bold designs, and the palate ranges from black-on-charcoal rectangles all the way to curvy, sweeping organic and stellar remnants in bright rainbows which manage never to overstep their place. There are no neon sneakers in this galaxy. The art team reached back to just before the dawning of Star Wars for inspiration, to my eyes pulling from the best of the vistas of Jack Kirby space art, and Neal Adams line work in spacecraft.

This is what I want science fiction to look like. Of, if you prefer, Space Opera should look like this; mostly bright and bold.

So I am glad to have seen this one on a big screen, and even from the second row. It’s a big galaxy, and the visual teams brought it to life for me.

200 Words on Turning Left

Turns out I’m pretty superstious about other drivers. I’m constantly trying to cast magical spells on them.

I live in a town where a lot of day-by-day stuff has to happen on the other side of a river. I love the fact that we live near so much water. There’s that river, there’s an inland lake near our home, a bayou across town, and Lake Michigan is just a mile or so to the west. It’s great.

Traffic patterns are quirky, and every local area has its own particular set of circumstances which animate those quirks. In my case, the combination of avoiding heavy traffic routes in favor of quieter side streets, the timing of traffic lights in two municipalities, the topography of roads in my neighborhood, and the very particular-to-me place where we live leads to the quirk that it is generally really difficult to get from the next-to-last leg of my drive home from errands to the actual last leg.

So almost every time I come home from errands, I find I am muttering spells under my breath pressing oncoming drivers to leave a big enough gap for me to make a left turn.