Whee! As of midnight pacific time, my ass finally got kicked off of SurvivorBlog by a currently undisclosed margin. So, you’ve got me back full-time now. Parting comments soon to come.
by krisis
Archives for February 2001
Today is my last day at the coffee shop; just another tiny end-parentheses in the string of open ones i’ve managed to create in my life. The funny thing is, i open a lot more things than i close. Maybe it’s just the packrat within me, but being the drama-king that i am i always thought that i really did sever as many ties as i’ve made. But, i haven’t. I don’t end friendships, or memberships, or hobbies, or anything. Sometimes some of them get put on hold for a little while to make room for other things, but nothing ever goes away; i still have boxes upon boxes of comic books at home and a years-old saved campaign of StarCraft on my computer. So, the feeling of something ending is strange to me – powerful and relieving and bittersweet. No more free bagels. No more trying to entice customers with free music. No more coming home with the scent of ground coffee and too-sweet pastry ground into my fingerprints.
Off to work i go…
I’m still on SurvivorBlog2, as improbable as that might seem. All of my net-friends loudly proclaimed that i’d get booted fast when they first found out that i was a contestant, though i don’t recall any of them qualifying their statement with any reasoning. It’s an odd thing,… all the fun dynamics of a group log but with the subtle undercurrent of competition for attention and favour. I actually quite like it. I managed to win immunity from voting all this past week, first with a lovely speech i made in ra/mp3, and then by being the least popular logger still on our virtual slice of the outback. That least popular bit surprised me at first, but it didn’t burn at all; i open up as much as any of the other posters, but i’m not around as much and i’m just not as quirky.
I’ve yet to have a vote against me, but since i was protected for a whole week for all i know i could be voted off by everyone tomorrow. In a way i want to stay around, but i see how much this page is suffering. Yes, i run to them with the hottest sparkling shards of my life, and this is just the bits that fall through the proverbial cracks. For a while the many hits i was drawing from Sblog2 related links subsidized the slow decline of you all (my actual readers), but now it’s getting a bit out of hand. It’s true that i needed some kind of break from this (as was evident from my mean-spirited and belaboured posts in early January), but i never intended to let it shrivel up and die.
When Blogger adds this week’s archive to the page, it’ll be the 26th one; i’ve been doing this for half a year now. Time fools me the same way that physical scale does. This school year seems to be dragging on forever, but it’s a whole month shy of how long i’ve been blogging and that seems like just a tiny dent in the whole of my life. I’ve been rehearsing Good Woman of Setzuan for a month now, and there’s just under a month left. The month that’s passed seems like it stretches back infinitely far, and the one to come feels as if it’s going to evaporate before me, leaving my grasping for my lines tomorrow night under the spotlight.
Coincidentally, today marks the month anniversary of something else too. If you read closely i think you might know what. I’m sorry that i haven’t been as omnipresent on here as i’ve been in the past, but it’s just the way things go. Maybe, finally, my life has gotten up enough momentum of its own that this can’t be just a continuously updated daily log of boredom. Maybe now i’m bringing back the tiny shiny gems of experience i find during the course of each day. Or maybe i find myself a bit too important for my own good. Who knows. Love ya, and i’m off to work on lines so that the spotlight doesn’t catch me by surprise.
There’s really no point in my buying books anymore. Or maybe there is. It’s gotten to the point where purchasing and reading a book nearly equates to buying and watching a movie; i should probably just rent either the first time to see if they’re worth the expense. Reading a book is now totally analogous to watching a movie for me; if i don’t get through all of it in a sitting or two i’m tempted to just give up on it, and if i like it a lot i’ll gladly go back to it as soon as time allows.
I don’t ever remember reading a book twice back-to-back. A book is the sort of thing you have to digest, and let swirl around in your brain until you reconcile it nicely. There’s no point in going back so soon to read each and every one of the words again. Reading is an experience controlled by the reader, and as much as i can stop at a sentence written in Italian to translate it word for word i can just as easily gloss past it as well as the boring chapter that follows. Movies don’t allow such a luxury; movies are a medium that the viewer has no power over. We have freeze frame, and rewind, but we can’t slow the action without distorting the medium in which the story is told
Or, maybe you don’t believe me and you’re pretty quick on the trigger with your slo-mo button. I just read approximately 1400 pages in four days and i’m wholly dissatisfied. 1400 is two days worth, at the most. Or, i could have sat down and watched the three movies back to back in under nine hours. Usually i’d say that i wouldn’t have appreciated them nearly as much that way, but this time i’m not so sure.
Quick and biased remarks on the novels of Thomas Harris: Red Dragon – 6/10, badly plotted and lacking suspense where it should possess it. Silence of the Lambs – 8/10, practically a shooting script and excellently constructed. Hannibal – 4/10, several hours of my life that wouldn’t have necessarily been spent better but that i’ll never get back either. It’s not necessary to read them sequentially, but you should at least watch Silence before reading Hannibal.
I read too fast for my own damned good. Yesterday i decided to go on a smallish shopping spree with my credit card to see how close i could get to maxing it out without being rejected from purchasing something. In the madness, i hit Borders and picked up Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon and a sweet oversized edition of Silence of the Lambs. I’m not sure what suddenly spurred this in me, but recently my girlfriend’s roommate has been powering through Lambs, and i always meant to read it, and i sorta want to go see Hannible. So, i suppose the plan was to get through the two of them soon enough to buy a non-movie edition of Hannibal to read before i go see the flick in a weekend or two. Or, as it turns out, maybe this weekend.
First of all, you have to understand my unholy hatred of movie-edition paperbacks. I hate them. Hate them. While having the image of a main character to aid me in visualization is always helpful, i’ve endured too many ugly movie-photos like the ones on the covers of The Beach or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, both of which previously featured superb cover work. Even worse, the new edition of Hannibal doesn’t even use the creepy zombie-like picture of Anthony Hopkins from the movie posters – instead it substitutes some awful and nearly amusing picture of him preening with a large straw hat on. It isn’t too threatening.
Borders had two copies of the non-movie edition, but i didn’t want to get ahead of myself. Paperbacks cost quite a lot now ($8 for a paperback? Does anyone else miss the 90’s yet?), and i didn’t want to sink nearly $30 into three books that i might not even like. So, i bought Red Dragon so i could finally read it & Silence of the Lambs, which looks nice if nothing else. I finished the dense 450 page Dragon in under 20 hours of intermittent reading; started around 4pm yesterday and completed noon today with rehearsal, sleep, and class coming inbetween. I was proud of myself. I’ve been known to finish 500 page books in well under eight hours in the past, but i tend to lose my momentum when i don’t read a large book all in a single sitting.
So far my impression is that Thomas Harris is a tremendous writer but a nearly equally inconsistent author who relies on too many plot devices and explicit histories in the place of actual suspense and horror. Much as in the movie of Silence of the Lambs, where you become excited by the chase rather than the whodunnit, this novel reveals the killer early on and becomes a book as much about him as about the protagonist (who’s a much better character). The protagonist is vivid, logical, and entangles himself and the reader frighteningly deep into each murder. On the other hand, the killer’s history is boring, contrived, evokes little pity, and surprisingly does nearly nothing to set the reader up for his near schizophrenic behaviour near the end of the novel. In fact, the book took a downturn as soon as it dropped the pretense and mainly focused on the murderer. And, i’ll never look at dentures the same way again.
Lambs is 350 pages in super-oversized soft-cover format, and it looks to be a bit more firmly put-together than Dragon. And, of course, it has a lot more of Hannibal Lecter in it. One thing i’ll hand to Harris as an author is that he crafted the ultimate chiller of a villain in Hannibal; in his new forward to the first novel he portrays the writing of Lecter’s first scene as though he viewed it from a corner where he was huddled in fear the entire time, fending off the urge to bolt out the door as well as the cackling of other inmates in the asylum. His description of writing Hannibal seems apropos, because i would hardly expect someone to deliberately conjure this sort of killer from the depths of their own imagination. A monster is hard to create, and much easier to develop in small strides as he crawls into the cracks of your psyche and makes you scared to even write him. Lecter definitely had that effect on his author, and now i can hardly wait to get Silence of the Lambs out of the way so i can run back to Borders tomorrow to buy a lovely copy of Hannibal.
Who knows, i might even wind up seeing it this weekend…