In a techno-paradise...
Fgrry Ornpu ?
Whenever things claw their way out of books or movies and into the real world, I like to call it defictionalization. Favorite examples: when Spinal Tap went on tour in 1992, and when Buzz Rickson's started making jackets to match the one in Pattern Recognition.
Recently I watched The Fountainhead. Knowing Rand had been mentored by Cecil B. DeMille, and wouldn't let anyone change a syllable of her screenplay, I just had to find out how her arid prose style and pitiless logic would translate into a film.
The weird result: it's a proper movie -- there's a story, dialogue, scenes that "turn," a good musical score, visual sophistication, moody lighting, and the young Patricia Neal in a chic black dress -- but all the characters are from Mars. They're inhuman. They're psychologically bizarro. Logical and motivated, yes, but if I met a batch of robot sociopaths like that in real life I'd flee screaming.
And how about that seduction scene? [shudder]
I've just now reading Pullman's The Golden Compass. Am I alone in picturing the villainous Mrs. Coulter as -- you know -- Ann?
Looks like no one here's beheld Overdrawn at the Memory Bank and lived to tell the tale. John Varley's delightful novelette got adapted -- mutilated, really -- into something that will destroy your will to live. It starts by giving away the novelette's main suspense point. Then Raul Julia provides cringetastically unfunny voiceovers for budget-slimming wildlife stock footage. Add an incoherent plot and plenty of parking-garage "lunar" interiors, and pretty soon the meteoric decline of intelligence plunges straight to Hell. Truly, it's astonishing; essentially Atlanta Nights in visual form.
Toxic Sludge is Good For You alerted me to the hideousness of the PR industry. It brims with remarkable accounts of astroturfing and infiltration. Shortly before publication, its authors were contacted -- mindbendingly -- by the reps of a sewage-treatment company who sought assurance that the book would not shed unfavorable light on their plans to produce "humanure."
"sub-Burchill" is a brutal aspersion indeed.
Language Log's Geoffrey K. Pullum got his milk thoroughly curdled last month by the renowned curator.
German's brawny sound is addressed in this favorite passage from Damon Knight's In Search of Wonder:
...I believe no serious student will contradict me when I say that, on the whole, the German text represents an enormous improvement over the English.
Take, for example, the well-known first sentence of Campbell's "Wer Da?"
The place stank.
This is a short, skinny, pallid sentence; it understates; it is half ashamed of itself. But see what a robust, impressive, nose-filling thing it becomes in the German:
Der Raum war voller Gestank.
Even when our English-speaking writer is doing his best, as in Padgett's:
"S-s-s-spit!" Emma shrieked, overcome by a sudden fit of badness. "Spit."
--the Teuton can better him without even breathing hard:
"Ssspucke!" schrie Emma in einem ploetzlichen Anfall von Ungezogenheit. "Spucke."
Leah,
My favorite chronological history is the Times Atlas of World History, on the strength of its concision, ice-age-to-yesterday scope, and cheery maps a-tangle with warring arrows.
Years ago I worked nights for a bank just seconds from Halifax's "Pizza Corner" -- four Lebanese-owned pizzerias on a single intersection -- and I'd often succumb to a demented 2 a.m. craving for a donair slice.
It's a sweet-sour-meat-dairy-tomatoes-bread-and-grease bus crash with enough calories to stun an ox. Don't let it drip on your pants! The whole idea nauseates me now, but back when I was keeping vampire hours, donair slices seemed somehow plausible.
Mayakda,
The title of the picture you asked about is "Isolated house in the mountains of the Musandam Peninsula, Oman" (pp. 46-47).
Earth From Above duels Full Moon for the throne of my photo book collection.
I've got the book Earth from Above that the photos come from. The algae is from page 257, and is titled "Algae in the Gulf of Morbihan, France."
When I worked as a graphic artist on a now-shuttered Canadian army base, the commandant was Colonel Saunders. In his shoes, I'd have stopped at Major.
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