Assorted Nonsense

… I go a spell without blogging.  Doesn’t mean I’ve given up on it.

Just, all my writing time lately has been spent on the novel.  I was on page 320, now I’m on page 315.  How the heck did that happen?  Well, I’m sorting out the conclusion.  And in the process of sorting out the conclusion I realized that about five pages worth of material back in the two hundreds were messing things up.  So I got rid of them.  Now I’m back to sorting out the conclusion.

We’re getting there.  Slowly. 

Just for fun, here is a list of the chapter names:

A Time and a Place

Part One: Beautiful Stranger

Chapter One: Demon in the Den

Chapter Two: Casa Terra

Chapter Three: A Quite Exceptional Nose

Chapter Four: Friends Like These

Chapter Five:  Ignominious Procedures

Chapter Six: Plan B

Chapter Seven: Fuzzy

Part Two: Through the Looking Glass

Chapter Eight:  A Short Trek

Chapter Nine: Inside

Chapter Ten: Cat

Chapter Eleven:  Vegetation Abounded

Part Three: What’s Past is Prologue

Chapter Twelve:  She That Dwells

Chapter Thirteen: Monkey Business

Part Four: No Time Like the Present

Chapter Fourteen: Wings

Chapter Fifteen: Ansalar

Chapter Sixteen:  Scary Monsters

Chapter Seventeen: Interview With a Monster

Chapter Eighteen:  No Place Like Home Part One

Chapter Nineteen: No Place Like Home Part Two

Chapter Twenty: Still picking out a name for this one

Epilogue

I’m working on Chapter Nineteen through to the Epilogue right now. 

All I can say is I understand what George R. R. Martin must be going through right now…

Here’s more on Avatar, in response to this blog post, which I really think is over thinking the matter.

So now I’ll just go ahead and over think it:

Cameron’s hero is white because he’s white.  If he were to make a
movie with a hero of a different skin colour he would probably find
himself subject to even greater criticism, so he’s pretty much gotta
stick to white.

So he makes a movie about his white hero interacting with aliens.  He
could make the aliens white, but then they’d be the same as his hero.
It would be a completely white movie.  What kind of criticism would he
be subject to then?  So he doesn’t make them white, he makes them a
different colour, blue.  Why blue?  Because his mother dreamt about a
nine foot tall blue alien when he was a kid, which he thought was cool
and always remembered.

Now he’s got three choices.  Either the aliens are more advanced than
his hero, or the same technological level, or more primitive.  If he
made them more advanced there would be no comparisons to Dances With
Wolves and probably a whole let less criticism.  Maybe he should have
done that.  Better yet, had he made the natives the same technological
level as the hero it would have been a fair fight at the end and he
also would have avoided comparisons to Dances With Wolves.  Probably
he should have done that. Except that environmentalism is all the rage
now and it fit the plot he had in mind so he made the mistake of
making the aliens noble savages, and the comparisons to First Nations
folk becomes inevitable.

So what is the criticism in that post exactly?  That this movie is a
product of guilt, that it’s a white guy trying to make up for the
crimes of his own race by creating a hero who saves another race from
his own.  And that the movie is also a product of wish fulfillment,
because while he’s at it the hero (with whom the filmmaker and
audience both identify) gets to be just that, a hero, and the coolest
member of the other race.

On the first point, Cameron himself isn’t responsible for the white
invasion of the Americas. So I think it’s quite an assumption that he
would feel any guilt on that matter.  Why should he?  He didn’t have
anything to do with it.  He probably does (and should) deplore any
atrocities associated with said invasion, but I don’t see how any
residual racial guilt would necessarily find its way into any of his
films.  That being said I suppose it’s entirely possible that his
great grandfather was General George Armstrong Custer, in which case I stand corrected, but I doubt it.

On the second point I expect Cameron is guilty as charged.  It’s
completely wish fulfillment.  But what’s wrong with that?  What’s
wrong with fantasizing about being the hero, and getting to fly on the
backs of cool huge birds, and being able to fight like a son of a gun?
 Even if it is fantasizing about being a hero among a race other than
your own?  Maybe it’s just about being accepted, accepted by people
you happen to think are cool, and no more than that, certainly not
about being accepted by people a whole bunch of other people (who have
no more in common with you other than your skin colour) once treated
(exceedingly) poorly.

The more I think about it the more I realize that Cameron’s one true
mistake was making his aliens blue.  If he had made them white it
would have been exactly the same movie, but nobody would have been
able to read more into it than is actually there (although I expect
they still would have).  In real life we strive to be colour blind,
because we know that skin colour doesn’t (or shouldn’t) matter.  I
would suggest that the same should apply to this film.  It seems to me
Cameron is being picked on because of the colour of his skin.

Sometimes an alien is just an alien.

Somebody on a listserve I’m on trashed Avatar recently.  Having just stated on the same listserve that I liked the movie, I felt compelled to respond.  I can’t post the post I was responding to, but it should be pretty clear the sorts of things they were saying in my response:

Hi **********,

***********Spoiler alert**********

As someone who enjoyed the film I feel compelled to respond.

Cameron is the first to admit that the story is a hodge-podge of all his favourite science fiction tropes gleaned since childhood.  I don’t see how this is a bad thing as long as it’s not plagiarism, and the original sources are not denied; we all stand on the shoulders of giants.  No less a misanthrope than Harlan Ellison has stated that he would have been fine with Cameron “stealing” his ideas if only he had been credited (for Terminator).

Yes, the natives are Noble Savages but again I don’t see why that in itself is bad.  We’re not allowed to create stories about primitive cultures, or allegedly advanced cultures encountering those primitive cultures?

Your main criticism (if I’ve interpreted it correctly) seems to be
that the so-called primitive (non white, somewhat matriarchal) society needed to be saved by a member of a so-called advanced (white, male) society.  However, in the film it doesn’t appear he taught them much.  He certainly taught them little or nothing about fighting.  For one thing he didn’t have much time to.  He simply led them, brought them together to fight, inspired by the example of a previous generation of natives (as opposed to some innate “white” wisdom he himself brought to the table).  And ultimately when his attempt to thwart the enemy
failed, it was Pandora itself that responded, achieving success with its own methods, spurred into action by the memories and knowledge of a woman (admittedly white).

I would submit that the white man learned far more from this primitive culture (and the example of least two female mentors and role models) than he taught them.  Specifically, environmentalism and how to utilize (as opposed to exploit) your environment.  In return, the only thing he really taught them was the reality of the threat that they faced, which (through no fault of their own) they were ill-equipped to
appreciate.  And why shouldn’t he be allowed to teach them that if that was what they needed to learn, and it was all he had to offer in return for the riches with which they endowed him?

Finally, when the hero faced the American military leader in the end, the larger battle had already been won, by Pandora.  He was not therefore fighting on behalf of the natives at this point.  The final confrontation was about saving his own life.  And he didn’t even win that fight; he needed to be saved by a native (a woman, no less).

I would like to hear your unabridged thoughts on this movie’s
treatment of heterosexism, anthropomorphism, gender politics, Real Men and the fight between military (male) and cultural sensitivity etc. to understand exactly what else about this (in my opinion) really quite enjoyable movie got under your skin.

Regards,

Joe