How would you react if you looked up and saw people flying overhead?

Yesterday I read an article in the Toronto Star by Heather Mallick about Robert Fulford of the National Post writing a critical review of Margaret Atwood’s latest story in the New Yorker, called Stone Mattress. The Atwood story is about a woman who was raped as a teenager by an older boy who gets away with it. This act sends the woman down a bad road in which she gets pregnant, becomes a prostitute, and then marries older men of ill health so that she can help them die prematurely and get their money. Ultimately she meets the man who raped her and exacts her revenge.

Fulford doesn’t like the story because he thinks it “comes across as a classic man-hating story.” Mallick doesn’t like Fulford’s review because she thinks Atwood is “entitled to fill her fiction with hateful men.” She also didn’t like that Fulford didn’t own up to once having been skewered in an Atwood piece, suggesting that his review of Stone Mattress was simply revenge, as if it’s not possible to dislike a story solely on its own merits, or lack thereof.

Mallick professes to have once adored Bob Fulford, “wisest and cleverest of older male journalists.” Now, she claims that Fulford has stopped regarding life with endless interest and even joy, and turned sour. This seems a harsh assessment based on a single review of Atwood’s story. When I read that line in her article it seemed so disproportionately harsh that I wondered what else must be informing Mallick’s revised opinion of Fulford.

As a reasonably decent man this whole episode struck a nerve. I’m aware that certain women don’t like men, or distrust them, and that because of the actions of some jerks they have good reason to feel this way. I have always tried to conduct myself in a way to give women reason to like men. I have three sisters, a mother, a wife and two daughters and many female friends and colleagues. I like women. I’m good to them. I treat them with respect. So it annoys me when I am confronted with women who think that, as Fulford writes, men are villains except when they are clowns. That’s just a different kind of hatred, and it’s no better than men disrespecting women. Understanding that there are men out there deserving of scorn, just as there are woman deserving of scorn because of hateful attitudes and actions.

So I am sympathetic to Fulford’s take on Atwood’s story, although Atwood is equally hard on women in Stone Mattress. The female protagonist, essentially a serial killer, is certainly no more sympathetic than the male schmuck she murders. But I’m more sympathetic to Fulford himself than I am to his take on the story because I’d like to know why Mallick has come to dislike him so much. Just disliking Atwood’s story, and not owning up to having been a victim of an earlier Atwood story, just doesn’t seem to justify it.

I once spent four days at Atwood’s house recording a series of interviews for CBC Radio. Surreally for me, the entire four days were spent conversing with Atwood and the rest of the crew in French, which I was in the process of learning at the time, having recently returned from several months of living in Aix-en-Provence, France. Apart from Atwood’s assistant at the time, Sarah Cooper, Atwood and I were the only anglophones. On the third night we all went to a restaurant together where circumstances contrived to place Atwood and myself alone together for about twenty minutes, and we conversed in English for the first time. The whole experience generated a certain camaraderie between us, or at least that was how it felt to me – I’ve met her several times since and she has never indicated that she remembers me. Although I consider this last point worthy of mention, I don’t hold it against her. I’m not sure that I would remember her much either if she were not one of Canada’s most famous authors, mentioned time and again on the CBC and in the rest of our national media. Impossible to forget, in other words.

However, I’ve never forgotten her friendliness at the time. She did not come off to me as the least bit man hating. Her characters and stories are fiction, after all, not necessarily representative of the author’s own mind set. The truth is I haven’t actually read much Atwood, apart from some short stories in a book she gave me on our last day together (Good Bones) and the aforementioned Stone Mattress. And a handful of radio drama adaptations of her work such as The Handmaid’s Tale.

No, if I had one bone to pick with Margaret Atwood it wouldn’t be her stance against men, it would be her stance against science fiction, which she seems to regard as less than worthy. Yes, she writes it from time to time, but when she writes it is isn’t science fiction, it’s something else, something better, “speculative fiction” maybe. I find this attitude inexplicable and insulting, and no I don’t feel that way because she has previously skewered me in her work, at least that I’m aware, not that I would be aware not having read much of her work.

So neither Robert Fulford nor Heather Mallick have done anything to alter my opinion of Margaret Atwood. I’ve never given Robert Fulford much thought but I feel rather sympathetic toward the man now. As for Heather Mallick, who’s work I have read from time to time in the Star, and to whom I haven’t given much thought either, I am now unduly curious about.

Just what the heck does she really have against Robert Fulford?

In my last post I talked about reading a story I wrote as a kid at Grownups Read Things They Wrote As Kids.

Here’s a recording of my reading from that event , courtesy of organizer Dan Misener.

It runs about five minutes forty seconds:

Attended a really cool event Monday night put on by the inimitable Dan Misener of CBC Radio Sparks fame.

It was called (if memory serves) Grownups Read Stuff They Wrote As Kids.

I’d been wanting to attend one of these events for a while now.  This was the ninth or tenth one Dan has put on.  Dan and his wife are about to leave for France for a year, so I knew this was going to be the last one for awhile, so I made sure I attended.  And I volunteered to read.

So the weekend before I perused my three scribblers full of juvenilia, mostly written between the ages of 12 and 14 (Grades 7 to 9) for school.  I chose three potential pieces, each one varying degrees of ridiculous.  Although I remember thinking quite highly of them at the time I wrote them!

I walked to the Garrison Pub at Ossington and Dundas with Dan an hour and a half before the event.  I told Dan I had mixed feelings about reading my stuff.  On the one hand I felt a sense of betrayal toward my younger self because I would essentially be mocking that kid’s work.  And as a kid I had been proud of my writing.  I thought I was pretty good at it.  On the other hand, I noted, maybe the kid deserved to be mocked, because the one piece (the one I eventually read) had been written as homework, sitting before the television.  Even so I had thought it was pretty good at the time (it wasn’t, really).  (Ooh, there’s that pesky sense of betrayal again!)

We got to the club and it turned out nobody had set the chairs out.  So Dan and I (and the club’s sound guy) got to work setting up the chairs (two other readers eventually joined in).

We got under way at 7:30.  The place was packed — an impressive turnout.  I was the fourth reader.  The first two readers were awesome.  One guy read from a monster book he had written in Grade One, complete with cool monster pictures.  He was quite funny.  I can’t remember the second reader’s material as I type this (it’ll come to me long after I’ve posted this, no doubt) but I remember it was entertaining and well presented.  I began to have serious qualms about reading the story I had selected.  I didn’t think it was either good enough or bad enough.  I was afraid it would fall flat.

I didn’t hear the third reader because I was busy behind the stage trying to pick out a better story.  But Dan introduced me by saying I would read a science fiction story, so I was stuck with the one I’d selected.

Fortunately the audience was laughing by the second sentence.  They continued to laugh throughout.  Bottom line, I didn’t bomb.  Of course, the story had not been written as a comedy; I don’t think there was a single line in it that was supposed to be funny.  So although I didn’t bomb, I did completely betray my twelve year old self.  What a heel.  But it doesn’t bother me at all.  Because ya gotta be able to laugh at yourself, whatever age you are.

It was a great night.  The rest of the readers were terrific. A standout was a woman names Laura (I think) who read a will she had written at the age of nine!  Surreal and quite amusing.  I was really glad I participated, and many kudos to Dan for putting an event like that on.  (It’s simple, he told me on the way over.  Book the club, which is surprisingly cheap, get readers to sign up on line, arrange for the sale of tickets online, and Bob’s your uncle.  The odd time you might have to set up the chairs yourself.  Ticket sales go to fund the venue with excess funds going to charity.  A class act, Mr. Dan Misener).

I think he’ll be putting more of these on in a year, when he’s back from France.

Which means, of course, that the next one will have to be in French.

Recently writer and blogger Lynda Williams invited me to contribute a post to the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop blog.  I’ve always wanted to attend Clarion to learn a thing or two or three about writing, but this may be the closest I ever come.  I was quite honored to be asked to contribute.

Lynda was interested in hearing about a writing pet peeve of mine, so I wrote a little something entitled “To Hiss the Unhissable.”

Feel free to check it out and hiss at it.

I watched Terra Nova with the kids last night.  I thought they might like a good dinosaur show, and I was curious about it.

SPOILER ALERT

It was entertaining enough to watch.  Possibly intriguing enough to watch another episode.  But not necessarily in the right ways on both counts.  You see, I find it instructive to watch mediocre writing.  Because I like to ask myself, how could this have been made better? 

(The girls were not entirely convinced either.  K didn’t think it made for a good family show, and she played her Nintendo DSI throughout the episode.  E paid attention, but doesn’t feel a great need to ever watch another episode.)

 My main issue with the writing was that it just didn’t seem like they were trying very hard.  And/or weren’t particularly inspired.  Or perhaps whoever wrote it just isn’t very good at storytelling. Hey, it’s possible.  Here are some of the problems:

The dad is a cop.  He lives in a world where they’re only allowed two kids.  So they have three.  Why?  He’s a cop, supposed to uphold the law.  Maybe it isn’t a great law, but it’s the law.  There’s no reason to think that he’s a corrupt cop.  So there’s got to be some compelling reason why he and his wife had three kids.  Even another character in the episode (Commander Taylor, the head of the expedition to the past) asks him that.  I have to admit at that point in the show they had me.  I was curious.  Why?  The cop’s answer?  “It seemed  like the thing to do at the time.”  I groaned when he said this.  The line itself is trite, and it smacked of the writer just not trying very hard.  It did no work for the character.  It didn’t advance the story or plot in any way.  It was just a stupid line.  But that’s not the worst of it.  The worst is that the question is hanging out there, why would this cop and his wife do this?  I can think of several compelling possible reasons.  And I’m sure there is one (there had better be one!)  But it needed to be trotted out in that episode so that we could better understand and sympathize with these characters.  Not in some future episode.  Why?  Because we may not be watching anymore then.

What else didn’t work?  Well, I loved how the characters in the episode possessed sufficient objectivity to comment on the stupidities of the episode themselves.  As if the writers themselves were aware of their work’s deficiencies and felt compelled to admit it.  There’s the example I mention above.  And there’s the son who remarks at one point that for his Dad to accompany them back in time he must first break out of a maximum security prison and then break into a maximum security facility.  Dear God!  If you’re aware that the plot is stupid and unbelievable, why not change it so that it isn’t stupid and unbelievable anymore?  It shouldn’t even have been that difficult a fix.  Of course, I don’t know what the overall storytelling arc is, which may be restricting the writers in some way, but whatever it is doesn’t justify keeping stupidities in Episode One, the very episode in which you most want to hook your viewers.

To me the fix would have been: don’t send the Dad to prison.  Instead of the cops finding the child, they almost find the child.  But the child is cleverly hidden (not in a vent where the child can be heard!) thus reinforcing the intelligence of the main characters and eliminating the need to send the Dad to prison.  Then, instead of the family going back in time because the Mom gets a job there, they are compelled to go back in time because they need to, to save the child!  So all their cunning and resources go toward making this happen (instead of going toward breaking Dad out of prison).  Of course, all this needs to be coupled with a compelling reason for the family to have had the third child in the first place.

The latter part of the episode is your standard kids do something stupid and get into major trouble as a result morality lesson, with lots of action and special effects.  From a storytelling perspective it’s all very superficial, not much going on in the way of character development, no great inner conflicts, not a whole lot of empathy generated.  The last real bonehead plot point was, after all the excitement of saving the kids from the mean dinosaurs and the inherent trauma of almost losing your kid (on the second day to the past, no less) the family gathers together to marvel at the size of the moon in the past.  I can see them marvelling at the size of the moon.  I just can’t see them doing it after almost losing their son/brother.  At that point just about all of them should have been asking themselves the following question:

What the hell have we done?

So unless the series gets a lot smarter fast, my family won’t be watching their family long.

Okay, I wasn’t quite as back as I thought I was.

I’m a little bit back.

First of all, thanks to Mr. Lozinski (who commented on the last post) for the wonderful piano solo he left me a while back on my answering machine.  Golden Brown, by the Stranglers.  Or in this case, by his talented daughter.  I must say I was utterly confused when I first heard the message, because it’s one of the few tunes I remember how to play on the piano, and I had played it myself recently on my mother’s piano during my vacation, and when I heard it on the answering machine my first thought was that I must have made a butt call with my Blackberry while I was playing.  Only it didn’t sound like my playing (it was much better).

At the end of the recording the truth came out, it was my friend Mr. Lozinski sharing with me his daughter’s rendition of the tune.

So… thanks for that!

And now for the requisite update on the novel.  You know, there was a time when I thought it would come in at just under one hundred thousand words.  About three hundred and forty pages.  The darned thing is now about one hundred and eight thousand words.  Three hundred and seventy two pages.  About three hundred and sixty pages are complete, so eighteen left to revise.  Course, the last time I had eighteen pages left to revise, I was on page three hundred and twenty, and somehow I wrote another sixty pages instead of just revising the eighteen.

Oh well.

Oh, and the seagull section is back in.

I’m happy about that.

But I’ll be even happier when the whole darned thing is done!

Well folks, while I’m not abandoning this blog entirely, I am redirecting my efforts to assist my good friend Barnabus J. Wildebear over at his new blog. He’s not much of a technophile so he’s going to need a lot of help for a while.

Barnabus plans to write specifically about his passion for all aspects of science fiction and fantasy, and also about certain recent exploits of his that, although difficult to believe, he insists are every bit as real as (ahem) he is.

So I hope you’ll join me in migrating over to Chez Wildebear for awhile.

He promises to post every single day, or at the very least, every eighteen days.

Good luck Barnabus!

And perhaps I’ll see the rest of you back here in the not-too-distant future.

So long…

Ever wonder what happened to the original Starbuck? (I mean the original BG Starbuck… not the Moby Dick Starbuck…)

Now we know:

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.