Deeds & Words

The Name of the Wind

Patrick Rothfuss

Daw Fantasy Paperback

            The Name of the Wind is the first book of a three-book story arc.  It’s well done, introducing interesting characters and intriguing “story questions” from the opening couple of chapters.  It is a fantasy, and a pretty good one, but I’m going to complain about two things.  They happen to be pet peeves.  I’m also going to praise Patrick Rothfuss for doing something more fantasy writers should do, and that is to ground his magic in a magical system, but more on that later.

            Pet Peeve Number One:  The book doesn’t end.  It stops.  This is typical of books in trilogies.  After all, Tolkien did this with The Two Towers.  If even Tolkien did it, I can’t give Rothfuss demerits for it.

            In this book, Rothfuss gives us an unassuming innkeeper who is obviously more than he seems.  The small town (its name is a play on the word “nowhere,”) where his inn is located is off the beaten path and has been, up until recently, untouched by the politics and the war that is happening in their realm.  That is changing.  There is discussion, at the inn, of the number of deserter soldiers on the roads, and the danger they represent. There is an attack by magical or perhaps demonic creatures.    Then into the story rides Chronicler, a scribe who is searching for the enigmatic Kvothe (pronounced “quoth”).  It soon becomes obvious that the innkeeper is his man.  He pesters Kvothe, the subject of legend and rumor, for this life story, and Kvothe complies.

            Kvothe’s story is wonderful, full of magic, danger, epic loss, epic suffering, desperate bravado, told in the voice of someone looking back ruefully at the antics of his younger self.  Rothfuss captures that perfectly.  As a boy, Kvothe is part of a troupe of traveling performers, and the book hums with theatrical ballads, nursery rhymes and bawdy songs. A university trained arcanist—magician– joins the troupe for a while, and teaches young Kvothe magic.  Then tragedy strikes, leaving Kvothe consumed with the need for vengeance, and a half-baked plan to enter the university of magic.  He succeeds.  He is a scholarship student, startlingly gifted, desperately poor, frighteningly cocky and strangely naïve.  All of this works beautifully.

            Rothfuss’s system of magic is post-Einsteinian and it works beautifully too.  Poor fantasists often try to hide sloppy magic by assuming that it “can’t be understood by mere mortals.”  They are wrong.  For magic to function correctly in any novel, it must be based on a system, and the dramatic purpose of the system, if your novel is any good, is not as a deus ex machina or as wish-fulfillment; it is to force your character to make choices.  Do you have to sacrifice something (or someone) to make the magic work?  Do you have to tie yourself to a demonic or alien entity?  What do you have to give up to wield power?  In The Name of the Wind, magic is all about energy and energy cannot be created or destroyed. Kvothe, who as a youngster is a fearless show-off, lets us see firsthand the risks of assuming you can trade energy, when you don’t know what you’re doing. His first attempt to control the wind is a startling and realistic example of what can go wrong.

            So, I like the story; like the characters, and I like the magical system the writer has created.  What’s my second pet peeve?  Language.  Into this vibrant, vivid, sensuous fantastical world, with its own languages, myths, fairy tales and campfire stories, its own political feuds and dynasties, we have characters who say things like, “Are you okay?”  Are you okay?  How did the construction “okay” develop in this world?  This rings as flat as broken lute string in the middle of a minstrel competition.

            Lazy fantasists (yes, you know where I’m going) often try to hide sloppy language behind the “universal translator” argument.  “Well, you’re hearing the words in your head, and you are translating what they really said into your own vernacular, like ‘okay.’”  It doesn’t work and Rothfuss is too good writer to be allowed to get away with it. Nobody explains this better than Ursula LeGuin in her essay, “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie.”    Now, Rothfuss could have skated on this one if he hadn’t made so much of his book about language; the songs and rhymes, the power of naming.  When you create a world where words matter, then the words have to matter. As much as I enjoyed the Name of the Wind, Mr. Rothfuss only gets an A- over a B+ in execution, for lazy language.

Living in California, I’ve been bombarded with “Yes on 8” ads on TV.  Proposition 8 could revise the California constitution to define marriage as only being between a man and a woman. Two ads state that children will be taught about gay marriage in public school (the horror!).  Both ads flashed a cover of a book.  Perhaps in this context, “flashed” is not the best word to use. . . or, given the mind set of the Prop 8 folks, perhaps it is. The name of this children’s book is King and King.

I thought the agency that put together Prop 8’s commercials had made this up.  Imagine my surprise!  It’s a real book.  It looks like it’s aimed at kids 5 to 8 years old—reviewers say that it’s marketed at third-to-fifth-graders and a little too young for them. 

Our story: Prince Bertie is harangued by his mother the Queen to get married, and reluctantly agrees to do so.  He falls head-over-heels in love with the brother of one of the princesses paraded past him.  True love conquers all and they get married, prepared to live happily ever after.  With me now:  One, two, three, “Awwwww!”

In the sequel, King Bertie and King Lee go on a honeymoon and find an orphan child whom they adopt, thereby addressing that pesky problem that plagues monarchies; succession planning. The artwork is collage style.  I looked at one page in the sequel and the colors really jarred me, but I’m not a kid anymore, sadly.  The important life lesson I took away from this experience was that red and pink really do clash when they’re next to each other.

Whatever happens with Prop 8, I hope a side-effect is that King and King gets lots of hits on Amazon from the curious (like me) and the positive reviews result in many more sales for the two authors.

            You’ve got to love a festival whose major competitive sporting event is a pumpkin-seed-spitting contest.

 For the past three years, Tolay Lake Regional Park has hosted a fall festival each October ever since the county acquired the property in 2005.  The Sig-O and I went this year.  He drove, which meant as we turned off of Old Lakeville Road onto Cannon Lane and started the drive up the hill, I was free to look back at the Petaluma River Basin, with silvery ribbons of water glinting among the dark green tulles and the rust-colored reeds. The park property is over the ridge, facing Highway 37. 

            This park was a working ranch and there is an architecturally interesting silo, a great old barn, several out-buildings and a house.  The lake is what some people call “seasonal.”  I’d call it a marsh.  This time of year it is practically dry, the  tall orange-red rushes a contrast to the tanned grasses and hills around it. To the northeast flame-orange-and-gold vineyards catch the midday sun and provide the narrow valley with a dramatic backdrop.

            The festival has a strong emphasis on educational things, in a fun way.  Leapin’ Lizards was there with a couple of impressive lizards, some praying mantises and stick insects.  Sonoma County’s bat lady had a table with two of her charges in one of their special carrying cases.  They weren’t available to meet the public that day, but she had some good photos and information on bats. There was also a Creepy Crawlie room that we didn’t go through, although later, while we were walking around, I got to see a beautiful red-backed boa—the snake, not the fashion accessory.

None of the commotion in the barn seemed to disturb the two barn owls napping high in the rafters.

            We had a good chat with a volunteer from the Sonoma Raptor Project, who talked about the various raptors, including a peregrine falcon, that have been spotted on the Tolay property.  Then we wandered around to check out the llamas and see the area that had old-fashioned crafts such as carding, spinning wool and candle-making. The festival is kid-friendly, with plenty of things for adults, and the cost is only $5 for parking.  Tolay Lake is not open as a true park yet but they do provide docent-guided hikes at various times of year.  Spring would be gorgeous and would probably provide a bird-watcher with lots of varieties of waterfowl to study.

            Go here for more information about Tolay Lake.

Photos copyright 2008, Marion Deeds

          “–Come on, Riddick.  Don’t you want to rejoin the human race?”

            “–Truthfully, I wouldn’t know how.”

Radha Mitchell and Vin Deisel (Fry and Riddick)

Pitch Black

            So a couple of months ago this guy in my writer’s group—I’ll call him John, because that’s his name—says to me, “There’s this movie out called Babylon AD and your novel reminds me of it.”  I hadn’t seen Babylon AD or read much about it, but I had seen a trailer so I knew Vin Diesel was in it and a lot of stuff got blown up.  I have to say that based on this, I didn’t see the similarities. Okay, I do blow up a train in my book.  And a plane.  And later on, a boat, but still. . .

            I went home and researched the movie on the Internet.  Then I had a choice:  e-mail John and cuss him out with every bad word I knew, or put my head in my hands and weep at my computer for fifteen or twenty minutes.  Why?  Here’s why:  Babylon AD—probably the worst movie to date of 2008; on the short list for worst movie so far of the oughts, and a contender, at least on some critics’ lists, for one of the ten worst movies ever.  If Roger Ebert writes Your Movie Sucks, Volume II, Babylon AD will be in it. Yeah, so thanks for that comparison.

            Why does my book remind him of this movie?  Well, he said (he hadn’t seen the movie) he thought it was about a tough guy who is hired to escort a woman to safety, and bad guys are after her.  Which is, by the way,  the plot of my novel. . . and the plot of African Queen, True Grit, Tristian and Isolde, the King Arthur cycle where Lancelot is sent to escort Guinevere to Camelot, and even the book I just finished, The Quiet Girl.  And a host of others.  So there.

            I opted for the head in hands weeping.  No, I didn’t really.  I sulked around the house for a while.  Then I ate some chocolate and felt better. Not just because of the chocolate, though.  I got to thinking about Vin Diesel (who, by the way, doesn’t like Babylon AD either, apparently).

            I realized my main character, the “tough guy,” is like another Vin Diesel character. My character reminds me of Riddick.  The real Riddick, the one that’s in the cheap little suspense/horror movie called Pitch Black.

            Does John get points for making this intuitive connection?  No, he does not.

            Pitch Black is pure who-makes-it-out-alive horror in a space opera setting, with one of those unusual environmental things (like Dune) that seems cool and you shouldn’t think about too much.  A battered interstellar freighter crashes in a desert.  The survivors include the sociopathic killer/criminal Riddick, the bounty hunter who is taking him back to jail, a morally conflicted pilot, a religious man and his sons, a young runaway and a sarcastic antiques dealer.  And a host of others, but they’re what you might call “red shirts.” The monsters, while not  believable, are really scary and cool—think big, winged piranhas with these awesome, scythe-shaped heads– and the characters are plausible, multi-faceted, with real conflicts that spring out of diverse values. The plot is exactly simple enough to give us time to care about these characters.  The. . . well, I wouldn’t exactly call it science. .  the stuff about the monsters, and the desert planet and the eclipse that causes  it all to go pitch black, doesn’t really bear thinking about.  (Like, why would an indigenous life form recognize earth-based human blood as a source of nourishment?  And if the planet orbits a binary star, how can one sun rise as the other is setting? And how does that whole eclipse thing work anyway. . .? Maybe it’s just me). None of that really matters.  We care about these people and whether they live; and we are interested to see if Riddick can redeem himself at the end of the movie.

            When I saw the movie, Riddick seemed to me like someone who had been in the foster care system from a young age.  There was no security and no love in his early life.  His code is survival-based, not societally or morally based, yet in the movie there are flickers of the person he would have liked to have been.  I liked that.  That’s the part of him I took and gave to my main character.

            Pitch Black is low-budget, the language is rough and a lot of the actors were not well-known when it was made.  All of that works for it.

            Later, based on the surprising success of this movie, they gave the same director, David Twohy, way too much money to make a sequel about the Riddick character.  It was called the Chronicles of Riddick—or, as a friend of mine put it, “The Chronicles of Riddiculus.” Twohy studied Pitch Black carefully, painstakingly identified all the things that made it a success, then threw those out, choosing instead to make a gaudy, puffy, wedding-cake-on-steroids spectacle that included Dame Judy Dench as a floaty, all-dressed-in-white-and-can-turn-invisible alien, and eviscerated Riddick by turning him from a survivor of a horror-show childhood to a messianic killer hero with a “destiny.” It had a barely comprehensible plot and sets so grandiose that they made the de Laurentius version of Dune look restrained.

            It was probably the worst movie of 2004, on the short list to be the worst movie of the oughts. . . until Babylon AD.

Photos copyright 2008, Marion Deeds

See, this is why I hate these new-fangled contraptions like digital cameras.  The other day I took a different route to work.  As I looked east across the laguna, the area above the blue outline of the hills gleamed white-wine gold.  The sky was pale greenish-blue, one smudge of clouds tinged rose-colored.  In the foreground, a diaphanous, silvery scarf of mist twined among the stark black trunks of the oak trees.

            I hit my blinker and stepped on the brake, pulled off the road and clawed through my briefcase for the digital camera.  I found it, waited until the garbage truck went by so that I wouldn’t get pan-caked, scrambled out the car and ran back to a good vantage point.  Mist, still there, rose-golden cloud, still there. . . I raised the camera and stared at the blinking Low Battery light. 

            Of course I had extra batteries!  But this was a dynamic situation.  The light was changing with each breath.  I risked it, went ahead and took three shots.  What I got. . .well, you can see what I got.

            This isn’t one-tenth of what it looked like—not one-one hundredth of what it looked like.

            If I had used my old-school film camera, the picture would have been better, the color subtler, the whole image more evocative.  And if I had done that, and the picture wasn’t any better, would I blame the old camera?  In a heartbeat.

            There’s a run-off election for county supervisor in my district.  One candidate is styled as the “environmental candidate.”  The Environmental Candidate has said that the other candidate is in the pocket of the developers and doesn’t understand the district’s environmental issues.

            One day last week while I sorted out the mail, I decided to keep a stack of mailers, or fliers, from each campaign.  I included the ones that eddy up in a little pile on my doormat each weekend like autumn leaves.

            At the end of the week, here’s what I had:

            Environmental Candidate:      3

            In-the-Pocket Candidate:       0

            To be fair, not all of the three came from the Environmental Candidate’s campaign.  One came from a group of people who have banded together and given money to that campaign (and printed up mailers).  There is a particular piece of land in the district they want to see handled a certain way.

            And, after all, mailers re-cycle, don’t they?

            Maybe the In-the-Pocket candidate can’t afford mailers.  Developers aren’t doing so well these days.

            As I said,  just an observation.

            If you like books, or writing about books, check out Terry Weyna’s blog Reading the Leaves.  Terry is in my writers’ group but I didn’t know about her blog until recently.  It’s like stumbling across that used bookstore in a strange city when you’re on vacation.  It looks small from the outside, but when you go in you see how far back it stretches, how tall the book-stuffed shelves are, how many there are, and how many dark little alcoves curve off of the main aisle, each one filled with volumes. . .

            Terry reads so much that I can only conclude that, somehow, she does not sleep.  She reads almost everything; literary fiction, mystery, fantasy, science fiction, thrillers, short fiction anthologies, literary criticism.  She might even read a romance novel now and then.  I keep expecting to find the back of a cereal box in there somewhere (“Post’s sparing use of sweetener make the characters of rice and corn even more powerful.”).  She reads a lot of the authors I read, so it’s nice to get her opinion.  She reads a lot of people I don’t read, so it’s nice to get a recommendation.  She reads a lot of people I’ve never heard of, so every visit to The Leaves is a little voyage of discovery.

            Terry’s a good reviewer, a good critic and she’s not a snob.  She understands the value of the three-hours-in-the-porch-swing book and she doesn’t apologize for including them.  Literary criticism of the work of Emily Dickinson or the latest Robert Parker novel; each gets the same treatment.  The comment threads are lively too, as partisans vigorously debate the merits of their favorite writers.

            If you’re looking for a new author to try, or you just like well-written book reviews, check her out. She also posts a column on Book Balloon, another cool site.

Religulous

Directed by Larry Charles

Starring Bill Maher

Clearly I don’t know what a documentary is anymore, because this is marketed as a documentary and I don’t think it is one.  I don’t think most of Michael Moore’s work is documentary either.  I think it’s “video-essay” or something.  So, I’m putting this Larry Charles movie, starring Bill Maher,  in the category of “video-essay.”

I thought Maher’s movie was funny, and pretty brave.  I didn’t think it was particularly fair, but then he never said he was going to be fair.  I was touched by the simple conversational scenes with his mother and sister in a church, the more so when, at the end, I found out the movie was dedicated to his mother and she had died in 2007.

Parts of the movie are chilling, and not the ones I expected.  Yes, I expected to find the scenes of religious terrorism chilling.  I did not expect to see shots of a theme park in the south where they re-enact the crucifixion every day.  Not just the crucifixion, but the whole via dolorosa, the stations of the cross.  Every day.  For a fee.  Like Disneyland, only with scourging, beating, and nailing someone to a cross. To be, well, fair, it’s possible that they act out the resurrection as well, and the director just didn’t show us that.

Like Larry Charles’s film before this one, Borat, Religulous mostly shows Bill Maher asking people difficult questions about their religious beliefs. Of course the film is carefully edited so that Maher gets the last word, often in his car after the scene has finished shooting.

Funniest moments?  The cannabis church in Amsterdam, and Maher getting run off the lawn in front of the Latter Day Saints’ temple in Salt Lake City.  Scariest moments?  Several, actually, and one of them, while not overtly threatening, involves the guy who runs the Genesis Museum asking Maher, in a stern, patriarchal tone, “Are you God?”

Maher looks down and says softly, “No.”

So, as an op-ed piece about the dangers of blind belief and checking your intelligence and free will at the door, it’s good.  When it’s about the patent absurdity of expecting religious texts written by mortal people to anticipate scientific findings that would happen millennia later, it’s good too. When Bill was carrying on about the dangers of faith, though, I started thinking about the Buddhist monks in Myanmar, who risk their lives every day to speak out against the military dictatorship there.  They do that because their belief system tells them to, and they have faith that it’s the right thing.  They aren’t about separating the unwary from their money, or strapping explosives to another person’s body and pointing that person at a crowded hotel.  They risk their own lives for their faith.  I liked the movie, and I wish Bill Maher had considered talking just a little bit about them.

 After breakfast at Ken’s we drove through the Puna District toward the volcano.  There is a glass-blowing gallery on the way to the Volcano Park called 2400 Fahrenheit.  Because of the Big Island’s strict rules about access to highways (and signs), the place is a tease; you can see it from the highway but you can’t get to it from the highway. Instead you drive past it about half a mile, take a right on Old Volcano Road and double back a half a mile, and there you are.

Worth it?  Yes.  Unfortunately, none of the glass-blowers were working with glass the day we were there but the small gallery was open, filled with light and color; glowing oranges and reds, misty translucent grays, rich, opaque cobalts and cool greens. They made some stunning vases and small pieces in tropical-water greens and blues to go on lightboxes, and some similar shapes in black and red that looked like pools of lava.  As is always the case with art glass, pieces were expensive, but they also had sun-catchers and chopstick holders for souvenir prices.  The chopstick holders looked like palm fronds or feathers, with the top curled over to form a loop.  You could conceivably wear one as a necklace.  Misato Mortara, co-owner, who helped us, had made a sculpture piece from them, scores of them, entwined with drift wood.  They looked like drifting kelp fronds.

Check out their very hot website at www.2400f.com.

We asked Misato why they didn’t have a second sign up at Old Volcano Road.  She explained that Hawai’i has some very strict rules about signs along public thoroughfares.  L had explained earlier that this was why you only saw political signs in people’s yards, or held by volunteers by the side of the road.  I have to admit I find that part refreshing.

This is the only state I know about that has a minimum speed limit, so that the sight-seers do not impede the kamaiaina (locals) on their way to work.