December 2009: Other Stories
For the last few weeks of the year, I’m going through stories I saved, but never posted. Today’s stories are from December 2009:
* I’m sure some of you saw this story, but just in case here is the NY Times account:
Cormac McCarthy has written more than a dozen novels, several screenplays, two plays, two short stories, countless drafts, letters and more — and nearly every one of them was tapped out on a portable Olivetti manual typewriter he bought in a Knoxville, Tenn., pawnshop around 1963 for $50.
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Lately this dependable machine has been showing irrevocable signs of age. So after his friend and colleague John Miller offered to buy him another, Mr. McCarthy agreed to auction off his Olivetti Lettera 32 and donate the proceeds to the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit interdisciplinary scientific research organization with which both men are affiliated.
“He found another one just like this,” a portable Olivetti that looks practically brand new, Mr. McCarthy said from his home in New Mexico. “I think he paid $11, and the shipping was about $19.95.”
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“It has never been serviced or cleaned other than blowing out the dust with a service station hose. … I have typed on this typewriter every book I have written including three not published. Including all drafts and correspondence I would put this at about five million words over a period of 50 years.”
And the results of the auction? McCarthy’s old typewriter sold for $254,500. Perhaps someday your typewriter / computer / pen will be worth that much based upon the great stories you write!
* I started to draft a post on this, but the noxious bile seeping out of my ears kept splattering onto my keyboard, so I had to stop:
God help me, but please make the stupid stop:
Yesterday I took an incredible trip: boarding a private jet in Van Nuys, I and a handful of other reporters went down to San Diego, where we toured the USS Sterett, the most modern destroyer in the US Navy, and met with director Peter Berg. Seeing how a cutting edge warship works would have been more than enough to drag me out of my house, but the real reason for the trip was to talk about Berg’s next movie, Battleship. Yes, the film based on the board game.
A couple of weeks ago Latino Review revealed that the bad guys in Battleship won’t be another Earthly navy but in fact an alien fleet; that revelation is what spurred Berg and Universal to put this expedition together, as they wanted to get information about the movie — which won’t start filming until next spring — out there to combat rumor, speculation and the natural skepticism that comes from hearing a movie is being made from one of the most plotless board games of all time.
Berg opened up the info floodgates, even showing us pre-production concepts of the alien ships. Designed by ILM, who will be doing the FX, the alien ships look like giant water bugs, with giant hydrofoil legs that race across the surface of the sea. They’re huge, black and scary looking.
Battleships vs. aliens. Well. Clearly aliens have now replaced terrorists and the Soviet Union as the default Bad Guys in movies. And with Battleship: The Movie, we get to look forward to our heroes fighting “giant water bugs.”
If you’ve got a bottle of Maalox handy, I suggest you read the entire article as methinks we’re on the front edge of Hwood’s board game-into-movies mania.
* Regular readers will probably recognize the name “Robert Fuller” because for the last couple of months, I’ve been flinging H/Ts (hat tips) at him regularly. It seems that Mr. Fuller is afflicted with the same condition I have: Internetus Obsessicus. I thought I was able to find obscure but interesting sites re movies and writing. But RF would appear to burrow even deeper into the Web’s rabbit hole to find the strangest yet fascinating virtual locations. Like this one:
Welcome to Seventh Sanctum, a site of random tools for creativity and more!
Here you’ll find a collection of ‘generators’ that make random characters, plots, ideas, and more to use in your writing, games, art and more.
So I tried the Alien Race Name generator and came up with this list:
Artifical Ladies
Beast-behemoths
Crab Seers Of Mimosa Beta
Cryominers
Gryphon Prohpets Of The Artifical Field
Interdimensional Seers Of Castor
Jaguar-bats
Lizard-chameleons
Megasages Of The Vortex
Mysterious Drakes Of The Darkened Planet
Necrowarpers
Neoghosts Of The Sun
Phased Assasins
Pulsarkin Of Pluto
Rift Brood
System Warriors
Ultrakin Of Capella
Vortex Manipulators Of Spica
Vortex Monks
Wolf Dwellers
Then I tried the Science Fiction Medical Tool generator:
Bionic Splint
Cytoretractor
Dynamic Artery Sanitizer
Phased Laryngosterilizer
Resonating Dacrioprobe
Skin Sterilizer
Spatial Unguithermometer
Tracheoscalpel
Tumor Fibrobrace
Vertebrae Scalpel
Finally I tried the Superhero/Villian Organization generator:
Conspiracy Of Commandos
Family Of Necroheroes
Infantry R
Mu Force
Order Myriad Of Avalon
Pi Platoon
Platoon Of Compugirls
Psychospirits Of Water
Society Of Negasuper-villains
Soverign Guard
Family of Necroheroes v. Platoon of Compugirls! Hoo-hoo!
So another great waste of time courtesy of — and H/T to — Robert F.
* Finally there’s this post that has made its way around the Web: “When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like ‘Avatar’”. Some excerpts:
Critics have called alien epic Avatar a version of Dances With Wolves because it’s about a white guy going native and becoming a great leader. But Avatar is just the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy. Spoilers…
Whether Avatar is racist is a matter for debate. Regardless of where you come down on that question, it’s undeniable that the film — like alien apartheid flick District 9, released earlier this year — is emphatically a fantasy about race. Specifically, it’s a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people. Avatar and scifi films like it give us the opportunity to answer the question: What do white people fantasize about when they fantasize about racial identity?
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These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color — their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the “alien” cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become “race traitors,” and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It’s not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it’s not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It’s a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.
Think of it this way. Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people, but never losing white privilege. Jake never really knows what it’s like to be a Na’vi because he always has the option to switch back into human mode. Interestingly, Wikus in District 9 learns a very different lesson. He’s becoming alien and he can’t go back. He has no other choice but to live in the slums and eat catfood. And guess what? He really hates it. He helps his alien buddy to escape Earth solely because he’s hoping the guy will come back in a few years with a “cure” for his alienness. When whites fantasize about becoming other races, it’s only fun if they can blithely ignore the fundamental experience of being an oppressed racial group. Which is that you are oppressed, and nobody will let you be a leader of anything.
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Whites need to stop remaking the white guilt story, which is a sneaky way of turning every story about people of color into a story about being white. Speaking as a white person, I don’t need to hear more about my own racial experience. I’d like to watch some movies about people of color (ahem, aliens), from the perspective of that group, without injecting a random white (erm, human) character to explain everything to me. Science fiction is exciting because it promises to show the world and the universe from perspectives radically unlike what we’ve seen before. But until white people stop making movies like Avatar, I fear that I’m doomed to see the same old story again and again.
Look, our country has got major issues when it comes to race. As the writer points out, that’s a legacy that stretches back to the subjugation of Native Americans by European immigrants and their progeny, and to the horrific practice of slavery. But here’s what Avatar says:
* It assaults corporatism and its blind allegiance to profit above all else
* It promotes environmentalism by uplifting the natives’ intense connection to nature on Pandora in stark contrast to the destructive instincts and actions of the human warriors
* It decries militarism with its worship of high-tech weapons of mass destruction
* It praises right-brain / anima / the feminine as being closer to the spiritual truth of organic existence as compared to left-brain / animus / the masculine
Per the latter, some of the movie’s strongest, most powerful characters are women.
And for good measure, the story’s Protagonist is paralyzed from the waist down, thereby, a representative of physically challenged people.
So in one way of looking at it, Avatar is a politically correct wet dream.
Re the point that the Protagonist is a white male who — yes, like Dances With Wolves and The Last Samurai — immerses himself in native culture, changing his world view. Given everything else on the P.C. side, I don’t think Cameron was consciously trying to make another white guy-goes-native movie. Rather I suspect that, as a writer, he was responding to two other needs: (1) To create a story set-up to provide the greatest range possible for the Sully’s personal transformation; being a white male and a member of the military, Sully has to grow from a perspective of subjugating ‘The Other’ to understanding them. (2) But the biggest concern for Cameron — I’m guessing — was about how to take the audience into Pandora. He knew what he was envisioning was a whole other level of cinematic reality. He needed a Protagonist who could best reflect ‘everyman’. And since the core audience for this type of movie is young, adult, white males — the largest group of sci-fi fans at least here in the States — it was probably a no-brainer. Jake Sully becomes an easy ‘role’ for the movie viewer to slip into and therefore enter into the story world.
And there’s this: Avatar tells this story. As a writer and director, that is Cameron’s only responsibility — to tell this story as best as he could. This is the story he envisioned. This is the story he wrote. And this is the story he directed. If people who watch it want to get all hot and bothered about how Avatar somehow stands in a tradition of white heroes saving indigenous cultures, that is the audience member’s right. But as a storyteller, Cameron has zero responsibility to them — his only allegiance is to the story.
Finally, and this is what blows me away the most about the io9 article, is how the writer completely misses the biggest freaking point of the movie: Its beauty. This is one of the most beautiful movies I’ve ever seen. The care, attention, and even love for Pandora as exhibited onscreen, representing the tens of thousands of hours put in by hundreds of people involved in the production, how can anyone come away from the movie not being moved by that?
How about you? Is Avatar somehow a story told from the perspective of white guilt and Hwood needs to stop making those type of films? Or is the choice of Jake Sully, a white protagonist, more a reflection of the writer’s needs per this specific story?