Page to Screen: Vertigo (1958)

Vertigo
based on D’entre les morts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac

As you can imagine, my film class introduced me to the the supposed greats of cinema—y’all know how I feel about the label “classics”? Yeah, imagine that backed up by the American Film Institute rather than Western academia and you’ll get a sense of how I feel about that. While I’m glad I watched these films for my cinematic education, sometimes I just have to remind myself that it’s okay not to agree with people who have more experience in the field than you know. It’s art, man—everybody’s opinion is, in its own way, right.

So, um, we watched Vertigo and I didn’t like it.

Booking Through Thursday: DIY

If you could write a book, what would it be about, and why? (Though, of course, some of you already HAVE.)

 Well, I’ve only got a first draft of a manuscript and a half, which I’d like to finish up this summer. (The half first draft, not both manuscripts up to par, obviously!) I haven’t written a lot this spring, but I hope to rectify that situation once I’m probably settled for the summer. But the thing is, I’m kind of paranoid, so I don’t like talking specifics about my manuscripts, beyond vague tweets about certain situations, such as side characters demanding more attention and protagonists doing silly things. (This one time, my heroine escaped me on a boat! That draft stopped right there. I need to reboot that one…) So here’s a vague sampling of stuff sprinkled all through my writing—ghosts, comedians, androids, cannibalism, glam rock, bad jokes, meritocracies, near-future sci-fi, far -future sci-fi, multicultural fantasy, contemporary, willfully anachronistic historical, and pregnant women.

And why? Well, because the stories keep coming and I need to make some room for the new ones. Essentially, because I can’t not.

Review: Dramarama

Dramarama by E. Lockhart

I have no idea how Dramarama ended up on my reading list. I have vague, associated memories of a young adult panel at Dragon*Con in 2010, but I can’t imagine I picked up there. In any case, a young adult novel about theater camp does sound up my alley, doesn’t it? I’ve been involved in theater since high school and the trauma of Debate (oh, Debate), and there’s something fannish about being the only person in your physical community who loves something and the bonds you can make with people who love that thing too. How much could it hurt? Well, a lot more than I expected…

Dramarama tells the story of Sadye (birth name Sarah) and Demi (birth name Douglas), two theater geeks who live in Brenton, Ohio, the most unfabulous place on earth. When the two meet in high school, they become best friends, and apply to Wildewood, a theatrical summer program. When they get in, they dream of taking over Wildewood and becoming fabulous royalty, but the reality is a lot more mundane than the fantasy. While Demi succeeds in both the program and his personal life, every day is an uphill battle for Sadye. Can their friendship survive theater camp?

Like a lot of young adult novels closer to the younger end of that age spectrum, Dramarama is a breezy read; I knocked it out in three hours. The characters are vaguely engaging, in that catchall teenage cast kind of way, the setting is interesting, and, hey, theater? Always fantastic and rife with conflict to fictionalize. In fact, in the afterword, Lockhart mentions that she borrowed several anecdotes from one of her friends for this novel. While the transcripts of Sadye and Demi’s tape recorder can get a little silly and twee at times (and the phone transcript at the end made me cry out, “But that’s illegal unless you tell them!” until I realized it was kind of supposed to be real time… I guess?), I can see tweens going for it. Except for something huge, it’s a light, inoffensive novel that would be great to give to the young theater geek in your life.

But that something huge is the protagonist.

Sadye is, in a word, infuriating. At first, I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt; after all, I’m not terribly fond of teenagers, but that’s a me thing. No need to punish our protagonist for it. But it soon became apparent that Sadye was just kind of an awful human being. Early on, Sadye recounts all the wacky, whimsical things she and Demi get up to; singing loudly in public, dressing differently than the other girls from Brenton (who are all awful conformists, of course; Sadye is a super special snowflake, dontcha know), so on and so forth, to the point of whining about how her boring parents never notice when she and Demi stage “halfway pornographic numbers to songs from Fiddler on the Roof” (37) in front of them. While I can kind of buy this from Demi–if he spends so much time and energy suppressing who he is, it could come out in high volume bursts, I guess?—Sadye is just an attention seeker in the absolute worst way. I wanted to shake her so badly. On top of that, she seems woefully lethargic about theater, despite her supposed enthusiasm. If her high school even has a theater department or a chorus, we wouldn’t know. Sadye has taken dance lessons since she was little, but she seems determined to be an actress instead of a dancer, which is fine, except that she whines during her acting classes like nothing else I’ve seen. On top of that, if she’s been the only theater geek she knows for most of her life, why hasn’t she reached out online? She just comes across as someone who wants the fame and glory of a thing without the actual work, which I absolutely loathe.

Now, to be fair, making an unlikable protagonist learn the error of her attention-seeking, lazy ways is a very valid character arc. But Sadye never changes. She whines through acting classes taught by a Broadway professional, whines at a director of a, to be honest, terrible version of A Midsummer’s Night Dream in the middle of rehearsal, whines at her new friends… you know what? I’m very thankful I did not listen to the audiobook of this. I don’t know if I could have taken it. The real lessons of theater—there are no small parts, only small actors, diplomatically approach problem-solving, the director is the director, shut your face, so on and so forth—fly by her, but she never picks them up. Even as she leaves at the end of the summer, she’s still whining about she’s being persecuted for speaking up and being herself, when she’s just been so obnoxious for the entire novel that no one can stand her anymore and are just glad for a reason to get rid of her.

Now, I want to be clear; I’m not saying you shouldn’t let your freak flag fly, to borrow from a musical. Personally, I think everybody is a gorgeous freak in their own way. But there’s a way to be yourself that doesn’t involve looking down at other people (Candie, a not-so-bright conservative girl, is mocked endlessly), overestimating your own talents, and disturbing the peace.

Oh, I just had a thought—is this what it’s like inside a Manic Pixie Dream Girl’s head? Horrors.

Bottom line: A light, inoffensive novel perfect for theater-loving tweens is ruined by the infuriatingly obnoxious, obtuse, and selfish heroine, who doesn’t learn a thing over the course of the novel. Avoid.

I rented this book from the public library.

The Literary Horizon: The Book of Knights

I think I love this new format. It means I can systemically work through my reading list to highlight here. Of course, it also brings up the fact that many of my selections have trickled down to me via mysterious and unknown recommenders, who are, most likely, either Nancy Pearl or myself. So while I’d like to provide a good reason for why I want to read The Book of Knights, I don’t remember why it’s on my list beyond “it sounded cool”.

Review: In the Peanut Gallery with Mystery Science Theater 3000

In the Peanut Gallery with Mystery Science Theater 3000 edited by Robert G. Weiner and Shelley E. Barba

So there I am at Dragon*Con, wandering the dealer’s room, vacillating between my usual cheapness and a desire to buy everything. (Cheapness and a limited amount of things I can physically abscond with keeps me down.) And then I wander across McFarlane’s table, stacked high with academic books about popular culture, which boasts a copy of In the Peanut Gallery with Mystery Science Theater 3000, which I’d heard about via the magnificent Cleolinda Jones, who knows one of the contributors. While I try not to buy books sight unseen, especially at con, I already knew I’d never find it anywhere else, and home (or into the totebag) it went.

The Sunday Salon: The Texts I Come From

At the beginning of the month, Malinda Lo put up a very interesting post in the wake of Maurice Sendak’s death. While she herself never read Where the Wild Things Are as a kid, it made her think about the books that she connected with as a child. The title of the post, “The Books I Come From”, is absolutely brilliant, so, obviously, I decided to copy it. But the thing is… I actually didn’t read a lot as a kid. (Your disappointment in wee Clare cannot compete with my own.) So none of them are actually books—but if you boiled me down, these texts are, honestly, probably the main components.

Review: Rose Daughter

Rose Daughter by Robin McKinley

So I had some issues with Robin McKinley’s first go at “Beauty and the Beast”, Beauty. The pacing was borked, the characterization was off, and I just couldn’t get why it was so beloved. I ended that review by promising myself I’d investigate Rose Daughter, McKinley’s second go at the fairy tale, as I’ve been assured it’s better than Beauty. (Charmingly, McKinley threatens to have a third go in twenty years in the afterword—which would be 2016…) It’s taken me two years to get around to it, but I finally picked up after the end of my academic semester. And I was right. It is way better than Beauty.

Booking Through Thursday: Pet Names

Do you have any pet that has a name inspired by your readings?

If not, what would you pick if you DID?

Do any of your friends have book-based names for their pets? (Or their children?)

My family dog’s name is Charlemagne Alaric Jack West (…I was ten!), but my mom really was the one who picked out Charlemagne. So no, not really. A lot of the names I am hyper-attached to tend to come out of other media, for whatever reason (for instance, my computer’s name is Demora Pasha, after Sulu’s daughter and a possible nickname for Chekov), although I’ve been getting very fond of Gilraen as of late. But I tend to only name inanimate objects that; my inability to bestow names on living creatures aside, naming someone after someone or something else is a very powerful thing. I’m a namesake (County Clare, Ireland), and that’s a much different thing than being named Claire arbitrarily. I can only imagine what it’s like when you’re named after a (hopefully) fully realized character.

As for other people naming pets and children after book characters… I do know of a girl named Eowyn, but I don’t think I’ve ever met her.

Review: The Ecstasy of Influence

The Ecstasy of Influence by Jonathan Lethem

At the beginning of my reading career, I got a lot of recommendations from The New York Times, but that’s gone done in recent years, because I now have a thriving community of readers all around me tossing recommendations my way. But I still read the book section from time and time, and that’s where I found a review for The Ecstasy of Influence. I’d never heard of Jonathan Lethem in my life—although Motherless Brooklyn, one of his novels, sounds very familiar—but I’m always fond of authors examining “influence”, because it can lead to discussion about fannish experience, whether or not the author names them as such. As the summer began, I dove in—but I think I hit a roadblock pretty quickly…

The Literary Horizon: Are You My Mother?

Alright, kids, something had to give; while I like this feature, since it gives me feedback on stuff I have yet to read from you lovely people, it’s hard to sit down and pair them off, because with a reading list five hundred plus books long, I tend to forget specifics. So, compromise! From now on, the Literary Horizon will feature only one book, but link to more reviews. We good? Everybody good? Good. On to today’s selection!