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Or a cataclysmic earthquake, I'd accept with some despair
In which I shoot fish in a barrel.
As someone whose subway rides tend to resemble scenes from an "Evil Dead" movie, in which I am Bruce Campbell dodging zombies who have had all traces of their humanity sucked out of them by a sinister book—not the "Necronomicon," but "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows"—I sometimes wonder how any self-respecting author of speculative fiction can find fulfillment in writing novels for young readers. I suppose J. K. Rowling could give me 1.12 billion reasons in favor of it: get your formula just right and you can enjoy worldwide sales, film and television options, vibrating-toy-broom licensing fees, Chinese-language bootlegs of your work, a kind of limited immortality (L. Frank Baum who?) and—finally—genuine grown-up readers. But where's the artistic satisfaction? Where's the dignity?
Let that steep for a moment.
To its credit, "InterWorld" isn't sugarcoated for its readership; it wastes no time in putting its young heroes in mortal peril and pitting them against at least one brutal adversary who threatens to floss with their innards. But its prose is often only functional, and it has a slight problem of verisimilitude: are there really any high-school-age iconoclasts out there who have heard of synesthesia, Benoit Mandelbrot and the Midgard serpent, but not of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen?
Yes. In high school? Me.
May Dave Itzkoff be haunted by the shades of all the children's authors who died in this last year, except that he would not appreciate it.
As someone whose subway rides tend to resemble scenes from an "Evil Dead" movie, in which I am Bruce Campbell dodging zombies who have had all traces of their humanity sucked out of them by a sinister book—not the "Necronomicon," but "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows"—I sometimes wonder how any self-respecting author of speculative fiction can find fulfillment in writing novels for young readers. I suppose J. K. Rowling could give me 1.12 billion reasons in favor of it: get your formula just right and you can enjoy worldwide sales, film and television options, vibrating-toy-broom licensing fees, Chinese-language bootlegs of your work, a kind of limited immortality (L. Frank Baum who?) and—finally—genuine grown-up readers. But where's the artistic satisfaction? Where's the dignity?
Let that steep for a moment.
To its credit, "InterWorld" isn't sugarcoated for its readership; it wastes no time in putting its young heroes in mortal peril and pitting them against at least one brutal adversary who threatens to floss with their innards. But its prose is often only functional, and it has a slight problem of verisimilitude: are there really any high-school-age iconoclasts out there who have heard of synesthesia, Benoit Mandelbrot and the Midgard serpent, but not of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen?
Yes. In high school? Me.
May Dave Itzkoff be haunted by the shades of all the children's authors who died in this last year, except that he would not appreciate it.
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WTF? The dignity??? ::boggles::
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I tried wondering if he had intended a sort of arch provocation, meant to be taken in the spirit of a devil's advocate, but then my capacity for disbelief hanged itself.
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I should totally ask you for a story with those ingredients (synesthesia, fractal geometry, Jörmungandr), too. You would write awesome Mandelbrot.
I still don't know who Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen are.
I know because of
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In the late 1970s, Sid Vicious was the bass player for the Sex Pistols, who acheived immortality through one of the greatest performances of "My Way" ever done, which is saying something since he had no musical talent whatsoever (although he did possess a genius for giving offense).
Nancy Spungen was his girlfriend, who had serious emotional problems and dreamed of being Debbie Harry. The two of them became addicted to heroin and embarked on a self-destructive spiral downward that led to him stabbing her to death and then later dying himself of a drug overdose.
They have since become the poster children for just how awful drug addiction can be, and as a tragic case of lovers who should have gotten help but didn't, in part because they had a sad sort of celebrity to maintain.
If you want to see a brilliant movie about the whole thing, go and rent "Sid and Nancy". Just remember to bring along a bottle of prozac.
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I still only the vaguest idea. Synethesia and Mandelbrot and the Midgard serpent, though? Oh, absolutely, and the Midgard serpent at least I knew of long before high school.
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Second grade. D'Aulaires' Norse Gods and Giants. The librarians kept making me return the book.
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I don't remember when I first read that, but I think it was fourth grade or so. I know that by fifth I was definitely hooked on mythology in general.
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That's a lovely book. I can see why you'd be giving the librarians trouble over it. ;-)
I only ever saw their Greek mythology book as a child, but the Norse stuff got in through half a dozen other books, none of which I can really remember individually, which may be a sign that it permeated my consciousness on a more elemental level than the Greco-Roman stuff.
This probably has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that I'm more likely to swear in Anglo-Saxon than Greek.
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Maybe that's supposed to make it more likely—it's not pop culture, it's anachronism? I dunno . . .
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I'm very amused by the way that some of these types think their generation's pop culture is eternal, whilst history and mythology are transitory.
Sid and Nancy? Did Itzkoff, as a youngling, know who Al Jolson was?
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ARID
world he lives in.no subject
ARID
world he lives in.
Reading well is the best revenge.
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(It's late at night. My sense of proportion and moral compass are haywire) ... um, oops. It's not even midnight yet.... guess it's too early to use the "it's late at night" excuse...
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"That, and pecking out his eyes."
Thank you both. *g*
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my favorite part of Sid and Nancy is when they imitate daleks:
"Boring, Sidney, boring, boring, boring... exterminate, exterminate, exterminate" (in dalek voices)
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You, sir, win.
My boot.
As a brand new integral part of your anatomy.
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I love your apostrophes.
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There are also times I seriously wish there were a good chance of the giant shark Megalodon's survival, so that certain individuals could be used as fodder for it. This is also one of them.
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>> I sometimes wonder how any self-respecting author of speculative fiction can find fulfillment in writing novels for young readers. <<
To quote Ursula LeGuin (and this is from memory, so it may not be word-perfect): "Sure, writing for children is easy. Just as easy as raising them."
I feel for any children this man has, or may have at some future time. And I'm really sorry that his own inner child seems to have decamped a long time ago.
(FWIW, I didn't like Interworld that much either. But I'm wondering whether my classic-rock-loving almost-16-yr-old knows about Sid and Nancy - likely not. And you won't get anywhere with me by making snide remarks about what Gaiman, who has a young teen, a college student, and a recent college grad of his own, understands about his young readers.)
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I knew about fractals (though not the founder of the geometry behind them) in middle school, the Midgard Serpent in middle school, but synesthesia I just learned about last year. Words that look like colors!