Filed under: Books I'm Reading, Movies I'm Watching, Things I'm Doing, TV I'm Watching
Blog Reboot:
I do realise it’s been almost a year since the blog became a victim of procrastination, but I have reached that point in the school term when I am rebelling against bringing work at home. Unfortunately it’s a dangerous time to do so as student reports are due early next week, and I have a huge weekend of tears, lifting of heavy things and Professional Development, commencing Thursday. So, rather than fiddling with my blog, or going through my burnt DVDs looking for music videos, or watching Caprica episodes, I should really be marking Stage 1 English assignments, and preparing spelling lists for Year 8s. There’s nothing better to defeat procrastination than procrastination, hey? No wonder my house is so clean at the moment. Why do my schoolwork when I need to do the dishes?
So, this is a return to blogging. I will intersperse blogs about Currently with blogs on my remaining memories of the Anzac Day trip from last April/May/June. Blog-wise I only made it as far as Turkey, and there’s Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Romania, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Spain and Belgium to cover yet! Slacker!
Currently:
… an English teacher in a small South Australian town, on the Yorke Peninsula. In the madness of
- return-from-Europe-get-employed-two-weeks-later
- work-mad-shit-for-six-months
- desperately-look-for-another-job
- get-one
- pack-whole-life-in-Christmas-holidays
- buy-a-life’s-worth-of-whitegoods-in-two-weeks
- move-house-to-the-other-side-of-state
- start-new-job-on-the-day-after-moving-in
- put-ikea-furniture-together-unpack-boxes-unpack-white-goods
- learn-how-to-cook-again-how-to-teach-again-and-how-to-organise-everyday-life-again, and
- set-up-house-cat-and-internet-account
the blog just got forgotten.
But recently I’ve had the urge to start writing again (*0), and besides digging out my old word processing files (last seen in 2004), the blog was a good place to get my practice on. There’s a lot of trivia and random thoughts rattling around in my solitary head that would do better to be expressed. And besides, I have a really cute new netbook that is sadly getting underused as the school has lent me one for school-purposes.
Doing:
Gardening. Yes, seriously. I garden. I grew a basil plant. Pity it’ll go out of season soon and die off, but still, I grew it. And I brought a rosemary bush back to life, now I’m just desperately trying to plow through the supermarket bough dried rosemary I bought last year so I can start using the fresh stuff. There’s also some peas, tomatoes, oregano, paper daisies (I love Aussie paper daisies), mignonette lettuce, chives and spring onion on the grow. Plus, the government-beige-house I live in had a non-lawn when I moved in, and with nothing but grey water and rain I’ve managed to get it to grow again (pity I don’t have a lawn mower. Oops).
Programming. No, not computer programming, but syllabus programming. During term time, no teacher has a life unless their either a) disenchanted and hanging out for retirement, or b) too good for their own good. So, most evenings and early mornings have been spent producing worksheets and lesson plans for my current group of disengaged Stage 1′s (that’s year 11 for the non-Aussies) and rowdy year 8′s.
Avoiding all physical activity. At some point I’ll go join the gym which is about 200m away from my house. But my feet hurt. And if it’s not my feet, it’s my knees. Well, actually, my feet hurting is a real excuse given their spur-rific cramping painful state, but still, I could use the weight machines. Or go swimming. Just too attached to the 500 gig of media the I.T. Escapee gave me before I moved up here.
Reading:
Tomorrow When The War Began by John Marsden (*1) partly for work purposes, but also ahead of the film to be released later this year. Just as I remembered it, the first section of the book is interesting and well written with nice characterisation. But, as soon as the kids get home and discover all the dogs are dead (and the main events of the novel start), the book trips on its poorly formulated background story and the plot stumbles along, jerky and uneven. So many holes.
It’s popular with the kids, but Red Dawn (the underlying concept of which Marsden appears to have borrowed) is still better. I hope the film fixes some of the major narrative issues, a la Catherine Hardwicke with Twilight. Certainly, provided it’s of a certain quality, the film will be immediately bought by every high school and library in Australia. Considering there’ll be a Red Dawn remake out sometime this year as well I doubt it’ll have much interest overseas, though.
I am curious how they will handle just who is it that’s invading? So far in the novel it’s a racially-neutral group, of who we know little more than they’re mixed in gender, come somewhere from the north, have a lot of money and invaded to get extra room to move. When I was a kid and I read it, I always thought it was some random Asian country (i.e. China), so desperate for space they would invade a random Australian rural town: now I read and realise that was simply me drawing upon the racist flack being thrown around in the early 90′s. I’m curious to see who today’s kids would pick as the culprits: probably Muslims.
Before that I was reading We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver. Far better. Oh god, this book must be adapted for film at some point.(*2) Shriver attempts to explore the causes of socio-pathic mass-murdering Columbine-esue teenagers. Who is to blame for Kevin: society, lack of affection from his mother, bullying, disadvantage, genetics, Conduct Disorder, spoiling by his father, modern life, what? The strength of the novel is you’re never allowed to settle on one particular cause: in fact, by the end you’ll be struggling to blame Kevin on, well, anything really.
Recently, I’ve noticed it’s a rare thing when a bloke captures the inner dialogue and thought processes of a woman. I found I related easily to Shriver’s narrator: the mother of a teenaged Columbine-esque mass-murderer who relates her side of the story in letters to her estranged husband. Most male writers fail miserably at expressing the way a woman thinks: and not, as my somewhat-emotionally-challenged male friends might argue, because feminine thought is irrational. My argument is that it’s the exact opposite: women think on a different level of rational abstract complexity which is just simply too hard for your average emotionally stunted guy to comprehend. Take Stephen King’s one-dimensional female characters. That’s also a reason why I can’t bear old-school sci-fi writers like Arthur C. Clarke or Asimov. But authors like Kazuo Ishiguro make my day: Never Let Me Go is also confidently and competently told from a feminine voice(*3).
Is it the same when the genders are reversed? i.e. do female writers write men accurately? Well, I’d like to ask any well-read guys that question … except I don’t know any. Except maybe Fritz – well, Fritz, what do you think? Hey J. K. Rowling did alright with Harry, didn’t he?(*4)
Watching:
Caprica, the prequel spin-off to Battlestar Galactica, the sci-fi tv drama that even the non-sci-fi nerds get along with. So far Caprica’s bigger budget and a bit glossier than it’s parent series, but still has the high standard of writing that I now expect in my tv: oh the dialogue is wonderful! No cliché! No clunky plot lines! No awkward unrealistic dialogue! No doubt most viewers don’t look for more than pretty people and spekky special effects, but I’ve seen so much decent TV in my life that watching things like NCIS and Grays Anatomy is painful.
Also, new episodes of Big Love, Lost and Heroes have passed my television screen. God I love Big Love, it’s so shamefully soap-opera, though the writing and acting is good. Chloe Sevigny is a hoot. Heroes has lost its way (well, it lost it back in Series 2) but is still fun. And Lost is doing what it always did best: taking it off in a new direction which somehow fits in with the old one. It finishes after this season, and it’s a good time for it: providing they wrap everything up nicely, and that when I sit down and watch it beginning to end it’ll all make sense.
From new to old, I just finished watching the complete 6 seasons of pioneer TV series Oz. Starting mid-90′s, Oz has its place as a forerunner of the 90′s/2000′s golden age of narrative drama which produced Lost, Heroes and Dexter. It was US movie cable channel HBO’s first television drama, and despite a dreadful opening-credit sequence(*5), is still quite credible and watch-worthy (unlike the equally revolutionary Twin Peaks which is embarrassingly kitsch today).
For those not in the know, the series follows the day-in-day-outs of prisoners in a reformatory program at a maximum security prison – Oswald State. Most of the controversy (and there was a lot of that) is for the graphic violence, adult themes and nudity (you’ll get to see more willies then you’ve ever seen in your life), but in reality the show is nothing more than a soap opera set in a prison, with good dialogue and characterisation.
But, one thing I couldn’t help noticing what that half of the casts of most popular tv series around today found their start in Oz. Guess where Soprano’s diva Edie Falco started? Then there’s Lost’s Michael, Harrold Perrineau, who’s a junkie in a wheelchair in Oz, SVU and general-everywhere-at-the-moment guy J.K. Simmons playing a neo-nazi; a lead character is Dennis from 30 Rock, Dean Winters (he couldn’t act even then). Probably one of the most recognisable is Lauren Velez – now a staple on Dexter as Laguerta (and co-star David Zayas – Baptista – is in Oz as well). Oh, and once you’ve seen Oz you’ll never think of Elliot (Christopher Meloni) from Law and Order: Special Victims Unit the same again.
Movie wise, so many have come and gone that it’s a bit of a blur: I loved Avatar, which is a suprise given my obsession with narrative, strong dialogue, writing, plot and characterisation, five things this movie seriously lacks. Avatar would probably be the only film where they don’t matter: it’s all about the pretty green and blue things and the facial animation which was fucking superb.
I saw a sci-fi flick called Pandorum which I really liked, though that may be because it stars Six Feet Under’s Ben Foster, whose character, Russell, I always had a soft-spot for. Despite the clunky ending, it’s narratively and special-effectually tight.
And to finish it off, Zombieland is brilliant. Funny, sarcastic and a nice relief from films like 28 Days Later.
Next
… I will be going back home to help the olds pack up the house I’ve been living in for 28 years. That’s the tears and lifting-of-heavy-furniture part of my plans next weekend. It’s pretty devastating, though not as devastating as the reasons underpinning the move (no more can be said, of course, because of legal reasons, but there’s a particular hotel and chemist owning pharmacist in Adelaide who has plenty of dark karma coming to him). This somewhat coincidently coincides with a trip to Adelaide for two days of conferencalicious-ness (the ‘Professional Development’ and sofa-sleeping component of next weekend). In other words, the blog will once again be on hiatus for quite a long time.
But … there’s always more Caprica, Big Love and Lost to watch when I come back, a gym to avoid, and disgruntled teenagers to deal with in the meantime.
____________________________
Notes
(1) On Tomorrow When the War Began: Tomorrow When The War Began is a classic Aussie teen novel, taught to death in every school since the early 90′s. It’s premise is pretty simple: a bunch of rural teenagers go camping in a secluded sheltered mountain region. When they return home, they discover their country town has been invaded by a nameless enemy and their families imprisoned. The kids become guerilla fighters. So much like the 1984 US film Red Dawn it’s embarrassing.
(2) On We Need To Talk About Kevin being made into a film: Having just said that, I did an IMDB search and what do you know. Tilda Swinton! Perfect! Can’t wait for that one.
(3) On Kazuo Ishiguro: I think I would have stopped reading male writers if it weren’t for Kazuo Ishiguro. Remains of the Day remains on my Top 5 Books of All Time list, which is otherwise dominated by Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin.
(4) On Females writing Male Characters: DO NOT EVEN THINK ABOUT MENTIONING STEPHENIE MEYER. General consensus is she’s a crap writer period let alone when she attempts to write masculine characters.
(5) On the opening sequence of Oz: The opening sequence of Oz just goes on too long (2 minutes!) and features saxophones. Really.
(6) On Twilight being a load of tosh: I should probably confess, however, that I too am a sucker for Twilight, and have the films on my iPod. Damn you, Mormon lady.
1 Comment so far
Leave a comment
hey, I dig your blog. I recently found it after watching some youtube videos of peoples experiences in Japan. I know i’m not really adding anything to the discussion but I just wanted to pass on the well deserved compliment
Comment by bryan. May 21, 2011 @ 4:43 pm