March Madness for Readers

We who are basketball illiterate need no longer be left out of March Madness. Full Circle Bookstore in Oklahoma City is providing an NCAA tournament-type bracket for us readers. The titles are ranked and seeded for our own Big Dance.

Share your choices with friends and family and see how brilliant and well-read they are. Of course, the truly smart and literate members of your circle will chose the same books you do.

The first set of competing books are now available for voting. Click on http://a.pgtb.me/zRGbVZ to vote for your favorite books and follow the voting to see if your picks are winners.

Life of Pi

“Life of Pi” in 3D

When I was a little girl, more than half a century ago, I saw my first 3D movie. At the opening flaming arrows came out into the audience. I snatched off my special paper-framed glasses, went down behind the seats, and didn’t come up again until my parents were ready to go home.

Things have changed. I have changed. I love the concept of 3D movies. Disney World awakened me to the glories of 3D cinema. Misbegotten rereleases of movies like “Jaws” in 3D reburied my enthusiasm under what I believed to be impenetrable volcanic mud and ash.

Then came “Avatar” stoking an ember into flame. I could overlook the rehash of every old Tarzan movie I’d ever seen complete with restless, dancing natives and the search for…you name it… In “Avatar” it was unobtainium, which my daughter pointed out was scientifically abbreviated as BS.

But the special effects were stunning. And immediately the ‘it’ I was searching for was a good movie in 3D. So when I heard Life of Pi was being made into a movie and a 3D movie at that, I knew I had to see it.

I had a serious problem. Despite recommendations from my well-read son, and an equally well-read friend, and good intentions on my part, I had not yet read the book. My son suggested that I would probably like the movie, but it would be best to read the book. And I had only three days before the movie opened in my hometown.

Luckily, Life of Pi is a slender volume and was immediately available through the internet wonder of Barnes and Noble’s Nook. (Don’t get me started on the financial dangers of books being so easily purchased day or night, rain or shine.)

With passages like “A white splinter came crashing down from the sky, puncturing the water. The water was shot through with what looked like white roots; briefly, a great celestial tree stood in the ocean.” And “The sea lay quietly, bathed in a shy, light-footed light, a dancing play of black and silver that extended without limits all about me. The volume of things was confounding—the volume of air above me, the volume of water around and beneath me.” This book was intended to be 3D.

The story, told in poetic simplicity, twists and turns through cultures and philosophies and geographies. It’s hero balances precariously on the edge between life and death, sanity and insanity, reality and fantasy throughout the book. Here is a story worthy of the special effects of a 3D movie.

For those of you not familiar with the story, it follows a teen-aged Indian boy through his survival alone on a life boat with a Bengal tiger adrift in the Pacific Ocean for 227 days.

Then there was the question of whether or not, Hollywood would be up to the task.

The film won 2013 Academy Awards for Best Direction, Best Original Score, Best Cinematography, and Best Visual Effects. I can’t speak to the music, because quite honestly I don’t remember it. I think it must have fit the movie though, or I would remember it.

The visual effects were outstanding, especially the tiger. I particularly remember the computer generated tiger’s paws as he went from well-fed to emaciated during the ordeal. His paws became angular bone and sinew covered with a pelt, dulled by starvation.

The 3D effects were overshadowed by the CG work. And truly, the film will lose very little if you see it without 3D.

The book gives you the ultimate 3D experience. Pi describes the sea at night:

“At multiple depths, as far as I could see, there were evanescent trails of phosphorescent green bubbles…. As soon as one trail faded another appeared. … from all directions and disappeared in all directions. … like time-exposure photographs of cities at night, with the long red streaks made by the tail lights of cars. … driving above and under each other as if they were on interchanges stacked ten storeys high. And here the cars were of the craziest colours. The dorados…showed off their bright gold, blue and green as they whisked by. Other fish that I could not identify were yellow, brown, silver, blue, red, pink, green, white, in all kinds of combinations…. Only the sharks stubbornly refused to be colourful…. …one thing was constant: the furious driving. There were many collisions—all involving fatalities—and a number of cars spun wildly out of control…bursting above the surface of the water and splashing down in showers of luminescence.”

Don’t Open with a Weather Report

“It was a dark and stormy night…”

How many of you out there have writing teachers, coaches, mentors, whatever, who admonish you against starting your Great American Novel with a weather report? Yeah, me, too. And I think they’re probably right.

But weather certainly has a place in our world and in our work.

I grew up in Oklahoma and learned early-on that watching the weather can be a matter of life and death.

For a while, I lived on the edge of a vast wheat field and was privileged to watch combat between man and weather. Combines clanked and roared their way back and forth across ripe wheat trying to get the crop in before the weather hit. In this case, the weather was rain and hail bearing down on the men and their machines. And threatening their livelihood.

Storms on the prairie (and, for that matter, on the Gulf of Mexico) may not always be big enough to have a name, but they have a face, a front edge that you can see for miles.  

Here on Colorado’s Front Range, the weather is seldom intense. From my chair at the computer, I cannot see the glorious Rocky Mountains because of The Foot Hills. They block my view. But far from resenting their intrusion, I love them.

They teach me about the weather here. When the morning light shows them clear and bold, I’ll have yet another of the many sunny days. A wave cloud can mean a dreary day, because it usually spreads toward Denver out on the prairie to our east and blocks the sunshine until that short, amazing time when the sun blazes from below the cloud before sinking behind the hills.

And on days like today, when the foot hills are shrouded in roiling blue-gray, I know the weather is very close. There is no face, no edge to see, just the knowledge that it, whatever it is, is very near and very soon.

Like the dark moors of the Brontë sisters and Arthur Conan Doyle’s London fog. And that saddest of rains in A Farewell to Arms. It is coming.

So, unless you have a damn good reason to, don’t open your story with a weather report. But, if it helps you tell your story, use it.

See You at the Movies

Tonight, finally, is the Academy Awards. The night when all the speculation ends. We had the elections, the Super Bowl, and now the Academy Awards. What will the so-called television news shows talk about after they’ve rehashed tonight’s red carpet and who’s wearing whom? Oh, yes, there is sequestration.

The Movies. I do enjoy going to the movies. The screen is big enough to completely fill my field of vision. The sounds surround me. The scent of popcorn saturates everything, including my clothes and hair. The lights go down and I am ready to be transported.

Well, after all the trailers and television show adverts, not to mention the local dry cleaners and pharmacies. Then there are the admonitions to silence our cell phones and prohibitions against texting. The requests that we properly dispose of our trash and the entreaties to not talk. But even public television indulges in ads and requests for donations. I guess it’s the sign of the times and a reminder that somebody has to pay for all this. (No, I didn’t forget about the price we just paid for tickets and refreshments. But, never mind, never mind.)

I have seen three of the nine Academy Award nominees: Lincoln, Life of Pi, and Les Miserables. All were done very well. Need I add that the books were better? But then books, by their very nature, have more time to do it better and bigger and in more dimensions than 3.

“But that’s not what I come here to talk about. I come to talk about the draft.” Oh, dear. That’s another song and another time.

What I did come here to talk about is the last time I went to the movies. A couple of weeks ago.

We went to see the re-release of Top Gun in 3D. I love this movie. It’s the nearest I’ll ever come to taking off and landing on an aircraft carrier. Next to lift off from Cape Canaveral, that has got to be the greatest rush possible.

The lights in the theater dimmed and I was ready to be transported along with a small crowd of perfect strangers.

The word perfect  turns out to be an imperfect adjective as applied to that particular audience.

Some man entered with his four-year-old in tow. A vocal, unhappy, four-year-old, easily frightened by 3D special effects. Then a group of noisy 20-somethings, male and female, took seats in the back.

I don’t know which was worse. The frightened child and his insensitive father. Or the young adults who thought they were sitting in their own living room and could spout intellectually limited witticisms during the love scenes.

Someday, when I’m rich and famous, I’ll buy out the theater and invite the public free-of-charge. I will set guards at the entrance to allow only people who are old enough to enjoy the movie—without regard to actual age—to enter.

I’ll have a nice cappuccino and sit in the middle, right up front. And I’ll be transported along with an audience of perfect strangers. 

The Wheel of Time

At last it is done. A Memory of Light is read and the Wheel of Time series is completed. Delayed so long by the time it takes to write and edit and publish books, then the reading interrupted by normal life intrusions, the epic fantasy finally ended for me this morning.

And so it is with A Memory of Light. Physically too large to hold easily and read in bed, this Final Battle sometimes dragged me forward, sometimes hurled me forward, and sometimes beat me down with such sorrow that I didn’t think I could continue. But like the characters Robert Jordan raised and Brandon Sanderson carried on, I had to see it through to the end. Whatever end that might be.

My journey through the Third Age began early in 2008, shortly after the announcement that Brandon Sanderson would finish Robert Jordan’s work. As a fan of J.R.R. Tolkien, I had been forever after The Trilogy of the Rings, dissatisfied by fantasy fiction in general. I had never liked series. Most had characters about whom I did not care past the first book. And the stories got watered-down and I, quite frankly, did not care how they ended.

The characters in the Wheel of Time series are so well-wrought that they lived in my imagination parallel to the real people in my real world. I cared what happened to them. I needed as much as wanted to know what happened to them.

And the story. The story is truly epic. Written on this page, the word epic is so small, but it feels too big to be contained by this world. I’m sure the story of my real world, if there might be such a story, is also epic. But it does not present itself to me in a coherent beginning, middle, and end style that I can follow. The characters in my real world are so little known to me, even those closest to me, that I do not get to see more than snapshots and shadows of their thoughts and feelings, their anticipations and experiences. There may be a Pattern to my real life just as there is in the Wheel of Time, but I can’t see it. Here is the advantage of fantasy done well. I can’t see these things in my life but I can in the lives of the characters in these books.

Five years and fourteen books later, The Wheel of Time has turned as it willed and, I am satisfied.

Traditions

Traditions

The radio talk show was focusing on Christmas food traditions. The foods were from around the world, some familiar to me with my Oklahoma background. Some I’ve never heard of before, much less eaten.

The host said his family eats at a Chinese restaurant every Christmas. Visions not of sugar plums, which I have never seen or eaten, but of A Christmas Story and the Bumpus hounds made me smile. Then he said he’s Jewish. Now that’s something to think about.

And I like it.

The idea that Christmas traditions need not be exclusive to Christians is wonderful. In fact, no one need be excluded from having their own Christmas traditions.

We can all appreciate and celebrate peace and good will. We can all enjoy family and fellowship. We can all give and forgive. And none of these concepts require adherence to a particular religion or culture or food preference.

Maybe I should look into holidays that I do not now celebrate. Without a doubt we could all benefit by developing our own Hanukkah traditions or Kwanzaa or Diwali or Eid al-Fitr or Risshun. Or any festival from wherever-in-the-world that celebrates life and hope.

And, perhaps, we would be too busy celebrating to focus on division and despair.

Neil Alden Armstrong

On a grainy black and white television, I watched Neil Alden Armstrong step on the moon July 20, 1969.

People completely disinterested in the event filled the room. Old people whose first trip away from small-town Oklahoma was to go to WWII. And a baby less than two-weeks-old, visiting from its small-town in New Mexico. That baby’s older siblings argued and played with their dog. The baby’s parents, grandparents, and an assortment of other adult relatives chatted and cooed. I felt like I was the only person in the room who cared about the picture on the TV, being received in an American heartland room, live from the moon. And maybe that day, I was. At least in that room.

I knew that with that small step and giant leap we as a species were starting our emigration away from our natal planet.

We all come from a long line of immigrants. My great-grandparents came from the old-country. Someday one of my great-grand-children or great-great-grandchildren will say they came from the old-world. And their new world will truly be a new world, not just a new continent, or a new country, or a new neighborhood.

I do not believe that I will visit a colony on the moon. But I do believe that I will live long enough to see other people do just that. Average people. Not only highly trained, physically fit astronauts hired by and representing this nation or that one. But a geologist from a state university somewhere in this old world, going to do research. A teacher husband joining his doctor wife. He will be one of many to teach the colony’s children. And she will be one of many to provide professional support to the colony’s growing population. A population of miners and mechanics and technicians and restaurateurs and grocers and all the other people who make a community thrive.

That teacher will teach the children about astronauts from the 20^th Century who rode the ships into space. He may not take the time to teach them about the dreamers and the scientists and the regular people just like them who made it possible for humans to out-migrate from Earth. But he will teach them about Neil Alden Armstrong, the first human being to stand on the moon.