the Richard Larson blog

"Why write if not to try to join the absolute best?"

Matt Cheney on artists consciously choosing to work within particular genres:

But what if an SF writer aspires to reach toward the heights of Kafka and Borges?  Why write if not to try to join the absolute best? (Which is not to say everybody will agree with me that Kafka and Borges are among the absolute best, but they're among the absolute best for me, so I use them.)  Then I'm not sure it makes a whole lot of sense to try to write within a genre community.  It's kind of like wanting to make a zombie movie that is as good as Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game.  You're unlikely to include the stuff that makes for a good zombie movie, and you're also unlikely to be as good as Renoir, because, well, who's as good as Renoir?  Or maybe you'll be really good, but not in a genre that needs you to be really good -- the Stephen Sondheim problem.  Sondheim's created an absolutely stunning body of work within the musical theatre genre ... but despite the genre-bending that much of his work has accomplished, it's still in the musical theatre genre, and the limits of the genre continue to limit him, because if they didn't, he would no longer be writing musical theatre -- he'd be writing opera, or concerti, or plays.  Which is fine, and probably best, but reminds us that we have to evaluate things within the context that produced them.  It's not a perfect comparison, though, because SF can only be called a genre in a very general sense, and is less constricted than musical theatre, and its limits may be more limits of reader expectation than anything else.  If you don't want to at least partly meet the expectations of genre readers, then it's not doing you much good to try to write for a genre audience, whatever that genre may be.

The Oscars

Kind of annoying.  I mean, I'm excited about Benjamin Button's success, but Frost/Nixon and The Reader belong nowhere near the list of Best Picture nominees (and even Milk may be stretching it...), the Sally Hawkins snub is obscene, the Kate Winslet nomination should have been for Revolutionary Road, etc.  I'll come up with some predictions at a later date, but for the moment I'm just generally bothered.

Back from D.C.!

What an amazing weekend.

 

(yes, it looks like this pin is from another event, but I think you get the idea...)

Man On Wire

"The object of my dream did not exist yet," says Philippe Petit, the subject of Man On Wire, James Marsh's documentary about the French tightrope walker who walked between the two towers of the World Trade Center in 1974.  The film is framed by this concept of the acquisition of dreams, tangible or otherwise, and how we motivate ourselves to achieve what we want out of life.  The young Phillipe had just seen a picture in a newspaper of the projected finished product of the World Trade Center's then-imminent construction and he had already decided that he would eventually walk a tightrope between the towers, thus dedicating himself to preparing for the day when he'll have the opportunity to make this dream a reality.  And when he looks back upon his eventual success, now much older and being interviewed for the documentary, he speaks of the possibility that he may have died during the attempt, but "what a beautiful death!  To die in the exercise of your passion!"  The film is an elegy to a life "lived on the tightrope," a tribute to a mad, extravagant kind of dreaming, the idea that we can exist simply to transcend the very nature of that existence.  The success of Petit's attempt is a marvel to behold, almost making us forget how creepy it is to see how easily he broke into the World Trade Center and how vulnerable the buildings must have always been up until the moment of their destruction, an eventuality that is not mentioned at all in Man On Wire, an omission which lends the towers a mythical, almost timeless quality, perfectly representative of the transience of Petit's dream. And the experience of watching his group's infiltration of the World Trade Center is actually wonderful, rather than disconcerting, because it is in the service of something grand and seemingly impossible, instead of a piece of some sinister plot. How innocent it all seems now, breaking into a major world landmark only to perform what amounts to circus trickery, but that sentiment contributes directly to the power of Philippe Petit's achievement and the success of this extraordinarily affecting film.

Golden Globes!

While always kind of lame, the Golden Globes are still more or less worth watching, and seeing Kate Winslet take home two awards (for both The Reader and Revolutionary Road) was awesome, as was the win by Sally Hawkins and the standing ovation when Heath Ledger's award was announced.  Plus, the awkward banter by award presenters is always a riot. 

Slumdog Millionaire looks more and more like a sure bet for the top prize at the Oscars... even as I hold out hope for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.  I wish I had liked Revolutionary Road more, but other than that, my favorite films of the year ended up being smaller, more intimate films (Wendy and Lucy, Let The Right One In, Synecdoche, etc) which didn't end up being major awards fodder. 

I think it was actually a better year for horror films, though, than the past few years have been; along with Let The Right One In, I think The Strangers and Cloverfield are both really important contributions to the genre.

I love Liesl Schillinger:

Consider the barrage of movies and news, Internet and travel options — images and innovations that simultaneously satisfy and dull one’s curiosity, replacing reflection and reverie with quick sensation. If contemporary audiences prefer to watch “The Last of the Mohicans” rather than to read it, is Fenimore Cooper diminished? If foreign readers find no affinity with Updike, Roth or Oates, does that mean our men and women of letters have lost their art? And, by the same token, if American readers would rather watch cable television to get their Tolstoy and Austen, and choose to skip “The Magic Mountain,” “The Brothers Karamazov,” Elfriede Jelinek and Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, is Europe to blame? Or is the capacity for the quiet use of leisure, something essential to reading, on the wane? Isolation and insularity can afflict any land. One of the best cures is to read the finest literature from as many places as possible.

(from a review of Louise Erdrich's new short story collection, The Red Convertible, in which Schillinger challenges Horace Engdahl's statement last year that American literature is "too isolated, too insular ... [not participating] in the big dialogue of literature")

Year in Review

The reviewers at Strange Horizons (myself included) have come up with a 2008 In Review feature which is well worth checking out, pointing to a bunch of great stuff that's appeared in the past year.