Words are inadequate

This has been four-fifths written since mid-September. May as well finish a thing, to the extent that memory serves.

( cathedrals, montmartre, rodin, eiffel )

Potential wrapup of random bits that didn't fit anywhere else coming, um, maybe.

JOE: We're gonna have to live with them eventually.
HARRY: Who?
JOE: The Protestants, Harry. The other half of the population.

Watching a film set in the Troubles on the eve of travel to Minneapolis and after doing some reading about Palestine may not have been the wisest course. Then again, maybe it was. No time like the present.

"The Boxer" is mostly about Daniel Day-Lewis and Emily Watson's characters' relationship, but there's a lot of focus on Harry the IRA warlord and Joe the more political-minded IRA leader as well.

HARRY: And what are you offering, Joe?
JOE: Peace, Harry. Peace.
HARRY: Well, I'm sure you can deliver.

I'll be doing bus-stop watch for a couple of days, making sure kids can get home from school or seeing where they get taken if they don't. It's scary out here.

Silmarillion update: I used to have what turns out to be a first-US-edition Silmarillion (not first printing, not in great shape) that was Pop's. Emily had the same edition in better condition and less smoke-infested, so Pop's went before the crosscountry move fifteen years ago, and then Emily's obviously went with her. In conversation Steph determined the particular edition from my vague description ("white-ish dust jacket, big fold-out map of Beleriand glued to the endcover"), found a site with a few copies that were well within my budget, and then while I was dithering bought one for me. So that was a nice end to the year.

The last time I read LotR, some ten or twelve years ago, was the first time I'd read Pop's copies. Before that almost all my reads had been in increasingly-decrepit Ballantine paperbacks from the eighties, bright blue/green/red with Darrell K. Sweet covers. It turned out to be extremely distracting to have the familiar words in different places on the page. Apparently I imprinted hard.

My nice fancy new edition of The Hobbit has an extensive editor's note from Christopher Tolkien talking about the changes they've made to bring it in line with what can be deduced of JRRT's desires for a Preferred Text. Unfortunately this means it's missing Tolkien's second-edition note, the one that begins "In this edition several minor inaccuracies, most of them noted by readers, have been corrected." (AKA "the Watsonian explanation for why I had to retcon 'Riddles In The Dark' to bring it in line with Lord of the Rings.") It felt downright weird to read the book without that note. Thankfully I also have a paperback with the psychedelic pink fruits and emus (no lion, alas; must be a later edition), so I can read the introductory note as is Proper.

... it occurs to me that Pop's hardbacks lack the Peter Beagle essay/encomium that appeared as the front page of my Ballantine paperbacks, which also imprinted though I was far too young to understand it. Text follows, so that I'll have it.

( Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams. )

That sure has been a year. Further retrospective to come, I suppose.

What are you reading now?

The Hobbit, nth reread. Over at LG&M Abigail Nussbaum is blogging a reread of Lord of the Rings, and that's inspired me to pick them up again. I've a nice anniversary edition of Hobbit with JRRT's illustrations to read, and Pop Shackelford's late-seventies hardbacks of the trilogy. Unsure what I'll do for a Silmarillion but that is a next-week problem at the earliest.

Usually I'm a little annoyed by The Hobbit: it's tonally dissonant from LotR, more of a bedtime story than Serious Fiction. This time through I'm finding it an absolute delight. It's very clearly written to be read aloud, and the prose is just musical. I am also hearing the voices of John 'Gandalf' Huston and Orson 'Bilbo' Bean in my head as I read. Presumably this will extend to Richard 'Smaug' Boone as well once I get that far.

What did you just finish reading?

A.K. Larkwood's The Unspoken Name / The Thousand Eyes duology, which came highly recommended ages ago. Sigh. I wanted to like these, and did like the first third of the first book. Csorwe is an Orc girl who's due to be sacrificed to her god, the Unspoken Name; instead she gets kidnapped by someone who is quite probably the book's evil sorcerer and becomes quite a competent right hand for him. I quite enjoyed Csorwe's point-of-view and voice. I liked it less when she was forced to work with a particular obnoxious character who she had good reason to hate, even less when we started getting his viewpoint and were clearly intended to sympathise with him, and much less than that when her viewpoint disappears entirely a quarter through the second book.

These are doing very neat things with gods and immortality. I wish I'd been less annoyed and more able to appreciate those neat things. If you can get past Talasseres being insufferable, and don't mind character-stretching wisecracking, I'd recommend them.

Before that, R.F. Kuang's Katabasis, best summed up by her: "I started off writing this like ha ha, academia is hell, and then it was oh no, academia IS Hell." Cambridge graduate student in magic descends to the Underworld to retrieve her advisor, who she thinks she killed; she's accompanied by a golden-boy grad student for (it turns out) similar reasons. This sneaks in under the wire as my favourite read of the year. It opens with a passage complaining about inaccuracies in depictions of the journey to the underworld:

Dante's account was so distracted with spiteful potshots that the reportage got lost within. T.S. Eliot had supplied some of the more recent and detailed landscape descriptions on record, but The Waste Land was so self-referential that its status as a sojourner's account was under serious dispute. Orpheus's notes, already in archaic Greek, were largely in shreds like the rest of him. And Aeneas-- well, that was all Roman propaganda.

I love this, but then I would. It's great. I am deeply annoyed that the publisher (and the author's agent) refuse to even talk to Subterranean about doing a fancy edition.

What do you think you'll read next?

LotR, naturellement. After that, anyone's guess. Lord knows there's plenty on the shelf to pick from.

Yesterday I flew home from Minneapolis. My bag got lost, for the first time in ages, so I slept CPAP-less (poorly) last night. When the bag deigned to arrive this morning, it was missing one of the zipper sliders. Same thing happened to an identical bag last year. Time to stop buying and recommending Travelpro suitcases, no matter how nice the wheels are.

I also had a crown break and pop off on Saturday. And my dentist is on holiday until the fifth of January. Argh. At least it's not hurting. I did speak with him briefly and got "yeah, just keep it clean and be gentle with it, and DON'T PUT THE BROKEN CROWN BACK ON."

We lose our use of colour
Just water on the brush

Minneapolis had snow and sun, which were both a nice change from the overly typical wintergrey here. Contrariwise, it remains nice to be back at home with my kitten.

Small changes, small improvements, day by day. Sunreturn.

From today's Ask A Manager update:

I am still job searching. It's extremely rough out there, and I have not been able to get very far in interviews for the same job I left at this company because I am so early career. I've been getting feedback from companies when they do not move forward with me that they just have more candidates with more experience, always.

Money is at least sorted for the short-term. Assuming I can in fact sell this place and find somewhere else to live, it's sorted medium-term as well. Beyond that, I refer you to John Maynard Keynes: "In the long run, we are all dead."

(Context makes that quote much more interesting than simple fatalism. Keynes was arguing with someone claiming that certain economic policies would make things worse in the short term but in the long run we'd all be much better off. Keynes believed strongly in fixing what we could now, an attitude I appreciate even when I have trouble implementing it. Can't have a better future if you can't get yourself into the future.)

Books on shelves, roof overhead, food in pantry, snoring cat. Breaking out the xmas stuff this weekend, I think. Could be worse.

Took Mr Tuppert in to the vet today for his annual vaccines. Apparently when you get a rabies shot they give you a cute lil tag. I may put that on his collar, Just In Case. The odds of him getting out are basically nil but why take chances.

He's got a heart murmur, but it looks like that came up last time, and it's not gotten any worse, so that's just a Thing That Exists. Between that, the one tooth that the vet's been warning me about since he arrived, and what might be early-stage arthritis, this is a cat that is made of Problems (But Not Yet). I'm okay with that. Chaos started showing wear at about this point (thirteen-ish) as well, and he got another four years after that.

I did have a moment of "oh no" when the vet-tech took him to the back for shots and blood-drawing. Nothing real or serious, just the sudden realisation that I'm not nearly ready for him to go away, to be taken into a room by a kind and gentle tech and not come back out again. Of course I'll be there when it happens, this time, but still.

When we got home I gave him a little bit of tunafish, and filled up his treat-puzzle with treats. I don't think he's gotten -all- of them yet but he certainly spent some good time snuffling and crunching. Currently he is sacked out on the bed Recovering. Seems fair.

I move a lot. I was an Army brat, that's expected. But I've moved more since becoming an adult. As an Army brat I moved about once every two and a half years; as an adult, it's one move every twenty months.

I feel like I am in a good position to declare that moving sucks.

However. I've been remarkably stable lately. The three and a half years I've been at Corvaric are now the longest I've lived in a single place as an adult, and the third-longest in my life. (Four years in a townhouse outside of DC for high school, preceded by the five worst years of my life in Fayetteville NC in late elementary and junior high.) I was in the same apartment complex for the almost-five years I lived in northern Virginia right after college, but I changed apartments to move in with Emily halfway through that.

This also pushes my total time in the lower mainland (the Vancouver area) above the eleven years I spent in Blacksburg VA. (The longest I've spent in any one locale is still northern Virginia, at not quite twelve years, spread across three separate occasions.)

Sure, I'd rather stay in the same place, put down roots, all that. Just never seems to quite come together for me. There's always a good reason to move: money, or job, or relationship, or just "this place is terrible." This time I'm betting it'll be money, though it might be any of the above.

No real point to this. I'm not moving imminently. It's just interesting to look back at where I've been, and for how short a time.

Although moving DOES suck.

Joachim Rønning (dir.), Tron: Ares

Apparently I have developed sufficient distance to be at least somewhat objective about a Tron movie. Tron: Ares is ... not good.

It's not awful. It's fine. It's a movie-shaped object. The dialogue, especially in the first third, is too on-the-nose, too screenwriter-school, too concerned with making sure the audience picks up what it's putting down in terms of plot and character. It spends an insufficiency of time inside the computer and too much time bringing inside-the-computer to the Real World.

However. It does look pretty. It has nonwhite characters, something both previous films were sorely lacking. Greta Lee absolutely carries the bulk of the movie, and Gillian Anderson does the heavy lifting for all her scenes. (Zarf: "A good movie would have stabbed the kid and let Mom carry the third act.")

There's a plot. It's ridiculous, as is traditional. The Macguffin is "the permanence code," an algorithm that can allow things to come out of the computer and not fall apart after twenty-nine minutes. The rival heads of rival big-tech-AI companies are trying to find it: one (the one whose computer-world is red) to sell weapons and soldiers to the military, one (the one whose computer-world is blue) to ... make orange trees in Alaska? Just go with it. It's still the case that good, as Jonathan L-- observed in the late nineties, is higher on the electromagnetic spectrum than evil. Eve Kim, the good CEO, finds the permanence code in some forty-year-old five-and-a-quarter floppies that used to belong to Kevin Flynn. Julian Dillinger pulls his main security program Ares into the real world and sends it to get the code from Eve. Ares gets cold feet at the thought of killing Eve and goes rogue, and plot ensues.

Having said that, I can't actually be all that objective about the movie. I imprinted hard on Tron as a kid. I enjoyed Tron Legacy even when it felt like it was trying really hard to visually distance itself from the original. The Ares script is a mess, but someone told the designers that they were making a sequel not just to Legacy but to the original as well. There's a portrait of David Warner, who played the human villain from the first movie, in his grandson's office in the evil corp. I laughed out loud in the theatre when Eve's phone rang and it was the descending-arpeggio motif from Wendy Carlos's Tron soundtrack.

And towards the end there's about a fifteen-minute sequence where Ares ends up in the 1980s 'grid'. It -is- the original Tron, dim lighting and lack of textures and all. I laughed again when the Bit turned up, and caught my breath as Ares shifted into a proper lightcycle. That made me so happy. It even had a few moments of appropriately airy philosophizing, this time about the value of mortality rather than "if you're a User then ... everything you've done has been according to a plan, right?". Jeff Bridges returns to full-on seventies guru mode, and that's pretty good too. (People will say "It's just The Dude from The Big Lebowski" but The Dude was always channeling the same flower-child vibe that Flynn embodied, just twenty years later.)

So, it was absolutely worth it to me, and I cannot in good conscience recommend it to anyone else.

Maybe I'll rewatch the multi-hour Making Of Tron stuff this week.

Postscript: I saw Ares in 3D. I mostly avoid things in 3D, it doesn't add much for me and costs a lot more. (My go-to "this was worth 3D" are Tron Legacy, which I might have a different opinion on now, and The Cave Of Lost Dreams, Werner Herzog's movie about cave paintings, which really did benefit from being able to see how the artists used the texture of the wall.) This was worth it mostly to say "yep, 3D movies do very little for me, even in the kind of effects extravaganza that they're sold for."

Happy Canucksgiving. In light of a recent proclamation from the US Executive Office, do remember that Christopher Columbus is the second-most hated explorer of all time, behind only Internet Explorer.

I'm thankful that citizenship (and before that permanent residency) went through, and I can be unemployed and jobhunting and not have to worry quite so much about health care. I'm thankful for the roof over my head and for my mostly-full fridge and pantry, and for being surrounded by my books and games.

I'm thankful that I've made pies (different pies) for two separate Canucksgivings, yesterday and today. I'm thankful for my acquaintances and friends. I'm thankful that Erin is still talking to me, and for that relationship having had a solid positive impact on me being who I want to be.

I'm thankful for Stephanie, for having found / re-found someone whose flaws and insecurities can complement my own, rather than magnifying them and vice versa.

I'm thankful that after almost three years Mr Tuppert and I are getting along, and Establishing Routines. The last couple of months it's been "breakfast is a time for internet and scritches," which has been a good way to greet the morning.

Autumn grey and coolth have arrived. Time to drag the cold robot back into the storage room for another six months. Time to start baking again.

I'm still here. Next year maybe I can be thankful for that.