First, it has to be the right snow. Big-flake, Bing Crosby, stick to the ground snow that won’t let you run your fingers through it, snow that muffles and crunches when your foot comes down. It can still be snowing, or you can wait until it stops; your call. If the snow came unexpectedly, there will still be the leavings of the lawn’s last mowing beneath it. You take a handful of the stuff, compact it into the shape of the inside of your first, and then you roll it, as if rolling out a carpet, along the ground.
Eventually you will be rolling up big ribbons of snow, leaving the stark, perplexed grass behind. There will be grass stuck in the snow, but don’t worry. This is October and there will be more snow. What you’re doing now is reminding your yard what it means to board snow people. For now, just keep rolling. The snow will come up like laying down sod in reverse, a snow burrito. Whenever you feel like it, turn the snow roll a quarter turn and start to roll again, to even things out. Whenever it’s big enough, roll it somewhere with good lighting, a place of prominence, because your man is going to be standing there at least until November, dying sooner only if some punk kid happens along with delusions of martial art. When it’s in place, you can start your second ball, the torso ball. This one need not be as big, unless you’re making a misshapen man for fun.
Don’t worry if the snow ball you’re rolling cracks and falls to pieces. You’ll be able to see the layers of the thing, like a broken jawbreaker, seeing the ribbons of grass spiraling through the cutaway snow like the sparkling layers of a geode opened by a skilled lapidary.
It doesn’t matter what you’re making because anything is more than what you had before.
You can stack as many parts as you like, vertical for humanoids, horizontal for reptiles, and do not be shy about fashioning grotesque, exaggerated sex organs for your creations; you are not the first to do this and you will not be the last. Men have been fashioning all kinds of things into penises since time immemorial, so feel free to indulge these inner urges. Breasts are fine too, but women in your group will be critical of them, noting that they are likely lop-sided and disproportionate. Pebbles or acorns can be added for nipples, if you like.
You can use anything handy for facial features and accessories. Carrots are popular for noses, but you can also use doorknobs, extra shoes, old boxing gloves. Buckets should only ever be used as hats; never as a brassiere. Coal is alright to use for eyes, but who has coal handy anymore? Apples work, as will most citrus, but you will have a flock of crows violating your creation in a few days, so be warned. If you’re making a snow scarecrow, this will add to the effect.
Twigs and sticks can serve as appendages, but they aren’t very original. Mats of grass can, of course, he fashioned into rudimentary hair pieces, and as long as your snow women have none on their faces or under their arms, no one driving by will be terribly offended.
Give your snowman an old coat to keep him warm and giggle at the irony.
The important thing is to have the guy smile. Bananas will do for this, as will a simple curvilinear line of stones, or a loop of red licorice if you’re really creative. He won’t be around for long (but who of us really is?) and it’s the least you can to do make his brief stay pleasant.
The NFL is recognizing Breast Cancer Awareness month by dappling in bits of pink all over stadiums and player uniforms. Aaron Rodgers wore a pink sweatband tonight, and Brett Favre wore pink shoes. It’s an interesting item of consideration. Football is typically thought of as the ultimate man’s sport (well, at least here, in a country that’s never heard of rugby), where big manful guys rage around on a full-contact chessboard. Seeing them in pink is, well, it’s funny.
But why breast cancer specifically? And is there a correlation between the advertisements one could see at the Metrodome tonight touting the newly released Cheerleader Swimsuit Calendar? I don’t want to claim that the NFL is insensitive, but why breast cancer and not, I dunno, brain cancer, or leukemia? Well, because American culture loves boobies, holds them in esteem over all other female body parts, and, perhaps, the thought of the mammaries riddled with cancer is fearsome enough for the male population that it warrants these superficial displays of concern. Because no guy ever fantasized about a woman with really, really good bone marrow.
It just seems incongruous that an organization that so objectifies and exploits the female form (gotta sell those swimsuit calendars, so, bounce titties, bounce) would so boldly and with no self-awareness promote breast health. As if there’s anything healthy about the kinds of breasts that perhaps the men who watch NFL football so rabidly would prefer. Nonetheless, big, mountainous boobies filled with saline are great, but, never, no, never, we never want our boobies filled with cancer.
Here at least, fourth grade feminine wisdom hold true: Boys are weird.
Autumn finally showed up, making her bold, drizzly proclamation, and today she and summer had a tussle, one final argument before the changing of the guard. The storm started in the morning and went all day, dropping rain in sprinkles and heavy sheets, lightning in scattered flashes, thunder like rupturing quarries of invisible stone. The chill set in and held on through the rain, reminding us at once of the summer that has been spent, this storm the brisk final note of that warm sonata, and the winter that’s waiting, just ahead, like a bandit around the pass, chilly pistol in hand, chamber loaded, hammer back, patient.
For the entire next day, the machine stood silent under its tarp. There was a perfunctory twine fence strung up between makeshift posts in a wide circumference around the machine–the nearest camper was not within a half mile of the shrouded rocket. The ground around the machine was strewn with tools and scraps and other detritus of invention and construction. Acetylene torches like strange alien probes, confetti bits of wire insulation, dully glinting washers and bolts, cans of paint with leftover reservoirs congealed at the bottom, brushes forgotten, their bristles made brittle and useless, scraps of metal with edges burned black and jagged, and a massive black anvil like a fossilized bone from some unimaginable prehistorical animal.
from “Earthly Possessions”
Dan Brown’s new novel, The Lost Symbol, came out last week. Over a million people bought it. I was one of them. It’s been interesting to see the sort of division the novel has caused in reviewers. Some seem to view it as the next progressive step in Dan Brown’s career as a writer of intellectual thrillers, while others seem to view it as the coming of the Anti-Christ. Even one trusted friend of mine seemed to think that I needed to give back my English degree if I was going to go anywhere near the novel, let alone read it.
Well, I read it. I’ve also read everything Dan Brown’s published. And I still have my English degree. So, I’m going to try to articulate here why I think Dan Brown is worth your time, and why he is not, in fact, a harbinger of the death of the American novel.
To draw comparisons to another titan of modern publishing, I want to say, unequivocally, that Dan Brown is a much better writer than Stephanie Meyer (the author of the Twilight series of novels). Both writers sell almost unfathomable amounts books and have, for better or worse, become two of the few rock stars of American letters. The largest and most important distinction between the two of these writers, however, is this: Dan Brown is a good writer; Stephanie Meyer is not.
Neither of them write particularly challenging books, and neither of them will ever be considered great stylists, each of them preferring simple sentences, often with painful attempts at variety. For example, Stephanie Meyer needs a thesaurus to rectify the fact that the world “perfect” appears in Twilight some forty times, and Dan Brown’s editor should have explained to him that using an ellipsis to establish tension in a singular sentence is clumsy and cheap. At a basic sentence level, neither author is going to blow your hair back. Some sentences may even make you cringe.
However, Dan Brown’s books do not actively seem to assume that their readers are dumb. What Brown lacks in lexical acumen he more than makes up for with his keen sense of narrative momentum, of giving the reader enough intriguing plot and enough fascinating historical information that he can’t help but continue reading. He builds tension and interest, so that the reader wants concurrently to know what is going to happen next and also to proceed to the next historical oddity that Brown has uncovered in his research. Conversely, Stephanie Meyer spent the first 400 pages of Twilight setting up a stunted, unsatisfying conclusion. Up until that point in Meyer’s book, not really happens. In Dan Brown, stuff is happening from the first page. In a genre piece, whether it’s a thriller or a vampire novel, or science fiction or a mystery, stuff needs to happen, and stuff needs to continue happening in a logical succession of events. Brown understands this basic plotting notion; Meyer appears to be simply winging it.
There is a craftsmanship apparent in Brown’s novels that is almost entirely absent from Meyer. Sure, Brown’s books are formulaic, but most genre fiction, to an extent, is. What matters is not that a reader may anticipate what will happen in a book, but rather how the author delivers to reader to those events. Spoiler alert, but, at the end of The Lost Symbol, Robert Langdon, the brilliant Harvard symbologist, saves the world. I know. I just blew your mind, right? That’s just the way these novels work. In that sense, before we even begin reading, we already know the ending. But it is the scaffolding of intrigue that Brown creates, how he propels readers from one event and twist to the next that marks him as a very capable practitioner of the thriller genre. Even though we know how it all ends, we want to see how Brown delivers us to that inevitable conclusion.
Brown’s not going to win a Pulitzer, but he’s totally not trying to. Casino Royale was an amazing spy movie, but it totally wasn’t trying to win the Best Picture Oscar. I don’t read Dan Brown for the same reason that I read someone like Michael Chabon or William Faulkner in just the same way that I don’t watch Clerks for the same reason I watch THe Godfather–but all of this stuff nonetheless trigger certain happy-making parts of my mind. I read Brown for an educated, intelligent thriller with interesting insights in art, history and science. I don’t read it for spiritual edification.
And, in that regard, The Lost Symbol is a terrific read. It doesn’t have the break-neck sense of urgency found in Angel & Demons, but I think it’s content about Noetic science, the founding of the United States, and the Masonic conception of God has the potential to be as every bit as controversial as the Christian history explored in The Da Vinci Code. It will be interesting to see if people have a reaction to the ideas presented in the novel’s final fifty pages.
There’s of course much more to be said here about reader expectations and about why people read what they read, and even about the conventions of genre fiction versus literary fiction. But for now I’m content to know that I had a really fun reading experience.
If the books you’re reading aren’t fun, then, seriously, why would you read them?
The photograph is famous. Two steam engines, massive like steel destriers, one aimed at either distant coast, converging on that sliver of Utah countryside. There are men everywhere in frame that there is room for them. The men here are hard men, chambray men, grimed and lined by sun and grit. A man stands atop one hulking engine and proffers a champagne bottle to a man man opposite him holding an empty slender glass. There are other men in suits with watch chains bridging the rounded landscape between their lapels. The emotions visible are only the barest expressions of reserved pride. Men lean poised on the sidewalls of the steam engines, reposed on crooked arms, their mouths sly smiles beneath the shadowed coronas provided by their hats. In the foreground, two men make a show of shaking hands. And of course, behind these two men, standing somewhat timidly, much of him obscured by an unfortunate top hat, is The Beacon. The steady glow emitted from the portal at the face of his helmet is evident as a bright blur in the primitive nineteenth-century photography.
-from The Beacon
There was a guy in the store the other day talking about office pranks. After several volleys back and forth, his co-worker applied a clandestine layer of super glue to a door handle, to which the guy I was talking to stuck his hand.
“That’s my left hand,” he clarifies. “The hand I eat with, the hand I write with. My gaming hand.” Then, after a pause, “Sex life goes to shit.”
The removal of his hand claimed a layer of skin from that useful appendage.
He then told me that, in retaliation, in the dead of winter, he went out to the parking lot and Saran-wrapped this jerk’s entire car, fender to bumper, covering everything. And then I learned about unfathomable physics. Apparently, when ice cold water is dumped onto plastic wrap, it violently and powerfully constricts.
“If you wrapped a person with it and dumped ice water on them, it’s shrink so hard that it’d break bones.”
When this principal is applied to automobiles, it means that constricting plastic shatters every window, front and back windshields, incurring thousands in damages in the blink of an instant.
The guy I was talking to said that he snuck back into the office, and though the victim knew it was him, he could never prove it.
I like to have an optimistic view of human interactions, but this anecdote reinforces the notion that we have our high level of ingenuity, we are at our most cunning, when it comes to our desire to hurt one another.
But, then again, you have to admit, that’s pretty damn clever. And more than a little funny.
Even for a medium that exists to make the unimaginable manifest, the Beacon’s existence as an enduring cultural figure strained credulity. Just one of many heroes created in that spiritually depressed period during and following the American Great Depression, the Beacon faded into obscurity rather quickly following the first set of issues. Created by Herbert Dresden in 1932, the hero was stalwart, stoic, not very talkative, and quick to take decisive and authoritative action against anyone he perceived as a threat to the “eventual reinstatement of the American superiority.” Of course, it’s somewhat unfair to indict these early Beacon stories without a consideration of the sociopolitical climate in which they were written. Siegel and Schuster’s inimitable Superman—often credited as the first true American superhero— was still years away, and the American repository of mythology was running dry. The nation was craving a figure to rally around, a body onto which they could see their own trials and anxieties represented, a hero for an age bereft of hope.
If one of the principle signs of genius is the ability to recognize a lack and fill it, then Dresden would certainly qualify. Rather than dwell on the uncertainty and inequity of that dark time, Dresden looked back to a period of adversity overcome, of evil defeated. The brilliance of this move is apparent—for a nation that emerged afresh from the tangle morass of civil war could certainly again rise from the depths of destitution and lack. In a 1933 interview—when the Beacon’s popularity was rising—Dresden said he intended the character to “ignite the fires of hope under a despondent populous.” It was clear that Dresden has a poetic sense of self-heroics from the beginning, a trait we find common in analogous men of ambition.
One could argue that Dresden indeed forged the template by which other superheroes—most notably Siegel and Schuster’s Superman and the creations of Marvel’s Stan Lee—would be created. In Lee’s stories, the genesis of heroes are centered on pre-existing cultural anxieties about the advancements of science and the mysteries of atomic power. Dresden’s analogue is the growing acumen of American industrialists at the end of the Civil War and during the reformation. The Beacon himself emerges from an industrial accident as a freak of genetics and nature, a man concurrently blessed and cursed with the strangest of physical dispositions. Put simply, the Beacon possessed the ability to absorb all ambient heat energy from the space around him. In a mechanical sense, he was the perfect machine, able to convert ambient energy into work with one hundred percent efficiency. In a world predicated on the power of its emerging class of machines, the Beacon was the perfect specimen.
-a bit from the big pile of The Beacon work I’ve got sitting disheveled on the floor.
Games are starting to get interesting. Despite some recent criticism (the bad kind, not the argumentative kind) on behalf of writers such as Steven Johnson (whose book Everything Bad is Good for You gets games just completely wrong, despite arguing that they may not be, after all, completely bad for you), video games are beginning to find ways to tell singular narratives that only function effectively in a video game. Hideo Kojima wants his Metal Gear Solid series to be a cinematic experiences, but in trying to make his games filmic, he sacrifices some of their, to use a pretty clumsy noun, gameness.
I have an unabashed love for BioShock. Even though the final boss was completely lame, and even though I felt like the narrative peaked about three-quarters through the game, what that game did with narrative and player agency is better than anything I’ve ever seen in a video game. The story plays with the core concept of a video game–meaning, that the player, more or less, must do a series of tasks in a sequence to accomplish the ultimate goal of the game. Meaning that, to accomplish to goal, to progress in the game, the player really has no choice but to play the game. A man chooses, a slave obeys, as goes Andrew Ryan’s Randian dogma. But, in games, as much as current developers proselytize about the necessity of player choice, really, the player has already chosen to act through the events of the game. BioShock plays with that very foundational concept, and the narrative payoff is incredible.
Other games are finding different ways of telling stories. I’ve been playing this nifty little iPhone game called Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor. In summary, you play as a spider who can construct webs across various domestic levels to trap insects of various kinds that have infested an abandoned house. And on that level, the game is perfectly serviceable and enjoyable. But the backgrounds themselves, the levels across which the player is guiding the spider, tell the macabre story of what happened to the Bryce family, and why this house now stands empty. For instance, the spider may crawl over a wicker basket, only to fall in and discover a bloody chisel resting hidden at the bottom. What happened with that chisel? Those questions and the environmental answers make up the passive narrative of the game. It’s really well done.
Consumable narratives have long been the purview of films and books; games are just now beginning to catch up, evolving past the kill-fest point-a-thons of early gaming, and evolving into a discreet vessel for the delivery of narrative, narratives that can affect players in ways that conventional narrative types cannot.
This post could go on for pages and pages, discussing the emotional investment in Ico, the character drama of Final Fantasy VII, the sprawling story-driven worlds of Oblivion and Fallout 3, the allegorical masterpiece of Braid. But, in the interest of space and the author’s wrists, I’ll stop here and proclaim, loudly across the internets, that it’s a good time to be a gamer. We’re seeing a renaissance of narrative execution. And it’s only going to get better from here.
