Sunday, August 23, 2009

James Bond Daily: The Only Way To Dress For Golf Is Not to Dress for Golf

007 sniffs at the sartorial aspirations of Auric Goldfinger on pp.087-088 of Goldfinger:
Many unlikely people play golf, including people who are blind, who have only one arm, or even no legs, and people often wear bizarre clothes to the game. Other golfers don't think them odd, for there are no rules of appearance of dress at golf. That is one of its minor pleasures. But Goldfinger had made an attempt to look smart at golf and that is the only way of dressing that is incongruous on a links. Everything matched in a blaze of rust-coloured tweed from the buttoned 'golfer's cap' centered on the huge, flaming red hair, to the brilliantly polished, almost orange shoes. The plus-four suit was too well cut and the plus-fours themselves had been pressed down the sides. The stockings were of a matching heather mixture and had green garter tabs. It was as if Goldfinger had gone to his tailor and said, 'Dress me for golf -- you know, like they wear in Scotland.' Social errors made no impression on Bond, and for the matter of that he rarely noticed them. With Goldfinger it was different. Everything about the man had grated on Bond's teeth from the first moment he had seen him. The assertive blatancy of his clothes was just part of the malevolent animal magnetism that had affected Bond from the beginning.
One feels the need to note that Fleming specifically denies that Goldfinger -- ugly, grasping, uncouth, obsessed with gold -- is Jewish. That's good to know. Wouldn't want to think he's a stereotype or anything.
----------------
Listening to: Josh Ritter - You Don't Make It Easy Babe (live)
via FoxyTunes

Saturday, August 22, 2009

Incoming Books: 21 August

I'm on the Borders e-mail list, so I get some kind of offer from them at least once a week -- usually it's something like "all DVD box sets 30% off in stores" or "buy one paperback, get another for 30% off, limited to store stock only." And usually I put the coupon aside, sometimes with a vague intention to go to the (very close) Borders to see what they have. But recently they sent me a coupon with a better offer, which was also good at their website, and so I've actually spent some money.

The deal was to buy one book, and then get a second one for 50% off -- so I found some small-press SF books (four of them), that didn't have any discount on Amazon. And the first two came in yesterday -- I suppose the other two will arrive later, and I'll mention them then.

My four books broke down neatly -- two by Zelazny, two by Silverberg -- and this package continued the split, containing the two Silverberg books:

Other Spaces, Other Times is Silverberg's memoirs of his life in the science fiction world -- conglomerated and adapted from various things Silverberg has written (introductions, columns, etc.) over the past few decades for various reasons. It seems to be all edited together to form a coherent narrative -- and, even if it isn't, I've mentioned several times in the past that I have a weakness for collections of fiction writers' occasional nonfiction, so I expect I'll like this even if it is choppy and disjointed. It's published by an outfit called Nonstop Press, whom I've never heard of. (They say that they're in New York, which is even more surprising -- the book credits Luis Ortiz as editor and Bret Erway as copy editor, and I haven't heard of them. Have I been out of the SF world that long?)

And the other Silverberg book is the third in the ongoing Subterranean Press "Collected Stories" series -- the first of them that I think I've bought, which shows how far behind I am -- Something Wild is Loose, which collects stories from 1969 to 1972. Silverberg is and was an amazing writer of short fiction, and that's perhaps his best period. So -- assuming I ever have time to get to this book, which is a big assumption -- I've got a great book of short stories to look forward to. And now I'm officially collecting this series, so I'd better hurry and find the other books.
----------------
Listening to: Cordero - Come On Dear
via FoxyTunes

Movie Log: Ponyo

I can't tell you the last time that I saw a movie on opening day, but I did it for Hayao Miyazaki's new film Ponyo, and the whole Hornswoggler clan (The Wife and my sons Thing 1 and Thing 2) loved it.

It’s a version of the “Little Mermaid” story, filtered through Miyazaki’s usual environmental concerns and with his desire to tell a story appropriate for five-year-olds. (Since the main characters are themselves five.) It's sweet and lovely, as immersive as any of Miyazaki's movies but with a lightness and simplicity that he usually doesn't have.

I saw it a week ago, and I've seen four movies since (busy week!), so there's not much more to say. I do intend to see it again -- I have vague ideas of seeing all of Miyazaki's movies again, preferably one a day in order, but that's less likely to happen -- and I may have more to say about it then.

But, for now: it's a lovely movie that's appropriate for anyone over the age of three and a great introduction to one of the best filmmakers in the world. How can you miss that?
----------------
Listening to: Frou Frou - Breathe In
via FoxyTunes

James Bond Daily: For Your Eyes Only

For Your Eyes Only is the only break in the novel-a-year pace of the Bond books; one wonders (without bothering to do any research) if Kruschev's real-world dismantling of SMERSH, Bond's overall nemesis, in 1958 might possibly have caused a novel to run onto the rocks and sink. (Or perhaps Fleming was caught up in one of the earlier schemes to make a Bond movie, or just took more time with the next year's Thunderball -- which was based on a screen treatment by Fleming and two others, after all -- or maybe there's some reason I couldn't even guess.) It collects the five Bond short stories that had been published to that point, which were:

'From a View to a Kill,' adapted from Fleming's teleplay of the same name for a never-finalized TV series, originally published in this collection in 1960 -- It's a full Bond plot in miniature, with evil Russians, a girl to be seduced, a bit of a puzzle to be solved, and some wet work before it's all done. From the title, I've always vaguely thought it was about Bond assassinating someone with a sniper scope, but it's nothing like that -- a Soviet cell has knocked off a dispatch rider with secret documents in the forests of Northern France, and Bond has to find and stop them.

'For Your Eyes Only,' another adapted teleplay -- This one, on the other hand, does see Bond at one end of a sniper rifle, as he goes to New York's Adirondack Mountains to kill some people pretty much unofficially as a favor for M. (Of course, they do need killing, as we American say.) There's a girl in this one as well; for the aborted TV show, Fleming seems to have been playing up the fact that Bond can always find some excellent sack-fodder.

'Quantum of Solace,' originally published in the May 1959 issue of Cosmopolitan, of all places -- The best of the stories in this book is a long story of infidelity and the death of love, as told by an aging colonial administrator to Bond over drinks late one evening.

'Risico,' the third and last adapted teleplay -- The title, I'm sorry to say, is one character's dialect way of saying 'risk.' Much of this story was incorporated into the movie For Your Eyes Only, though it only forms part of Act II and a piece of the plot armature there. Bond traces a narcotics pipeline through Northern Italy, and finds that the mastermind is not who he thought it was at first.

'The Hildebrand Rarity,' from the March 1960 Playboy, a much more expected home for a Bond story -- One of the ugliest of Fleming's rich ugly Americans offers Bond a ride on his yacht as part of a natural history hunt for the very rare title fish. One of them doesn't make it back, which pleases the rich man's young (and still awfully close to innocent) wife.

The two pieces that were written as stories are, unsurprisingly, better than the three adapted teleplays, which are decent adventures with some Fleming edge. The best thing here has the least Bond in it, and, in general, For Your Eyes Only is really mostly for Bond completests.

----------------
Listening to: Elvis Costello - Complicated Shadows
via FoxyTunes

Friday, August 21, 2009

James Bond Daily: The Joys of the Open Road

007 is vexed by a slow driver on his way to play golf, on pp.072-073 of Goldfinger:
A repainted sky-blue Ford Popular with large yellow ears was scurrying along the crown of the road ahead. Mechanically Bond gave the horn ring a couple of short, polite jabs. There was no reaction. The Ford Popular was doing its forty. Why should anyone want to go more than that respectable speed? The Ford obstinately hunched its shoulders and kept on its course. Bond gave it a sharp blast, expecting it to swerve. He had to touch his brakes when it didn't. Damn the man! Of course! The usual tense figure, hands held too high up on the wheel, and the inevitable hat, this time a particularly hideous black bowler, square on a large bullet head. Oh well, thought Bond, they weren't his stomach ulcers. He changed down and contemptuously slammed the DB III past on the inside. Silly bastard!
----------------
Listening to: Slaraffenland - Meet and Greet
via FoxyTunes

Quote of the Week

"I was serious about Spanish. I was never serious about French. Sure, I will still exchange nasty remarks with a Paris taxi driver now and again. But my public announcement that, more or less as a matter of policy, I do not use verbs in French was widely taken as an acknowledgement that I could no longer be considered a diligent student of the language. I never made a systematic attempt at Italian, and I have simply ignored German. Spanish is my foreign language."
- Calvin Trillin, Travels with Alice
----------------
Listening to: The Brunettes - B-A-B-Y
via FoxyTunes

Thursday, August 20, 2009

James Bond Daily: Short People Got No Reason

James Bond, whose height I can't call to mind at the moment, ponders the problem of those whom you have to pick up just to say hello, on p.029 of Goldfinger:
What else could he guess? Bond always distrusted short men, They grew up from childhood with an inferiority complex. All their lives they would strive to be big -- bigger than the others who had teased them as a child., Napoleon had been short, and Hitler. It was the short men that caused all the trouble in the world. And what about a misshapen short man with a red hair and a bizarre face? That might add up to a really formidable misfit. One could certainly feel the repressions. There was a powerhouse of vitality humming in the man that suggested if one stuck an electric bulb into Goldfinger's mouth it would light up. Bond smiled at the thought.
----------------
Listening to: Local H - Manipulator [Live]
via FoxyTunes

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Another Dose of Murder from Geary

Today, over at the ComicMix, I reviewed Rick Geary's new graphic novel, Famous Players, the latest in his series about infamous murders.

And I noticed that my ComicMix reviews have been patchy this summer -- one week in July, this week in August, and a few in June. Summer is the busy time for conferences at work, which is part of the reason -- and you can't discount laziness and inertia, either. As I often say, I shall strive to do better in the future.
----------------
Listening to: R.E.M. - Sitting Still (live)
via FoxyTunes

Linking To Writing About Blogging...On a Blog

The recursiveness level is well over my head, so this is just a quick note to say that SF Signal had one of their Mind Meld pieces, posted in the wee hours of the night, on the following topic:

First it seemed like everyone was writing a blog. Then it seemed like everyone was getting a MySpace page. Now it seems like everyone is hopping on the FaceBook and Twitter trains. We asked this week's panel about it:

Q: How has blogging and the emergence of social networking changed the face of publishing? How has it affected you personally?
And I was one of the contributors to that meld, along with Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Rose Fox, Pablo Defendini, and several others.

Go check it out if you like, and argue with our premises and conclusions...since that's what social networking is all about.

James Bond Daily: In Which the Villain Claims to Have a Good Reason for Not Just Killing 007

It's no better than the million excuses since, but this is the one Julius No claims on pp.182-183 of Doctor No:
Doctor No said quietly, 'You said that power was an illusion, Mister Bond. Do you change your mind? My power to select this particular death for the girl is surely not an illusion. However, let us proceed to the method of your departure. That also has its novel aspects. You see, Mister Bond, I am interested in the anatomy of courage -- in the power of the human body to endure. But how to measure human endurance? How to plot a graph of the will to survive, the tolerance of pain, the conquest of fear? I have given much thought to the problem, and I believe I have solved it. It is, of course, only a rough and ready method, and I shall learn by experience as more and more subjects are put to the test. I have prepared you for the experiment as best I could. I gave you a sedative so that your body should be rested and I have fed you well so that you may be at full strength. Future -- what shall I call them -- patients, will have the same advantages. All will start equal in that respect. After that it will be a question of the individual's courage and powers of endurance.' Doctor No paused, watching Bond's face. 'You see, Mister Bond, I have just finished constructing an obstacle race, an assault course against death. I will say no more about it because the element of surprise is one of the constituents of fear, It is the unknown danger that are the worst, that bear most heavily on the reserves of courage, And I flatter myself that the gauntlet you will run contains a rich assortment of the unexpected. It will be particularly interesting, Mister Bond, that a man of your physical qualities is to be my first competitor. It will be most interesting to observe how far you get down the course I have devised. You should put up a worthy target figure for future runners. I have high expectations of you. You should go far, but when, as is inevitable, you have finally failed at an obstacle, your body will be recovered and I shall most meticulously examine the physical state of your remains. The data will be recorded. You will be the first dot on a graph. Something of an honour, is it not, Mister Bond?'
----------------
Listening to: Local H - No Problem [Live]
via FoxyTunes

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

World Fantasy Defines 2009 Lifetime Achievement, From A to Y

This year's Lifetime Achievement winners for the World Fantasy Award were announced earlier today, and they will be Jane Yolen and Ellen Asher!

My heartiest congratulations to both -- I worked with Ellen for sixteen years (and refer to her regularly, and without any sarcasm, as the Uncrowned Queen of Science Fiction) and just the other day was poking through a library shelf of middle-grade novels and noticing just how darn many good books Jane Yolen has written.

I got an e-mail from one of the Secret Masters of Fandom tipping me off this morning; the official word that it was no longer secret came via Locus Online.

All of the other World Fantasy Awards will be announced at this year's World Fantasy Convention in San Jose over Halloween weekend; sadly, I will not be attending this year, for distance and time and not-working-in-the-field-right-at-this-second reasons.

James Bond Daily: Goldfinger

Goldfinger is Doctor No done again, with slight variations -- in some ways, it's more refined and tightened (particularly in the three-encounters structure), and in others, it's clumsier (as with the shuffling of three Bond girls, and the anti-climax at Fort Knox). The most interesting lesson of Goldfinger-the-book is that Goldfinger-the-movie is faithful to all of the things that are good about it, and deviates only to be more like Doctor No (the book and movie), only to be more like the Platonic ideal of a James Bond story.

Goldfinger also echoes Moonraker, with a rich, ruthless man (first Drax, then Goldfinger) cheating while gambling, and that cheating being what originally brings Bond into the picture and onto the villain's trail. In this case, Bond is passing through Miami, runs into a minor character from Casino Royale, and is enlisted to help figure out how Goldfinger is cheating.

After humiliating Goldfinger in America, Bond is set to investigating Goldfinger's gold-smuggling, and so goes off to play golf, in hope of ingratiating himself with the villain, getting a job in his operation, and unravelling the whole plot. (Fleming insists on giving the reader a stroke-by-stroke depiction of the game; I found it tolerable but it runs on for nearly two whole chapters.)

Eventually, the third encounter comes about -- do we all remember Goldfinger's Chicago dictum about interference? once coincidence, twice happenstance, thrice enemy action? -- and Bond finds himself once more the captive of a sinister figure with designs on the world. The plot in the book is subtly different than the one in the movie -- as I said above, the movie machines some rough edges from the plot, though it also disengages Goldfinger from the vague overall anti-SMERSH plot of Fleming's books. (Though I have to admit, the SMERSH connection, as here, is often pretty perfunctory.)

Goldfinger does get in his allotted number of villain speeches, and they work quite well -- he's both a megalo- and a monomaniac, with the Fleming touch to make his dementias seem entirely reasonable while he's speaking.

Without looking at the dates, a casual reader might assume that Goldfinger was influenced by the movies -- it has that feeling of doing the same sort of thing as before, only broader and bigger -- but Goldfinger was published in 1959, and the movie of Doctor No wasn't released until 1962. So this is still all Fleming at this point -- the feedback from the film series could only have affected the last novel (or two, at best). And I'm now searching my memories to remember if the books do keep getting bigger and less realistic from here -- but I don't believe they do.
----------------
Listening to: Tom Waits - I Don't Wanna Grow Up
via FoxyTunes

Monday, August 17, 2009

ComicMix is Stuffed With My Words

But only in the sense that ComicMix ran a review I just wrote, of a book titled Stuffed! It was written by a TV guy, Glenn Eichler, and illustrated by Nick Bertozzi.
----------------
Listening to: The New Pornographers - The Body Says No
via FoxyTunes

James Bond Daily: The One Ubiquitous Mid-Century Fetish

From p.142 of Doctor No, in which James and Honey are the unwilling guests of the titular Doctor:
He stood away and held her at arms' length. For a moment they looked at each other, their eyes bright with desire, She was breathing fast, her lips parted so that he could see the glint ot teeth. He said unsteadily, 'Honey, get into that bath before I spank you.'
What is it with mid-20th century guys threatening to spank their girlfriends?
----------------
Listening to: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Hold On To Yourself
via FoxyTunes

Movie Log: How to Lose Friends & Alienate People

For some reason, I thought How to Lose Friends & Alienate People was a Run Fatboy Run-level Simon Pegg vehicle, so I didn't rush to see it, and came in with very low expectations. But it's actually pretty good -- oh, it's no Hot Fuzz; I'll admit, but it's funny a lot of the time, and the "only a non-elite life is worth living" message doesn't become dull and blunt until near the obvious end -- so I was happily surprised.

It's based on a memoir by Toby Young -- apparently, quite loosely based, since Young crawled back to England at the end of his adventure, which the Pegg character does not -- and is of the time-honored "young man from the sticks comes to the Big City, is tempted by its decadent charms (and its even more decadent women) but eventually chooses the path of righteousness and a Good Woman" formula, with Megan Fox as the bad girl (a dumb-as-rocks up-and-coming movie star) and Kirsten Dunst as the good girl (Pegg's colleague and eventual boss).

Pegg is the publisher and editor of a scurrilous, low-rent London satire magazine when Jeff Bridges (playing not-Graydon Carter and running not-Vanity Fair) drags him to NYC and gives him a lucrative contract for what are really very unlikely and mostly unexplained reasons. Pegg takes a while to adjust to kissing celebrity ass rather than kicking it, but eventually he succumbs to the lures of the fast life.

How to Lose Friends is probably annoying and tedious to those who have actually read Young's memoir; I haven't, so I found it a serviceable comedy along very obvious lines. It resolutely stays as far away from new ground as it possibly can, but it's pleasant enough as it goes along, and Pegg's character is a lot of fun as long as he keeps his British rough edges (which isn't nearly long enough). Dunst is cute and lovable; Fox is scorching and yet clueless; and Bridges good as the grumpy soft-living boss whom Pegg, in the end, can't follow. It's not nearly as smart and interesting a movie as it should have been, but it's not a disaster, just a disappointment.

I may have to read the book now.