Need A Good Stiff Bonk?

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The push to get a few more books read before January is an odd sort of end-year resolution, and it prompts me to wonder if any of you has a similar deadline looming December 31st… something that isn’t work related, so much. Most of us decide to embark upon Personal Improvement during the holidays, and have forgotten all about it by April, am I right? Anyway, this is my quest. And I’ve failed, so far, to plump up my numbers by striking gold in the graphic novel dept: I did like Grandville, but I didn’t love it, and have set aside a bunch of the other prospects after 2-3 pages.

Before I read So Cold the River, I read Mary Roach’s Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. Roach is a rockin’ fusion of science journalist and comedian, as evidenced by the following Very Not Safe for Work TED Talk on orgasms:

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers covers bases I expected–cadaver research in a variety of contexts. It examined the ethics surrounding how donated bodies are used, stuff about Body Worlds, and lots of material on forensics, including the examination of decomposition by leaving corpses lying around outside. (You may have encountered this in procedural novels like The Body Farm). It also had plenty of things I’d never thought of: using corpses to make crash-test dummies, the cannibalistic use of bodies in medicine, for example, and a discussion of how much mercury is released into the atmosphere during your average cremation.

Intriguing, frequently guffaw-worthy and occasionally gross beyond words, Stiff
is a great read. I am planning to absorb Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
and Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex in the near future.

If Joss Whedon created Glee…

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Jumping right in, with no further ado:

Due to a fateful encounter with a magical booby trap in Sue’s office fridge, Will finds all the women he ever kissed demanding song and dance numbers from him… some of them at gunpoint. Being a slut (slut slut slut…) and all, he is in serious danger of death by exhaustion, unless the kids can find out how to reverse the curse. Featuring the return of April Rhodes with a smashing rendition of “Hey, Big Spender.”

There would be fewer Eighties Classics and more Nineties emo rock. The kids would definitely have performed songs by Garbage (possibly “Bleed like Me“) and Four Star Mary.

A short distance from the William McKinley High School there would be a stunningly cool, entirely licensed, but nevertheless open to teens bar, the Gold, where the Solid Gold dancers and the cast of original Fame would rhythmically stalk the night, mysteriously immortal and thriving by sucking the talent out of unsuspecting performers.

Upon failing to get a decent solo–again!–Mercedes would work a spell to increase her already mighty musical moxie. When the spell turns on her, rats, small children and of course Britney, end up chasing her through Lima as she sings a nonstop rendition of Whitney Houston’s “I will always love You,” until finally the team finds and destroys the mystic music box where the spell resides. Will learns an important lesson.

Arty would receive the gift of real working legs from Santa Claus. Oh, sure, they would be scaly demon legs. You win some, you lose some, right? With them, he can dance the macarena, polka with ease and perform the rare but always fatal flying crane with a machete toe strike from Karate Kid 2012: The Slithering. In fact, the demonic claws puncture anything they touch, nixing his dream of becoming the football team’s new star kicker.

After a particularly memorable grapefruit and horseradish slushy pairing, Rachel turns to ex-boyfriend and all-demon Jesse for advice. Wacky hijinx ensue when he urges her to steal Dave Karofsky’s football pads for use in a vengeance spell. Jesse turns the pads into a giant rampaging Korofsky, who chases pretty young men through the town until the cheerleading squad forms a pyramid, topped by Kurt, that lures him into the meat packing plant and an inevitable but splashy end. Everyone agrees that this was neither helpful nor productive. Rachel sings a current pop song I’ve never heard of, one that truly captures her spirit of penitence and desire for redemption. She nevertheless fails to retain an important lesson.

We would live in constant fear of the sudden death of any likable or harmless character, especially if their romantic partner had just forgiven them for bad behavior.

Acting as the pawn of the mysterious media mogul who runs the local news station, Rod Remington hires Santana to appear in a TV commercial for a new exercise device, the Supple-izer. The Glee club girls are riven by jealousy over her stardom. But the commercial is enchanted, and causes the William McKinley High School staff to engage in an endless series of Supple-enhancing poses. The kids have to steal the enchanted video camera used to make the commercial, so that Santana can film and air a rendition of “Good Morning Baltimore” to snap the adults of Lima out of the trance. The plan nearly founders when she balks at singing a song expressly written for a fat girl.

Puck and Sue would get into a fistfight over which of them is badass Spike and which is post-souled emasculated whiner Spike.

Finn learns a valuable lesson when his dad comes back from the dead. Hey, what’d you do with my armchair? Let’s go throw a ball around the backyard, son. What do you say we go maim this Burt Hummel guy so I can patch things up with your Mom? Got any bbbrrrrrains in the fridge?

Show Choir rules would require the kids to recruit a hacker and a mage.

Terry Schuster would so try to kill Emma.

Not only would Emma and Will’s romance make sense, so would the overall story arc of each season. In fact, these scripts would be kick ass, nail biting, keep you up at night monuments of continuity. With songs!

At some point it would become obvious that the oft-mentioned AV club is a secret order of high school students operating as a freelance Junior Achievement franchise of the aforementioned Mysterious Media Mogul, with a mission of spreading pain, woe and degradation among the teenagers of Lima.

In a stunning revelation, the evil media mogul turns out to be Adam Baldwin.

After the painful romantic revelations of sectionals, a choir of evil babies attacks the school, rupturing eardrums with their high E’s until Puck and Finn sing them lullabies one by one. By the end of the confrontation, there has been communication, catharsis, and forgiveness. Both boys feel they’ve learned a valuable lesson, but cannot quite articulate what that might be.

When an anonymous visitor leaves the Lima Class of 89 Glee Club time capsule on his front porch, Will realizes his memories of those precious hallowed days are… well, murky. Inside the time capsule, he finds an early arrangement of “Thriller“, written in blood, with such powerfully musical music that he knows it will blow Vocal Adrenaline out of the water at Regionals. Unfortunately, the song calls forth the dancing zombie hoards, who attack the audience and threaten an eternal reign of torment unless the Glee clubber with the purest heart, Kurt, can bring himself to deliver a pitch-perfect and sincere rendition of the anti-pop anthem, Candle in the Wind.

Vocal Adrenaline’s big number, following this musical fiasco, would be New Pornographer’s song “The Slow Descent into Alcoholism.” (Courtesy kelly-yoyoKelly)

Students who cause a disturbance in the library are never seen again.

After an encounter with her one-time mentor, played with deliciously wicked abandon by guest star Eliza Dushku, reformed dark priestess Suzy Pepper has a relapse to her Will loving ways. She turns Emma into an adorable cartoon mouse… and Sue and Terri into cats.

Succumbing to one of his random fits of badness, Will lets an opposing school’s cheerleading coach into Sue’s office, and the coach steals Sue’s diary. The lurking force of irrational babble within the diary is usually contained by Sue’s personality, but now the entire school runs amok, making megalomaniacal pronouncements, advocating bizarre legislation and telling people that’s how they “Cee” it. Will realizes what he’s done only after he is arrested for gross overuse of haircare products. But how can he get back the journal if he’s in jail?

Gina Torres would take over the school board. She would be wearing extremely provocative boots (and other garments as well) and have Bryan Ryan on a leash. She would sing “When You’re Good to Mama,” from Chicago, to the terrified WMHS student body.

I will leave the true nature of Quinn’s baby unexplored. Or perhaps to you. Additions are, naturally, extremely welcome.

In which Ana is to blame for everything, absolutely everything

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There is something about the phrase Favorite Thing Ever that makes me want to write upbeat zany reviews with lots of Wow! and digressions and silly blather. I mean, we’re enthusing, right? This week I enthuse about Will Ferrell and Stranger than Fiction (scooping Matt, who really really wanted to review it too), and kelly-yoyoKelly shares her new shiny love for Alan Bennett and An Uncommon Reader.

Links and language

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A couple links, first: my Quantum Leap rewatch of “A Single Drop of Rain” is up at TOR.COM, and there’s a new review of Indigo Springs here. Reviewer C.N. Rivera wasn’t crazy about the back and forth between the two storylines, and she hated Sahara from the git-go. To the latter, I confess I thought: “GOOD!”

Second, because she’s so darned interesting, I want to show you my friend Linda Carson, talking about art history and Lady Gaga’s references to same. (It’s a quickie: the Waterloo Ignite talks give speakers five minutes and twenty slides–the motto is “Enlighten Us, but Do it Quick.”)

I’m thinking “Bring on the meat dress!” may become a new catchphrase here at Chez Dua, which ties into some musings and observation of mine about language. None of us speaks quite the same language, you see: we all have our own DIY dialect.

Groups of people start building their own language as soon as they come together. Work groups, friendships, sports teams, theater companies, lovers… it’s part of the process of forging connections: in-jokes, the task-specific language, all this in-speak forms the true secret handshake. Once established, it can be used to refer back to specific facts, to memories, to emotions; it can also be used include or exclude. Your personal language is a merger of these separate variations, a fusion of the tongues of the family, the workplace, and your variety of social spheres.

The inspeak also can come with grammar and usage conventions. This spring I learned that in birding, the use of the term LBJ can refer to any one of the numberless brown handful-sized birds out there. LBJ stands for little brown job, and means, therefore, your basic bushtit or sparrowy bird. But I dug further, and discovered that within birding culture, you can’t just just go sticking this label on every LBJ that comes along. Once or twice, and you’re in the club. Once too many times, and you become some schmuck who can’t identify what’s in front of them.

(Also, if you’re me, this leads to an earworm of: LBJ, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today? Which sparrows appreciate not at all. Or it takes me to memories of the weird-butt animatronic LBJ cracking jokes at the Presidential Library in Austin. Really. Not joking.)

One very rich and heavily mined source of inspeak, of course, is pop culture. Here in North America, we eat, sleep, and breathe movies, TV, and books. We transform catchy quotes, imbue them with our own meanings, and sometimes make them impermeable to others in the process.

Some examples:
In my house, Monty Python has provided the line “S/he is a standard British Bird.” To us, this means any UK actor we recognize from multiple costume dramas, but don’t know by name. Not Dame Judy, not Rupert Graves… but the actress who was in Sense and Sensibility, say, who then played the King’s widow in Young Victoria. (I know, I could look her up, but that’s not the point.) Anyway, she’s an SBB.

Or the two blink and you miss ’em little boys on BlueBloods (What, you’re thinking, there are kids on Bluebloods?) have become Dr. Quinn and Medicine Woman thanks to Will Ferrell and Talladega Nights. kelly-yoyoKelly and I crack up pretty much every time we say this.

Finally, no Child of the Eighties private language would be complete without a scattering of quotes, some mangled, from Ghostbusters. We were dragging ourselves out the door the other day and what came out of my mouth wasn’t “Rah rah, let’s go, we can do it, go team!” It was: “Let’s show this prehistoric bitch how we do things downtown.” It made sense. I’m not sure it should have.

This is a basic human behavior, but it can be a tricky thing to set up in fiction. If you’re writing something contemporary and you use actual pop culture, you may be stale-dating your stories. If you’re not, there’s a process. You make up the source, put it in context, use it appropriately… and bang! When you bring off that effect, of letting the reader in the club, of having them understand perfectly, on an emotional level, something that doesn’t make actual sense when scanned… it’s a powerful thing. It’s hard to do but it’s also something I find hugely compelling, when I encounter it as a reader.

Where do your linguistic quirks originate? If you’re a writer–have you ever pulled this off in a way you’re exceptionally proud of?

Early morning sightings

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I saw a skunk on Wednesday on my way to the cafe. It was six in the morning, raining hard and very dark–so, no chance of a photo. That, combined with the fact that it was a skunk, meant I didn’t even try to give chase. I was nevertheless delighted to see him waddling down Woodland in high gear, wavering between the west side of the street–and the fenced-in safety of a Terasen work site that is popular with a lot of the urban wildlife–and the garbage dumps of Greyhound Cate’s alley on the east. I don’t see skunks that often, and it has been at least a year. I took it for a good sign.

Yes, out and about at six. My timetable has shifted slightly, and now every day starts with an early fiction-writing session at the cafe. It used to start at half-past eight on Monday to Friday, and then early on Saturday-Sunday. Now it’s all crack of dawn, all the time. As an Xtreme Morning Person, this suits me… but every change has effects, and some have been hard to quantify.

Still, there’s been some “Mmm, must eat this meal at this point in the day now,” and a bit of “Gotta figure out when I’m getting to the pet store,” and “Hey, the frozen food run is sooo much more convenient!” I didn’t count on having to slot in a replacement for the semi-conscious woolgathering I used to do at five in the morning, five days a week. ( I’m not waking up any earlier, in general; I’ve just shifted around the daily must-do list in a way that’s been mostly pleasing.)

A thousand tiny consequences, some to be sorted; some, savored. The weekends are glorious, because K and I are on exactly the same clock, and we’ve already spent a couple long, delicious days together, reading and hanging out. Saturday when we went to the opera, we had a leisurely two hour window to get there… for ten! There was also a fit of self-indulgence wherein we destroyed the living room’s fitness for visitors by arranging the couch and our armchairs back-to-back, to maximize TV viewing comfort on the former and fireside-reading in the latter.

We are still muddling through the process of figuring out when and how to hang out with people when one runs out of brain at seven and goes to bed at nine.

Early bedtime has also proved to be the final nail for choir rehearsals. After the January 22 concert, I am planning to become a non-singing volunteer: meaning I’ll finish out my term on the Board and continue to run the website, but for the first time since 2003 I won’t be rehearsing or performing.