lying for a living

Until today, I thought the worst lyrics ever written were “My humps, my humps, my lovely lady lumps.” But this morning I heard the choir stumbling through these words in a hymn: “Thy unction grace bestoweth.”

Archaic, ugly, and unsingable - it was a choral hat trick. And more: bestoweth? The lyricist was digging deep into the Big Book of Tortured Rhymes that day, seeking a match for “floweth.” The line instantly jumped to number one on my list of awful couplings, knocking down previous winners — “Wake me up before you go go” ( “Don’t leave me hangin’ on like a yo-yo!”) and “If I could move I’d get my gun and put her in the ground” ( “Ruuuuu-oo-by, don’t take your love to town.”)

Then, seconds later, the song got worse. “Perverse and foolish…” Oh, dear God. Hymn Writing 101: Do not start a verse with the word perverse. Ever. “Perverse and foolish oft I strayed…” This was heading nowhere good. What rhyme lay in wait for the sinner — er, singer — who so oft strayed? What was he going to get?

“Laid.”

Gently laid. Yes, I’m making it sound bad. The hymn was based on the 22nd psalm, and the perverse little strayer gets laid like a lamb on the shepherd’s shoulder. And yes, I’m a filthy-minded heathen. Didn’t matter. I wasn’t singing it.

Remember a while back, I wrote a post about throwing books? Be proud of me. I didn’t throw this one.

Roller coaster designer Brendan Walker talks about designing thrills.

So is there an overriding definition of thrill?

Yes. I think that we experience thrill as a reward for the perseverance of human life. So, obviously, there’s an evolutionary driver - we evolved a sense of thrill because it helps us escape danger. But in modern life, things have become confused - we’re rarely in real danger, so we have to invent artificial situations in order to experience that reward. Extreme sports are quite obviously a replacement for running away from a lion, but it also becomes very psychologically complex with experiences such as bondage or other fetishes. It sounds a bit of a cliché, but actually I believe that we go looking for thrills because that’s when we have the greatest sense of being alive.

The interview ranges from the genetics of thrill-seeking to the genius of Alfred Hitchcock, and Walker’s comments are pertinent for writers as well as BASE jumpers.

Hitchcock is known as the ‘Master of Suspense.’ What would be the difference between something that’s thrilling and something that’s frightening?

In dictionary terms, the differences are very subtle. But by my definition, thrill has high levels of both arousal and pleasure, whereas fright has high levels of arousal but low levels of pleasure. In terms of pleasure, ‘fright’ is exactly opposite to ‘thrill’. What’s interesting is that, in a horror film, tension and fright are unpleasurable. But from that low point, the pleasure has to increase to get back to “normal.” It’s the release from fright which people find thrilling.

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

Commenting on my post about Hollywood computer myths, Don asks:

Maybe you should start a thread on falsehoods that Hollywood perpetuates in order to draw out the plot. I will start you off with number 1.

Tracing phone calls is instant and doesn’t need the caller to stay on the line for a protracted period of time in order for the trace to be successful.

Good idea. I’ll give you number 2.

The CIA is all-powerful. Take The Bourne Ultimatum. In this flick the agency has instant access to — and control over — every CCTV camera and cell phone in the world. From an office in New York City it snaps its fingers and eavesdrops on a reporter as he walks through central London.

I love the movie. Absolutely love it. But hey, Hollywood? Three letters: WMD. Kind of undercuts the whole omnipotence thing, doesn’t it? Fortunately, the movie is so fast and furious that we only notice the implausibility of the All-Seeing CIA in retrospect. But still, we notice. Sort of like my son did when he put “WMDs” on the grocery list. Because you never know — the agency says it checked everywhere, but we might as well try the BBQ aisle.

It’s good for me to think about all this, so I can avoid myths and cliches in my own writing. But for now, if you want an extensive list of movie howlers, the BBC has a rundown: Hollywood’s Laws of Life, Physics and Everything.

David Mamet’s Village Voice essay, on changing his mind politically, contains this priceless vignette about winning a New York magazine competition.

The task was to name or create a “10″ of anything, and mine was the World’s Perfect Theatrical Review. It went like this: “I never understood the theater until last night. Please forgive everything I’ve ever written. When you read this I’ll be dead.”  That, of course, is the only review anybody in the theater ever wants to get.

And anybody who writes can relate.

I don’t smoke. And laws banning public smoking have made restaurants, clubs, airports, and train travel immensely more pleasant for me. But I think this is hilarious.

Minnesota bars beat smoking ban.

A new state ban on smoking in restaurants and other nightspots contains an exception for performers in theatrical productions. So some bars are getting around the ban by printing up playbills, encouraging customers to come in costume, and pronouncing them “actors.”

On theater night at The Rock, a St. Paul heavy metal bar, patrons “sit around, drink, smoke and listen to the earsplitting music.” “‘They’re playing themselves before Oct. 1. You know, before there was a smoking ban,’ owner Brian Bauman explained. Shaping the words in the air with his hands, like a producer envisioning the marquee, he said: ‘We call the production, “Before the Ban!”‘”

At The Rock earlier this week, a black stage curtain covered part of the entrance, and a sign next to it with an arrow read, “Stage Entrance.” Along the opposite wall, below a sign saying “Props Dept.,” was a stack of the only props needed: black ashtrays.

At the door was a printed playbill for that night’s program, with a list of names of the people portraying bartenders and security guards. Playing the owner: “Brian.”

Courtney Conk paid $1 for a button that said “Act Now” and pinned it to her shirt. That made her an actor for the night, entitling her to smoke. She turned in an understated, minimalist performance, sitting with cigarette in hand and talking to a bass player with the band.

Yesterday was National Grammar Day in the US. And though I’m late to this shindig, I want to pull out the party hats and sparklers and crank up Kool and the Gang singing “Celebrate.” Somebody cares about grammar! Have some fun and browse the Grammar Day website for style tips, celebrity English, and awards for worst grammar of the year.

First Japan invented the cell phone novel. Now comes the cell phone robot buddy.

TOKYO (AFP) - For those who feel a bit lonely just talking on the phone, a Japanese company is offering a cellphone that turns into a robot buddy ready to chat. Softbank Mobile Corp.’s new mobile line looks like a small humanoid with attachable arms and legs, with the screen showing various faces.

Not only do the cells come with Optimus Prime-type limbs, they’re equipped with artificial intelligence that learns their owner’s habits. “If the user calls a particular person many times, a text phrase such as ‘You’re calling her often these days, aren’t you?’ might appear coming out of the face’s mouth.” Humans can then answer by typing Yes or No.

It all sounds so… I was going to say creepy, but for the sake of argument let’s go with innocent. Hypothetical question: What happens if a lonesome commuter downloads a cell phone novel onto her robot? Love Sky, the cell phone novel that became Japan’s number one best seller last year, is “A tear-jerker featuring adolescent sex, rape, pregnancy and a fatal disease — the genre’s sine qua non.” It captures “the young generation’s attitude, its verbal tics and the cellphone’s omnipresence.”

And when the cell robot gets all its knowledge about human behavior from melodramatic adolescent novels? What will its AI make of us?

Says the manufacturer: “Your mobile would grow into a buddy different from others that is unique in the world.”

Yeah, right. Your nosy, omnipresent buddy: different and unique and convinced by cell phone fiction that humans are disease-ridden nymphos.

I’m sure the manufacturer will insist that the robot buddies are friendly. But that’s what everybody said about the cyborgs, until the day Skynet became self-aware and Schwarzenegger crashed through the time portal to hunt down Sarah Connor.

Think I’ll go read Jane Austen and wait for Armageddon.

(Thanks to Susan Daly for the NYT link.)

Timothy Egan takes issue with Steve Jobs’s assertion that “people don’t read anymore.” Egan offers another take: Book Lust.

Last year, a survey for the Associated Press found that a much smaller number — 27 percent — had not read a book lately, which means nearly three-in-four have read a book. Steve Jobs may be many things – maestro, visionary, demi-god – but he apparently isn’t a careful reader of certain market reports.

The more compelling statistic was rarely mentioned in news accounts of the A.P. story: the survey found that another 27 percent of Americans had read 15 or more books a year. That report documents a national celebration.

Yep. Celebrate that. Yahoo, no pun or commercial endorsement intended.

Egan’s argument that books are more involving than Jobs’s inventions - mere passive “stuff” in his eyes - is either facile or facetious, as is his assertion that industry sales figures (400 million books sold last year vs. 3.7 million iPhones) show that Apple is “piddling” in comparison to the book industry. But he understands exactly what reading is, and it’s more than “just product, dude.”

Reading is something else, an engagement of the imagination with life experience. It’s fad-resistant, precisely because human beings are hard-wired for story, and intrinsically curious. Reading is not about product.

You bet.

Now I’m going to open iTunes, stick the buds in my ears, and use a Mac to engage my imagination in creating a new story.

On the Guardian’s arts blog, Lisa Drysdale praises the great American photographer Ansel Adams. I can only second her sense of awe at his work.

Reading the essay, I realized that my readers might not know Adams’s spectacular landscapes of the American west. I mention them in my books: Evan Delaney has an Adams print of Yosemite in her living room. If you want to get a sense of the man’s genius - and to see where my taste and Evan’s intersect - take a look at the online Ansel Adams gallery.

Evan is not an autobiographical character. Not entirely. But when it comes to Ansel Adams, what moves me also moves her.

Another quiz.

Gah! I scored 33%!

Who painted these pictures? Take the quiz.

My score was 67%.

Clive Thompson argues that speculative fiction is “the last bastion of philosophical writing.”

How would love change if we lived to be 500? If you could travel back in time and revise decisions, would you? What if you could confront, talk to, or kill God?

Teenagers love to ponder such massive, brain-shaking concepts, which is precisely why they devour novels like Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, the Narnia series, the Harry Potter books, and Ender’s Game. They know that big-idea novels are more likely to have an embossed foil dragon on the cover than a Booker Prize badge.

It’s a short, lively essay. Read the whole thing.

(Via GalleyCat.)