Fomy: What did you feel when you finally wrote the kiss, awaited so much by the fans, of Ron and Hermione
And lots more. h/t to Yale physics ninja, Jack Challis.
J.K. Rowling: I loved writing it, and I loved the fact that Hermione took the initiative! Ron had finally got SPEW and earned himself a snog!
One of my friends sent me an article on whether or not Anakin Skywalker has a DSM-IV psychiatric disorder (long story short, he probably does and in all likelihood, more than one). Since I absolutely detest the new Star Wars and only moderately like the old ones at best, I thought I would instead follow the link to a more interesting and humorous study on fictional characters: "Pathology in the Hundred Acre Wood". And you thought Pooh's honey-lust was endearing, not a cry for help. My favorite line: "This unfortunate bear embodies the concept of comorbidity."
To be honest, as much as I enjoy making fun of childhood classics, it's not really surprising that so many fictional characters would display traits consistent with a psychiatric disorder. When you think about it, many psychiatric disorders contain traits that we all experience at one time or another, but to such an extreme degree as to cause significant disruptions to life. All of us are have been happy or sad or irritable or excited at one time or another. Fortunately, not everyone has a major depressive or manic episode. Considering that good stories usually require something unusual happen, it seems reasonable to give some of these traits to characters. After all, do you want to read a fictional tale of an average guy doing average stuff? No thank you; I'll take the OCD bear and his gender-identity disorder pal.
I always knew there would be a special level of hell for the folks at Fox News, but I didn't know they were going to work towards pushing that level further and further down.
Disgusting. After calling Vonnegut "irrelevant," the final lines of the obituary take the cake:
Vonnegut, who failed at suicide 23 years ago, said 34 year ago that he hoped his children wouldn't say of him when he was gone, "He made wonderful jokes, but he was such an unhappy man." So, I'll say it for them. Kurt Vonnegut was 84. In Washington, James Rosen, Fox News.What a stupid fuck of a man.
When my radio alarm woke me up this morning, I caught "he survived the firebombing of Dresden, and much of his early work dealt with atrocities..."
Holy Shit.
The segment ended, I poked Courtney, and she listened to the last bit with me, still too asleep to process that all the verbs were in the past tense. She ran to the computer and popped up the news, and there it was. Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84.
You're not supposed to cry when people die whom you never met. But damn, I can hardly even type right now. I was okay, until I entered that title above, and then it just broke. Goodbye, Blue Monday. It's like the god damn Velveteen Rabbit all over again.
People either get Vonnegut, or they don't. Few people who get Vonnegut don't have a period of their life where they start voraciously consuming his novels as fast as they can read for at least a few months. You change during those months. I think I was 16. People talk about great writers, but Vonnegut was an important writer. He was important because he's often the first writer that existential dysthymic teenagers run across who is so interested in something that, however nebulously, you have to call truth.
Vonnegut, like the other main artistic force in my personal development, R.E.M., wasn't doing anything nowadays to add to his legacy. A Man Without A Country was a guilty pleasure, and quintessential Vonnegut, but it wasn't a book, and it was clear to all of us that he wasn't going to write another book. Timequake wasn't even supposed to happen, and plenty of people wish it hadn't. But Kurt Vonnegut had a series of seven novels, each of which incrementally dealt further with his time in Dresden, leading to his eventual release from its grasp on his artistic psyche in Breakfast of Champions.
He was old, and the fact that he didn't die of lung cancer might be a small miracle unto itself. But these days come. And these days are devastating.
On the top of one of my bookshelves, every Vonnegut book published (except for a few of the random nonfiction ones that have popped up over the past ten years or so, mostly collections of previous stuff), is lined up in a nice dusty row. Several of them have more than one copy, due to the merging of my and Courtney's book collection. I imagine the two or three that have managed to avoid being read for all these years will find that streak coming to an end very soon.
Funny, I just mentioned to Courtney that we watched Slaughterhouse Five on DVD the night of our first kiss.
Poo-tee-weet.
Dana Stevens seems convinced that the film adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's really shitty novel The Namesake won't suck nearly as bad as the book did. Is there nothing that a little bit of Kal Penn idiocy can't save?
To be clear, there are very few books that I love, and very few books that I loathe. Any book within two standard deviations of my personal mean, I generally like a lot, even if I don't love it. The Namesake, I loathed. Maybe it's just from hanging around with too many Indian kids in high school. Maybe it's how Lahiri managed to create a stock character from second generation Indian-Americans, when no stock character really existed to my knowledge. Besides an interesting name, Gogol (whom Kal Penn must desperately save from lameness) is completely uninteresting. If you've ever met a single person whose parents immigrated from India, no matter how boring a person that person might be, that person is more interesting than Gogol.
I'm currently reading Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell (get it in the remaindered pile at your bookstore now). It's a pretty funny account of Vowell's trips to various locations associated with the past assignations of Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley; "visiting everything from grave sites and simple plaques (like the one in Buffalo that marks the place where McKinley was shot) to places like the National Museum of Health and Medicine, where fragments of Lincoln's skull are on display." The best part though is Vowell's hilarious wit as she engages in a macabre trip around the country in search of assignation paraphernalia. In the opening of the book she explains how (due to her feelings about the current administration) she can begin to understand how someone decides to kill the president, although she emphasizes that she does not wish anyone to harm Bush. Previously she viewed Booth and others as crazies, but today with animosity towards the president so high, assassination isn't such an alien possibility. And being that those who truly dislike Bush are the same liberals that won't let their kids play with guns and abhor hunting, the idea that some part of them is angry enough to sympathize with killers is off putting. Like waking up one day and saying, "Gee, I don't know why but I really feel like clubbing baby seals". Anyway, it's a fun read with lots of humor and history. Kind of like Bill Bryson meets Dave Bary meets David McCullough.
Haven't read it yet, but the NPR interview suggests that Washington's take on the historical mistreatments of blacks by white doctors goes well beyond Tuskegee (but of course, includes it) to illuminate the legacy of the sort of racist cruelty that makes blacks suspicious of white doctors even now.
Washington also expresses the importance of African Americans participating in research today, and ends on a bit of an upturn that I didn't really expect. Good for her.
