The Golden Compass
 Without knowing there was a movie coming out, I started reading Phillip Pullman's brilliant "His Dark Materials" trilogy, the first book of which, "The Golden Compass", has been adapted for film.
My education in fantasy stories has been limited by my dislike of most people who like fantasy stories. It is an ancient prejudice. But I've been lucky; I've enjoyed the "Harry Potter" books, think "The Lord of the Rings" is a masterpiece, and am very impressed with "His Dark Materials", which takes its title from this area of "Paradise Lost":
Into this wilde Abyss,
The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,
 Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,
But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt
Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more Worlds,
Into this wilde Abyss the warie fiend
Stood on the brink of Hell and look'd a while,
Pondering his Voyage; for no narrow frith
He had to cross.
My brief exposure to fantasy stories has revealed that they all have things in common:
1. Children with dead or compromised parents
2. Guys in robes
3. A weapon to be used for good or evil
4. Betrayal
Based on this, I have written my own short fantasy story. It is called
The Wondrous Bathrobe Tool
by Marty Barrett
Hugh Hefner approached Gary.
"It's a shame your parents are dead," he said, "but these witches want you to be their leader."
"May I take my magic toothbrush?" asked Gary.
"That's not any toothbrush," replied Hef. "His Dark Materials" is ambitious and uncondescending to young readers. It also has some bold things to say about organized religion and God, something I think "Harry Potter" and "Lord of the Rings" deal with obliquely, but Pullman puts right out there.
"But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one; you can never see any concrete proof that it exists but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of thibngs that couldn't be imagined without it." If the movie trailer is any indication, "The Golden Compass" gets dumbed down in the adaptation, but I'll still see it; it still looks fun. Gandalf plays a bear, for example.
Labels: books, geekery, movies, poetry
EXCLUSIVE (but fabricated) Harry Potter spoilers
 Scholastic, the publisher of the "Harry Potter" books, printed 12 million copies of "Harry Potter And the Deathly Hallows", one of which arrived at our door, personally delivered by the mailman, last Saturday.
"I never leave them at the door because people steal them," he said.
(This guy is an improvement over our last mailman, who wouldn't leave anything except a trail of incompetence.)
I am currently 550 pages in, and can reveal a couple of spoilers:
- Voldemort is a girl
- Wizards do not produce saliva
- The action takes place in Salt Lake City
- Cthulhu is involved, and Mitt Romney
- The whole series is revealed to have been a dream
It is interesting to note that this book has already broken many retailers' one-day sales records, having moved in excess of eight million copies Saturday.
I looked for the top-selling novels of all time and, though sales figures are disputed, the following titles are believed to have sold over 10 million copies in hardcover and paperback:
* Jonathan Livingstone Seagull - Richard Bach
* The Exorcist - William Peter Blatty
* Jaws - Peter Benchley
* God's Little Acre - Erskine Caldwell
* Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
* To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
* The Thorn Birds - Colleen McCullough
* Peyton Place - Grace Metalious
* Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell (estimated 28 million copies)
* 1984 and Animal Farm - George Orwell
* The Godfather - Mario Puzo
* The Carepetbaggers - Harold Robbins
* The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
According to many, the bestselling novel of all time is Jacqueline Susann's "Valley of the Dolls". Growing up, I knew a bunch of older ladies who owned that book, but I remember my late Aunt Grace telling me that she'd read the first page and then quit reading it.
In other media, last month's "Sopranos" finale was watched - at the time it first aired - by 11.9 million people, which was over a million people fewer than watched "America's Got Talent" on NBC at the same time. Conclusion: you can't treat books like TV.
I couldn't help thinking that commercial events are second only to world events in getting everyone on the same page at the same time.
Everyone remembers 9/11, but a great many people also remember June 29, 2007 when the iPhone was released as well as July 21 when the final "Harry Potter" showed up. It is nice to think that if upwards of ten million people (by now) are doing the same thing, that that thing is reading a book.
Previously: Potter familias
See also: The Internet Public Library, Amazon.com Harry Potter storeLabels: books
"Sorry Fugu": If the River Was Ratatouille
 TAARG noticed that the food critic/Alan Rickman character in Pixar's Ratatouille (played by Peter O'Toole) recalled the food critic in T.C. Boyle's short story "Sorry Fugu" from a 1989 collection.
In the movie, the merciless critic Anton Ego caves in to a simple peasant dish that he remembers from his childhood. In the short story, the critic's boyfriend is kept at bay with burned steak and peas, "shanty Irish" food his mother used to make.
The critics in both stories find it easier to dismiss things than embrace them.
"To like something," Boyle's critic says, "to really like it and come out and say so, is taking a terrible risk. I mean, what if I'm wrong? What if it's really no good?"
Ratatouille's critic says, "But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new."
This was the first movie the three of us attended at a theatre, and our 2.5-year-old took the movie like a champ while other kids around her shrieked and kicked their chairs. Ours was the child that made single people and childless couples want to have children, and both TAARG and I had to fend off proposals to create children.
"No, really," TAARG said. "I'm already pregnant."
"Sure, when?" I said. "I've got a 3:00 and a 3:15 available."
Ratatouille's animation was brilliant but the story required a little too much of the audience. It wasn't a matter of giving the audience too much credit, it was a matter of not knowing when to stop teaching us about individualism and following one's dreams and listening to one's heart. There were too many ingredients in the stew.
And the density in one area was a deficit in another. While it's not very interesting that "anyone can cook", we would like to know how the human protagonist suddenly is an expert rollerblader and customer service representative when before he couldn't ride a bike or keep a job. The story needed simpling up, but visually it was rich, and the ending was very satisfying.
See also: Buy T.C. Boyle's "If the River Was Whiskey"Labels: books, movies, TAARG, tot
 As tied in to the high school industry as it is, American Heritage Dictionary Publisher Houghton Mifflin still manages to astonish with its blatant product placement in this month's publication of "100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know".
The list also targets parents, hinting that they, too, should run to a bookstore and buy a dictionary - say, an American Heritage Dictionary - and look up words like "quotidian", which is a person from Glendale who won't shut up about William Saroyan.
Gee, maybe every member of the family should have a dictionary. That's about as bad as the U.S. Government stamping its logo all over my cheese.
After some thought, I put together a sentence with all 100 words, defining each in context so you wouldn't have to further enslave yourself to the Linguo-Educational complex.
I like to abjure abrogate abstemious acumen antebellum auspicious belie bellicose bowdlerize chicanery chromosome churlish circumlocution circumnavigate deciduous deleterious diffident enervate enfranchise epiphany equinox euro evanescent expurgate facetious fatuous feckless fiduciary filibuster gamete gauche gerrymander hegemony hemoglobin homogeneous hubris hypotenuse impeach incognito incontrovertible inculcate infrastructure interpolate irony jejune kinetic kowtow laissez faire lexicon loquacious lugubrious metamorphosis mitosis moiety nanotechnology nihilism nomenclature nonsectarian notarize obsequious oligarchy omnipotent orthography oxidize parabola paradigm parameter pecuniary photosynthesis plagiarize plasma polymer precipitous quasar quotidian recapitulate reciprocal reparation respiration sanguine soliloquy subjugate suffragist supercilious tautology taxonomy tectonic tempestuous thermodynamics totalitarian unctuous usurp vacuous vehement vortex winnow wrought xenophobe yeoman ziggurat three or four times daily if I can get away with it.
Notice there's no "eleemosynary" on the list. I guess they'll toss that one out in the deluxe package after you've already bought this one. Lucasfilm should start printing dictionaries.
See also: 100 Words Every High School Graduate Should KnowLabels: books
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Without knowing there was a movie coming out, I started reading Phillip Pullman's brilliant "His Dark Materials" trilogy, the first book of which, "The Golden Compass", has been adapted for film.
Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,
