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4/8/10
Who needs sleep?
4/8/10 15:02Have started sleeping with a face mask in order to shift my bedtime a little later (Early to bed, early to rise, kind of sucks if you ever want to go out drinking and stay up past midnight. My body starts yelling about bedtime around 10:15.)
Every morning I wake up at 6:25 with my face mask on my pillow or on my blanket, having apparently managed to wiggle out of it during the night.
It took me a long time sleeping with earplugs in before I started waking up with them still both in, too.
Would rather not mess with blackout curtains, but I get a rare great night of sleep whenever I'm in a hotel, so maybe that's the answer.
Every morning I wake up at 6:25 with my face mask on my pillow or on my blanket, having apparently managed to wiggle out of it during the night.
It took me a long time sleeping with earplugs in before I started waking up with them still both in, too.
Would rather not mess with blackout curtains, but I get a rare great night of sleep whenever I'm in a hotel, so maybe that's the answer.
Cleverness
4/8/10 22:35Ah, sometimes I miss being unpublished and being able to name names when complaining about books in public posts. So I will refrain from naming names, because I'm more interested in the larger issue.
It's an extremely good book on a number of levels, tautly written and plotted, with a great sense of voice and atmosphere. And as it goes on it seems to hinge, fundamentally, on the moral questions of violence and nonviolence, as the protagonist is placed in a situation that threatens to turn violent very quickly. Throughout the book, a few hints of backstory and scene-setting are dropped very unobtrusively -- and as the book wends towards its finish these are the hints that the plot turns on, because the protagonist manages with cleverness and resourcefulness to get out of the dangerous situation without resorting to violence.
And it was exactly the kind of ending that ought to work on paper, and obviously did work for a large number of readers. For me it felt moralistic and patronizing and in some ways fundamentally dishonest.
Generally speaking I want stories to be about moral things. I don't want them to be about virtuous people doing virtuous things, but moral questions are the questions that I want fiction to deal with. And that doesn't mean that I want the good guys to win by being good; that works in Sailor Moon but pureness of heart doesn't get you that far in real life and most fiction should reflect that. But a story where the good guys win by being stronger than the bad guys feels trivial unless they're stronger because of some moral quality (they have learned to work together! They have learned to get past their own egocentricity and accepted the need to buckle down and train hard!), and likewise for a story where the good guys win by being cleverer than the bad guys. Cleverness is not a moral quality.
But on the other hand, the willingness to look for a third way is a moral quality, isn't it? The conviction that even in the direst circumstances you have better options than violence? The faith that you will be provided with the three crucial pieces of information that you need to beat the bad guy?
Maybe it's just that I'm more interested in what you do when you aren't provided with those crucial pieces of information. Maybe it's just that I don't believe things can ever work out so neatly in real life. Yes, author, I want to believe that there are other alternatives besides violence and victimization! But they're more hard-won and difficult than that; they're not about cleverness, I think, but about compromise, empathy, community, swallowing one's pride, speaking the truth.
I may just be dealing with a fundamental mismatch between the book the author meant to write and the book I wanted to read. But these are questions I'm thinking about a lot lately and I can't help seeing everything through that filter.
It's an extremely good book on a number of levels, tautly written and plotted, with a great sense of voice and atmosphere. And as it goes on it seems to hinge, fundamentally, on the moral questions of violence and nonviolence, as the protagonist is placed in a situation that threatens to turn violent very quickly. Throughout the book, a few hints of backstory and scene-setting are dropped very unobtrusively -- and as the book wends towards its finish these are the hints that the plot turns on, because the protagonist manages with cleverness and resourcefulness to get out of the dangerous situation without resorting to violence.
And it was exactly the kind of ending that ought to work on paper, and obviously did work for a large number of readers. For me it felt moralistic and patronizing and in some ways fundamentally dishonest.
Generally speaking I want stories to be about moral things. I don't want them to be about virtuous people doing virtuous things, but moral questions are the questions that I want fiction to deal with. And that doesn't mean that I want the good guys to win by being good; that works in Sailor Moon but pureness of heart doesn't get you that far in real life and most fiction should reflect that. But a story where the good guys win by being stronger than the bad guys feels trivial unless they're stronger because of some moral quality (they have learned to work together! They have learned to get past their own egocentricity and accepted the need to buckle down and train hard!), and likewise for a story where the good guys win by being cleverer than the bad guys. Cleverness is not a moral quality.
But on the other hand, the willingness to look for a third way is a moral quality, isn't it? The conviction that even in the direst circumstances you have better options than violence? The faith that you will be provided with the three crucial pieces of information that you need to beat the bad guy?
Maybe it's just that I'm more interested in what you do when you aren't provided with those crucial pieces of information. Maybe it's just that I don't believe things can ever work out so neatly in real life. Yes, author, I want to believe that there are other alternatives besides violence and victimization! But they're more hard-won and difficult than that; they're not about cleverness, I think, but about compromise, empathy, community, swallowing one's pride, speaking the truth.
I may just be dealing with a fundamental mismatch between the book the author meant to write and the book I wanted to read. But these are questions I'm thinking about a lot lately and I can't help seeing everything through that filter.
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