1. I think my current favorite song is “Help I’m Alive” by the band Metric. (Title of this post is from that song.) Here’s the song on Blip.fm, I think. (If the links at Blip work the way I think they do, that is.)
2. The soundtrack for writing this next project is all my my Tegan and Sarah, Silversun Pickups, and Metric albums in a random mix. Beware the emotasticness! I think I found the plot engine in this setting I like, and I think I found the pov character. We’ll see.
3. I started watching the live-action version of Blood: The Last Vampire last night. I’ve seen the anime, and I recently read this Heroine Content review of the live action film. I don’t have a complete opinion yet, as I fell asleep before finishing the film, but so far it’s . . . . interesting. Like Skye at Heroine Content, I couldn’t get the anime out of my head. I was a little meh on some of the revisions made for the sake of streamlining. But, that said, I am really loving the actors. Particularly Colin Salmon. The special effects are, um, well-intentioned. A mix of classic puppetry and latex masks with computer-game-style cgi. They are not making the mistake of showing the latex-and-rubber monsters too much, thank goodness. But, even so, I applaud Allison Miller’s ability to look threatened by a wet rubber mask.
4. On Nancy_clue’s recommendation I bought and read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson. I really liked it, was grabbed by the character of Lisbeth Salander. (I know, I know. Predictable Sigrid is predictable.) It was interesting, though, reading a book in translation. This is not something I usually do. I spent a lot of brain cycles trying to figure out what the town and place references were telling me, that I was missing. What kind of suburb is that? What sort of neighborhood? Where is that town, again? What meaning, what cultural context, would natives of Sweden be getting from this book that I am missing? What do the clothing and furniture references mean? What do they say about the character that I am missing because I’m not from Sweden? Anyway, the book is good, the plot was interesting, and the characters fascinating. If you like slow, inexorable mystery-thrillers, I recommend it.
5. At my workplace, when we are on break, we can be paged back to the area if we are needed. The page is over a building-wide loudspeaker system. Pages are of the format, “Ellis, Sigrid Ellis, Area 4. Sigrid, Area 4.” It’s a practice among some controllers, though, in my area, of paging people back using the names of controllers who are no longer employed here and who were known for incompetence. So you get “Insult Name, real first name Insult Name, Area 4. Real first name, Area 4.” That’s just how we role, here in ZMP.
Filed under: Books, Music, Review, Work | Tagged: blood the last vampire, girl with the dragon tattoo, metric
I have read ‘Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ twice and ‘The Girl Who Played with Fire’ once. It grieves me mightily that the author died promptly after submitting his manuscripts. There is a third book coming out fall 2010; his final obviously. I love the characters especially Lisa.
I’ve had Larsson’s books on my ‘to-read’ list for a while and definitely want to get to them.
About the issue of reading something that was written in a different language/for a different culture — that’s how we learn about our own, right? By picking up on other people’s references by osmosis; I always prefer immersion to straight-up exposition, at least for starters, the same way I prefer reading books that were written in a period to historical fiction — there’s a little eavesdroppers’ thrill to it, learning how people would talk to their peers without having to translate every little nuance.
@Cynthia Luckily, the person who recommended the nooks to me *told* me that the author died and there aren’t any more than three.
So I was warned.
@Caroline I think you’d like this book.
I think I have an internal bias, because of my background in SF/F reading and 80s comics, in favor of exposition. (Up to a POINT!) When I was forced to read Literary Novels in college, one of the things I objected to was that nothing is explained, you’re left to fumble about. Now, I’ve read more and more widely over the years, and sometimes I appreciate that fumbling feeling. But I do spend the time wondering what I’m *missing*, and whether its important.