The Red-Headed Gorgonette

Blog Audit

wanderingmonster — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 23:59:30 +0000

After re-reading my blog posts, I’ve realized I can be a very angry person. An angry opinionated person, about things that really shouldn’t matter to me. I’m not an English major, as is also quite evident by my blog posts. I’m a biology major, which is kind of noticeable in my posts if you look for it. Though I don’t back up lots of statements with quotes (mostly because I write what I can remember, which is rarely specific quotes, but the ideas behind them), I do descriptively back up my comparisons, sometimes using videos. And as a person of SCIENCE, I don’t like saying things without them having some basis in fact. Even if that fact is heavily biased by my own angry opinions. I go into what books mean and should mean to people, and discuss the stories in broad ways, not so much focused dissections of specific characters/events.

But books DO matter to me, and I think they should matter to more people. Something I focus on in my blog posts is that its not just reading that is important. The quality of the content matters a great deal. I mention a couple bad books, like the twilight series and “Blood and Chocolate”, some of which I’ve read on purpose, because I feel if I don’t read them and still criticize them, my argument is flawed from the beginning. Others, like Harry Potter, because they caught me when I was young and didn’t know better. And hey, there are worse books out there. And at least the series is kinda fun.

The blog posts also focus on relating subjects from the books to personal experiences. All of which seem to again be angry/bitter, but it’s all still very personal. Its similar to the way I write notes in class, which are usually covered in doodles and silly liner notes which mean something to me personally, but would probably be meaningless to anyone else in the class. Or on earth.

Allan Quatermain and the Last Crusade

wanderingmonster — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 23:42:56 +0000

I can’t be the only person who thought of Indiana Jones while reading about Allan Quatermain. I can’t. But in case I am, I… do. (And after a few google searches, so does wikipedia.) True, Allan is not an Archaeology Professor who goes treasure hunting over, I assume, summer break. But he is a mans man, a man of adventure and heroism, who narrowly escapes danger but ultimately gets his treasure. Indiana Jones ALSO gets the girl, but Allan is a bit too timid for that. Allan is also an expert marksman, while Indiana Jones is… not. (Though he’s pretty great with a bullwhip/versus a sword.) Also, Indiana Jones is a pretty attractive man, while Allan Quatermain never describes himself or gets described as a very pretty man. But I think that’s just a sign of the times. Allan Quatermain isn’t attractive because that’s not the kind of man who would be knee deep in the jungle fighting lions and finding lost civilizations. In Hollywood, we want all of our men rugged AND handsome (and note: I’m not complaining.)

But again, at their cores, they are very similar. Bachelors seeking thrills in the wildest of places, meeting wild people and women, and finding treasure and adventure. Especially King Solomons mines, which is set up almost the exact same way that an Indiana Jones film is. Take Raiders of the Lost Ark. The movie starts (after the scene with the rolling rock and the golden idol and stuff) with Indiana Jones getting approached by army intelligence guys who want Indy to go find his old mentor, who has something the nazis want to gain ultimate power (It’s always the damn Nazi’s…). King Solomons mines starts with Allan getting approached by Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good, who want HIM to find Sir Henry’s brother, who’s gone to a fabled place that Allan happens to have a map too. So Indy and Allan get sent on an a quest to find someone, that ends UP leading to MORE MYSTERY and TREASURE.

Without good books, we wouldn’t have good movies. Even if the movie isn’t based on any one specific book, its concocted in the brains of people who have read bunches of them, who think of their own stories or adaptations. Which is really what League of Extraordinary gentlemen is. Its a tribute to classic literature, and in it’s own special, often graphic and perverted and wonderful way, a way of breathing life into those old characters once again.

Lady Roll Call

wanderingmonster — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 21:11:10 +0000

Alternate post title: “Where all the white women at?”

But seriously, where are all of the ladies? And what are they doing? The answer: Not much. Out of the lovely ladies we do meet, two out of the four are in Dracula, and two are (at least eventually) horrible monsters. But the worst part of it all is:

I didn’t care. I didn’t want them there.

Characters in books can go three ways for me:

1. They can be realistic characters, integral to the plot or perhaps even the star of the plot, who are consistent, flawed, and interesting. They don’t even need to be likable, and often they aren’t. But that doesn’t stop you from liking the story, because its realistic and that’s cool. (It CAN stop you from liking a story, but it doesn’t have to)

2. They can be there simply as a plot device, a person who has as much of a role as a smoking gun or a conveniently placed horse. A random person you meet who JUST so happens to have the information you need/the diamonds that were stolen/the map to a secret treasure. These characters are often brought up, disposed of, and never discussed again.(Mentioning a treasure map brought the character Billy Bones to mind)

3. They can be there for sex, or for shock value. They have habits of doing something visceral to keep you involved. They don’t have a lot of back story or a complex personality, but you usually get a detailed physical description. So you can picture them in your twisted little mind. Their actions are unpredictable, because they don’t make much sense.

Note: I’m not talking female characters here. Just characters in general. Also, of course there are other kinds of characters. I didn’t even go into bad guys here, just good guys. Bad guys are a whole other box of tomatoes. But again, I didn’t mention women. Because the sex of a character shouldn’t affect how awesome they are AS a character. But sadly, lots of writers seem to think if you write about a woman realistically, the world will end. I don’t want all female characters to be LIKEABLE I just want them to be consistent and to have depth, and to not simply be put there as plot devices with tits or something to fuck between conflicts. So, I was kind of glad there weren’t a lot of female characters in these books. The female characters who were around were kind of plot devicey, yes. But there were only four of them! And they weren’t around enough to really bother me at all! If there had been more female characters just thrown in, it would have, because they would have probably felt thrown in. These books were not written in times where women weren’t really respected or viewed as being capable of having personalities that weren’t crazy. Any female characters would probably have been just as terrible as the racism we encountered in many of these books and viewed as outdated ways of thinking since proven and accepted to be horribly wrong.

(EDIT: I had totally spaced out about Lady Ragnall. She was great. Kinda still plot devicey, but she had a lot of personality.)

The Invisible… hey, where’d he go?

wanderingmonster — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 20:36:33 +0000

So I may have dicussed this in previous blog posts, but I read League of Extraordinary Gentlemen before reading any of these books. It gave me a few preconcived notions about the characters when reading the books, especially the invisible man and Edward Hyde. The invisible man is portrayed in the graphic novel as a rapist, traitor, murdered and all around not nice guy. In the book, he’s just kind of a dick. Griffen (The Invisible Man) only uses his invisiblity powers to avoid people and steal things, and ends up getting beaten to death by the townspeople. He IS a coward, which is present in the graphic novel, but in the novel he hides his true cowardice by just being invisible…most of the time. Because what do you need to be scared of if no one can see you? He is untouchable, but only because he can go where ever he wants undetected. But everything he does is motivated by cowardice, greed, pleasure, or simply by wanting to be on the winning side. In the first book, he technically saves the day by spying on Campion Bond meeting with Moriarty as he monologues, which seems odd for a coward. But it was fun! he got to kill a policeman and spy on people and be a sneaky snake which is what he does best. It wasn’t to help the team, he just found it fun. He also immediately turns on the team and the entire human race in the second book upon seeing the martians in action. We only hear true terror in his voice when he realizes that Hyde can see him… and has come to kill him.

I enjoy what Moore did by expanding on the fears and instability of the invisible man and turning him into a horrible monster. Moore was definitely writing his story in a world where you can get away with saying a lot more and in much more obvious ways, and he used that to free Griffen to be exactly the kind of person an unstable albino scientist who has suddenly acheived invisibility would be.

Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping…

wanderingmonster — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 19:57:25 +0000

The time machine is a story I’ve known since I was a little kid. Not the actual BOOK the time machine, which is sad. No, I took in the time machine in a way that tons of kids my age did: Through Wishbone. Oh, Wishbone. The reason I randomly will picture Jack Russells as the main character of stories. Wishbone was a fantastic children’s show that where a dog (with a BIG imagination… and a much bigger vocabulary than your average pup. He makes scooby doo look like a special ed student) retells classic stories, with himself in little costumes as the lead character. Such classics as The Odyssey, Rip Van Winkle, Robin Hood, Oliver Twist, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and of course, The Time Machine. These versions are, of course, shortened and made easily digestible for children, but they still get (most of) the point across. In the Time Machine, Wishbone is the Time Traveler. We meet Weena, and the rest of her docile brethren. There ARE some things that the children’s television show skips over, like the orgies in the park that the Eloi are so fond of. And wishbone doesn’t kill any morlocs and enjoying feeling their squishy insides being bashed in by his…I don’t even know how he held stuff, he IS a dog. But I definitely remember him stringing and firing a bow several times in other episodes, which makes no sense.

When Harry Potter came out, people said it was great that kids were getting into books again. And I feel like that is only kind of true. It was getting kids into mediocre books, which is only good because they’re exercising their ability to read but not much else. Shows like this got kids into the classics, even if it was through a medium that most parents now condemn. But I think its great, and it inspires to kids to read GOOD books, which I think is much better than them just reading badly written cutesy fiction all the time. Even though both activities will keep your kids busy and out of your hair for a few precious minutes of the day.

For your entertainment:

(Also, enjoy early 90′s discussions of how cool calculators are)

Where do our stories come from?

wanderingmonster — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 04:18:08 +0000

I’ve been saying to anyone who would listen for a long time that what is passing for a “good story” these days is pretty pathetic. I don’t even want to bring up the train wreck that is the twilight saga, but I probably will. It isn’t just in the movies or on TV, where its more obvious. But they aren’t exactly helping. I wish I could think its was just my angry brain rebelling against all things “mainstream” people think are “hip,” but that can’t be it. The stories being told to us today aren’t just tired retellings of things we’ve already seen. Some of them barely even qualify as a story. I’ll go ahead and bring up Twilight, because it’s a fun one to dissect.

In twilight, the main character you have to get behind is an empty vessel for the reader to pour themselves into. She feels like she’s the only person who “gets it,” the only person awake in a world of “sheeple” (an example of this found here.), and at the same time immediately popular and loved by everyone she meets. A fact she ignores when she meets the “love” interest, Edward, who she becomes completely obsessed with. I’m going to stop there, because complaining about terribly written female characters will be another post. I’m complaining about the story, which is… non existant. A narrative story should, if it’s going to make any sense at all, follow this order: Setup, Conflict, and Resolution. If you try and find these elements in Twilight, you’ll be disappointed. Partially because you just read Twilight, and because you might become convinced that if THIS is now viewed as acceptable storytelling, we are doomed. The setup takes the first half of the book. The conflict, which is resolved in… a chapter, has no actual bearing on the story or characters at all. The resolution is just a teaser for the next book. This isn’t a story. Its an advertisement.

Good books and movies have these elements. Bad stories and movies can too, but usually a gaping hole in one of those elements will be what makes them bad. But, this is all the opinion of a random person who just likes to read casually. I’m in no way an English or History Major,and what little I do know is tainted by personal bias. But as a person who has been told a good story, who has seen a good story unfold on film, I feel like I see it less and less. Reading the books we are in class, I noticed that even the less than great ones has better story lines and development than half the crap I see/read today.

Jekyll and Hyde (your kids, hyde your wife)

wanderingmonster — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 04:16:21 +0000

Probably because I read the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen years before this class, and before reading this book, I was really looking forward to this book. I loved Hyde in LOEG. He reminded me of Beast from “Beauty and the Beast,” (Another book I have to read. But I’ve seen the movie! TOTALLY the same thing.) and of other werewolf fiction I’ve read or watched. Though Jekyll and Hyde isn’t TECHNICALLY about werewolves, the story has similar elements to werewolf stories. The transmogrified character undergoes both a change in personality and their physical appearance, their altered self more animal than man, their personalities primal and angry. The person who undergoes the change is also usually a person who is hiding aspects of themselves, or scared of themselves in some way. The book I’m going to use to show this is a terrible little young adult werewolf book I read in middle school called “Blood and Chocolate” by Annette Curtis Klause. Its main character is a werewolf in highschool, who is torn between a relationship with a human and with a werewolf. Her transformations into a werewolf transform her sexuality as well, allowing her to give in to her primal desires. She eventually has sex with both of her love interests, while in the appropriate form, and her experiences are contrasted by the sweetness of chocolate and the more powerful thirst for blood. (hence the title of the BOOK, super clever.) While shes a human girl, she just wants to be accepted for who she is, to the point of being timid (and shes a WEREWOLF). But when shes a werewolf, she is the alpha female of her pack, and she can have crazy werewolf sex. I know what you’re thinking: Why was I reading this in middle school? It was in the library!!

I think the point i’m feebly attempting to make is that I like werewolf stories, and I feel like Jekyll and Hyde is a sort of “modern” (for victorians) werewolf story, where instead of the moon transforming you into an actual wolf beast, science transforms you into a primal and aggressive version of yourself, untethered by convention and social norms. The other book I brought up is also slightly less than conventional werewolves, who are still human shaped when they transform and really like having rough sex. The sexuality of Hyde isn’t very discussed in his book, but it is expanded on in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, where Hyde uses rape as a method of execution. I thought it fit his character quite well, seeing as Hyde is supposed to be a completely free and agressive individual. He would use whatever he wanted to kill something if he wanted it dead, and what better weapon than your giant ape man cock? I also liked that they made him much larger than Jekyll, which I like to think was just a progression of the character, eventually taking over him and becoming the dominant personality.

The gathering of mediocre individuals

wanderingmonster — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 01:19:44 +0000

In class on friday we watched the first 17 minutes of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a movie based on the graphic novel we’re currently reading. As we all quickly learned, the movie got the name right, but thats about it. The film starts with an introduction of the assumed “big bad” of the movie, a masked nazi named The Phantom. Because Americans know nazis=bad!! No one is going to condemn you for having your bad guys be nazis. Except maybe Germans, but I’m sure they’re over it by now. But if this movie was accurately killing multitudes of chinamen (Asian American, Donnie!), people would complain and wildly condemn its racism. We are then introduced to apparently the main character of our tale: Allan Quatermain. Yup. No strong female character leading the way, gathering together a team of monsters. Nope. Mina Murray, I mean, Mina Harker (Widowed instead of Divorced, because she couldn’t POSSIBLY make the decision to leave her husband. He must shake off this mortal coil, and she must mourn him. And keep his last name like a trophy to honor his memory… or a kill count. Maybe she’ll keep ALL the last names of all the men who die after marriage… hmmm.) gets introduced to the rest of the group after they’ve already been assembled. Also she’s the last to arrive. Because she’s a woman. (As a woman who is constantly late, I still take offense. It has nothing to do with me being a woman. It has to do with my desire to sleep in/overall laziness. Or that I’ve forgotten something. Like my car keys. In my car. I’m not late because of my period or making sure my boobs were in order.) There is also no gathering of the crew, the crew is just… there. Preassembled. So you get no back story on any of them, you just see a bunch of people. Or not see, in the cae of the invisible man. At least they did that correctly. He was in fact invisible. He wasn’t raping anybody, though. That we know of.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed watching an old man fight in a bar that eventually exploded. But when you remember the introduction of Quatermain in the graphic novel, his emaciated body huddled in the corner of an opium den, and his heroics saving Mina from her would be rapists, the movie was definitely more showy, but lacking in any sort of depth. And that seems like what this movie wants to be! It has no problems with it, since showy is what moviegoers (apparently) want to see! George Lucas COULD have made the new Star Wars movies into good movies, but instead he went with shiny showy pile of steaming crap we have today. Similarly, this movie removed all of the things that meant anything in the graphic novel, and ground it down into a more edible and political correct paste.

On the topic of whales…

wanderingmonster — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 19:21:13 +0000

Try reading 20,000 leagues under the sea with this stuck in your head the entire time. Its absolutely awful. And awesome. And terrible. I don’t recommend the link if you hate adorable narwhals and songs that will be in your brain for days. But yes, every time the word narwhal was said, this song would pop up. It was only in the first couple chapters, yes, but thats quite enough to make anyone insane.

A whale of a tale, sans whale

wanderingmonster — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 19:13:16 +0000

20,000 leagues under the sea was, over all, pretty enjoyable. The only downfall it had, and it was a small one, was my complete hatred for the main character. It seems like a running theme so far in the books: The character telling the story is a complete moron, who is persistently naive in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I know this isn’t entirely fair, since Dracula was told by several characters, but the character who starts and ends the book, Jonathan Harker, is a complete fool. Like Arronax, he is an educated fool, but both are completely useless in the face of danger. They refuse to believe the obvious, fantastic truth until the fangs are at their neck or they are inside the giant submarine! Perhaps these characters represent the tunnel vision of scientific minds, focused on logical solutions instead of the vampire in the next room that just ate a baby. But maybe thats my problem: For me, science has never been about being “logical”, it’s about curiosity, and finding out how things happen, no matter how strange or ridiculous.