For the past week I’ve been applying for jobs with ever-decreasing enthusiasm, enjoying the air-conditioning, and my friends, and life in the tank-top and flip-flop lane. I keep reminding myself not to panic about finding a job, because every time I spend useless amounts of time panicking, something comes along and I could have spent all that panic time doing something more useful.
Like obsessing over geekery!
Currently I am obsessed with two things: Doctor Who and Harry Potter. Doctor Who fans, you should get behind me when I say I cried for 20 minutes at the finale of Season 2 for reasons I shan’t spoil here. SERIOUSLY THOUGH WTF. When we went to Jeb and Neela’s to watch the start of Season 3 on their enormous shiny television, I spent most of the first two episodes curled in the corner looking exceedingly grumpy at the whole experience. I even begrudged David Tennant how adorable he is and he IS adorable. I am clearly not over the end of Season 2 yet.
Also Harry Potter! I don’t think there is oxygen enough in the universe for how much geeking out I’m willing to do over Book 7 so I will just point you to one of my favorite people in the universe: Raychul. Her last few posts in the past two weeks – hey, studying for the Bar is nothing compared to Horcruxes – have been full of ideas and theories I hadn’t even stumbled across in the hours of brain-churning I’ve done.
All this geekishness really drives home the amount my tastes have broadened and changed in the past five years. I always loved Harry Potter from the beginning, but Battlestar Galactica? Doctor Who? Firefly? YA Fantasy and cold war spy thrillers and futuristic sci-fi? I’m even reading Buffy Season 8 in Dark Horse comics! Have you heard my opinion on reading comics? I just can’t do it. I can’t divide my attentions between pictures and words. But where Whedon leads, I follow. And space! Have you heard what I think of space? Space is bullshit! And yet here I am obsessing over Kobol and Starbuck and DAMN, how many times can Sharon die?
My whole reading and consuming life – books, primarily, but movies and TV as well – has changed and expanded. I think it’s for the better, although you should see how far back my dad’s eyes manage to roll (which, buddy, you read Sydney Sheldon. Gimme a break!) when I start geeking out like this. Partly, it’s the influence of my friends, who are all delightful geeks, but I like to think I’ve become more open-minded about what makes a good story, and what makes a great idea.
Which is really the black-teeshirt-wearing heart of my point here. There are all these things that make great, soaring, beautiful stories, and they’re not really in The New Yorker or on NPR. They’re not in the traditional places I used to look to inspiration, places that are starting to seem positively RGB compared to the million points of color and madness you find when you give reality the slip.
It’s refreshing and enlightening and absorbing to look into uber-realities and sub-realities and alternate realities and still see humanity and struggle and beauty. Which is still my requirement – I need to see people. Or even alterna-people. But they need to have lives and struggles and souls and needs. And they do! Even when it takes place on the seventeenth moon of Gool or has tentacles in its forearms.
So I guess from several miles into the border of this strange and hypercolored land, I’m looking back and yelling down the tracks to any of you that are still stuck in the (admittedly wonderful world of) Penguin Modern Classics: you should set aside some of those easy-to-carry preconceptions and go exploring. It’s wild out here on the frontier.
different worlds
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In the last year, I’ve read “The Hobbit” and watched the Dune miniseries. Does that count?
Considering I’ve never been able to get through either (a lifelong fear of The Hobbit instilled at an early age by the cartoon, god, that dragon was TERRIFYING), I’d say yes.
Have you read the His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman? I’ve never known anyone to not adore those books. Except Kate and Conrad. Weirdos.
We can talk some more about this frontier of yours after you persevere with Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler and when we’ve both finished The Last Samurai and you listen to my attempted explanation of Helen Dewitt’s journey into ways of representing mathematical thinking about chance in fiction without accidentally walking close to a source of loud noise like the air conditioner or a jackhammer.
Oh hang on…are these different frontiers we’re talking about?
DOES ANYONE HAVE A MAP PLEASE, I AM LOST.
Preferably a colourful one that gets the information across very intelligently, but still the sort with the frontiers clearly marked and with warnings like ‘Here Be Deconstructionists’.
OK I did not adore the last book in that Pullman series. It felt like a subversive waste and it angered me.
It’s so true what you say about widening your attention to include different settings and backgrounds for stories: wherever its set, it’s still a story of human hopes, fears, challenges, love etc. And if the writing’s good, why argue with it?
There is a Buffy Season 8? I may have to start reading comics. (Is it online, or in print?) Right after I finish the Harry Potter book 7. So, Monday.
Nymphdora is the perfect name for a cat.
Lisa, it’s published by Dark Horse comics, in print. Whedon is in charge, writing most of the story lines and, I believe, most of the actual text. I don’t read comics and my comics-reading friends say that they’re not good comic books but DAMN, like I care?! It’s BUFFY. Season EIGHT.
And the characters are drawn to be like the actors, although sometimes Buffy looks like something out of Little Orphan Annie.
Speaking of different worlds and YA books, here’s a warning if you’ve ever read The Dark is Rising series and enjoyed it: sometime in October, Walden Media will be releasing a crappy rip-off on Susan Cooper’s book. The production’s justification for making wholesale changes to almost the whole book plot is that these are old books and hardly anyone is reading them now.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0484562/board/threads/
Imagine how the fans would have reacted if they’d been given a wise-cracking blond American Harry Potter?
As someone who reads comics, the Buffy comics are certainly good ones!
(hmmm.. well ok, maybe I don’t really read the traditional comics, I read very specific comics, like all of Neil Gaiman’s and “The Civil War” comics by Marvel recently, which were very political and also considered by lots of comics-readers as not as good…and I’ve always loved Marvel more than DC (except for some choice Vertigo titles)
I think it really actually comes down to the smackdown between DC and Marvel, which divides many comic readers and then opposing forces are likely to say the other side “aren’t actually good comics” for various reasons. You might just happen to be on the Marvel side with Buffy. (If so, than welcome.. its a nice frontier) Because I don’t hear anyone over here complaining.
Maybe I’m a bit biased too with the Buffy comics and I’m not sure I would have cared either, since its effectively Season 8. But I’ve read some BAD comics and these are not bad. If you like those, you should also read Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X Men series. And Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. And Marvel 1602. To me, its all the same kind of brilliance.
Other worlds indeed.
Also – if you like the Buffy series 8, you must pick up a market paperback copy of FRAY. Its another series Joss Whedon did within the “slayer” universe years ago and its REALLY REALLY good.
in the past year, i have totally gone down that self-same path of geekdom. i am a new reader here, tho, and not sure if you have peered even further into the nerd abyss, as i have done, and by that i mean…amime and manga. Osamu tesuka’s Phonenix series, or his biography of the Budda! some of the best comics (and lit) ever. and iron wok jan, a japanese iron chef comic. they karate kick a live shark out of a tank in one challenge and deep fry it whole (and live), then stuff it with bean spruts which have in turn been stuffed with foie grois (sp?) using a hypodermic needle. karate kick a live shark. it’s awesome.
and then moster, an animae you can torrent, and become obsessed with. mushi shi- anime, awesome mysterious fables (if you like gaiman you’d like this, in a japanese sort of way). paprika (recently at the angelicka). steam boy. the great thing about geeky obsessions is that they are created by geeks, and therefore produced obsessively and in large number. lots of fun.
If you like Buffy Season 8, you should pick up the first trade of “Y: The Last Man.” Because Vaughn and Whedon are buddies and their work has similar echoes.