Television and the Willing Suspension of Disbelief

I am not much of a TV person. I haven't made a point to follow a live action series since Homicide was on. I tried watching 24 for a while, but, much as I loved the idea and Kiefer Sutherland, I got bored. Cartoons are another matter. So are sports or sports related shows. At the moment, it's all about hockey and a show called Quite Frankly on ESPN. The fictional worlds created on TV shows have never been fictional enough for me, or I found myself guessing plots too quickly. It's painful to watch bad actors hack their way through a poorly conceived and sloppily executed script. There are too many of these things out there. The easiest, and safest, thing for me to do is stick with cartoons and hockey.

I'm more of a reader, really. Books have a power TV just doesn't have for me. I learned how to willingly suspend disbelief with literature, after all, not TV.

For some reason, the concept of willing suspension of disbelief is cemented to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Logically, I can assume that whenever it was I encountered the crusty sailor and his albatross in the course of my schooling, there was some kind of lecture about suspending disbelief. Honestly, I don't recall, although I know exactly what the concept means. As a reader and a writer, it's the marrow of the bones that hold up what I read or write. Problem is, this concept is so ingrained that when I have to actively use it, I get snarky.

This television season has yielded one new show that I can watch. Supernatural, in which a pair of brothers hunting for their missing ghost hunting father hunt ghosts and have witty dialogue. What I've enjoyed most is that the monsters they've chased thus far are all based on real mythology and legends. Even urban legends. Oh, how I'd love to see them do an alligators in the New York sewers story! But anyway. This works for me because it forces a certain consistency that shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer failed to adhere to. Any variation in the world is a direct result of the culture from which the beastie of the week hails. This is a nifty thing. The show is well written. The characters are good. The actors who play the brothers have fantastic chemistry, and they're both very nice to look at.

While watching an episode last night, I noticed how easily our heroes slipped into a parking space along a downtown street. Enough room to not have to perform exasperating parallel parking manouvers even! I couldn't help but comment. "They drove around the block ten times during the commercial break," my husband said. "Uh-huh," I said. I let it slide. I was rather suspicious.

Later on the show, one of our young hunks, I mean, heroes, is tied up and about to be killed by a shapeshifting thing wearing his brother's skin. It just so happens that the thing poked a butcher knife into the railing of a pool table so that the blade was conveniently exposed for the cutting of the ropes. A couple of sawing motions, and Sam's hands are free of this very thick rope he'd been bound with. (There was a lot of tying up of both brothers in this episode. I approve!) I had a very difficult time believing that this knife, probably dull from use, could cut rope that thick so quickly. Maybe if this was just one coil of rope, but no, the damn thing was wrapped around his wrists several times. Of course, I had to comment on this, and there was no escaping it this time. I was willing to believe that this shapeshifting murderer existed in that world, but I could not conceed that a butcher knife -- a kitchen knife, not a butcher's butcher knife, which would be quite sharp indeed -- could slice rope that way. Thinking on it, I wasn't willing to conceed their stroke of luck in parking the car earlier in the episode.

And then of course there was the matter of the shapeshifter morphing clothing as well as body. Earlier, we saw him remove clothing as he shed someone else's skin and had been told a man accused of murdering his girlfriend had been the victim of a clothing theft. "It's just willing suspension of disbelief," my husband said.

"Really," I said. "And the parking? Do they really have the ability to defy the parking gods?" Parking gods are tricksters, by the way. Every time you think you've found a spot, a giant SUV will swoop down and snatch it or it will actually be in use by a small sports car or motorcycle. For some reason, the parking gods think this is funny. There's no way they would let anyone find a spot as easily as anyone driving a car on a TV does.

And of course, people in TV land never go to the bathroom, take showers (unless they're going to be killed or have sex or both), get colds, flat tires or any other normal every day life thing. This bothers me because most TV shows purport to be taking place in a real, every day life kind of setting with highly abnormal circumstances in most cases. People in books don't tend to do these things either, but they will more often than TV people. This kind of thing doesn't bother me in books because the books I read make no bones about the unreality of the worlds in which they take place.

The difference I think is that television is visual and on time constraints. A book might show us Sam sawing the ropes against the blade until the ropes fray and weaken enough for him to pull his hands free, by which time of course, evil beastie has set upon him again and he wails helplessly until big brother Dean comes to his rescue. Essentially, that's what happened in that particular scene, but since this was towards the end of an hour long show, there wasn't time for frantic sawing.

I mean, there's willing suspension of disbelief and then there's breaking the laws of nature. Breaking laws isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'm still not entirely certain why what works so well in books for me doesn't work at all in television. Maybe it has to do with me not being a visual kind of person. Some people learn better with visual aids. I learn by doing. Visual aids don't mean shit unless there's something I can put my hands on. Reading is doing.

Damn, I've lost the train of thought now. This was so much more coherent eight hours ago. Now I'm all tired and have completely forgotten about my laundry. Or maybe I simply willingly suspended the belief that I had to do any laundry.

Observation

Wrote a poem in my head while taking a shower this evening, and I noticed something. It seems the influence of listening to rap and hip hop has lead me down the road of rhyme. I still don't count out meter. I listen for rhythm, though. I always have. Even free verse has a certain rhythm to it. I still shun conventional end rhyme and favor internal rhyme, which I think creates a more interesting rhythm than end rhymes, and the best writers of rap and hip hop make use of highly creative internal rhymes. My rhymed poems tend to be more light hearted while my free verse is fairly melancholy, not angsty, I never really did angst in my poetry. Melancholy, I can do. Anger, I can do that, too.

Poetry is an interesting thing. I think most people have a vastly different idea of what poetry should be than I do. I see that in the kinds of poems that get published in PP and in the kinds of poems various Pikers like. I'm not talking the technical stuff here. That's all a matter of taste. I mean the soul of the form. What does a poem do to a reader? Kathy's comment on my poem Rap that ran in the Press last week thrilled me to no end. What I had written meant something to her, something probably completely different to me as the poet or to whomever that voice was (because it's not always the poet's voice). And that to me is the beauty of verse. I could tell you exactly what I was thinking when I wrote the last lines of the poem, and perhaps that would ruin the experience for you. I won't do that. A reader makes a poem work as much as the poet does, something that prose can't really claim to do because of its less than malleable nature. By that I mean I can show you a character's mood or action, and these are not disputable. But a poem has a little more freedom of interpretation. "I fell long before you came here." Fell from where, into what, why, how far, how long ago exactly? Speaker of the poem has one answer. Speaker, in this case, is not poet. Poet, then, has another answer. Reader, who is neither speaker nor poet and reads the lines filtered through her own experiences and emotions has yet another answer. And not one of them can be wrong. And that's just so damn cool.

Kathy, I don't know if you're reading this, but thank you again for the comment. It really meant a lot to me.

Insomnia and the Hole in the Universe

I so desperately need to and want to go to bed. I'm in pain, and I am tired. But the pain, the bling in my mouth and a general paranoia about possible allergic reactions to Aleve make me not want to try to sleep. I think I've taken Aleve before and not had a problem, but that was years ago. I just don't think it's fun to wake up in the middle of the night having an asthma attack because I took something for pain. I'm allergic to aspirin. So I speak from experience. I'd stick to my generic acteomenaphin, but it doesn't work any more. Ibuprofen, having been popping it like giant blue Tic Tacs for two days now, is winding down to ineffective. I want to send a message to my liver. Fucking stop it and let me get dopy once in a while. I don't care how many alcoholics I'm decended from. I'm not an alcoholic, so it isn't fair you going an giving me this kind of chemical tolerance.

But there's a hockey game to entertain me, and it's only just now midnight. I can deal. Or not. Throbbing in head not good. I swear I tolerate pain a hell of a lot better than it sounds like right now. This was something I did to myself willingly, though, and will be living with for the next two years. Somehow the consolation of a lovely straight-toothed smile doesn't seem worth it. I don't fucking smile anyway. Especially not when I hurt this way.

So. I mentioned somewhere or another that I had finished reading William Gibson's Pattern Recognition and that I might throw together a review. So here I am. Throwing. I didn't hate the book. I was mightly unhappy with it. I'd never read any Gibson before and kept hearing how great a sci-fi writer he is. I figured I owe it to myself to read a guy who influences other writers I like to read; same reason I read Lovecraft. To view the source. But this was just ... utterly unremarkable. A woman with an allergy to brandnames and an affinity for some mysterious flim snips that have shown up on the internet gets drawn into a web of ... something. I was not intrigued. I didn't feel any empathy for the characters, and I certainly had no vested interest in the finding of the maker of these flim snips. I was annoyed some 60 pages in on discovering that the heroine's name is pronounced Case, not Casey. It's spelled Cacey. I continued to read it as Casey. This is not the kind of thing that translates well in writing. If pronunciation of a name is in anyway important, even if just to cause confusion at some point, the name should be spelled in such a way that the intended pronunciation is obvious. But that's just me. Perhaps he was writing with a feature film in mind, no doubt having sold the movie rights long ago. I kept reading, though. Like I said, I didn't hate the book. I was waiting for it to get good, waiting to be impressed by this master of sci-fi. Pattern Recognition is less sci-fi and more mainstream literary fiction which means that almost nothing happens over the course of a few hundred pages. The ending was pure bullshit. Too much of Cacey asking, "What happened to so and so?" and being fed neat little answers. That's the way I wrote when I was 12 and got tired of a story. Sorry, Bill, this one's a loser. It's perhaps unfair to judge the man's skills on one book that falls flat. Maybe if I take a gander at his very first book, I'll see the stellar writer people claim he is. It wasn't his writing style that fell flat. It was the story he was telling. It's like hearing a song by a band you know you like, but the song doesn't quite do it for you the way their other songs do.

Once that was done, I cleansed my reading pallette with two more volumes of Min-Woo Hyung's Priest. Yummy. And then I dove headlong into Neil Gaiman's latest, Anansi Boys. For now, on that, just this: I've never read a writer who could get so much characterization out of a green fedora and lemon-yellow gloves. I adore Gaiman's work.

Other things to gush about: A History of Violence. A most excellent movie of deliberate, excrutiating pace, bursts of bloody violence and a beautiful, beautiful ending. And (bonus!) Viggo Mortenson's bare ass.

Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine. This is the album Sony didn't want to release because they didn't hear a single. Fiona leaked it out to the internet, and now the album's out. Sony was right. There's no pop single on it. Just like her last one, this one's more jazz than pop. Suits me fine. It's most excellent.

The Like's Are You Thinking What I'm Thinking?. A trio of young ladies that hubby and I saw open for Tori Amos back in August. Melodic rock n roll, a girl version of BRMC (one of my favorites), with a little more whimsy and a little less distortion. This is their first album. I hope they make many many more.

I'd say something about the Gorillaz, too, but I bought their first one instead of the new one. I'll pick up Demon Days at some point. Sure the idea of a cartoon band is gimmicky, but I like the gimmick and I dig the tunes. Groovy, hip hop stuff. Good hip hop is hard to find, 'cause like R Kelly and Nelly and all that, that's not good hip hop. I don't really know what it is. 'Slong as it stays away from me, I don't care.

How long before an allergic reaction to medication sets in, do you think? An hour, two, more? Been about an hour I think. I'm still breathing freely. Lung wise. Nose wise ... well, that's not the drug's fault. Pain still lingering.

... I just witnessed a car commerical that rips off the movie Hero. What the fuck.

Egg on you face

To Lulu or not Lulu ... that is the question

The fables project is mostly complete. There's one story that I need to type and another that on second reading doesn't seem finished. I had decided that I would do a Lulu book if these got to 50,000 words. I will be just about 10,000 words short of that, and no new stories are occurring to me. I'm not going to force out a few more stories, although I probably could if I really wanted to. But now I'm not sure that I want to make the effort to edit, format and do all the stuff I would need to do to upload these to Lulu. It's not something I would even begin to work on until December at the earliest. But just like everything else I do, I'm now uncertain of what to do. Why can't I just be brave? Am I that afraid of failure? And how is it failure to self publish these stories with absolutely no expecations of sales or anything else? Besides, anyone who would want to read them already has since they're on my Live Journal. Well, not all of them. There are a total of four that I hadn't posted, including the one I need to type and the one that isn't really finished.

So there you have it. I'm angsting over something that doesn't fucking matter to anyone, not really even me. I don't write because I want people to read my writing. I write because I have to. I write because there are things that I hear in my head that want out. Yes it sounds like a case of some kind of delusional disorder, but it's the only way to describe it. It's not a coherent voice. It's a whisper, a suggestion, a feeling that's more tangible than just feeling. I hear stories and poems. I realized that's what it was a few days ago when I ended up writing about six complete poems and a couple of fragments. Only a couple of them were any good, but it was because I heard something in the back of my head that wanted to be written down. I had to get them out or they would have bugged me forever.

Not long ago, there was an incident. Details not withstanding, the result was a decision that I should quit writing because it's wasting my time and ruining my life. I even went so far as to box up all my notebooks, folders, pens and reference books. It physically hurt me to do that. I sat here not looking at my boxes of stuff and literally ached with the thought of never writing anything every again. It's only wasting my time and ruining my life because I'm not in the right place.

So what's that got to do with Lulu? Well, Lulu is another step. The first step was NaNoWriMo. I learned how to finish things. The second step was Piker Press. I've learned how to bite the bullet and submit things. (Although I sort of wish I hadn't looked at the list of upcoming issues. I seem to have the cover story for Nov. 28th. And it's not an anime review. Gulp.)

My mood is shit right now. I need a long hot bath with nice smelling stuff. I need to do some writing. I need to do some reading. Finally finished Pattern Recognition (book review here later maybe), so after one more issue of Priest, it's on to Anansi Boys. I wish I was Neil Gaiman sometimes. I have the capacity to tell the kinds of stories he does, yet he seems so much more balanced than I am. How do you balance creativity and stability? But I wasn't stable to begin with. Is it ironic that what I seek to achieve in my life is the one thing I am, chemically, unable to attain? Or is that just a coincidence?

Like a Million Golden Opportunities

November 1st is fast approaching, and I'm so excited that I want to start writing now. Premature ejaculation of word count is not a good thing. So instead, I write background. In my mind, I'm working out a short story called Pirates of Pale. It occurred to me that there oughta be a pirate radio station in the city. So there it goes. It could be just a piece of background that means nothing, or I could use radio broadcasts as word count padding. I guess it depends on how important I want the DJs to be as characters. I do, however, have other plans for them. Nothing in this story is what it seems to be. Though its color palette is mostly brown and grey, I've got a lot of shades of each to work with. Can't wait. Can't wait. Can't wait.

Being the glutton for noveling punishment that I am, I'm considering signing up to be my region's ML. I considered it last year, but then two other Wrimos got to it first. Neither of them are doing it this year. I have no idea why I want to do this. I'm not a social creature. I'm not a planner. I'm not even as organized as I give the illusion of being. Don't I just wish I was as organized at home as I am at work. I'm still conflicted about actually being an ML. It's not like it's a hard thing to do. I think what gets me about it is the change in my personality it represents. Does getting older mean the end of the Belligerant Apathy party? Am I going to start getting more and more involved in the world I supposedly live in? Because I've been thinking about that, too. The whole idea of living. Other people have busy lives. They have jobs that keep them hopping, kids, family, friends, hobbies and so on. My life is not busy at all. I have a job, sure. But no kids, not much family, few friends. And this perspective that people claim to gain when they get older? What's that? If I could go back knowing what I know now, I'd play the drums or saxophone in band instead of the flute. I'd maybe study a little harder and not let the fact that I was always bored in school get in the way. Who am I kidding? I'd still be bored. I'd be even more bored. I'm serious about the band thing, though. I'd make one hell of a drummer. I love beating on things.

Maybe being an ML would be a good thing for me. Maybe if I find myself with an obligation, I'll stop pretending to be shy. Because that's the only difference between me and my evil twin. My evil twin is a lot more outspoken. Although perhaps that's why she's evil. An outspoken me maybe isn't a good thing. Well. Still more than enough time to consider.

Hmm. It has begun to rain again. There's a storm out in the Atlantic now that's likely to become Tropical Storm Vince. Fucking Vince. I don't know the last time there were this many named storms in a hurricane season. It's worrying to say the least. It's of course a natural cycle for there to be more active and intense seasons every so often, but the things humans have been doing to the environment are not helping. I used to want to be an environmental activist. It seemed important to me to try to save the world that way. Now I think the fight's long over. We've lost. All we can do now is try to lessen the consequences. Hybrid cars, solar panels, cleaner fuel. Why's it so hard to get these kinds of things to be the norm rather than the alternative? I'd willingly be inconvenienced a bit for the sake of a healthy mother earth.

Alright. I can see by my wandering topics that my need to write is growing. Cold shower.