Super Sugarplum Pre-Apocalyptic Holiday Mega Crunchy Post!

Merry holiday-times everyone!

     Chances are, you've heard we've yet another end of the world on our hands. Just in case something does happen later, let's talk about writers' fixation on the apocalypse - now!
     It's fairly common for sci-fi writers to mention the end of the world; either as a setting for the tale or a potential stake if the hero loses. The apocalypse offers a great deal of freedom for an author to craft (or un-craft) his world. It also goes along way towards sparking public interest in how our little blue marble may one day meet its maker. In recent year it's been all about the zombies; zombies with guns, zombie plagues, fat zombies, short zombies, zombies that climb on rocks, the list goes on. No one is sure how the cultural movement began (though the word has roots in voodoo and Night of the Living Dead seems to be their first successful mainstream outing), but the walkers are now inundating mass media, from Call of Duty games  to The Walking Dead comics to The View.
     Going further back we see definitive streaks of alien invasions/annihilations. Meteor strikes and other natural phenomena are safe bets too in the right setting (Roland Emerich's made a career of it, with Independence Day and Day After Tomorrow, among others).
     The 2012 Mayan Apocalypse has sparked its own number of responses, from the big budget (2012) to Walmart bin Schlock I can't even remember. This past weekend I saw 4 different trailers for end-of-the-world movies, including the deftly titled After Earth (by the incomparable M. Knight Shaymalan), a romantic comedy with - you guessed it- zombies, and the requisite "Giant Robots fight Giant Monsters" flick.
     The point is, even when we aren't supposed to die later in the week, pop culture has a fascination with the End. Have we exhausted all possible scenarios? Will we ever have a new fate to fear? WE may never know.
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Now that that's out of the way...

If you are reading this, it means the world may not have ended yet, which means it's time for the Super Secret Holiday Message! In every blog post I've made thus far (starting with #2) I have left a fragment to a coded message of the utmost yuletide importance. Can you decode it? Here's a hint:

9=I

20=T

Good Luck, Happy Holidays, and listen to the Little Orphan Annie radio show!

The Lost Sequel to the Odyssey

     The Iliad and Odyssey are some of Homer's most famous works, detailing the Trojan War. But according to a scholar named Proclus, they are but two in a series of eight epic poems. None were written by Homer, but when stitched together they fill in his missing pieces of the war.

     Now, we don't actually have any way of proving Proclus' story, but other writers have quoted the six alledged tales, and tiny scraps of them have survived in paper. Asside from that, it's difficult to question him. We know the Trojan War happened, so it's logical that someone wrote about it, and we know it was common to write epic poetry back then. If the only existing evidence of Julius Caesar was that some dude from the Elizabethian Period claimed there was a drama about the assassination of Caesar, could we refute it? We know that the assasination did take place, and we know that there were many famous playwrites in Elizabethian England - including Shakepeare.                                  14

     The last book in the lost collection, the Telegony, details the end of Odysseus' life. According to Proclus, Odysseus returns home to Ithaca from his latest adventure (which sees him marry the queen of a faraway land and remain there long enough to see his illegitimate child reach adulthood) just in time for the invasion of Telegonus, the bastard child of Odysseus and - gasp! Circe! It seems Telegonus went to visit his long-lost father, but didn't appreciate his absence when he got there.

The Death of Ophelia

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When King Hamlet died, it made his son vengeful and crazed. The same thing happened when Hamlet slew (slayed?) Polonius, only Polonius had two kids. Laertes got the vengeful, and Ophelia got the crazed.

Only whereas Hamlet could have been faking his insanity, Ophelia definitely isn't faking hers.

It may seem odd for someone to be so stricken with grief that they develop an unaimed loss of composure, but for Ophelia, it's a blade that cuts on both ends. Obviously on one hand comes the sudden death of her father, but on the other hand comes the man responsible; Hamlet. The man she loves just killed her father, and she doesn't know how to cope with this.

So we come to one of the most famous scenes in Hamlet that you've never seen. After an outburst of creepy singing in the courtyard, Ophelia drowns hanging Laurels by the river. But what exactly happened? Shakepeare leaves it ambiguous, but there are a few options. She could have simply slipped, or she could have committed suicide. Her mental condition muddles the water even further. Perhaps she even went for a swim, not realizing in her state that she was wearing a flowing, heavy dress. Each option is equally likely, which was probably Will's intention.

What the Devil?

We already know from our time in the Inferno that Dante established a vision of Hell that holds true to this day. We also know that many of his interpretations have not held up as well, cheifly being the diminishing of Satan.

Looney Tunes, "Devil's Feud Cake"



South Park

     We often see Satan as a malicious force of temptation and evil, with red skin, horns, a goatee, and impeccable skills on the fiddle. Despite Dante's rather ingenious way of showing how internally weak the Devil is, he's always coniving in popular culture.
    
     John Milton's 15th Century epic Paradise Lost speaks from Lucifer's point of view for a fair stretch of the tale. Satan is presented as a tragic hero, though still antagonistic. If that sounds really risky for an author to do, well it is. Satan's part of the story is about his unsuccessful rebellion in Heaven and sub sequent rallying of the Dark Angels in Pandaemonium. Lucifer leads his men from the front lines and rallies them with his power over the spoken word just as well as epic protagonists like Odysseus. If Milton's verses on the "behind the scenes" of God's will parallel with Dante's, then this portrayal of Satan polarizes them equally. It has also raised quite a stir among scholars, as they debate the meaning behind Milton's words.                                                                        20

Satan in Paradise Lost    

Hades vs. Satan

     Long before Lucifer took up his fiddle, a god named Hades presided over a similar kingdom of death. But not as similar as some believe. Even the nigh-infallible Dante drew somewhat unfair parallels between the orignal Dark Angel and Greece's God of Death (though this was likely due to the fact that even back then people thought the Greek myths were cool).

Satan in the Inferno

     Part of the Greek origin myth tells of how Zeus freed his brothers and sisters from the stomach of their father Cronus, thus overthrowing the titans. Zeus and two of his brothers then divided the world into three and drew lots over sovereignty. Zeus became king of the heavens and everything under the sun. Poseidon won lordship over the seas, and the third brother, named Hades, "the unseen," by the humans, gained the Underworld.                                                     12

And who wouldn't trust this guy?

     The Underworld is not Hell. All dead went to the Underworld, regardless of morality. If you did wrong, there were Hellish places for you to stay, but it wasn't the norm. Regardless of this, death was still scary. Hades became a name whispered, much as we don't speak of Hell in regular conversation.

     There is very little written about Hades, likely attributed to his less revered and more feared reputation. There is only one piece of evidence to suggest Hades was anymore violent or dark or evil than his kin. This would be the tale of Persephone and how Hades wooed her to be his bride with a pomegranate.

     So, the bottom line is that while Satan is an evil lord of evil evilness, Hades is just doing his job. Modern culture tends to show Hades with shades of his devilish counterpart.

How to be Evil (or not) by Brian Perkins

     Have you ever heard of an anti-hero or an anti-villain? I've always been somewhat confused as to what the difference was. At a glance, they seem like the same intermediate step between evil and good, but there is a difference.

     So, you have a good guy. He does good things in uncompromisingly good ways. He's polite, he follows the rules, and he will never go against his beliefs to accomplish his goal. As you travel down the ladder the hero gaets a little more tarnished; he may have a tragic past, or may have questionable methods.                                                           15 22 1

     The anti-hero takes this a step further. He has good goals/intentions, but is willing to do potentially bad things to accomplish them. Alternatively, he may believe in "good," but doesn't agree with the laws, and so he takes justice into his own hands.

     If an anti-hero does good things in a bad way, then an anti-villain does bad things with a strong moral fiber. His goals fit the "evil" standard, but there are things he will not do, lows he shan't sink to, in pursuing those goals. Anti-heros and anti-villains walk a fine line between good and evil.

     Then you have sympathetic villains. These guys are really evil, but the reason they became evil, or their behavior, warrants your pity or remorse.

     Finally, there are the completely irredeemably evil characters. They kick puppies, they twirl mustaches, and they do it with a smile on their face.

     Literarily speaking, there are a number of shades of grey in between the black and white of moral struggle. The "greyer" a character is, the more rounded of a persona they may be.

Writing Your Inner Self

     Sometimes when an author is writing a book or a movie, he will insert him/herself into the story. This can be literal, like Stan Lee or , or it can be more discreet.

     Often times a character based on the author appears in the book. Even if the character doesn't outwardly seem like their real-life counterpart, they may reflect the author's inner-self. What does this mean? Maybe it's the author at a different point in his life, or maybe it's a persona adopted by the author's mind. M. Night Shyamalan frequently gives himself nigh omnipotent roles in his movies, for example.                                                                                                                                     21 18

     Dante and other writers (like Stephen Colbert) take this a step further by using their own names. For example, Dante the Florentine writer wrote Commedia, starring a Florentine writer named Dante. They are essentially the same person, only the real Dante probably didn't vacation in Hell.

The Phantom of the Opera

So, when your thinking of Halloween music, there's a lot of spooky pipe organs, right?

This is only marginally related to that topic.

     First written as a novel by Gaston Leroux in 1909 France, Le Fantome de l'Opera was similar to Frankenstein in that it sold very poorly when first published. What the novel lacked in any literary signifigance though was more than made up for by its musical adaptations.

     The first musical was Ken Hill's British Phantom of the Opera. During one performance Hill was aproached by Andrew Lloyd Webber to establish a Broadway version. In 1988 Webber's own version of Phantom opened.

     Phantom is a macabre love story about a female actor named Christine who is bedeviled by a mysterious admirer named Erik that lives beneath the Opera House. It's not exactly a horror by any stretch, but it has dark elements that win it over many a horde of (often teenage female) fans. Michael Crawford made his name in America off of the role of Erik.                                11 25 15

     Today Webber's play is the longest running ticket on Broadway, by over 2500 shows, as well as the first to surpass 10,000 performances. It is considered (admittedly by its own writers' calculations) to be the single highest grossing entertainment venture ever conceived, making 5.1 billion dollars.

     The connection to literature is that Phantom is a classic, at least by any theater teacher's terms, in the ranks of Shakespeare. Though Leroux's novel was a flop, its legacy will likely live forever.

The Frankenpost

     In 1818, Mary Shelley anonymously published Frankenstein, a horror that would one day greatly influence monster media. And seeing as next week is Halloween, I figure I could write a breif blog post about it.
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     Mary Shelley's name was not on the first edition of Frankenstein, as it was still uncommon for women to write books. Reviews were mixed, with some praising its ingenious writing style and others panning its dark and sometimes meandering plot. Still, the public instatnly latched on to it, and it still holds up today.
 
     Many of the now commonplace elements of horror literature (mad scientists, reanimated corpses, dark and stormy nights, etc.) weren't the norm before Frankenstein. Of course, the monster himself has become a staple of the modern Halloween scene. Nowadays he looks a little different then the meat puppet Shelley envisioned, but he's there nonetheless. Next week, gentle bloggers, is actual Halloween.So I have something special planned.

Well, not particularly. It's just Halloween themed again.

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

     Sinfeld prides itself with being a show about nothing, a term this blogger doesn't entirely subscribe to. But before there was Sinfeld, and by extension most other shows about nothing, there was Cheers.

     Cheers was an early entry into the ensemble cast genre. Taking place in a (sort of*) real life bar in Boston, the show dealt with a number of regular patrons with unique quirks. The bar itseld served the "Jerry's apartment" role, a room with essentially one camera angle that people would randomly burst into.
     Frasier (star of the spin-off of the same name) was a down-on-his-luck psychologist, Norm was the typical barfly (literally everyone knew his name), and Cliff was a mailman who loved quoting facts and figures. Cliff is also Ham the piggy bank from Toy Story, which you will never be able to unhear if you ever watch the show now.

The "nothing" draw of the show came from the principal action rarely leaving the bar. Someone would bring up a conversation, the rest would join in, rinse and repaeat. There was, of course, an overarching plot like Mr. Sinfeld's sitcom, but those were the small potatoes.
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*The outside of the bar used in stock footage is the real Cheers bar in Boston. The inside where the action took place was filmed on a setpeice. The decor of the Cheers set was then converted into a sports-bar like setting in Boston's Quincy Market.

Music and the Senses

So, after discussing dissonance and tone last week, I got to thinking about the way music conveys emotion, and how that may be equated into literature.

I'll start off easy - suspense. It dangles something in front of you, then, at the right moment, strikes! A way to accomplish this often seen in movies and TV is the employment of Hitchcock strings (or Lost strings as we might as well start calling them). Hitchcock would famously use the etherial whining of violins to build suspense, then let loose with a shrill "scare chord" (think the shower scene from Psycho) A good story teller (campfire stories anyone?) can use this same technique with his voice, drawing out syllables to give that cliche' "spooooky" feeling.

Next, consider how one may express anger in music. Loud, short, stilted, phrases with sharp attacks should do the trick. Looking around the internet, this selection checks off most of the above (note the intense blasts of base drums and brass). Evidence suggests the meter that Beowulf has been passed down in employs this emphasis on the first syllable.

The easiest way to show sadness in music is to use a minor key and slow, lilting phrases. This again falls to the good story teller, who uses his own tone to get his point across. The below example is more mysterious than sad, but the same basic principle applies.

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I'll leave you on a high note. Happiness can be signified with soaring and triuphant chords, which there again can be immitated by a skilled poet. If you've ever heard the main theme to Disney's Dinosaur, then you'll know what I mean.

It should be noted that not all songs that convey these emotions use these techniques, nor do songs with these techniques necessarily need to convey these emotions (Or else Bernstein's "America" would be angry). It's just a few tricks I've picked up on.

The Tone of Scone

The thing about written word is, it was recorded from speech. The original speaker probably would have said something a certain way, and we deduce that using the author's diction and textual clues. We call this tone.
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Tone in written documents is usually denoted with punctuation marks like exclamation points. Italics can be used to stress a word as though it was being enunciated, while boldfont and CAPITALIZATION can emphasize loudness of the word or phrase.

Other things are harder to show on the limitations of a white page. In more visual mediums, color palettes greatly influence the emotional response from the audience. The feel of a character's voice, or the speed at which they speak a line, can also impact tone. Imagine a mother singing Rock-a-bye Baby to her child. Now, imagine Anthony Hopkins singing it in his Hannibal Lecter voice from Silence of the Lambs.

Speed, or tempo, is a factor that applies to music and literature equally. One of the most prominent examples from my childhood is from a favorite movie of mine, Disney's The Brave Little Toaster(1987).

Sung by junked cars in a scrapyard, "Worthless" is about all the things they accomplished in life as they await a magnetic crane to hoist them into a trash compactor.

I'll give you a minute to let that sink in.

Perhaps the only thing that prevented myself and other 6 to 10 year-olds from bawling our collective eyes out over this premise was the actual music in the song. For what it is, "Worthless" is rather up-tempo, with a rock beat and what I make out to be a major key. There are heavy implications of death, aging, and even a debated suicide in the sequence, but the music masks it for less perceptive minds. The movie and its sequel (the one good sequel, that is) have a number of mature elements that you wouldn't expect from the box art alone.

 

"An adorable adventure that kids will treasure"

- The Chicago Sun-Times on Toaster

It's TIME for comedy!

"Dying is easy, comedy is hard."
                                                        - Old Adage




"Tradgedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die."
                                                        - Mel Brooks

Timing is the purest aspect of comedy. That's kind of why it was considered inferior to the only other kind of story in existance back then, the tragedy.

The most revered of writers back then had what I once recently called "diarrhea of the pen". Take Homer, for instance. He takes roughly 30 lines at the end of Book 7 of The Odyssey to describe the lineage of the Queen of Phaecia, just so that when Odysseus meets her next book he'll know something about her. This style of eloquent and descriptive writing greatly benefits the tradgedy, where the goal is to upheave a full eotional response fro the audience. For comedy however, this may not work.

Comedy is virtually never this discriptive (unless your comedicly listing off meaningless details). The makers of Airplane! have stated that making a large volume of brief gags allows them to move on from a potentially bad joke before it actually registers in your mind. The goal is to be concise, but not necessarily short. Especially in the visual medium, many authors like to draw out gags to almost excruciating lengths. This sets up expectations for the audience, which makes it funny for them to see just how long it goes. Seth McFarlane in particular grabs onto this style like a chigger and sucks it until it collapses from bloodloss.

Want to know how it's done? I used a textual type of comedic timing at the top of this page. By spacing out the two quotes, I prevented most of you from seeing the "punchline" quote until after your eye scrolled down from the "set up" quote.

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*For the record, if you don't get it, The black guy's name is Roger, the guy in the back is Victor, and Peter Graves is Clarence Oveur.

Epics by the Numbers

     When you discuss an epic like The Odyssey, you talk about a quest that the main character undergoes. Over the centuries our tastes in high adventure have yielded a certain fundamental pattern in the way such fiction is written.

     In the simplest works, the heroes will need to get to a place X, or obtain an object Y. The Odyssey involves the former for most of the book, with Odyssesus trying to get home to Ithaca. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings combines the two, revolves around getting object Y (The Ring) to place X (Mordor). Writers can weave any number of "equations" using these variables.
     Sometimes though, the what and where won't cut it. Sometimes you need a who.

Eh, close enough.

     Enter Person Z. The adversary who covets the Y, or whom the hero must prevent from reaching X.
Or, perhaps they're the only one who knows how to get to X, and will accompany the hero throughout the story. There can be any number of X's, Y's, and Z's in a story. Z-characters, however, are often nost plentiful. They will often take major roles in the plot; specifically a role the main protagonist or villain would not be able to cover. Marlin would not be able to assume Dory's responsibilities as comic relief if she was absent from the final draft of Finding Nemo, but Anchor, Chum, and Bruce could have been roled into one shark and not really altered the end product.

Now, not all genres are this formulaic (the more philosophical and artsy you get as a writer, the less you'll adhere to convention), but looking for the X,Y, and Z can make adventure fiction like The Odyssey much easier to understand.