Out West

This is the blog post for the week of January 28. The blog post for last week precedes this one, and is dated thus.

This weekend, as I pondered through a second viewing of Industrial Light and Magic's Rango, I realized just how much this outwardly so-so picture manages to lovingly homage its western roots.

A Western takes place between the end of the Civil War and the 1890's, when the frontier closed. Westerns actually originated in literature well before the War, when the "frontier" was east of the Missouri River. One of the earliest films in the genre (or of any genre for that matter), was The Great Train Robbery of 1903. Train Robberies are a staple of the Western Genre (and one of the only elements Rango doesn't homage or parody). During the 50's and 60's Western TV Shows and Comics exploded, and from Bonanza to Gunsmoke to Jonah Hex they still remain in semi-public conscience. It was a time of bank robbers and wanted posters, cattle drives and posses. Gunslingers faced off at high noon, and unsavory characters walked bow-legged into saloons.

But when you think of a Western (even though few do anymore) you probably think of the genre's little amigo, the Spaghetti Western. Called so because of their Italian studio origin, Spaghetti Westerns were often filmed on location in Spain (Where the cacti were more stereotypical). They were often distillations and deconstructions (breakdowns) of regular Westerns, but managed to outshine their inspirations. Sergio Leone directed the Dollars Trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly), source of some of Wild West cinema's most seminal scenes (like that song that always plays when a gunfight happens), and helped make Clint Eastwood (The Man With No Name) the household name he is today.

Noir

This is the blog for the week of January 21.

So, before we started reading Crime and Punishment, I mistook it for a member of the Film Noir genre. Popularized in the 40's, noir is the typical "crime drama" style, before crime dramas inundated the prime-time TV scene. Noir typically featured your private gumshoe, your street hustler with a heart of gold, and other hard-boiled smooth-talker types. The words "dame" and "doll" are thrown around a lot.

In visual media, Noir is striking based on its light and dark contrasts. Shadows are long and often partially obtrusive to faces (known as chiaroscuro), and light will be used sparingly, often for dramatic effect (horizontal blinds are a staple). Dutch angles and other atmospheric positions are fair game. Authentic noir is shot in black and white of course, given the era.

Cynical, fast-talking, and never far from his cigarette, the protagonist will often be less then wholesome, but never genuinely evil. His outlook on the city he lives in (and it's always a city) is, as a rule, bleak and defeatist, often disillusioned by an event from his past.

Venerated printed examples include The Maltese Falcon and The Postman Always Rings Twice. Those two books were adapted into movies, the latter of which starred Humphrey Bogart, famous for Casablanca, another Noir Film.

You Read a Post About the Second Person...

Before I begin, let me follow up on last week by breifly discussing Huck Finn. Twain writes in a pseudo-present tense, as while it's clear that Huck is speaking about previous events, he uses phrasing like "He says," or "I am." It's supposed to be like listening to someone tell a story, or like one of those "A guy walks into a bar" jokes. I hadn't considered this kind of implement of present tense last week; it gets my approval.

Now, today we discuss an even more narrowly implemented style: second person. To put it concretely, The second person is a story in which you are a participant, and which is told from your perspective by a limited narrator. This technique is almost exclusively relegated to the text based or "Chose your own" media. Interactivity is almost a necessity, as dictating a reader's actions to them is essentially a less efficient form of third person limited.

Brian writes about writing in the present tense

This month I am writing about some of the less commonly utilized narrative mode. This week; my least favorite method: Present Tense. I am trying to remember one book I once read that was written entirely in this tense. Basically, the writer plans his narrative, then writes the characters as though they were currently acting them. One tends to get odd, unnatural feeling sentences like "John plans the surprise party," or '"Hey, stop that!" Jane cries.' This is a rarely used tactic, as it doesn't offer as much flexibility in story telling.

**Editor's Note: An adendum to this post has been written into next weeks post.

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.