A Burning Dog Needs No Chimney

My best of 2011

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 18:36:27 GMT

Dropping back in, briefly, to mention that my best of 2011 reading list is up on my new blog.

Also, The Mirage will be in bookstores in a little more than month.

Happy New Year, all!

New Matt Ruff website and blog

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 16:16:28 GMT

I've just converted my bymattruff.com website to a WordPress installation. Everything seems to be working, so far, though I'm sure I'll blow it up at least once as I continue tinkering with the theme.

As part of the site update, I've started a new blog, here. I'll be keeping this LiveJournal account for archival purposes, and may still post occasional announcements here, but if you want to continue following me you should subscribe to my new blog's RSS feed and/or my new Twitter account.

FYI, I'm on Twitter now

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:38:56 GMT

@bymattruff

Contagion

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:00:01 GMT

Lisa and I saw this over the weekend. If you've been thinking about checking it out, but were worried that it might be upsetting, you should know that it's mostly harmless. Even though it's about a mass tragedy, it doesn't touch any 9/11 nerves. Unfortunately, it doesn't touch any other nerves, either.

Cold, clinical, and smartly paced, Contagion feels less like a story and more like a dramatization of a (fictional) catastrophe. The attempt to show the global scope of the pandemic, the multiple plotlines, and the relatively short running time mean you never stay with any character long enough to really get to know or care about them. And the all-star cast only amplifies this distancing effect. Seeing a plague victim get autopsied ought to be harrowing, but all I could think, watching a doctor peel back the scalp of a certain A-list actress, was "Huh, first Glee, now this."

The film also raises all sorts of issues related to the pandemic without resolving or even exploring most of them, because, again, there just isn't time. Talking about it afterwards, Lisa and I noted any number of throwaway plot points that could have served as the basis for an entire movie. For example, Matt Damon, as Gwyneth Paltrow's husband, learns from a CDC investigator that in the course of bringing the plague back to Minnesota from Hong Kong, Gwyneth made a stopover in Chicago, where her (supposedly ex-)lover happens to live. So, a grieving widower, forced to deal with the discovery that his dead wife was cheating on him -- that could be a good story. Here, it just gets lost.

I don't want to be totally negative, because it was a diverting film -- we weren't bored, and we went to the matinee so it was cheap entertainment -- but we were both left wishing there'd been more to it. All that talent, you expect something more substantial.

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 14:15:15 GMT

Weird decade, eh? Next time, I may try the blue pill...

Stay safe and stay sane today, everyone.

FYI, Charlie Jade is on Hulu

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 15:45:44 GMT

If you're looking for an offbeat sci-fi series -- or just something non-9/11 related to watch over the weekend -- check out Charlie Jade on Hulu. It's a Canadian/South African production filmed in and around Cape Town. It concerns a private investigator from an alternate universe who gets blown into our world after rebels in a third universe sabotage a facility belonging to the evil Vexcor Corporation.

I first heard about this show when I was on a Norwescon panel with series creator Bob Wertheimer and lead actor Jeffrey Pierce. Unfortunately, it's never been released on DVD in the U.S., and its only U.S. broadcast was a one-shot run on the Sci Fi Channel that aired at the wrong time for me to catch it. I've only watched the pilot so far, but I like it -- it's got a gritty, TV-budget Blade Runner aesthetic going on, and the S.A. locale makes it feel different without trying too hard.

Also interesting: Complications Ensue, a screenwriting blog by Alex Epstein, who was lead writer for the show.

I'm 46 today

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 12:43:13 GMT

#11

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 16:45:24 GMT

Another severed foot has been found floating in the waters off B.C.

Wikipedia now has an entry covering the phenomenon: "Salish Sea human foot discoveries."

Elsewhere in the Mirage world...

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 18:34:53 GMT

Huffington Post reports [via Research Maven]:

Among the many bizarre items uncovered as Libyan rebels ransacked Muammar Gaddafi's Tripoli compound: an album filled with photos of former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
The discovery was perhaps not surprising given Gaddafi's much-professed admiration of the former U.S. Secretary of State, MSNBC is noting. "I support my darling black African woman," Gaddafi told al-Jazeera television in 2007, according to The Guardian. "I admire and am very proud of the way she leans back and gives orders to the Arab leaders...Leezza, Leezza, Leezza. I love her very much. I admire her and I'm proud of her because she's a black woman of African origin."

I'd love to have been a fly on the wall for this:

In 2008, Rice historically became the first U.S. Secretary of State to visit Tripoli since 1953. She and Gaddafi are reported to have enjoyed a private dinner, during which a State Department report indicates the Libyan leader also showered his visitor with an estimated $212,000 worth of gifts -- including a diamond ring in a wooden box, a lute and an accompanying DVD, and a locket with Qaddafi's own picture inside.

I wonder if the villa is owned by the Alighieri family

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 18:19:53 GMT

This morning's New York Times has an article about Dick Cheney's new memoir. I thought this bit at the end was interesting:

[I]n the epilogue, Mr. Cheney writes that after undergoing heart surgery in 2010, he was unconscious for weeks. During that period, he wrote, he had a prolonged, vivid dream that he was living in an Italian villa, pacing the stone paths to get coffee and newspapers.

Tomorrow night

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 15:33:00 GMT

Just a reminder, there's going to be a show tomorrow. Paul Constant at The Stranger has more.

Songs About Books -- Aug. 19

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 17:30:58 GMT

If you're in the Seattle area and looking for something cool to do on the evening of August 19th (that would be the Friday after next), Fremont Abbey Arts Center is hosting Songs About Books, a project in which five local songwriters will be performing original songs inspired by books assigned to them by The Stranger's Paul Constant. My own Set This House in Order is one of the books, and the artist who'll be making it sing is Johanna Kunin (Bright Archer).

The other artists who'll be performing are Alex Guy (Led to Sea), singing songs inspired by Vladamir Nabakov's Pale Fire; Ryan Barrett (The Pica Beats), singing about Michael Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island; Joshua Morrison, singing about Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai; and Levi Fuller, singing about Maggie Nelson's Bluets.

Tickets, available online, are $12 in advance and $15 at the door. Everybody gets a free limited-edition Songs About Books CD at the door; I'll be in the audience with a pen, so if you'd like me to forge Nabakov's signature on the liner notes, just give a yell.

If you can't attend the concert but still want to hear the music, you can listen to sample song tracks and buy copies of the CD on the Ball of Wax blog's Bandcamp page.

The Mirage

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 16:23:54 GMT

Second-pass galleys are done. (There were a whopping seven corrections this time. I could have made it nine, but decided to let a couple of borderline style issues* slide as a way of convincing myself I was actually finished.) Bound galleys are next, then actual books.

Meanwhile, as you can see, we have a cover. And for those of you who've been wondering what the story is actually about, I've posted jacket copy on the Mirage page of my website. Enjoy!

*Because someone is sure to ask, both involved colons: in the first case, whether the colon in question should have been a period, and in the second, whether the word following the colon should have been lowercased instead of capitalized. Heavy stuff.

Feeding Time

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 16:52:03 GMT

As my reward for supporting her in the Clarion West Write-a-thon, I get a custom-written story by the talented Kelley Eskridge.

The story-prompt I gave Kelley was a pair of videos from the YouTube subgenre of "kids being stalked by zoo animals" (hat tip to james_nicoll and his commenters for turning me onto these):

Kelley's story is here. Enjoy!

The Mirage: قَدْ أُكْمِلَ

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 19:08:05 GMT

Or as the Romans would say, Consummatum est:

These are the corrected first-pass galleys, just moments before we packed them into a box for return to the publisher last Friday. I'll get second-pass galleys later this month, and no doubt find one last punctuation mark or variant word spelling to angst over, but really, it's done.

Even in this pass I was scraping to find things to fix. Because I keep a master list of changes, I know there were only 56 corrections in 415 pages, almost all of them involving either minor formatting issues (at one point, the word "TransArabia" is broken between two lines, and the line break was between the "n" and the "s" instead of between the "s" and the "A") or single word substitutions (at another place, I had written "change to world" where I meant "change the world," the sort of error that's easily missed in copyediting, because your brain fills in the correct word automatically; I only finally noticed it because the galleys are in a different font than the manuscript I've been working with for the past four years).

As with Bad Monkeys, I did manage to find a statue to obsess over. There's a scene in The Mirage where my protagonist Mustafa al Baghdadi pays a visit to one of Saddam Hussein's mansions. Saddam's son Qusay leads Mustafa down a long hall lined with statues depicting Saddam in the guise of various historical figures, such as Hammurabi and Ramesses the Great. The hall ends in a domed chamber at the center of which is a two-story-tall statue of Saddam-as-Nebuchadnezzar; in a deliberate allusion to the Book of Daniel, sunlight shining through windows in the dome makes the statue's head glister like gold. Qusay instructs Mustafa to wait in this chamber, and leaves him standing "in Nebuchadnezzar's shadow."

This is the part my brain decided to fixate on. Because it is morning -- early morning -- the sunlight would be entering the dome at a shallow angle, so would there really be a shadow on the chamber floor for Mustafa to stand in? Also, Qusay and Mustafa are walking towards the west end of the house, and since I don't describe Mustafa passing the statue, that would put him still on the east side of it. Even if there is a shadow, would it be on the east side of the statue?

Yeah, I know: Nobody but me and maybe two other guys with OCD or Asperger's would ever even think to care about this, so it doesn't matter. But that didn't stop me from standing in front of a window one morning last week, pretending to be a statue of Nebuchadnezzar, and sighing with relief when I saw that I actually cast two shadows: one to the west, caused by the direct light of the sun, and another to the east, caused by the sun reflecting off the wall behind me.

And yeah, I know: It still doesn't matter. But after that, I was able to let it go. !قَدْ أُكْمِلَ

P.S. Now that it is finished, I hope to have cover art and a description of what the novel is actually about up on my website fairly shortly. Sorry I've been so cryptic up to now, but I didn't want to jinx it.

P.P.S. The tentative pub. date is January 17, 2012.

Sat, 21 May 2011 13:38:04 GMT

"That's so Takei"

Fri, 20 May 2011 15:25:32 GMT

Via Rachel Maddow:

Four-legged SEALs

Fri, 06 May 2011 15:25:45 GMT

So it seems the SEAL team that got Bin Laden included a "war dog" -- probably a German Shepherd -- trained to sniff out bombs and snipers, and to parachute from altitude:

Slate makes the inevitable "war cat" joke:

Yes, we can

Mon, 02 May 2011 19:40:35 GMT

My favorite partisan reaction to the news (via Blag Hag):

Meanwhile, on FOX (via Regret the Error):

If nothing else, this may explain why our own local FOX affiliate was spelling Osama bin Laden's name "Usama" last night. At first I thought it was because they wanted to get the USA in there, but now I'm thinking it was to avoid confusing the staff.

Murderer shot by Union troops

Mon, 02 May 2011 17:38:44 GMT

On CNN last night they were making repeated comparisons between Osama bin Laden and Adolf Hitler, but it seems to me the more apt comparison is to John Wilkes Booth: a spoiled rich kid who convinced himself he had a starring role in the divine plan, who changed history through a single violent act, and who contrary to his own expectations will be remembered not as a hero but as a murderer.

It's too bad the timelines couldn't have been more similar: Booth lasted all of twelve days after shooting Lincoln, while Bin Laden has been "hiding in a cave" for so long that I'd almost ceased to think of him as a real person. My initial reaction to the news was this weird dissonance, as if the Navy SEALs had killed the boogeyman.

I am very glad they got him, and hope this brings some solace to the families of the victims. I also hope this means the war is over.

Is Quinoa kosher?

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 12:08:09 GMT

The Times reports. You decide:

Tasty, gluten-free, protein-rich — and, by many accounts, kosher for Seders lacking in carbohydrate variety — [quinoa] has become a staple of Passover cookbooks. Gourmet magazine hailed it in 2008 as the new “belle of the Passover ball.”

If only life were so simple.

As with most matters under the purview of Jewish law — from how to turn on the lights during the Sabbath, to what kind of cough syrup is certified kosher — a debate has emerged among rabbinical experts about quinoa’s bona fides as a kosher alternative to leavened-grain products like bread. And this has led to confusion and concern in many Passover kitchens around the country on the eve of the holiday, which begins on Monday evening.

“I went to hear two rabbis discussing the quinoa situation at my synagogue last week,” said Arlene J. Mathes-Scharf, a food scientist in Sharon, Mass... “They had basically the same information, but they came to opposite conclusions,” Ms. Mathes-Scharf said. “Typical...”

There are two camps on quinoa: rabbis who say it is fine, and those who regard it as suspect. But both agree that its suitability for Passover depends on how the crop is harvested and shipped.

A definitive answer is not likely to be reached until a rabbi can be dispatched to a remote mountain region of Bolivia to inspect certain quinoa operations...

Nightmare fuel

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 13:32:01 GMT

Via William Gibson's twitter feed: There's a tumblr called "Chicks With Steve Buscemeyes" devoted to pictures in which actor Steve Buscemi's eyes are Photoshopped onto the heads of female celebrities. Now there's a YouTube version as well:

Many Doctorows died to bring us this information

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 18:44:41 GMT

Via BoingBoing, the Instructables website offers a home recipe for Pop Rocks.

Want

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 18:53:20 GMT

The New York Times reviews Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, the 6-volume, 40-pound, $625 labor of love from the lab of Seattle local Nathan Myhrvold:

I will get this out of the way fast. The text, and there is a lot of it, is proficient and as compelling as my high school science textbooks. But artful prose is not the point...the goal was clarity and thoroughness, and the information is indeed clear, sound and, if anything, too thorough. Buried in the verbiage is a treasure of insights, some truly original, some familiar but described from new and compelling angles. Sometimes overly proud of itself, at other times it is recklessly (and admirably) opinionated...

Government suggestions for temperatures at which chicken and pork are safe to eat seem “to have been based not on science but on politics, tradition, and subjective judgment.” There is no single safe temperature that kills salmonella, for instance, but rather times that food must maintain specific temperatures to kill it. The authors provide the time-temperature tables.

Several pages are devoted to how to wash your hands and there is a brief foray into the Timurid dynasty of Central Asia; the book includes the equation required to calculate the radiant heat of a gas grill (which is not nearly as effective as a charcoal grill, it says, explaining why). Not sure how to balance your centrifuge? Look no further. On sous vide equipment, the Pacojet, ultrasonic baths, gelling agents, hydrocolloids and emulsifiers, the text is astonishingly thorough.

There's also, apparently, a recipe for making your own Pringles. Sounds like the must-have food porn book of the year.

The Adjustment Bureau

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 14:34:09 GMT

This was a lot of fun, definitely one of the better Philip K. Dick-inspired films. It's not really an SF film, more like a Dickian take on Heaven Can Wait -- the adjusters of the title are angels in the guise of corporate bureaucrats, working to implement the divine plan laid down by the Chairman.

Matt Damon is a New York politician who is destined to one day become president. When his senatorial bid is derailed by a minor scandal, the Adjustment Bureau steps in and arranges a chance meeting with a beautiful dancer played by Emily Blunt. For reasons that make sense in the film, the meeting inspires Damon to give a kickass speech that revives his political career and puts the Plan back on track. The thing is, he's only supposed to meet Blunt the one time (true love, it seems, would quench the fire driving his political ambitions). But owing to an apparently random screw-up, Damon not only does meet Blunt again, he learns about the existence of the adjusters.

Panic time. The bureau agents grab Damon and drag him to an extradimensional room where adjustment team leader John Slattery lays down the rules that will govern the rest of the movie. Rule one is, of course, you don't talk about the Adjustment Bureau: if Damon tries to tell anyone what he's learned, he'll be given what amounts to a lobotomy. Rule two is, forget about the girl. Here the consequences for disobedience are more vague, but it's clear that the Adjustment Bureau are willing to go to considerable lengths to make sure Damon and Blunt don't become a couple.

That's the set-up, and the rest of the film is Damon trying to break rule two without breaking rule one. As I say, it's a lot of fun -- Lisa and I both loved it. Damon and Blunt have the kind of chemistry that makes you believe that they'd be willing to defy heaven itself to be together. John Slattery is hilarious, and Terence Stamp has a nice turn as a heavy-hitting upper management angel who's brought in after Slattery's more delicate attempts at fixing things don't work. And Anthony Mackie does a nice job as a low-level adjuster who takes pity on Damon and decides to help him out, although he's also the subject of the film's most unintentionally funny line -- that would be where Damon, trying to figure out why Mackie is so nice, asks "What makes you different?" (Here's a hint: It's the same thing that made Will Smith different in The Legend of Bagger Vance.)

The one real flaw in the film, for me, is that Blunt's character is too passive. To a certain extent this is dictated by the set-up: Damon knows about the Adjustment Bureau, Blunt doesn't, and Damon can't tell her. So he's the one making informed decisions, while she's left reacting to his sometimes inexplicable behavior. The thing is -- speaking as a long-time married person here -- it's possible to break rule one without breaking rule one. Lisa and I routinely finish each other's sentences, so if I were in secret communication with angels I would expect her to pick up on that, even if I didn't say a word. Damon and Blunt are at a much earlier point in their relationship, but still, she's smart enough to figure it out and take a more active role in the proceedings, and I think it would have made both her character and the story more interesting if she had. This goes in the category of things that would make a good film even better, but it did bug me, given how well everything else worked.

Anyway, good movie, and Lisa and I are both looking forward to seeing what the director George Nolfi does next.