I saw Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest over the last weekend and I was disappointed. Three hours of setup for the sequel, with nice special effects along the way. Ultimately disappointing.
But seeing it reminded me of a problem that I’ve detected in at least two different artistic endeavors: movie making and genre writing. It’s the problem of trilogies or series that just can’t bear the weight of three parts.
I was watching a few of my favorite episodes from Ren and Stimpy on DVD last night and I started thinking about comedy and taste.
Commedia dell’Arte is a form of improvisational comedy theater which flourished in Italy from the 16th to the 18th century. It consisted of stock plots, and characters, which were often adapted to fit the local audience. I was reading up on this subject for last Tuesday’s book club, The Innamorati by Midori Snyder.
I recently watched the documentary film The Corporation which stitches together an argument about the many ways the modern corporation is sociopathic. It condemns corporations for failing to be concerned with others, is amoral, etc.
The operational principles of the corporation give it a highly anti-social “personality”: It is self-interested, inherently amoral, callous and deceitful; it breaches social and legal standards to get its way; it does not suffer from guilt, yet it can mimic the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism.
On the tenth of January, I went to my first meeting of Eric Rabkin’s science fiction and fantasy discussion group. The book under discussion was Accelerando by Charles Stross.
I first encountered Stross in Asimov’s SF magazine. In fact the novel Accelerando was serialized in Asimov’s. The first story I read was ‘Tourist’, now one of the early chapters in Accelerando. I was blown away. It was some of the best short SF I’d read in a long time.
I spent most of last weekend pleasureably engrossed in John Derbyshire’s new book, Prime Obsession. It is a historical and mathematical exploration of the Riemann hypothesis. The book is very good and when I finish it I may return to it here. But what this weblog entry is about are the strange assumptions we often make about authors we know nothing about.
The dust jacket copy mentioned that Derbyshire writes an online column, so on Monday I decided to look it up via Google.
It must have been a year or more since I download The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin, from Project Gutenberg, but it is only today that I find a very interesting e-book reader that is designed specifically for free text files like the ones distributed by Project Gutenberg. The Jujusoft BookReader appears to be just the ticket, at least for Windows users. The program has a much nicer display than a text editor ever did.