Avatar is the Massage
So, via The NY Times, I just learned that James Cameron is planning a novel “providing back stories for characters” who splash along on the big screen to box-office success in all of their dazzling 3-D glory.
What’s remarkable to me is the interplay between the two media. The novel becomes the site of significance. The film becomes the playground for awe. Given the digitization of the book, and how keenly that’s felt in the library world, this re-inscription of meaning to the analog, to the book (as it’s still imagined), seems to set these terms up in ways that they’re beginning to resist.
Like I wondered yesterday, are epics now devoid of allegorical meaning? This dovetails into the same concerns. The major criticism of Avatar is that it lacked substance. Is substance really only necessary for the literate? Even worse, is this substance a byproduct of other media?
I think there’s something more going on here that my cursory reaction doesn’t quite nail.
Retroactively assigning meaning to pyrotechnic displays of technical expertise and situating it in a book as THE SITE for narrative also does a disservice to books. It excludes them from the realm of real significance, making them contingent on digital factors, rather than substantive on their own. Books have value to us as the Kindle and other technologies make them disposable and drop them into our palms.
I’m all for more widespread literary. For enjoyment in reading. I’m just not sure about the vehicle being the message. Oh, Marshall McLuhan. Wish I knew what you’d have said. Until then, I’ll bide my time until Henry Jenkins weighs in. Ah, participatory culture… explain my passivity.
Allegories of Halo?
Okay. Back with a vengeance?
Trying to clear out some of my reader is like plowing through some of these city streets: huge globs of material, not going anywhere, fascinating but ultimately intrusive.
This time a post on Ta-Nehisi Coate’s blog made me think.. do video games really fail to offer up significant allegory? They seem rife with possibility. Games do manage to be epic (though not in the parlance of the times defines “epic”), but what is it about this distinction and disconnect between epic and allegory? I used to think that an epic work necessarily had to be allegorical, but now I’m not so sure.
I’m fascinated by this because of the linkages with film and games — and the potential of both to tell stories in significant ways. But what do the failures tell us?
Edit: I should add that the original question stems from a guest post on Ta-Nehisi Coate’s blog by Evan Narcisse. Credit where credit is due.
HJNTIY, Take 309
Just when I think I can’t love Rebecca Traister on Broadsheet any more…
So if anyone else out there has a sentence they want to get off their chest, but especially if it’s about how women should just pull themselves together and stop being so damn crazy, get ready to ride the American Dream Train all the way to movie theaters!
Last night I was forced to admit my obsession with this book to someone I’d actually like to have a little respect for me in the morning. When it came down to it, there was no back-tracking, there was stumbling over words. His reaction was an undeniable what-the-fuck moment.
I’m a woman, I obsess. Maybe the book just isn’t that into me.
Xb U QEURW kujw RGUA> (Can I write like this?)
I want to write a novel where I type the entire thing with my hands one space to the left of home base. Maybe for the sequel, I’ll go one space to the right.
Walking Spanish [antelogism]
While gchatting with Shani, she casually used the phrase “walking spanish” that she picked up from a book we both have read (or are reading, in my case), and I wanted to toss it into the neologism pot. In researching it without my copy of the book (“Then We Came to the End,” by Joshua Ferris), I discovered that it’s no neologism after all.
The characters coin the phrase Walking Spanish to refer to the laid off workers, as in, “the folks at my firm are walking spanish.” Sadly, when Shani used the phrase, it was used casually because of the recession, and it actually applies. Damn life imitating art! The phrase, as acknowledged by the slightly clueless characters, comes from a Tom Waits song, which according to a New York Times review of the book, is “a phrase with origins in pirate days borrowed from a Tom Waits song about an execution.”
According to my extensive internet researches, the phrase didn’t originate with Waits’ definition.
Anyway, I recently discovered that “walking Spanish” means, literally, being forcibly carried from a place by one’s collar and belt, with one’s tiptoes scrabbling at the floor, so that the Spanish walker is being forced to go somewhere he doesn’t want to go. The expression derives from being made to walk the plank on a pirate ship, but a more modern example might be being thrown out of a bar.
So, while this isn’t a Shani-ism, I think phrases from books are fair game for the neologism feature.
