The Academy Awards

The 84th Academy Awards aired Sunday night.  If you missed it, well, I did too.  I don't have a TV, so I couldn't watch it in real time, but I do have a computer, so I was able to catch some stuff the next day.

Let me first say that I enjoy movies both as a form of entertainment and as a form of art.  Not that those are mutually exclusive.  Some may say that movies and television have been the death of reading.  I don't know if I'd go that far, but there's probably some truth to it.

I didn't get into the Harry Potter movies until...I think it was the fifth movie.  I watched that one in the theater, and now I own all the DVDs.  Sunny and I watch them all at Christmas time, because to us they're Christmas movies.  Most of them came out around Christmas, they have Christmas scenes, and most importantly, they are fantastic stories.  Fantastic stories really make the best Christmas movies.

It wasn't until this last Christmas that I started reading the books.  Sunny bought them all for me for my birthday, which is right after Christmas (now you know and you have no excuse for not getting me a gift) so I finally started reading them.  I'm on book five right now.

While I'm one of the first people to criticize the film industry for its lack of creativity (How quickly did they remake Spiderman and The Hulk, both of which were adaptations of comic books to begin with?), I do appreciate seeing film adaptations of books that I've read.  And now, I'm learning to appreciate reading the books after having seen the films.  There's so much more story in the books.

For the fun of it, let's look at all the Oscar nominees for Best Picture and see how many were based on books:

     Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close written by Jonathan Safran Foer.
     The Descendants written by Kaui Hart Hemmings.
     The Help written by Kathryn Stockett.
     Hugo, aka The Invention of Hugo Cabret, written & illustrated by Brian Selznick.
     Moneyball written by Michael Lewis.
     War Horse written by Michael Morpurgo.
          Actually, the movie was based both on the book and the play written by Nick Stafford,
          which was based on the book.

Midnight in Paris, The Tree of Life and The Artist (the winner) were original.

When I was a kid, I would get so annoyed when film adaptations of books I'd read deviated even marginally from the original story.  Silly me.  I've now come to appreciate how different media can tell similar stories in different ways.  I'm really looking forward to seeing The Hunger Games.  Although I'm certain a film won't be able to capture the intricacies and nuances that are present in the book, it may be able to add something new.

I enjoy seeing film adaptations of books.  Sometimes I've read the books before seeing the film, and sometimes seeing the film makes me want to read the book.  So no judgment that two-thirds of the Best Picture nominees were adapted from books.

Now if you're going to create a movie based on a theme park ride (Pirates of the Caribbean) or a board game (Battleship), that's creativity.  Good luck.

On "Divided"

The universe, a kind of “whole,” is divided into gravitationally bound systems—galaxies of stars, stellar remnants, gas and dust and dare I say dark matter. We divide solar systems into planets. We divide the globe horizontally and vertically by lines of latitude and longitude. Planet Earth is divided by bodies of water into continents, which are further divided into countries, which are divided into regions, states, cities, villages, neighborhoods, houses (which are divided into rooms—some families under the same roof are divided). The pages of the Rand McNally you might keep under the passenger's seat of your car are divided by the Interstate Highway System, roadways and waterways like strings of lights draped from one city to another, each city a little bulb, lit up, or not.

The divisions on a compass rose orient us: north, south, east, and west.

            “When possible, make a U-turn,” the GPS lady says when we veer off course.

            My address: The Universe, Milky Way, Earth, North America, the United (not “divided”) States, Idaho, Moscow (I don't yet know you well enough to say exactly, but I could).

            Because of division, or in spite of it, there is no such thing as a permanent address, however—I am always moving (we are all transient). Relative to the sun, I am moving at approximately 30 kilometers per second; for Earth, as you learned in elementary school, back when you didn't consider “division” beyond obeli on wide-ruled notebook paper or the question of enough cupcakes for everyone to have two, is in orbit around the sun. Division likewise animates Earth's crust in the form of tectonic plates that diverge and converge and transform (massive rafts in motion) as the molten matter we tread upon changes beneath our relatively tiny feet. We keep walking.

            We divide time: eras, centuries, decades, years, days, even down to the the tick of a clock, the tock of that watch upon your wrist or the one that was your grandpa's hidden in your pocket.

            The body is divided into systems (you know them), all of which must function in sync to keep the heart beating, the eyes open, the feet stepping—until that final breath, that is (a great gasp), divides the living from the dead. Some say there is an afterlife, however. Some say there is rebirth, too: the Ouroborus eats its own tail. But for better or worse, as cognitive beings, depending on our system of belief, many of us operate under the assumption of binary divisions, or we challenge them as such: life/death, woman/man, happiness/sadness, external/internal, creation/destruction. Through division, we order chaos. We grid things. We keep time ticking in pockets. We frame our days on walls. To divide a batch of cupcakes evenly, sometimes we have to split them in half—there are beautiful little acts of violence like that we live by.

            Division creates boundaries and chasms (canyons grand). Sometimes these boundaries warn against trespassing: KEEP OUT. Sometimes we straddle or transgress them anyway. We hop a fence. Is there any escape from division and the boundaries it forms?

            I don't know. But even tectonic plates, responsible for the disasters we fear, are artistic—mountain-makers. Tectonic, from tectonicus, pertains to “building.”

            Perhaps the act of art is possible because of the / or the ÷. As artists, we hop some fences, or we knock them down, or we raise them up again as best we can. “Can you hear me now?” we sing, hammers swinging.

            5x5 derives its name from the ratio of signal-to-noise, or S/N, a kind of division that compares the level of a desired signal to the level of background noise or static. 5x5 is the best possible ratio for carrying a voice through space. Thus, in terms of radio transmission, 5x5 translates to the answer all artists hope to hear: “I can...perfectly.”

            The artists in our upcoming issue are as clear as what croons from your car stereo on a good day (or when you're not driving through tunnels), and maybe even clearer. There are no “tunnels” here, no static. Stay tuned!

            Over and Out (for now)—

             S.J. Dunning

On Sound and Vision: The Soundtrack of Your Writing

As readers, we are often stunned by the prose of the page, but how many of us think about the author toiling away to get their words in front of us?

Writers do.

I sometimes sit in front of a poem, or sentence dazzled.  I think, "How could a writer do this?"  I then begin to imagine him or her in the process of composing the work of art.  Ultimately, this means that I am imagining myself writing it as well.  How could I write something this good?

When in my cups (the self-pity cups) I imagine that the writer I so admire is always brilliant and has completed the entire novel on the first draft.  We all know this isn't true, if for no other reason than editors love to edit.

Imagining other writers, helps me to consider my own writing practice.  A large part of that practice for me lately, has been listening to music.

I know that many writers compose a book or piece of work with a set of songs to help them "get into the mood."  For myself, I find words with music distract me.  I have a hard time considering the next line of a poem is "Baby Baby Baby noooo"drifts through my stereo speakers.  Sometimes the words even leak out onto the page.  The horror of find upon rereading my new draft, "The gate slapped shut, an ultimatum / a gunshot.  The car that gunned out of the driveway / the radio in the room playing on / as if nothing was going on at all/ and I was like baby baby baby ooooh."

For this very reason, I tend to listen to the classical NPR station while writing or reading.  Sometimes if I leave the radio on another channel, I will find myself composing and then yelling at the radio: SHUT UP!  When trying to summon up feelings from the past, I might play a song I associate with that period in my life or even a whole album.  I wrote an entire essay about teenage angst and The Cure's album Disintegration. http://kinemapoetics.blogspot.com/2011/07/jory-mickelson-on-cures-disintegration.html

My question for you this week is what kind of background noise fills your writing?  Is it the chatter of people in a busy cafe?  Is it the sound of your children fighting or playing Wii?  Do you impose absolute silence while you compose?

What is the soundtrack of your own writing life?

Divided

The deadline for our Divided themed issue has passed, and (I know I say this every time, but it's true every time) we're really excited about this issue.  We've got an amazing comic from Nick Straight that's going to be in it.  Get a taste of what's coming by checking out his work at his blog, Drawmit!

The rest of the issue is still in the works, but with the number of submissions we've gotten, and what we've read so far, it's going to be another great issue.  If you missed the deadline for Divided, the next theme is Backwards, and very soon we'll be accepting submissions for the theme after that, which we've yet to choose.

Stay tuned everyone.  2012 is going to be an exciting year.