(The ‘home’ theme isn’t a coincidence, btw, it’s a result of WorldCon, where us Oz-ers began to think about what it was like to have the world come to us — for a change! Hence, ‘home’.)

(I am now writing 2 different stories with the word ‘executioner’ in the title. That *is* a coincidence.)

I’m actually particularly proud of my essay in 21ST CENTURY GOTHIC: GREAT GOTHIC NOVELS SINCE 2000 (ed. Danel Olson, pub. Scarecrow Press) — & I can send a PDF of that essay, too, though there’s so much excellent criticism going on lately (esp. with all the podcasting) that this is really an exercise in spreading the gothic love. Edit: and as Ellen Datlow points out, in fact the volume was published in 2011, not 2010!  Still, if you want to read it for NEXT year’s Ditmars, I can send a copy.

You can email me via deborahb AT livejournal or through my website.

In the meantime, my Skribit dialogue box on my blog has netted another suggestion from a reader: pie. A fine and noble suggestion! And one I must ponder, probably with a piece of pie.

More seriously, he says that the cancellation of Firefly not only made him “the sourest man alive” but had an unexpected and potentially devastating side effect.

“I stopped having ideas, which for me is an extremely rare experience,” Whedon says. “It was something much more subtle [than losing hope], it took away my ability to think in terms of episodic television. For years.”

[snip]

“You have to have a certain naivety, almost Memento-like, and get bitch-slapped over and over. You’ve got to go in with an enormous amount of confidence because everyone is going to question everything you do. You have to be the person who believes when nobody else does.”

It seems that rather than the five stages of grief, for writers there is just one stage: wiping your memory and starting again, like the characters in Dollhouse.

“Yeah, pretty much. Anger, anger, anger. Anger. Bargaining,” he deadpans.

To no one’s surprise, Greg Egan took out Best Collection. But the real intrigue of the evening lay in discovering what would happen when he did. Egan has famously removed himself from award lists for long enough that I forget why he ever did it in the first place. And he’s so notoriously private that I’ve only ever met 2 people who claim to have met him. (This fact amused my non-fandom bf so much he later used it to claim that HE, in fact, was Greg Egan & he’d been looking for a way to break it to me for the past several years.)

But since neither of the 2 Egan-witnesses can actually describe him, I figure Egan a) carries one of those Men in Black memory zappers, or b) moves in complete darkness.

So: what would happen at the moment his name was called? Would he spring from the audience on legs like pistons (a la Burton’s apes from his awful re-imagined Planet of the Apes movie), screaming his disapproval at the audience, smashing the award on the back wall of the hall and disappearing wrathfully into the night? Would he instead descend demurely, accept his award & apologise for never calling or dropping by, while we all sat mutely thinking, “So THAT’S what he looks like?”

And, did he actually DO either or both of those things before donning dark glasses and holding up his MIB memory zapper?

Because what I *remember* happening is a petite female publishing rep descending to the microphone & accepting the award on behalf of the publishers (not, notably, on behalf of Greg) & commenting that Gollancz was pleased we liked Greg’s stories.

(Those of us with more acute hearing picked up the unuttered phrase that followed: that she was maybe a little sorry that Greg didn’t like that we liked his stories.)

There were some other marvellous moments in the evening: Haines getting TWO best horror awards & giving my favourite speech of the evening (my favourite speeches are almost always the shortest ones , the establishment of the Chris Hembry award for promising new writers; and the granting of the Peter McNamara award for service to the community to Justin Ackroyd. Much deserved & long overdue! Justin’s support of the community is outstanding. For me alone he’s encouraged my involvement in fandom, he’s babysat me at my first couple of WFCs, he’s added my name to his ‘best of 2009′ book list — AND he’s personally sold (& sold out) of A Book of Endings in Melbourne, where he’s been selling books for 33 years.

That, my friends, was a blast to witness!

Also there was drinking & carousing (even if those 2 words mean the same thing) & laughs & catching up with fabulous people & then collapsing for about 24 hours straight in our free upgrade of a hotel room. All of which was a delight & a wonderful start to the writing year. Happy Year of the Tiger, everyone!

Now, back to work.

Ursula K. Le Guin laments the passing of the squid: ‘[L]ast night on the Lehrer news hour Margaret Atwood did not say she did not write science fiction because she did not write about talking squids, but said that she did not write science fiction because she did not write about talking cabbages. I am pondering the significance of this change from sea beast to land vegetable, but so far it escapes me. She was otherwise charming, and I do think The Year of the Flood is good science fiction even though its cabbages are speechless.’ (23 September) Those eloquent cabbages presumably live on Planet X: the indefatigable Ms Atwood told the New York Times that her work is not sf since ‘I don’t write about Planet X, I write about where we are now.’ (21 September)

Also Eddie Izzard has an encounter of the SF kind. And a Booker prize judge makes some interesting comments about SF living in ‘special rooms’. I often do think the SF ghetto is a self-perpetuating thing. Though I understand this view upsets people who damn well *enjoy* their persecution complexes & don’t like me spoiling their fun!

So I’ll refrain from saying more.

http://www.thebookdesignreview.com
http://shelvedbooks.blogspot.com
http://henryseneyee.blogspot.com

I also followed various links, finding myself in a world of cover debate. Including a link to a rant by Stuart Evers on the good side of bad books:

After a promising first page, which actually made me laugh, Low Alcohol descended into the kind of literary hell most readers would hesitate to enter, even led by a Dickens or an Austen, let alone a debut novelist sniffing like a mangy dog around the arse end of Martin Amis. Derivative, unfunny, nasty and puerile, the whole shabby affair – concerning the life and loves of Doug Down – was an ill-conceived disaster. And I’m glad I read it before it fell out of print.

See, I’m not convinced there’s a value in that. Surely life is too short for bad books in the same way it’s too short for bad coffee, bad food and bad love affairs…?

Over at The Guardian, Alison Flood asks the question “are we really going to admit to judging books by their covers?” To which the answer must be ‘yes’. Even in an age when more & more of us are looking at electronic solutions for our libraries, it’s probably useful not to stray TOO far from your content with a misleading cover.

(This presented a particular problem for the cover of my own antho, as I find myself moving further away from genre into just a kind of ‘weird urban’ storytelling. Which — I hope! — the Stathopoulos cover captured rather brilliantly!)

Please-god, spare me from ever having a chicklit cover! Or from finding myself in the ‘chicklit’ section of Barnes & Noble (seriously, does that exist?). Somewhere I’ve seen chicklit referred to as the ‘buying shoes in the big city’ genre. Which reminds me, I think I *did* write a story about buying shoes in a big city once. But I like to think it was only because I needed shoes. And live in a city.

I digress. Let’s leave the final word on that one to author Janelle Brown, ““Chick lit” is a catch all for everything that’s not “hard” literature written by a woman. It implies that the male experience is universal, while the female experience is something only other women would be interested in.””

And there’s also recommendations on literary fiction for people who hate literary fiction at Emerald City.

benpeek goes a little crazy talking about how the rest of us are crazy for always talking about genre. Or something.

Over here.

Answers are never simple, are they.

Good.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/ninebelow/83410.html?nc=41

(Thanks, coalescent.)

Sometimes I think that what’s happened is that sf has become too sophisticated for its core audience, which used to be teenage boys. Their attention span, and maybe yours and mine, isn’t going to last through three paragraphs’ description of the protagonist’s breakfast with his mother when that doesn’t add any dramatic tension or move the plot forward. I’m sure this was true even back in the Golden Age, before everyone’s attention spans got shorter. Science fiction used to be adventure fiction, and that’s what attracted a lot of its readership.

Thanks to genreneep for pointing this out.

1) it mentions character almost not at all; 2) it emphasizes plot twists, which I rarely hear talked about.

Interesting. Because plot, I thought, was more important to genre writers than mainstream writers. I mean, just anecdotally. Just going from what you hear discussed when writers and critics talk writing.

There’s a line in a movie someplace where someone is asked who their favourite author is, & they reply,

“Jane Austen. I like an author you can depend on.”

To me, that always sounded like ‘I like an author you can predict’. Which — further — summed up a lot of mainstream writing for me at the time. Prose and setting were meaningful & appreciated by mainstreamers (which is why you got lyrical love stories set in Tuscany/Provence/California, or so I imagined), but what passed for plot was just a way to get from one locale to another. There were no surprises, no pay-offs, and no stretches for the imagination. I mean, if I were to generalise completely, of course. Which, indeed, I tend to do with great relish.

Genre, I decided, tried to take an actual journey with its plots.

Genre was for travellers, whereas non-genre was for tourists.

Heh. (Yeah, eat that, Austen.

But now I hear that plot twists have apparently become neglected. Is it because modern audiences — particularly genre audiences — are difficult to out-twist, given their level of sophistication? Have we consequently given up on the plot twist?

And if so, what are the implications of that?

And for god’s sake, nobody say ‘a return to the golden age of science fiction’.

Which Famous Modern American Poet Are You

Quizilla, etc.

Ashbery’s works are characterized by a free-flowing, often disjunctive syntax, extensive linguistic play, often infused with considerable humor, and a prosaic, sometimes disarmingly flat or parodic tone. The play of the human mind is the subject of a great many of his poems.

Naturally, I was curious. I checked out some Ashbery over at poets.org and it was not my thing remarkably individual and challenging work.

“The difficulty of [Ashbery's] poetry,” Shetley explains, “arises in great measure from [the] decision not to write the sort of poem [Robert] Lowell was writing, not to produce within the paradigms offered by the New Criticism.” (VS 104). Again, a curious account of poetic evolution, implying as it does that one can simply decide, as an act of will, to write a certain kind of poem. Ashbery, I would posit, could no more have written a Lowell poem than, say, a Mayakovsky one, his sensibility, ethos, and culture being so different.
– Normalizing John Ashbery by MARJORIE PERLOFF

Occasionally I am challenged as to why I write spec fic.

- Why don’t you write for a genre that actually sells, deb?

Not often, because most people don’t really mind, & the people that do mind usually know what spec fic is, & so don’t have to ask. And the people who mind and DON’T know what spec fic is, well, they get to hear my rant about Shakespeare and Milton and Shelley (and if I’m feeling cruel I just make stuff up), and so on ad infinitum.

- Do you write that stuff because you’re a big Stephen King fan? *Are* you a Stephen King fan? Really? Gee, I didn’t know he wrote short stories.

In rare moments, the questions stump me. Usually in a good way. They make me think. They challenge me to examine what I’m doing &, more importantly, what I *think* I’m doing.

- Do you write genre because it’s a small pool? Do you do it to keep yourself safe?

And then I have to pause, nod, and begin to intellectualise myself out of the corner into which I’ve been backed. Mostly I do this not to defend myself, but to defend a genre I love. Truth is, though, love is generally not intellectual. Not all of it, anyway. I can talk about ‘thrill’ & ‘awe’, but that’s not the whole of what I feel for genre.

- So do you want to be like that woman who wrote Harry Potter? What’s her name again? Yeah. You like writing for kids?

And I wonder: is there a reasonable, rational justification for why we write to one form or school or trope or genre?

Do we choose our stories or do they choose us?

Mostly I don’t wonder these things, because it is enough to even *find* a direction let alone to second-guess it.

- Yeah, I guess you’re right, Shakespeare did write supernatural stuff, but that’s ancient history, hey. I mean, what’s happening with sci-fi nowdays? Isn’t it dead?

Vernon Shetley’s essay in a book ominously called After the Death of Poetry: Poetry and Audience in Contemporary America (1993). In Shetley’s scheme of things, the three significant American postwar poets are Ashbery, Bishop, and Merrill [snip]. Given these parameters, he is forced to conclude that “Poetry is dead. With that judgment I have no interest in arguing, if what it means is that poetry is unlikely in any foreseeable future to regain an audience like the one enjoyed by Tennyson, or even by Frost. But it seems to me that poetry still has an enormous job of work to do, posthumously, as it were. If nothing else, poetry’s death should haunt the rest of the culture.”
– Normalizing John Ashbery by MARJORIE PERLOFF

SF is dead. Long live SF.

Literature is an uttering, or outering, of the human imagination. It lets the shadowy forms of thought and feeling – heaven, hell, monsters, angels and all – out into the light, where we can take a good look at them and perhaps come to a better understanding of who we are and what we want, and what the limits to those wants may be. Understanding the imagination is no longer a pastime, but a necessity; because increasingly, if we can imagine it, we’ll be able to do it.
– Margaret Atwood, ‘Aliens have taken the place of angels’, Guardian Unlimited, 17 June 2005

Thanks, coalescent

What she sez: Yay, Justine Larbalestier, for poking holes in that whole ‘woe is me, it’s just not the same around here since the golden age ended’ rubbish some people go on with. Please. I hate that shit. The best chance we have of seeing the best fiction in history to this point is right now, when we have the benefits of the (entire literary) canon that has been forged already, coupled with the unique insights of our time. And if I live a thousand years, you’ll find me saying the same thing a thousand years from now. Because literature is for the living, & the time we’re living is *right now*, so howsabout we goddamn make some use of it.

Also want to agree with the divine Ms L re. the new anonymous blog on genre fic. Its slogan is ‘Vote for stories, not for friends’. It’s as true in this field as in any other that there are alliances that can be made. Allegiances that may be used either to drum up promotion or conspire to keep silent, all because of friendship or other shared attributes. Though I prize honesty, I don’t necessarily support cruelty. Though I want to assist friends, I’m not comfortable with complicity or politic conspiracies. Also I know that these were the rules of the game as given to us, that we may forge strategic networks or otherwise, that we may offer ourselves as marketable product, or not. There are also a host of other positions and compromises that may be made and maintained. Each one of us makes our own decision, & all that is required is that we allow room enough for each other to find our own locations on the matrices.

I like the idea of an anonymous blog of honest critique. It’s a challenge, though. I wonder how long anonymity may be maintained. I wonder how much honesty is too much.

Related to the above post (by marriage): Scott Westerfeld covers interesting ground with his post on perceptions of beauty. Digital TV shows up Cameron Diaz’s bad skin. Shoot. Good thing I decided to stick with writing for a trade. Remind me to turn down all those Letterman interviews.

I couldn’t take that kind of pressure. Ah, how the myth of perfection has turned into a capitalist dream! Keep us anxious, keep us consuming, no possible resolution to either of these entwined processes.

Beauty is an interesting topic. I like beauty. What I consider beautiful, however, is not necessarily what Hollywood has so far been considering beautiful. I like people who are expressive & energetic & enthusiastic & optimistic. I think that sort of stuff shows up in a person’s face. I don’t necessarily think Zellweger looks better thinner than fatter (she kinda looks unhappy all the time), I didn’t think Zeta Jones was more heavenly when she squished herself into that tiny red dress at whateverawardceremonythatwas than when she was pregnant some months earlier. I think Streep looks more fabulous now than ever before. If I had to compile a list of the world’s most beautiful people, I would put Dawn French on it — & I would mean it.

But I’ve been aware of the ways celluloid (not cellulite, that’s an entirely different subject) has influenced us, given us what I call the ‘portrait of a lady’ syndrome, the idea that stasis is attractive, that planes and angles are desirable because of the way they direct the light into the lens. I could never watch Friends, because I couldn’t get past how thin the women were. (Also, it just wasn’t my thing.) I saw ‘The Interpreter’ the other week & it’s a really good film, but Nicole Kidman has no thighs, no hips, no ribs, nothing, nothing, I swear. There is nothing between her chin and her knees except distance. Good thing she can act with her eyes. There’s not much more to her. She’s thin. Very thin.

Or, her knees are huge. One or the other. Both, maybe.

This is not a criticism of Nicole Kidman, though. Turns out you really can ‘never be too rich or too thin’. I feel that desire, myself, to escape corporeal reality & turn myself into a feather, a satin sheet, a canvas, a veritable page of a human being, as slim as a photographic negative. And being that slight, that insubstantial, like air, like an angel, somehow I will have escaped my biology and with that escape comes the defeat of death. I will be too ethereal to die.

It is the only explanation for how those women on film get so thin and still manage to stand upright, still smile, still have porcelain skin, still have teeth that aren’t falling out of their heads. And people say, ‘I’m sure there are health consequences to being that thin’ — but are there? You would think by now someone would’ve expired on the red carpet. But, of course, they can’t. For that to happen they would have to be alive. Made of meat. But they are made of air and light.

And here’s another beef I have: when people say, ‘we should eat more like they did in caveman times because it was more natural for our bodies’ … was it? Really? Why? And, if it’s true, why haven’t our bodies evolved yet? Why did they get to caveman times (cavePEOPLE! I hear some of you cry) & then just stop? ‘OK, honey, looks like we got us a cave, think I’ll squat here with a physique that craves cheesecake at the same time as being wholly unable to healthily digest it, what do yer say?’

So many things make no sense to me.

Anyway, beauty. Beauty is interesting.

[big snip]

“Today, a lot of posters are put together on computers, but back in the day when posters were completely handmade, illustrators worked in a variety of mediums including acrylic, oil, colored pencil and watercolor.”

http://www.moviemaker.com/issues/53/posterart.html

I’m beginning to switch off whenever someone starts talking about ‘the death of’ things.

Like, the death of genre, the death of the short story, the death of oral story telling, the death of traditional movie poster art. To me, change isn’t death, & expansion/contraction are natural results of time. Maybe I’m lucky. Maybe I’m naive. Maybe I’m untouched, so far, by the kind of grief & loss being voiced by people who talk about the death of things.

Maybe.

Or, hey, maybe none of those things is really dying.

Maybe it’s true that we don’t sit around a fire wearing animal furs & listening to the Magic Man make up tales of spirits and demons, but have you ever listened to two people chat over lunch? Have you ever had a conversation in a workplace where you apply narrative to the events & people around you?

“Did you see him pull out the daggers in that meeting?”
“Oh, yeah. They wheel him out whenever they need someone to implement the old ‘slash & burn’, if you know what I mean.”

Have you ever gossiped? Have you stood beside the figurative water cooler discussing last night’s episode of Law & Order? We’re not wearing furs, but we’re not mute, either. Death of the oral tradition? I don’t buy it.

And genre’s dying, right, uh-huh, it’s been dying since I began reading articles on it ten years ago. A slow death, then. But to my mind the guts of genre — the awe & inspiration of it, the elements of the fantastical, the imaginative might and the taste for the surreal, the weird, the unwholesome, the irreverant, the barely-possible — these things don’t die. We’d have to wipe out every scrap of humanity on the planet to get rid of these things. They grow like weeds, you pull off one bud here, it springs up under a paver over there. You pour weedkiller over your driveway, the weeds will grow in the walls. Just give ‘em enough time & they will find themselves a new place. That’s what ‘fantasy’ (in its broadest sense) does; that’s what humans do. We are survival _machines_. We cannot stop making stuff, or making stuff up.

So, genre, eh? Mainstream writing’s gone & chopped its head off & now it’s dead, *waaaah*? Hardly. Cut off one head, three will grow. Then we give those new heads different names to baffle the people who think they don’t like genre. We call ‘em Slipstream, Dark Fantasy, Speculative Literature. Whatever. Or we do some surgery, snip off bits of the beast’s intestines, transplant those pieces into bodies that appear wholesome. The perfect hosts: even the writers don’t realise they’re carriers. Atwood doesn’t write SF, of course she doesn’t & I’m not gonna say otherwise because she is useful to us & I don’t want her realising that stories set in the future (A Handmaid’s Tale) & stories about mythical beings (The Robber Bride) & strange, surreal tales (The Edible Woman) might — just *might*, I’m saying — be considered SF by some of us. No. Because Atwood proves you can sell all those kinds of stories & people will _read_ them. Provided you don’t call them SF. And Isabelle Allende. She’s popular. She writes slipstream, yes? And no, I’m not going to say slipstream is SF, because provided I don’t say that, people are willing to read ghost stories & not complain. Which is how I like it.

And Henry James & Mary Shelley … no, no, they’re *literature*, darling, don’t start freaking people out by saying they’re S-fucking-F. Now, don’t bother me, I need to suture this giant gaping hole in this otherwise ‘mainstream’ novel. There. Perfect.

Thing is, I know how non-SF fans feel. I, too, cringe at labels like ‘horror’ & ‘fantasy’ & ‘sci-fi’, instinctively associating them with bad reading experiences in my past in the same way I associate food poisoning with vanilla milkshakes & one particular bout of late-night vomiting with Midori. I, too, have made myself sick on bad examples of genre & seek, instead, for something that doesn’t carry the reminders of those dark times.

“You’ll like this cocktail, I promise,” says my friend.
“All right, but tell me I won’t be able to taste the Midori.”

Why not? Sell it to me without the hint of green & I’ll be fine with it. I’ll take mine without a hint of Heinlein, thanks.

That’s not the death of genre. That’s just dealing with changes in taste.

So apparently the ‘traditional’ movie poster is dying because — sorry, why, again? Because it’s being done on computer instead of canvas? Why is that the *death* of the movie poster? Why isn’t that the re-birth?

There. I think I’ve thrown every metaphor I can at this thing for the time being.

If most people were to be born twice they’d probably call it dying – you and I are not snobs.
We can never be born enough.
– e.e. cummings

Over on his journal, all week, is interview week. I am not over there, I am here, because I don’t have anything to pimp at the moment. I am just home, writing & watching TV. You should check his blog out all week, though, because it’s such an interesting idea.

1) How would you describe a typical Deborah Biancotti story, and how do you think it’s changed, or is changing?

A friend cruelly introduced me at a party recently as a ‘writer’, which always leads to the question ‘what do you write?’ I hate that question. I don’t know how to answer it. I ended up saying ‘fantasy’ & then when the friend-of-friend looked at me pityingly, I carried on at great length reminding them that, well, Shakespeare used fantastical elements in his stuff, no one told him to write more mainstream, and what on earth did they imagine Gulliver’s Travels to be, etc, etc, and so on. After name-dropping a few of the literary big wigs, I moved on to mention that Stephen King & J.K. Rowling were two of the richest writers in the world. (I did this in case their pity was directed not at my supposedly juvenile interest in bedtime stories, but had more to do with the impossibility of ever being a “successful” — in the capitalist sense — writer.)

I ended by telling them I write the kind of thing Mary Shelley wrote, except I am also able to make use of the entire literary canon to this point. I left them with the thought that ‘the most interesting stuff is always at the fringes’ and at that point they decided to change the subject. ‘Bout time.

As to changing, my stuff’s getting bigger. Just ‘bigger’. More ambitious, more broad, more thoughtful, just more. IMHO.

2) How do comments about your work being obscure influence your decisions to push your personal boundaries?

Hmm, yeah, I have had that accusation a couple of times, though not as often as your question implies, Ben!

I’m like that bald guy in LOST — “Don’t tell me what I can’t do.” Comments on obscurity make me want to firm up my grasp on narrative. Maybe not for every story, though. Sometimes I’ll still want to write my surreal, personal stuff *as well*. But if the understanding of story is a mountain, I intend to get to the top of it.

Apologies, is my answer maybe a little too surreal, there? In this instance, I am happy to answer more straightforwardly *grin*.

3) If the local scene is to grow, how is it to do this? And do you think this is a question that has been addressed in the last ten years?

Eh, I dunno. The scene (by which I take it you mean the number of active participants working in local artistic endeavours) seems pretty healthy to me. What I’m really interested in is expanding readership for what-we-currently-call ‘genre’. It’s purely a laziness thing. I’m tired of explaining myself at parties. ) I’m bored with the division between mainstream & genre. Look, if it was good enough for Mary Shelley, it’s good enough for everyone, I say.

I like when I go into a bookstore (like, say, Better Read than Dead in Newtown) & the new release tables have _all_ kinds of books lying cover to cover. China Mielville is right there between a book on the politics of Rwanda and something being described as ‘a new Australian literary classic’.

‘Has it been addressed in the last ten years’, well, a lot of people say that the ‘ghetto’ of spec fic is what allows us to grow & to do challenging work without mainstream or financial interests shutting us down. I guess they have that whole mushroom theory — things grow better in the dark, when nobody’s watching. And hey, they could be entirely right.

Me, I think if we can get out of the ghetto we can run this town.

4) You’re dead. It was a beautiful funeral, but the fact that you made us all donate to cover the costs has meant we’re kinda pissed. But what do you care. You’re in Heaven (assuming there is, blah blah) and you’re in front of God. What do you say?

Sooooooo, funny bugger, hey?

5) Favourite swear word?

Cunt. I’m a traditionalist. Also a feminist. When I say cunt I mean it with respect.

1. The Incredibles, by Brad Bird (Pixar, Nov 2004)
2. The Butterfly Effect, by J. Mackye Gruber and Eric Bress (New Line Cinema, Jan 2004)
3. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, by Charlie Kaufman & Michel Gondry (Anonymus Content/Focus Features, Mar 2004)
4. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, by Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson, based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien (New Line Cinema, Dec 2003)

So I was very much not a fan of The Butterfly Effect, but as to the others — whoa! Fabulous movies. How do you choose just one? Is Eternal Sunshine better because it’s off-beat, is The Incredibles better because it’s good, old-fashioned narrative? Is LOTR the best because it has so much darn story in it?

They’re all excellent, all have different purposes & — consequently — different effects. And awards are interested in effects, right? Awards mark what reacted most strongly in the audience, what resonated best, what left an impression? I think they do, anyhow. Of course, technical prowess feeds into effect, but it’s EFFECT we’re all after, as artists.

Are we to say that heartwarming re-affirmation of family values is the most desirable outcome? Or do we say grown-up acceptance of life’s inevitable tragedy is more valuable because it makes us think? Or epic vastness and a storyline that satisfies is our greatest goal?

Seriously. Not possible.