TVTropes: Muse Abuse

Welcome to the end of the Internet, the last place you will look for hours.  A dark hole for anyone who loves tales, deconstructing stories and those who make them.  The website is tvtropes.org.  Click that link if you dare.

I tend to troll around TVTropes often, generally after I have finished a work, be it a novel, TV show or movie to see how others have already broken the work down into all the little story pieces.  Sometimes I find things they miss, but I rarely add.  I am not chronicler of tropes, I enjoy them for the sake of them as a whole.

After I finished my review of American Gods, I jumped to the TVTropes page of that work.  This lead me to the page on the author, Neil Gaiman.  You can see how easy this website can be abused for someone who enjoys it so.  Finally, I ended up on another topic: Muse Abuse.  

I am going to finish with a small discussion on Muse Abuse.  A small definition is when an author writes his or her true life to a degree that it hurts the inspiration.  This can be from a small scale (an argument with your wife becomes a conversation in the middle of a book) or a large scale (the death of a loved one leads to an entire work devoted on them, warts and all). This has happened to me in my life.  At times I have reveled in it, goading friends to guess which parts are true.  Sometimes the truth is does not paint my experiences in a great light.

For example, I once wrote a fractured story about a guy reading at home who gets a call from a friend saying the friend needs help.  He finds the friend but is surprised to learn that no call has been made.  They begin drinking, becoming very drunk.  After an adventure or two broken by periods of blackouts, our heroes end up in a diner where the friend jokingly calls the guy and tells him he needs help.  The main character runs from the diner and in a drunken dream makes it home, where he is reading and gets a phone call.

It was not very good, a mobius tale that was contrived and a little boring.  But it was based on my friends and a drunken moment late at night in a diner where one called the other's answering machine screaming for help.  The intention was the drunk would wake up and hear the message, not remember the joke and think something devastating had happened.  Haha.

So I took the small event and ran with it.  When I showed it to my friends, they seemed to like it but all of them had nearly the same comment: We seem like drunks in this.  

Yeah, I said, we are.  

But, they would say, what would my mom think?

I guess that is the problem with stealing from your own life sometimes.  You air dirty laundry and disappoint a lot of mothers.

American Gods Review

American Gods by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

American Gods is a love letter to old mythology and America as a land and people. Told with Gaiman’s unblinking eye, the story follows Shadow from prison to the wilds of Georgia, crisscrossing the country in an apologetic view of how old myths can survive in the modern world. This review is based on the 10th Anniversary Author’s Preferred Text.

Be warned, thar may be spoilers.

Summary
Shadow gets out of prison to find the love of his life dead and a job offer. Taking up with Mr. Wednesday, he meets a menagerie of oddball folks who wish to either smash his brains in or smash his groin in while recruiting for a war Shadow knows nothing about. Side trips to a small, frozen town and eclectic San Francisco are just a small taste of the amount of locations Shadow and Wednesday pass through on their recruiting effort. Behind them are a shadowy government-type agency and a dead woman. It’s a hoot.

Our protagonist Shadow is a mess of a person. We get little of his backstory, even his name is secret. At first, I found him unbelievable. He accepts this new world a little too well, going along with all the weird dreams and god talk as if, hey, that stuff happens, right? But then I looked back on how he was introduced to us. Gaiman breaks this character from the start like a prison bitch, blank slates the man with horrific news of his wife’s death and then the worst funeral one could imagine. Also, looking back, there is some fridge logic in how Shadow’s heritage might give him a more aptitude for the weird.

As for the secondary characters, all of them are a little shallow but entertaining. This book sets them up as a horror movie would set up a group of teenagers, all worse than the last, waiting until the big bad comes along to stuff them into sleeping bags and beat them against trees. I admit that is unfair because I did say they were entertaining. I enjoyed seeing how Gaiman constructed each ancient deity and placed them in modern day but wished we could have stuck with a core group rather than the pantheon presented.

The plot and setting of this book go hand in hand. It’s right there on the cover, a dark road with lightning crashing down on a solitary figure. This book is about America, the American Dream, hopes, ideals, identity, et cetera and so forth. And in that vein it is scattered and different. Sections of the book are rich with characters and people bouncing off each other while other sections are lonely, desolate places I wished Shadow would simply run from. My personal favorite were the quiet moments with a couple of folk just sharing time and a beer. I think that if you have traveled this land enough, spent time on the back roads and cities of America, you will also find your favorite part of the book corresponds with your favorite places in this country.

View all my reviews

American Gods 2

""...when I was still of an age where a book could change me forever." -Gaiman in Acknowledgements for American Gods"  

I love that quote.  Gaiman is talking about Harlan Ellison's Deathbird Stories in here and the impact it left on him "burned... onto the back of [Gaiman's] head."  It's sad that books, movies and other items can't have that effect on me anymore but is to be expected.  Sure, every once in a while something will come along and surprise and delight me.  Without that feeling I might as well just stop consuming all together.  But... but it is not like it was when I once put down a book or left the theater and thought, "Shit, what the hell was that?" in an excited way.  Too much deconstruction, symbol hunting and simple over thinking have generally left me with "I liked what they did with that, that was new" when I walk out of something I like.

Maybe that is why I drift toward comedy.  There's still a surprise element in comedy.  A life and breath.  Passion for the absurd or the simple turn of phrase.  And it's fun to laugh.  There's always that.

So I finished American Gods, Mr. Gaiman has guided Shadow through trials and tribulations, through life and death and all around the gods.  I will have a full review up soon, but I want to take the time right here to thank the author personally.  This has been a difficult week and his book has provided both inspiration and distraction.  No one should ask more of fiction than that.

I recommend if you are going to purchase a copy of American Gods, get the author's preferred copy with a nice interview, essay and extra bits. 

American Gods 1

Today I met a man named Shadow who in turn met a man named Mr. Wednesday.  Shadow lost something dear to him, his life, after leaving prison after a 3 year stint.  Now embarking on a new career, Shadow is following Mr. Wednesday in the driver’s seat.  He has met the dead, played checkers, and robbed a bank.  I wonder what he will get up to next.

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book and by extension series left me wanting more yet fulfilled at the same time. So begins my review of the most hard to read book I have enjoyed in a long time.

Beware, thar be spoilers in the following, you have been warned.

The basic plot is a direct continuation of Catching Fire. Katniss has been liberated from the Quarter Quell and is smack in the middle of the head of the rebellion, District 13. In the militaristic environment, she struggles for independence and individuality while attempting to assimilate so she can survive. The plot is the same as the other two: Katniss stumbles around a new environment, is hungry, fights with someone about something, excels at whatever she needs to, then goes into battle and triumphs in a backhanded way. There, I did that without really spoiling anything.

All our favorite characters are back, with the point of view squarely in Katniss’s eye. She hems and haws through most of the story, looking for her place in the world that has been thrust upon her, blah blah blah. Looking at the mechanics as a whole, nothing has really changed about the structure of the story which makes the characters that much more important. And, I have to say it, I’m kinda done with Katniss. Most of the way through this book, I was bored with her. She’s a reactionary character for the majority of the time, having greatness thrust upon her over and over. I was much more interested in the side characters as more was revealed about them, but the novel only gave information as Katniss received it so we got very little and then her projections of that information. This made the reading really frustrating as you were thrust into her mindset so much that I did not feel empathy as much as I wanted to control her as a puppet. Go over there! Talk to that guy! This makes it kinda jarring when she does act, throwing off the dynamic of how much we are actually told about her state of mind versus what she plans to do next. I do not think I have ever had that in a book, a character where I know their thoughts except when he or she is actually thinking.

So this book is at its heart about Katniss’s struggle within the rebellion and her place in it. Is she a figurehead or a leader? A soldier or a vengeful being? In the end, none of this is really answered. Yet, it is. She’s just Katniss. I can get behind that, except that there is no application of that beyond what I stated above: she reacts when we know what she’s thinking and we get jack when she decides on a course of action. Also, key points in her story are placed off screen, fueling the reaction. The rescue of Peeta and the rebels winning the war all happen when she is unconscious. This is bullshit. Realistic, but bullshit. I equate this with Leia getting knocked out and coming to with some random we just met telling her Luke saved the galaxy. As a reader, this is frustrating as hell, yet I do admire Collins’s commitment to follow Katniss’s story, no matter how boring it may be.

At the end of the day, this trilogy I would put on par with The Lovely Bones. A great series that tells an epic journey in a realistic way that defies expectation to a fault. Sometimes realism is great, but I felt fairly disappointed through much of the novel. That being said, I thought it had one of the most touching and perfect endings to a character’s story I have read. I would not have been surprised if Frodo had shown up at the end to take her to the Grey Lands.

View all my reviews

Z is for Zenz, Aaron "The Hiccupotamus"

The Hiccupotamus by Aaron Zenz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Summary
A hippopotamus gets the hiccups and his "friends" decided to help him out.

I can only start this review with one question: If a hippopotamus got hiccups, who would give more than two shits? After much research (AKA, repeated viewings of the movie Congo) I have found that hippopotami are complete and total assholes. The first half of this book proves this point as the hippopotamus (from the latin "monster douche"), runs from friend to friend disturbing their lifestyles to the point that they must solve the problem or perish.

The elephant, centipede, and rhinoceros (yeah, you just read that right) all start attempting various cures from scaring and wrapping him with licorice and spinning him around. Cause that happens in a jungle. At one point, it seems they also secure the talents of a damn American buffalo, tie the hippo to him, then I guess they just jump around. There’s also a bit with vinegar that I do not understand.

I am going to let you folks into a little secret: This month might as well have broken me like a dry twig on a cold winter night. Children’s books sounded so fun. What could be more fun and easy than reviewing motherpunking picture books? Yeah, if I had only known. I feel like the next time I am forced to do a story time I am going to start yelling at the children how their culture is disintegrating. This book had a buffalo with a hippo tied to his back. Those creatures do not even exist together in god’s creation outside of mankind’s animal jails that are zoos. I am going to drop some truth bombs on these little sons of bitches and they will not see it coming. This month is going to make children cry. I hope you are happy, A to Z challenge. Bless.

Oh, and the art’s pretty fun to look at.

Each day in the month of April 2012 (starting the first Sunday, then excluding every other Sunday) we will blog using the alphabet as our guide. I will link each post to the letter and you can find them all on this page. If you want to keep up with the challenge for my fellow bloggers, check out the A to Z Challenge Page.

Y is for Young, Ed “Lon Po Po”

Lon Po Po by Ed Young
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Summary
Three children are left alone at night so they murder a talking wolf.

I can only surmise that the setting of this book is supposed to be Narnia due to the talking animal. This takes me right out of the story as I do not believe in talking animals or locations where they exist. I find the entire notion ridiculous.

The characters are shallow adaptations of classic fairy tales, in this case an amalgamation of Red Riding Hood. We are told much about each character, only to then have that trait shown. The best example of this is when the “clever” oldest child murders the talking wolf by tricking him.

This story is supposed to be a tale about not trusting strangers, but it comes off as a horrible murder tale. At no point are we given evidence that the wolf wishes the children any harm. Sure, he notices how plump and sweet they are, but so does my grandma and I doubt she’s gonna kill me any time soon. No doubt cause I can take her, but I digress. In fact, when the wolf is invited in the house, he hangs out with them, crawls in bed with them, even talks to them. This poor lonely bastard was just looking for warmth and immortality and these crazy children killed him for it.

So what do we learn from this book? Don’t go asking for help when kids parents are away. The children will go all Home Alone and kill you.

I will give this book high marks for the watercolor art design. Each page floats by in a dream state of color and emotion. The picture of the wolf in the sheet outside the house is just unsettling. The images are beautiful renditions of classic Chinese art, too bad the words got in the way.

Each day in the month of April 2012 (starting the first Sunday, then excluding every other Sunday) we will blog using the alphabet as our guide. I will link each post to the letter and you can find them all on this page. If you want to keep up with the challenge for my fellow bloggers, check out the A to Z Challenge Page.