An Author Considers How to Create Characters

Fascinating read.  Here's a bit of it:

"... your bad guys need to be great. They need to be so interesting that they potentially upstage your good guys. Hans Gruber versus John McClane. I’m rooting for McClane, but Hans steals every scene with his casual, clever villainy (best Christmas movie ever, by the way). "

If you don't think Die Hard is a Christmas movie, then I have nothing to say to you.

Summer Reading ... Or Not

The season's most unread books as listed by a math professor.

Happy 450th Birthday, William Shakespeare!

Take a moment to appreciate his lasting influence and also to take part in Talk Like Shakespeare Day today!  Have you thought about just how many words and phrases we owe to the Swan of Avon?

An Interview with David Mamet

Fascinating.  It also yields our Quote of the Day:

"... man is a striving animal.  That’s what separates us from the poodles.  So, our unquenchable urge to investigate, reform, and reshape everything around us, not only makes the world, but destroys the world.  The question is how do we deal with human nature, and that is the ultimate question of drama."

Friday Fun Videos: Thug Notes

This is some kind of brilliant.  The video series covers a gloriously wide array of famous literary works from Shakespeare to Orwell.  Here's the Thug Notes take on The Hobbit.  Don't be fooled by the fun of it all; the analyses are often very insightful indeed.

Ave atque Vale: Tom Clancy (1947-2013)

He will be missed.  His books are always enjoyable.  The Hunt For Red October was the first I read, and I loved it.  I was just a schoolgirl.  While my peers were reading Sweet Valley High, I was reading military thrillers.  Not much has changed - only now they're reading Fifty Shades of Awful and I'm still reading military thrillers.  Heh.

Hail and farewell to Tom Clancy.  Shall we maybe as a tribute re-watch the 1990 movie of the Red October book?  The cast includes the incomparable Sean Connery, James Earl Jones, Sam Neill, and - surprisingly - Tim Curry in a serious role.  It's one of the last Cold War movies made, and it's a lot of fun.

"Bond Girls" or "Bond Women"?

Someone thinks that the term "Bond Girls" should be changed to "Bond Women."  He then argues that James Bond wants real relationships with women and not just casual disposable sex, an argument that prompts La Parisienne and me to ask incredulously, Have you even seen any James Bond movies?  

And I don't care if the guy is writing Bond books.  He's no Ian Fleming.

007 is practically his own genre, and genres have expectations and rules.  Leave James Bond alone!  Let him drink, smoke, brawl, and flirt as much as he pleases as long as he's also sparring with Moneypenny and Q and M and going after bad guys.

Gee, next we'll see some awful wussified version of Bond who is a pacifist vegan hipster or something!  No, thanks.  I leave you with classic vintage Bond: women want him and men want to be him.  It's movie magic.

Oh, James.

Life Imitates Science Fiction: 10 Examples

10 Sci-Fi Predictions That Became Science Fact by alltime10s

Government Literary Stimulus!

Read up, bookworms!  

Here's an accompanying bon mot: "It should be a point of consensus that any chief executive that sends the public flocking into the loving arms of Orwell and Rand is probably not doing the job correctly." Heh.

Happy 449th Birthday, Will Shakespeare!

Join the fun with the third annual Happy Birthday, Shakespeare online project sponsored by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and remember that it's also Talk Like Shakespeare Day!  You can join your fellow fans on Twitter all day long with the #happybirthdayshakespeare hashtag too.

Happy birthday indeed to the sweet swan of Avon, who has given me so much pleasure from the first moment I met him in a children's storybook to right now, when every re-reading of every play yields something fresh and new and wonderful.  The haters can hate all they want; Shakespeare is immortal.

For the quote of the day, I'll give you Ben Jonson's poem "To the Memory of My Beloved Master William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us" and its peerless assessment that Shakespeare was not of an age, but for all time.

Forgotten History: Artistic/Intellectual Feuds

Spanning the Renaissance to the modern age, here are some delicious tales of brilliant people engaging in some memorable feuds. 

BiblioFiles: Mario Vargas Llosa's "The Dream of the Celt"

It's the Peruvian author's first novel to appear in the US since he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010.  Here's more about it.  I previously posted about (and praised) the freedom-loving Mario Vargas Llosa here.  Here's his website. In fact, I'm going to pluck the Quote of the Day from an archived interview with him (the lines are from his 2000 novel "The Feast of the Goat"):

 "It must be nice. Your cup of coffee or glass of rum must taste better, the smoke of your cigar, a swim in the ocean on a hot day, the movie you see on Saturday, the merengue on the radio, everything must leave a more pleasurable sensation in your body and spirit when you had what Trujillo had taken away from Dominicans 31 years ago: free will."

Mark Steyn, Mark Twain, and the $ 1 Trillion Coin

Do read.  Now I want to read that Twain story!

Larry Correia on Gun Control

Why should you care what a bestselling sci-fi author has to say about guns?  Because he was also a firearms instructor and competition shooter who has worked with law enforcement and knows more about guns than your average talking head on the news.  Read this, please, if you haven't already.  Here is a piece of it:

Gun Free Zones are hunting preserves for innocent people. Period. 

Think about it. You are a violent, homicidal madman, looking to make a statement and hoping to go from disaffected loser to most famous person in the world. The best way to accomplish your goals is to kill a whole bunch of people. So where’s the best place to go shoot all these people? Obviously, it is someplace where nobody can shoot back. 

In all honesty I have no respect for anybody who believes Gun Free Zones actually work. You are going to commit several hundred felonies, up to and including mass murder, and you are going to refrain because there is a sign? That No Guns Allowed sign is not a cross that wards off vampires. It is wishful thinking, and really pathetic wishful thinking at that.

On another day I might blog about how I personally think that most efforts at gun control are actually and ultimately efforts at people control, but you pretty much can anticipate what I'd say, right? As for arguments that nobody should own firearms except the police ...  Just stop and think about that for a minute.  Do proponents of this realize that they're basically arguing in favor not only of more crime but also a potential police state?  What happens if and when it gets corrupted and nasty and starts to abuse power and stomp on your civil liberties?  Anyway, it's too late tonight to talk much more about a complicated issue and meditations on self-defense (not only as a right but also even as a responsibility), so I'm just going to sign off with this and one of my favorite lines from Firefly.  You know the one, darlings. Oh, you know.

Publishing the New Nobel Literature Prize Winner

This year's Nobel for lit goes to Chinese writer Mo Yan, and the English translation of his novel Sandalwood Death will be published by .... *drum roll* ... the University of Oklahoma Press!  That's quite a coup for the academic publishing house.

Public Service Announcement: If You're Not Reading Sarah Hoyt, You Should Be

Her many sci fi books aside, Hoyt's blog is fascinating stuff.  Her latest post is here.

Top 100 Books of Science Fiction and Fantasy

Let the debates begin about this list!  Hey, where's The Eye of Argon?  (Just kidding!)

Reading Recommendations From An Econ Prof

Usually this sort of thing would have me rushing for the doors, but econ professor Art Carden (Samford University) has some interesting-looking choices.  Carden also links to some cool TED talks and free online lectures.  Ain't technology grand!

Fifty Shades of Terrible, Fifty Shades of Snark

For La Parisienne especially and for everyone who (a) appreciates good writing and (b) takes pleasure in shredding bad writing.  If you thought Twilight was bad, wait until you get a load of Fifty Shades of Grey!  Fifty Shades started out as Twilight fanfic.  That should tell you something.

Now behold the intrepid soul who is reading Fifty Shades of Craptastic so you don't have to!  It is to Fifty Shades of Sewage what Reasoning with Vampires is to Twilight.

Have I personally read Fifty Shades of Abominable?  No.  I've only encountered snippets and excerpts, but they were enough to convince me that I'll never read the whole thing.  Am I really not going to read the book?  ABSOLUTELY. "But, but, Minerva!  Isn't this unfair?  Doesn't this fly in the face of your usual demand for intellectual rigor and solid research and ... ?"  There's an exception for every rule, sweet cheeks.  Read this again and grant me a dispensation just this once, mmmmkay?  Twilight was bad enough because it's clearly Stephenie Meyer's weird personal fantasy.  I have no desire to get involved in someone else's fantasy about that fantasy.  Nope, you'll find me off reading Jasper Fforde or Daniel Silva.

The Hungry Dragon: China and Raw Materials

Zambia-born, Oxford-trained economist Dambisa Moyo has a new book out on the subject, and her conclusion is sobering.