Bad Monkeys (Ruff, Matt) 2007

When an author spends years hard at work on Sewer, Gas, and Electric (the bastard child of Snow Crash and the Illuminatus Trilogy) and then Set This House in Order (a psychological drama with a surprise ending), it's only natural that his next novel will be a fast-paced psychadelilogical trip with a multi-layered surprise ending. Bad Monkeys' page count is tiny compared to its predecessors in Matt Ruff's bibliography, but it's just the right length and you have to applaud him for knowing when to stop. However, while a fun read, Bad Monkeys feels a bit too much like the novelization of a screenplay. And heck, it could be a great movie, so now I wanna know whether it's been picked up, and if so, whether it's actually being developed, and if so, whether someone competent has been assigned to the project.

Things Fall Apart (Achebe, Chinua) 1959

"Okonkwo cleared his throat and moved his feet to the beat of the drums.  It filled him with fire as it had always done from his youth.  He trembled with the desire to conquer and subdue.  It was like the desire for woman."  

This passage neatly sums up everything I come to dislike, over the first 2/3 of the novel, about Okonkwo and the society that produces him.  Shouldn't we be happy that a society that allows men to beat their wives, forces them to kill their children at the whims of the gods, and so muddles them that they confuse rape with athletic prowess (the drums are calling the people to the wrestling matches, at which Okonkwo excelled in his youth.  Being a great wrestler is something to be proud of; feeling that the high you get from winning competitions is equable to forcing women is pathetic) is falling apart?  And yet, Achebe renders the death of Okonkwo's society at the hands of the colonialists a tragedy because what Okonkwo's society needs is to evolve, retaining what is good while shucking what is not, not to be torn apart.

Cut hair at home and SAVE

About two years ago my father-in-law gave me a vintage 14-piece barber kit from Sears, and I haven't been in a barbershop since. You can see some of the latest results here. Not bad, eh?

Across the Universe

Great music. Great singing. Great choreography. Inventive visuals. An engaging young actor in the lead. Strong supporting actors. With so much going right for Julie Taymor's 2007 all-Beatles musical, why does it end up as nothing more than an extended, glorified music video? Well, there's little in the way of spoken script, so we move from one musical number to another with scant connective tissue and no material for the characters to develop beyond the sketches in which they're introduced. I like a good cameo as much as the next, and Bono would make a good Doctor Robert as described in the song, so it's somewhat unfortunate that he's not... or at least doesn't appear to be, aside from a quickly spoken line referring to the song's lyrics. Still, his rendition of "I Am the Walrus" was amusing. Unfortunately, Eddie Izzard's Mr. Kite sequence, coming immediately on the heels of the Bono cameo, fails miserably because it extends a stretch of film that does nothing to advance what plot there is and lacks the musicality present in the rest of the film.

But back to what's good -- I'm always a sucker for Princeton footage, even when they play hell with geography; the "I've Just Seen a Face" sequence at the bowling alley is just fun; the a capella arrangement of "Because" in the tall grass is beautiful; and the sight of the strawberries pinned to a sheet with the juice running down like blood is interesting, at least until it's expanded upon in order to provide enough different visuals to fill up the entire song.

Engine Summer (John Crowley) 1979

Crowley just doesn't give a damn about plotting or pacing, at least, not in the way we're conditioned to expect from typical SF/F novels. Engine Summer is at least a little more accessible than, say, the Deep, retelling the old "growing up in far post-apocalyptic human civilization" story in a way only John Crowley can (or will) tell it, full of primitive magic, naive wonderment, and a flair for sly puns. This is a good "test" novel to decide whether you want to tackle Little, Big, or the Aegypt series.