I went to see Inception for a second time, in an IMAX theatre. Several things happened:

• I enjoyed it more this time than the first time. It really is a lovely-looking movie.
• I got to hear an even larger audience of people sigh frustratedly in unison at the final scene. I still don’t get this, by the way — once you see the REDACTED SPOILER THING, how can you not know what Nolan is going to do with that scene?
• I traumatized myself by thinking about what it would be like to watch Mysterious Skin in IMAX. (Giant hands on Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s skinny chest!) We watched that for the first time this week, and I’ll admit that I don’t understand its good reviews, either, much as I adore JGL; talk about movies structured as if they’re setting up surprising reveals when they aren’t.

I still don’t think Inception is a perfect masterpiece or even much of a mystery, but I’ve enjoyed thinking about it. If you also enjoy thinking about it, you might be interested to know that Hans Zimmer’s score is based on a slowed-down sample of the Edith Piaf song that’s so important to the dreamers (via Merrie Haskell). This is extra interesting to me because the Crystal Castles song that I mentioned in my last Inception post — “Violent Dreams,” the one that Zimmer’s score reminded me of — is also based on a slowed-down sample of a different song (Stina Nordenstam’s “A Walk in the Park”), as I discovered when I was googling it after seeing the movie the first time. Intriguing that the auditory landscape of dreams is slowed-down music, and that somehow my brain recognized that before I knew that Zimmer’s score or the Crystal Castles song had used that technique.

Other interesting (and spoilery) Inception links: the one about Cobb’s wedding ring, and the one with a bingo card for Christopher Nolan movies.

They will come and speak to your fiction workshops! Last Friday, the fabulous Maureen McHugh visited my summer fiction class and spent about 75 minutes talking with my students. In preparation for her visit, they’d read a story from her currently in-development collection of post-apocalyptic short fiction, and they’d also read the first 25 pages of The Road as a counterpoint.

Maureen on the right, talking to one side of the table

We talked about Maureen’s ARG company No Mimes. She walked the students through the development of a typical ARG project and described the many ways that working in the ARG world is different from writing prose fiction, by yourself, at your computer — and the many sorts of knowledge she’s gained from writing in a fiction-adjacent field.

We talked about the story the students read, “After the Apocalypse,” which follows a mother and daughter trying to go north to Detroit — not south, like McCarthy’s father and son — after the world falls apart. Maureen explained how she viewed her story as existing in conversation with McCarthy’s novel, but not offering a direct response to it (though we did offer some direct responses to the novel in class!). She also noted which elements of the story had changed in response to workshop feedback.

We also talked about Twitter and about communities of writers; Maureen is @maureenmcq on Twitter, for reference. I first read one of Maureen’s books when I was in college (China Mountain Zhang, still one of my favorite books), but I got to know her personally after becoming friendly with a group of Austin writers I met through Twitter. One of my favorite things about the writing world on Twitter is how generous many established writers are with their time, with their RTs of former students’ excited announcements, with their enthusiasm about new books. Maureen’s visit to our class was just another instance of that kind of generosity, and we had a great time.

This week, my students are workshopping their first pieces of fiction (and doing an excellent job of it). After a week and a half of class every day, I think we’re all starting to realize that an intensive summer fiction workshop will, in fact, be intensive. For all of us. But with judicious applications of cookies and porcupines that think they’re dogs, I think we’ll manage just fine.

Anyway, I’m afraid it’s links all the way down today:

• Via Gwynne Garfinkle, this recap of a Readercon panel about New England horror that I so wish I could’ve attended. Killingly is New England gothic, I think, rather than horror, but after reading The Passage I’m more willing to think of horror as something that sneaks into many other genres. (I don’t have a blog category for Killingly stuff! This must be remedied at once.)
• Fabulous illustrations of characters from The Wire (though Snoop’s the only woman represented so far; odd). I like Freamon’s the best, but then I usually like Freamon best. (Via David Schwartz on Twitter.)
• Susana Daniel’s essay in Slate about the purgatorial decade she spent writing and not writing her first novel.
• The most charming interview with Bill Murray, who rarely gives them. It concludes with the interviewer asking Murray about the rumor that he likes to sneak up behind people in NYC, cover their eyes with his hands, and ask, “Guess who?” Murray’s answer: “[long pause] I know. I know, I know, I know. I’ve heard about that from a lot of people. A lot of people. I don’t know what to say. There’s probably a really appropriate thing to say. Something exactly and just perfectly right. [long beat, and then he breaks into a huge grin] But by God, it sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Just so crazy and unlikely and unusual?”

My first week of teaching is over! Or sort of over — my students just turned in their first assignments, so I’ll be reading those this weekend. We spent most of this week reading and discussing published short fiction and we begin workshopping their own work on Monday.

I am very sleepy this morning, not least because T. talked me into attending the midnight showing of Inception with him on Thursday night. Vaguely spoilery reaction below — skip if you’re not into that kind of thing. Non-spoilery reaction: it’s fun and you should see it.

Beyond that, I think A. O. Scott’s review is right on:

… though there is a lot to see in “Inception,” there is nothing that counts as genuine vision. Mr. Nolan’s idea of the mind is too literal, too logical, too rule-bound to allow the full measure of madness — the risk of real confusion, of delirium, of ineffable ambiguity — that this subject requires. The unconscious, as Freud (and Hitchcock, and a lot of other great filmmakers) knew, is a supremely unruly place, a maze of inadmissible desires, scrambled secrets, jokes and fears. If Mr. Nolan can’t quite reach this place, that may be because his access is blocked by the very medium he deploys with such skill.

I had the same reaction to the movie that Scott did — I really enjoyed it and admired the caper-plot machinery, but I felt slightly unsatisfied at the end. I think the problem is that the plot is designed, like just about all of Nolan’s plots, to turn on a series of reveals. Except that these reveals aren’t really surprising. You can see them coming from at least a few minutes away, if not more. T. and I were both perplexed at the critical habit of describing the movie as confusing or hard to follow — it’s complex but incredibly regular, and I don’t think I ever got confused about what was happening or where/when the action was occurring. (Roger Ebert’s review, which is very positive and definitely worth reading, does this a bit; he also points out, interestingly, that Nolan was working on this script while he filmed Memento. [Obligatory mention here of how much I enjoy Ebert's Twitter feed, if you aren't familiar with it!])  I found The Prestige‘s reveals more satisfying, and its moral sense more resonant, too. You would think that a movie that is explicitly about the very foundations of reality would have higher stakes than a movie about magicians, but it seems to me that Nolan might be better at approaching ethical questions sideways rather than head-on. (Do not get me started about the question of ethics in relation to the dreadful The Dark Knight.)

The other weakness of the movie, for me, was the lack of development of the relationships among the characters, especially in comparison to the character-driven drama of The Prestige. This is maybe a flaw inherent in the caper plot, though I think even Ocean’s 11 did a better job of creating real people to fill out its team (and there were, as you’ll note, eleven of them). I liked all the team members just fine — I think I will always adore Joseph Gordon-Levitt, even though I couldn’t get through (500) Days of Summer — but their interactions are shallow. The movie also wastes a chance to do something really interesting, which I won’t discuss much here because it would be super-spoilery, by eliding one large chunk of time that would have allowed it to investigate the relationship between DiCaprio’s character and Watanabe’s character, and to be weirder. I liked Marion Cotillard a lot, which was a nice change from Public Enemies in which she just seemed like a pretty but bizarre casting choice and reminded me that I really do want to see her Piaf movie. (Okay, one spoilery side note regarding her character: Nolan is really obsessed with giving his main male characters idealized wives who died in ways they may be culpable for.) And the movie also made me want to look up a few of the other actors, especially Tom Hardy, who is delightfully smirky.

In sum: not perfect, but it is a gorgeous movie. It will make you clutch the arm of the person sitting next to you, and it may make you think about it after it’s over. And if you have a partner who likes Crystal Castles, you will definitely be unable to get this song out of your head after the movie, as it’s very like the movie score in some ways:

A really amazing, thoughtful, detailed, super-complimentary reader review. The kind that inspires dolphin-sonar noises and flappy hands. (If you’ve never been inspired to make dolphin-sonar noises and flappy hands, I feel bad for you.)

And now, I’m about to go talk  about Katherine Mansfield’s “Bliss” with my fiction students. Heh.

In March, I filmed an interview with “Open Books, Open Minds,” a local TV book program based in Ashland, Oregon, and sponsored by the Jackson County library system. Clips from that interview are now up on Youtube — the first features a bit of the interview and me reading the prologue; the second shows me reading a selection from chapter 1 that I haven’t read publicly before. (The bit about the seawater ritual, for those of you who’ve read the book.)

Many thanks to Maureen Battistella of the Ashland Mystery group, who organized and filmed the interview, and Ashland Public Library manager Amy Blossom, who interviewed me!

Back in May — long enough ago that I’d totally forgotten about it — Lambda Literary asked for interview questions for the fabulous Sarah Waters. This was just after I’d read The Little Stranger, so I was bubbling over with them, and I left a few at the Lambda Literary blog. Yesterday I was surprised and delighted to see that Lambda Literary had actually asked Sarah Waters those questions, along with great questions by Shelley Ettinger and Jeri Estes. Here’s a snip from her answer to my question about historical fiction, to entice you to visit the LL site and read the rest:

One thing that’s always intrigued me about our relationship with the past is how we’re always rewriting it. You can date a historical novel just like you can a period drama for TV or film: they always tell us as much about the period in which they were produced, as about the period they’re attempting to describe. I don’t see that as a limitation, though. The past is necessarily elusive; we can never “reproduce” it. But we can have lots of fun trying! That’s a big attraction of the genre, for me — taking on stereotypes about the past, and finding way to revise them, or to overturn them altogether.

And now back to teaching prep — as you could probably tell from my previous post, I’ve begun teaching my summer fiction workshop class at UT. Today was day two. Tomorrow, among other things, we’re going to take up Kelly Link’s suggestion of listing tropes you like and use that as an idea-generating writing exercise. (I will cheerfully admit that I do the writing exercises right along with my students.)

Watching a room full of students busily writing fiction, in response to a writing exercise given on the first day of class.

I’ve been trying all week to write a post about why the film versions of Twilight and Eclipse are kind of avant garde — notice I claim nothing of the sort for New Moon — but I just can’t seem to finish it up and post it. Can it be that I’ve hit my limit for dissecting the cultural phenomenon that is Twilight? Does Edward Cullen like to eat bears? (This is still the funniest thing about the Twilight universe, by FAR.) Actually, I’m almost tempted to read the remaining Twilight books — I’ve only read the first — so that I can see if this theory about the movies holds true for them, too. That just might be a ridiculous amount of preparation for writing a blog entry, though.

There are a few other reasons for my lack of follow-through:

1. Migraine, yargh.
2. Dissertation chapter: the one I am almost done with and really wanted to finish before Monday.
3. Teaching prep for my class that starts Monday (hence the diss chapter deadline).

In fact, I need to be finishing up the section on Martha Fowke Sansom’s Clio right now. Which means it’s time for a few links and a promise to be back soon with more substantive thoughts — possibly even more substantive thoughts on topics not related to vampires or YA! Well, maybe not that last bit.

Links!

• Kate Elliott is smart about genre boundaries.
• N. K. Jemisin is smart about worldbuilding.
• What happened at the Folger Library when the Durham First Folio was recovered. Short answer: wackiness.
• An 80s-style credits sequence for Firefly. Oh dear.
• A deservedly superlative review of Winter’s Bone, which is pretty amazing.

… first of all, you’re silly. But second: read this wonderful letter by Mary A. Dempsey, the Chicago Public Library Commissioner, calling out the many stupidities of a FOX News story asking why we still need those tax-greedy libraries now that we have this handy series of tubes called the internet.

The post also has one of the most heartening and non-keyboard-mash-y comment threads I’ve read in a while. The best one is by a Patrick F.: