{"id":41,"date":"2002-01-20T10:56:55","date_gmt":"2002-01-20T15:56:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/wordpress\/convolutions"},"modified":"2002-01-20T10:56:55","modified_gmt":"2002-01-20T15:56:55","slug":"convolutions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/2002\/01\/convolutions.html","title":{"rendered":"Convolutions"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nFriday night Pat, Courtney, Amber, and I went out to see
\nMulholland Drive<\/a><\/em>.
\nNow, the movie theater<\/a> was great.
\nIt’s in Oakland, and it has big comfy chairs and tables and couches — couches!
\nAnd you can order pizza and fancy nachos and beer.
\nAs for the movie itself<\/em>… it was a bit much. I think that unlike, say,
\nMemento<\/a><\/em>,
\nMulholland Drive<\/em> cannot be reassembled into something that makes
\nsense in the light of day. Which bothers me. Pat and Courtney
\nand I talked about the movie on the way home, and I think we all
\nagreed on which parts of the movie were real and which parts
\nwere dream\/fantasy. But as for the niggling details — what was that
\nblue box? The monster in the alley? The old people? Well, who knows?
\nUnlike Memento<\/em>, where it was fun to pick over the details
\nand marvel over the movie’s clever intricacies… the same process
\nin Mulholland Drive<\/em> just makes me think that I’m wasting my
\ntime. That there’s no there<\/em>, there.\n<\/p>\n

\nWhich reminds me — I just sent a short story, “Ogress”, to
\nM’ris<\/a>
\nfor a critique. My main concern was whether the story made sense:
\nthere’s a fair amount of backstory, and I tried to get some ideas across using
\ncouple of flashbacks. Frankly, I’m wary of the flashback
\ndevice, let alone the dream\/fantasy device. I want to tell my story<\/em>, not dazzle
\nthe reader with Stupid Narrative Tricks. In this case, I wanted the flashbacks to
\nprovide the reader a few critical facts, while keeping the story from growing
\nmuch, much, longer than I wanted it to be. And as it turned out, M’ris
\nunderstood the story just fine. If she hadn’t,
\nI would have had to completely rewrite the whole thing.\n<\/p>\n

\nUnfortunately, rather than polish up “Ogress” and ship it out, I’ve been finishing up the
\nSandman saga<\/a>.
\nI finally went out and splurged, bought all the books I was missing. Now that I’m done, I
\nhave to say it was a heck of a story. I can’t see how Neil Gaiman could have told this
\nstory in any other medium. I wouldn’t go quite as hyperbolic
\nas some of writers of the introductions did — and I’m thinking of Harlan Ellison in
\nparticular — the Sandman comics were not Great Art. They were, however,
\nreally good art. Which is good enough for me.\n<\/p>\n

\nFinally, I’ve decided to start a Winelog. (Not to be confused with
\nWinerlog.) No, see, I have this
\nproblem: I buy wine, drink it… and then
\nforget about it. And so I end up buying the wines I didn’t like again<\/em> —
\nbecause here in California we are blessed and cursed with an enormous wine
\nselection everywhere we go, including Safeway. Which is where I get
\nall of my wine. Safeway, occasionally Trader Joe’s, and when I’m really feeling
\nlike The Man, Ridge Vineyards<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

\nHenceforth, I will keep a record of the wines I’ve tried. Now, first off,
\nlet me say that I have no wine education whatsoever. I can’t even
\ngrip the wineglass by the stem and swirl the wine properly — I have to cheat
\nand clutch the glass around the rim from the top. I don’t know what “body”
\nis. I couldn’t care less about letting the wine “breathe”. I evaluate
\nwine in the same way I evaluate doughnuts. I try it and decide right then
\nand there, “Yum!” or “Yuck!”\n<\/p>\n

\nSo here goes with the first one:\n<\/p>\n

\nBella Sera, Italy, 2000 Merlot: Yuck!\n<\/p>\n

\nHey, that was easy enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I want to tell my story<\/em>, not dazzle the reader with Stupid Narrative Tricks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellany"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}