Anywhere but here?
Jan. 5th, 2008 06:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatI've been struggling with the books I've been reading lately, specifically the last two - both fantasy novels - one that dealt with angels and demons, the other with fairies and humans.
They start off brilliantly, I'm swept away by the characters, eager to rip into the next page, want more time to read, then whammo, somewhere around the 100th page or thereabouts, it starts dragging. Gets stale. I start to feel as if the characters are having the same old conversations, and not moving anywhere. In short, I begin to get bored and annoyed with the writer for leading me on. This has happened with tv shows and comics as well. They are great for the first five episodes, then you think, damn, what happened? It's also annoying, because being me, I have a tendency to jump the gun and announce how brilliant the show, book, etc is - only to have to change my tune halfway through or towards the end and say, ugh, I should never have recommended this pile of crap and kept my mouth shut. (I'm told tv shows, comics and books are often picked up based on the first script, first fifty pages, or first issue - which explains a lot.) It's not unlike love at first sight or romantic love if I think about it. You know you meet this person they appear to be your dream come true then six months later, you wonder what you ever saw in them?
Then, there's writers like Joss Whedon. His stories start off sort of sluggish, jagged, then when you least expect it, pick up steam and hit you right between the eyes with unexpected brilliance. Unexpected, because it didn't quite start out that way, he apparently had to work up to it. Here you were reading along or watching along, enjoying it perhaps, but not really paying all that much attention, then whammo - you think wow, okay, this guy actually has something new to say here. Let me go back and re-read or re-watch all of this, I think I missed something. And you begin to fall gradually in love with what he is doing. The long-lasting kind that causes you to obsessively collect DVD's and read all the writers work. In a way it's more rewarding than the first type of writer - because you feel you've gained something as opposed to having something taken away from you.
I tend to remember the second type of writers, while I forget and disregard the first type. This reminds me that sometimes its the people and things we discount at first that end up meaning the most to us.
This brings me to my review of the most recent issue of Buffy S8, "Anywhere but Here", which may have the best art of any of the Buffy/Angel books so far issued. I've never seen Cliff Richards work before now and was quite impressed. A shame he's just a guest artist.
Admittedly not everyone is a Buffy fan or for that matter a comic book fan. I don't know anyone off the internet that is one. My close friends aren't nor are my co-workers or family members. To be fair - they don't like fantasy or sci-fi that much either. So, I don't discuss this interest with them. Like many others currently on lj, I came online to discuss interests that I could not discuss elsewhere. This live journal is partly in existence for that purpose.
Of the issues released to date, this may be the best one I've seen. It also may be the best thing I've seen Whedon write in a while. It's not an easy issue to write. Very intimate. Relationship focused. And he has inserted a real-life person, a fan, into the story - a woman - whose husband wrote a letter on her behalf, asking that she be selected as the fan to insert into Whedon's tale. When I first read the letter, I found myself thinking, yep, Buffy attracts the crazy people...and I've met quite a few of them over the last five years, then I took a step back - and thought about it. Life makes us all a tad crazy at times and in different ways. My mother's friend had a daughter who up until her thirtieth birthday was sane, the woman had a husband and two children, had been wickedly smart, cheerful, a joy to be around - and suddenly without warning she started hearing voices, became delusional, paranoid, had mood swings, and her personality completely changed. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She could not longer focus on the world around her, she lost her grasp on it.
In short she was living my worse nightmare. On TV, I saw Britney Spears have the mother of all nervous breakdowns, made all the worse for being televised. And I think back to 2001 and 2002, when I found myself beginning to unravel - and how I used Buffy to keep myself together, finding in the process a bunch of likeminded souls who were in a sense doing much the same thing. A co-worker and friend at the time, once quipped - "Oh I see, that fanboard you're on is a type of free group therapy". In a way it was. For exampe - on those boards, I met a navy nurse working in Japan, alone, and afraid, who I was later told by her husband, before he left on his ship for Afganistan, that our correspondence on Buffy was keeping his wife from committing suicide and how worried they were about her. Another fan called me and told me that the show and our interaction online had helped him get through a serious surgery and depression. For myself? It kept me from sabotauging myself at work, made me feel good about myself when everyone around me was telling me that I was a failure. It sounds crazy, when I think about it now. And when I speak of it to people who weren't there and did not experience it themselves - I get blank stares. I've lost touch with most of the friends I made at that times, some of the ones I was closest to and cared the most about at that time have long since disappeared as often tends to be the case in life, which is part of the reason life is so hard. I think sometimes that I miss the navy nurse the most, Kat Robinson, was her name.
She sent me flowers when I finally quit my job at the evil company, wishing me luck, way back in 2002. I still have the vase on top of my refrigerator.
It's odd that as I write this I recall thoughts I had earlier in the week regarding writing and the written word - mostly in response to my irritation at the never-ending writer's strike and the books I've been reading - that writing is not important, that we won't miss it. Sure it entertains. But it does not change the world. It does not make it better. It's not as important as being a cop or a firefighter or a teacher or the President or an enviromentalist. Today, I realize that I couldn't be more wrong. If something is written well it can change the world and it can change a person's life, it may even save a life. For Christmas, I gave my mother the final Harry Potter book. My mother had become stressed out caring for my Grandmother. She couldn't relax. Could not focus. I considered giving her a massage, which was what my brother decided to do, but knew she had never had one and when she recieved gift certificates for them, avoided them like the plague. So, I gave her Harry. And after I left. She sat down and read the book in less than a week. Just spent an entire weekend doing nothing but reading. And she felt better afterwards. Harry Potter provided my mother with the release she desperately needed. It relaxed her. It made her laugh. It made her cry. And it took her out of the world for a while.
Joss Whedon explains this in Anywhere but Here - Willow and Buffy have gone to a hut that has a demon that can provide them with information on what "Twilight" - their new nemesis is. The information provided is not all that important - what is, as is often the case in Whedon's work, is the journey or the process of obtaining the information. Along the way the characters play a game. The game reveals bits and pieces of their relationship and their fears. They also meet a woman named Robin - who has been chosen to mind or keep together an unstable reality within her mind. Doing so makes her a bit loopy. As Buffy states: "So minding an unstable reality means containing it? Means time and logic and everything's just bendy in the brain..." And then later the demon who tells them what "twighlight" means - states: "Lies, delusions, gross simplifications - these are what make mankind. No fault in it. Your brains could not contain the horrible beauty of total awareness. You run from it. As from a Predator. You Escape. Even from Each Other." In a way - Whedon is describing and explaining how we deal with life's insanity. The secret of the universe would blow our mind. Those who are the most unstable are often the most gifted, the brightest. My cousin certainly is - he graduated high school at 14, went directly to college, was advanced in mathematics, then dropped out - mentally unstable and diagnosed finally at the age of 40 with bipolar syndrom, he's never found the right mixture of drugs to enable him to live the life of a teacher or a mathematician, the best he can manage is smaller jobs. Sometimes art helps us handle it - seeing the world through a filter as opposed to direct.
The story is far from perfect - Dawn's bit is admittedly stereotypical, yet it made me laugh all the same - since Whedon is picking up on a female romance trope. The male version - we can see in Angel - with all the femme fatales. For reasons that escape me, people always seem to be attracted to individuals they wish to save or are dangerous. It seems to be our fantasy. It's a cliche - sure. But the reason it is one is we keep repeating ourselves. Also, I like the play on names Nick and Kenny (Nicholas Brendan and his twin Kelly?) - doubt Whedon was thinking that when he named Dawn's two beux. But you never know.
You could argue not much happens here - it's mostly talking, but I'm reading a book right now in which they appear to do nothing but talk for pages and pages and pages - actually have read two now in which that is the case - and trust me, more happens within these twenty-five than happened in over a hundred in the book I'm reading. What happens? We learn who these people are. Who Willow is. Who Buffy is. How they feel about the people in their lives and the choices they've made. How some of those choices may come back and bite them. What I love most about Whedon is he is not afraid to make his characters flawed, to have them make stupid decisions. In that respect, his characters often feel more real than some of the characters I've seen in less fantastical works.
If you've given up on the Buffy S8 comics - you might want to pick this one up and give a shot. Then see if you can't grab the last nine, check them out again. The comics much like the series itself grows on you. It is not love at first sight. It requires committment. It is more of a novel in progress much like Dickens who submitted his works bit by bit in serial format ages ago, then it is a short story or a film, quick to engage.
If you've never watched Buffy (and you are reading this entry), for whatever reason, you might also want to give it shot. It doesn't get really interesting in my opinion until the latter seasons - but to truly appreciate the layers in those seasons, you have to see all of it from the beginning. In my view and I know others will disagree as is their perogative, it is still the best tv series that has aired in its entirety, even with all its flaws.
They start off brilliantly, I'm swept away by the characters, eager to rip into the next page, want more time to read, then whammo, somewhere around the 100th page or thereabouts, it starts dragging. Gets stale. I start to feel as if the characters are having the same old conversations, and not moving anywhere. In short, I begin to get bored and annoyed with the writer for leading me on. This has happened with tv shows and comics as well. They are great for the first five episodes, then you think, damn, what happened? It's also annoying, because being me, I have a tendency to jump the gun and announce how brilliant the show, book, etc is - only to have to change my tune halfway through or towards the end and say, ugh, I should never have recommended this pile of crap and kept my mouth shut. (I'm told tv shows, comics and books are often picked up based on the first script, first fifty pages, or first issue - which explains a lot.) It's not unlike love at first sight or romantic love if I think about it. You know you meet this person they appear to be your dream come true then six months later, you wonder what you ever saw in them?
Then, there's writers like Joss Whedon. His stories start off sort of sluggish, jagged, then when you least expect it, pick up steam and hit you right between the eyes with unexpected brilliance. Unexpected, because it didn't quite start out that way, he apparently had to work up to it. Here you were reading along or watching along, enjoying it perhaps, but not really paying all that much attention, then whammo - you think wow, okay, this guy actually has something new to say here. Let me go back and re-read or re-watch all of this, I think I missed something. And you begin to fall gradually in love with what he is doing. The long-lasting kind that causes you to obsessively collect DVD's and read all the writers work. In a way it's more rewarding than the first type of writer - because you feel you've gained something as opposed to having something taken away from you.
I tend to remember the second type of writers, while I forget and disregard the first type. This reminds me that sometimes its the people and things we discount at first that end up meaning the most to us.
This brings me to my review of the most recent issue of Buffy S8, "Anywhere but Here", which may have the best art of any of the Buffy/Angel books so far issued. I've never seen Cliff Richards work before now and was quite impressed. A shame he's just a guest artist.
Admittedly not everyone is a Buffy fan or for that matter a comic book fan. I don't know anyone off the internet that is one. My close friends aren't nor are my co-workers or family members. To be fair - they don't like fantasy or sci-fi that much either. So, I don't discuss this interest with them. Like many others currently on lj, I came online to discuss interests that I could not discuss elsewhere. This live journal is partly in existence for that purpose.
Of the issues released to date, this may be the best one I've seen. It also may be the best thing I've seen Whedon write in a while. It's not an easy issue to write. Very intimate. Relationship focused. And he has inserted a real-life person, a fan, into the story - a woman - whose husband wrote a letter on her behalf, asking that she be selected as the fan to insert into Whedon's tale. When I first read the letter, I found myself thinking, yep, Buffy attracts the crazy people...and I've met quite a few of them over the last five years, then I took a step back - and thought about it. Life makes us all a tad crazy at times and in different ways. My mother's friend had a daughter who up until her thirtieth birthday was sane, the woman had a husband and two children, had been wickedly smart, cheerful, a joy to be around - and suddenly without warning she started hearing voices, became delusional, paranoid, had mood swings, and her personality completely changed. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She could not longer focus on the world around her, she lost her grasp on it.
In short she was living my worse nightmare. On TV, I saw Britney Spears have the mother of all nervous breakdowns, made all the worse for being televised. And I think back to 2001 and 2002, when I found myself beginning to unravel - and how I used Buffy to keep myself together, finding in the process a bunch of likeminded souls who were in a sense doing much the same thing. A co-worker and friend at the time, once quipped - "Oh I see, that fanboard you're on is a type of free group therapy". In a way it was. For exampe - on those boards, I met a navy nurse working in Japan, alone, and afraid, who I was later told by her husband, before he left on his ship for Afganistan, that our correspondence on Buffy was keeping his wife from committing suicide and how worried they were about her. Another fan called me and told me that the show and our interaction online had helped him get through a serious surgery and depression. For myself? It kept me from sabotauging myself at work, made me feel good about myself when everyone around me was telling me that I was a failure. It sounds crazy, when I think about it now. And when I speak of it to people who weren't there and did not experience it themselves - I get blank stares. I've lost touch with most of the friends I made at that times, some of the ones I was closest to and cared the most about at that time have long since disappeared as often tends to be the case in life, which is part of the reason life is so hard. I think sometimes that I miss the navy nurse the most, Kat Robinson, was her name.
She sent me flowers when I finally quit my job at the evil company, wishing me luck, way back in 2002. I still have the vase on top of my refrigerator.
It's odd that as I write this I recall thoughts I had earlier in the week regarding writing and the written word - mostly in response to my irritation at the never-ending writer's strike and the books I've been reading - that writing is not important, that we won't miss it. Sure it entertains. But it does not change the world. It does not make it better. It's not as important as being a cop or a firefighter or a teacher or the President or an enviromentalist. Today, I realize that I couldn't be more wrong. If something is written well it can change the world and it can change a person's life, it may even save a life. For Christmas, I gave my mother the final Harry Potter book. My mother had become stressed out caring for my Grandmother. She couldn't relax. Could not focus. I considered giving her a massage, which was what my brother decided to do, but knew she had never had one and when she recieved gift certificates for them, avoided them like the plague. So, I gave her Harry. And after I left. She sat down and read the book in less than a week. Just spent an entire weekend doing nothing but reading. And she felt better afterwards. Harry Potter provided my mother with the release she desperately needed. It relaxed her. It made her laugh. It made her cry. And it took her out of the world for a while.
Joss Whedon explains this in Anywhere but Here - Willow and Buffy have gone to a hut that has a demon that can provide them with information on what "Twilight" - their new nemesis is. The information provided is not all that important - what is, as is often the case in Whedon's work, is the journey or the process of obtaining the information. Along the way the characters play a game. The game reveals bits and pieces of their relationship and their fears. They also meet a woman named Robin - who has been chosen to mind or keep together an unstable reality within her mind. Doing so makes her a bit loopy. As Buffy states: "So minding an unstable reality means containing it? Means time and logic and everything's just bendy in the brain..." And then later the demon who tells them what "twighlight" means - states: "Lies, delusions, gross simplifications - these are what make mankind. No fault in it. Your brains could not contain the horrible beauty of total awareness. You run from it. As from a Predator. You Escape. Even from Each Other." In a way - Whedon is describing and explaining how we deal with life's insanity. The secret of the universe would blow our mind. Those who are the most unstable are often the most gifted, the brightest. My cousin certainly is - he graduated high school at 14, went directly to college, was advanced in mathematics, then dropped out - mentally unstable and diagnosed finally at the age of 40 with bipolar syndrom, he's never found the right mixture of drugs to enable him to live the life of a teacher or a mathematician, the best he can manage is smaller jobs. Sometimes art helps us handle it - seeing the world through a filter as opposed to direct.
The story is far from perfect - Dawn's bit is admittedly stereotypical, yet it made me laugh all the same - since Whedon is picking up on a female romance trope. The male version - we can see in Angel - with all the femme fatales. For reasons that escape me, people always seem to be attracted to individuals they wish to save or are dangerous. It seems to be our fantasy. It's a cliche - sure. But the reason it is one is we keep repeating ourselves. Also, I like the play on names Nick and Kenny (Nicholas Brendan and his twin Kelly?) - doubt Whedon was thinking that when he named Dawn's two beux. But you never know.
You could argue not much happens here - it's mostly talking, but I'm reading a book right now in which they appear to do nothing but talk for pages and pages and pages - actually have read two now in which that is the case - and trust me, more happens within these twenty-five than happened in over a hundred in the book I'm reading. What happens? We learn who these people are. Who Willow is. Who Buffy is. How they feel about the people in their lives and the choices they've made. How some of those choices may come back and bite them. What I love most about Whedon is he is not afraid to make his characters flawed, to have them make stupid decisions. In that respect, his characters often feel more real than some of the characters I've seen in less fantastical works.
If you've given up on the Buffy S8 comics - you might want to pick this one up and give a shot. Then see if you can't grab the last nine, check them out again. The comics much like the series itself grows on you. It is not love at first sight. It requires committment. It is more of a novel in progress much like Dickens who submitted his works bit by bit in serial format ages ago, then it is a short story or a film, quick to engage.
If you've never watched Buffy (and you are reading this entry), for whatever reason, you might also want to give it shot. It doesn't get really interesting in my opinion until the latter seasons - but to truly appreciate the layers in those seasons, you have to see all of it from the beginning. In my view and I know others will disagree as is their perogative, it is still the best tv series that has aired in its entirety, even with all its flaws.
