The Magic Theatre here in San Francisco looooves to boast about all the Sam Shepard world premieres they've done and now I'm mad that they never talk about premiering a vampire-goes-to-therapy play and that I had to learn about it from your newsletter...
lollllll. I am kind of curious about the play and actually the script for it must be in the archives here, since Charnas and her husband wrote it themselves, but I might not have time to look at it on this trip…
I did a quick Google last night and fortunately it looks like it is still licensed by Broadway Play Publishing—didn't pull the trigger to pay them $15 for a digital download copy but now I know that's an option...
Earth Abides sounds like someone read First & Last Men and tried to make a bad story out of a small part of it.
I have had Stars partially read for a few years now. I liked very little of what I read - the moments you're describing read to me like the author indulging himself performatively, creating strange little ultimately-meaningless bauble pocket situations that in the bigger context seemed ultimately incoherent. Trying to bamboozle the reader into feeling like he must be much smarter than they are. I guess the short way of putting that is jerking off. Or maybe he's just sooOooo smart that little old me just can't understand. I don't know. I'll probably try it again sometime though, maybe I just read it at a bad time and it's actually fantastic.
I think a lot of Delany that I've read is often riding the razor's edge between "this is kind of glib" and "this is profound." I think for me Stars was a book where the characters were stuck trying to articulate significance when the measuring tools or comparisons for what significance could mean did not exist. (Late in the book somebody gets stuck on using "dawn" as a metaphor because when you've seen dawn on various planets or from space, what are you talking about anymore etc.) And because they keep trying and failing to do so it does feel as a reader like you're being inviting to stand somewhere and having the carpet yanked out from under you.
last month i read charles harness’ the ring of ritornel. a ridiculous book, however it does feature an honest-to-god man-2-computer transformation as well as an action scene where a dude repairs his phaser gun by putting a venomous spider on it. i truly feel that i had not grasped the nature of science fiction until i read that scene.
also in the world of “why hasn’t somebody adapted…” i feel like nova is truly fujoshi catnip and in a post–heated rivalry world somebody should be able to get the green light for it
gosh i would love that so much. wounded young men sniping at each other across the interstellar night...the mouse and katin ambling through alien cities playing the syrynx...chip my man you are leaving money on the table. (also this is maybe an obvious fujo pick but denis girl get timmy into left hand of darkness if you can...) (ETA i know "fujo" is probably a loaded term to use in the particular context of LHoD but the longing is so intense...)
of that entire 70s scene delany is the writer i feel like i have most sympathy with though i haven't gone deep on him...the most interesting things in nova for me were the debates between the mouse and katin on what form art should take in the future. (in "time considered as a helix..." there is similar stuff going on with the figure of the singer.) for that reason i think he's a writer especially ripe for adaptation by an intelligent artist, although i don't know how much he would welcome the attention that would come to him thereby.
I feel like any screen adaptation of LHoD is going to be bad because the degree to which Le Guin ultimately presents you with an all-male world that is female occasionally is unavoidable on screen. If you are reading it's not such a problem. All to say you might as well stick Timmy in there.
i would probably agree that any adaptation likely to get made would be bad (especially anything involving timmy lol) but i don’t think the problem is insurmountable. on the one hand, current american cinema is definitely not equipped to deal with a text that transacts gender so complexly; otoh plenty of trans people do live in a world where male and female realities impinge at different times. the book corresponds to a real lived experience and if it’s real it can be represented cinematically, at least that’s the way i think about it.
true… it's almost like the movie of LHoD should already exist as a flawed but interesting product of an earlier time. upon further consideration I'm just having a full body negative reaction to the idea of big sweeping drone shots of snowy landscapes with that "agitated strings… BWAHM" music you always get in trailers these days.
yeah the other variable in this equation is the state of american SF cinema is so so awful across the board…it’s insane that the two kinds of SF films that can get made are big-budget spectacle written like TV and slightly eccentric auteur-branded one-offs…we need more intelligent low-budget filmmakers capable of thinking through futuristic ideas and images! amy seimetz the world needs you!!
The Magic Theatre here in San Francisco looooves to boast about all the Sam Shepard world premieres they've done and now I'm mad that they never talk about premiering a vampire-goes-to-therapy play and that I had to learn about it from your newsletter...
lollllll. I am kind of curious about the play and actually the script for it must be in the archives here, since Charnas and her husband wrote it themselves, but I might not have time to look at it on this trip…
I did a quick Google last night and fortunately it looks like it is still licensed by Broadway Play Publishing—didn't pull the trigger to pay them $15 for a digital download copy but now I know that's an option...
Earth Abides sounds like someone read First & Last Men and tried to make a bad story out of a small part of it.
I have had Stars partially read for a few years now. I liked very little of what I read - the moments you're describing read to me like the author indulging himself performatively, creating strange little ultimately-meaningless bauble pocket situations that in the bigger context seemed ultimately incoherent. Trying to bamboozle the reader into feeling like he must be much smarter than they are. I guess the short way of putting that is jerking off. Or maybe he's just sooOooo smart that little old me just can't understand. I don't know. I'll probably try it again sometime though, maybe I just read it at a bad time and it's actually fantastic.
I think a lot of Delany that I've read is often riding the razor's edge between "this is kind of glib" and "this is profound." I think for me Stars was a book where the characters were stuck trying to articulate significance when the measuring tools or comparisons for what significance could mean did not exist. (Late in the book somebody gets stuck on using "dawn" as a metaphor because when you've seen dawn on various planets or from space, what are you talking about anymore etc.) And because they keep trying and failing to do so it does feel as a reader like you're being inviting to stand somewhere and having the carpet yanked out from under you.
last month i read charles harness’ the ring of ritornel. a ridiculous book, however it does feature an honest-to-god man-2-computer transformation as well as an action scene where a dude repairs his phaser gun by putting a venomous spider on it. i truly feel that i had not grasped the nature of science fiction until i read that scene.
also in the world of “why hasn’t somebody adapted…” i feel like nova is truly fujoshi catnip and in a post–heated rivalry world somebody should be able to get the green light for it
gosh i would love that so much. wounded young men sniping at each other across the interstellar night...the mouse and katin ambling through alien cities playing the syrynx...chip my man you are leaving money on the table. (also this is maybe an obvious fujo pick but denis girl get timmy into left hand of darkness if you can...) (ETA i know "fujo" is probably a loaded term to use in the particular context of LHoD but the longing is so intense...)
of that entire 70s scene delany is the writer i feel like i have most sympathy with though i haven't gone deep on him...the most interesting things in nova for me were the debates between the mouse and katin on what form art should take in the future. (in "time considered as a helix..." there is similar stuff going on with the figure of the singer.) for that reason i think he's a writer especially ripe for adaptation by an intelligent artist, although i don't know how much he would welcome the attention that would come to him thereby.
I feel like any screen adaptation of LHoD is going to be bad because the degree to which Le Guin ultimately presents you with an all-male world that is female occasionally is unavoidable on screen. If you are reading it's not such a problem. All to say you might as well stick Timmy in there.
i would probably agree that any adaptation likely to get made would be bad (especially anything involving timmy lol) but i don’t think the problem is insurmountable. on the one hand, current american cinema is definitely not equipped to deal with a text that transacts gender so complexly; otoh plenty of trans people do live in a world where male and female realities impinge at different times. the book corresponds to a real lived experience and if it’s real it can be represented cinematically, at least that’s the way i think about it.
true… it's almost like the movie of LHoD should already exist as a flawed but interesting product of an earlier time. upon further consideration I'm just having a full body negative reaction to the idea of big sweeping drone shots of snowy landscapes with that "agitated strings… BWAHM" music you always get in trailers these days.
yeah the other variable in this equation is the state of american SF cinema is so so awful across the board…it’s insane that the two kinds of SF films that can get made are big-budget spectacle written like TV and slightly eccentric auteur-branded one-offs…we need more intelligent low-budget filmmakers capable of thinking through futuristic ideas and images! amy seimetz the world needs you!!
i’m adding this to my list