Category: Inspiration/Musings
Gabbler Recommends: Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes
Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes: A No-Bullshit Guide to World Mythology by Cory O’Brien
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
One of the most hilarious things I have ever read.
Fact: Cory O’Brien is B.L.A.’s spirit animal. I’m sure of it.
O’Brien is arguably helpful to the ancient myths, giving modern context to things I hadn’t paid attention to before…maybe because my mind is not as fundamentally dirty as his (where he actually “gets” myth, I tend to romanticize it — but such is the curse of a lit major).
Gabbler Recommends: The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec
This movie, based off a French comic, is kind of like a cross between The Mummy and Amélie. It is silly and fun and quite a good time — where mummies can speak French (of course they can, if they live in France long enough) and dinosaurs come back to life.
She’s kind of the female Indiana Jones, but in a French, comic-book way.
Gabbler Recommends: Saga Vol. 2
So, our favorite part of Saga Vol. 2 was the part where Alana tries to get her so-called “Work Friend” to read a novel so that they can both talk about it. Alana tries to sell the novel as: “They mostly just hang out and play board games, except sometimes they leave their apartment to eat…” As seen in exhibit A:
After work-friend’s resting bitch-face, this happened:
“I don’t know Alana. Sounds a little…boring.”
“It is! That’s kind of the point, I think!”
We need more novels that are a little boring. A little boring with a point.
Ugh, and please don’t comment on the crappy phone pics of the pages. They’re just there to give you a general idea. Don’t get your panties in a wad. We’re writers, not photographers. Geez.
See also: Chekov and the setting of simplicity.
Lev Grossman, on how sometimes you can fill in someone else’s blanks.
“Today’s fantasy writers feel as though the fictional worlds they create have to be full-scale working models. People talk a lot about the ecology of [George R. R. Martin’s] Westeros, for instance—how do the seasons work? What are the climate patterns? How does it function as an ecosphere? You have to think about the economy, too—have I got a working feudal model? It’s gotten so extreme that when characters do magic, it’s very common to see fantasy writers talk about thermodynamics—okay, he’s lighting a candle with magic, can he draw the heat from somewhere else in the room so that equilibrium gets preserved?Â
This is the school of thought that extends from Tolkien, and his scrupulously-crafted Middle Earth. Lewis was of a different school from that. Magic, to him, was a much wilder, stranger thing. It was much less domesticated. And when I re-read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, I feel as though we’ve wandered too far from the true magic, the kind Lewis wrote. Maybe we want to worry less about thermodynamics and work harder to get that sense of wonder he achieves with such apparent effortlessness.”
Read the rest at The Atlantic.
[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name – singular) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, goodreads, and Vulcan’s shit list.]
