John M Ford (Mike) is Dead

I never managed to actually get my hands on any of his official writings, but got to know him through his posts and comments at Making Light, the sum of which could fill quite a few very funny, very serious books. As Neil Gaiman has said, “…all of [his] great bon mots really did just come tumbling straight out -- they were always replies to something, with never a hint of ‘here's one I prepared earlier’ about them…”

Here are three of my favourites, from the particular body of work that Neil’s talking about:



“Scotty! I need a sonnet in three minutes or we’re all dead!”
“Och, Cap’n, ye canna force the muse. Have ye got a rhyme for ‘silvery Tay’ somewhere on the bridge?”

- John M Ford



Against Entropy

The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days --
Perhaps you will not miss them. That's the joke.
The universe winds down. That's how it's made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you'll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.

- John M Ford



NASA ANNOUNCES PLANS TO EXPLORE LANGDON SPACE
For Immediate Release As Soon As We Find Some Money

As part of its “Mission Earth” program to do things that might, you know, be comprehensible to the average American (see “Manned Mars Program to Incorporate ‘Survivor’ Elements” above), the agency today announced its “Mission to Langdon Space,” in which teams of EVA-suited scientists would be “inserted” into multiply-connected Occupational Use Terrains (MachOUT universes) with the intention of discovering who is, in physical-science terms, getting any, with whom, and in what combinations.

The first question that came to reporter’s minds should be obvious. The second question was, “What if everybody just, like, fibs?” Mission Specialist Victor von Kinsey (winner of this year’s Nash Trophy for Interesting Paramathematical Behavior) replied, “We naturally expect respondents to fall back on constructions such as ‘It depends on what you mean by “whoopee” and ‘Nudge nudge say no more.’ The purpose of this project is to collect interesting data from which results suitable for premium-cable distribution can be redacted. Everything else is error bars.”

Asked what the practical application of this effort might be, Dr. Kinsey said, “Global warming,” and ran off singing “Du, du, bist eine kleine Teekanne.”

- John M Ford


(These I took from Making Light, without asking - apologies: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/ )

RIP dear man, although I think you’ll be too busy entertaining the astrals for any resting. We have lots of your words to keep us company, and we’ll treasure them.

Neil said...

“All my life, I've felt that I was getting away with something because I was just making things up and writing them down, and that one day there would be a knock, and a man with a clipboard would be standing there and say, ‘It says here you've just been making things up all these years. Now it's time to go off and work in a bank.’”

–Neil Gaiman

A really good movie...

...is one of the highest forms of art, for me.

The Sea Inside – just saw this on DVD. Awesome movie. I cried, and I don’t usually.

Beowulf - I read something about “The new Angelina Jolie movie” yesterday. As though a movie is nothing but a celebrity limo. The fact that Neil Gaiman has been working on this project for ages now is not newsworthy enough I guess. Anyhow, the “new Angelina Jolie movie” is actually a long standing project called Beowulf, and is based on the Anglo Saxon epic poem of the same name. Hero Beowulf fights evil Grendel “descendant of Cain”, and Grendel’s mother, and dragons and things: “...Thus these warriors lived in joy, blessed, until one began to do evil deeds, a hellish enemy. The grim spirit was called Grendel, known as a rover of the borders, one who held the moors, fen and fastness...” It should be a dark and thunderous adventure and I’m looking forward to it.
They are also going to do a movie of Neil’s astonishing novel, Stardust. You should rush out now and get a copy of this book, it’s not like anything you’ve read before and yet you will recognise it all. He is doing the screenplay himself, so it will translate into celluloid beautifully I think.


Rant…

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe -

Don’t read this rant if you don’t know the books and you want to go see the movie and enjoy it for what it’s worth.

I was afraid to go and see this movie. I lived in these stories as a kid, wore them like coats, and tried often to go through my own wardrobe. They were my best friends and gave me courage.
Maybe it had something to do with the 20 minutes worth of ads I had to watch beforehand (Hey! I am paying for this ticket and this stale popcorn and this flat cola and these buzzing speakers! You should be paying ME to watch these ads!), but I was right to be afraid. While the movie looks nice enough on the surface, some of the CG animals, like the fox and the wolves, (and yes, even the lion that they’ve been bragging about so much) fall seriously short. You just can’t really believe in them. And surely there’s a better way to make animals talk? Like maybe let them think aloud or something? Busting guts and harddrive space to make them photo-real and then giving them human mouth movements and facial expressions is just silly. It’s not bending the truth, it’s breaking it clean in two. The faun/satyr/phoenix/mermaid thing works well with CG because you’re not trying to fool yourself about them being real to start with.
With Jadis, I got the feeling that they were onto something, but then they got lazy. She’s cruel and cold and selfish, sure, but not enough. The mere sight of her should stab your heart with a steely icicle, you should tremble at the very thought of her. This does not happen in the movie and her sleigh makes far too much noise. She should be snake-like. She isn’t.
Peter is smarmy. Susan is an afterthought. Aslan… what can I say. You don’t actually end up understanding what all the fuss is about, they don’t explain: What’s so special about this Narnia place anyway? Why is this lion so beloved? Why are they all so keen on fighting this battle? So what if he dies? At one point, he’s supposed to be about to roar a roar that will shake the foundations of Narnia and fundamentally alter all who hear it, it must put courage in some hearts and fear in others. Cover your ears, he says. He roars. Rrooaarr. So?
And then, they’ve censored it silly. Come now. Not one drop of blood. I had to censor it myself when I read it to my kids when they were very small, and they went on to read it for themselves a little later, in full. But telling it this sweetly to a generation of wiseass kids who are playing Doom and Quake and even Vice City (yes, they are. 10 year old kids are playing this. If you’re a parent and you don’t know this then you need to catch a wake up), and who have unrestricted access to adult material of all kinds via their cellphones… that’s just stupid. Does Disney think it’s going to undo decades of gratuity now, by telling only half of a really good story? Now that Disney owns Narnia… oh god. I have a headache.

Well anyway. Lucy and Mr Tumnus are great in the movie. But then, they are not complex characters. So this ends up being just another kids holiday movie, unexceptional. Which is nothing short of a travesty. I wonder how it will go with the rest of the Narnia stories, should they decide to go on with it? There is enough material for another ten years worth of spin-off figurines.