Literateur: Short Attention Span Reviews

I read a lot. Here's some bite-sized takes on some stuff I recently read for some reason.

The Frankenstein Papers by Fred Saberhagen

Saberhagen wrote a fun Dracula secret history book- reviewed HERE- so I had high hopes for this Frankenstein secret history book. But this is a misfire. Dracula works as a storyteller because he's charismatic and compelling. Frankenstein's monster is just not that interesting. This is more a sequel to Frankenstein than an alternate perspective. Highlight: the creature travels to the United States to meet with Ben Franklin and discuss electricity and stuff. That was a neat idea, but Frankenstein Unbound did a lot more neat things with this secret-life-of-Frankenstein concept a decade earlier.

Clownfellas: Tales of the Bozo Crime Family by Carlton Mellick III

One of the most amazing, creative, and funny books I've ever read. This is a very well-written, fast-paced, entertaining organized crime epic that just happens to be about clowns. There are explosive pies, cotton candy cigarettes, homicidal jugglers on unicycles, and guns with bullets that explode into giant pieces of popcorn on impact. And that's just a few of the things you'll find in the first story. And there are six stories in here. All interconnected and building on each other nicely. I was totally blindsided by this book, just shocked senseless at its quality and imagination level. And now I'm over-hyping it to you. Okay. Calm down. Don't get too excited. Temper your expectations, so you can read it and be totally blown away, too!

Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien

Re-reading it. Just noticed that right near the start, Gandalf tells Frodo "Oh crap! The word is out that one of you Hobbits has this ring! The forces of darkness are closing in on you to get it back!" And then he walks away and Frodo just chills for a few years. Because the only way to deal with this clear and present danger is to relax for a few years.

Reel Terror by Various Authors

I've had this book on my bookshelf forever. Us book people all have books like that. Books that lurk in the darkness that we never quite get around to. Glad I finally got around to it! It's a cool collection of short stories, many lesser-known, that were adapted into famous films. The basis for the films Total Recall, Freaks, Duel, The Golem, The Fly, you name it- they're all in here.

The Big Short by Michael Lewis

This is one of the most insane and frightening books ever written, full of dark humor and sad-but-true observations about human greed and ignorance. It explains the ridiculous things people were doing behind the scenes that led up to the 2008 financial meltdown. I had to re-read parts of this book multiple times because I couldn't believe it was actually saying what it was saying. But yep. It's saying what it's saying. People are nuts. Humans are doomed.

Takeaways: 
-Sometimes the person closest to a situation is the least reliable; they think they know everything about it, so they miss problems that are obvious to a casual observer. 
-Most financial transactions are zero-sum; someone is winning and losing and even if you win, there's usually a catch.
-Know that in the world of finance, you're gonna get screwed. Just figure out how and why they're gonna screw you and use that to decide if a transaction is still worth it.

Bethany's Sin by Robert R. McCammon

McCammon is a first-class writer. I mostly love him for his sprawling 1987 pre-, mid-, and post-nuclear holocaust supernatural epic, Swan Song. But his more mainstream thrillers, mysteries, and short stories are also awesome.

But he wasn't always a first-class writer. He openly admits that his first four books aren't very good- Bethany's Sin is his second- and he made the choice to let them go out of print because he didn't want inferior work tarnishing his name. Well- this ain't bad, for a disavowed early-career novel! Ancient savage Amazon women possess the ladies in a small Pennsylvania town and they attack all the menfolk. Rich with detail, cool enough story and thrills, and yeah- it's badly written. Pacing is off, things don't really come to life until halfway through, and the characters aren't very well-drawn. McCammon was learning to write in public with this one, but it's a fun read nonetheless.

I'd say the same thing for McCammon's likewise-disavowed early novel, the 1980 Night Boat. Voodoo Nazi zombies in a submarine taking over a tropical paradise? Nothing wrong with that.

Fundamental Accounting Principles by John Wild

This is the textbook for the accounting class I'm taking. It's a stunning work of art. I'm not surprised the author's name is "Wild" because he seems like a pretty WILD guy!!!

The Merciless by Danielle Vega

Easy summary: Mean Girls meets The Exorcist. A group of popular girls kidnap the local weirdo Goth girl and torture her and attempt to perform an exorcism to "get the demon out of her." But who is truly evil here? There are a couple plot twists late in the game that are unlikely to surprise anyone. I'd be surprised if they surprised you. Oddly- this has the sloppy writing and ridiculous characterizations of most YA supernatural lit, but it's loaded with cuss words and graphic violence. This book has no idea what it's doing.

The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson

This is pre-Lovecraft horror here. 1908. And gotta say- I like it more than most of Lovecraft's output. Pros: cool phantasmagoric imagery, neat pig-monsters, lucid writing, thick atmosphere, and- most unlike Lovecraft- a proactive protagonist who blasts the swine creatures with a shotgun rather than cowering in fear. Cons: weak story, weak characterization, and the found-book structure is unnecessary. Overall- a worthwhile horror classic.

Survivor by J.F. Gonzalez

The most disgusting and depressing thing I've ever read. And I have a rich history of reading disgusting and depressing things. It's about snuff movies. It's pretty badly-written, too. Clunky dialogue and repetitive descriptions.

Witch World by Andre Norton

A dude gets whisked away to the Witch World and finds himself caught between two warring tribes and he favors the noble savage one over the authoritarian one. Norton's books are starting to blur together for me. There's always a fish out of water getting involved in tribal warfare in the jungle on an exotic alien planet. Why do all Norton's alien planets have jungles and why do all Norton's aliens look like humans? The witch's magic is treated more like science and it's powered by their virginity. So I guess this is a pro-abstinence story? There are five gazillion sequels to this book. I think I'll pass. She's done some truly great books, but I'm probably gonna take a break from Norton for a while.

Fireworks by James A. Moore

This tale of alien invasion zeroes in on the part where the government arrives and takes control of the spaceship's crash site. The fact that an alien spacecraft lands becomes irrelevant pretty quickly, as the enemy becomes the townspeople turning on each other and the military getting reactionary and cracking down. But it's not didactic. It's very believable and for the most part, people respond to things the way you or I would respond to things.

Fast Breaks by Phony McFakename

An interesting, energetic, and flawed first work by an unknown author who I'm pretty sure is writing under a pseudonym. Full of jarring tonal shifts and spanning a variety of genres- horror, humor, fantasy, bizarro, literary fiction. Some of the jokes hit, some miss. It's okay, I guess. BUY IT NOW.

Tales of Known Space by Larry Niven

There's some winners and losers in these hard-SF tales. Props to Niven for building a complete and coherent cosmos, as mankind makes his first tentative moves into space and ends with massive evolution and everyday space travel 10,000 years later. Hate to get all SJW on this book, but Larry Niven has some troublesome views on women and sexual assault that may have been acceptable in the 70's, but come off as really poisonous now. He's very cavalier on those topics in "Cloak of Anarchy" and the ideas he expresses about women are downright despicable in Ringworld, to the point that they took me out of that book. This collection is fun overall, but anyone who thinks science fiction is/was a boy's club will not find anything to contradict them here.

Doctor Who Short Trips: Destination Prague by Various Writers

This is a collection of Doctor Who stories set in Prague. I love Doctor Who and I love Prague, so this could not possibly have been more my jam. They could have phoned this book in with no-name authors, but NOPE. One of my favorite horror writers, Brian Keene, has a story in here. James Moore's in here, too. He wrote Fireworks, a book that I reviewed a few paragraphs ago.

-Phony McFakename

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Legal disclaimer: Me am on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and even Pinterest if that's your thing. And me books am on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

Cinemasterworks: "The Big Short" and My First Mortgage

The Big Short is a fantastic book and Adam McKay made a fantastic movie adaptation of it.

The basic premise: a few clever guys figured out that the mortgage securities market was due for a collapse so they bet millions against it and ended up making billions.

The movie does a great job explaining complex topics in a simple, accessible way. "Synthetic CDOs" were particularly well-explained as "betting on people making bets in a blackjack game in a casino."

I read the book this movie was based on and "synthetic CDOs" were the most horrifying, incomprehensible thing in the book. I had to re-read the section on it three times and even then, was like "THIS CAN'T BE RIGHT?!?" But nope- it really happened. They were real. Movie confirms it.

The whole thing is incredibly disturbing. Even more sad when you think about how the financial market has kept on going over the last few years. Nothing's changed. Market players are as crooked and awful as ever. 

Why? Because nobody was ever punished.

This movie was compared to Wolf of Wall Street, but the difference is that the sleazebag in that story actually got punished. He did time and he still has fines to pay. (UPDATE: a bank involved in these shenanigans actually was fined a few days ago. It's still nothing compared to the amount they were raking in, plus there have STILL been no individual prosecutions.)

The Big Short is particularly trenchant because its story involves a LOT of good everyday people losing their homes and getting their credit and financial lives ruined not because they were stupid or greedy, but just because they were naive and trusted that banks wouldn't lend them money unless they believed they could pay them back. 

But as this movie explains- there was a total disconnect between risk and responsibility there. The lenders had zero incentive to make sure they would be paid back, since they just passed the loans on to other banks before the ink on the mortgage paperwork was dry.

And this is where I break the fourth wall and tell you that I was part of this story.

I got my first home loan thanks to this financial madness. In 2004, my wife and I were making near-minimum wage. I was a movie theater assistant manager making about $6 an hour. She was a retail worker making about $7 an hour. Both of our retail jobs were part-time and we had no additional income sources.

Did we sound like a good bet for a 30-year mortgage?

Countrywide sure thought so!

Countrywide was the worst offender for signing poor people up for ballooning-rate mortgages that could never be paid back. My mortgage was one of millions that was bundled together with other high-risk mortgages and sold as a mortgage bond. (And then possibly converted to a CDO, and then possibly a synthetic CDO on top of that...)

And thanks to these idiotic crooks, we got approved for a home loan that was like five times our yearly income. 

Countrywide was one of the first places to implode when the housing market disintegrated. We ended up writing our monthly checks to a half-dozen other banks and mortgage companies amidst this chaos as our mortgage was thrown around like a hot potato.

But here's the thing: despite our limited finances, we never defaulted. We never even missed a payment. Because we were fiscally responsible. We didn't make a lot, but we had no student loans, credit card debt, or car payments. So- not that it mattered to our lenders- we were actually a good risk. 

We got our second loan for our second house through Countrywide, too. Again- it was for more than we had any business borrowing. And again- they didn't care. And we could handle it.

But an average person with our economic credentials really really really shouldn't have been borrowing that much. It was surreal.

Now it wasn't all just evil banks being evil. There were people that refinanced their mortgages and took out money against the value of their home. It wouldn't be unfair to call those choices greedy and/or stupid. (I did the opposite- I've refinanced my home three times, but used my savings to PAY DOWN the mortgage balance and get a better rate each time. I've ultimately reduced my monthly payments by $400. I'm the only person I know who has done this. I recommend it.)

Thankfully, I wasn't one of the people who suffered as a result of the events in The Big Short. But I came darned close. 

Almost no one who suffered because of the collapse didn't deserve to suffer. And almost all of the people at the top who actually deserved to suffer didn't suffer at all.

If you don't laugh, you'll cry.

-Phony McFakename

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Legal disclaimer: Me am on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and even Pinterest if that's your thing. And me books am on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

The Best Words: January 2016

As a public service once a month, I share a few of my favorite things. In quote form. If you also want to see what I think was funny on Twitter, here's the link. And here us goes!

“From the first moment I laid eyes on you, I have always, always loved...your money.”

-House on Haunted Hill

  

"They're starving to death. They're dying of disease to death."

-The West Wing

“I keep thinking about our great dueling Jesus pictures, The Last Temptation of Christ and The Passion of The Christ. Both look to the suffering of Jesus for meaning, but the two films approach that suffering from totally different ways. For Scorsese the suffering of Christ wasn't being nailed to the cross (although that did suck for him), it was being shown the life he could have if he just gave up the mantle of Messiah. The suffering of Willem DaFoe's Christ is an emotional one, and it's a suffering that makes Christ all the more human, as we can truly relate to the idea of giving up our dreams for something bigger or more important. We've all known what it's like to put duty before happiness. In The Passion of the Christ Jim Caviezel's Christly suffering is almost purely physical; while I can get that on a gut level (just as I can recoil at all slasher and splatter pictures) I can't truly relate to being relentlessly flogged. Emotional torture I get. Physical torture is distant.”

-Devin Faraci

“Off to the movies we will go

Where we learn everything that we know

Because the movies teach us

What our parents don’t have time to say!”

-South Park

“Two hundred years ago, we had great-great-greats who lived in the dark, without much in the way of healthcare, commerce or opportunity.

“Today, we complain that the MRI was chilly, or that the wifi on the transatlantic plane wasn't fast enough or that there's nothing new going on at the mall.

“It's human nature to recalibrate. But maybe it's worth fighting that off, for an hour or even a day.

“The world around us is uneven, unfair and yes, absolutely, over-the-top amazing.

“Boring is an attitude, not the truth.”

-Seth Godin

“Double dumbass on you!”

-Star Trek IV

“He had an almost freakish ability to identify shadowy motives. If you had just donated $20 million to your alma mater, say, and were feeling the glow of selfless devotion to a cause greater than yourself, Lippman would be the first to ask, ‘So you gave twenty mission because that’s the minimum to get your name on a building, right?’”

“In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $724,000.”

“Charlie and Jamie had always sort of assumed that there was some grown-up in charge of the financial system whom they had never met; now, they saw there was not.”

“The CDO was, in effect, a credit laundering service for the residents of Lower Middle Class America. For Wall Street it was a machine that turned lead into gold.”

“That was the problem with money: What people did with it had consequences, but they were so remote from the original action that the mind never connected the one with the other.”

Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

“I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn’t read.”

-Neil Gaiman

”You always have to bring that up, don’t you?”

“You put dynamite in the oven, Wayne.”

“Gotta hide a gift where nobody’ll look for it.”

Brandon Sanderson, Shadows of Self

"It's almost impossible to persuade someone that he's wrong. Almost impossible to make your argument louder and sharper and have the other person say, 'I was wrong and I will change my mind.' Far more effective: Help someone make a new decision, based on new alternatives and a new story."

-Seth Godin

“Dreams are a dime a dozen...it’s their execution that counts.”

-Theodore Roosevelt

“Success is 99 percent failure.”

-Soichiro Honda

“If you lend money, you make a secret enemy; if you refuse, an open one.”

-Voltaire

“[I would say] ‘Hang, on. Explain to me, what is a dysfunctional family?’ And people would explain, and after a while, I realized that what Americans called a ‘dysfunctional family’ is what we in England call ‘a family,’ having never encountered any of these functional ones.”

-Neil Gaiman

“Nothing changes on New Year’s Day.”

-U2

-Phony McFakename

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Legal disclaimer: Me am on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and even Pinterest if that's your thing. And me books am on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

Cinemasterworks: George Lucas Hates You

(Full Disclosure: I loved the original Star Wars films as a kid. I can be objective and see their flaws now as an adult, but they still have a place in my heart.)

Okay, most of us liked The Force Awakens. We saw it, we were like "Cool," and we got on with our lives.

But not so fast!

We are currently experiencing the backlash and it's a tidal wave. Everyone's pissing all over Force Awakens now. Honeymoon's over.

I saw this coming. Everyone was TOO excited about this movie. Everyone set their expectations TOO high. Everyone seemed to forget that we've been smacked with THREE nearly-unwatchable Star Wars films in a row.

Disaster was imminent. People were setting themselves up for the biggest letdown in history that they were gonna kvetch about endlessly on Facebook.

But then the movie came out. And it seemed I was wrong.

Everyone was being positive about it. The warmth and nostalgia were palpable in the air. Almost no one spoiled the ending online. The Internet- a toxic place full of complaints and nitpicks about everything- somehow seemed to be giving this movie a pass. It was surreal.

I saw it a week after it came out- to avoid the crowds- and had fun with it. Enjoyed it the same way I enjoyed the last few Fast and/or Furious movies. It was brain candy, transparently giving the audience what it wanted. And that was fine. 

I stand behind this opinion. Credits rolled, I was smiling, and I was content never to see it again.

But I've noticed that some of my friends who really liked it at first seem to be hating it the most now. And almost every new negative online analysis has a tone of wounded betrayal. People are seriously angry at this movie for manipulating them and tricking them into thinking it was good. Of all the things to be angry about in this world, they're raging against a movie that just tried to entertain them and make them happy for a couple hours.

And here's an interesting historical fact for you- Phantom Menace was actually pretty positively received before the backlash hit and it became violently hated.

Force Awakens seems to be going the same way.

Force Awakens is a flawed film. But oddly, it's flawed in the same way as the original Star Wars. Both films have the same generic Hero's Journey plot. Both have the same basic characters. Both have the same story beats. Both are big dumb effects-driven blockbusters. Both tap into primal mythology. And both are engineered to manipulate fans.

And that brings me to the difference between A New Hope and Force Awakens.

The difference is that J.J. Abrams doesn't hate the material. He loves it. He wants you to enjoy the ride. George Lucas did not feel the same way about the Star Wars films he made. Messed up as it is, Abrams cares more about Star Wars than the man who invented it.

This may sound inflammatory- especially in light of his recent interview where he sounded fiercely protective about his creation- but George Lucas has been overtly and covertly expressing his contempt for the galaxy-far-far-away saga right from the start.

And I'm not even talking about his endless second-guessing or digital tweaking of the original trilogy. And I'm not talking about the legacy-tarnishing impact of his prequels. I'm talking about his attitude toward the films right from the start.

Reliable sources who knew Lucas back in the day said he made Star Wars sarcastically. According to the book Harlan Ellison's Watching, Ellison heard Lucas admit in 1977 that he was deliberately making a dumb film. Lucas'  primary goal with Star Wars was to prove how easy it is to manipulate audiences.

And he was right! We were manipulated! Still are! The movie resonates, despite its flaws. It works on a deep mythological level, because Lucas understands mythology.

But make no mistake- Lucas made Star Wars with contempt for his audience. Even after the success of American Graffiti, he was still bitter that his most personal film- the hard-hitting THX-1138- was unsuccessful.

He never got over this, either. Lucas did an interview in 2005 where he made his feelings on the Star Wars saga pretty transparent. He felt trapped by it. He says what he really wanted to make were experimental films like THX-1138 and was angry that no one was interested in them.

(Since Lucas finished Revenge of the Sith over a decade ago, it would be tempting to do a Stewie-style taunt and ask how his new experimental films are coming along, but that would be mean. So let's not.)

But let's be honest in our assessment of Lucas' work. He did a pretty solid job with a very limited budget and limited control on the first Star Wars and he wisely stepped back and let other people take  more creative control on his next two films.

And when Lucas was given unlimited money and unlimited creative control, he made...Phantom Menace. That tells you everything you need to know about the man. He had nothing to prove and he didn't care about giving the audience what they wanted there...and he dropped a turd on us.

People are still puzzling and experiencing cognitive dissonance over that film. But it makes perfect sense- Lucas assumed that since Star Wars was dumb, all of its fans must be dumb, so he made a super-dumb film. He just miscalculated how dumb the fans truly were.

The emperor has no clothes.

No matter how much you love Star Wars, Lucas simply doesn't feel the same way. He sees it as an economic asset that purchased him an amazing life. He's grateful for what it's done for him- and he understands that it's his legacy- but he doesn't respect it at all.

So if/when you trash-talk Force Awakens, be aware that you're hating on a movie made by people that care about you and care about Star Wars more than George Lucas ever cared about you or any of his Star Wars films.

-Phony McFakename

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Legal disclaimer: Me am on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and even Pinterest if that's your thing. And me books am on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.