Roger Zelazny Drinking Game Update

Per the suggestion of Chris Kovacs, I have added an automobile element to the Roger Zelazny Drinking Game.

Lily and the Lord

Lily's been very good lately. I don't know if she's been "scared straight" by the promise of Santa, but she's been consistently well behaved all week.

She got a hidden picture calender along with her most recent issue of Highlights and we were on the floor on our tummies looking for combs and paintbrushes hidden in pictures of skiing dogs. After a while, we started singing our questions to each other.

Lily: *singing* "Do you see the crown anywhere?"
Me: *singing* I think it's upside down in the mountain!
Lily: *singing* You do this very well, daddy!

As an aside, Lily's grammar is exceptionally good for her age. That's to be expected, as both of her parents are grammar genies, (I split an infinitive at the dinner table last night and Jen stabbed me in the face with a fork) but I am surprised to the extent to which she's taken it. She uses adverbs better than some adults I know.

The other night she was agitating for more dessert and said, "My tummy hurts really badly because it's so empty", and I raised my eyebrows and said "That's a well constructed sentence, but I think you just want another cookie."

We had a little daddy/daughter day last night. We met my friend the Lord at his job, did a little shopping and then went for dinner.

I mentioned shortly after she was born that the day before she was born I couldn't imagine what she would look like and the day after, I couldn't imagine her any other way. It's just funny, the rituals that arise and take on their own life. We were at a thrift shop back when we were down in Florida and Jen was shopping and Lily and I were mostly killing time. We passed by a mirror and I said, "Look at those people over in the other room!" and now whenever we pass a mirror in a store, we talk about "Mirror-daddy" and "Mirror-Lily". Mirror Lily has very bad manners. She's always blowing raspberries at us. Lily can't let such an insult slide, so she blows them right back at her! She knows how a mirror functions, but it never fails to amuse her.

We went into Target and walked around for a bit. Lily wanted to buy Jen the most gaudy purple lipstick imaginable. (She's getting into makeup, which doesn't thrill me.) Lily was really well-behaved. She had previously expressed interest in karate, and I mentioned that the Lord used to teach it to kids. (Actually Tae Kwon Do, but no point in confusing her with the distinction.) She wanted to take classes him RIGHT THERE! but he had to explain that he doesn't teach the classes any more.

I would not be opposed to martial arts classes. Obviously we don't want to enroll her with the Kobra Kai ("Sweep the leg, Lily"), but I do think it's a good activity for kids. I'm actually rather somewhat more partial to it for a girl than I would be a boy.

When  we were in Target, we saw some nutcrackers and Lily gasped and said "Do they really work?!" and I was like "Well, I'm sure if we put a walnut in it and activated the mechanism, it would crack the nut, but it's not going to come to life and dance, if that's what you mean."

"Oh."

After that it was off the Key City Diner. I had previously mentioned that Mister Dave might meet us, and Lily was getting a little worried, "Why isn't Mister Dave here? Did his car break down?" I was also impressed by her kindness. I had bought her a lollipop at Target and she decided to leave it in a car, "There might be kids in the restaurant, and they would get jealous and feel sad if I had a lollipop and they didn't." Also, when we were driving Jeremy home, she said "Daddy, I want to tell you a secret." Jeremy dutifully covered his ears, and she said, "I forgot your friend's name and I don't want him to be sad about it. Can you remind me?" So I did and we were all happy.

Lily and I split the appetizer sampler and it was really good. The Lord also showed her how to make home made lemonade by mashing down the lemon wedges and adding the sugar that was on the table for the coffee and she quite enjoyed that experiment too.

It was one of those rare outings where everyone wins. Lily and Jeremy and I had a pretty good time and Jen got some time to herself and caught up on her Glee. With any luck, we can make this a regular feature of our week.

The Roger Zelazny Drinking Game

Note: The Updated Version of the game is found on this page..

Let me open with the disclaimer that I have nothing but respect and affection for Roger Zelazny, both for the writer and the man.  He is my very favorite author, by a considerable margin, and by every account I've ever heard, a profoundly decent human being.

That said, he does have elements that tend to recur in his work with certain regularity, and as I've been reading a great deal of his fiction very closely and in rapid succession, I'm more aware of these elements than I otherwise would be. And once you see the old woman hidden in the curves of the young girl's necklace, you never unsee her.

So here is an affectionate look as what I perceive to be the recurring themes in Zelazny's work. Since this is the Internet, I'll present the list as a drinking game.

Every time you encounter an item on the following list, take a drink (or eat some m&ms or do whatever you do to play your particular version of the game)

• The Zelazny archetype - Take a drink for each of the traits the protagonist has:
• Long lived/immortal(includes the serial immortality of Lord of Light)
• super strong
• "laid-back.."
•  "...easy-going..."
•  "...wise-cracking..."
•  "...homicidal"
• If the story is written in an unusual format - Doorways in the Sand's cliffhanger-to-flashback format at the beginning of each chapter, the play/free verse/present tense narration of Creatures of Light and Darkness, Roadmarks' chapter structure, that kind of thing.
  
• For every dig at government inefficiency/bureaucracy
• Prose as poetry - Whenever you read a passage so lyrical that you feel compelled to put down the book for a moment to reflect on it.
• Free verse poetry - Like Corwin's hellrides or Thoth's account of The Thing that Cried in the night in Creatures of Light and Darkness.
• Use of Real-World Mythology - If you're reading about a drinking game on a blog dedicated to the works of Roger Zelazny, I trust that this needs no explanation.
  
• Use of First person narrative - Ditto
• Any time you discover a pun
• Two drinks if it's terrible
• Finish off the bottle if it's "Then the fit hit the Shan", just because.
• Each time you encounter a character with green eyes - see below
• If the plot involves a missing father figure
• If our protagonist has female robot sidekick - (Maxine, Flowers or Jenny)
  
• Any time a character smokes or talks about smoking
• Description of techniques or use of specialized terms from martial arts or fencing ("I parried in quarte and riposted.) ("I studied judo. There are three schools of it, you  know: there is the Kodokon, or the pure Japanese style,  and there are the Budo Kwai and the French Federation  systems...")
  
• "Hey, I can see Roger's house from here!" - Take a drink every time the story moves to or takes place in New Mexico 
• Use of the word "arroyo"
• For use of phrases in foreign languages
• Two drinks if it's in French
• Three drinks if you feel compelled to stop reading in order to look up the reference
• Finish the bottle and toast the author if the reference leads you to discover something incredibly cool which was previously unknown to you

Green Eyes: Green eyes are pretty rare, but you'd never know that from reading Roger Zelazny.

Just off the top of my head, we have:

Corwin, his siblings Fiona, Llewella, Gérard and Brand, his father Oberon, his "grandmother" (depending on how literal Dworkin was being with that claim) the unicorn  in the Amber books, Carol Deith and Don Walsh from the Legion collection, Heidel von Hymack, ("the green-eyed saint from the stars") from To Die in Italbar, Evene from Jack of Shadows, Dennis and Lydia Guise from Bridge of Ashes, Sanza from The Keys to December, Arlata from The Changing Land, Eleanor in This Moment of the Storm, both Red Dorakeen and Leila from Roadmarks, Mara and Maia (and probably more I'm forgetting)  from Lord of Light, and Morgana from The Last Defender of Camelot.

Things I left out of this list. Suicide is the biggy. Sure, it shows up in He Who Shapes and a A Rose for Eccelsiates, but it's not as pervasive as the other elements. I never saw the obsession with cars other critics have mentioned. Sure, he wrote Auto-de-fé and Jenny and Murdock and there were elements of this in The Dream Master, certainly, but it seems something influenced by the then-recent car accidents in his early life and grew less prevalent as he grew older.

Some quick googling seems to suggest that I'm the first person to put together a Roger Zelazny drinking game. That can't be right, can it? If it is, then I feel kind of happy to have contributed in this way.

Roger Zelazny Book Review: The Changing Land

I liked the original collection of Dilvish stories, but I figured that's all I was going to see of him. It wasn't my favorite of Zelazny's worlds, but I didn't hate it like I did  Lord Demon or  A Farce to be Reckoned With. I gave it a B- on the page with all my rankings.

I've mentioned in the past that I would buy Zelazny books without even reading the cover, on the strength of his name alone. Consequently, when I started the Changing Land, I didn't know I was reading the follow up to the Dilvish anthology until I was underway.

In my earlier review, I had likened Dilvish to the pulp sword & sorcery characters. I had a vague recollection of there being some cross-pollination between Robert E. Howard's work and H.P. Lovecraft's Mythos stories. I checked with my friend Tim, who is something of an authority on Robert E. Howard and he got back to me with this helpful link and the information that Howard's non-Conan stuff has way more Cthulhu/Mythos-related stuff.  So that's cool.

I bring this up because but the plot centers around Tualua, ("...one of the Old Ones—the ancient, tentacled kin of the Elder Gods...") who is an expy of  Cthulhu (he's identified as Cthulhu in the A Cthulhu Mythos Bibliography & Concordance, which was written by a guy from my wife's church. No lie.) (They're Unitarians, so they worship Cthulhu already) I would assume the slight change is not due to copyright issues but just because the name Cthulhu is so overused that it's distracting.

The story seems to take place not all that long after the last of the short stories in the previous collection. Jelerak is still weak from his earlier confrontation.  The Society (they used to be called the Brotherhood, but the Circle of Sorceresses, Enchantresses, and Wizardresses raised a fuss, and finally got it changed) believes that Jelerak might flee to Castle Timeless, so they have stationed wardens to dissuade visitors from intruding. The warden speaks to those who arrive on the day the story begins and we discover that Arlata of Marinta, Weleand of Murcave and Dilvish all seek to enter Castle Timeless, each for his or her own reason. I though this was a cool way to get a lot of information in a hurry. (It certainly worked better than the infodump about each of the psychics in Eye of Cat.)

It had a nice supporting cast. Semirama was an interesting character. Arlata was neat too, and so was Baran of the Extra Hand. I liked most of minor characters, with the exception of the bunch of sorcerers chained up in the dungeon. They were boring and I found myself skimming their interludes.

Arlata is an elf maiden. It's worth noting that the elves in the Dilvish series are mostly human in appearance, i.e. they don't have pointy ears. (Though, if I recall  Tolkien's elves, the progenitor of the archetype, are described as having leaf-shaped ears only once, and that's ambiguous enough to be open to interpretation.) Arlata is a dead ringer for her grandmother—Fevera of Mirata, whom Dilvish loved. Dilvish, we learn resembles his illustrious forebear Selar very strongly. Semirama, the queen resurrected by Jelerak in order to speak with Tualua, once loved Selar. I don't think this is all that realistic, (whatever that means in this context), but it's a trope of the pulp genre, so I'll go with it.

We get some memorable passages.

Melbriniononsadsazzersteldregandishfeltselior had seldom been exploited by terrestrial adepts, inasmuch as the use of a demon's name was necessary in those rites binding him to servitude. One missed syllable and the conjurer would step from the circle smiling, to discover that the demon was smiling also.

Then, leaving the remains artistically disposed about the conjuring area, the demon would return to the infernal regions, perhaps bearing with him some small souvenir of an amusing interlude.

It was Melbriniononsadsazzersteldregandishfeltselior's misfortune, however, that Baran of the Extra Hand hailed from Blackwold, where a complex, agglutinative language was spoken.

Could anyone in the world but Roger Zelazny have written that?

A sorcerer named Holrun examines the spell blocking the transport mirror:

One line was thinner than the other, indicating a high pitch to the sorcerer's voice as he had uttered that sound. Normally, a spell commenced on a lower note than it ended, though this was not always the case. Either line, for that matter, could also represent a preliminary gesture. He moved nearer and made momentary contact with the heavier line. The blue coil flashed toward him, but he had already withdrawn by the time it arrived, bearing one piece of information away with him: the line echoed on contact! Therefore, it was a word, not a gesture... The seventh term ended with a hard consonant and the eighth began with one. The same applied to the twenty-third and twenty-fourth words. He ran by them again. The caesura between the seven-eight pair was slightly longer.

I commented in the earlier Dilvish review that I like that we get bits and pieces of how magic is put together in this world and I'm glad that this practice continues in this book. This in particular reminds me of logic puzzles I did as a kid. "If Sue is two thirds as old as Steve will be in three years, and Jim is the oldest and Jane is half as old as Sue was two years ago..."

Another very Zelazny passage:

Monstrously ancient structures of an imposing nature are not in the habit of having been constructed by men. Nor was the Castle Timeless an exception, as most venerable cities trace their origins to the architectural enterprise of gods and demigods, so the heavy structure in the Kannais which predated them all, and which had over the ages served every conceivable function from royal palace to prison, brothel to university, monastery to abandoned haunt of ghouls—changing even its shape, it was said, to accommodate its users' needs —so it informed with the echoes of all the ages, was muttered by some (with averted eyes and evil-forfending gesture) to be a relic of the days when the Elder Gods walked the earth, a point of their contact with it, a toy, a machine, or perhaps even a strangely living entity, fashioned by those higher powers whose vision transcended that of mankind—whom they had blessed or cursed with the spark of selfconsciousness and the ache of curiosity that was the beginning of soul—as mankind's surpassed that of the hairy tree-dwellers counted by some as his kin, for purposes best known only to those shining folk whom it at least served somewhere, somehow as an interdimensional clubhouse before those beings absented themselves to felicity of a higher order, leaving behind the unripened fruits of their meddling in the affairs of otherwise satisfied simians; fashioned, in the opinion of some metaphysicians, on a timeless plane out of spiritual substances and, hence, not truly a part of this grosser world to which it had been transported, consisting as it did of equal measures of good and evil and their more interesting counterparts, love and hate, compounded with a beauty, therefore, that was both sinister and beatific, possessed of an aura as absorbent as a psychic sponge and as discriminating, alive in the sense that a man with only a functioning portion of his right hemisphere might be said to live, and anchored in space and time by an act of will imperfect because divided, yet superior to normal earthly vicissitudes for all the unearthly reasons the metaphysician would not care to recite a second time

The book gets a bit silly near the end, but I don't mind, because a little silliness is in keeping with the genre:

"Oh, it's going to take a tedious human sacrifice to straighten out our Old One. It wouldn't if I were in better form, but that's the way it is just now. Don't worry, I've a virgin locater spell I can use."

Of course you do.

"There you are, Jelerak, as I should have guessed I'd find you—surrounded by toads, bats, snakes, spiders, rats and noxious fumes, next to a big pool of shit, about to tear out a girl's heart!"

Jelerak lowered the blade.

"These are a few of my favorite things," he said, smiling,

We learn that Black is not quite a demon. Tualua to Black:

The man thinks you a demon, little brother.

Let him. We've other problems.

That reminds me of one of the (very few) cool things from the Merlin books, the hints that Greyswandir was "something else" before it was a sword.

Dilvish is captured and thrown in with the boring captured sorcerers. They escape and there is a bit of wandering around in the castle. Eventually the maintenance spell is disrupted and the castle becomes unmoored in time.

"It has decided upon a smaller scale this time around. But the main reason is that the Great Flash will soon occur, for we left at a very fast pace, as the house requested—"

"Excuse me, Dark One," Hodgson shouted as they passed through the alcove and started down upon the stair, "but this Great Flash—are you referring to… ?"

"The creation of the universe," Black finished. "Yes. We are going all the way around. At any rate, after the flash we will be passing through a dangerous belt inhabited by beings which would do us the worst sort of harm."

Squee! It's the Hounds of Tindalos, all lean and athirst!  (The book calls them the Hounds of Thandolos, and I don't know if Zelazny felt obligated to change the name slightly or if he just got it wrong)

Black references the Garden of Blood from the first book. I'm a sucker for continuity porn.

The Bells of Shoredan story in the Dilvish, the Damned collection has two references to black doves:

In the sky then he saw the shapes of the nine black doves that must circle the world forever, never to land, seeing all things on the earth and on the sea, and passing all things by.

and

"There!" [Dilvish] said, gesturing. "There is your sign of his goodness and light!"

Nine black doves circled in the heavens.

The Changing Land concludes with this quote:  Somewhere in the world the black doves were singing as they headed for their landing and their rest.

It was neat to get some resolution, though, all things considered,  I'd have preferred a sequel to Roadmarks or A Night in the Lonesome October, but it was nice to see Dilvish one last time.

A very quick summary of my weekend

We had a nice enough weekend. Jen finally got a replacement car, more than two months after she was hit. It's a Focus. Her last two cars were also Focuses (Foci?), and both were destroyed in rear end collisions from distracted drivers.

I occasionally have a good idea, and I suggested that we go to Friendly's after work on Friday and get an appetizer tray and some ice cream. That actually worked out really well, and we had a fun little family picnic.

We got our tree on Saturday morning, then Jen went on the annual Bethlehem Peace Pilgrimage. She is one of my favorite Pilgrims.

I learned that I probably need a shave, when Lily felt my face and told me "Your chin feels like a cactus and a porcupine had a baby!"

Steve Wozniak was on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me for their "Not My Job" segment. He seemed like he was having so much fun and he is one of the reasons I proudly self-identify as a geek. We was getting so excited talking about his own nerdery (he told a story about about having six smart phones) and he seems like a really decent, fun-loving guy.

On Sunday, we went to Glendon's annual Christmas party and saw Santa there. Lily didn't want to sit on his lap, but she was fine standing next to him.

Lily is really getting into the Nightmare Before Christmas. Frederick will probably come over just to kick my ass when I mention this, but I don't actually own the movie. I used to have it on VHS, and thought I still did, but I was unable to find it. Still, we're watching little videos on youtube and Lily is really enjoying them. I'll have to get it from Netflix one of these days.

We watching "This is Halloween" when Jen came into the room and Lily said, "Don't be scared. It's just pretend." Pause. "And if they were real, my stuffed animals could fight them."

We trimmed the tree on Sunday, did a little shopping and watched Little Miss Sunshine. I was expecting to like it. I didn't. I actually disliked it.

The Wikipedia page for the movie has this account leading up to its creation: Prior to writing the script, Arndt read in a newspaper about Arnold Schwarzenegger speaking to a group of high school students and saying "If there's one thing in this world I hate, it's losers. I despise them." As a result, Arndt developed his script lampooning the thought process: "And I thought there's something so wrong with that attitude ... I wanted to ... attack that idea that in life you're going up or you're going down ... So to a degree a child beauty pageant is the epitome of the ultimate stupid meaningless competition people put themselves through." I post on a message board where one of the moderators said "I hate Nazis". This would have been cool if he were making some kind of Blues Brothers reference, but no, he was actually taking the very courageous stance of speaking out...against Nazis. And likewise, it's not hard to include something stupid and meaningless in your movie, but then you don't get any points by pointing out how stupid and meaningless it. Tim decried Juno as "quirky", but at least it was entertaining. In Little Miss Sunshine, there was no plot twist too predictable to use, no characterization too banal. The characters were unlikeable, but more importantly, they were boring. I was just very disappointed in this movie.