Roger Zelazny Book Review: The Visual Guide to Castle Amber

The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny are a fantastic resource, but not one I consult when writing these reviews, simply because the commentary there is so incisive that it would be too easy to unconsciously incorporate the observations there into my own work if I started reading it before I had an idea of the form a particular entry will take. So, if I read it at all, it's right before I publish, to see if I overlooked something blindingly obvious.

That's what I did this time around and I saw that I had pretty much said the same things about it that people have been saying since its release at the end of the 80s and that Chris Kovacs already covered the points that I was going to make when he looked at it in the "And Call Me Roger..." segment.

I'm not sure I even consider it a proper Zelazny book. The book was written by Neil Randall and Roger Zelazny, though Zelazny's contributions seemed to be limited to answering the questions Randall posed to him. I don't feel that's a role to which he's entirely suited, because by his own accounts, he makes up his worlds as he goes along, often having no idea how a story will end when he begins writing it. And it's possible for him to reverse engineer it to an extent, by remembering what he's written, determinging what would lead to that state of events and projecting where they might go in the future, but it's not as if Amber had been rigorously planned from the beginning.

Randall plugs his Amber choose-your-own-adventure books (Black Road War & Seven No Trump) a couple times but I'm okay with that because I happened to like them. My biggest complaint is that I read Black Road War right before I started The Hand of Oberon for the very first time and Zelazny casually mentions that Oberon is Ganelon in the introduction.

It's probably the best semi-canonical work in regards to giving the neglected princesses some real character. Sometimes it's a mess, when it suggests that Gérard played defensive tackle for a college team. We never get an official age in the books for any of the princes, except for Benedict, who by Corwin's account is "several" millennia old. Gerard was at least a young adult when Corwin was banished to the London during the plague and that was several centuries ago. I suppose it's possible that Gérard played football as an undergrad on some adjacent shadow, but a more likely explanation is that Randall or Zelazny just didn't think that one through.

Showing how each royal decorates his or her room was really clever. I like maps of the room, and the little details, like Julian's bearskin rugs or Fiona's Scandinavian decor.  I was amused by the account of Bleys's chess match with Tlingel the unicorn, though it's not something I'm inclined to treat as canon. I especially like the characterization of Diedre as an urbane Manhattanite and "the first to comfort the grieving Yoko Ono", and I will forever after imagine her as Audrey Hepburn wearing a black turtleneck.

I really liked the art in the book with a few exceptions. (Why, exactly, was Fiona's head so flat? Why did you give the unicorn those horrifying goat eyes? Gérard looks like he's really enjoying that goblet of wine.) It got me thinking about the perennial pastime of Amber fans, the casting of the hypothetical Amber movie.

I'm terrible at this, but I have a couple of suggestions:

If the artist is to be believed, we should absolutely go with Timothy Dalton as Corwin. I like him in The Lion in Winter (one of my favorite movies), but he's just too young in that role to play Corwin.

Eric Bana as Eric, naturally.

Christopher Walken as Julian. In my most recent reading of the books, Julian came across as emotionally stunted, what with his awkward wooing of his sister and "his slow, almost impeded way of speaking". There is something...off about each of them and I think Walken would be a great fit. Ideally, I'm thinking young Walken, like from the Deer Hunter or Annie Hall.

"I enjoy slaughtering beasts and I think of my relatives constantly. Please brothers, scooch closer."

Audrey Hepburn as Diedre, as per above.

Brendon Gleeson in his role as Menelaus as Ganelon 

Bernard Hill in his role as Théoden as Oberon

And finally Justin Bieber as Merlin.

Ha ha ha. Fuck Merlin.

 I may be back for the characters I missed, because this was kind of fun.

Nice and Nerdy

We had a pleasant weekend. I showed Star Wars to Lily for the first time. She loves princesses, so I told her that this movie had a space princess, so that was an easy sell.

I noticed at the beginning that the Tantive IV was firing back at the Star Destroyer, and I was thinking, "What's the point?' because it wasn't until Return of the Jedi that the things started exploding like pintos whenever something brushed against them.

She kept calling Chewbacca "The Monkey" and the first time she said it, I only caught the second half and thought she said "Wookie" and I  thought she was some sort of Star Wars savant who just instinctively knew the names of various alien species.

She liked the twins that show up for one second in the cantina and the monster in the trash compactor, but her attention kept wandering.  We ran out of time right after they escaped from the Death Star,  and we'll pick up with the rest of the movie in a couple days.

I bought TMBG's "Here Comes Science" off Amazon and it's a really solid album. I burned it to a disc and we we had a nice Saturday afternoon of listening to the album and looking up pictures in "The Illustrated Atlas of the Universe." Though it was awkward when a song about the solar system ended and Lily said "I want to see a picture of Uranus!"

It's an excellent book and Lily really enjoyed the pictures that compared the relative size of the planets. Jen and I really like astronomy (one of my fondest childhood memories is the time my father took me to the beach for pre-dawn astronomy program) and I'm glad that Lily enjoys it too. My friend Jen is a big astronomy nerd too, but she hangs out with a bad crowd.

We know you are, Doctor Tyson!

There's also a song on the album called "I am a Paleontologist" and after listening to that, Lily said she wanted to teach a dog to be a paleontologist. "Because they already know how to dig!"

We also went a local park and played on the swings, and played some hide and seek. I hid in the car. A winner is me! We also made a run to the library and I picked up a collection of Jack Prelutsky's poetry to read to Lily. It was just a really nice weekend.

Ignore your teeth and they'll go away

I had a dentist appointment on Thursday afternoon. I like my dentist office, and dentists in general. Not that I spend a lot of time thinking about them one way or the other, but when I do, it's generally positive.

I work more than an hour away from where I live, but the dentists office is less than a mile away (Google maps said 2.0 miles, but since I made it in eight minutes without hustling and I am not, as far as I know, Usain Bolt, I think they gave me a more meandering route than I actually took.)

The office is perpetually understaffed, and I had an hour wait, but that's okay, because they had The Electric Company ("Heeeyyyy youuuuu guysssssss!") on in the lobby!  I didn't know they still made that! (Aha! Some quick Googling shows it was revived in 2009!) I used to love that show and I'd been thinking about it and other shows, because I'm always on the lookout for worthwhile stuff to show to Lily.

So after that wait, I got in the chair and did all the things one does at the dentist. After a while he came to me and said "Your teeth are in great shape-"

"Yes!"

"-except for that suppurating abscess. We'd remove the tooth, but your blood pressure is too high."

High blood pressure certainty runs in my family, and while I do walk a couple miles every day, I'm under crazy stress at work (magnified by a commute that not infrequently stretches out to 90 minutes) and my diet is just a ball of sugar, salt and fat squeezed into a ball, and I'm older than I've ever been. (And now I'm even older.)  I should take better care of myself, but this job has been grinding me down for a long time. 

Lily, for instance. There's a good reason for taking care of myself.

Even at four, Lily has has an extremely fine distinction between real and make-believe. That's great, but sometimes, I feel that she's missing out on part of the sense of wonder of being a kid. So I was happy that Jen told me the story about a missing lovey, Baby Bear.

Baby Bear is her little pink bear that goes everywhere with her. Other favorites come and go, but Baby Bear is eternal. (Though it's more reincarnation than immortality, as we've located a source of Baby Bears online and we try to keep a spare sandbagged in my sock drawer in case of emergency.)

We couldn't find our first Baby Bear and the other had already been left behind elsewhere, so Lily had to go Bearless into her day. Once we all got home and started looking again around bedtime, Jen shook out Lily's blue blanket, just as she had in the morning, and Baby Bear fell out on to the floor.

Lily's eyes got huge, and she said "They really do come to life!" When we asked her what she meant, she said that she was thinking of the Toy Story movies, where the toys scurry around on their own when they're not being observed, and they might cling to the back of a blanket as it's being shaken out. I thought that was really cute.

I came home from work on Tuesday night in a pretty good mood and realized as soon as I came through the back door that I had forgotten my phone. So I said that and opened the door to go back out to retrieve it when Lily said "Can I come? I have long sleeves on!" and I said yeah and we both went out to grab my phone. As I opened the door, she saw the little Scott and Romona plushies I'd had sitting at my desk at work for the past couple weeks, but which I recently brought home.

"Are those for me?!" she gushed, and what was I supposed to say, no, those are daddy's dolls? So she fell in love with them, and we've played with them every night since. At first they were siblings and Baby Bear was their mother. Then Baby Bear became Romona's adopted mom (she was raised by bears) and Scott became the boy who pesters her all the time. Baby Bear bites him on the heiney when he looks away and Romona yells "hi-ya" like Miss Piggy and karate chops him all the time. We watched Scooby Doo for our Wacky Wednesday movie, and Romona (played by Lily)  offered commentary for Scott (played by me). I was asking easy questions to allow to provide some chance for her to segue into exposition. I asked "What's Halloween?" and I think she was role-playing Romona when she huffed and said don't you know anything?"

She's got a mint in her mouth, which is why her cheek looks like that. Her smile is normally much cuter.

Roger Zelazny Book Review: Comes Now the Power

It's funny. I can see the search terms people have used to reach the site (and some of them are kind of disturbing and worthy of a post in their own right) and lately I've been getting a bunch of hits for variations of the search: Zelazny analysis Comes Now the Power. It makes me wonder if some Zelazny loving prof out there issued an assignment on the story. I didn't have a review of it prior to today, but searchers were directed here regardless, because "comes" "now" "the" and "power' are pretty common words anywhere, and "Zelazny" is not exactly rare in this corner of the internet. (And also, I see that the story was mentioned in the comments section as one of Chris's favorites.)

Anyway, enough preamble.  This is another one from Zelazny's darkest day, when he was dealing with the death of his father. ("I wrote this story on one of the blackest days in my memory, a day of extreme wretchedness accompanied by an unusual burst of writing activity—which I encouraged, to keep from thinking about what was bothering me. I sat down and did three short stories, one after the other without leaving the typewriter. They were 'Divine Madness,' this one and 'But Not the Herald.'") Power and Madness are both brilliant in their melancholy, but Herald is literally forgettable. (I didn't have a copy in front of me and I had to Google it to remember that it's the one with Hercules.)

Like Divine Madness, Comes Now the Power achingly invokes the feelings of absolute despair. This is depression at its bleakest, not a mere temporal sadness, but the inability to conceive of a time when things will ever be any better than they are now. It's like Frodo says in Return of he King: "No taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of moon or star are left to me. I am naked in the dark, Sam, and there is no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I begin to see it even with my waking eyes, and all else fades."

Despair like that is a crushing weight that not only comes to dominate your world, it becomes your entire world. It is despair like that which Zelazny must have channeled in writing the story and which protagonist Milt Rand now feels.  Rand has some sort of psychic power, the exercise of which is blocked by his current state of mind.

The divorce had beaten hell out of him.

It is bad enough to know that somewhere someone is hating you; but to have known the very form of that hatred and to have proven ineffectual against it, to have known it as the hater held it for you, to have lived with it growing around you, this is more than distasteful circumstance. Whether you are offender or offended, when you are hated and you live within the circle of that hate, it takes a thing from you: it tears a piece of spirit from your soul, or, if you prefer, a way of thinking from your mind; it cuts and does not cauterize.

Milt Rand dragged his bleeding psyche around the country and returned home.

The descriptions of his wanderings seem to parallel those of the character in Madness, looking for anything to fill that vacant spot. He had known some others with the same power that he held, and contact with them was impossible for various reasons, which was unfortunate, because contact with another such empowered individual is often therapeutic in the case of a blockage such as Milt has.

One day he touches another mind such as his, but contact is fleeting, and soon broken. But it is the first hint of progress that Rand has known, so he pursues it again, reuniting after a time with the mind, and restoring his own power thereby. And now that it is returned to him, he realizes that the presence with which he has been communicating is that of a little girl dying of leukemia, and that her efforts to help him may have hastened her own death. Seeing that is so, he resolves to show her every thing of beauty he has ever known.

He calls upon the power that lives within him now, fused with his will and his sense, his thoughts, memories, feelings. In one great blaze of life, he shows her Milt Rand.

Here is everything I have, all I have ever been that might please. Here is swarming through a foggy night, blinking on and off. Here is lying beneath a bush as the rains of summer fall about you, drip from the leaves upon your fox-soft fur. Here is the moon-dance of the deer, the dream drift of the trout beneath the dark swell, blood cold as the waters about you.

Here is Tatya dancing and Walker preaching; here is my cousin Gary, as he whittles, contriving a ball within a box, all out of one piece of wood. This is my New York and my Paris. This, my favorite meal, drink, cigar, restaurant, park, road to drive on late at night; this is where I dug tunnels, built a lean-to, went swimming; this, my first kiss; these are the tears of loss; this is exile and alone, and recovery, awe, joy; these, my grandmother's daffodils: this her coffin, daffodils about it; these are the colors of the music I love, and this is my dog who lived long and was good. See all the things that heat the spirit, cool within the mind, are encased in memory and one's self. I give them to you, who have no time to know them.

He sees himself standing on the far hills of her mind. She laughs aloud then, and in her room somewhere high away a hand is laid upon her and her wrist is taken between fingers and thumb as she rushes toward him suddenly grown large. His great black wings sweep forward to fold her wordless spasm of life, then are empty.

It shouldn't be surprisingly that the structure parallels that of Divine Madness to an extent (gut-twisting tragedy leading to joy, transcendent in the case of Madness, bittersweet here in Power), as they both are drawn from the same source. It appeals to my personal belief system. I don't believe in any kind of personal immortality, but I think as long as you can remember the departed and remember the things that brought them joy, that's some solace in the face of death.

It did not change me in the same ways as Divine Madness, but it is worthy sister piece and moving in its own way.

Life in a small town

We live in a reasonably nice neighborhood. It's not perfect, but we like our neighbors and haven't run into any real problems in the six years we've lived here. If I'm out shoveling the front walkway, I'll always do it for the widow next door, and I'll try to do it for the neighbors on the other side if I'm out before they are. They'll do the same for us.

I usually park in the rear parking pad off the alley and when it's warm, I'll usually see a bunch of kids skateboarding or playing catch or just goofing off in that alley. I haven't given it a lot of thought, but I imagine I would be okay with it if Lily wanted to play like that when she got a few years older.

We have a large park less than a mile away and two small playgrounds with some decent equipment for Lily even closer. When we go to play, sometimes Jen will take a sharpie along to cover up graffiti, leaving behind her humorous edits like "Sock my cook" on the underside of the twisty plastic sliding boards. It's a nice quiet community.

One of the two playgrounds is a on the grounds of a local grade school. Details are still sketchy, but apparently on early Monday morning, a man was followed out of the corner bar and beaten to death by two other people outside that school.

There aren't a lot of details out there yet, but the victim was gay and one of the alleged assailants has a history of vituperative anti-gay slurs. The police aren't calling it a hate  crime yet, but the victim's partner believes it was.

I'm appalled that it happens here. I'm appalled that it happens anywhere.