Twilight Had a Genuinely Funny Moment

I saw the movie Twilight last weekend, with the help of a generous dose of RiffTrax. Vapid characters, forgettable dialogue, and excessively slick post-production aside, it was actually pretty neat when Bella went to "meet the family." It's an awkward moment for any teenager, but it's even more awkward when it goes something like, "So... Edward tells us you eat ... food and stuff. So we made you some pasta!" *Nervous laughter all around.*

Would have been even funnier if they'd ruined the pasta because none of them have cooked anything in, like, ever, but alas.

New Arrivals at Benton Library

I'm very excited to announce that we've been able to add a lot of new titles this term:

• Artemis Fowl, by Eoin Colfer
• Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident, by Eoin Colfer
• Forerunner, by Andre Norton
• Norstrilia, by Cordwainer Smith
• The Lurking Fear and Other Stories, by H.P. Lovecraft
• Birds of Prey: Club Kids, by Tony Bedard

And one of my favorites,

• The Amulet of Samarkand, by Jonathan Stroud

Go ahead and check them out! We're on Second and Winona, and Carleton students are welcome any time.

Beloved

Deep, dark, and rich, in a chocolate torte laced with cyanide sort of way.

I picked it up because Amazon.com said people who bought Edgar Allen Poe also bought this, but I was still expecting more of a historical novel than the terror ride of my life. It’s 1873 and Sethe is an ex-slave. She lives all alone in Cincinnati with her daughter, Denver, the only child she has left. Her two sons have run away from home and her older daughter is dead. During the book, she’s haunted by the past in every meaning of the word.

Paul D, who used to be a slave on the same farm as Sethe, arrives on their doorstep one day. Denver resents that they’re attracted to each other. They think Sethe’s husband died trying to escape the farm, but nobody knows for sure. Just to make matters worse, then a mysterious young woman with no wrinkles in her skin shows up, calling herself Beloved.

When Sethe’s daughter died eighteen years before, Sethe didn’t have enough money for a headstone. She was able to barter sexual favors with the engraver for just one word. Not enough for Dearly Beloved. Just Beloved.

Is Beloved the evil ghost of the dead little girl? Has Sethe finally lost her mind? Both? You just don’t know, even after it’s all over.

The best part of the prose is not what Morrison says, but what she leaves unsaid.

But none of that had worn out his marrow. None of that. It was the ribbon. Tying his flatbed up on the bank of the Licking River, securing it best he could, he caught sight of something red on its bottom. Reaching for it, he thought it was a cardinal feather stuck to his boat. He tugged and what came loose in his hand was a red ribbon tied around a curl of wet wooly hair, clinging still to its bit of scalp.

Deliciously terrifying.





Literary lessons learned:

• If you’re Toni Morrison, you can handle a book that is more flashback than present day. She’s Toni Morrison.
• Magical realism: it’s not just for Latin America anymore.

What do Inkheart, the Turing Test, and viruses have to do with each other?

Here’s one that’ll bust your noodle: it looks like fictional characters could pass the Turing Test. Imagine that we’re text-messaging each other, and I answer all your questions as one of my favorite imaginary people, like Lyra Belacqua. Our conversation might go something like this:

Interviewer: Hello, Lyra.
Lyra: How do you know my name, then?
Interviewer: Well, I–
Lyra: What is this place? You’re one of them Gobblers, en’t you?
Lyra: Where did I learn how to type?

Theoretically, this could go in indefinitely. I’m using all the intelligence of my brain to convince the interviewer about Lyra’s intelligence. It only breaks down when I reach the limits of my knowledge about Lyra or we run into some logical inconsistencies due to the fact that she’s from another dimension. You can see that that second problem happened pretty fast, but maybe somebody skilled enough (Lyra’s creator?) could fool the interviewer every time. Are we supposed to conclude that imaginary people are intelligent? Where do they keep their brains?

I’m bringing up the subject because it’s so compelling for writers such as myself. One of the common experiences for a fiction writer, across all genres, is that it feels like one’s characters are alive. My characters are like the most wonderful imaginary friends; I don’t write their dialogue, I just let them talk. And this experience doesn’t have to happen to just authors. Some characters have captured the public attention so thoroughly (like the Tin Woodsman, for example, or Harry Potter) that they can live independently of their creators. But if characters are intelligent, then we writers are all psychotic. We’re all multiple personality disorder cases with a bunch of knights and talking dragons bopping around in our heads. And some days, that’s what it feels like.

Maybe the best way to look at this is to go back to what the Turing test was supposed to prove in the first place. We tend to regard it as just a sentience test. But the grand old man Turing himself introduced the idea with a sort of parlor game where both a man and a woman pretend to be women. Somebody runs typewriter-generated messages between them and an interviewer (if only he’d known about Instant Messenger!). If the man wins the game by convincing the interviewer that he’s the woman, Turing says we can conclude he’s got a pretty good understanding of gender. Likewise, in the more famous version of the test, if a computer is smart enough to convince an interviewer that it’s smart, it must be pretty smart. Okay. So far, so good. So, if an interviewer becomes convinced that Lyra Belacqua is a real person, then

Lyra Belacqua must be pretty smart.
I must be a pretty good actress.

Which is it?

Here’s what I think, anyway. Characters are particularly good memes. Those are those ideas that can hop from head to head, taking on lives of their own. (Yes, kind of like LOLcats, but more sophisticated than that.) Viruses aren’t alive, but they can hijack the machinery of a cell in order to act like they’re alive and reproduce. Characters aren’t intelligent; they’re “personality fragments” that can sieze hold of a person’s imagination and act like they’re real. Lyra uses my brain (with my permission, I hope!) to answer the interviewer’s questions. And there’s a plot idea in that. What if there is a character whose personality is so virulent that his author goes nuts?

The Almighty Guru

http://www.thealmightyguru.com/

Looks like the sort of site that's good to procrastinate on.

Peptides are kind of like proteins...

"Dr. Perricone's revolutionary program utilizes the biggest breakthrough in antiaging medicine in years, protein-like substances called peptides and neuropeptides."

From The Perricone Promise, a hot new diet book published by a dermatologist.

Please tell me the biochemists aren't the only ones rolling their eyes at the above. Peptides ARE proteins! Itty bitty ones. It's significant to note there was an advertisement for Dr. Perricone's special peptide brews on the last page.

Elves

Fritter Thingies

Happy Bodies, a new blog on campus.

Jill and the people who commented on the post bring up some interesting points.

Food is a really emotional issue. It's an extremely old issue. Try to think of anything that's been part of the human condition for just as long, and probably the only answer is sex. It's so important to survival, and so much of our culture revolves around it. That's why people get so angry.

It can lead to some pretty amusing clashes, too. Now, I'm not all that vegetarian; I probably eat meat about once or twice a week because it happens to be in some soup I wanted at the dining hall. My mother, bless her heart, is an excellent cook, but we have diverging cooking styles. The last time I was home on vacation she asked me, as delicately as she could, "But what do you eat?"

Why, all sorts of things! Eggs. Pasta. Lentil soup. That delicious falafel they make at the snack bar. Bananas. Yes, I'm getting enough protein. I feel fine, everybody. I'm not dead yet! I think I'll go for a walk...

Perhaps the best way to lure others to the dark side is with delicious, delicious meatless recipes.


Fritter thingies

• 4 slices of bread (for best results, leave them uncovered for 24 hours)
• 5 or 6 nice mushrooms
• 1/2 can black beans
• 2 eggs
• Tabasco
• spices you enjoy (I recommend lots of black pepper)
  

Mash the beans slightly with a potato masher or fork. Dice the mushrooms small and combine with the beans in big bowl. Toast the bread pretty dark, then crumble into the bowl. Blend. Add spices to taste (the more the better, the bread soaks it up a lot).

Beat the eggs separately. Add to the dry ingredients. Next comes the fun part: heat up a little oil in the bottom of a pan. Mix the goo, then form into patties with your hands. Sauté on both sides until the egg is cooked, and voilá! Crispy on the outside, creamy on the inside, with mushroomy chewy bits.

Try them, you'll like them.

Cool Word of the Day

Histidine.

It's just cool.