Wow, the Avengers was one of the best comic book-based movies ever made! I’m hard pressed to think of a better alien invasion movie, too. It was a stroke of genius, really, to give each of the characters previous movies to handle the character development, because this movie didn’t have time for that. What it did have was character expression in spades. Characters of wildly different personalities and goals learning to work as a team. I so want to give you guys examples, but they would be spoilers, and half the value of a joke is the surprise factor.

And the enemy was awesome. Not just Loki, but Loki’s backers. You don’t even realize how awesome the alien enemies are until the end of the monologue by the bad guy after the credits. Again, I can’t tell you why it is; I don’t want to give it away.

I had been looking forward to seeing “Avengers,” but when I found out that Whedon had written and directed it, I was itching after it. Lusting. The expression on my face made the guy who told me laugh out loud; he said I looked like I’d seen Nerd Heaven open up before me. Even now, I’m flashing back to the movie and chuckling to myself about the surprising sense of humor scattered through out, the genius of Whedon’s funny bone was on full display.

And if this doesn’t give Joss Whedon the clout to call his own shots in movies now, I don’t know what will. Will he shoot his “Wonder Woman” script? Get “Firefly” back on track? Free “Buffy” from his deal with the devil? I’m certainly looking forward to “Avengers II.”

And Whedon proved again that he is one of the few male writers who can write “strong women characters.” (That’s it quotes because I think the clip of his speech about them might still be on Youtube.) His writing for the Black Widow was amazing, putting her on the Avengers not because she’s super-powered but super trained. No radiation, no super-armor, no super-soldier potion, just agility, guts, and cunning (the kind you’d expect from an ex-villain, which Whedon managed to hint at), and she held her own. This was nicely fore-shadowed in the second Iron Man movie, in which she had the best fight scene, at least from the point of view of a martial arts connoisseur such as myself.

Paul Must See … Again.

I went to a lecture by Gerald Cupchik, a professor of psychology, who, despite spending way too much time relating tales of academic in-fighting, eventually got around to his interesting data on emotional reactions to art. For example, of all the scales by which we separate visual art, bright or dark colors, real or surreal, the strongest separation, psychologically is “hard edged” vs. “soft edged.” Impressionist paintings are the classic example of “soft edged” paintings. He also showed us a few brain scans of where the brain “lights” up in different places when engaged in different tasks, including artistic appreciation, and referred to how different kinds of rooms inspire viewers to write different kinds of stories (abstract, modern décor apparently inspires more negative stories than cozy, lived-in looking rooms) and how different sorts of writing tasks concerning responses to photographs change how we remember them. Unfortunately, as I said before, he was too easily distracted by his stories of academic politics to really go deeply into any of this. He lectures like a scrappy, no holding back debater, but it wasn’t a debate.

Despite this, I thought his idea about ideological vs. metaphorical reactions to art interesting. Basically, he showed modern styles of art concerning religion to religious people, and found that people who responded ideologically to new artistic styles almost always responded negatively and those who responded metaphorically almost always responded positively. However, a friend of mine pointed out later that a negative response to art is almost bound to sound ideological and a positive response is almost bound to sound metaphorical and personal, so just how did he draw the line between the two?

I think the professor was on firmer ground when he talked about how normal perception is habitual but aesthetic perception is a “reawakening.” We go through our lives always seeing things in the same way because we don’t think about them, but I’m sure we’ve all had a good laugh when a comedian’s joke reawakens our perception of something by coming at a normal object from a different, and often more logical, direction. Those of us who love reading can all name a book (and probably several) that changed, or at least refined, how we look at the world.

And yet he almost mentioned that consumers of art do so to fulfill a need. That need they are trying to fulfill is more likely to be a desire to avoid boredom than achieve enlightenment. That’s certainly what’s going on in my mind when I watch a TV show. I definitely expect more enlightenment from a book than visual media, even if I’m just reading a book to understand the genre it represents.

I was watching Season one of “Big Bang Theory” and began to wonder if the dialogue between Penny and the guys is a parody of the Golden Age dialogue between the hero and his love interest or not just a funny coincidence. In the older, or just old fashioned, science fiction novels, beautiful women existed so the hero would be able to explain stuff without addressing the reader directly. In “Big Bang Theory,” Sheldon or Leonard are often explaining things to Penny, but instead of admiring their intelligence as Golden Age heroines did, she directly mocks them or gently steers them towards understanding how strange they are, depending upon how much she likes them.

Does it speak to my age that when I have a day off I feel like staying in bed and sleeping or reading a murder mystery? On the other hand, I’ve decided that carefully selected Beatles songs make for great wake up music.

It occurred to me that the world’s morality would make a lot more sense if magic was real. That way you could tell a priest’s god (or a priestess’ goddess) by the spells they cast. And we wouldn’t have all this nonsense of good guys and bad guys within a culture worshiping the same gods and using the same holy books to back up their arguments. I’m sure the assholes would find ways to deceive people, committed assholes always do, but it would be easier to figure out eventually.

I showed the first four chapters of a novel to a friend of mine. I was a little nervous for two reasons. First, because it’s a long time since I exposed my writing to anyone for critique aside from Lane. I’ve just fallen out of the habit. Second, he has a Master’s degree in Creative Writing and is finishing up his doctorate in Literature, plus he is knows both Tolkien and Shakespeare better than I do, which is an unusual combination in my experience. In other words, I have little excuse to disregard his opinion. Third, it’s one of my really weird novels, in which both magic and science are operative and I just let my imagination rip and to hell with marketing categories.

Fortunately he liked it. He had a lot of suggestions, but they all boiled down to saying that my first two chapters ought to be four chapters because there’s so much world building going on and my pacing was inconsistent. I can see in retrospect why he would think that; in my head I have competing bits of writing advice fighting it out, in this case the fight between a voice telling me to increase the pace of the plot and an urge in me wanting to describe the cool world in my head.

“And I am only writing all this to you to prepare you. In a world controlled by business why should we not expect businessmen to think first of business?

And do bear in mind that publishers of books, of magazines, of newspapers are, first of all, businessmen. They are compelled to be.

And do not blame them when they do not buy your stories. Do not be romantic. There is no golden key that unlocks all doors. There is only the joy of living as richly as you can, always feeling more, absorbing more, and, if you are by nature a teller of tales, the realization that by faking, trying to give people what they think they want, you are in danger of dulling and in the end quite destroying what may be your own road into life.

There will remain for you, to be sure, the matter of making a living, and I am sorry to say to you that in the solution of that problem, for you and other young writers, I am not interested. That, alas, is your own problem. I am interested only in what you may be able to contribute to the advancement of our mutual craft.

But why not call it an art? That is what it is.
Did you ever hear of an artist who had an easy road to travel in life?”

Sherwood Anderson, author of “Winesburg, Ohio” and advertising agent.

I’ve been reading novels by Edith Wharton (whose stories all took place roughly a hundred years ago) and find the unusual endings alluring, no doubt because so far, in every novel, the ending is the opposite one would find in a novel written today with similar premises. In The Age of Innocence, the independent, forthright heroine loses her love interest to her subtle, conformist cousin. In The House of Mirth, the plucky heroine torn between her desire to marry money and her love of a good man dies of an overdose of sleeping pills. In The Reef, only one of two couples can marry, and it turns out not to be the beautiful younger couple in which the younger man stands up to his rich family to marry the poor but plucky woman.

As a result of the ending of the first one I read, I read the next two with a impending sense of doom, and a strange fascination with that sensation. It is quite opposite to my feeling of pleasant surprise while reading "Sense and Sensibility," in which the more romantically behaving man loses the heroine to the sturdier, more reliable man. Over the years, I’ve reread "Sense and Sensibility" six times, because I like seeing men I can identify with “get the girl,” a feeling I rarely get reading other romantically centered novels. But recently I opened it for the seventh time and didn’t feel an urge to continue; maybe the fact that living in China has allowed me to enjoy romance in my read life means I no longer need literary comfort food, any more than when I was in college and would console myself on Friday nights by ordering in pizza.

“The whole of her darkened and settled, as when some foil whose addition makes the round and solidity of a surface is added to it, and the shallow becomes deep and the near distant; and all is contained as water is contained by the sides of a well. So she was now darkened, stilled, and become, with the addition of this Orlando, what is called, rightly or wrongly, a single self, a real self. And she felt silent. For it is probable that when people talk aloud the selves (of which there may be more than two thousand) are conscious of disseverment, and are trying to communicate, but when communication is established they fall silent.”

"Orlando," Virginia Woolf

Recently at my TeacherPaul alter ego site I’ve been having my students read my novels in progress. What I’m getting is less critique and more reader response, which is useful in its own way. I’ve noticed that the most confident students are the ones who have responded first, which makes sense, of course. There is a lot of overlap between those students and the ones I gave 90% or better to last semester (in the non-fiction composition course).

I definitely suggest people read a book I found in the library, "Misreading Jane Eyre" by Jerome Beaty. It's all about what reading "Jane Eyre" was like for Bronte's contemporaries, based upon book reviews written at the time and comparing it to novels written before "JE" came out. Bronte played around a lot with the genre conventions of writers, and therefore the genre expectations of readers, of her time. Back then, the conventions included Governess novels, domestic novels, children suffering in school novels, and the basic horror stuff. So reading "JE" the clues could lead one to think that Bertha could have been a ghost, a vampire, or an innocent wife imprisoned by a villianous husband.

Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, and Lao-tzu.