A Prose Poem (pictures I like)

The Fall of the House of Usher (an opera review post)

When you think of operas (assuming you ever think of operas) and you think of all the reasons you don't want to go to an opera (because I know most of you don't want to go to an opera), this is the opera you're thinking of. No, seriously, it is. This opera, both of them, actually, because this was a double bill (two different interpretations of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher"), is the very epitome of everything that can be wrong in opera.

The one cool thing, even, turned out to be a bad thing by the end of the show. So... At that San Francisco Opera house, they have these big mobile projection screens that can be on the stage. This allows them to project images which allows for greater scenery options. You want your scene to be on a beach, no problem. In the forest, no problem. Whatever, no problem. Thus far in our opera viewing, the screens have been used very minimally. These performances were set up around using the screens to convey movement. For instance, in the first show, the screens are used to convey movement through the house of Usher.

Right at first, it was way cool. Very neat. But... Well, then the actors just stood in place and did their singing thing. Every once in a while, they would switch places on the stage. The background stuff just became these constantly moving pictures that didn't mean anything. It was inane. What could have been something cool became an excuse for a poor performance. It was like going to a movie that's all special effects with poor acting and no story.

I mentioned that the actors just stood and sang, right? Well, that wasn't the worst of it. It gets worse? Why, yes. Yes, it does. The singing, which was in English for the first one, was just sung dialogue, which is a thing sometimes done in opera but still... Sung dialogue to not very good music. There were no actual "songs." It was monotonous and hard to follow. And the music overpowered the performers throughout both pieces so that you couldn't actually hear them anyway.

To top it all off, I picked this one to go see. I mean, heck! It was Poe! I was all, "How cool is that?!" As it turns out, not very.

You know, I don't want to imply anything (okay, so maybe I do), but Usher House (the name of the first of the two operas) was written by a Gordon Getty, a big donater to the San Francisco Opera. "Big" is probably not the right word there. The dude is beyond loaded and considered one of the richest men in the world. Is it possible that someone in charge actually thought his opera was good? I suppose so. However, I'm going to go with the Occam's razor explanation on this one.

[Edit: Because I was rushed for time when I wrote this, I forgot to mention the vampire theme in the Getty opera. The doctor, who appears for about one sentence in the short story, has a vastly expanded role in his opera. He's a pale thing, and it's implied that he's been alive for hundreds of years. The disease that Usher (and his sister) is suffering from has all the symptoms of someone who is being fed on long term by a vampire as in Stoker's Dracula. It also serves as the basis for Roderick's sister to escape her tomb. Having this incorporated into Usher is just stupid. Utterly.]

"The Fall of the House of Usher" (a book review post)

"The Fall of the House of Usher" is a perfect example of how our modern idea that showing is better than telling is just that: a modern idea. Usher is, basically, a story that is all telling. Which is not to say that you ought to like it just because it's Poe -- in fact, most of you probably wouldn't like it -- but it is to say that this story, despite having virtually no action or dialogue has become one of the most famous of Poe's stories.

Honestly, it's not one of Poe's most compelling stories for me, but that has less to do with the telling aspect of the story than it does with the fact that there is no good reason for the narrator to stay for as long as he does with Roderick Usher other than to satisfy the needs of the plot. Where's the motivation, Poe? Not that Poe doesn't supply one, I just can't really buy into the whole "he was my childhood chum" thing. Maybe it's just me, but, if my best friend from childhood wrote me a letter and begged me to come see him because, well, basically, he was all morose and stuff, I'd have a hard time finding it in me to make that trip after not having seen the person for at least 20 years. And, even if I did decide to go, I wouldn't stay there for months on end listening to my previous buddy being melancholy and going on and on about how horrible everything is.

Really, for the end result of the story, Usher goes on a bit too long. Poe gives us way more information than we actually need in order to appreciate the horror at the end of the story. We just don't need to know that light hurts Roderick's eyes or that he can only listen to certain kinds of music or any of the other sense-related conditions he has, as none of that actually relates to what's going to happen. It does help to fill the story with a sense of despair but not in a way that makes sense to the story.

It's a story that leaves the reader with a lot of questions. Maybe Poe meant it to be that way, but I don't really think so. I think it was meant to have a horrifying ending and for that to be enough. You'd read it, get scared, and go on and not think about it anymore. Personally, I like answers.

None of which is to say that I disenjoyed the story. I didn't. It's good for what it is. If you like Poe, you should definitely read it. If you haven't read any Poe, you should start somewhere else.

Exploring Personality: Part Six -- "I'm special!" (an IWM post)

"You are all individuals!"

"I'm not."

--If you don't know, you don't deserve to know

The Individualist

Have you ever wondered how

Edgar Allan Poe
Virginia Woolf
Tennessee Williams
J. D. Salinger
Anne Rice
Hank Williams
Judy Garland
Bob Dylan
Paul Simon
Angelina Jolie
Johnny Depp

may all be related? Sure, I could list more people, but if those haven't hooked you, no one else will. If you want to find out what they all have in common, follow the link over to Indie Writers Monthly to find out. It's just a finger twitch away. And there are songs!

The A to Z of Fiction to Reality: Cyborgs

Ah, cyborgs. If there's anything more terrifying than an apocalypse caused by an out-of-control AI, it's an apocalypse where we're all turned into some kind of cyborgs controlled by that out-of-control AI. Okay, I hear you zombie people out there, but don't get me started on zombies (I already did a post about that). Besides, I think we see a lot of similarities between the cyborg masses (like the Cybermen and the Borg) and zombies, and the cyborgs were here first. En masse, that is. In fiction. [The Cybermen pre-date Night of the Living Dead by two years.]

Anyway... this isn't meant to be a debate between cyborgs and zombies, so you zombie people shut it.

As with artificial intelligence, the concept pre-dates the word, which didn't come about until 1960 (in an article about human-machine systems in space). In the 1840s, Edgar Allan Poe wrote "The Man That Was Used Up" about a man that has been so damaged, has to use so many prostheses, that he has to be put together every morning before anyone can see him. "He's more machine, now, than man." (No, that's not from Poe's story for anyone that's wondering. It is, however, what immediately came to mind.) However, it was Jean de la Hire who is attributed to creating the first literary cyborg in 1908 with the character Nyctalope from The Man Who Can Live in the Water.

Edmond Hamilton may be more responsible for bringing cyborgs into fiction than anyone else, though. In his novel The Comet Doom (1928), he has characters that are a mesh of organic and machine parts which enable them to operate in outer space, the very thing that was cited in the scientific article in 1960 in which the term cyborg originates. He is also the first person to use the term in a piece of fiction in his 1962 short story "After a Judgment Day."

Possibly, the most famous (earthly (because, let's face it, it's hard to actually get more (in)famous than Darth Vader (yes, he's a cyborg))) individual cyborg (as opposed to a cyborg race like the Cybermen or the Borg) is Steve Austin from the novel, you guessed it, Cyborg from 1972 by sci-fi author Martin Caidin. The book was adapted into the television show The Six Million Dollar Man and its spin off The Bionic Woman. Several sequels to the book followed.

Cyborg systems are a thing of the now even if not in ways that would cause us to think of people as cyborgs. Our current emphasis is to use these systems to restore function to ailing body systems (as with artificial hearts) or replace lost limbs. Prosthetics are not so simples these days as they were when they amounted to just a hook or a peg. Many of these artificial limbs could be capable of enhanced performance; we just don't do that. Yet. I'm sure that day is coming.

As soon as it's shown to be profitable, that is.

But cyborgs aren't limited to people, even if that's what we think of when we think of cyborgs. We think of this:

But, really, this also counts:

Yes, that is a snail. A cyborg snail. Yes, it is real. And it's kind of scary. You can go read all about it here. It's scary because cyborg insects seem to be a big deal to the military. Yeah, you can step on them, but it will mean that anything could be a surveillance device. Anything. [And, since that article is about sustainable power, I also saw an article about robotic jelly fish (robojellies or something like that) that have sustainable power (but I didn't keep the link).]

All of that to say that cyborgs are here. Now. Maybe not all around you, but they could be. And sooner than you might think.