A book of essays around the game, World of Warcraft, and philosophy, has been released.

It’s not really my thing, to be honest, and I won’t be buying it. I still dig WoW, but the kind of pop philosophy that exists behind books like this, and others on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Bewitched, and whatever large social pop culture fad that is in existence, doesn’t ever really grab me. The essays usually end up being the worse examples of the ‘make everything have meaning’ mentality that make High School English so painful–except that instead of drawing meaning out of a painful set of Emily Dickinson poetry, the attempt is being made with a TV show or video game.

However, that doesn’t mean the Amazon user reviews aren’t any fun!

Monica Evans introduces us to the lore of World of Warcraft, discussing misdeeds and other noteworthy misadventures. Plato and Kant are introduced innocently and unobtrusively, yet I could feel the gentle increase of my intellect by at least +2!

Another highlight is Miquel Sicart’s Warrior angst and consequent in-depth philosophical discussion of game play, game community, and game ethics. Again, I felt a nice increase in INT +2!

You could even call it a sexy read, as the ethical implications of flirting and role play are explored in the most unlikely places. OMG! I just got a boost in charisma +1!

This book makes the game itself more fun. After settling in to read for a bit, I rejoined my guild and found myself considering many things I hadn’t previously pondered. Is the rogue really female and does it matter? How much real money is that epic loot worth? Does the game play affect our real personas? What linguistic influences will carry over into RL? What’s the etymological root for noob? Tank? Or griefer? How long before folks are going to the doctor to report that their health bar is low?

A true delight for the thoughtful gamer! Belongs in a spot on the book shelf between Plato’s Republic and Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash.

Good times, good times.

A strange thing has happened recently in my work: it has stopped requiring advertising.

About a week ago, the last of my year 12 students finished up. The HSC has begun and I’m not required anymore. Hopefully the guys–they were all guys this year–do alright. In previous years, however, what I’ve done at this point in time is toss an ad in the local paper and hope to pick up a couple of replacements–a plan that has had varying scales of success, to be honest. At this time in the year, not a whole lot of people are looking for a private tutor. Everything is winding down. There’s a few final exams left, but outside eager new year 12 students, I’ve usually just cut back a little and glided into the end of the year, in which I’ve run an occasional workshop or found some other work to tide me over. I have to cut back on the fish eggs and the slaves, but you know how it goes.

This year, however, it was different. As soon as the HSC started, my phone started ringing with people wanting to get the empty spots. I am known, it seems, in the Asian community, and it seems that word of mouth travels well there, and I’m full. It’s a strange thing to experience, to be honest. The writing side of my life has been a bit slow this year, the natural result of shifting to trying to sell novels, leaving an agent, and a little bit of burn out from having done this for fifteen years now, with all its ups and downs and things I could do with and without. The business of writing, too, has always struck me as being so much work–not the writing itself, which is always a pleasure, but the business of selling, people, and making sure you’re in the position you want to be. I’ve had varying degrees of success in every part, but it has always been work. To have the other work I do exist and bubble along without any real effort into bringing up people is a strange situation, but one that is quite satisfying, and is what I hope eventually the writing will become.

In fairness, I probably write the wrong kind of stuff for it to happen in the same as it seems to have occurred for my teaching. If I did freelance writing, rather than fiction, I suspect the work would fall into a similar pattern, just because there’s a lot more demand for it.

But, of course, I began teaching so I wouldn’t have to do that.

Which means everything is probably where it should be, and I ought to buy a beret, and work on being emotionally tortured, again.

Every few years I figure I ought to try to do that, y’know?

I have never really understood the desire authors have to slip the occasional foreign word into story, especially in dialogue. I got thinking about this yesterday, in relation to Nam Le’s ‘Cartagena’. The story itself is a coming of age story for a child assassin in Colombia, and it is a pretty decent read, though I found myself stumbling over parts when the author did thinks like this; “You have been a good soldado, he said. I think it is time we met. This week, I think.”

The meaning of the word isn’t very difficult to figure out, as the occasional bit of Spanish rarely is, and the context of it makes it fairly clear, but I wonder about its use. Throwing it in, to me, doesn’t reinforce the cultural world that a character lives in–mostly it draws attention to the fact that it is written by someone who is writing in English. It reminds me, in fact, of an old comic character called Gambit. He used to show up in old X-Men comics with the worse Cajun dialogue, in which he calls every girl ‘chere’ and so on and so forth.

However, ignoring that, and returning to dialogue: I suppose the convention wisdom behind dropping in parts of other languages is to add authenticity, to further help the author build up his or her world. In theory, a few bits of Spanish or French or Japanese can do for you what a few hundred words here and there will do for world building and culture–at least, in a lazy fashion. I’m not yet convinced that it is nothing more than a shortcut that authors use in place of a real understanding of their topic–which, I might add, isn’t a slam on the Le story, since I didn’t have any real problem with the cultural building there, in as far as I knew much about Colombia. But still, when he dropped in the bits of Spanish, I did find myself thinking that they were unnecessary, and not doing him any favours.

Perhaps it’s just me, though.

Yesterday I saw Peter Carey’s new novel, Parrot and Olivier in America, and it looks pretty cool. It’s a good sign, because I passed on Carey’s previous book because I thought that His Illegal Self looked like it was mostly treading water in Carey’s thematics. Maybe I was wrong about that, but I didn’t buy it anyhow; and to be fair, there’s something in the description of Parrot and Olivier in America that hints at earlier Carey, but it has at least caught my interest.

Over the last month of so I’ve been flipping between a few books. I’ve read a couple of short stories out of Nam Le’s the Boat, and I dug them, actually. There’s a lot of hype on the collection, but if you try your best to ignore it, you’ll find the work to be pretty solid and satisfying, or at least I have. I must admit, however, that I could have done without the story about the author, the exploitation of Vietnamese culture, and his father visiting–it was a little too knowing for me, but it’s all taste at that point. Good stuff overall and worth the time.

I’ve also been reading Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, the science fiction novel she doesn’t want you to call a science fiction novel. To be fair, it doesn’t really fit into what you would generally consider the modern day science fiction genre. It doesn’t have the drive in plot that I would consider to be part of the successful side of the genre, and the prose itself is not what’s in style. Sure, it’s a science fiction novel, but if you were wanting to market it to an audience, I would head outside the SF genre to do it. Perhaps that won’t make a whole lot of people happy, but while I am enjoying the book for the most part–Snowman tends to sit around a lot, which is fine, except when it’s not–all the debate on whether it was a SF novel never seemed to address the idea of if it could be a commercially successful SF novel.

Ah well.

It’s Monday morning, it’s raining, and hello.

The comic above is funny to me probably because I watched the original Terminator the other night. I hadn’t seen it for a long time, so I had a good laugh at some of the effects, clothing, and hair.

Mostly the hair.

What I found odd, however, while I was watching it was how much the film had these moments of simply not making sense. Whenever the first bits involving the future appeared–and why Sarah Conner actually believes Reece and his story. It was odd, because I knew how the film worked–all the narrative dots could be easily joined by me. However, what I found strange was that I wasn’t really joining the dots through the film itself, but through my knowledge of the film in pop culture, and my own experience of it. At one point, I realised that the film itself could be a huge mess of points without any narrative cohesion in it at all, but I’d been so prepared by society about it that I would have no trouble at all in following it if it was my first time watching the flick.

I made a brief mention of Thomas Lynch’s book of essays, the Undertaking, yesterday. It is, as I said then, one of my most favourite and cherished books–Lynch is, in fact, one of those writers who if I had the chance to meet them, I’d turn it down. It doesn’t pay, sometimes, to meet the people you admire.

I’ve read everything I could get my hands on before and after the Undertaking, and it has been a mixed bag. Bodies in Motion has some fine essays, but was a little too Catholic for my tastes, and Booking Passage, Lynch’s memoir about his family in Ireland, had its moments, and was certainly beautifully written. Of his poetry, Still Life in Milford, was decent enough, but I thought it lacked the focus that would arise in the latter three books in relation to family, mortality, and life. (I haven’t read the other two collections of poetry–though if I remember right, one is included in Still Life; or at least something like that. There was a reason at the time why I didn’t pursue it.) Anyhow, it has been a bit of time since the release of Booking Passage, and I thought I’d see what Lynch had coming out new, and it turns out that in early 2010, he’ll have a collection entitled Apparition and Late Fiction.

Sweetness.

Link.

I’m pushing round the idea of writing a story in a funeral home. I’m not quite sure what it is going to be yet, but I have a basic idea, and a character, and that’s usually enough to get me into it. A little bit of research covers me for the parts I don’t quite know.

One of the things I’ve found interesting is the Institutionalisation of Death, as it’s being called. Apparently, most funeral homes are family businesses, which I suppose makes sense, given the nature of the work–it would be hard, I think, to not have it seep into your personal life, waking you up at two in the morning, pulling you away from a family dinner, and the like. Dying is one of those things that’s terrible for time management, really. At any rate, it’s not very difficult to see how the family would get drawn into the work, and that the business would be handed down to willing (and probably unwilling) children. However, it seems that the family business funeral home is coming under threat from larger, multi-national funeral companies, who employ a number of people and handle a number of bodies. Just in poking around, nothing I read says that this is being met with approval. I can’t say I’m surprised: ignoring the general negativity people have towards large companies anyhow, death has always been considered a family thing, and one that does not invite outsiders. Following that logic, it’s not surprising that people would prefer family funeral homes, since though you may not know the family, it does imply that closeness and closed in nature that a death in the family often conveys.

I think Thomas Lynch, the undertaker poet turned undertaker essayist, wrote something about this in one of his collections. Reckon I’ll track it down–not that I need any particular reason to go flipping through Lynch’s work. The Undertaking remains one of my favourite books.

For some unknown reason, I can’t quite get the chorus of Mumford and Sons’ ‘Little Lion Man’ out of my head.

I’ve been quiet on the blog this week. No particular reason–there are just weeks where there’s not a whole lot to say. I’ve been listening to what other people have been saying however. A football team lost. A soccer team won. Someone famous did something. The Australian dollar went up. The global recession is over, they say. Interest rates are jumping. Someone is gouging us. The world’s doing alright now. That weight on your cash is someone who sees opportunity. Apparently before Obama was elected, the sales in guns went up. An election is being rigged. A war needs more soldiers. The place we invaded is in a bad state. Refugees sit in a boat demanding to be taken ashore. The world continues to be cut and cut and on the radio, someone is talking about the most pointless things that they had to do in a job. Another radio station and someone was discussing the social stigma of not wearing shoes. I was stuck in traffic, but it felt like I was stuck in something much worse, listening to this shit. Maybe I’m alone on this, but if you’ve got a public outlet, and you think it’s time to discuss whether or not Kevin Rudd is a nerd, and does that mean that nerds are becoming cool again, then you probably don’t deserve to have a public voice.

In fact, you should probably kill yourself.

I did a Mind Meld question the other week on best film villains. I bet you can’t guess who was my pick, but I bet you can guess what a lot of other people picked.

I deliberately went for something a little amusing and different, but I really thought people would mention The Thing and, well, the Thing. I always thought that was a really nicely implemented bad guy, especially in how it built its fear on the paranoia of everyone in the camp. Also, there was a head that sprouted spider legs. It’s hard to overlook that.

Link.

One of my students got a new Ipod Nano during the week, so I was flipping through it, checking it out, and hassling him for having a couple of Britney Spears and Beyounce tracks on it. I’m not really a music Nazi, but you have to apply the peer pressure early with this stuff if you want kids to grow up right, I reckon. Anyhow, I like to move my lessons around what the students are into–one of the perks of running your own gig–so by the end of the lesson I’d shifted my plans into music, and had told him to download six albums and write reviews on them.

“Six?” he said.

“Yeah, why not? You’re on holidays. Do an album a day. Besides, what other tutor would get you to download music?”

“None,” he muttered.

“See, that’s why I’m so cool.”

“That’s why you’re insane!”

Perhaps you had to be there to find it funny.

As I was flipping through his Ipod I noticed a lot of bands I hadn’t heard of, but which kinda sounded boring. I figured that was about the way of things, and though 30 Seconds to Mars is a cool band name, I’m good with it not being my thing. I’m 33, after all–I ought to start getting good with being out of touch with what’s cool. In fact, I think I’ll just dig being out of touch.