Notes and Errata of Mark of the Asphodel

So, I wanted to see some old factories.  I do that sometimes.  I signed up for a little Detroit history tour, hoping to get inside the old Ford plant on Piquette.  Well... we saw it from a bus.  But I did get inside the Guardian Building and saw a lot of other neat stuff from the bus.  The tour was more geared to out-of-towners, and it was a little bit too far in the "Detroit Yes!" camp ("Oh, it's great living here, yeah your car might get broken into, but that happens everywhere, right?"), but it did provide a real sense of how grand a city this was fifty years ago.  The degradation of Detroit is something almost beyond comprehension, even if you've lived there.  

The place that hosted the tour was right next to this cafe that was on my to-do list on account of its Red Velvet Pancakes and variations on a theme of Eggs Benedict.  Take a wild guess as to what I ordered.  It wasn't cheap and the place was kind of noisy, but the food was goooood.

Then we (the most excellent spouse was with me) took the People Mover, Detroit's risible excuse for a public transportation system, to Cobo for the NAIAS.  I'd never been before, and this was a great year to go-- more than 700,000 visitors overall and a real feeling of optimism, instead of the deathwatch/wake feeling of the last decade.  It was the happiest crush of people I'd seen in... a very long time!  GM and Scion had some interesting stuff, like the cute little Chevy Spark and a sweet Chevy concept car, but the most memorable thing in the exhibition was the Lincoln MKZ concept.  One look at it, and my husband and I knew instantly they were aiming for Edsel Ford's classic Zephyr.  And then we went upstairs and, presto-- Edsel's own roadster on display, so nobody could possibly miss the comparison.  It was beautifully displayed, too; leaving the colorful and noisy Ford displays and going into the Lincoln display was breathtaking.  You pass through a curtain into a softly-lit room with hypnotic music and these buckyball-flower things dangling from the ceiling, and there in the center of the room (like a single truffle on presented a china saucer) is the most beautiful car of 2013.  With one of the most beautiful cars EVER tucked just out of sight.

And then we went out to the observatory and froze our butts off the rest of the night.  That was Saturday.

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Today, we back to the DIA for the Rembrandt exhibit and actually got in to see the special exhibition this time.  It was a very nice display with a lot of interesting takeaways about the artist and his times... implicit and explicit.  Frex, it's impossible not to get the impression that Rembrandt was an asshole anti-Semite until he moved into the Jewish quarter and actually met Jews.  Then the howling Semitic mobs in his early religious work get replaced by a distinctly Jewish Christ.  This, by the way, is one of the most beautiful paintings of the Christ that I've ever seen.  I'd display this in my house and I'm not even Christian.  I was sorry they didn't have copies on sale.

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I now have all kinds of plotbunnies regarding artist!Forde jumping around in my head.  Stay tuned.


I guess I also need to work on revising a certain NaNoWriMo effort...


And finish something I promised Ammie.

Kind of interesting article here on the value of unlikable characters as protagonists.  Chock-full of spoilers for the author's own works and a number of Notable Works besides, so if you're planning to see We Need to Talk About Kevin and don't want the details, don't read this article.

Potentially more useful for those of us working on original 'fic, I suppose, given the constraints of canon characterization.

 Well, I know what I'm doing for NaNo next year.  And it'll take a year to research, so I may as well start next week.

I have always had a secret desire to write a novel about the Mexican-American War.  Actually, I'd rather sit down and read one, but I've never found one that was any good.  Why the MexAm War?  Easy.  Because it features a sweeping subset of the brilliant, colorful and just plain weird characters that make the American Civil War so damned interesting, only they're fifteen years younger and without the stupid beards.  Also, they're fighting in a war that some of them know is totally immoral and Very Bad Juju, but they're doing it anyway because hey, that's their job. 

I've read one or two novels that deal with the Mexican War in passing, but it kind of didn't work... the authors had too "stiff" and heroic a conception of their characters, so the Mexican War stuff didn't come alive.  It was too weighed down by the future.  The thing is, the skinny young lieutenant shooting up a crowd of civilians with artillery fire doesn't know he's going to be Stonewall Jackson some day, any more than another young lieutenant (the one running dispatches under sniper fire) knows he's going to be the U.S. President in a couple of decades.  There's fictional foreshadowing, and there's smothering your characters with too much meaning.  It's one thing to intimate that Lt. Sam Grant secretly feels that the whole "invade Mexico" business is opening up a Pandora's Box and there's cosmic retribution comin' down the pipeline.  But these kids-- and a lot of them were barely out of West Point-- don't know what they are going to be.  They certainly shouldn't know that people will still be picking apart their words, actions, and psyches in the year 2010.  And writers just go weird when confronted with characters like Jackson and Robert E. Lee.

So, doing it right will take loads of time and effort, and that'll be a project for 2011.  In the meantime, I'll go the "easier" route and fanfic it with Seth, Orson, Hector, Eliwood and friends.  :D