Pony Up

God works in mysterious ways.

So I've heard many times. Okay, maybe this is one of them (or maybe not; I don't pretend to understand the mind of God).

All us Christians (yep, I'm one--surprised?) who just finished singing the praises of the birth of Jesus, just lauded the season of giving . . . all the Christians who claim to have voted their Christian values in the recent election, who have said that faith and moral values are the most important issue: with the disaster in Southeast Asia we all just got handed an opportunity to practice what we preach, in a big way. To prove we're not all talk and Sunday best. Time to pony up.

34“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

37“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

40“The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’

That's the Gospel according to Matthew, chapter 35. Pretty straightforward.

You call yourself a Christian? Okay, millions of people just lost their homes and loved ones. Help them on your own and demand that your government, as your representative, do the same. They are hungry. Feed them. They thirst for clean water to drink. Send some. They lost their clothes along with everything else. Clothe them. They risk cholera and typhoid and assorted other diseases--send doctors and medicines to help.

They are strangers to most of us. If you call yourself a Christian, invite them into your heart.

Countless

At some point numbers become meaningless; they are just too big to wrap one's mind around. The death toll in the quake and tsunami in Southeast Asia has reached that point: various sources give it as between 20,000 and 24,000 dead with thousands still missing, and many areas as yet unreached so the tolls there remain unknown. That's about the population of the town I used to live in . . . but I never saw my whole town's population in one place, so even that doesn't make it visual.

What does make it visual is photos. Most of the news photos I've seen so far have focused on a single family or small group (and so far I've seen dead children, looking like they are asleep, but few photos of dead adults). The only photo I've seen so far that hints at what it must be like to be overwhelmed with death in these places is this one (which, if you read the comments on Boring Diatribe, you've already seen me mention): my Spanish is not good, but roughly I think it says this is a bird's eye view of the Marina Beach in Madras, India, where what used to be sand is now a mire of debris and dead bodies.

If you saw the 9/11 documentary by the Naudet brothers, you'll recall the pop-pop-popsound of falling bodies hitting the building and ground, and the news photos of people falling and leaping from the burning buildings. It was hard then to wrap the mind around how horrifying the situation must have been on those upper floors for people to decide that an 80-story plunge to certain death was a desirable alternative . . . and make the leap. Likewise, try to wrap your mind around seeing a 30-foot-high, wide-as-the-eye-can-see wall of water rise up out of a sun-kissed sea and sweep away your community, your loved ones . . . wade through the carnage, the detritus and bodies, looking for your loved ones, hoping not to find them among the corpses littering the ground and trees . . .

It is beyond numbers. It is beyond words. Maybe beyond pictures, too.

Easier to imagine how one might help. As we did on 9/11. The New York Times has a list of aid organizations you can contribute to. If this country is as great as we claim to be, as we aspire to be, as I hope deep in our hearts we are, then perhaps the amount we give to help will be beyond counting, too.

Addendum: Antonius imagines a perfect world. Would that it were so.

A Wizard of a Different Color

This past weekend, I was on a panel at Philcon in which the question was raised as to why authors sell rights to their books to be made into frequently lousy movies that often either miss the point of the book or simply fail to capture its essence in what is, after all, a vastly different medium. (The original subject of the comment was the news that Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series is being made into a film that will omit all mention of God or the church. If you've read those books, you're right now saying, "Huh? How is that possible, given that the church of the story is the main driver of the plot?" If you've not read them, you must right this minute get hold of The Golden Compass--the first book in the three-book series--and get started. Don't worry, we'll be here when you get back.) Potter fans have been dismayed by the liberties necessary to squeeze multi-hundred-page books into two-hour films. The Lemony Snicket movie's trailer appears to have the right look, and the girl playing Violet seems a good fit, but if you've read those (and yes, I'll wait while you digress to grab the first Series of Unfortunate Events book, too), you'll perhaps be thinking, as I was, that much of the joy of those books is the way the author plays with words. To wit:

"Lately," Count Olaf said, "I have been very nervous about my performances with the theater troupe, and I'm afraid I may have acted a bit standoffish."

The word "standoffish" is a wonderful one, but it does not describe Count Olaf's behavior toward the children. It means "reluctant to associate with others" and it might describe somebody who, during a party, would stand in a corner and not talk to anyone. It would not describe somebody who provides one bed for three people to sleep in, forces them to do horrible chores, and strikes them across the face. There are many words for people like that, but "standoffish" is not one of them.

Okay, so why does an author permit his or her work to be made into a substandard film? Well, one supposes J. K. Rowling didn't need the money, but some other authors do: if your book's not a best-seller, then the movie rights money may be what makes it possible for you to pay the rent, write your next book, or send your kids to college, or retire, or buy health insurance.

Of course the books I've cited here have all been some degree of pretty popular, enough that the motivation for someone to want to make a movie was that the property was already known, with a built-in core audience of fans of the books, and people who've been meaning to read the books but haven't yet and will settle for seeing the movie. Maybe the authors figured the movie would bring more readers to the books (this often happens; that's why publishers find it profitable to do a movie tie-in cover with an image from the film on it). Maybe the authors really thought the movie would be a faithful (if different: again, movies and books are different media--apples and oranges, people) representation of their ideas. Or maybe, as in the case of the Lord of the Rings films, the author was dead. (However, by most accounts the films are a pretty satisfactory adaptation of the vision of the books in that case.)

That last was what motivated Ursula K. Le Guin to sell rights to her Earthsea novels. She had worked herself to adapt them, and when she sold the rights, the screenwriter of the LOTR films was attached. Alas, the dramatis personae changed, and so did the end result. Le Guin kept quiet about such travesties as changing her nonwhite characters to nice, vanilla white people, and laughable errors in plot, until the filmmakers decided to put (wrong) words in her mouth about what she intended with the books.

One thing you don't want to do is put words in the mouth of someone whose business is words. Le Guin responded to the original remarks on her web page on November 13, 2004:

So, for the record: there is no statement in the books, nor did I ever intend to make a statement, about "the union of two belief systems." There's nothing at all about the "duality of spirituality and paganism," whatever that means, either.

Earlier in the article, Robert Halmi is quoted as saying that Earthsea "has people who believe and people who do not believe." I can only admire Mr Halmi's imagination, but I wish he'd left mine alone.

More recently, she's said more about the SciFi Channel film's whitewash of her characters, and the process that let it happen here and here.(Thanks to The Dark Lady for the tip.)

That's the beauty of sf and fantasy -- freedom of invention.

But with all freedom comes responsibility. . .

. . .which is something these film-makers seem not to understand.

The books are about two young people finding what their power, their freedom, and their responsibility is. I don't know what the film is about. It's full of scenes from the story, but in this different plot, they make no sense. Its hero goes through lots of Ged's experiences, but learns nothing from them. How could he? He isn't Ged. Ged isn't a petulant white kid.

It's like casting Eminem as Jim in Huckleberry Finn.

Be warned if you are an author, that unless you have a great deal of clout (and I've read somewhere that even Stephen King hasn't always been happy with liberties taken in the transition from page to screen, and if Stephen King isn't an author with clout, I don't know who is), your lovely shiny apple of a book may well come out of the filmmaking process as watered-down applesauce in the school cafeteria. Or worse.

More important, be aware if you are a film-goer that seeing the movie is most certainly not the same as having read the book.

Addendum: This evening on NPR's All Things Considered, Michele Norris interviewed Daniel Handler a.k.a. Lemony Snicket. Forget the article on the page (although the excerpt from The Bad Beginning at the bottom may pique your interest); just click the "Listen" button at the top of the article. I was especially amused to hear Norris quote back an interview she'd done with Handler a couple years ago, in which the author expressed trepidation that if Hollywood got hold of his books, they would probably do something awful like cast Jim Carrey . . . in response to which Handler seeks to back-pedal without quite taking back his original comments.

Microscopes and Spreadsheets

I noticed the other day that flags in my community were flying at half mast, and wondered why. I checked The New York Times, where I learned that a NYC firefighter had died in Iraq. (The city tabloids milked his death for several days' worth of screaming headlines and sobbing family photos. Not surprisingly: even before 9/11 firefighters were special here. When three of them died in a hardware store fire in Astoria, their pictures were all over city and suburbs for weeks, and collections for their families were made everywhere.) The Times story mentions that a New Jersey firefighter died the same day in a separate incident in Iraq, and another NYC firefighter was injured.

None of these men came from my community. (And if we lowered flags here every time someone from somewhere else died in Iraq, well, we wouldn't ever raise them.) So I checked Newsday, the Long Island paper, where I learned that the same car bomb that killed the NYC firefighter also took the life of Will Urbina, a 29-year-old volunteer firefighter from my community.

So we can calculate from these two newspaper accounts that the death toll among firefighters from our area for that one day was at least three. No idea what the casualties among other professions and regions might have been.

Back in the days of the Vietnam War, every day news outlets reported that day's number of dead and injured American soldiers. (We were also allowed to see photos of the coffins; between a president, a senator, a civil rights activist, three astronauts and all the Vietnam dead, the dominant image of my childhood is of flag-draped coffins.) It got so routine that the numbers became almost meaningless to most people. They were just numbers. Vast, mounting numbers.

Today we've gone to the opposite extreme. Embedded reporters give us an up-close-and-personal view of war, and newspapers (and presumably TV, although I can't say, because I seldom watch TV news) give us the local story of individuals who have died. But we've lost as much perspective by that microscopic view of the war as we did in the Vietnam era by the big-picture spreadsheet version. During the Vietnam era, the deaths were just part of an anonymous calculus (until they touched your own family). Today each death is localized, the business of its community, but largely unnoticed for its part in the growing cost in lives to our nation.

I wish we could find the place in between, in which the individuals can be mourned in their community, but we never forget that more and more families, more and more communities, are experiencing similar losses with every day that this war goes on.