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NEWS AND VIEWS - NOVEMBER 2022
WRITING NEWS Working on more Playground Noir stories this month -- I finished both Goodbye, My Galaga and The Slumberous Party (the title is a play on Ross Macdonald's book The Barbarous Coast). These stories seem to want to run about 6,000-7,000 words each, so to get a 50,000-word book out of them I'm going to need to write at least six or seven more. But the writing seems to be going pretty smoothly. I've got a good feeling about these stories, but I'm not a very good judge of my own work. It seems like whenever I put forth a really serious effort, no one's interested in the result, but when I just slap something together, people love it. Back in high school I used to draw these absolutely terrible no-effort comics with my friend Ant, and occasionally I'd show them to the kids on the school bus. They loved them. I can't remember anyone ever having anything bad to say about them. Likewise, a few years later the two of us got interested in making movies -- we'd get a few friends together and spend a whole Saturday filming these awful horror movies ("The Skeleton's Wrath" and "Horror in Death Forest") with an old camcorder and whatever random props we had lying around. And we'd get these huge enthusiastic responses whenever we'd show them to people. But whenever we put any real effort into something, like Ant with his music or me with my writing, people just shrug their shoulders. It's a puzzler. Anyway, I'm going to keep working on these stories, and maybe by February or March next year I'll have enough material for a book. * * * * * * * * WHAT I'M READING I finished Toby Wilkinson's A World Beneath the Sands: The Golden Age of Egyptology this month. It's a good companion to The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, which is his popular history of Ancient Egypt. Before reading these books I never had much interest in this subject; now I'm tracking down old photos of Abu Simbel and listening to James Tappern play Tutankhamun's trumpets on YouTube. Very interesting stuff. I also finished reading Mike Silver's The Arc of Boxing: The Rise and Decline of the Sweet Science, which was published in 2006. Silver and his panel of experts (which include Carlos Ortiz, Emanuel Steward, and the seemingly omnipresent Teddy Atlas) make the case that boxing has been in a steep decline since the 1950's, and that the fighters of today are basically just amateurish poseurs compared to the fighters of yesteryear. This has been obvious to me for years, so I didn't really learn anything new here, but it was nice to see these arguments being made in a systematic way. What are those arguments? Well, first off, there simply aren't as many boxers as there used to be, so the competition isn't as fierce. "During the 1920's and 1930's, approximately 8,000 to 10,000 professional boxers were licensed annually in the United States. In 2006, approximately 2,850 boxers (at least one fight a year) were licensed in the United States." Additionally, the fighters of today aren't fighting nearly as often as the old-timers did, and so aren't acquiring the necessary experience. Most fighters fight once, twice, maybe three times a year now. Back in the old days they'd fight dozens of times and face all kinds of different styles. Harry Greb once fought forty-four times in a single year. As the sport got smaller and smaller, the managers and trainers lost a lot of the knowledge that had been passed down over the years, to the point where things like feinting, body punching, parrying, effective infighting, basic strategic thinking, and so on, became lost arts, which the boxers under their tutelage never learned. Silver's panel concedes that fighters like Bernard Hopkins and Floyd Mayweather, Jr. had great speed and athletic ability, but because they never developed these fundamental boxing skills, they never reached their full potential. Silver and his panel also complain about the no-nothing boxing fans and sportswriters of today -- who, because they have no sense of history, are always making bonehead assertions about guys like Mayweather or Mike Tyson, claiming they're the best fighters ever in their divisions. I see this a lot when I'm browsing around YouTube and I see these compilations of Mike Tyson's knockouts and the commenters are all convinced that no one could have beaten him in his prime. It's absurd. I mean, I like Mike Tyson, but the competition he faced early in his career, when he was knocking all those guys out, was not great, and he lost to Holyfield and Lewis, the two best fighters of his generation. Who did he beat? An overweight Larry Holmes, who came out of retirement for the fight? Michael Spinks, who was so terrified of him that he didn't even try to fight him? What's more, Tyson never rallied to win a fight, like Foreman did when he beat Lyle or like Marciano did when he beat Walcott. If he got knocked down, or got hurt, that was the end for him. But people still think of Tyson as this monster destroyer. He's not even in my top twenty for heavyweights. So anyway, the book makes a lot of great points. My only problem with it is it's rather redundant, with the panel making these same points over and over again. You also get a lot of Teddy Atlas's pep-talky speechifying, which is par for the course. * * * * * * * * WHAT I'M WATCHING Here's some of what I've been watching lately, with some thoughts. Hataraku Maou-sama!! Definitely not as much fun as the first season. The budget isn't there and the story has been pretty dopey so far, with the cast hanging out at the beach and later getting jobs on a farm or something. The "Alus Ramus" character is annoying, too. I'd probably watch another season, but I wouldn't be as excited for it. Anyway, I've got one episode of this left to go now. Tokyo Revengers. Six episodes into this now. Can't decide whether I like it or not. I like the premise, I guess, and the protagonist, but I can't really relate to and have very little sympathy for these delinquent-type characters. I'm just not interested in gang wars and mafia stuff. But I'm sticking with the series for now. Business Proposal. A Korean comedy/drama. The first episode didn't really hook me, but three episodes in, it's starting to grow on me. It's a very silly, cartoonish romantic comedy, with twists you can see coming a mile away, but these kinds of shows are a guilty pleasure for me, and I really like the leads. Mike Judge's Beavis and Butt-head: Funny as always. Mamahaha no Tsurego ga Motokano Datta. This one was kind of a surprise -- I thought it would be a silly, lighthearted, turn-off-your-brain kind of anime, and although it does employ a lot of the usual anime tropes, it's also surprisingly thoughtful and mature at times. It's not blowing me away, but it's an enjoyable show. I'd probably watch a second season. One episode left to go. * * * * * * * * SCENERY Here's some more photos of some random rural scenery, taken while I've been out and about in western Minnesota (working on a big project for the local power company). There are from May to November. 
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