Why I'm Skipping The Hunger Games

Okay, I know I run the risk of triggering some fangirl rage by saying this, but I've read The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, and I think I'm going to skip the movie. And books 2 and 3. Please allow me to explain before you begin hurling shurikens and high heels.

I was not terribly impressed with the book. Unlike many others, I don't really have issues with its lack of originality; I think if your work is executed well enough, you can get past a lack of new ideas (or even a wholesale theft; sometimes this book feels like a literary pantry raid), and it's not like there are a ton of shiny unused concepts floating around anyway. But I don't think it was very well-executed. Don't get me wrong; it wasn't BAD either. Certainly not Twilight bad. It was... okay.

It had some serious issues. Some were little things; for example, I thought that Collins took a swing for an emotional punch in the first few pages that she had not yet earned, her character names are just downright bad (Peeta? REALLY?), some of the elements leaning to sci-fi were ill-thought-out and obnoxious (all of the 'muttations'; not to mention the word 'muttation' itself, which makes me want to punch something whenever I see it), I feel that present-tense narration in the first person across an entire book is tiresome and borders on pretense, naming the nation Panem (as in panem et circenses) seemed a little precious to me, and I think that if you wanted to overanalyze a little bit, Panem would not have survived this long in the geopolitical climate and probably would have been attacked and subsumed for its obvious weakness and mishandling of resources). But others were big, gaping problems in the narrative.

The writing is simple and straightforward. I won't call it clean and economical, because that's not how it feels. It feels clipped, lacking finesse, heavily burdened with huge blocks of exposition that aren't layered in smoothly.

The lead character. Katniss Everdeen is an incredibly awful protagonist. While the overall book is not, as I said previously, Twilight bad, Katniss is Bella bad. Not in the same way; she's not the anti-feminist trainwreck that Bella was, and she's at least independent (though she spends most of the book being manipulated by anyone and everyone) and has a marginally more defined personality than Bella. However, her primary character flaw is that she is completely emotionally blank. And it's not just her. Every single character in the book is free of emotion. You can tell yourself that that's supposed to indicate how broken down these people are or something to that effect, but it doesn't hold water. No one is ever particularly distressed about ANYTHING that is going on. They're all bizarrely stoic about it, even disconnected. These children have been plucked from their homes and forced to murder one another, and they just do so. There's a huge missed opportunity here. What could be an interesting study of human fear, obligation, and horror is instead a strangely empty vessel. Spread across all of these characters like this, it becomes a flaw in the writer rather than the characters. Collins needs to learn how to write people, because none of these ones feel real. However, this one common flaw is not the only one Katniss is saddled with. She's also hopelessly un-empathetic and incapable of relating to people, which makes her unendingly aggravating to read about as our POV character.

Character flaws should make a character more interesting (and are, in fact, among the most important elements of a strong, well-rounded character), but Kat's only make her frustrating.

She's also never given any real conflict outside of the love triangle subplot, which is so deeply contrived and irritating that I couldn't bring myself to engage in any part of it. She's a plot passenger; a character who remains largely passive throughout the storyline. Some would say this is how her struggle to survive is portrayed, but it's uninteresting from a narrative standpoint. I would find her more interesting if she was more proactive in some way. Give her shades of grey by making her act pre-emptively rather than taking the easy way out by never allowing her to kill anyone except in self-defense. Present her with the moral dilemma of necessity vs. atrocity, and don't let her take any obvious choices.

The plot is slack and predictable, and since we've already established that the characters aren't strong enough to support the plot, the whole thing falls down. The only thing that keeps you reading is that the book reads easily even if it doesn't involve you.

Structurally, the book feels awkward. It's clearly the first of a series, and it makes the mistake of not being partially self-contained. Most plot points receive no resolution. Some are introduced that will obviously have consequences later, but don't even have any grounding in the story here in this volume. The flow of the story is a little uneven, though it's not as bad as it could be. There's no sense of a chapter closing; instead it feels like a book abruptly halting mid-paragraph, and it didn't make me care enough about what happens to bother reading the rest.

The story as a piece feels... bloodless. There is no energy to the proceedings at all. Even the supposedly brutal violence that has made the book controversial is sterile and dull. How has this book been banned? It's so SAFE. No risks are taken.

And it's funny to me how a plot that many have compared to modern-day reality TV taken to its logical extremes is so eager to be what it could easily be critical of. The reader becomes just one more viewer watching the Hunger Games on TV. It's voyeuristic, bland, and feels hastily cobbled together, just like so much reality programming. Rather than choosing to reflect in an interesting manner on its subject, it simply emulates it. There's an opportunity here to try to make the reader feel uncomfortable with their 'participation', but it's summarily ignored. Collins wouldn't need to moralize, but the book would be much better if she'd at least given us something to think about.

I feel that most highly popular fiction I've read that gets tagged with the vague and dubious descriptor 'YA' has been underwhelming despite huge success. The Harry Potter series is another example. Once again, I don't hate it, but I do find it frustratingly mediocre. It's been an incredible cultural phenomenon, but it's genuinely nothing special. J.K. Rowling is good at worldbuilding and tone, but her characters are flat and excessively archetypical. For a series structured as a bildungsroman, it's very strange to reach the end and find the protagonist unchanged. Harry is EXACTLY the same character at the end of the series as he was when it began. He's static, and that's irritating. Even the more likable characters are, for the most part, arc-free. I feel like the series should have been about Neville instead.

But where Harry Potter felt like a slightly unfinished painting still lacking fine details on a taut, textured canvas, The Hunger Games feels rather like the kind of crayon scribbling you'd tell your child was very good because you love them. It's clumsy and the strokes are broad.

Names, Identity, and Procrastination

As anyone reading this blog is likely to know, I'm an aspiring writer. And I've now settled on a pen name!

For ages, I've been going by David Aarons, which is simply my first and middle names with an S tacked onto the end, but I've always felt like it didn't flow properly. If I'm going to build a brand around a name (and fiction writers definitely need to do exactly that), I need it to roll off the tongue but stick in your head. I have nothing against my birth name of David Aaron Huff, but there's just something about my surname that wouldn't work on the cover of a book, and David Aarons (which I've been using for a long time) feels like a gear grinds up somewhere halfway through.

So I figured I'd add a middle name to that! I've already co-opted my own middle name, made some alterations, and repurposed it as a surname. Putting a spacer in there should do fine. I finally picked one a few days ago, and after some settling into it, it's still working for me, so say hello to David Zaine Aarons.

Sure, it's arbitrary, but I like the sound and look of it. It has a certain weight to it.

Anyway, the main reason for this post is not the announcement of my official pen name, but rather that all of this thought of names has led me to think quite a bit about the nature of names themselves, and how we relate to them.

A name is a definition, sometimes a statement of identity, sometimes of nature, sometimes of both. We use them to keep infinite thoughts and ideas and objects and creatures and people separate from one another and in order in our minds. Sometimes the name reflects the named, and sometimes the opposite happens. But something that fascinates me about all of this is that some names have colors and shapes and ideas associated with them directly, and it's not always possible to know whether those concepts were tethered to those names by language and culture or if they're attached to something deep in the base of our psyches.

Some are clearly cultural, even pop cultural. In the US, at least, if you hear of someone named Thor, you probably expect a large, muscular individual (most likely wielding a hammer) to be behind that name. However, if you're from a Scandinavian country where the name would be a little more common, you may not necessarily have those same preconceptions, despite the fact that the mythology originated closer to home. If you hear the names Nigel or Reginald, just TRY and tell me you don't half expect to see a stereotypical, possibly even anachronistic Brit when you're introduced, because I hear those names and all I think of is this guy:

I love the fact that some names have this kind of information stapled to them. This didn't have anything in particular to do with my motivations for altering my pen name; that decision was a purely aesthetic one. Oddly enough, I find that I already think of myself by that name. When asked my name, my mind defaults to the one I've chosen for myself rather than the one that I've had for almost 22 years. Self-definition trumps Pavlovian conditioning, haha. Some part of me is surprised at that, but to be honest, in a way it makes sense. We all have our own conceptions of ourselves; of who we are and what constitutes our nature and being. Sometimes the names we were given don't quite fit with those ideas. Maybe there's something in our subconscious that is prepared to accept and apply something that is subjectively perceived as being more "us".

In my case, I may have an extra leg up on that, as I've gone through a massive redefinition of personal identity over the last few years. I feel, almost literally, that I am not the same person as I was in high school. As over-dramatic and pretentious as it sounds to say it this way, maybe David Aaron Huff died when he was about 18, and David Zaine Aarons was born in that instant.

Perhaps it's silly to feel like my name should reflect the changes in my beliefs and personality, but it's not the only thing that's changed as I have. One of the reasons I'm so attached to my long hair and goatee is that in my head, they have a sort of personal symbolism. They help to separate me as I am from me as I was. They represent something to me. I suspect most people have something like this; nobody's the same person from adolescence to adulthood, and most of us probably recognize that.

Picking a pen name is good, but it's still a pretty small step. I'm a master of procrastination, and I need to figure out how to turn off the autopilot on that, because I'm not getting as much done as I need to be as far as writing is concerned. I need to discipline myself into steadily working every day, and I'm struggling to implement that new habit into my daily life. It's very easy to keep telling myself that I'll work in a few minutes. There's such a wealth of distractions on all sides; I'm guaranteed to be well-supplied with things to do. So many movies and TV shows to watch, so many books to read, so much music and so many podcasts or radio shows to listen to, so many games to play. It's all too simple to let all of that stimulus crowd out how many stories I have to tell.

Writing is fun, and I love it, but it's a lot of work. I know quite a few people who assume that writing must be a really cushy job, and I suppose it is if you define 'cushy' as 'not involving hefting blocks of raw stone in the hot sun'. But it involves a lot, especially fiction, at least if you intend to go about it properly. Everyone has their methods, but I have to conceptualize and flesh out ideas and painstakingly outline and structure a complete story before I actually go about writing it. I need to know where I'm going and thoroughly understand who I'm traveling with so that I can tell the story the way it needs to be told. As much fun as it is, that's a lot of work, and then once that's finished, I go into the writing process, which is about 1% inspired art and 99% the verbal equivalent of manual labor. It's not at all difficult to look at all that work and the sheer scale of the collected tasks ahead and decide to go watch Doctor Who instead.

Not to mention the fact that something Robert A. Heinlein once said often springs to mind: "The first million words don't count." Odds are good that you'll need to write a million words or so of fiction before you start producing publishable work. I'm not intimidated by the number so much as I simply hate the idea of wasting a perfectly good story. If I'm going to tell the story, I want it to be heard!

But those are walls I know must be torn down. Ass in chair, hands on keyboard, no sidetracking, no procrastination, every day, whether I feel 'inspired' or not. And I can always return to a story and rewrite it later if I feel like it needs to be published. What's important is that I stop putting off the trip and start getting there.

The Mysterious Yonaguni Monument - Artificial or natural?

In 1986, Japanese divers in the Ryukyu islands stumbled...er, swam... across a unique rock formation under the water that appeared to have been carved by some ancient civilization. The massive stone seemed to have been fashioned in a shape reminiscent of the stepped pyramids of Sumeria and Meso-America. In Japan, it was big news. In the United States, nobody talked about it.

In 1995, an even bigger structure like the one from 1986 was found off the coast of a Ryukyu island called Yonaguni. Apparently, it was the most popular news story in Japan for a year. A huge 'platform' of rock was discovered with what appear to be tiered ramparts, streets, and holes for wooden posts. At first, Japanese archeologist Masaaki Kimura thought the natural rock formations were probably a natural phenomena. After diving down himself, however, he changed his mind. Here are photos of what he saw:

In total, eight under-sea sites like this one have been found surrounding Japan.  American scholars have been loathe to address the existence of these stone monuments. If the stones have indeed been altered or the structures built by man, then scholars would be forced to rewrite their idea of human history. Why? It has been estimated that these stone structures have been submerged for 8,000 - 10,000 years. That means that during the stone age, there would have been an advanced civilization in Asia -- 5,000 years before the Egyptian empire! It would bother American historians for something amazing to be true. They are rather attached to their dogmas.

So I've said it. I believe that those shapes are quite evidently the result of the work of human hands. Professor  Robert Schoch of Boston University, who decided to meet with Kimura and make the dives to the monument, has stated that there is no reason to believe they are man-made. I don't know what his reasoning is, but he is supposedly an expert on geology. 

Here is one more piece of evidence that something like the Yonaguni monument exists and is known to be manmade: the Macchu Picchu ruins.

To me, these show how possible it is for Yonaguni to be the remnants of a powerful, ancient civilization. But what do you think? Feel free to comment!

Three Musicians Bryce Couldn't Live Without

The first musician I would like to lend my praise to is Loreena Mckennit. Her incredible skill possesses an intricate duality in its effect: Both the power to break one's heart and the power to mend it. Her lyrics and melodies seem to cry out to us from a forgotten age of the earth, speaking on behalf of our own lost, personal histories. Her voice is...well, I think she somehow must be an angel, because mere mortals just don't sound that beautiful and haunting. Aside from her vocals, she is an impressive instrumentalist. She plays the harp, piano, accordian, penny whistle, bouzouki, and perhaps more.

SUGGESTED LISTENING FROM THIS ARTIST: My favorite albums by McKennit are "The Visit" and "The Mask and the Mirror," though all of them are great. If I were to recommend one song, I would say, "All of her songs." Fine, I'll be fair: check out her masterpiece entitled "The Old Ways." THEN listen to all of her songs.

Another musician I would highly recommend is A Fine Frenzy. The band's  vocalist, pianist, and songwriter, Alison Sudol, creates a powerful realization with her lyrics: That the world is more beautiful and fantastic than it seems at first glance. Many of the words she sings carry a rare positive energy, and her style and presence glorifies the beauty of femininity in song, something which most other pop musicians seem not to know exists; if they do know it exists, they choose not to admit it. I think A Fine Frenzy ought to be displayed as a beacon of righteousness in a world of ugly radio play.

SUGGESTED LISTENING FROM THIS ARTIST: A Fine Frenzy's debut album, One Cell in the Sea, is amazing. I like all of the songs on it, but I often find myself listening and re-listening to "Come On, Come Out." But yeah. They're all good. Familiarize yourself with her now so that you will be prepared for the upcoming release of their third album.

Another musician who is particularly dear to me is a relatively unknown Texan by the name of Doug Burr. He possesses an incredibly unique yet invaluable ability to compose and arrange songs so that the tracks on his albums flow together like one, masterful suite. From beginnin to end, the listener feels he is transported to a realm where notes are the building blocks of a beautifully melancholy world. With a blend of the familiarity of American folk and a transcendience that is all his own, Burr's songs tug at the heart strings and make one happy to be in possession of human emotion, whether they be painful or ecstatic in nature.

SUGGESTED LISTENING FROM THIS ARTIST: Without a doubt, I have to say that you need to listen to Burr's album, "On Promenade," from beginning to end. No skipping around. The album in its entirety is an experience that you shouldn't miss out on. If you want to hear a single, I would recommend "Red, Red" from his album, "O Ye Devastator." Like what you hear? Buy his albums. Help him rise to the stardom he deserves.

I Call it Sharing

Last weekend, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or the Mormons, participated in a very important event. Well, it is important to Mormons. Every April and October, they hold what they call 'General Conference.' General Conference is a time when Mormons all over the world stop and listen to the words of the men they consider to be the apostles and prophets of our day. This conference lasts for two days.

I am a Mormon, and I was able to sit at my friend's house in Idaho and listen to the speakers who shared insights to the worldwide membership of the Church. Although the conference center in Salt Lake City is extremely large, it is not large enough for the 14 million members of the church. And not everyone could make it to Utah, USA, anyway, for there are Mormons in nations all across the earth. Because of these reasons, the Church broadcasts general conference over radio, television, and the internet.

It is amazing to hear the words of an actual prophet on two occasions each year. I say actual prophet because we believe that he is as much a prophet as Moses, Abraham, or Joseph of Egypt. Prophets are men who God chooses to speak His words to the people on the earth, conveying messages that instruct God's children in the ways of Happiness. It is easy to often view God as a scary, angry man who sits in some unknown sphere and punishes the people of the earth. Mormons view Him differently; we know He is a loving and caring being who teaches His children commandments that, if followed, open the windows to let in the light of true happiness. If God punishes us for doing wrong, it is because of His deep concern and His desire for us to turn away from darkness and unhappiness and face the light again.

To many, this sounds ludicrous, and Mormons are mocked on every hand for believing in modern prophets. I have experienced this mockery first-hand. I have been yelled at for my beliefs. A pastor of another faith tried to get me and my Mormon friends thrown in prison merely for being Mormons. An attempt has even been made on my life for being a Mormon. And for all this, I will not back down or deny that I know that the God of this earth loves His children as much today as He did anciently, and so He still speaks to us today. What He says through his prophets today is openly available to all. Here is a short video clip of an apostle speaking at a past general conference meeting:



I openly invite anyone who has questions to either visit our church's website (mormon.org) or to leave a comment on this post. A huge part of our religion is sharing the happiness we have found in our faith. God's words from his prophets are for everyone, and you ought to know them and find the peace and joy that can be yours. I hope you accept this invitation. Some may view this article as an attempt to shove my ideologies down their throats. That's not what I'm trying at all. I am happy, and I know why I am happy. I call my invitation sharing.

Sometimes, Vikings should be real again.

Do you ever spend hours in idol gongoozlement over the sheer stupidity of some folks? Well, if you do, you probably hold a belief similar to one that I harbor within my own heart: that there should be Vikings on the earth again.

Draw from that whatever conclusion you'd like. I think it's self-explanatory.

Perspective

Perspective.

I don't think we realize how relative everything is. We don't let ourselves think about it. We try to make everything concrete, objective, quantifiable. We need things to make sense, so we arrange a constellation of references and landmarks neatly around ourselves and ignore the fact that we only see them from one fixed point of view.

We lock into these angles as tightly as we can, because the only way we know where we are is by comparing our position relative to everything else in our lives, from an atomic microscale all the way up. If our perspective started to slip, we'd lose track of our identities. And sometimes that happens. You've probably had that feeling of falling in a metaphysical sense. Like gravity has shifted away from the familiar downward pull and is beginning to reassert itself in a different direction. Like everything is flying past you in a blur. Like time has stopped for you but sped up for everyone else. These feelings usually start for me with a strange sensation that my emotions have shifted into physical form; crystallized in my chest, pushed aside muscle and bone, and cut something in my core.

That sudden disconnect kicks me into a surreal state where my perception of time and self alters significantly. Days seem to drag on forever, but weeks go by like ticks of a clock. My life becomes one of those artsy time-lapse scenes from romantic comedies, where the protagonist sits motionless at a bar while the world speeds around him, only I generally don't get the mournful acoustic ballad playing over the top. Under normal circumstances, we don't notice the motion, just like we don't notice the rotation of the earth; because we're held by its gravity, locked into relative movement. But unlike that rotation, our relation to the universe is all in our heads. Everything's hurtling around us at impossible speeds, but we've learned to pick things out of the storm and keep our eyes on them, giving us the illusion of place and stability.

But the point is, if any of this sounds familiar to you, you've had a slip of perspective. Normally, we move at a steady rate in one direction, the objects and beliefs that make up our worldview orbiting around us. But if we stop for a minute, those things don't stop with us. They keep moving at the same rate, and suddenly everything looks wrong. Foreign. Even if we don't stop for long, there's a sense of unfamiliarity when we begin moving again. We're creatures of habit, and we come programmed with a deep obsessive compulsion buried somewhere in our brains that grows accustomed to having everything in its place. This part of our consciousness develops a dependence on patterns and recurrences, and goes through withdrawal if faced with change of any sort, with the side effect of a kind of existential disorientation.

Sometimes these slips happen suddenly, and sometimes they gradually build while we're not paying attention, and when we discover that something is out of place, it wakes us up to a sudden awareness that nothing is quite where we left it. Either way, these crises of self-location can be devastating. As I've spoken about to some extent previously on this blog, I went through a particularly harsh example a few years back, when my first love and I split. It was like going to sleep in your own bed and waking up on the rings of Saturn.

Previously, I had convinced myself that one of the reasons that loss was so debilitating for me was that I hadn't established my own identity within myself yet; that I'd built my concept of self on someone else, and that when she left, I was left not knowing who I was, and while there's probably a great deal of truth in that, I don't think that was the sole cause anymore. I think I'd settled firmly into the idea of that specific set of circumstances as 'real' and 'right', and then suddenly, my perspective changed. I stopped and they continued moving, and when I looked up, they were far ahead, taking with them everything that I understood.

This happened again for me with yet another love lost not long ago, and I keep feeling that familiar sense of standing in a billion-mile-per-hour wind. I'm not being buffeted by it as badly this time around, but it's still not my favorite place to be, haha. In any case, I find that I'm trying to re-establish perspective.

Perspective. It's more fascinating to me than ever, because right now I have a pretty clear view of things. And there's something amazing about it. Perspective is a purely human creation. We have found a way to draw order out of chaos, simply because our strictly regimented brains NEED order. How amazing is that?

I also find our relation to previous perspectives interesting. Our minds store little snapshots of certain perspectives we once had, and sometimes, without warning, our brains bust out the photo album and start flipping through. Sometimes it's triggered by a familiar formation of circumstances that looks kind of like one we used to have, sometimes it's totally random. But I occasionally have these oddly specific, incredibly vivid nostalgia spikes out of nowhere. It's the nearest thing to time travel we have right now. Images, feelings, smells, whatever; sometimes they all come flooding in, and they're often of the most obscure things. Not momentous happenings, just... moments. Flashes of history. Most things fade in our brains with time, edges worn down by the endless tumble of thought, but these remain untouched.

Yesterday, I was in the midst of working when one of these hit me with meteoric force for no apparent reason. I'm not sure what triggered it, but suddenly, it was late in the fall. I was eight or nine years old, and it was a blue, chilly, dying evening quickly giving way to night. The sun had fallen behind the mountains a few minutes ago, and daylight was quickly fading. We'd been adding on to our house, and my parents were working. I was sitting on a large plastic bundle that contained pink fiberglass insulation (one of several sitting on our front lawn between our house and the apple trees, playing Pokemon Yellow on my Game Boy. I distinctly remember that I was in Viridian Forest in the game. Above me, despite the chill in the air, there were small clouds of gnats roiling about. It was almost too dark to see the screen, but I kept playing anyway, eyestrain be damned. There was an indescribable scent in the air. I don't think I can explain it; it resists verbalization, but it was... crisp, and sharp.

It's odd; these memories always have a unique, associated scent that is distinct and clear, but somehow unattainable; like I know that even if it's a familiar scent, I'll never be able to smell it that WAY again. Sometimes I have a strange yearning, like if I could just somehow smell that fragrance that same way now, it could transport me back there for a few minutes, or make things better somehow. That we even have perceptual memory and perspective in our olfactory system is bizarre and fantastic.

Nostalgia carries with it a longing that is destined by the laws of physics to be unrequited. Even if we don't want to do things differently, I think there are places and moments in our lives we'd all love to return to, just to experience them again. To walk in the shoes of our younger selves. To look around us and see things for just a few minutes from a perspective we've long since lost in the chaos. Things change within us and things change around us, and usually, we feel like they all change without us. And we never know in these moments which ones are going to take root in our minds and reappear down the road. I very clearly remember that moment when I was eight or nine, and it wasn't laden with significance. It didn't even feel special at the time. It was just an ordinary day. But when we redefine the ordinary so often, even mundane things can have a powerful effect on us down the road.

When my viewpoint takes hold once again and coalesces into whatever shape it takes, I can't help but wonder which experiences and moments from the last year or two will lodge in my memory. What will soften and fade with time? What about this time will strike me out of nowhere ten or fifteen years from now? The only way to find out is to wait and see, and try to find order in the chaos.