The Sweet 16 Round 4 is over, and we’ve raised another $125 for the Hero Initiative. Now we’re down to the Elite 8! Round 5 of the Mix March Madness 2014 Webcomics Tournament starts now, and lasts until Wednesday!
It’s getting rough and tough out there! Here are the latest standings.
NBC’s new hostage centered drama, CRISIS, might seem a bit familiar when you compare it to other shows on the air right now. However, series stars RACHEL TAYLOR and LANCE GROSS quickly point out just why their show is not what you are expecting. Plus ABC drops the axe on ONCE UPON A TIME IN WONDERLAND and it’s going to be a great year for ELFQUEST fans.
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In honor of the series finale, not because JJ Abrams is planning this. We think.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859
The other day two grandmothers, Mindy and Lynette, were visiting their beloved grandchild Meyer Manual. After playing and cooing and aahing and watching Alixandra attempt to feed him mashed bananas, 99% of which ended up on his bib and his chin and my elbow and just about everywhere but in his mouth, Lynette said she had to split. As she was leaving, she said to me, “I love your columns. You’re such a good writer.” (Be that as it may.) I said, “I don’t know where it comes from, I never had any formal training.” Lynette laughed, and said, “Well, I had formal training, and I can’t write like that.”
Well, I don’t know how good a writer I am; I always think I could be a gazillion-million times better. But that’s not the point of this column. This is…
I left soon afterwards, and as I was driving home in my car, listening to All Things Considered on WNYC-FM (my local NPR station), coincidentally the segment was about writing. Well, not writing exactly, but about great sentences.
The editors of the magazine American Scholar have compiled a list of their ten best sentences in fiction and non-fiction; as associate editor Margaret Foster explained, “It came about as a result of ‘water cooler’ talk around the office. We’re sometimes struck by a beautiful sentence or maybe a lousy sentence, and we’ll just say, ‘Hey, listen to this,’” Her choice, she went on to say, is the last line of Toni Morrison’s [[[Sula]]]:
It was a fine cry — loud and long — but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.
I haven’t read Sula, but even without knowing the context of the sentence, I agree that it is beautiful. It could be describing the wail of a mother who has lost her child, the ghostly unending cry of six million Jews exterminated by the Nazis in World War II, or the devastating misery of a population in a world gone to apocalyptic madness. It captures an emotional resonance that echoes of unforgettable pain, unforgivable brutality, and undying loss.
It’s hard to say what makes an unforgettable sentence. I agree with Ms. Foster, who said, “…in the end, very subjective,” she says. “I mean, who are we to say what the best sentence in The Great Gatsby is?”
By the way, Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, which many consider the Great American Novel, made the list with this sentence:
“Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
It’s not “See Spot run”, is it?
But even Fitzgerald started someplace.
I don’t know if diagramming a sentence is still taught in elementary school English classes anymore, but I remember it as a continuing homework assignment back when I was a student at P.S. 29 on Staten Island, New York. It began with simple sentences and progressively became more difficult with our increasing comprehension of grammatical structure. It looked like this, using the simple sentence from above:
Actually, that’s not such a simple sentence, “run” is a shortened present participle (don’t ask!), and the grammatically correct sentence should read, “Did you Spot running?”
So let’s pick another, simpler sentence. How about…
I | love | comics
…in which the diagram above indicates the “form” of a sentence. The “I” is the object, “love” is the verb, and “comics” is the subject.
But how do you get from a simple, three-word sentence to something like Fitzgerald’s last sentence [[[The Great Gatsby]]], or to William Faulkner’s [[[Absalom! Absalom!]]] or James Joyce’s [[[Ulysses]]] without your editor throwing you out on your ass with a copy of E.B. White’s The Element of Style following your bruised butt?
It’s the same answer as that old joke: “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” “Practice.”
Or is it? Maybe it’s something else—a mastery of the language, or talent, or maybe it’s something intangible.
Call it a mystery, call it a gift from God or the Goddess or the Universe or even call it The Force…
Whatever it is that allows some to grace us with words that form sentences that speak truth to us and stay in our heads forever and ever—It’s magic.
Photo by gualtiero 
You knew that, sooner or later, Hugh Jackman was going to do this:
Warning: spoilers below.
“Look at the flowers.”
A seemingly innocuous line that should set shivers through regular fans of the TV series, The Walking Dead. (more…)
No doubt you’ve watched it. If you’re of my generation? You’ve likely re-watched it several times over. And after each subsequent viewing… you ask yourself: Is Michael Bay destroying my childhood one license at a time? In response, I think we’ve all come to relatively the same conclusion– maybe a little bit. But the <a href=”
target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>trailer in question reveals to us a Michael Bay at his Bay-ie-est.
Let’s start with the good. There’s plenty of hints that the film makers know the lore from which they are drawing. From April O’Boobs’ yellow jacket, the TCRI building, to the relatively recognizable Shredder armor… it’s clear that someone in the production watched a few cartoons in their pre-production meeting. (more…)
The new NBC thriller CRISIS is filled with twists and turns. So how does the cast keep up? We asked series regulars RACHEL TAYLOR and LANCE GROSS to fill us in, plus 24 gets a comic prequel and who is talking TV on Twitter?
THE POINT covers it 24/7! Take us ANYWHERE on ANY mobile device (Apple or Android). Just get the free app, iNet Radio in The iTunes App store – and it’s FREE! The Point Radio – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE – and follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.
[[[Fifty shades of grey]]] isn’t just a runaway best-seller of debatable literary merit soon to be a major motion picture of, probably, even more debatable merit. It’s also the world we live in.
No, I don’t mean it’s a world of erotic fantasies, BDSM role-playing games, and dominance. Although if it were, can you imagine how that would change the popular Disney attraction “It’s a Small World?” (And I apologize for having put that now unwashable image into your minds.)
What I mean is that the world isn’t just “white hats” and “black hats,” good or evil. It’s a world of grey tones where everyone has some good and some evil, where everyone is grey. Some people are more good than evil, while others are more evil than good, which is why there are shades of grey; at least fifty of them if bad literature can be believed.
Otto Octavius, the former Doctor Octopus and now the controlling mentality in the body of Peter Parker, who is trying to prove he’s a “white hat” by being a superior Spider-Man is proving instead that, like Batman in [[[The Lego Movie]]], he “only work[s] in black. And sometimes, very, very dark grey.” And the world around him is trending darker too, like it’s got some sort of Goth hashtag.
Which brings us to The Superior Spider-Man #15 and the world’s reaction to the events of The Superior Spider-Man #14. (more…)
Please forgive me. I’m hideously jet-lagged.
Also, I haven’t read a comic book nor any of the news sites for more than ten days. Whatever the scandal du jour is, I don’t have an opinion.
Although I was in Israel for more than a week, I didn’t see a single comic book. I saw some newspaper cartoons at the Holocaust Museum, and the international edition of The New York Times in Jerusalem had strips, but that was it.
There were no comic book stores in any of the areas I walked through. I would think this might be some kind of kink in tourist destinations, but the Arab market in the Old City had three yarn shops. They were clearly designed for the local market (meaning they had no high-ticket tourist bait), so why were there no comics?
Certainly, the kids new about American superheroes. On Purim, not only did I see various Supergirls but Iron Men, Hulks, Spider-Men and more. It’s funny to see a kid with side-curls and a Thing t-shirt. I hope Jack Kirby would be pleased.
One of the most amazing people I met was in Akko, a city in the Western Gallilee. He had been in the Army, like many Israelis, but he and also been a junkie and had been in prison for a spell. He got himself together and was working with teens at risk. One of his projects was to organize a chess club. Chess is the hip thing to do in Akko. Arab kids play it. Jews play it. They play in tournaments together.
He told the story of a tourist couple, walking in the old section of town late at night, who saw a group of teen boys standing around a dark corner. The tourists were frightened, but had to walk that way. When they got close to the boys, they saw that two of them were playing chess, and the rest were watching.
It’s what the cool kids do.
It seems to me that a kid that can learn how to play chess can learn how to plot a story, or at least appreciate a story with a good plot. If there isn’t a comic book shop in Akko (and, like I said, I didn’t see one), maybe that’s a business opportunity.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to catch up on The Walking Dead.
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
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