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the only serious blip being a run-in with Chad Curtis during the 1999 season.
Curtis was serious and strong-willed, a 45th-round pick in the 1989 draft before he had driven himself to the major leagues. A religious man, he led the team's prayer group and bible study. The large group of practicing Christians among the players cut a broad cross-section of the Yankees' clubhouse -- Pettitte, Stanton, Brosius, O'Neill, Rivera, Strawberry, and others. Among those who did not participate, there was no standing resentment or tension, but some other players were uncomfortable with Curtis, believing he was too overt with his religion; he had approached other players to discuss their faith, and for some, this crossed a line. Jeter had politely declined him once, and when Curtis went to him again, the shortstop felt offended. Chad can do what he wants, Jeter told a friend, and I'll do what I want to do. Jeter was single and laid-back and lived the life of a rich celebrity bachelor, while Curtis was older, private and serious, married with children. They were very different in their outward manner on the field, as well: Curtis was uniformly intense and stone-faced, while Jeter laughed and smiled and joked with opponents who stopped at second base.
Apparently he is more into softcore.
The 1993 Opening Day Los Angeles lineup had Luis Polonia batting first and Chad Curtis batting second.
Touched by an Angel indeed!
The #3 hitter was JT Snow, but it looks like it is ok for your loved ones to live next door to him...
1993
1. Luis Polonia LF
2. Chad Curtis CF
3. J.T. Snow 1B
4. Chili Davis DH
5. Tim Salmon RF
6. Rene Gonzales 3B
7. Damion Easley 2B
8. Gary DiSarcina SS
9. John Orton C
P Mark Langston
There better not be any Tim Salmon stories....
As a Mariner fan, I wasn't real happy that A-Rod and Jeter were standing off the to the side talking during the melee either. I didn't know a player spoke about it to the press, but it pissed me off when I saw it. I was watching the game at the time and have never felt the same about A-Rod after.
I knew that Curtis had settled in the area (he's from West Michigan originally -- nearby Middleville, I think?) and was amusing himself with substitute teaching and coaching (football, I thought) at Lakewood. He also has a youth baseball travel team in Grand Rapids with Brent Gates.
I was never a fan of Curtis as a player or as a person, at least based on his public persona, but I wonder if this was just some kids trying to get him fired because they hated him. I would be a little surprised if he was actually a child molester, but there's a dark part of me that likes to see a holier-than-thou person like him get in trouble anyway.
You're right, some of them beat their wives. If you are surprised when a guy who projects as super-religious turns out to be a scumbag, you need to sharpen your observational skills.
True. Everyone loves Baelor the Blessed, but they forget that he's also the guy that imprisoned his sisters for years for fear that they would tempt him.
Sounds like a scouting report. Show us the data.
Seriously? Or is my sarcasm detector on the fritz?
Like how many saves?
In any case, whatever you think of doing that in the first place, there's no reason for Curtis to be calling out teammates in the press.
(* - extremely appropriately)
Molina's clenched right hand is hilarious in that picture. He KNOWS he should do something to help the kid, but at the same time, he's a little busy.
Man, 2002 seems so long ago. An Angel team with a high OBP and crappy starting pitching. My, how times have changed.
[EDIT] And a lights out bullpen.
sigh.........
Apparently that's not all he was amusing himself with at Lakewood.
Seriously? Or is my sarcasm detector on the fritz?
Not seriously. Thought I suppose they could start rating players 1 to 100 in zealotry.
Will we use heaven's version of WAR or hell's version of WAR?
How that ############ JT Snow could react quickly enough to pick up that kid but couldn't get to a Luis Sojo groundball going .02 MPH is a complete mystery to me.
WAR is hell, according to a famous Yankee who lit up Atlanta on the road.
QFT, BWV. I remember that one game playoff game vividly in 1995. It was the first "postseason" Angel game since 1986 when I was a 14 year old Angel fan and Mike Witt fan-boy. So, in 1995 I was itching to experience some post-season energy. I skipped my college classes, and sat in front of a TV to watch Langston hang in there against a damn near unhittable ugly-ass Big Unit. I was holding out hope until that Sojo dribbler. Then I just knew it wasn't meant to be.
Man 2002 was awesome. Here's to hoping it's not too long until another WS appearance for the Halos.
Man, you need to read better quality speculative fiction.
The Angels two wins in the 2009 ALCS were both ridiculously exciting.
Huh, I don't even remember them. Defeat salves all pleasures.
First time I've ever seen anyone suggest Martin's work is something less than "quality."
You must not visit BTF book threads or movie threads or TV threads very often. Every other post is someone saying "I never understood what people saw in [wildly popular and well-reviewed thing]. It's just a poor man's version of [other thing that is vaguely related in some way]." Or just "[Wildly popular and well-reviewed thing]? Yech. [Unwatchable/Unreadable/I slept through the last 60 minutes]."
You also need to read better quality speculative fiction.
Pointless sniping is pointless.
Here you go: The later Wild Card books got pretty meandering.
Fun, though!
This made me laugh, but I didn't remember what it was in reference to.
For anyone who wants to relive it, go to 0:40:
Mariners-Angels
I've gone into it in other threads, so I don't really like to repeat myself.
Also: ***spoiler alert***
Martin has some of the worst self-indulgent habits of the genre. He spins out wide worlds to tell a story, which people like and respond to. However, frequently, the characters are all sitting around waiting for things to happen. Denarys is a good example. From when Dhrogo dies to the last book, all of her chapters could have been skipped with zero impact on the larger narrative. That's poor writing.
Arya's story is very similar. It's just a lot of churn until she ends up in Braavos.
Several other characters seem to serve little narrative function. Why are there both Robb and Ned Stark? Why Kevan and Tywin Lannister? Why Renly?
I could keep going. It annoys me because it seems to be the direction the genre is headed in due to that style making money. As far as good contemporary spec. fiction writers, China Mieville does some really interesting stuff. The City and the City is a very interesting, entertaining book with something to say. Neil Gaiman's good, but most people have heard of him. I liked The Magicians by Lev Grossman a lot, but he wrote a second book. Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind series was very good in the first two books, but it worries me that it appears to be pulling a Martin and not moving narratively.
But yeah, Martin isn't that good, at least imo. I also tend to prefer really tight narratives, though.
Martin makes sprawling, dense, dark, realistic, complex, violent, political fantasy. Almost everything you mentioned served the purpose of fleshing out a fairly complete and believable world/culture on a level that in my experience is rare in any sort of fiction. Saying we need to upgrade our speculative fiction habits because you prefer tight and punchy narratives and can't see beyond such when evaluating a long series of ~1000 page epic fantasy tomes is pretty weak IMO.
I am almost through book 9 of Steven Erikson's delightfully insane Malazan Book of the Fallen. Based on tshipman's description, I think it's something that he'd hate though.
Seriously. My best friend and I coach little league and when his wife brings their 3 year old son to the games she has to basically tackle him because all the kid wants to do is run on the field and run the bases. That there is a game going on is entirely irrelevant to the kid (who in fairness is stinkin' cute when he gets to go on the field after the game and run).
And i agree with jyjjy; ASOIAF may not be perfect, but Martin does a lot of things right
I also really liked The City & the City, and am now 3/4 of the way through Perdido Street Station: a real doorstop of a book at 850+ pages, but consistently fascinating. Nobody in Perdido Street Station sits around waiting for anything to happen – the plot is relentless – and at the same time, there's an uncanny proliferation of interesting alternative-world elements.
Not sure, but I have a vague recollection of Harlan Ellison & Barry N. Malzberg & their ilk -- the we're-artistes!-&-don't-want-to-be-assocaited-with-grotty-science-fiction-writers-&-fans pretentionistas, though if memory serves they were happy to take those icky people's money, strangely enough -- being responsible for the rise & spread of the term around 35-40 years ago.
It's just a convenient way to refer to SF and Fantasy. They're generally the same genre nowadays.
Writing having a narrative function isn't personal preference. It's part of the core pact with the reader. Re-writing the same scenes with slightly different details doesn't advance the character or the plot. Literally hundreds upon hundreds of pages can be skipped with no impact on the narrative. That is bad writing. (It also happens to be extremely profitable writing.) It is also highly emblematic of the trends in the genre. No one wants a stand-alone book. Everything has to be a series.
I feel bad, because the original comment was just a joke because I had a long conversation with Greg (U)K about those books in another thread. I figured this thread was likely to die. My mistake.
Posts 49 and 56 suggest otherwise. If you're going to repeat your sniping in multiple threads, you should probably expect to get asked about your reasons more than once.
No, it's basically like you simply ignored everything I said and are now just repeating yourself. I won't do the same, I'll expand. A lot of your complaints don't make sense even from the limited perspective you seem to be coming from. Why both Ned and Robb Stark? Ned's death is key to the narrative, directly inspires the war that his son Robb then launches against the Lannisters that is the main narrative for almost the entirety of the next two books. How does it even make sense to ask why both characters are necessary? Arya's chapters have a narrative of their own, a rather good one imo and take place during and in the aftermath of said war. Without her chapters revealing the nature and consequences of the war on the surrounding landscape(a function later taken up by Brienne's chapters) the novels would have been significantly weaker IMO and they do frequently provide important info relevant to the other plot lines about characters like Bolton, both Cleganes, Vargo Hoat and his mummers, Dondarrian/Thoros and I imagine Gendry will be important at some point, which is another mistake you are making imo; judging and dismissing the narrative importance of characters and events in a series that has thousands of pages yet to come. Pages you probably should not read as you seemingly simply do not like this kind of literature.
A word of advice: you may physically burst into flame if you ever attempt to read the Wheel of Time novels so avoid them like the plague.
Can we agree that they should get rid of Sansa though?
China Mieville - most frustrating author I read. I thought that The City and the City and The Scar were excellent, Perdido Street Station, Looking for Jake and Other Stories, and Iron Council were solid, and thought that Kraken was terrible, while I couldn't get through Embassytown.
I tend to disagree with this --
Take War and Peace for example -
Prince Andrei has not one, but two battlefield epiphanies hundreds and hundreds of pages apart which are essentially variations of each other. Buzukhoz spends several books playing a wealthy Don Quixote. Tolstoy is a lot more subtle with his character development than Martin, I'll grant -- but he still illustrates them in drips and drabs. I guess I'd say that we suspect the sort of man Andrei, Pierre, etc are very early when we meet them, but Tolstoy spends hundreds of paging filling in the details and giving us ever more nuance. Martin's characters are a bit flatter, but I think there's a similar development schema --- Arya, for example, becomes more ruthless than we might have suspected in book one.
This is opposed to someone like, say, Dickens -- with very few exceptions -- pretty much cardboards his characters. Hell, in almost every book -- you can pretty much deduce who the character is (and how the character will end) based on the name alone. Oliver Twist is the same Oliver Twist when he gets adopted at the end, and Amy/Little Dorrit is the same moppet when she gets married. I've always thought Dickens reminded me of Stephen King -- not from a genre perspective, but because they both use characters to advance a plot rather plot as a backdrop for exploring the characters.
I don't think it's particularly correct to say either is better than the other -- I prefer the former over the latter -- but I think there has been and continues to be excellent work done in both styles.
I will say that as a sci-fi/ok, fine, "speculative fiction" perspective -- I do tend to enjoy the former a lot more. When you're immersing me in a future world, fantasy world, or alternate reality -- it's actually a lot of the background description I tend to enjoy most. So - sure - while you can say the books and the ultimate Fire & Ice plot could have done without Daenerys playing Moses wandering the desert for about 2-3 books, I felt like it was a useful device to learn more about the free cities and Essos. Frankly, if you land me in a fantasy world -- I tend to get annoyed if you expect me to just deduce too much from your plot. Describe the world, explain it to me via the interactions of characters in it.
Ooh! And how about Robinson Crusoe? That thing's full of the same scene over and over again with tiny differences.
Really? Thousands of pages? How long are these books?
I'm pretty sure I don't want to read thousands of pages about any one particular story line. How come nobody writes 300 pgs. books anymore?
Heh -- actually, a better Defoe example might be Moll Flanders... perhaps my favorite female character from literature, but if you want repetition, especially scandalous, Moll is your girl...
They are the sort where when it comes time to release a paperback edition the publisher must make a hard decision about whether to release it as two volumes or one huge one of questionable structural integrity.
Wow! How many of them are there in the series?
For me, if a book is going to exceed 500 pages, it better be covering a pretty big topic.
Hell, all three volume of LotR is only about 1000 pages.
My feelings on ADwD are summed up well by this Amazon review.
EDIT:
Wow! How many of them are there in the series?
So far, five. Ostensibly, it's going to wrap up in two more, but that seems vanishingly unlikely at this point. I think two more books would just about afford us one or two chapters for each of the viewpoint characters whose story arcs need to be resolved.
I mostly agree with that. I'm also increasingly skeptical that there's going to be a payoff. I hope it really is all building to something.
That is the most awesome review in the history of awesome reviews!
So far, five. Ostensibly, it's going to wrap up in two more, but that seems vanishingly unlikely at this point. I think two more books would just about afford us one or two chapters for each of the viewpoint characters whose story arcs need to be resolved.
Holy ####! 1040 pages and only one of seven (?) volumes. Good Lord!
Wait, he can't resolve the story ark for a single character in two chapters?!?!
It's not the length I object to -- I've read the Baroque Cycle multiple times, and I love a meaty 700 page biography. It's that Martin is so willing to piss away momentum. Fiction should above all things be interesting -- if you don't have anything to say, you should wrap things up so that I can spend my time on something else.
Interesting. I tend to lose momentum in biographies, even good ones like "John Adams", and "Theodore Rex", and "Titan", and don't finish them. Usually the interesting parts of peoples' lives are over long before their lives are.
Five so far with two yet to come but they are getting longer. Books four and five where supposed to be just book four actually but halfway through writing it he decided to split it in two(interestingly along geographic lines rather than temporally) as it was simply too long.
To use a different medium as a metaphor think of it as a television series with a plot that spans many seasons(which it actually is now as well) rather than a movie. Something like the first 3 seasons of The Wire if you've seen that would be a good example, though on a smaller scale. From tshipman's perspective I suspect all of the stuff in the second season about the docks/unions and the focus on city hall in the third would be extraneous filler, "bad writing," as they are only tangentially related to the pursuit of Barksdale/Bell which is the main narrative.
Killing so many characters does tend to trip up the momentum... fortunately, I hear the next book will finally introduce Maester Billy Crystal, who will explain that there's a difference between mostly dead and all dead.
And yet Martin is still a piker compared to Robert Jordan. Jordan wrote eleven books totalling nearly 8,500 pages in his "Wheel of Time" series, and showed every indication of being prepared to go on for several more before inconveniently dying of heart disease. By all accounts, the guy hired to complete the books in his stead has been tying off plot threads and wrapping up dangling plot points at a ferocious pace, but the total series is still expected to top 11,000 pages before it's complete.
Wait, he can't resolve the story ark for a single character in two chapters?!?!
Could he? In theory, yes. Will he? If the existing five books are any guide, no.
"Then Daenerys got on a boat, sailed across the narrow sea, and married, oh, let's say...Tyrion. The end!"
That sometimes happens to me, too. It's better when the subject lives in an interesting period, so that the author can talk about other things during the slow bits.
The all time award for best narrative structure in a real life has to go to Julius Caesar. He starts out as the young playboy on the run from political purges. He comes back and rises quickly, partly because the purges cleared out the generation of older people who would have been ahead of him. He becomes a controversial politician, then goes off to conquer half of Europe, becoming fabulously wealthy in the process. His opponents pull a fast one on him back at the Capital, so he rebels and topples the greatest republic the world had ever seen. Then, right on the brink of ultimate power, he gets betrayed and murdered.
Are those the names of actual characters in the book? If they are, Martin should be beaten severely. And so should the people enabling him with their money.
I have no idea what happened to the guy who wrote decent stuff like Armageddon Rag & Fevre Dream in the '80s. Apparently, he swallowed a copy of some crap by Stephen Donaldson whole & then couldn't pass the resulting mass, which has remained in his bowels, metastasized & spread to his brain.
Very sad.
Books about eras are better that way, because you can just focus on the interesting bits w/o worrying what John Adams did from 1801 to 1828 (hint: not much you care about).
I liked "Founding Brothers", by Joseph Ellis, a lot. And, only 308 pages.
The Romans had a lot of that. Gaius Marius and Sulla both have quite remarkable story arcs, and Caesar's allies/rivals Pompey and Crassus are also pretty good in that respect.
I have no idea what happened to the guy who wrote decent stuff like Armageddon Rag & Fevre Dream in the '80s.
He took a look at Robert Jordan's career arc, thought, "I could do better than that," and decided that artistic integrity was overrated compared to fame, adulation, and piles of money?
It's shocking the Empire survived as long as it did with that crappy governance structure.
IIRC, they averaged a civil war every 4 years, or so.
Yeah ... probably something like that.
Also, judging from photos I've seen, the "piles of money" part of the equation was motivated to some extent by his apparent life's dream of becoming perfectly round. It's not like food is free, after all.
But, wouldn't you make more money with numerous 400 page books rather than occasional 1000 pagers? I mean, they don't charge 3 times as much for a 1000 page book; it's like giving the product away for free.
Kraken was, I think, a joke, and Mieville isn't a very funny guy. Embassytown is a failure, but it's the most interesting, impressive, and satisfying failure I've read in a long time. It's an attempt to dramatize the idea of a language without a division between signs and referents, i.e., of a language that does not refer to the real world, but is an extension of the real world. Mieville was absolutely insane to try this (if only because the concept is impossible to the human mind), and it's astonishing that he managed to be about 45% successful with it. All artists in all forms should be willing to sometimes just go for it, and Mieville really did here.
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