Hi Smut, this is your agent. I've got your proposal on the desk in front of me, for a teen-market novel based on Kurt Nordby's life.Oh good.
But frankly I see a problem. Nordby says here that "As a child I preferred playing indoors with the curtains drawn, in cellars, attics and barns or outdoors when it was overcast, in the evenings, or at night." I mean, Scandiwegians, hiding from light... This is going to sound like a clone of "Let The Right One In".
No, no, you're missing the point. I see Nordby as an embodiment of a philosophical thought experiment. He knew all there was to know about colour from the theoretical side -- from the molecular biology of retinal photopigments up to the subtle environmental interactions and non-linearities that produce the Bezold-Brücke Effect and the Kohlrausch-Helmholtz Effect* -- without ever experiencing colour in practice (he was a rod monochromat, living in a black-and-white world on account of his eyes having no functional cone cells).
OK Smut, if you say so. Not seeing many laughs in the plot, though.
No laughs? What do you mean? When Nordby is sent to Blind School because his vision is poor...
...Only to be punished for using his eyes as well as his fingertips to read the braille, which they regarded as cheating. Yeah, I read that far. I couldn't start laughing. Listen, you need to sex up the story. Just thinking on my feet here, running some ideas up the flagpole to see if they spurt, but how about if Nordby is an explorer, travelling the world capturing animals for zoos? -- but because he's a monochromat, he only captures black-and-white animals like zebras and pandas and penguins.
You totally stole that conceit from A Zed & Two Noughts. Isn't it enough that Nordby was mates with Oliver Sacks and accompanied him on a trip to The Island of the Colorblind?
Get with the program, Smut; it's not "stealing", it's "paying homage". Just thinking of the readership. How about this, then? -- Nordby meets other philosophical thought-experiments like John the reversed-spectrum dude. They could team up to break out of the Chinese room where they are being held captive by philosophers constantly badgering them with questions about their qualia and their states of mind. It's a bromance angle, see. Just flying a kite to see who salutes it.
Somehow I suspect that you also have a suggestion for bringing zombies into the story.
Well you may jest, Smut, but if you're going to make anything of this story, you need to get cracking before Philip Glass gets onto Nordby's case and turns it into another chamber opera.
* If you want a colour effect named after you, you need a German surname. This may not be fair but it is NOT MY FAULT -- I didn't make the rules.
22 comments:
he was a rod monochromat, living in a black-and-white world on account of his eyes having no functional cone cells
I think you should rewrite the screenplay as a thriller, the climax of which features Nordby trying to disarm a bomb, but not being able to ascertain which of the conveniently color-coded wires to cut.
Tragically, that plot twist turned up as a one-liner in "Cats and Dogs".
How about taking a different tack, and writing "Cats and Tentacles"?
Oh, and on the island of the colorblind, the Yellow-Blue man is king.
Is that the Yellowman BlueMan Group?
Regarding colour (edited for antipodean sensibilites) vision, I only see puddings in black and white.
I may have to stop off at the market after work.
No spider subplot? Color me there!
If you want a colour effect named after you, you need a German surname. This may not be fair but it is NOT MY FAULT -- I didn't make the rules.
Damn the Zeissgeit!
Grrrr. Should have been zeissgeist...
no posting before the 3rd cup of coffee.
zombies make ANY story better.
Listen, you need to sex up the story.
I'd listen to that man. He knows the kind of moral instruction teens require.
I'm impressed by the fact that the god of the desert returns Smut's phone calls.
~
Didn't Trevanian write a novel about a german guy who grew up in Japan, trained as a Go master who moved to Spain and became a Zen Samurai Basque Warrior Philosopher, went blind and fought Japanese warlords with a short shotgun and won despite being unable to, well, SEE?
'Cause if he didn't, I think I hallucinated again.
All over the carpet...
Got to watch out for those carpets, mikey. Especially the persian ones with the paisley pattern of spirals and smaller spirals branching off and the closer you look the more detail you can see, and it draws you in, and FECKIN' CACTUS FLASHBACKS
The reason why my camera still takes crap photographs despite the expensive German lenses is because it is possessed by a Zeissgeist.
My approach to photography is based on the Monkeys/Dickens school of excellence through random redundancy.
I use 8GB cards, and shoot literally thousands of pictures, and in spite of my utter lack of technical, compositional or artistic skills, a solid half dozen of them come out very good.
mikey proves that Quantiy IS Quality.
...sometimes phrased as "size does matter"
Product Marketing is nothing but repetitive messaging....
Who is this "god of the dessert"? I may have been praying to him without knowing it.
...to return to the topics of vision (and animals, and songs about goats):
Gonna down to the drugstore
Buy myself a goat
Tie him up in my front yard
For all my so-called friends to see
what kind of drugstore sells goats?
the good ones (ask Randy)
What, it makes perfect sense.
Hell, I regularly go down to the goat store to buy drugs....
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