tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-159736692024-03-13T17:39:07.792-04:00Keifus Writes!Keifushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00287358319899471490noreply@blogger.comBlogger447125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15973669.post-11290746973737887292016-11-09T10:09:00.001-05:002016-11-09T10:09:38.635-05:00Bold PredictionThe next few years will not make America great ("again"), not in terms of happiness, prosperity or security anyway. Not even for white guys. Don't forget to own this one, you assholes.<br />
<br /><br />
It occurred to me last night that we're probably witnessing the end of the post-war era in this country. As if there've been a continuum of assumptions and influences that have held sway for the last 30 years and more, that's now letting go and slipping away. Change has been hovering grimly all over 2016, where each celebrity death has felt like the passing of the times. We are hitting ecological turning points. 1945 is escaping living memory, and there aren't going to be too many more baby boomers young enough to throw out as candidates after the new administration has had its turn. I'm not delighted that their saving throw is likely to overshadow a generation (<em>my</em> generation, as per fucking usual), and I fear it's going to be a tough stretch for many of us.<br />
<br /><br />
On the other hand, it's been my observation that the millennials have better-developed consciences than we do, and the younger people seem better still. They may have the wherewithal to make a better world for themselves. And they've been getting screwed their entire sentient lives, which has to count something for the motivation. Wherever they take it from here, with whatever resources are still left, it looks like it'll be somewhere <em>different</em>.<br />
<br /><br />
My hope, honestly, is that our new president delivers what he has always claimed to be selling: outsider status. He doesn't appear to have a deep understanding of how politics, economics, or the natural world work, and clearly has no use for conservative intellectualism, surrounding himself with something other than the usual undead army of advisors. Maybe he won't be imaginative enough, and maybe he's not even cruel enough, to really gear the system to grinding people down. Maybe he'll content himself to governing only as far as he can see. The status is all that really matters, right? Here's hoping for the least-worst.Keifushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00287358319899471490noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15973669.post-72763288359565296082016-03-03T07:20:00.000-05:002016-03-03T07:38:50.839-05:00A Candidate I Could Have a Beer With, Part IVTo tell the truth, I hadn't really drank in almost eight years. It's true that I felt a <em>little</em> better without all the booze, and I lost a <em>little</em> bit of weight, but the real reason I stopped (and I have never told Jane this) is that after my father-in-law died, I didn't have nearly as much cause to. (I don't know if the old prick had a heart attack at the idea of a black man as president, but it seems possible to me, given the timing. I remember thinking he'd die on the spot if I told him that I actually once met the dude, but I never got the chance.) But overall, things have felt better since then. I'm older than I was, obviously, but not enough to really start feeling it yet. There's a lot of work for a geologist with all the new gas wells everywhere, and if my job remains pretty thankless (and depressing when I think about it), it's still meant more regular hours, better pay, even a better place to live. <br />
<br />
Better restaurants too. But, yeah, Jesus. <br />
<br />
It was a couple Saturdays ago, on family night. Jane wanted to try a new place, a real barbecue joint like the people are always going on about on her tv shows. I guess they're popping up even out here these days. We went there, and they had sawdust on the floor, long wooden tables, and served the food to you on big sheets of paper. It all seemed a little fake to me, or maybe just out of place. It was too clean in the corners or something, and nothing was worn or busted (and of course it was too expensive to pretend to think of as a dive) but I can't deny the food was delicious. It was as if it was trying to be down-home, but also the kind of place the suits could come in to for a meeting. And hey, for all I know, that's how they actually do it down south. <br />
<br />
The guy who walked in behind us <em>was</em> wearing a suit. But he didn't wear it like an office guy would, like it was part of the job. Instead, this guy was beaming in it, hands in his pockets, shoulders back, paunch on display. (Brother, this is why I slouch.) I think he was <em>proud</em> that he got to wear a suit, like a kid wearing something too big for him. First impressions, right? We all got in line, and he stood really close behind me. I'm not necessarily a hands-off guy, but like most people, I do like a little personal space.
<br />
<br />
"Howdy, y'all," he said. Yeah, Texas, I'm pretty sure, even if he didn't seem like the howdy-ing version. More like the college-Texas accent I come across in the industry sometimes. Maybe he stopped at this place because he thought it would make him feel at home.<br />
<br />
"Nice family you got," he went on, leaning his head toward Jane and Simon. "I can't tell you how good it makes me feel to see real American families doing well in these trying economic times." <br />
<br />
He spoke these words slowly, drawing out 'real American families' to the point of discomfort, and grinned a little closed-mouth grin when he was done. I started to ask where he was from, but the line moved forward just then, and there was an awkward moment as my wife and son moved up a step while I stood still. This guy bumped up even closer to me, now physically touching, and the grin didn't change. I moved forward too, determined to ignore him from here on out, but he kept tailing us.
<br />
<br />
And by the way, I am never eating at one of these places with group seating again. People piled up along these tables and were almost forced to talk to people they didn't come in with. I've met interesting strangers in my day, but I don't want to get stuck in a seat I can't move from if the conversation starts getting weird, like this one did. I was just about to shove my face into my brisket (or whatever it was Jane picked out for me), and this guy plops his suited ass across from us, and now he's all "Excuse me," in a loud and haughty way, like he's really affronted about something. <br />
<br />
"Uh?"<br />
<br />
"Excuse me, please!" <br />
<br />
Maybe it's something about the drawl (and to be fair, he had already rubbed me the wrong way), but I could hear both a whine and a threat in his voice. A couple other people had looked at him the first time, but now the whole restaurant was staring our way. (Everyone except Simon, who had his head buried in a game. Why did we ever get him that thing?) The bench felt hard and narrow all of a sudden.<br />
<br />
He pulled his lips back into that smile again, with his teeth just barely showing. "I think it would be appropriate to thank the Lord for such a fine meal, don't you?" He spread his arms out, "don't you?"<br />
<br />
I think he meant everyone, but he was looking at me. "I ...guess?"<br />
<br />
"Smart people never guess. Let's begin." He pulled his hands together and bowed his head with great solemnity, but ruined the effect a little by opening up his eyes at the end and scanning the room with them before starting in. I was watching more than listening, and that's probably why I was slow to pick up on what happened next. <br />
<br />
"...and Lord, deliver unto this great land a true leader who can steer us away from the false gods of socialism, and protect the unborn from the predations of liberal..."<br />
<br />
Oh shit, that's not a good topic to bring up around Jane. She gripped my leg hard enough to bruise it. <br />
<br />
In the quiet moment between the murmured "amen" and the normal diner sounds resuming, I could hear my wife's teeth grind. Mr. College-Texas was no longer paying attention though, and was now digging happily into his greens and noisily poking them into his mouth.<br />
<br />
"You know," she said coldly, "I had an abortion once. It saved my life. And even if it didn't, I am sure I could live with the ...predation."<br />
<br />
He looked up, his eyebrows arched and mouth slack. "Well, you're going to straight to hell then."<br />
<br />
I did my best, good husband that I am. "Hey, who the hell do you think you are?"<br />
<br />
"Sir, where did you go to school?"<br />
<br />
"What?"<br />
<br />
"I am certain that it was no Princeton. You are clearly no Einstein, no Madison. Who am I? Someone who without doubt has an IQ far higher than yours. Do you really wish to get into an argument with me?"<br />
<br />
I am not normally one to lose my cool, such as it is. All those years listening to Jane's father and I never raised my voice. But <em>this </em>guy. "Bent fuck sad potato you!" I yelled. <br />
<br />
"I rest my case. Enjoy life with your harlot." He dabbed the corners of his mouth with a napkin, let the grin slither across his face one last time, and got up. As he turned his back, I got up too. But Jane grabbed my arm.<br />
<br />
"Please don't, Bob. You're not that kind of person."<br />
<br />
"I'm not following him, Hon," I said, rapidly deflating. "I think I'd really like a beer though" Keifushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00287358319899471490noreply@blogger.com23tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15973669.post-67449410115089895382016-02-22T11:35:00.002-05:002016-02-23T08:58:41.743-05:00Review: Ready Player One, by Ernest ClineI devoured <em>Ready Player One</em> in just a couple sittings, which is a rare thing for me these days. It certainly went down in a delightful way, but now, a few weeks later, I'm not so sure if that was really because it's a fundamentally delightful novel, or because I am the laser-targeted audience of it. It <em>does </em>have tons of positive energy--it's probably going to make a fun movie--but I'm aware that even a grouch like me has few defenses against such a focused ray of nostalgia. <br />
<br />
The story is set thirty years in the future, in a joyless, overpopulated world that we don't, thankfully, see much of. With cheap energy on the way out, populations have been retracting toward what jobs or assistance are left, and middle America has put its own special flair on the ungoverned shantytown, which by the 2040s are basically trailer parks piled up on top of one another. It's here, nestled behind his aunt's clothes dryer, that we first find Wade Watts, navigating high school, and chasing whatever available escapes from his shit existence.<br />
<br />
Fortunately for Wade (not to mention the rest of humanity), online resources have developed quite a bit by these days. There exists a shared virtual OASIS, which is basically a shared, free-form, customizable online environment, with vast servers and a really spiffy virtual interface, that has grabbed up the entire population. Everybody uses it. Like Facebook, it was the right technology at exactly the right time, and it made its developers fabulously rich. People meet, game, watch TV, go to school, and have business meetings in OASIS, because let's face it, it helps to go <em>somewhere</em>. In the book universe, the originally developers of the technology were children in the 1980s (just like me!), and the imprint of these old men's dreams is everywhere in the virtuality. The event that sets the plot in motion is that the company founder, one James Halliday, has died, leaving an elaborate will. Whoever can find the three Easter eggs he left in his sprawling online galaxy will win his inheritance, and it proves to be more difficult than even obsessive fanboys can work out. By the time Wade (online handle: Parcival) is lucky enough to figure a piece out, most of the world has long since given up the hunt, but now an egg has been found, and the chase is on. <br />
<br />
The "egg hunt" draws heavily on the 1980s cultural influences that led Halliday to create OASIS in the first place. It was informed by all the stuff nerds would have liked, before the days when being a nerd was cool. A hunter culture has grown up that studies and celebrates the culture, and Parcival has (rather conveniently) mastered every potentially relevant facet of 80s dork trivia: from the popular movies, to the bad Japanese tv imports, to prog rock, to Dungeons and Dragons, to the clunky computers, to the arcade games we used to obsess over. All of these things have some prime niches in the OASIS, and the accelerating race through them is a love-fest to us current fortysomethings. The first clue, we learn before long, is within a vintage D&D campaign, not found before now because it was hidden in an unlikely place.<br />
<br />
It's interesting to me (and it earned Cline a pass for the book's most obvious flaw) that I knew a few savants like Parcival growing up, or at least I knew kids who shared an aspect or two: misfits with freakish game skills, or fan nerds, or kids who could sleuth out computer tidbits, or who obsessed on text-based games. And maybe I'm a little ashamed about the times I sidled away from these perpetual acquaintances in the vague hopes of finding where the girls were, or what mysteries alcohol might hold for me. [I <em>am </em>ashamed, to be clear. And I am sure I would have liked the girls from those original circles better, too.] In any case, the characters did not seem completely artificial to me. It's not quite as spot-on as was, say, the world where <em>Freaks and Geeks </em>was, but that (virtual) rec room where Parcival hung out with his buds only needed the spilled sodas and forbidden thrill of HBO movies to match my experience at that age.<br />
<br />
And of course these 80s kids are the ones making popular culture now too, cobbled together from the trash of three decades ago. I realize that I have no useful vantage point to judge it--I honestly can't tell if there was something really original that was sparking to life in those times, or if it's merely the weird sensation of our turn at adulthood now rolling around. I mean, I <em>want </em>to believe that it was the off-color, under-the-surface, cult fare--the independent scenes--that ended up resulting in anything worth a damn. I want to argue that illegitimacy, popular scorn, is what lit the creative fires that are burning today. But that's bullshit, right? Or at least bullshit here? Pretty much everything mentioned above (except the MUDs) was successful, and these quaint beloved movies were friggin' blockbusters. Reminiscing about our shared love of <em>Star Wars </em>is maybe not so controversial. But there were new things developing then too, and maybe there's an argument that this was the decade where people (Americans anyway) started to turn more toward a shared multimedia escapism that, in the timeline of <em>Ready Player One</em>, eventually coalesced into a population-wide MMORPG. <br />
<br />
So is this novel an objectively good book, or is it rollicking nostalgia service? I tried to imagine how I might have reacted to it if had been released in 1990 or so. I think it could have been: its obvious predecessors were there (<em>Neuromancer</em> gave us cyberspace in 1984, and <em>Snow Crash</em>, which is a lot closer in tone, was only a couple years around the corner), and god knows the pop culture references were still fresh. It might have been both more fun <em>and</em> more insufferable. (But as for the planned movie, I'm sure the special effects would have sucked back then.)<br />
<br />Keifushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00287358319899471490noreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15973669.post-7863980601995238342016-01-22T16:43:00.002-05:002016-01-27T10:37:03.025-05:00Review: Songs of Earth and Power, by Greg Bear[<em>Songs of Earth and Power</em> is a combined edition of Greg Bear's two novels, <em>The Infinity Concerto</em> and <em>The Serpent Mage,</em> "substantially rewritten" so that they hang together better as a single story. Recommended by my music instructor.]<br />
<br />
Talented musicians, they say, can reach an elevated state of focus, where extraneous thought turns off and the moment is fully attained. It's as if they become a conduit for the music itself, channeling some pure entity that exists apart from the instrument, apart from the player, the written notes, the composer, or the audience. Parts click in place, improvisation becomes inspired, and the notes seem to find themselves. (So I've heard, anyway.) My man Switters has written about how the debut of <em>The Rite of Spring</em> all but broke polite society a hundred years ago, a piece clearly intended to convey music's connection to this more primitive source. It's hard for me to imagine that a tightly written score is really the best way to get across that kind of pagan and improvisational sound, and I don't see how it could be played worth a damn without an orchestra full of crack musicians all deep in the zone. But even a blues riff is light years beyond any notes you could put on a page. <br />
<br />
What is the zone? Athletes and writers talk about it sometimes too, as do theoreticians. Is it (in music) the result of extensive practice, where muscle and ear memory team up to satisfy or confound <a href="http://keifuswrites.blogspot.com/2012/11/i-just-want-to-bang-on-drum-all-day.html">biological expectations</a> of tone and rhythm? Is it being good enough to express our intuitions about the modes and patterns we've been conditioned to since birth? Alert enough to make subtle adjustments--right when our inductive brain functions are going full-fire--to connect nuances of tone to similarly subtle emotions? Or skilled enough that the hands finally respond at the speed of thought? Is it a non-language conversation between fluent players who are sharing similar ideas? Are body resources are being siphoned away from cognitive centers (or are brain chemicals being flooded in) to produce a sensation of euphoria? Maybe! Or maybe there's a simpler and more appealing explanation. Maybe it's <em>magic</em>.<br />
<br />
Greg Bear couldn't have come up with a better conceit for <em>Songs</em> than this<em>, </em>where music is not just magic, but the Deep Magic, the stuff that worlds themselves are made from. (Which, to be fair, has <a href="http://www.tor.com/2011/02/24/a-world-sung-into-creation-the-magicians-nephew/">often</a> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Silmarillion-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/0345325818">been</a> a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musica_universalis">song</a>.) The mystery is introduced in the story when elderly composer Arno Waltiri befriends unassuming youth Michael Perrin at a suburban Los Angeles party. Michael aspires to be a poet, and Arno forms a bond with the teen over that, and we learn before long that back in the 40s, the old man had gone full Stravinsky on the LA crowd, not just scandalizing them, but literally transporting listeners away to some other plane. Before he passes away, Waltiri leaves Michael some instructions on how to make the same trip over the hedge by foot, where he finds a small community of lost listeners and other artsy types who inadvertantly got themselves a little too close to the source. As it turns out, the native fairy folk haven't been governing them especially well.<br />
<br />
The first two thirds of <em>The Infinity Concerto</em> read like a certain 1980s-vintage urban fantasy (<a href="http://keifuswrites.blogspot.com/2012/01/jack-of-kinrowan-is-omnibus-edition.html">kind</a> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/War-Oaks-Novel-Emma-Bull/dp/0765300346">of</a> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/TEA-BLACK-DRAGON-R-MacAvoy/dp/0553279920/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1453473024&sr=1-3&keywords=tea+with+the+black">like</a> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Book-Kells-R-A-MacAvoy/dp/0553252607/ref=pd_sim_sbs_14_2?ie=UTF8&dpID=410VK2RWKWL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR98%2C160_&refRID=0N1Z0BXFPT2JFW3S0M3C">these</a>), which shows a contemporary person reacting somewhat realistically to a strange and unexpected world, not necessarily with high stakes. Throughout the book, Michael remains fairly calm given his circumstances, and he's even somewhat genre aware. (I might argue that his reasoned temperament is the only real constant through the story.) He is not mean-spirited, but he is not gifted with great empathy either (which may seem strange for a poet, but is not for a 16-year-old). In fact, one of his magic tricks is to bundle up and discard parts of his essential self, and the first thing he sloughs away is guilt, self-recrimination, or anything else that might make him whine. As his role morphs from confused interloper, to unwitting tool, to full-on Chosen One, we are spared a young man's agonizing about the sacrifices required to save the world. There are points where I'd expect the kid to offer up a little more understanding for the people he's hurt, but if this story must turn into another Hero's Journey, then it's nice to make the trip with someone who's a little more rational about getting on with it.<br />
<br />
The realm of the Sidhe, where Michael ends up, is an interesting place to visit--its vaguely archetypical geography (decaying manor house, border town, wasteland, forest), sudden boundaries, unclear sense of time and distance, spooky inhabitants, and subjective magic combine to give it a sort of half-baked fantasyland feel. Intentionally so. The Realm is a world that's a little less real than ours, richer in possibilities because it was not as well glued together by its creators. It's worked as a home for the Sidhe since they walked out of Earth a couple dozen millennia ago, but the human settlement is one of the cracks that have recently appeared in its winsome fairy-ness, along with (or maybe because of) a rogue half-human mage named Clarkham, who has been busy annoying both worlds for a couple centuries now. After a long opening stint in town, Michael finally makes it out into the larger Realm, and eventually confronts Clarkham at a broadly telegraphed replica ("all should cry, Beware! Beware!") of Coleridge's Xanadu, where we are reminded that Michael is a poet. By the time we get to <em>The Serpent Mage</em>, the tired gods have really let the Realm go, and now the Sidhe are emigrating by any possible means, as the whole construct starts to splinter away into the void. Michael is now faced with how universes are created anyway, and how anyone is going to deal with merging the two of them, if it can be done at all. Let's hope he knows some crack musicians back on Earth.<br />
<br />
I don't have any reason to think that Bear was getting creatively meta with these novels, but the Realm is not a bad metaphor for the books themselves. They are occasionally lovely or delightfully bizarre, but the story doesn't hold together well enough for its inhabitants to last in it. It is really inconsistent in focus and scope. A full two hundred pages are spent in the human and mixed-race refugee camps, and none of those relationships had a convincing impact on the later plot. Bear's fabulous premise gets diluted to encompass any creative art (hiding a small world in the taste of a fine wine is cute, and while oenology can be inspired to the level of art, I was not convinced that it creates the same elemental thrill as music), and when it's finally about the music again, as it was at points in the second book, I'd kind of forgotten about it. Here, after long neglect, are a group of players literally rocking worlds as they perform Waltiri's and (why not) Gustav Mahler's lost concertos (didn't they feel anything all the hours they practiced it?). And there, at the end of things, comes along Mahler himself, along with the likes of Homer, Mozart, and (why not) Hillel--anyone who was anyone in human history--who were totally not long dead, but had been chilling in elfin purgatory, available at just the moment Michael needs a song of power to be improvised on the spot. As a series of related episodes, these sorts of things are sometimes fun, but I lost faith in anything like a coherent arc, and when the author would go on about the core mythology that bound all the threads together--something about mages and makers of many different races--I didn't find those parts especially compelling.<br />
<br />
But here's for putting the creativity back in Creation. <em>Songs of Earth and Power</em> maybe didn't amount, in itself, to the grand symphony it sensed behind all things, but it had a few nice tunes, and that's fine with me.Keifushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00287358319899471490noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15973669.post-69716028691824401022016-01-10T14:14:00.000-05:002016-01-27T10:40:08.524-05:00At Gun Points<br />
It's hard to ignore the national argument about guns these days. Between the president's recent executive efforts, the ravings of lunatic acquaintances on Facebook, and actual conversations with those old friends I am required to accept as sane, it's hard for me to resist formulating some kind of internal statement of principles in response to all the unsolicited opinions. (I know I coughed up something along these lines a couple years ago; I recall it was one of my more obnoxious posts.) As I probably mentioned then, I don't have any particular issues with gun ownership, collecting, or sports, and I recognize firearms as occasionally useful tools of land stewardship. It's not <em>my </em>bag, but hey, if you like the things, then more power to ya. And as far as hunting goes, I feel similarly about that as I do about smoking in bars, other people's backyard parties, or leaf blowers. Which is to say, I would greatly prefer the public space to accommodate my activities more than those of some orange-jacketed yahoo who might accidentally put lead in me, but I accept that some kind of compromise is probably appropriate here.<br />
<br />
I don't reflexively hate the things, but I've arrived at a few considered points in my internal process that I can't work past, and which I've never seen adequately refuted in the public conversation. And, well, here they are. <br />
<ul>
<li>Owning a gun is one thing, but <em>carrying</em> a gun, on the other hand, makes you a dangerous asshole. You are dangerous because you're carrying a gun. And you are an asshole because you feel the need to be dangerous in my company. </li>
<li>Any reading of the second amendment that gets around the "well regulated militia" part is incredibly tendentious. For something held so proudly forth as an unassailable totem of gun rights, it's front-loaded with weasel words.</li>
<li>Gun manufacturers (and their lobbyists) don't necessarily have citizens' best interests at heart. Their goal is to <em>sell guns</em>, which may well be inimical to the well-being of the people, considering you can sell more guns when groups of locals are inspired to point them at one another. I won't address exporting them into conflict-rich zones (I don't know enough to comment), but let's take the NRA formulations as stated: the bad guys with guns, the world where only outlaws have guns. They didn't mysteriously appear in their hands of all these scary people. They bought arms that you, the gun companies, manufactured and sold to them. Are you seriously using the threat of the people you've already armed to sell even more guns to the rest of us? Fuck you, the NRA.</li>
<li>It's not your imagination: mass shootings in the U.S have gone up in the last 15 years, according to the <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0ahUKEwihwInGvZ_KAhWBVz4KHaCoDQ0QFggcMAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.fbi.gov%2Fnews%2Fstories%2F2014%2Fseptember%2Ffbi-releases-study-on-active-shooter-incidents%2Fpdfs%2Fa-study-of-active-shooter-incidents-in-the-u.s.-between-2000-and-2013&usg=AFQjCNHYI5rZWAW272j2D8kx8c4ahrS5uw&sig2=eoiUnWuCGgresIxcdX5ynw">FBI</a>. Meanwhile, our murder rate is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate">higher</a> than other developed countries, and guns make up the majority (like 60%) of those homicides. Guns are reported to increase the risk of <a href="http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/magazine/guns-and-suicide/">suicide</a>, at least among young people. I'm aware that statistics can be massaged, but these seem as reliable sources as anyone's going to find. I'm aware that <em>overall</em>, violent crime is down here, as it is in many parts of the world. But it's not too adventurous a hypothesis to propose that what gun access does is to change the <em>nature </em>of violence. They're death-enabling. Would-be murderers are empowered to take dozens of victims along with them. People down a rough path can have them right there when they're feeling their most desperate. Maybe this isn't for the best.</li>
<li>You're almost never going to get the jump on a prepared armed person. Any self- or home defense scenario which requires you to grab a hidden pistol from your person, or fish it out of your possessions, you've already lost. Seriously, playing cat-and-mouse through your sleepy house, standing off a mugger, preemptively intimidating a violent display, it all presumes you've identified the offender and his intentions (not to mention established the safety of everyone in <em>your </em>dangerous path) before he's had a chance to perpetrate his crime. Good luck with that. It also presumes your threat identification skills are top-notch, and let's be honest here...<br />
<br />
In order to ever put the odds of these kinds of scenarios in your favor, you have to be <em>constantly</em> prepared. There are situations where this level of perpetual adrenalized vigilance is warranted, but it is very stressful. Usually it's limited to people whose job it is (cops, soldiers, gang enforcers), and because it demands abnormally high commitment, they get paid for it. <br />
<br />It's true that sectors of normal life can also come under such routine threat as to require hyper-awareness, but when the social contract has broken down to such a degree as that, the equation changes. There are marginalized enough people in this country, sadly, but promotion of American gun rights has almost always been from a position of social privilege. I realize that I've been lucky, world-citizen-wise (as have the president, those Facebook loonies, and my friends). I'm not really at much risk getting wasted in the path of some neighborhood strongman or some aggressively deranged bastard, and I think obsessing about them is kind of chickenshit under the circumstances. I'm currently much more worried about drunk drivers, cancer, house fires, and botulism--you know, the perfectly rational stuff--none of which can be deterred with firearms.</li>
</ul>
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Undoubtedly, the number one perk of civil society--arguably the <em>definition</em> of civil society<em>-</em>-is that walking out the door isn't an invitation for death. A few legal hurdles don't sound too onerous to reserve guns for those who want them for nonviolent ends. The people who feel otherwise, I just wish to hell they'd make the honest argument that they feel the tradeoffs are worth it to them. If the increased risk of horrible violence (for <em>someone</em>) is worth the security/enjoyment/empowerment a gun provides (to you), then demonstrate your steel-eyed toughness and say so. Keifushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00287358319899471490noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15973669.post-17595196188070908912015-12-31T12:49:00.002-05:002015-12-31T12:49:41.082-05:00Happy New Year, FriendsSee you in '16.Keifushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00287358319899471490noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15973669.post-79783917535359955612015-11-26T10:57:00.002-05:002016-01-27T10:36:08.752-05:00Review: The Windup Girl, by Paulo BacigalupiI never realized it before reading this novel, but what the world needs is a dystopia in the style of Graham Greene, where the sadness, secrecy, danger, ubiquity... the altogether <em>oppressiveness </em>of a failed social effort can be written up as the perfect pot to stew the uneasy moral gristle of the characters. Greene, of course, had a knack for spotting these tired pockets of the real world, but your better science fiction is all about removing constraints like that, and it has a long history of creating sorry futures as a critique of political ideas. It'd be a great marriage, is what I'm saying.<br />
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<em>The Windup Girl</em> is not that novel, for better or worse, but I will admit that I read a good third of it really wanting it to shape up as a new <a href="http://keifuswrites.blogspot.com/2008/08/review-of-quiet-american-by-graham.html"><em>Quiet American.</em></a> The setting works: it's in a future southeast Asia, in a region historically resistant to imperialism, yet eternally dealing with the attempt, simmering with potential coups and clogged up with its own webs of loyalty, history, crime and general hardship. Generations of resource depletion and biological capitalism have left humanity diseased and dependent, and in the Thailand of the story, have put subsistence living toe to toe with modernity. We are also introduced early on to a character I wanted to read as a reinvented Alden Pyle. Similarly named, Anderson Lake is likewise more of an interloper than a proper protagonist, who, along with the boozy expats of his acquaintance, doesn't quite jibe with the culture. He's in truth a powerful political agent, a fact belied by his willingness to risk himself within the intrigues of Thai society. He takes a possessive interest in a local woman, and, well, even if that's as far as the similarities go, you can at least see why I was rolling with this.<br />
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But the cracks start early. We're in Lake's mind from the beginning of the book, and it doesn't take long for the his schemes to be revealed, in context, as probably malignant. Nor is there any allegorical love triangle here. Emiko may be a trophy object but, well, she's not Thai for one thing (not even Japanese, strictly speaking), and more importantly, she is a challenging individual in her own right. There is overall too much action, too many characters, and not the right kind of internal space to really qualify as a Greene knockoff. It's not a tenuously drawn inner balance, this novel, it's the usual point-of-view plot mosaic.<br />
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Bacigalupi imagines a world where food sources have been monopolized by a handful of "calorie companies," modern-day Monsantos who have long since succeeded in suppressing local agriculture in exchange for imports or rights to grow non-propagating proprietary strains that the companies sell. (It's the American Midwest extrapolated to a global hellscape.) It's not spelled out whether the succession of plagues that have further eradicated old species and leveled the human population were intentionally waged by the calorie companies, or whether they were a result of tempting the world's fate with highly engineered monoculture. In any case, the political arms of the companies actively seek out what biodiversity is left, with an aim to develop it (no doubt with similar results down the line), and keep the business one step ahead of the next pandemic. Thailand has made it this far by vicious containment measures, and a rumored pet scientist. The nation has also maintained an old seed vault in the capital that Anderson Lake wants very much to negotiate. <br />
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The detail of this sorry world is very well drawn out, and the author has really done a good job in fleshing out a location for its conflicts, and selecting characters to witness it from different angles. This Bangkok seethes with people and squirms under the weight of history. There is a languor to the city that comes from more than the jungle climate, it's heat, fatalism, decay, a struggle that's more necessary than hopeful. The impact of global scourge and dearth of kilowatt-hours is so effectively <em>shown </em>that I kept noticing the times it was told. (My only mild complaint about this book is that he uses just a hair more neologisms than I felt were necessary.)<br />
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Most things are windup in this world. The earth has been so poorly used that hand-crank power has become the ubiquitous poor-man's alternative to carbon. However, Emiko (the girl of the title) isn't throwback tech, she's been made to have jerky toy-like motions. Emiko is an engineered person, a New Person in the book's language, one who has been bred, altered, and conditioned from birth for a role as a high-end courtesan. Not just with the creepy doll motions, she's genetically predisposed to obey and please, to seek male guidance, and what the hell, that's three novels in a row (not to mention a tv show) now where subservience is governed by sci-fi technicalities, and although it's gotten under my skin, Emiko's arc is quite satisfying in this story, because this is a girl whose mind has a slim chance of conquering her genetic tendencies. This far from removed the microcosm for which she's been designed, obedience has treated her poorly. Abandoned by her old patron and forced into a lesser life of prostitution, in an unsuitable physical environment, she wants safety in Anderson Lake, and that is something her world will also probably not allow. <br />
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A spoiler here, but among the many plot whorls, a new disease has been simmering in Lake's business front, an entirely natural one. It is managed with the scientific tools at hand, but not before it gets Lake. Emiko (and new people in general) are resistant to it, and, we gradually learn, often have other strengths, provided the bullshit low-status-signifying mods can be weeded out (or gradually bred out, or can somehow provide into an ecological advantage). It's heavily suggested that these new organisms are the future of the planet, and our true legacy. The fact that the disease strain evolved from a natural mutation (i.e., not engineered and as a random element to the plot) is significant, and we're offered a question here about the nature of nature. Is human meddling an affront against nature or is it an aspect of it? Most of us prefer the anthropocentric answer, that we're the end result of evolution, and that we have some relationship with the biological world. But the honest answer is that we're part of the process that has no goal, and in the book, all our activity has been the kind of catastrophe that increases speciation (and the earth's had a few).Keifushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00287358319899471490noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15973669.post-55710237664821332622015-11-22T16:08:00.000-05:002016-01-27T10:44:23.247-05:00AKA Earned Suspension of DisbeliefSeveral months ago, I put aside a post about the <em>Daredevil </em>series that had recently aired on Netflix. I couldn't file it down to the narrow point I wanted to make at the time (and I was also conscious that I have one about the Marvel live-action universe still on the page), but last night, I stayed up binge-watching (as the kids do these days) the followup series, <em>Jessica Jones</em>, and I think I want to work a few things out here. <br />
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<em>Daredevil</em> was the only reason I gave in and got a new Netflix subscription early this year. On the whole (and like most people), I thought it was fantastic. There are any number of ways to take on the space-aliens-and-superheroes fare and keep it entertaining--god knows that like 90% of these books I read fall neatly in the sci-fi/fantasy basket--but I've always liked the stories best when they keep a strong connection to known reality. I think this was as important for the oldest hero stories as it is for the new ones: you can't make anyone larger than life if no one around them is life-sized. Almost always, the believable angle comes as a plausible approximation of human nature in the response to all the craziness (I always love the sane, marginalized characters who point out just how nuts everything around them is, or who can't help lampshading the plot flaws), but what I'm finding so interesting about Marvel's live-action efforts is how they've been very creative about the places the stories touch ground. <br />
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I don't think <em>Iron Man</em> would have worked nearly as well, for example, without a 20-minute cut of Tony Stark's touch-and-go experimentation. Something in there got the process of innovation some exaggerated flavor of right. Shit never works too well at the beginning, even when you're a tech genius. <em>Agent Carter</em> wasn't in the same league as the Netflix dramas, but it was occasionally very strong, and that one was held to earth by the unexpected tethers of institutional bias. When I write it like that, it sounds like it's been done before, but it's a very different animal here, and the distinction is important. Peggy isn't smashing her way through the sexist 1940s and punching oppression-themed villains in the eye (not yet anyway), she is more like a well-realized character who is struggling within a confining peacetime reality. <em></em><br />
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<em>Daredevil </em>went on to do a whole bunch of things right in this regard too. The grounding theme of this show was the human consequences of movie-theater violence. In a stroke of genius, the aftermath of all the skyscraper toppling in <em>The Avengers</em> reverted New York to an old film-school version its corrupt, shabby self. (Because for anyone who's been there recently, today's Hell's Kitchen is a world of safe boring storefronts, and modern Times Square looks like some unholy lovechild of Disneyland and Tokyo.) And of course when the hero can get his ass kicked, get ground down, get laid up as painfully as Matt Murdock did, it makes any of his successes feel earned. Seriously: <em>Daredevil</em> was a great urban Kung Fu story before anyone got in spitting distance of the red suit. It would have worked every bit as well if he were just an athletic blind guy--the story didn't really need the "abilities." I bought wholly in to the first ten episodes, even as syndicates of mystical old ninjas were running through the city, and this viewer didn't bat an eye. Those places where it gave in to its comic self, <em>that's </em>when it stumbled a little. <br />
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(The other way that <em>Daredevil</em> established its emotional stakes--and this is a strength of <em>Jessica Jones</em> as well--was by giving the characters room to act like believable friends. To get close to someone as likeable but remote as Matt, you'd have to keep ignoring all of his subtle keep-away vibes, and they found a couple sorts of people who could. It required some decent acting and direction to communicate it.)<br />
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So on to <em>Jessica Jones</em>, a character I was only vaguely aware of through the nerdblogs, who came out 15 years after I gave up on comics. On TV, she is more obviously powered with enhanced strength and (at least some) resilience, and it's terrifying how all of that power means precisely fuck-all when it comes to the emotional challenges of acting like a hero. <br />
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If <em>Daredevil </em>was about the consequences of violence, <em>Jessica Jones </em>is about the consequences of abuse. Looking back on the binge, I see it mapped on every character thread, but as before, this is the tether to human realism. David ("Tenth Doctor") Tennant plays the villain Kilgrave, who can make people obey him, who can make people <em>want </em>to obey him (and what good is super strength against <em>that</em>?). This is an abuser who is additionally enabled by mindfuck powers (and it's not at all clear which came first), and it's damn interesting how often he resorts to conventional abuse too, because that's the kind of person he is. It's damn interesting how willing the show is to get right in the head of people like this and develop it as a theme (not just Kilgrave, but a number other male and female characters act abusively as well), treating them with empathy, encouraging the viewer to understand their motives and to weigh their charming apologies, without forgiving a damn thing about what they do, and without ever ceding the agency of the victims. It's a bit of a spoiler, but Kilgrave starts out as casually menacing, and the show gradually recasts his behavior as obsession, and then as <em>petty </em>obsession. And the truth is, the Purple Man would be nowhere near as scary if he were bent on world domination, or revenge, or any of the standard supervillain schtick. Nor is Luke Cage (Jones's lover, and total badass) allowed to ride in as a savior, even though if anything he is more powered than she is. He understands that this is her demon to overcome, and the wannabe good-guy types who feel it is their job? The ladies don't even let them drive. It only sounds like a textbook in hindsight, because it's a character drama before anything else, and they do an good job of keeping it real.<br />
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<br />Keifushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00287358319899471490noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15973669.post-365735937606256032015-11-07T09:23:00.003-05:002016-01-27T10:36:08.705-05:00Review: The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell<span lang="">I remember the buzz in the science fiction groups when <em>The Sparrow</em> first came out. It populated almost everyone's best list for awhile (and the ones who didn't love it felt that the acclaim came at the expense of the genre's roots, which is silly enough to make me wonder if I am not in fact misremembering things), and among that crowd, it's not hard to see what the appeal was. The book is genial, lightly philosophical, hard-ish on the science, and tends to be empowering of women, introverts, and technical people. But as a plotted novel, Russell kind of botches the delivery, and I suspect that anyone's enjoyment of it is going to depend an awful lot on what they are reading for (even more than is usually the case).<br />
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The story is set in the near future (that is, 1996's near future, which is getting very close to the present), and it's set in motion when an astronomer at the Arecibo radio observatory in Puerto Rico picks up an unexpected signal. The politics of the times, the brevity and intermittancy of the message itself, and the protagonists' personal and professional networks, all have plausibly coincided in such a way that the is revelation is confined to a very small team at first, long enough that they can begin the project themselves, under the discreet hand of the Roman Catholic church (Jesuits, so, you know, the <em>good </em>discreet Catholics), before the public really gets wind of it. The team determines that it's in fact a snippet of an extraterrestial broadcast. Music, Hot Hits from the next star over. Could this be investigated further? Well, the church is genuinely interested, and consider it within the Society's historical context of mission and scholarship. Our primary character, Father Emilio Sandoz, is a preeminent linguist, and makes a compelling case for a cultural and scientific effort. Could we actually get there and check it out? Surprisingly yes: 2019 technology sometimes moves asteroids during mining (chucking mass out the back), and a sealed rock could in fact keep up 1g by doing this for a couple decades. The team already includes a pilot, an astronomer, and a polymath, and holy shit, this is all really happening. </span><br />
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The discovery aspects of the book are done pleasantly well. It reads like sf "competence porn" that for once isn't driven by male ego. Russell makes a lot out of the collaborative process, doesn't discount luck (enough things have come together that the Catholics, and Emilio particularly, can't help but see it as God's plan), and keeps a group dynamic based on open communication. So much of the planning and travel--it must be at least half the book--takes place over intelligent dinner party conversations, where people laugh a lot, and reveal themselves over that extra glass of wine. The individuals are diverse, likeable and interesting enough (Anne Edwards, the middle-aged den mother of the group, appears to be a real Mary Sue character here, the writer herself herding them along), and these kinds of scenes continue even through the voyage to the planet eventually known as Rakhat, where contact with the alien species is first made.<br />
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And even if it takes a while to get there, the events on the planet are <em>interesting</em>. Finally, the long-developed situation starts changing, and it's the best part of the book. The characters misjudge the nature of Rakhat's intelligent species (who are about as responsible with civilization as humans are, even if they're much better stewards of their planet). There are two of them, nearly indistinguishable, and of course people always overestimate the Eloi at first. Russell's understanding of ecological relationships drives the plot here, as well as inevitable cultural ignorance, and it's quite cleverly done. <span lang=""><br />
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<span lang="">It's a perfectly cromulent way to develop the story, but these parts are all told in flashback, and it's explicit from page one that something went terribly wrong on Rakhat. Emilio Sandoz is the only member of the team to return, and he's disfigured, cynical, sick, and with what little knowledge that's revealed, disgraced. His illness seems alien or supernatural (it's not, although he's been plenty traumatized), and the investigatory committee is hungry for his side of the story (although they have years worth of reports, and the popular conclusions that they have allowed are fairly ridiculous assumptions--I'll try not to spoil it). </span><br />
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Sending the mission off the rails and breaking Sandoz's faith would have worked fine as a linear progression, but this extended flashback business was not the right way to manage the contrasts. In effect, Russell has decided to set up two kinds of novels and make them sit awkwardly side by side. For a mission that has succeeded on a foundation of open communication within a group, the author is keeping information from the reader here only to delay Emilio's big reveal. Since none of the church officials we meet really do much to move the plot that way, I didn't really care about any of them, and yet they occupy a substantial chunk of the text. Russell wants <em>The Sparrow</em> to be a voyage of discovery and a tense character drama <em>at the same time</em>, but in the discovery part, the characters aren't behaving dramatically, and in fact, any sustained personal tension would have been inimical to the kind of story that's working itself out. Most of them don't even change in any meaningful way. And the one guy who does have an arc--Sandoz--is also the hardest character for the reader to approach. He starts off a somewhat enigmatic man--withholding his inner self from others as a sort of self-enforced humility--and keeps this level of remove throughout the story, a trait which grows sort of beatific as his faith deepens. When he's recovered afterwards, he's closed off for less subtle reasons. We spend the whole novel revisiting him in his broken state, but it doesn't become meaningful until the end, after all of his relationships are established, and we finally understand what caused it. Probably Emilio's more genuine opening after the trauma is the point of these sections, but even though it feels good to point him in a direction of recovery or redemption, it's still a tremendous anticlimax, and it would have made a better epilogue than ongoing plot.Keifushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00287358319899471490noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15973669.post-40343645110022513352015-10-21T18:34:00.001-04:002016-01-27T10:36:08.708-05:00Review: Fledgling, by Octavia E. Butler[This morning, I upended a mug of coffee all over my grandfather's old desk, splashing my computer, a small stack of books, and all of the usual office detritus. I mean, usually I reserve that sort of thing for work, where I can dramatically imperil valuable documents instead of 1950s scholastic-grade oak. But apparently I've grown weird about books, and maybe this was nature's way of telling me to write a couple of those up and put them away.]<br />
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<em>Fledgling</em>, in 2005, was published just a little bit ahead of the modern wave of attractive, socialized fictional vampires. It's similar on its face to all the <em>Twilight </em>clones, but unlike most of the selections from the Paranormal Romance section, this one still feels like an innovative concept, turning a traditionally supernatural relationship into an evolutionary one. (And unlike I imagine those selections to be, this one is very well written.) The Ina, as they're called in the book, have been on the earth for as long as humans have, existing in symbiosis with select human individuals. They live longer than us (and believe themselves wiser), have very low birth rates, and are gifted with more intense strength, dexterity, and senses (especially scent), with the attendant animal-like compulsions to feed, breed and sleep, which, as with their sister sapients, they arrange their society to accomodate and govern. They're light-sensitive, they require human blood for nourishment, and with proper care, they can heal like Wolverine. So standard vampires, more or less, except with a more compelling backstory, and a more interesting relationship to people. Their venom is intoxicating--it feels gooood for us humans to let blood--and it creates dependency, basically mood-altering people into a state of loyalty, contentment, and (not counting the addiction) physical health. The Ina maintain long-term partnerships with their symbionts, ranging from something rationalized as mutual benefit, to the relationship of an ant to an enslaved aphid.<br />
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And now enter the protagonist Shori, a pubescent Ina (looks 12, but is in fact in her fifties) who possesses some genetic advantages due to experimental interbreeding. Notably, she has dark skin that protects her in the daylight, but she's also improved in her Ina-ness compared to the rest of them--faster, stronger, more desirable scent, more intoxicating saliva, an objectively better specimen. <br />
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You will have perhaps noticed that in a few strokes, Butler has transformed an overused fantasy trope into a complicated question of race, power, sexism, sexuality, consent, agency, and morality. <br />
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It's a highly accessible read, too. In the opening pages of the book, Shori wakens from a near-death injury, without her memory, amid corpses, ashes, ruins. What happened to her? What's her place among her kind? It's a fairly linear (if somewhat episodic) path to answer those questions, and the prose doesn't wander too far off into the philosophical depths, even though Butler's given herself every opportunity to do so. Shori herself is a sympathetic outsider, and her personal stakes are high enough to keep the plot chugging. Focusing on the better people of either species, and pushing the really incorrigible brand of racism onto the snooty vampire elite, dodges a lot of the challenge for readers. (Or at least for white readers--I'd be very curious to know how this book reads from an African-American perspective.) <br />
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But the thing is, this story would have failed without a strong and nuanced understanding of those big themes, and they provoked a strong emotional reaction in me. I left it disappointed how the adult Ina couldn't avoid the same traps of prejudice and patriarchy that have ruined so much of human history. I liked Shori, but I couldn't let go of how damn patronizing she was toward her harem, or how her first symbiont was <em>not </em>a willing addition to it, how his intellectual antipathy toward obedience and revulsion at sexualizing a child's body had no chance against Shori's vampiric love juice. I was affronted by the idea of people as pets, either abused or loved. I was mad at the Ina for not creating a better society, and then angry, yet again, at my own damn species for the same reason. It seems like a small novel to contain such big currents, but then, that's what makes it good.<br />
Keifushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00287358319899471490noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15973669.post-87301431348572792552015-05-15T10:16:00.000-04:002016-01-27T10:36:08.757-05:00Review: Time's Arrow, by Martin Amis<br />
I don't know how I feel that the cover of my copy of <em>Time's Arrow</em> gave the plot away. Not because it ruins the story so much--we know that this Tod Friendly character's a creep, nursing some nasty past or other--but I wonder how I would have received it if I hadn't known already that the scale of evil reached all the way up to the Nazi death camps, if the escalation would have startled me (more), or if I would have found a different perspective on a re-read. (Welp, I guess I also just blew the chance for you to go read it and report back to me. Sorry about that.)<br />
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The conceit is that the narrator, whoever that is exactly, is stuck in Tod's body as a traveler, unable to exert his will on it or to see beyond what Tod sees. He perceives time going in reverse, only able to guess at the demons in his host's past until he actually gets there. The narrator opens his eyes and gasps in the man's last decrepit breath, as doctors batter him to sensation on the table. He painfully retraces his backwards way home, slowly getting more vital as he de-ages. He retains a forward-thinking sense of cause and effect, and Amis wrings comic irony from any number of vignettes told from that point of view. Beautiful things are lovingly destroyed, food is masticated into form and returned to the store for money, arguments and hurt feelings are suddenly reconciled with insensitivity or violence, and the toilet and the trash are the benevolent wellsprings and motive forces of humanity. Sometimes the bits are well-written enough that they almost work in either direction, at which point I had to stop and read them again. Even for a short book, and even with the humor,** it got tiring.<br />
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And it's a pretty well-worn shtick by the time we get to the real horrorshow, where Friendly finds himself with a proper German name, working under some fictionalized Mengele. He relates Auschwitz as the asshole of the world, and can think of no higher praise. Here, people are nursed from death to health, often with the urgent intervention of the doctor's own hand, and he soars with the good feeling of it. After the war, his story devolves to anticlimax, as the narrator fades away from consciousness toward the innocence of infancy. Amis suggests that Tod's a product of his time, that anyone could be corrupted with his empowerment and influences, but I don't buy it--even as a young man before the war, Tod (now Odilo) reads like some kind of sociopath. I don't think people abuse their wives and terrorize their neighbors just because they're <em>allowed</em> to. Too many of us drift along with the historical tides, but others smile and merrily dig in an oar.<br />
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Heavy stuff, and you know what? Enough already. I want to say that the problem here is that <em>Time's Arrow </em>either deals with far too weighty a subject for a gimmick book, or it's far too gimmicky and ironic for a Holocaust book. <br />
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Or maybe that's not exactly the right complaint. This backwards thing** is well-suited to terrifying experience, but, I think, it invites a more existential and universal sort of anxiety, giving us readers a rare alternate angle on these nagging questions of what it means to briefly be thinking meat in an incomprehensibly complex universe. I mean, you don't need genocide to make that point. <br />
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I found myself fixated on the reality of the narrator. I don't actually think Amis addresses "the rules" to my satisfaction, but he manages to squirrel away from scrutiny because it's such a short book. The speaker knows back from forward, and for that matter, he's stuck working in the language and metaphor we know, which is inevitably built on a foundation of causality... so why does he accept the mode of his experience? (And when he briefly asserts normal time, why doesn't the return to reverse chronology <em>keep </em>bothering him?) And who the hell is he narrating to? What is his perception of elapsed time? Because the continuity of his thought (that is, this short novel) sure makes it seems like he's walking us through a whole backwards life in the space of an hour or two. I settled in my mind that it was not an alien presence talking to us, but some other projection of Tod/Odilo himself. That is, another artifact of the same bolted-together biohardware floating there in space-time, one that is merely perceiving things in a different way, because after all, who the fuck knows the hidden depths of how all this works. And the message here--the holy-shit, make-you-think part that has really kept this novel alive in my mind--is that we can't condemn the widdershins experience for being any more arbitrary and bizarre than this one. We are only along for the ride on time's <em>forward </em>arrow too. The best we can really do is comment.<br />
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* Speaking of detached humor, and evil, and layers of irony, oh look, Martin Amis wrote the introduction to the copy of <em><a href="http://keifuswrites.blogspot.com/2010/03/review-lolita-by-vladimir-nabokov.html">Lolita </a></em> that I read. Seems fitting.<br />
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** It's not the most common one, but I think it's fair to call it a <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BackToFront">trope</a>. I was tearing through my shelves trying to find it, but once again, the internet was the better tool: the first story I remember reading in this vein was called <a href="http://where-there-had-been-darkness.blogspot.com/2011/02/roger-zelazny-book-review-divine.html"><em>Divine Madness</em></a>, by Roger Zelazny (which, I will add, didn't <a href="http://keifuswrites.blogspot.com/2006/11/postapocalyptic-highway-i-review-of.html">suck</a>). That one got to the scary and sensitive too, and didn't even require awful people doing unimaginable things. <br />
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<br />Keifushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00287358319899471490noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15973669.post-28294593620416046492015-04-05T16:26:00.002-04:002016-01-27T10:36:08.702-05:00Review: Reamde, by Neal Stephenson<br />
When I was reading this book last December, up popped a spookily coincident <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/12/08/366849122/ransomware-when-hackers-lock-your-files-to-pay-or-not-to-pay">NPR story</a> about new developments in ransomware, where hackers would only take payments in bitcoin to free up your locked files. Bitcoin, meanwhile, isn't far removed in either concept or practice from in-world video game currency, and we all remember the karmic hilarity when its largest exchange, Mt. Gox (still hanging on to its original name, when it was made for investing virtual gaming loot), <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox">went ass-up</a> a couple of years ago, with hundreds of thousands of electronic Fun Bux still unaccounted for. In <em>Reamde</em>, Stephenson only got ahead of these stories by a couple of years. Science fiction? Maybe just barely.<br />
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The story is set in motion when reclusive billionaire Richard Forthrast and his niece Zula inadvertently cross paths with a small-time criminal connected to the Russian mafia. Chases and movie violence follow, but the nut of it all is that our short-for-this-novel thug had been contracted to deliver some data to the mobsters, but it got locked up in ransomware that infected his computer while he was up the night before playing fictional online RPG, T'Rain. Zula winds up kidnapped and dragged along with the Russians as they look for these hackers to get the data, and a growing cast of interesting characters scramble to respond. (It already sounds complicated, right?) Will the kidnappers realize they've got the niece of the guy who struck it filthy rich <em>inventing the game</em>?<br />
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And here's a confession: I played World of Warcraft sporadically for a recent year or two. I didn't really play it right*--because hey, it's me--but I can certainly attest how compelling is the sheer size of the world and all its official supporting background lore, as well as the organic depth it has grown from all the people wandering around and feeling out the stories. The fictional T'Rain is fashioned as the next generation of WoW, and Stephenson delivers a pile of backstory on how something so broad could come together. <br />
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We're introduced to many of the fictional game developers, various sorts of geek obsessives who make Richard Forthrast (Vietnam-era draft dodger, erstwhile weed smuggler, with his family of borderline survivalist crackpots) look like a grounded member of normal society. The game world is built on an inappropriately thorough (and otherwise uselessly fictional) geological model developed by one of its founding geniuses. One conceit of T'Rain is that it does its world-building from, literally, the ground up--that is, it is a planet which generates its mineral wealth (a big deal when everything in it priced in gold pieces) by some academic-level approximation of natural processes. The reason it isn't called <em>Terrain</em> is that Richard also brought on a couple of by-the-pound fantasy authors to crank out a world's worth of cultural backstory, one of whom is a prolific hack, unapologetic about chucking apostrophes into every proper noun. (The other fancies himself a scholar and a linguist, and they drive each other amusingly nuts.) Sadly, these guys amount to not much more than subplots, but it's a secondary challenge to somehow fold players' rogue behaviors into the proper game.<br />
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The other conceit of the game is that it's built to <em>encourage</em> gold farming. Gps are transferrable to the outside world as currency, and players can fall under one anothers' vassalage. Low-level users are effectively paid a pittance to mine out T'Rain (often using bots), while players with higher purposes typically pay dues and have better quests. If WoW once gave economists a small thrill to observe it as a microcosm of a regulated economy, they'd go nuts about T'Rain, which has a permanent labor class and extraction-based wealth baked right into it. Stephenson is a good enough writer not to make this into a polemic, although I think he wants it seen as more mutually beneficial than fundamentally unequal. He does wind out a longer picture of the players behind all the exploited toons--the world where the Chinese hackers grew up, but those guys frankly end up okay.<br />
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So anyway, the key to some criminal filing cabinet is locked up in T'Rain somewhere, and all the best scenes in the book--mostly because they're so strange--have the characters chasing one another around in the game environment. Outside, there is a real-world pursuit going on too, and we see these hackers and trolls get to see fleshed out as real people, which is something anyone who's spent time online wonders about. (It doesn't take long for us to get squarely sympathetic with this guy who basically writes spam emails for a living.) There's a tightly-plotted novel in those events, and some logical conclusions. <br />
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And <em>instead,</em> we have a thousand-page monster here. It's an undeniably entertaining one (this is possibly the fastest kilopage I've ever been through--I was up late reading it every night), but there's a great big action movie that grows out of the central plot like an aggressive tumor, complete with spies and terrorist extremists and numerous deaths just off screen, just to show how evil these terrorist assholes are. It's enjoyable as entertainment, and I'm glad that Stephenson takes moments in all this to point out actual physics of ballistics and human endurance, but there's a sense of just cranking it all out at top speed. Romances don't really go anywhere, some of those natural conclusions are forgotten about (why didn't Richard take Marlon the hacker under his wing, just like he did his niece? that would have been perfect) and we kind of forget about all those eccentric game developers too. And why are the baddies so cartoonishly evil, when there's such rich comedy to be mined by pitting them against the American version of jihadis (Richard's more eccentric relatives) in the final showdown? Especially considering that getting the whole cast to this improbable point took so much effort.<br />
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I won't fail to recommend this one (and Stephenson isn't known for his endings anyway), but I would have enjoyed the carefully tied-together version more. I like to think he was writing as fast as he could to keep current events from catching up to his speculation.<br />
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*I think to get the most of any MMORPG, you really have to go in for the team aspect of it, block off time, and talk out loud to others. Instead, I mostly played as a means to randomly and quietly get <em>away </em>from people, which is pretty much the opposite thing. You can play WoW as a solo quest game, but it only goes so far that way. I still miss wandering around sometimes, though.<br />
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Keifushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00287358319899471490noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15973669.post-52582241333889582422015-01-03T09:36:00.001-05:002016-01-27T10:36:08.724-05:00Review: 2312, by Kim Stanley RobinsonIn the story of <em>2312</em>, the emotional world of a gentle young acolyte explodes open when he discovers an ancient musical instrument in the caves outside Megadon city, under the twin moons of his home planet. But, deterred by Father Brown and the other Temple priests, he suffers a mental breakd--<br />
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Oh shit. Wait. No, I'm describing the progressive rock epic, <em><a href="http://www.rush.com/album/2112/">2112</a></em>. The science fiction novel, <em>2<strong>3</strong>12</em> is set a couple hundred years later. Obviously.<br />
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It (the novel) primarily serves as a wide-angle view of life in the civilized solar system that takes place on almost all the <em>other </em>planets of the solar federation. It's conveyed mosaic-like, primarily filled with point-of-view character sections, soaring across diverse geography, liberally broken up with creative lists, encyclopedia entries, interpretations of contemporary art forms, and highlights from historical documents. (I'd bet that Mr. Robinson has also enjoyed a <a href="http://keifuswrites.blogspot.com/2009/01/review-usa-by-john-dos-passos.html">John Dos Passos</a> phase.)<br />
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The year 2312, in Robinson's history, is a pivotal one. The plot is... well, there is a plot, I guess. The story begins with an attack on the primary human settlement on Mercury. Swan Er Hong and Fitz Wahram, our two protagonists, are connected in different ways to one of extended humanity's key independent political and scientific groups, and in that capacity, they chase the whodunit clues around the solar system. I believe that, plot-wise, the effect is meant to be one of various paths intersecting, showcasing kind of an inflection point between the ages in that titular, and no solid climax is really intended. That's fine, but it's centered on a mystery and a chase, and that motor doesn't propel things forward worth a damn--seriously, I recall finding myself 200 pages in, trying to catalogue whether any movement toward solving the central mystery had occurred at all--and even by the end of the book, all that's really revealed is that the human sphere is a little bigger than realized, and that there are new factions in it, with different motivations. <br />
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But for all that, it's not an unpleasant traipse. Robinson's schtick, as I understand things, is environmentally-themed sf. If we presuppose that human capability could advance so far, then <em>how the heck could it be done?</em> I believe that<em> 2312</em> takes place in the same continuity as his more famous <em>Mars</em> trilogy (probably why it's skirted here in favor of everything else), in which Robinson took to task a plausible-within-known-physics approach to making the red planet habitable, complete with planet-scale engineering and challenging political ramifications. (Or so I understand without having read them--this is a theme of interest to me, but with a new author, I preferred a standalone volume for an introduction.) <br />
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<em>2312</em> takes place in the century following an established Martian civilization. Most of the rest of the system has been worked over similarly by that year, and Robinson takes care to describe how, in the case of <a href="http://keifuswrites.blogspot.com/2009/11/alien-earth.html">each sterile alien desert</a>, a stable human environment could conceivably be engineered, trucking nitrogen from Titan, for example, or cooling Venus and whacking it hard enough with celestial objects to give it a day. And if people lived on that toxic, cataclysmic rock, then what would the transition be like? Or could a city could thrive by constantly fleeing the blazing hellscape of Mercury's bright side? How could small bodies could be turned into floating terraria of all varieties? (Robinson creates a lot of cultural diversity in these outskirts, and he smirks at a lot of classic science fiction societies along the way.) How could our own earth possibly be un-fucked? Robinson really enjoys humanizing these landscapes (figuratively and literally), and he shows at least enough scientific grasp of ecology, and paints enough limitations and constraints, for me to suspend my disbelief. Even in 2312, with the ability to shift matter throughout the system at will, humanity is starting to confront resource shortages. And so it goes.<br />
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My disbelief in human cooperation was a little harder to suspend, though. One problem for me is that his society me an unfortunate parallel with those <a href="http://keifuswrites.blogspot.com/search?q=John+varley">John Varley</a> Seven Worlds novels (which I love), which maybe didn't wrangle the angle of geological science in such a detailed way, but understood us hairless apes so very brilliantly, and <em>that</em> society spread hypothetically across the ecliptic plane was dysfunctional enough to accept. Real governments and populations are so diverse and cloying--and Robinson worked at this, I realize, he was taking a good approach to express exactly this, but the locals were <em>still </em>not shown as stultifying enough or brutal enough to convince me they could overcome themselves. Maybe it's just my cynicism: I can't convince myself that 20 billion of us would survive indefinitely in a state of high technology, even after extending the odds by moving into every abandoned shack in Sol's neighborhood and squeaking a few minor gods out of the machine.<br />
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Not to say Robinson's individual characters are unconvincing. I liked them well enough, and they kept me reading. I think he did succeed in creating very exotic and altered people who could, superseding every homer prejudice we would ordinarily have, be easily recognized as not only regular folks, but good, decent, and distinguishable ones. Of course, if, before I invested in them, I had caught on that impulsive, self-destructive Swan was not only from Mercury but mercurial, and that patient, thoughtful Wahram, from Titan, was <em>literally</em> saturnine, I might have found it a hair too cute. So I may have just ruined them for you, but it worked out for me. In all, it was a enjoyable tour. Keifushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00287358319899471490noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15973669.post-42847697102380899782015-01-01T15:32:00.000-05:002016-01-27T10:36:08.712-05:00Review: Hyperbole and a Half, by Allie Brosh<br />
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It feels a little silly that this review will take me almost as long to write (an hour or two, depending on my level of focus) as it took to read the book, but, you know, <em>someone</em> needs to tell you to go out and buy it. It's not just that it's funny and insightful (it is), or that the author's primitively drawn dad is so darn compelling and handsome (he is!), or that you want to read the handful of strips of new content written just for the book (you do). Do it because you'll feel better about finally sending a few nickels Ms. Brosh's way for the comics you enjoyed for free for years.
Because, now that I made you think about it, your image of being a Good Person who cares about independent authors is finally coming into conflict with your cheapness and your glee about getting a quality freebie for this long. Agonizing over whether to pay the writer will give you all the tools you need to love, hate, and become bemused with yourself, all at the same time, which is precisely the correct motivation for reading her strip in the first place.<br />
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Oh, and also there's general-purpose life stories and bits about dogs. Here's a woman who knows how to tell you about the dysfunctional mind of a canine. Another great reason.<br />
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Before buying the book, I hadn't checked the <a href="http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/"><em>Hyperbole and a Half</em></a> blog since she'd apparently left the game, ostensibly to assemble the book, but also with a cliffhanger about depression, which is a hell of a place to last see anyone. (She followed it up two years later, and, reassuringly, there's an unrelated new-ish post up there as well.) I don't share the manic, imaginative side of Brosh's temperament, which is why I will never create a comedy routine out of it all, but I get all too well the inward-looking side, where self-awareness comes perilously close to self-image, and as another person who perceives himself as just barely smart enough to detect my own delusion, irrationality, and inadequacy, I understand how it can get you down, and farther down. (The bits about identity got to me most. As for depression, I sometimes think the only thing that staves off the clinical version is my abject terror of getting trapped in there without the tools to get out.) You, dear reader, probably know this balance pretty well yourself (introverts of the world, <strike>unite!</strike> think quietly about this by yourselves), and I commend Brosh for the ability to write poignant (and sometimes silly) jokes about the kinds of things that can go on in the deep places.<br />
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Although it's illustrated, the form is not really a comic, and although it's written, it's not really a book or an essay either. I wish the thought were original with me, but I've read the form of <em>Hyperbole and a Half</em> described as the text equivalent of a standup routine. To capture the <em>timing</em> of that delivery is very impressive, and it couldn't be done without using the pictures, without an intuition of how long it takes them to convey the content, and without reducing that content to some kind of essence. They're crude, yeah, but they're brilliantly crude.<br />
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So buy it, or, if you're too cheap, go troll the blog. Laugh mostly, and cry when you need to.Keifushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00287358319899471490noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15973669.post-87909489480333509792014-11-04T08:12:00.000-05:002016-01-27T10:36:08.761-05:00Review: Home, by Marilynne RobinsonWay back in April, I <a href="http://keifuswrites.blogspot.com/2014/04/review-gilead-by-marilynne-robinson.html">reviewed</a> the novel <i>Gilead</i> by the same author. In a comment, Bright (who as usual was right) recommended the followup <i>Home</i> maybe a month later. I eventually got to reading it a month or two after that, and, finally, I'm just now am writing something about it. I guess that's how things are these days. <br />
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The reading part flew by though, a flickering instant in my current slow time. I don't even know how it could have been such a page-turner. It fills in the other half (or the other third--it looks like Robinson has recently followed up with <i>Lila</i> as well) of the story that was told in <i>Gilead</i>, but it does so straightforwardly, without layering in new mysteries or misdirection, or much new plot. Lost is that strange meta element from the last novel with its weighty and unspoken secrets to decode (some of those relationships don't look so meaningful from the other side, sadly), but it kept my interest just the same. It's the story of Jack Boughton (imagined by John Ames of the last novel as some kind of secret-sharer, but now just a man) and his return visit home, now filled out from a closer perspective. <br />
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Jack remains irresolute, although he's more likeably so this time, because we see him trying so hard to overcome himself. We get to know his sister Glory as the primary point-of-view character too--the lone sibling who stayed home with their father--and it's satisfying to watch her (inhabited by her own doubts and failures) form an uneasy alliance, and eventually a genuine understanding, with her brother. Neither, in their way, has lived up to their family ideal, but then that perfect family is given to be a bit of a veneer too, and one which has worn through with the passage of time. It's as though the Boughtons were the family that tried a little too hard to express a joyous bond, the one that laid on the Christian middle-American values a little too thickly. (Their reverend father had no worse motive than practicing what he preached, but his version of the story wasn't quite big enough for the world.) The edifice itself, even, is a big pile of kitsch, with an unused tire swing and red barn in the view, and choked inside with dusty bric-a-brac, loaded up with tired <i>ideas</i> of family. The Boughtons never solved the inevitable scandals and disappointments in their lives with love, but they used a prescribed kind of love to paper them all over. <br />
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(Their house, by the way, reminds me of my grandparents' house, and Mr. Boughton a bit of my grandmother in her late days. It's a little uncomfortable.)<br />
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To this Jack returns, a ship at sea, either fleeing or seeking harbor, take your pick. His father is in failing health, and although it's not really why he came back, Jack can't avoid facing him in his decrepitude. It's no stretch to paint the old man as the fading embodiment of home itself, and I feel very guilty about it, but he's irritating. Whenever a real conversation starts to develop between Jack and Glory, in dodders old Boughton to demand attention, always diverting the story into the boring territory of meals, naps, and efforts at comfort. He keeps interjecting these small vanities, and it builds up to a sad climax where he finally judges, finally castigates Jack after all these years. And thus spent, he's at last free to drift away for good. <br />
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I could relate to Jack and Glory's discomfort in their home and with their father, and with their degrees and methods of distancing. Some ideas of "goodness" are really in contrast here (in terms of worldly matters like equality or American hegemony, Jack is by far the better man; in terms of preserving their father's idea of love, overlooked Glory is by far the more noble of her several siblings). Jack's difficult to connect to just the same, as his rebellion is a matter of his constitution, and his sins remain big ones, even though a desire to poke a stick at his postcard existence makes sense to me. Glory's hidden shame (living in sin, OMG!) was easier to relate. Her descent, such as it is, is more inadvertent, and there's a balance here between accepting her own agency and society's in making her life choices into false dilemmas. I kind of wish Robinson had removed a few of the pancake breakfast scenes in order to paint these personal vs. social notions of goodness more starkly.<br />
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Jack, of course, doesn't stay, and Robinson is unlikely to ever let us know what happened to him next. But he can't really ever separate from his own life either, and his general disconnection, it's clear, is a lot like homelessness. The question floats up near the end, is home the soul we can't get away from? It's an artifice, but is it essential to our humanity just the same? We are all, after all, written into the world. How much distance can we really get away from the plot? Keifushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00287358319899471490noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15973669.post-53362235141465841342014-08-19T06:48:00.001-04:002016-01-27T10:36:08.734-05:00Review: Maus: A Survivor's Tale, by Art Spiegelman<em>Maus</em>, as currently published, is a collection of graphic stories that were serialized between 1974 and 1991. (It has been previously released as two volumes--<em>My Father Bleeds History,</em> and <em>Here My Troubles Began</em>, and this edition combines them all.) I'd heard of it over the years, but finally read it after my daughter was assigned a copy for her history class. (At 17, it was the kid's first experience with the comic book format, which makes me feel as though I've failed as a parent.) It's a family memoir, his father's recollection of the Holocaust, and the author's own reflection of the legacy it left on himself and his family. I've been finding it difficult to review, and obviously it's taken me some time. <br />
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I can't do much service describing Spiegelman's significance in the underground comics movement (go to Wikipedia for that), but suffice to say, don't think <a href="http://keifuswrites.blogspot.com/2014/05/wave-upon-wave-of-demented-avengers.html">superheroes</a> and adolescent nerds here: this is a man who advocates cartooning and comics as an intellectual art form (<em>Maus </em>is the first publication in this format to win a Pulitzer), and experiments with the dense quality of the medium for storytelling. He is particularly invested, I think, in working out which sorts of things comic frames are particularly well-suited to convey, and how working concepts out in that medium can add something unique to the storytelling, with a taste for pushing boundaries. (In an explicit example, there's a clever segment discussing how voices and stories can be impositions on memory, but graphic art is unique in that it can communicate wordlessness.) <br />
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Although it's told in a visual medium, <em>Maus</em>, as a comic, relies less on the spectacle of those visuals than you might think--it's not a painting, in other words, it's a narrative, and the art serves as an ongoing comment to the plot and character, and often bears the forward motion and rhythm of the story. (The book is entirely in black and white, which I tend to prefer, but it's drawn somewhat roughly and is heavy on the inks.) Speigelman draws humans with animal faces, different ones for different cultures. Jews are mice, rooted out by the Nazi cats. Christian Poles are pigs, Americans are dogs, and there's an occasional French frog or Gypsy cricket in the mix. To me, it called to mind those vintage Donald Duck comics I had in the pile as a kid, and eventually I came to realize that the evocation of Disney was intentional--Maus as <a href="http://keifuswrites.blogspot.com/2008/03/holy-house-of-mouse.html">the Mouse</a>--a borrowed iconic motif. But the drawings didn't remind me of Mickey and Donald so much as those chimerical dog-faced creatures--whatever the hell species Goofy and Pete are supposed to be--that seemed to populate the entire cast of Disney comic extras, and I found the effect creepily anonymizing. The few times Spiegelman draws the characters with human faces, they get some sudden impact as individuals. <br />
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Sometimes the animal faces are shown as masks. When old Vladek pretends to be a non-Jewish Pole, his piggy face is tied on with a string. And the times when Spiegelman the author gets a little closer to the fourth wall, his mouse mask is revealed too. Is cultural identity something you wear or something you are? I like to think it's the former, but I realize that's a privileged opinion to have. The Polish Jews had no choice in the matter. <br />
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Vladek's story is given to his son in a matter-of-fact way (they are based on real-life taped interviews with his father), and even as the world constricts around him, he gets right on with what was happening then and what happened next. The old man often erupts in incredulity or irritability, and he recalls many people fondly, but the sorrow and the loss are deeper emotions for him, clearly harder to access. His story is one of luck and uncanny pragmatism as he evades one scrape, buys a bit of time till the next (worse) one, networks within his limits, shaves any tiny advantage, bails when he must. He and his wife give their first son to an imagined safer haven, and the poor kid and his cousins are poisoned rather than face capture by the Nazis. One of the scenes that sticks with me is how, at the war's end when prisoners were shipped from the camp, stuffed into railroad cars by the Nazis, Vladek manages to hoist himself up on a hammock made out of a hoarded shirt, while the crowd is jammed in below him. How can you survive as people suffocate and die in piles below you without shutting off some chunk of your empathy? And yet it's when his wife--another survivor--commits suicide years after the war, that the old man finally turns into himself, the last moment we see of him before crossing over to inflexible geezerhood. <br />
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It makes it hard for the American son. Nearly half the story is set in the book's present day, with Art dealing with his relationship with his father, trying to put his own grownup feelings of guilt and inadequacy and irritation in a context he can grapple with. In some ways, Vladek is everyone's aging parent, caught behind modern sensibilities and too old to care too much about them. But not much deeper than that, it's been impossible to live up to a dead older brother, or to a dead sainted wife and mother, and given what the old man has been through, it's got to feel incredibly selfish to demand any kind of attention. So Spiegelman gets him to open up about the experience instead, lets it serve as both therapy and tribute, and the world gets <em>Maus</em>. Keifushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00287358319899471490noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15973669.post-78568039422681956982014-05-23T11:39:00.002-04:002016-01-27T10:40:08.527-05:00Wave Upon Wave Of Demented Avengers March Cheerfully Out Of Obscurity Into The DreamYou know, I was looking forward immensely to using that title, and meanwhile, despite my best plans to hoist it up there in a timely fashion, Captain America came and went. Today, the X-Men will take the reins of cinematic superheroes-of-the-month, which actually gives me some good points to compare and contrast (and a reason to finish the post!), even before I see the movie. <br />
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But first, I want to say that I enjoyed the hell out of the new Captain America flick. My first thoughts about it were less to do with the title character, or with comic book movies in general, and more to observe just how far action movies have come in these late days. <i>Winter Soldier</i> doesn't really develop as a cerebral Cold War-style political thriller (maybe they thought Robert Redford would carry the office scenes? He didn't.), and maybe that wasn't the intent, but it does communicate the emotional immediacy that I associate with movies of that era, now with a sense of explosiveness that modern cinematography can actually deliver, which kind of balances the whole equation. As viewers, we know that the rumbling threat of shit going down, can, if necessary, and with good enough direction, be delivered with full fan-splattering spectacle. <br />
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And they got the kinematic balance right in this one, in a big way. The scenes in Washington traffic were great, as one small example. Somehow people and cars were depicted at the right first-person level--the aggravation and frantic energy of disrupted driving in that town was believable--and when the holdup turns out to be an armed weirdo standing stock still in the middle of the road, it was incredibly intimidating. I'm reminded of Paul Greengrass style tension again, and maybe that's part of the development of the art, except that these couple of guys were apparently directing sitcoms two years ago. What a break for them. <br />
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As a character, Captain America was always a tough sell in a modern age. Like Superman, he's one of the lazier concepts of the comics world, and like Superman, he's a throwback from a time when readers were, apparently, more comfortable with silly patriotic hyperbole. I thought the first Cap movie was somewhat enjoyable in its attempt to bring the yay-rah goofiness into a contemporary framework. The movies confront it (as did the comics, or so I understand) head-on. The first Captain America flick gave a big hat tip to the cuffed boots and dollar-bill shield of the character who once punched Hitler in the jaw (putting silly patriotic hyperbole right where it belongs--in entertainment!), and it wisely allowed some measure of cynicism about it from people who were the actual bloody, tired fighters. I've read that the directors of <i>Winter Soldier</i> intentionally kept the CGI to a minimum, as though people are finally learning that even with comic exaggeration, these movies aren't better as cartoons, and Chris Evans does a very good job of communicating the character with a kind of pure-hearted capability--Americans as we pretend ourselves to be--struggling to find a footing in a more cynical time, and his performance in the role gives credibility to everything else. <br />
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I only really read comic books with any kind of seriousness for a year or two of my life. Even then, I didn't care enough to actually spring for the damn things, and if my friend hadn't convinced his mom to buy him a stack every month, I was unlikely to have smeared as much teenage acne grease over as many collectible pages as I did. I never got much from the power fantasies they laid out, but I did relate to the otherness that these characters endured with such over-the-top pathos, and I absolutely loved the full-spectrum weirdness that Marvel added with a combined universe--where every story is epic, and you have gods, war heroes, scientists, freaks, aliens and athletes working at similar purposes and on improbably equivalent scales, and everyone looked impressive in spandex, which they probably needed less to show off their abs than to keep the requisite two tons of angst crammed tautly into every 180-lb body. I admit it was fun while it lasted. <br />
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The Marvel universe was just huge, with a gigantic B-list of characters, connected to itself on hundreds of levels. It was brilliant in its way, but it was also a problem, because with so many writers pulling these characters in different directions, it proved impossible to keep anything like a consistent story or even vision going. And it didn't take me long to realize that even within a given title, any investment I made in the story, setting, or character growth would never be rewarded, doomed instead to be split prematurely on the rocks of the next writer's unfaithful (and inevitably worse) vision, buried unceremoniously in some awkwardly shoehorned retroactive continuity. The word "retcon" comes out of the comics world in the first place, thanks to this pervasive, and fundamentally inconsiderate, practice. It's one of the main reasons I stopped reading them. (The other one was that in those days, nerds weren't cool.)<br />
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Adaptations in the movies have suffered the same problems, and also added new ones. Even with the ability to lift and adapt the best stories from decades of comics, it's a challenge to stuff something that develops slowly over many issues, using a large cast, into a two-hour film. I am looking forward to the next X-Men flick, but <i>Days of Future Past</i> is one of the few arcs I do remember from my brief fandom, and if I'm hopeful that it's maybe an easier (that is, shorter) one to adapt, even as they omit or combine characters, I still haven't forgotten that the "Dark Phoenix" storyline, goofy and elaborate as it may have been, couldn't have been Ratnered any worse in X3, so we'll see. A diversity of directors and writers have utterly wrecked any hope of continuity for those mutants, and poor Spiderman's a similar mess of reboots and overstuffed villains. So that part is just like the old comics, then, and it's kind of a shame. <br />
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I think the most forgivable way to look at all these disorganized and diverse efforts (some of them ranging over 70 years), is that through repetition and retelling, they've produced icons, characters that have been averaged out to a set of timeless and identifiable traits, fighting characteristic battles over and over again, living and dying, but never really changing. Ironically, this imbues them with something like the mythic status they originally copied. <br />
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Well, it was like this until recently. Captain America and the rest of the Avengers properties are taking a different and (for this kind of material) innovative path. I know from reading the nerdblogs that the film rights for the Avengers cast are owned by a different studio than the others (which means they'll never meet the Silver Surfer), and the tie-ins and cameos have all been intentionally part of a loose, overarching plan by the producers. (I'm <a href="http://keifuswrites.blogspot.com/2010/05/media-monday.html">on record</a> as thinking this approach was gratuitous and unlikely to work. And I was wrong--it's great.) It's allowed for hit-or-miss individual films (really, this is the first one that's as good as the original <i>Iron Man</i>), in a variety of styles, but it's brilliantly correcting something that ruined the comics for me 25 years ago. These characters are actually <i>developing</i> over the course of the big arc. They're aging (live actors give you little choice on that one), and they're getting wiser. Superheroism is affecting the world around these guys, and those changes keep growing into more developed settings for the next movies. My inner fourteen-year-old fanboy is squealing at finally seeing the dream done right. And it's big, it's weird, and it's all kinds of fun. Keifushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00287358319899471490noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15973669.post-12887486778492223642014-04-19T08:02:00.001-04:002016-01-27T10:36:08.699-05:00Review: The Goldfinch, by Donna TarttWell, I suppose I should finally get around to reviewing this novel, now that Donna Tartt has gone and let Pulitzer get all over the thing. It's taking up a lot of room in the pile anyway. I'm embarrassed to find myself riding the critical bandwagon for those these sweet, sweet Google hits (dozens of them!), but I want you all to know that I read it and formed opinions of my own a good month or so before it was Literary. <br />
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The goldfinch in the novel isn't a bird, but rather The Goldfinch, the famous painting by Carel Fabritius, reproduced way down below. In the alternate timeline* of the novel, it goes missing in a terrorist attack on the New York gallery that it's touring. (The attack is an undisguised parallel--and really, all the big metaphors in the novel are out there in the open and enjoyably discussed--to the artist's life, which reached an early end when the gunpowder factory next door to his studio blew up, taking the poor man out, and most of his work too. Tragically so: Fabritius was the most respected pupil of Rembrandt, and to read Tartt describe him, he was innovative almost to the point of anachronism, a rockstar back in his day.) In the mayhem around the museum explosion, the small painting falls into the hands of 13-year-old Theo Decker, and even the actions that lead the boy to <i>keep it</i> are innocent enough at the beginning--he couldn't be more traumatized--but as the novel unfolds, the piece persists through his young life, hidden under beds and in secret lockers, a token of undeniable significance that he feels lends similar significance to his own life struggles. <br />
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<i>The Goldfinch</i> is a long one, but it flies right by, even while including its share of heavy thoughts. I find a lot to admire in Tartt's writing style. It's as though every scene washes in and washes out in a heady wave of intelligent free-associative goodness, but it never lingers too long, never bogs down in the details. And if the plot, at times, appears to be tacking back and forth a bit, it doesn't stop moving, and doesn't lose its momentum. It's as if the author has found some interesting new middle area between tightly-mapped literary convention and what the sloppy course of a life is actually like. The dialogue reads like this, too. It's full of the inhibiting awkward pauses and stutter-starts that infuse real conversations, but it doesn't lack the usual storytelling impact that dialogue gives. It just makes it feels a little more natural. <br />
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[And since it came up at one point, does Tartt have any tells as a female author? Well, about 40% of the novel discusses Theo's relationship to his mother, and for a bildungsroman, it doesn't focus much on the usual checklist of boys' "firsts." And as in the last novel, the role of Manic Pixie Dreamgirl is now occupied by a full, complicated female character who could have had a story of her own.] <br />
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Or maybe what's telling is more an old-school sort of character development. The book reminded me a great deal of <i>Great Expectations</i> (and if there's a character named Pip in there, then probably this can be taken as intentional), which I admit I haven't read since high school. I find that to be a bizarre connection in some ways, because Tartt really doesn't share anything I could spot of Dickens' voice, and certainly isn't infected very deeply with his morality. Nor is there anything in any of the settings that I would remotely describe as "Dickensian." But on the other hand, our protagonist does, like the original Pip, skirt among the gray spaces between upper-crust society and underworld criminality though he doesn't really belong in either sphere. It's a schism struck by a random event, and the book takes us readers on a tour through both worlds. He's given a benefactor, given a love interest by dint of authorial placement (damaged, magnetic Pippa), of similar non-chemistry as Pip and Estelle ever had, but with a conscious statement to make about all of that. And if our new cast members fit perfectly modern molds, the characters have that same kind of fullness and extravagance as Dickens', here pulled up short of caricature (at least most of the time**). <br />
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As he develops, Theo comes to incorporate both poles, class and corruption, into his character. After the startling loss of his free-spirited nurturer of a mother, we turn to sad, grand outskirts of Las Vegas and his alcoholic gambler of a father, possessed of a kind of blowsy self-centered charm and lurking viciousness. (He probably doesn't deserve his fate either.) Theo develops into a bright underachiever with a self-destructive streak (ha--unlike Pip), and gravitates into the world of antiques and fine art, which is the commercial side of that same morally vague intersection. I don't actually think I <i>like</i> Theo all that much <a href="http://www.aceshowbiz.com/images/still/xmen_firstclass09.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="Nicholas Hoult as Theo" border="0" src="http://www.aceshowbiz.com/images/still/xmen_firstclass09.jpg" height="133" title="" width="200" /></a>[and I need to mention this somewhere: my mental images of characters are almost never cast as real-world actors, but in this case, he's clearly played in the movie version by this kid], but I do like how he looks at the world. He has a good eye for the flaws in beauty--like the <em>natures mortes</em> style that his mother describes--the chain on the golden bird--but he values the beauty for its own sake too, which is richer and somehow sturdier for the vulnerability it can't escape. <br />
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Life, of course, is infected by death, treachery, decay. And we, artists and observers, look to uncover the universals that make it beautiful. <i>Does</i> the painting make Theo's life significant? I think we, as per the novel's themes, have to concede that in his life, this is a conceit, but we also are left to recognize that if Theo's life can turn over one of those artistic truths, then that is a worthy thing to have done. Theo's infatuation with Pippa is unfounded, and even he knows that it's not real love, but then, blobs of paint (that, as composed, draw attention to themselves <i>as</i> paint) aren't a living bird either. Nor, of course, is a gigantic stack of words a real life--Theo and Pippa don't exist any more than the bird does. But on one very important level, <i>it doesn't matter</i>. There is power, truth, (and irony), and <em>permanence</em> in what these fleeting things can make us feel. <br />
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Regarding the painting: several prints of it can be found online, but the lighting was apparently different when some of them were photographed. There is a set that is a weak sea of browns--the print that's supplied on the page of the book is like this too--while others quite nearly glow. I tried to catch one of the latter, which is more how the book describes it. <br />
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* It doesn't fit into the flow of the review, but there is something just a little hinky about that timeline, and though it's a small complaint in what I found to be a great read, I can't quite let it go. I read the first 50 pages of the book thinking the whole thing took place 60 years ago, and it wasn't until people whipped out cell phones and laptops around the museum that it became clear to me that it's a relatively modern setting, though the precise when is even then not quite pinned down. (I was looking for reference points by then--I believe Theo says he was alive on 9/11, so we have a range.) Late on, when Theo's 27, the date is revealed as 2012, which puts the bombing in 1998--would people have had ubiquitous cell phone video cameras then? (She evidently <em>wrote </em>the book over approximately this span. Did she write it out linearly?) Tartt lets the characters watch well-loved old campy movies, but she is mostly vague about current ones. And for some reason, the kids devote time to video games that I am pretty sure don't exist. I got the feeling that some art doesn't make her radar.<br />
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** Okay the other faint damn amid the praise. I loved Theo's puckish bad seed of a friend, Boris, but that accent did cross the line. Keifushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00287358319899471490noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15973669.post-16612011103692871692014-04-05T11:35:00.001-04:002014-04-05T11:56:20.952-04:00Review: Gilead, by Marilynne RobinsonIn order for me to get to what I found interesting about Marilynne Robinson's short novel <i>Gilead</i>, I think I need to first describe the basic shape of it, the turns it took, and as such, this review is chock full of spoilers. So you know.<br />
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The book is framed as a long, open letter from Congregationalist minister John Ames to his son. Ames is in his seventies, a man who has married (for a second time) late in life to a much younger woman after many years alone. Now he has been diagnosed with heart disease, and he writes in part to fill his time as the living winds down, and more overtly to offer an account, as well as what wisdom he possesses, to the boy whom he realizes will grow up without him. It's a lovely tone in these beginning parts--sweet, slow-paced, and contentedly lonely. Ames is a thoughtful and humble man, and a deeply loving one, who sees fatherhood and family as an expression of Christian grace, and his philosophies feel like wise ones, informed by his theology.* He's an inquisitive soul--well read--but he's also an accepting one, declining the excursions from the obsolete old abolitionist settlement that others in his life had taken. He's at peace in Gilead.<br />
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And so it's going to be <i>that</i> kind of book then, just like the cover blurbs would have you believe. Except that it's not.<br />
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Returning to town in these days is one Jack Boughton, that is to say John Ames Boughton, the son of his best friend, who was named after the old pastor. Jack's a charming man and an uneasy soul--your better sort of scoundrel--and one who, despite the name connection (or more likely because of it), old John has never felt comfortable around. There is a dynamic between them as if the younger man had always insouciantly challenged the older to solve and save him, but the older one never figured out an access point. Ames' narrative starts concentrating unduly on his godson, who grows from a snag in his thoughts to a full-on obsession. (And it's not even just Jack: Ames' old firebrand grandfather is clearly not as put to rest as he'd hoped either.) The pastor understands and respects reasoned debate, but it comes out that he has an insurmountable difficulty with people who don't accept existence at face value, who are restless and uneasy in it.<br />
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It's flat-out <i>unpleasant</i> to read the old man's narrative veering off from his peaceful adages, but it's also fascinating, and I truly didn't anticipate the story going that way. Though he still keeps his unbreakable decency and his calm religious persepectives, the reader can see that these tools are now failing him. Jack is a man of many sins, but his mortal one was to father a child (when he was college age) with a broken-homed, criminally young girl, and then more or less ignore her. His revealed secret at the time of Ames' writing, which comes late in the novel, is that he's returned less to care for his elderly father and more in hopes of finding a home for his new and already troubled mixed-race family, which in the early 1950s might not be an easy fit, even in a town founded for the cause of abolition. <br />
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It took the featured biblical story of Hagar, about halfway through this novel, to clue me in that there's some subtext going on as well, that doesn't quite penetrate the consciousness of the kindly old man. He pictures himself in the sermon as dutiful old Abraham, trusting the godly advice that his difficult actions are indeed for the best. But let's not forget that this is also one of the more perverse Old Testament stories (and sure, hello <i>The Handmaid's Tale</i>), which in novelistic terms, must present some kind of meaning. Old man, young slave, creepy inappropriate sex, reluctant but obligatory shunning. The map isn't perfect, but I still jumped from here to the conclusion that Jack and Mrs. Ames surely had <i>some</i> kind of history with one another, and this is in fact confirmed before long. And although it is not made explicit, it didn't take me much longer to suspect that this young woman (thirty years younger than John and ten younger than Jack), this quietly-spoken woman of mean upbringing who chose to walk into a more socially well-adjusted world, is the very same feral girl that Jack knocked up years before and thereby nailed shut the coffin of his own ruin. Is there a better reason that she would be drawn to curiousity about the first John Ames? If it's not the same person, then it's her deliberate analog.<br />
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There is some weird goings-on too, I want to add, about names. The young wife is named only once (for all her presence, she's usually "your mother"), and not by the reverend. She's an interesting character, and I wish we could have had her presented her more as herself. The boy (also deeply present as "you") is not named at all, nor is Jack's Folly (if she is someone different from Mrs. Ames), and her tragic child with Jack, it's noted, is further impoverished by never receiving one in the first place, despite living to three years old or so. Meanwhile, John and Jack are connected by name. "John Ames" is the source of their bond, and of their difficulties as such radically different people.<br />
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And okay, I guess I'll make a nod after all to the German-style dialectic as I see it here. John breaks out of his unsettling focus on Jack by opening up about the <i>passion</i> he felt for his wife, in a way he had elided before. It's an innocent sort of passion to be sure, but he was still an old man who fell improbably in love with someone, and he had all the usual symptoms. He truly and genuinely doesn't give a calm fuck about his wife's past, whatever it is, and he loves her for precisely who she is. Which is really a pretty awesome thing. And it's over this understanding where he at long last finds a bond with his living antithesis. Old Ames is as decent a man he believes himself to be, but the wisdom of his days delivered him a late-burning fire in his belly that his rootin' tootin' forebears would have understood. His accepting worldview doesn't leave him, but he's now leaving the world as a whole person. It's brilliantly done, the whole thing. <br />
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* If there's conflict evident in this stage, it's a philosophical discussion with the likes of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Feuerbach">Ludwig Feuerbach</a>, the pet philosopher that his late brother had once taken home. And even that ends up as a gentle chide, respecting the atheist's joy of life, but finding it incomplete without the axiomatic divinity that informs his own spiritual views. (Feuerbach evidently took spirituality as a kind of anthropological epiphenomenon. On those grounds, I'd probably like him quite a bit.) Unfortunately, I'm not a good one to tell you how deeply this philosophical argument underpins the novel, but based on Ames' limited name-dropping, there very might well be a sort of dialectical structure to sniff out here.Keifushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00287358319899471490noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15973669.post-30372926854332402842014-03-26T16:30:00.006-04:002016-01-27T10:40:08.513-05:00Notable Corporate Actions Following the Hobby Lobby v. Sebelius Decision Going To The Plaintiff in the Summer of 2014
August 6, 2014: Bain Capital cancels the complimentary employee expense account with CoffeeStop Cafe at the ground floor of the home office building, saying consumption of caffiene conflicts with Mr. Romney's Mormon principles. <br />
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December 18, 2014: The staff of Google, Inc. is surprised to find that their expected Christmas bonuses have been canceled because they do not comport with the founders secular humanist beliefs. (This creates a minor lawsuit, but Google lawyers hold the day by pointing out that a "private company" doesn't necessarily mean a privately-held one, just a company that is owned by shareholders and not the government.) <br />
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January 23, 2015: Earthlink (which apparently still exists) strikes all prescription coverage from their company health plan. According to founder Sky Dayton, just too many medical drugs interfere with the mental and spiritual wellbeing of thetans, and he and the current owners have a religious objection to providing them. <br />
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April 1, 2015: The managers of <i>The Christian Science Monitor</i> completely remove medical benefits for the entire company, because, duh, Christian Science. Prayer consultation, however, is offered at a discounted rate. <br />
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June 20, 2015: The Boston Manufacturing Company requests that female employees remain on campus the entire day, all week, locked in with low light, so that their good Christian morals remain uncorrupted by the external world. Oh wait--sorry--<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_Mill_Girls">that happened in <i>18</i>15</a>. <br />
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February 12, 2016: Citing their devotion to Mammon, Goldman Sachs announces that they will completely suspend the pay for all janitorial staff, then the office assistants, and finally all positions up to low-level brokers by the end of the year, even though everyone will still be expected to work. In press interviews, senior management embrace former CEO (and now Treasury Secretary) Lloyd Blankfein's 2009 claim that 'god's work' gets done at Goldman.<br />
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January 10: 2042: M. Cletus Sitwell, current CEO of Massey Energy, requires that employees supply all of their own safety apparatus, although it is discouraged entirely around the flaming pits, especially on bring-your-kid-to-work day. "Don't forget," said Sitwell, "the M. stands 'Molech,' and when I am in charge, every year is a bull year for Massey!" <br />
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[Edit: Um, that is, "Hobby Lobby v. Sebelius." Who's suing whom, Keifus?]
Keifushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00287358319899471490noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15973669.post-24431508153166351582014-02-12T14:44:00.001-05:002014-04-05T11:36:15.481-04:00You Suck at Romance, and Here's WhyIn honor of Valentine's day, I present to you a couple of quick links to stories that have somehow penetrated my gruff, jaded exterior to find the tender-hearted boy within and wake him up with a mighty slap across the face. (Which of course reminds the little weenie why he built the scabrous shell in the first place, but I guess it's nice to know that he's still breathing in there.) Here are two stories touching enough to get even to me:<br />
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When I think of a template for the world's most romantically devoted men--Romeo, Orpheus, McLovin--about the very last person to come to mind would be Carl Sagan. Yes, I am talking about the popular astronomer, the man who drawled <i>Cosmos</i> on tv when I was an impressionable kid, the professional skeptic and rationalist who, on his deathbed, refused to accept any faith at all. That guy. I could imagine an academic sort of passion from a person like that, a bookish devotion to knowledge, but to another human being? It seems so unlikely, and yet there it is. <br />
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Sagan worked on the famous Voyager message, the gold record that was sent along with the craft. During that time, he was close, as friends, to his collaborator on the project, Ann Druyan. While exchanging phone messages about one of the musical entries, they discovered something more compelling than their work and stronger than their friendship. With the clichéd suddenness of Cupid's archery, they both realized they were deeply, impulsively, and irrevocably in love. [It worked out so sweetly for Carl and Ann, but what his wife at the time came to think of all this is not part of the story.] There is certainly a rare power in discovering chemistry with someone, but that is not even the part of the story that makes my inner romantic get misty-eyed. What Sagan and Druyan proceeded to do was to put an audio translation of her brain patterns onto the record, and the human biological noises that were added were also hers. The idea of pitching a doomed probe eternally into the void is sad and sweet and hopeless enough all by itself. In the infinitesimal chance it's discovered by alien civilizations, if they manage to decode it (if they even even get so far as to put together that we odd beings perceived the universe with gestalt images of narrow-band scattered light and linear mechanical vibrations), then it will happen millions of years after our species has guttered out and gulped its last. And if these hypothetical intelligences do get the LP turning properly, then what they will hear is the heartbeat of a woman who is newly and crazily in love. <br />
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[I first heard this on an <a href="http://www.npr.org/2010/02/12/123534818/carl-sagan-and-ann-druyans-ultimate-mix-tape">NPR story</a> a year or two ago, and it made me cry while driving into work.] <br />
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We humans lack the span of billions and billions, but hidden messages seep forward even from our meager past. Some 900 years ago, people in Norse cultures (when they weren't sailing away to massacre my ancestors) would write messages to each other, and remnants of carved notes on wood or bone are found occasionally in archaeological digs. Although Norse writing is known and can be translated today, these small totems can be hard to decipher, sometimes because they were copies of messages chiseled in by illiterates, but the carvers would also tend to get playful with the writing, using phonetic codes or decoratively bastardized script, which were pretty accessible then, but can be hard to pull from context when you don't happen to live in medieval Scandinavia. When one of these "Norse rune codes" was <a href="http://www.medievalists.net/2014/02/07/norse-rune-code-cracked/">cracked</a> last week (link <a href="http://io9.com/900-year-old-viking-code-cracked-to-reveal-secret-messa-1519928604">via</a>), it was a big deal. <br />
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What does the message say? What was important enough to painstakingly gouge out of a plank and pass on? <br />
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"Kiss me." <br />
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Awww. Now go get my insulin.Keifushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00287358319899471490noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15973669.post-33765570038936109822014-02-10T14:05:00.001-05:002014-02-10T16:26:03.896-05:00Review: Replay, by Ken Grimwood<i>Replay</i> is a book that is well-regarded among science fiction circles, one of those perfect-length novels that doesn't say anything more than it needs to say, that takes a simple speculative concept and spins it out into a meaningful comment about life. You can almost pull the story synopsis right out of the title. On an otherwise uneventful morning in an otherwise dull mid-life, Jeff Winston suffers a massive heart attack. In his own experience, he dies, but then immediately comes to in his 18-year-old body, the whole of history reset to exactly where it was 25 years before, with the exception of Jeff's intact memories. For inexplicable reasons, he's been given his life to start over again. And, as it painfully turns out, again and again and again. <br />
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Does the novel deserve the praise it gets? On page one, I thought I was in for something very special indeed. It opens with this guy dropping dead in the middle of a sad, dull, and strangely sweet conversation, and I thought that Grimwood captured something brilliant there, showing us the banality of life and death at once. As the story goes forward, however, the effect becomes rapidly less impressive--the unelaborate evocation is just Grimwood's writing style--but while I think the story succeeds overall in a related way, and is a rewarding read, it didn't blow me away with its genius. Each time Jeff goes back, he tries things a little differently, and the author walks us through his attempts (which we slowly learn are shortening). Jeff is successful in that he sets up his replayed lives with more in less time, and, as almost anyone would, he puts some effort in to change the broad course of things, and to seek out the deep meaning of life, and the point of his unusual experience of it. But it takes him as much work as ever to get better at <i>living</i>, and all he ever really manages to figure out is what's valuable to him, over which he has limited ultimate control. There are no answers, and the only lesson in the end is the one that is offered to any of us. <br />
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[A short novel? With a simple, elegant concept? That doesn't rely much on the depth of prose? It would probably make a great movie, and it's too bad that <i>Groundhog Day</i> went and happened in between.]<br />
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It's fun to imagine what you'd do if you got your own clock turned back like that. Speaking for myself, I am sure I'd handle Round One differently than Jeff Winston did. Twenty-five years ago today would put me as a junior in high school, which would be awful, but just around the corner was a college experience that I loved. I am not sure I remember world events (and certainly not sporting events) with enough precision to fund me in 1989, but it's nice to imagine that I'd enjoy the whole span a great deal more with some useful people experience and self-understanding under my belt. Moving on, I could see myself obsessing on those points where I wish I chose differently, and on a replay, I'd look forward to being sure I'd zig where last time I regrettably zagged. If I were writing this story, my version would have the character going back, determined to set right a couple of those long-brooded-upon wrongs, only to find that on a second try that he's still the same schmuck he always was. Ah fuck it, <a href="http://keifuswrites.blogspot.com/2005/08/wet-willy-updated-506-about-4700-words.html">I tried.</a><br />
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Wondering what else he may have written, I looked up Ken Grimwood on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Grimwood">Wikipedia</a>, and learned that he died of a heart attack ten years ago at the age of 59, a bit before his time. There can be no news on whether he went back. I won't hold it against him if he did; he seemed like a decent enough guy.Keifushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00287358319899471490noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15973669.post-10473892017155841772014-01-24T19:33:00.002-05:002014-02-10T14:06:36.640-05:00Review: The Hobbit, by J.R.R. TolkienIt's telling that I can't remember if I read <em>The Hobbit </em>before or after I discovered the Lord of the Rings novels. (I know that I encountered them in unrelated circumstances. One was pulled from the middle school library based on word of mouth, the other discovered like some alluring treasure in a closet in my grandparents' house, the exotic covers teasing me for awhile before I opened them.) I <i>think</i> I read the epic at the later date, aware that it was a sequel, but I read it for its own reason, not because I was so excited about a followup. <i>The Hobbit</i> is a standalone, and it remains so, a pleasant little story that only hints at bigger things (I did love the maps and illustrations as a kid), as befits the audience. Modern readers can pull up all the rest of his fiction for the level of background that suits them, or if you want to import another kind of depth, read it trying to suss out the <i>adult</i> elements that are working beneath the story, which is more or less how I feel like looking at it now. <br />
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And make no mistake, this is definitely a young adult book. Tolkien takes on the aspect of a grandfatherly storyteller, occasionally addressing the reader or referring directly to himself (e.g., "I wish I had time to tell you even a few of the tales..."), which is a fairly annoying affectation, however kindly intended. The story escalates in scope, but starts small, and stays light in tone throughout. We're given danger and threats that a child could understand (violent, unpredictable, or manipulative people; scary dark places), and Bilbo's actual struggles are not ones of mastery, but are rather personal efforts of will. He has to work up courage to face the situations he finds himself in, and, on occasion, to do what is evidently the right thing, a moral bravery that he slowly earns. There ends up being plenty of violent death, but the acts are sanitized (sometimes with humor and song), and are mostly outside the immediate point of view. Bilbo basically cringes and hides when it comes to battle and war, and he is only vaguely aware of the political forces that are driving his quest, but we are given that his own actions are worthwhile, even pivotal. Hell, you've read 'em all too: Tolkien puts a unique value and agency on "steadfast." <br />
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Also avoiding some of the usual high-fantasy lard, none of the supporting cast of <i>The Hobbit</i> is particularly noble and capable as all that anyway. They all tend to be thinly drawn (sometimes elegantly so--the quick rendering of Smaug's vanity and greedy indignation is great, and so is Gollum's madness--but others are inadequately sketched out--at least four of the dwarves have no distinguishing characteristics at all), but almost all of the outlines contain a serious deficiency of character. There are silly or vain elves, unheroic dwarves, grim men, aloof eagles, and volatile um, bear-dudes. The most intact archetype is Gandalf the wizard, who is indeed wise and great, but only intermittently helpful, and certainly unable to give the quest his full attention, even though he shows up for all the good meals. Next-best is Thorin Oakenshield, the dwarf leader and hereditary ruler of the mountain kingdom, and can I even tell you how much I love Thorin? Tolkien paints him as self-important and serious, but missing some critical element of leadership. (Peter Jackson allows him a brooding noble bearing in the films, and plays him as a tragically flawed figure, which I've been liking even better.*) He plays up the part, but it was less obvious to a kid that he is just not very good at the whole "king" thing. He is sort of a high-end fuckup, even given just thirteen subjects and the best advisor in Middle Earth. Yes he's an exile with no experience at actual rule, but it comes more down to problems of temperament, really. He's confrontational when he needs to be reasonable. He quits and mopes when he needs to persevere, and with the unexpected <i>success</i> of the effort, he pretty much implodes under the responsibility of it. He gets a heroic sort of redemption at the end, at full cost, but he has to give up on his regal dreams to do it. <br />
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What becomes clear on reading is that there's no way his quest should have ever succeeded. Putting yourself in the minds of the dwarves brings out a dark dimension to the whole endeavor. It's as if their itinerant lives had grown so meaningless and futile that grimly throwing themselves on the rocks of an entombed city, if they could even make it that far, seemed like a <i>good</i> idea. Likely to fail, sure, but if they were to die trying, then at least they would die trying <i>something</i>. (And if Gandalf saw how Bilbo could improve the slim odds, it was still pretty rotten of him to send his small friend along.) Perhaps, at best, they could have hoped to swipe an ancestral artifact or two, but the defeat of the dragon was never in the cards for them. Until, of course, it was. When the beast does vanish (killed with a lucky shot by Bard down at Lake Town, which character I think Jackson is also justified to fill out), the company bumbles around cautiously for awhile, and then, as the truth finally comes out, they hole up. Thorin is stuck with a number of practical matters beyond the world of questing: he's got an empty city he can't rule, a mountain of cash he can't spend, one fourteenth of which is allegedly Bilbo's, who can't exactly walk away with the stuff, never mind take it back home through the hostile wilderness. When a faction of the townsfolk arrives to quite reasonably point out they made their own share of painful contributions to the dragon's hoard, but they'd be interested in some sensible arrangements for mutual development of all this reclaimed infrastructure, the dwarves' response is funny at first, but the situation gets pretty hostile pretty quickly. <br />
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When I read this book as a child, the Battle of Five Armies seemed like the anchor for everything, the titled event that made it significant in the history of that world. And in a way it was, even though Tolkien shows only the chanciest sequence of action that brought it together. As competent leaders emerge to dispute big conflicts, Bilbo and the gang look like the underqualified amateurs they are, but more subtly and sweetly than in the grand-sweeping sequels, it shows that small people doing good things can change the world. As I said, it's a nice enough story all on its own.<br />
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*I could keep a long catalogue of Peter Jackson's cinematic rights and wrongs, but suffice to say that some of the things he added did help to fill out the story, and I think in a good way. Another irritating habit of Tolkien's narration is catching up the reader with "oh by the way, all this other stuff also happened while Bilbo was gone" sorts of deliveries. Sure, it keeps the story in scope, but it also makes it look more episodic and badly planned than it really is. Hovering behind Bilbo's adventure are a few other plots. For example, after Thorin &co. run through the Great Goblin during their escape from the tunnels, they set loose headless legions of bad guys which finally converge at Erebor. Say what you want to about the development of the "pale orc" (which is mostly Jackson's creation--Azog is briefly mentioned in the beginning of the book, and that's all)--and to some extent I'd say it too--it fits the hidden story pretty well to give the disparate goblin and warg forces some power dynamics of their own, and offer some reason they should all arrive angrily at the battlefield together.Keifushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00287358319899471490noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15973669.post-32472161264846268732014-01-14T10:48:00.003-05:002014-02-10T14:06:46.725-05:00This Is Why We Can't Have Nice ThingsLike many a cartoon American male (<a href="http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/uploaded_images/Vinci_06_FredRoundHair-775817.jpg">actual photo!</a>), I've been drawn (heh), more or less against my will, into watching <i>Downton Abbey</i>. Of course, I don't like to think my initial aversion is so comical as all that: the show basically encourages the viewer to empathize with the idle lives of a bunch of repressed, inbred, aristocratic motherfuckers. Yes, there are real struggles with class and status presented on the show, sometimes with a shred of cleverness and sometimes more as a scrubbed and kind-hearted anachronism, but on the whole, these mostly are just props to steer the characters, highborn and low, toward soap-operatic plots. (God help me, I think Maureen Dowd has <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/08/opinion/dowd-beautifying-abbey-road.html?_r=1">just the right take on it</a>, which has got to happen about as often as a hit shows airs on PBS. <i>Downton Abbey</i> as <i>Gone with the Wind</i>? Yowch!) My own opinion of the show is that when the omnipresent reality of ruin is better presented--in the war or in the workhouses, say--then it is more compelling than when it's just a drama of manners of these surprisingly egalitarian-minded overlords. [And sure, I agree the individual characters are well-enough conceived so that I care what happens to them, and that the costume is great, and that most of the (gulp) casting and acting is a whole lot better than the actual writing deserves.] But the ultimate case for <i>Downton Abbey</i> is the one that the show itself makes again and again. It is, well, Downton Abbey itself. The message is that even though change happens, nice things are worth having because they are nice things. <br />
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Granted, this is an insufferably <i>English </i>view of nice things (and it's one that I've seen often enough in British novels to pick right up on), but it's a hell of a step up from the "glory and conquest" view of nationalism (er, not to say the self-styled empire lacked that either). The motif of Downton is preservation, and the principle conflict in the show is one of sustainability. It's made of idealized rustic green estates that are topped off with a comfortable grandeur, one which imagines that all of its elaborate gimcracks and mannered conventions--livery, variegated flatware, gravelled walking paths, riding and hunting, all the forelock-tuggings and "m'lords"--hell, the nobility and the smiling peasants themselves--all are explicitly <i>useful</i>, that there's a good reason the chairs are a set distance from the table and you that you should pull up the right claret from the cellars, just like there's a good reason to rotate crops and to pass on the right. <i>Downton Abbey </i>imagines that the land and its customary adornments are things worth holding on to, that they are essential parts in a long-ago optimized machine which needs to produce nothing but itself. Of all the apologia for aristocracy, conservation of nice things is the only one that I have found not to be laughable on its face. The family is allowed to inhabit the manor because the <em>estate </em>is worth having, not because the family is.<br />
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Downton Abbey, in other words, is a community that is valued as such. The community needs to be complicit in the concentration of its wealth, to support the estate. It's an enabling fiction of a community, and I don't forgive that. It's built on the backs of those kindly-seeming laborers, on net ancestral plunder, and on a system that allows one entitled and unproductive class to drain its resources from others. The antebellum American south copied the model consciously, and it was a horrorshow. (Meanwhile, the somewhat more communitarian settlement of the colonies to the north set up some of our nation's enduring conflicts.) The recent pretense to democratize American greenspace only got us the suburbs, a boring, shoddy clapboard <a href="http://keifuswrites.blogspot.com/2006/05/america-horse-pen-or-coffee-stain.html">fiction</a> built on consumption instead of conservation. The people's revolutions of last century--though you have to appreciate the generations of effort it took to get outside the thought box--often earned central parties and widespread repression. It's a real conflict of the human animal, and it sucks that we can't seem to have nice things without massive inequality railing along with it. Authoritarianism, stifling of individual expression, and a devolution to oligarchy seems to be part and parcel with any of them. <br />
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One novel I recall very fondly is <i>Gypsies</i> by <a href="http://keifuswrites.blogspot.com/search?q=Robert+Charles+Wilson">Robert Charles Wilson</a>. This author uses science fiction constructs to flesh out and deliver some sock-you-in-the-eye humanist themes. In this one, a family of young people possesses the power to step between alternate realities--some are better than others--but only, as the painfully delivered climax reveals, worlds which they are capable to conceive. We are limited, he says, <i>all </i>of society is limited by our collective imaginations. It's <i>Candide </i>with a quantum-mechanical kludge, that only keeps 99% of the cynicism. It's a nice empirical shortcut to allow a writer: some societies do evolve to be more sustainable, beautiful, <i>and </i>happy, and it would be nice if we could somehow sample for them with better tools than history, theory, and propaganda. The problem is that I wouldn't believe anybody who told you that any one of them is as good as it can be, or that this is the way it <i>must</i> be. Anyone who spews that is romanticizing some nonexistent ideal (as they do on <i>DA</i>), or else is using you. I've been a technical guy all my life, and I place a great value on evidence, consistent thinking, and proper weighting, which certainly applies to something as grand and important as culture. As I get older, however, I understand that we need to cultivate imagination every bit as much. If we don't let ourselves dream better, then we also fail. Keifushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00287358319899471490noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15973669.post-21567182351046771262013-12-18T14:30:00.001-05:002013-12-18T20:06:07.809-05:00Review: The Dragon Griaule, by Lucius ShepardI first read <i>The Man Who Painted The Dragon Griaule</i>, oh, ten years ago or so. I've occasionally picked up <a href="http://keifuswrites.blogspot.com/2008/09/review-of-life-during-wartime-by-lucius.html">other stuff</a> by the author, hoping to find anything that grabbed me as much as that story did, only to encounter a maddening mix of potential and disappointment. But the additional Griaule stories contained in this collection* only improve and expand the original one, and they're as great as (or better than) I remember. The milieu was established, by all evidence, by a guy who enjoys storytelling, clearly is talented at it, but who despises the trappings of stock fantasy, as if Shepard was grabbed by the idea of a giant dragon in spite of himself, and the beast wouldn't stop tugging at the fringes of his unconscious. As narrative, this conflicted view of the central object plays out brilliantly. Griaule himself is an imposition, a monster as formidable and ubiquitous as the landscape, and as subtle. He's the shape of everything, unnoticed in the way that, when it's all around you, you stop paying attention the lay of the hills and the flavor of the air. <br />
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The dragon is a mile or so long, mostly buried, infested and overgrown, built over and (mostly) around, and nearly completely immobilized. His exposed head is roughly the size of a football stadium with (at the opening of the first story) a shantytown crumbling over his eye. But he's not dead, and in more ways than size, the long millennia of stasis have made him something considerably more than a once-flying reptile. When we open in 1853, Griaule has been reduced to (or maybe grown to) a creature of the mind. He occupies the slow years influencing the people of the valley with his silent, malefic will. It's not the sort of pressure one could <i>prove</i>--although one of the shorts centers on a lawyer who builds an improbable case around the idea--but consists of coincidences, inspirations, obsessions, and a generalized sense of oppression, but it's beyond narrative doubt that this is a force which tempts people to the sorts of drama that serves or idly entertains the beast. Whether it's an <i>intelligent</i> malice is left unclear. The animal aspect of dragons isn't ever lost, and Griaule may well scheme and corrupt as a mere part of his nature, which has happened to become as magnificently overgrown as the rest of him. But he's a force beyond the scope of humans, either way. <br />
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The stories all play out as an expression of this insidious orchestration, where characters are pulled cleverly to plotted ends. The first of them is by far my favorite riff. The man who painted the dragon steps up before the local council and claims to be able to murder the creature with toxic pigments, by scaffolding his great head and flank and turning him into a mountain-size mural. There's just something brilliant and romantic and doomed about the idea that one of the great forces of the world can be subdued through <i>art</i>, and there's no way that I wasn't going to be pulled in by it myself. (And if it sounds like a potitical allegory, well, it shifts into an explicit one for some of the other stories.) And it's a scam of course, but the proposal nonetheless grows real as it takes over the artist's life, and the region's destiny, and brings Griaule to the conclusion he always desired, with lots of casualties along the way. <br />
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And they almost all go down like this. Generally, Griaule draws out callousness, venality, and lust in the men under his influence. Women get to be a little stronger than this (if they're a protagonist) or they get to be a little more <i>fatale</i> than outright nasty (if they're not), possibly less guileless to start with, but given to bursts of openness when the control falters. (God help me, I felt drawn to them too.) As we move through the other novellas, the arc is such that the dragon's mechanisms of control become a bit more overt. In the second one, a young woman is drawn into the guts and veins of the creature, mostly for purposes of housekeeping, to help out a colony of sensitives who take care of the more mundane tasks. (For her, things work out well in the end.) Other stories have Griaule drawing in a smaller, "normal" dragon to help along his seduction, or pushing some people through an alternate timeline to bring along a more spectacular ending than paint. Other broad trends have the main characters growing less sympathetic story by story (by the time we get to 2012, the last guy is a total asshole), and the writing expands a little more nicely and neatens up over time (the plots remain short enough to stay focused, however), with fewer writerly stunts. As well, the geography becomes a little more concrete, and more similar to the present day's. In the opening story, it's set in "a country to the south," and even though it's got some New World flora (banana trees and so on), the proper names and the style of narration seem comfortably European. Frankly, I'd have put it on the other end of the continent as <a href="http://keifuswrites.blogspot.com/2007/03/bedtime-reading-two-books-for-children.html">Florin and Guilder</a>. But Shepard has Central America in mind all along, and for the dragon's swan song, his menace becomes part and parcel of the disastrous, violent, meddled-in governance of the area. We are left with the feeling that Griaule, even dead and dispersed, can encompass all of the political evil of the world. I found him a little more palatable in a generic setting, but it's still an engaging read right to the end. Recommended, if you can find it. <br />
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*This publication includes the original short, published in the early 1980s, along with five additional novellas that have been written over the succeeding 30 years. I believe that the final one, released last year, is exclusive to this book. For the Googlers, the titles of the stories are, The Scalehunter's Beautiful Daughter, The Father of Stones, Liar's House, The Taborin Scale, and The Skull. Shepard also includes notes on the various stories, which are interesting (and which comprise most of the evidence about his opinions on fantasy and Griaule). Keifushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00287358319899471490noreply@blogger.com0