freckles_and_doubt | Entries tagged with fantasy

Cat Valente's short story 'The difference between love and time' just turned my brain inside out, in a good way, and now I'm crying. On Tor.com.

In other news, Cat Valente continues to be my literary girl crush.

In other, other news, the COVID brain fog also continues, in the last week I have distinguished myself by taking 4 hours to train curriculum advisors, which usually takes 2, necessitating a complete second session and a catchup set of notes on the examples we didn't have time for. Running training feels weird - what I say is coherent, apparently, but I don't have my usual fairly efficient and incisive control over the ideas I'm presenting. Bugger COVID, anyway. Horrible little thing. I still have a lyric-soprano-in-a-garret cough.

I am quite spectacularly tired, and going into three months of exam committees, orientation and registration. Yay.

It's definitely the apocalypse, I was in the supermarket yesterday and they hit me amidships with the first Christmas carol of the year, "Silent Night" sung in what appeared, for some reason, to be Dutch. This was cruel and unusual in itself, since normally the Geneva convention requires that it be November before Christmas carols are permitted to enter the arena of war. It was rendered additionally and unnecessarily hideous by the fact that the supermarket was playing syrupy "Silent Night" in Dutch at one end, and an entirely different Supermarket Radio Experience was inexplicably churning out the Proclaimers at the other. Standing exactly in the middle, circa the ice-cream aisle, with one in each ear was completely indescribable. I emerged, shaken, and tottered across to the mall to acquire (1) soothing new towels in an attempt to recover, and (2) books for Da Niece, whose esteemed birthday it was yesterday.

Time is weird this year. Da Niece retains her excellent literary taste - Song of Achilles by request, and receiving with joy Naomi Novik (not the dark school one) and the second Spider-Gwen - but also vouchsafed the information that she turned 15 yesterday. I have genuinely spent the last two years thinking she's 13, by my mathematically-challenged calculations she should have been turning 14 at the absolute most. Apparently it's been 2018 since 2018. Or I'm in a serious kind of denial. I had been vaguely assuming, with auntly pride, that she's a particularly mature 13-year-old. She's a delightful and particularly mature 15-year-old, anyway.

Also on the Dark front: I have just re-read, with much enjoyment, Tamsyn Muir's Harrow the Ninth, which retains, beyond its unabashedly Gothy vibe, its status as an excellent LARP/escape room puzzler, now with added bones, blood and despair. I cannot, alas, get into the sequel at all, it appears to be submerging itself in excessive literary device, including fragmented time-flow and inexplicable descents into the second person. The worldbuilding remains amazing and fascinating, and there are satisfying revelations, but even with the first-book twist as a starting point, it's losing me. Phooey.

Possibly by way of slightly more satisfying excursions into blood and death, I am currently re-playing Fallout 4 on survival mode, which means dying approximatly four times a combat, and needing to eat, hydrate and sleep to a somewhat realistic schedule. In this, if nothing else, will we exert some control over the apocalpyse.

I woke up spontaneously at a quarter to five this morning, which means it must be a random day ending in "Y", and bugger insomnia, anyway. Since I am functionally incapable of getting back to sleep once I've woken up, I did the usual, which entails stealth!tea (the plumbing in this house makes loud, weird noises in the neighbour's roof if you don't switch on taps strategically and in carefully-observed patterns, so obscenely early tea-drinking requires care) and climbing back into bed with two cats, a mug of Earl Grey and the Ipad, whereon I am currently reading Kindle books because the screen is larger. And I had just randomly bought the new Naomi Novik, which is called A Deadly Education, and which I thereafter read cover to cover in a giant, ravenous gollup between 5am and 8am, at which point I exhaled, muttered "She's so good! she's so fucking brilliant" in slightly resentful tones, and staggered off to work.

(Parenthesis: staggering off to work is so much better when it's literally staggering into the study to switch on the computer, and does not require dressing, driving, brushing one's hair or actual coherence).

I completely adored Naomi Novik's fairy tales, Spinning Silver (Jewish take on Rumplestiltskin; brilliant) and Uprooted (really dangerous darkly magical forests, also wizard's towers; brilliant). I also completely adored A Deadly Education, which is what you'd get if you crossed Lord of the Flies and the Hunger Games with A Wizard of Earthsea and executed the result with considerable verve in the mode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer while flipping a giant Up Yours over your shoulder in the general direction of J K Rowling. Which is to say, it's a very dark magical school story about what happens when both magic and magical education are carnivorous and predatory.

It's also about power and privilege. Everything Naomi Novik writes is about power and privilege, she's actually an extremely and deceptively political writer. She also did Napoleonic wars with dragons, remember? You are so busy being charmed by her tough, pragmatic protagonists that you don't notice the politics until it's socked you between the eyes with a brick. (She also severely does crossovers, apparently, which I suppose is logical enough given the fan fiction.) I was not so half-asleep this morning that I could not detect that this dark magic school story is also a more than somewhat searing critique of capitalism.

Anyway, I recommend Deadly Education,if you don't mind your school stories with a side order of death and really nasty politics. In addition to the politics, it has really interesting people. I am now more than somewhat slavering for the sequel. Sigh.

Gawsh, that was an unconscionably large posting gap. In the featureless slide of lockdown days it's fatal to get out of the habit of posting, weeks have drifted past before you know it. Something about the comparative blandness of days at home makes time go weirdly fast, even with the enormous and horrible events happening out there - they are still strangely distant.

I cannot tell a lie, however, my absence from Teh Intarwebs for the last couple of weeks has more than a little to do with the fact that I finished playing Witcher 3 and went straight back to replay 1 and 2 in quick succession, more or less in a spirit of enquiry. Did I hate 2 as much as I did first time round? oh hell yes, the Roche path is even worse than the Iorveth one. But I enjoyed 1 again, as much for its nostalgia value as anything else. While replaying I was struck by how similar in feel it is to DA Origins, just in level of graphics and underlying assumptions about gameplay, my guess would be that they came out in approximately the same year. (A quick google reveals I am almost correct: 2007 and 2009, respectively). Am now embarked happily on 3 again, which was the whole point of the replay (I will be completist or nothing, dammit). I am revelling in its beautiful design.

South Africa has yet, I think, to hit its true COVID peak, I suspect our worst times are ahead of us, so I am in no way complacent about this, but I am still reeling at how badly the whole thing is being handled in the UK and, particularly, the US. There is no excuse, absolutely none, for a major global power and highly developed nation to screw up disaster management this badly. I keep reading reports of Trump or Johnson doing their typical destructive flailing, and thinking, gods, they are actually trying to kill people, this is Scrooge's “they had better [die], and decrease the surplus population".

But a slightly different Shower Thought struck me the other night. If America were a fantasy novel, this whole thing would be a giant cautionary tale about the hideous energies unleashed when a Manifest Destiny goes wrong. Can you imagine how much, even with the cumbersome corruptions of the American political system to circumvent, Hillary would be kicking butt responding to this whole crisis? There would be none of this nonsense about science denialism, or not wearing masks, or opening businesses again. Her particular brand of energetic, hard-headed efficiency was clearly designed by merciful Cosmic Wossnames to lead the US out of this horrible thing with minimal loss. Trump stealing that election drove destiny off course, causing backlashes of cosmic energy which ensured that (a) he was the exact inverse of the Destined One, absolutely the worst possible person to respond to this particular challenge, and (b) everything would go spectacularly to hell in the most extreme way possible. Thus plagues and rains of fire and riots and murder hornets. Barring a plucky band of chosen heroes to overthrow the Big Bad, we're doomed.

I spent five days over last weekend pretty much flattened with a sinus thing, which manifested as killer headache + killer nausea, necessitating three of those days spent pretty much lying flat and wishing gently for death. It's a beautiful catch-22 - I wake up with the headache, which I can't medicate without eating something first, and I'm feeling too sick to eat. The anti-nausea meds take a while to kick in, and then kick me in the head so I sleep like the dead for about five hours, but I'm pretty good at wedging a quick slice of toast and two anti-inflammatories into the tiny window before I pass out, and when I wake up the headache has at least receded somewhat. But it wasn't a happy five days. 0/10, would not recommend.
Origin, that evil organ of the EA evil empire, celebrated my return to health yesterday by losing my entire games library, which is annoying as I'd been distracting myself during the illness bits in which I could actually remain upright by re-playing Inquisition. All of Mass Effect and Dragon Age, gone, as if they never existed. Then Origin had a hissy fit, booted me out the login, and refused to let me log in again. The usual tech-support Google search revealed numerous other people who've experienced the same thing and received only mockery and condemnation at the hands of the EA helplines. I am horribly struck by the ephemeral, conditional and precarious nature of the "things" we "buy" when such things are virtual constructs and we are simply licensed to access them at the whim of giant, profit-obsessed corporations. I hope a complete Origin re-install this evening sorts it out; if not, I may be forced to rush howling at EA's giant, oblivious ankles with an axe.
While sick, I re-read Katherine Addison's Goblin Emperor three times in six days, it seems to be pressing very specific buttons which require ritual re-immersion. On mature reflection, I think that this is because it's an intrinsically and topically anti-Trumpian narrative. The Current Disaster in the US presents the scenario of an old, complex, sophisticated structure designed to provide checks and balances on the presidential figurehead's running of the country, which has been subverted with pinpoint precision by inserting a venal, amoral toddler into the figurehead position, allowing him to co-opt, bypass and pervert the system. Goblin Emperor is an exploration, in utopian mode, of an old, complex, sophisticated structure designed to allow the figurehead (the Emperor) to run the country for the benefit of its nobles, which is joyously subverted, with pinpoint precision, by inserting an outsider, someone who has survived an abusive childhood while remaining an actual cinnamon roll, into the figurehead position, allowing him to co-opt the system into serving basic decency rather than privilege and control. I cannot sufficiently stress how satisfying it is; the more so because the novel does a more than decent job of exploring race issues through a fantasy lens. Also, for the record, Goblin Emperor fanfic appears to attract high-level writers, ability-wise, and is lovely.
I made Irish stew for jo&stv last night, because someone mentioned it in a fanfic and I suddenly had a jones. I used this recipe, mostly; the Guinness gives it a rich, dark gravy with a slightly silken texture, it's marvellous. The Jamie Oliver version does this weird thing with greaseproof paper, damped and scrunched on top of the stew for the first hour of cooking, which I've never come across before; presumably it's to keep moisture in, but it seems oddly specific. Why scrunching? why moist? It a mystery.
I hope everyone had a lovely Easter weekend! I really needed the four days off, I am still glandular and headachy after the sinus thing. My faculty also, in a hitherto unknown display of staff-centredness, closed us down at midday on Thursday, giving everyone an extra, informal half-day off. It transpires that the undergrad admin office has always done this, but no-one has ever told me about the tradition, with the net result that my unit has spent the last decade obliviously working the full pre-Easter Thursday. I am somewhat miffed about this. Fortunately my line management has just moved over to the Dean rather than the faculty manager, and the Dean's secretary is somewhat mama-bearish about staff privileges, so she carefully informed me and we all buggered off home early, rejoicing. The next three weeks are also four-day weeks, owing to voting day and Mayday public holidays, so hopefully I shall continue to gently recover. Maybe.

I would not have believed until it happened the sheer level of relief occasioned by the arrival of a new lightning cable for my Ipad. The old one had semi-disintegrated, it had worn at both ends to the point where the only way I could transfer Stardew Valley files between the Ipad and the desktop was to seize the neck of the Ipad end (already taped up with duct tape and toothpicks to keep it straight), wiggle it until it beeped, and then hold it in exactly the right position with my right hand while I frantically and ineptly transferred files on the pc with my left. Also, charging the Ipad entailed laying the cable out in a straight line and moving it millimetre by millimetre until the charge bar went green, then putting heavy things on everything to hold it in place and fence off the cats. As I darkly suspect that the weakness at the cable ends is a deliberate Apple ploy to make us buy more overpriced specialised peripherals, I have wantonly researched and acquired the most durable, by internet review, non-Apple replacement. (FWIW, Anker). *makes rude signs at Apple*.
Work is very boring, which I think is a combination of work actually being very boring (we're in the post-curriculum-change-period doldrums), and my state of health - I am still very glandular and sinusey and perpetually exhausted. I think a 'flu bout may be incoming, but in addition, following, weirdly enough, someone's Tumblr post diagnosing pre-serum Captain America, I am mentally resolving to research CVID and go and see an immunologist or rheumatologist or some such fancy specialist. Because the constellation of symptoms was startlingly familiar, and, frankly, bored.
Jo&Stv have inveigled me into attending the Grahamstown arts festival in June/July! I have not been for many, many years, the one time I did was in early postgrad, that epic five-person camping expedition with various Andrews and an elderly family VW Combi which blew a head gasket in PE on the way back, stranding five broke students for an extra two nights in the middle of a minor social meltdown. I remember Grahamstown being fun, but cold. Jo&Stv have booked a house and we're flying, so, water restrictions permitting, I confidently expect this to be a far more grown-up event. Also, they are generously standing me the plane ticket as a birthday present, because they're lovely that way and I'm kinda broke.
I spent part of the weekend re-reading Katherine Addison's Goblin Emperor, mostly because dragonlady has been blogging her responses, and it reminded me how much I loved the novel. It's becoming a comfort read, that must have been my, what, fourth or fifth re-read? It's incredibly interesting world-building, but mostly it's a deeply emotionally satisfying read in the same way that I find Jane Eyre or Fanny Price satisfying: gentle, empathetic main characters whose horrible experiences of abuse have not eroded their basic core of steely resolve to be decent. I love watching them triumph against the structures and bastard individuals who try to oppress them. It's the kind of vindication of decency that's very consoling in our current state of general global political fuckwittery. I recommend the novel. keeping the names straight will bewilder you, but it's worth it.
Gosh, this seems to be sort of working. Go five things structure. Also, it gives me happy early-internet flashbacks to be coding the bulleted list in basic HTML. I used to put up my own websites via FTP and with files coded in HTML in Notepad. Backwards. Uphill both ways. Through the snow. There is something pleasingly structured about HTML tags, I always enjoyed their logic and found it intuitive. Probably because, weirdly enough, of a typing course I did in my last years of high school, which left me touch-typing but also introduced me to very early word processors, all green screen and WordPerfect (remember WordPerfect?). WordPerfect used anglebracket commands rather like HTML, I remember at one point diligently coding substitutions for ten green bottles hanging on the wall to end up with ten purple marshmallows sticking to the ceiling, which somewhat disconcerted the teacher. Of such things is our early imprinting made.

Is it just me, or is T. Kingfisher sounding more and more like mid-period Terry Pratchett? (This is, I hasten to add, one of the highest compliments in my lexicon). She has her own very distinct voice, but it exists very much in the same landscape as Pratchett's, the same earthy humanism, irreverence and comic timing. I am somewhat enamoured of the story I've just found, which is The Rose McGregor Drinking And Admiration Society, it's funny and acute and a sock in the eye to the die-away ladies common to balladry.

I am distracting myself with random internet wandering because I have just had to take Jyn in to the vet, she was a bit subdued and I searched her all over for bites and couldn't find anything, and it turns out she has a massive abscess inside her mouth. She's in tonight so they can keep her fasting before they operate tomorrow, and the house has only half its cat count and is very empty.

For some bizarre reason my morning Earl Grey tastes faintly of coffee. This seems both unlikely and a little unfair. I don't think there is actually any coffee in the house.

Today is my last day of leave, which I propose to spend doing entirely self-indulgent things which probably include comfort-replaying something hack-and-slashy. It's been a lovely three weeks of leave, which have been characterised by a nice balance of achievement and goofing off.

I examined a PhD thesis, for the first time ever, which was pretty terrifying going in but actually doable, and I think I've done a reasonably fair and conscientious job despite large tracts of it being in an unfamiliar critical field.
I should have written a paper, but three days in I examined my conscience and state of energy, thought "Hell no" and withdrew from the collection, which made me feel guilty for about three seconds, and then enormously relieved; the editor was nice about it and the world did not end. (I also have to say that if there's a silver lining to the student protest cloud, it makes a magnificent excuse for not being able to do stuff).
I finished Portal, Portal 2 and Firewatch, all three of which were highly enjoyable.
I've managed over the holiday period to get back into exercising, which means I've been walking for about 40 mins daily, and am feeling much better for it.
And, notwithstanding water restrictions, I have madly grown a batch of gem squash plants and a mango seedling from seed, by virtue of randomly planting the remnants of various meals, watering them at erratic intervals, standing back and let the currently rather fierce African sun and my predilection for compost do their stuff.

By way of some faint point to this slightly vague and wandering post, have some random linkery.

This is an obituary for Leia Organa, rather nicely done.
This is an Ursula Vernon YA portal fantasy, evincing her characteristic combination of whimsy and down-to-earthness, and featuring a particularly virulent toxic mother figure. I loved it.
This, on the other hand, is an entirely adult, very dark, very freaky, very good Ursula Vernon horror story, finishing which made me go "Holy fuck!" out loud. There's feminist fairy-tale rewrites, and then there's ... this.

My subject line is a random Dirk Gently quote for no reason other than a vague association with multiplicity, and the fact that Tumblr has a current sideline in gifs from the new Dirk Gently tv series. It sounds completely off the wall, has anyone seen it?

Some Things About Doctor Strange:

I am resolved to be more organised in my movie-watching experience so I never have to go back to Canal Walk as the only place a film is still showing. Their sound is always cranked up too high, and their projection is always too dark. Even in a 2D version. This does detract from one's experience of the film, particularly the night scenes, in that really one can't see what's going on. Also, my ears hurt.
Conversely, on a Sunday morning, even the one just before Christmas, I was the only person in the cinema, allowing me to put my feet up on the chairs in front of me and to apostrophise the screen with some vigour at whim. I love doing this. It's the best possibly movie-watching experience.
Significant swathes of this film were tragically miscast. My love of the Cumberbatch is a pure and abiding thing, but he's just wrong with an American accent, it's seriously distracting. The perfect fit of the gaunt lines of his face with the magician archetype wasn't quite enough to carry it. And the character's weird mix of driven egotistical ambition and irreverent one-liners never really gelled. Also, while my love of Tilda Swinton's particular brand of individualistic androgyny is an even purer and more abiding thing, a white woman should not be representing Nepalese mysticism. However elaborate the backstory that claims the Sorcerer Supreme as a global figure, a whitewash in this context has profound implications for representation and it bugged the hell out of me all the way through. Mordo, on the other hand, was great. Chiwetel Ejiofor is always great.
My profound fondness for spaceships and exciting techie gadgets notwithstanding, it's clear that, however flawed a film is involved, by gum at heart I'm a fantasy creature. Magic does it for me. It really does. Memo to self, fantastic beasts, eftsoons and right speedily.
Notwithstanding which, the film was so busy going "whoo!" at the special effects team as they had at the fractal nature of visual reality with both hands and cool glowing spell diagrams, that it really wasn't paying much attention to the plot. It offered a weird degree of emotional disconnect. I never quite cared about anything. If done properly, an over-arching cosmic threat should explicate and resonate (shut up, stv) with the protagonist's own issues and arc, and... not so much. It felt patched together. I do not think that this was a good script.
The Cloak of Levitation stole the show. Flirty thing. Like the best cats - sleek, self-possessed, wayward and pleasingly homicidal when not being affectionate.
This film failed the Marvel Test, viz. whether or not I'd sit through the credits to see the final easter egg. In a word: no. Was not sufficiently interested. Tragically, more and more recent Marvel films are actually failing the Marvel test, because, regrettably, more and more they are rehashed, homogenised, money-making artefacts whose actual content is dictated by a marketing committee and thus lacks inspiration, spark or narrative coherence. Yet another in the Giant Commercial Superhero Line, ho-hum. Yawn. With a side order of tone-deafness to issues of race and gender and the like. It's enough to make me, an almost entirely Marvel-fondling comics fan, eye DC edgeways with an awakening interest. The whisper flies around the clubs, could they be worse? I fear they could, yet still I am tempted.
Marvel test, failed. Bechdel test, failed. Sexy lamp test actually not failed on the second go (the female doctor's first appearance arc could have been replaced by a sexy lamp with "Doctor Strange Is A Dick" stuck to it on a post-it note, but on the second try she actually did plot-relevant stuff. Her third appearance could have been replaced by a sexy lamp with "SPOILER is SPOILER" stuck to it on a post-it note.). Furiosa test failed in spades, good grief, this was a movie about a man's struggle with ambition and power, MRAs drool at it.
I was prepared to love this film, on account of its confluence of several happy buttons, but no. I am disappoint.

My subject line is what happens if your dodgy memory mashes up two Shakespeare quotes, namely "passing strange" (Othello) and "indifferent honest" (Hamlet). I stoutly maintain that the conflation was irresistibly conjured by the quality of the film. Also, while the quote is possibly orbiting my brain randomly as a result of having seen BC in Hamlet (he was great), now I want to see him do Iago.

I am in the sweary stage of paper writing. It's fighting me; I'm wrestling it, it's largely winning. I hate it, and myself, and my writing, and African fairy-tale film, about equally. I am horribly bored by the need to finish the damned thing (it's now nearly a week after deadline) and the fact that I can't permit myself much in the way of socialising or happy domestic fuffling until it's bloody well done. Alarmingly enough, this is all familiar and status quo: never underestimate the extent to which the relationship academics have with academia is basically abusive. I'll finish it. This too will pass. Until then, swearing, and loathing, and hedgehoggy hermitting. But especially the swearing.

I did, however, track down the volume on African folklore which I'd randomly packed at the bottom of a whole box of Pratchett and Moorcock. This has led me, as a knock-on effect, to throw out more books, as I had to unpack and repack a bunch of them. I'm still obscurely enjoying the catharsis of the clear-out.

There should be an almost complete Elric in the Moorcock, and a couple of other series as well - Corum, and Dorian Hawkmoon? I have kept the Jerry Cornelius ones, because postmodernism, and the Dancers at the End of Time ones, because I don't do hallucinogenic drugs and a girl has to have some substitutes. I am forced to admit that I've pretty much outgrown Elric, I haven't read them since undergrad. The John C. Wright are buying it because the frothing homophobia of the writer's online presence is having the Orson Effect, namely an inability to read his fiction without a sort of Pavlovian response of annoyance and distaste. Also, he's a sexist sod, frankly; I really like some of what the Orphans series does, but its ideological irritations are now outweighing its enjoyments. Never trust a writer who feels impelled to spank almost all of his women. I have retained only the remnants of my Heinlein collection which are (a) genre classics and (b) I am able to read without actually throwing the book across the room, which in the event turns out not to be many of them. I've turfed out the young adult stuff, because frankly there's better y.a. sf out there, but they're actually fun and comparatively inoffensive - Pam, you might like them for the young'uns? The Michael Scott Rohan are swashbucklery fun, but I've kept Scott Lynch for that.

If anyone wants to appropriate any of these, please let me know! So far only the Kay and the Aldiss have been bagsed from the previous group.

I do like Tom Gauld's cartoons, they have a sort of wry, self-deprecating literacy to them which strikes something of a chord. If you haven't read his collection You're All Just Jealous Of My Jetpack, you darned well should, if only because its titular cartoon exemplifies so neatly my own stance in an uncaring academic world. The above cartoon is particularly relevant to my current interests as, while I am generally ensconced in my very own house somewhat ecstatically, I am still confronting the problem of the Library, which is approximately three times the size of my available shelf space. Unpacking my books has forced me to revisit the process of self-interrogation which led to my earlier exercises in Shuffling Off or Throwing Out books, with particular reference to Gauld's categories of "Saving For When I Have More Time" and "Will Never Read", because the usual processes of self-deception lead to an over-easy conflation of these categories. I am thus embarked upon a secondary literary weeding, with particular reference to the above categories and my new, idiosyncratic one, which is not so much "Wish I Hadn't Read" as "Am Reluctantly Forced to Admit I Will Never Read Again Because Really It's Not That Good."

In short, I have more books to throw out, and the next few posts will probably give alert readers a faint sense of déja vu. As before, Capetonian witterers are please to tell me if you want any of these and I'll shunt them your way before hauling the leftovers to the charity shop.

Guy Gavriel Kay, alas, is buying it, because I am way too old and ornery an English academic to survive another dose of flights of portentous emotionality. I've kept the interesting Tanith Lee short stories, I'm mostly throwing out her young adult stuff and the more over-the-top erotic horror. Some of the classics - Anderson, Aldiss, Lieber - I was keeping out of a vague sense of academic completeness, in case I ever needed to refer to them, which I really won't. I've kept some MacAvoy, thrown out the ones I don't flat-out love. The Kurtz has only survived thus far out of a vague nostalgia for my neo-pagan phase.

My Book Discards: How I Grew Up. Have at them.

The subject line is Pratchett, Rule 3 for Discworld librarians. In hanging onto books it's not so much causality that I've been trying to interfere with, as the nature of time.

It being Stv's birthday and all, we went out to Overture for supper last night. I feel that it is important and indicative that, if the Salty Cracker crowd could be said to have a favourite default restaurant at which to hang out and celebrate anything at all, it's bloody upmarket and one of the top ten in the country. The waitstaff know us. Stv got free champagne. At in excess of R600 a head for a four-course meal with a wine pairing, that's an expensive neighbourhood joint. (And a bit distant, too, being half an hour's drive away in Stellenbosch). It was a lovely evening, although slightly negative notes were introduced by the following:

It's faculty exam committee season, which means I'd spent the entire day checking and annotating the 635 student records on a 364-page board schedule which is a fraction under 2.5cm thick. This puts me in a strangely zen state composed of equal parts of numerical trance, Machiavellian structural insight, advisor empathy and seething resentment, and incidentally renders me completely exhausted and glandular to the max. I was only really capable of conversation by the end of the first course and my second glass of wine. Overture was a kindly panacea to the day's ills, but conversely I wasn't really in the best state to enjoy it properly.
We may be overdoing the neighbourhood joint five-star expensive restaurant thing to the point of over-exposure. The food was, as always, excellent, but I didn't think it hit its usual plane of dizzy high. Lovely tomato risotto (they always do great risotto), but slightly arb green bean salad with unidentifiable duck, and bland square chunks of mostly tender pork. Fellow diners' mileage may vary, you are perfectly free to blame my exhausted state rather than any diminution in quality, but I wasn't blown away. Beautiful evening on the terrace, though, exquisite dusk clouds, and as always the best sort of company.
It is possibly fortunate that my tiredness was sufficient for me not to rise to the provocation offered by a fellow guest, who during the course of conversation incautiously offered a statement to the effect that she thinks Stephenie Meyer writes well. Them's fighting words, where I come from. It is my professional opinion that Twilight's stylistic and narrative infelicities are only marginally better than its gender politics in general loathsomeness. In default of the spirited debate and righteous suppression I would normally offer to such provocation, I present, as threatened, the blog which picks Meyer's grammar apart, with maximum snark. Fortuitously, today also gave rise randomly to this Slate article, which does statistical/linguistic analysis comparing three hugely popular texts - Twilight, Harry Potter and The Hunger Games. It's a fascinating comparison, and in particular the tables which look at adjectives are extremely telling. Viz:

The thing which immediately strikes me: Collins's characteristic adjectives and adverbs are generally more sophisticated, but they also relate to complex states and actions and very frequently to abstractions. Rowling's are very action-oriented, but you can see her younger audience intentions in their comparative simplicity, with a focus on straightforward emotional states which tend to reflect action. Meyer's are definitely less sophisticated than those used by Collins, but they're also almost entirely emotional, and when they're physical it's physicality which largely reflects or responds to emotion. This echoes the frustration I feel when reading Twilight (and, for the record, I've read the entire series twice and supervised a couple of graduate theses on the books, if I diss them it's from full knowledge and exposure), because really, when you get down to it, nothing much happens in them. You drift passively around in Bella's head while she angsts and reacts and feeeeeeeeeeels. The language is not accomplished at the structural level, frequently obvious and clumsy and weirdly unfocused (my undergrads can do better), but it's the pacing, characterisation and plot which are really problematical, and which are heartily outdone by almost any piece of fan fiction I have read recently. I stick by my assertion. Even without getting me started on the gender politics, Meyer does not write well.

Rantage and random analysis brought to you courtesy of my really rather strong feelings about this, did you notice? And by the sure and horrible knowledge that in about twenty minutes I go to meet my four-hour meeting doom. Doooooom! At least the energy from all that ranting has my blood buzzing enough to mostly compensate for my state of over-fed, mildly hung-over sleep deprivation. Now with extra glands. Sigh.

Subject line is still Arcade Fire, "Wasted Hours", from The Suburbs. It's a ridiculously catchy, lilting, gentle tune which was playing in the car this morning and which has thoroughly colonised my head. It's curiously soothing, particularly after losing a day to board schedule checking. One feels they understand.

Bugger, I forgot to go back and do the May attribution thing. Excelsior!

2nd May, "it's not about what you love, it's about how you love it". Quoting Wil Wheaton on being a geek, from a response at a Q&A (linked from that post). The man is very sane.
5th May, "the same old painted lady". The Mandatory David Bowie Quote, this one from "Song for Bob Dylan", slightly mis-applied because I was talking about wearing make-up. You know, I'd never realised until I looked properly at those lyrics how involuted the imagery is. "Here she comes again / The same old painted lady / From the brow of a super brain..." The image is actually Athena (wisdom) emerging from the brain of Zeus, but the song snarls up the ideas so you're not sure if the painted lady is actually Dylan's wisdom, or if she's some sort of harpy-like figure to be vanquished by his songs. Typical Bowie flow--of-consciousness, in fact.
8th May, "I'd much rather have a mansion in the hills". Crowded House, "A mansion in the slums". Somewhere round the third verse they stop trying to differentiate between a caravan in the hills and a mansion in the slums, and decide they'd rather have it all. Word.
13th May, "the stars look very different today". Bonus Mandatory David Bowie Quote, this time clearly from "Space Oddity", appropriately enough since I was talking about Chris Hadfield covering "Space Oddity" from the International Space Station, and yes, it bloody still makes me weepy.
24th May, "you may seek him in the basement, you may look up in the air". T.S. Eliot, "Macavity, the Mystery Cat", from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. You should have recognised that one. And not because of Andrew Lloyd Webber.
28th May, "one day will flash and send you crashing through the ceiling". From "Thank heavens for little girls", jolly old Lerner and Loewe, originating in Gigi, but I think I probably know the Perry Como version, FSM knows from what source. The aether, perhaps.
30th May, "what she says is all right by me, I kinda like that style". Talking Heads, "The lady don't mind", and if you're anything like me the mere reading of this sentence will have infallibly ear-wormed you with the song in question, which will resist all exorcism for upwards of a week. Catchy little bugger.

This should be the last ever Giant Attribution Post, on account of how I've started footnoting posts with an attribution for the subject line, just because. It's remotely possible that my academia may be showing.

In other news:

I write like
Ray Bradbury

I Write Like. Analyze your writing!

I am deeply flattered.

Cat Valente, on the other hand, writes always and only like Cat Valente. The Shoot-Out at Burnt Corn Ranch Over the Bride of the World is a sort of weird mythic western thing which causes me love and despair and illuminating pain, like a crowbar inserted to the head and twisted. Read it and weep. (My subject line is her penultimate sentence, which I steal because, in its precise moment and context, it's perfect in the way that Mozart is perfect).

I fear it's official: I am Peter Jackson's bitch. He has me right where he wants me. It needs only the swelling strains of that Shire soundtrack, and I'm all misty-eyed and lump-in-throat and ready, once more, to be charmed. Which I was. I had very mixed expectations of The Hobbit, and it's a deeply flawed film, but I loved it nonetheless - why, yes, children, you can revisit Middle Earth, and it's just as beguiling as it was the first time round. I am down with this. I participate shamelessly in this shameless manipulation. It's fine by me.

Mostly, though, I left thinking, slightly weak-kneed, wow but this is going to be spectacular when all six films are done - a seamless, integrated storytelling artefact which even without extended versions will fling at us something over sixteen hours of loving, sprawling, coherent and unified vision. Unexpected Journey is so tightly woven into the LotR trilogy, it's basically meaningless considered separately. This is not a film version of Tolkien's The Hobbit, this is a structuring of a prequel to The Lord of the Rings around the backbone of Bilbo's story, but essentially and intrinsically fleshed out with history, backstory, foregrounding of minor story elements, wholesale ripping off of appendices, logical extrapolation of action for people from LotR, and other acts of gratuitous fannishness. This is a geek's film, built for the joyous recognition of those of us who have altogether too minute a knowledge of Middle-Earth.

This rather elevated project does some very specific things to the feel of the film. It's not about the children's book. It doesn't, other than in some slightly jarring moments, even try for the tone of the children's book: it's in a weird way rather more true to Tolkien's overall epic, rather dark-edged, elegiac Middle-Earth world-building than the children's book ever was. The violence and battle which are glossed with a certain childish innocence in the novel are here given the almost-full LotR grim and grit, and the broader implications of history and event which the book refuses to contemplate are damned well contemplated. If the result is a wee bit schizophrenic, I think that's inevitable, because the book is as well.

Above all, I am completely fascinated with what they've done with Thorin Oakenshield, who becomes the epic warrior hero counterpoint to Bilbo's little guy. Film-Thorin is a brooding, tormented, gothy figure with a Tragic!Backstory well upfront, prone to dramatic, solitary posing against interesting backdrops, à la Draco in Half-Blood Prince. He is an extremely compelling figure, and also ridiculously hot. Ridiculously. The sheer toe-wriggling appreciation of my own viewing experience (brooding intense men buttons firmly hit!) is backed up by a frothing online fandom frenzy approaching Legolas levels. (Fili and Kili are also incidentally firmly in the "wouldn't throw them out of bed for gratuitous bass-line part singing" camp). Most interestingly, I don't see this version of Thorin as in any way a betrayal of the book version. Book-Thorin always was fascinatingly flawed, a complex mix of heroism and dignity and focused intent and a chip on his shoulder the size of the Lonely Mountain which makes his avarice and defensiveness all too likely. Film-Thorin is something of a redemption of the Comic Dwarf elements of Gimli: no-one would dare to think of tossing Thorin Oakenshield, and I'm very happy the film picked up on the book's insistence on his dignity. He embodies "Tolkien Dwarf" both conceptually and physically in a way which at least partially compensates for the broad comedy of some of his brethren, for which, bitch or no, I will not really be forgiving Jackson any time soon.

While I loved the film, it was not an unmixed viewing experience: I don't think it's up there with the LotR movies in terms of absolute quality. It's a sprawling, self-indulgent piece, and some of its attempts to negotiate the clashes between childlike and epic elements are not wildly successful. While I'm still on a bit of a fangirly high, I'm also exceeding even Two Towers levels of slightly enraged incomprehension at some of the adaptation choices that were made. Therefore, a Swings and Roundabouts comparison seems called for. ( I shall also cut it in case anyone doesn't want to be spoiled for adaptation choices, although if you're spoiled for the novel as a whole I am shocked and horrified. )

All things considered, I am immeasurably relieved. The response to the film has been so mixed, I was rather afraid that Jackson-bloat would have crushed the life out of the world I love. But it hasn't. It's still Middle-Earth, and the visit is still magical. The kind of carping I'm doing is very much that of a fan, levied at the work of a fellow fan with whom I'm comfortable enough to wrangle affectionately when our visions differ. Thank the cosmic wossnames.

Also, hot dwarves. I'm just saying.

Current Mood: happy, relieved
Current Music: dwarven part-singing IN MY HEAD!

I've spent the better part of the last two weekends marking a Masters dissertation. It's on modern fantasy, specifically Stephen Erickson, who I hadn't read before and am very glad to have read now. (Probably more on him in a future post, when I've ploughed through more Malazan). The thesis makes some good points, but its sense of contemporary fantasy is rather limited; it argues that Erickson's gritty, realistic, non-romance-based world and plot is a ground-breaking departure from the classical fantasy genre.

The thing is, it isn't. The epic fantasy genre has been breaking madly away from heroic stereotypes for decades. Stephen Donaldson does it. Terry Pratchett does it. George R R Martin does it. There's a whole new crop of fresh works by China Miéville, Joe Abercrombie, Richard Morgan, Lev Grossman, which are gleefully standing the genre and its heroes on their heads. These days there's a well-defined and vociferous sub-set of epic fantasy which is resolutely postmodern, dammit.

And I find myself looking at that list and thinking, hang on, those are all men. What's with that? Is the postmodern mickey-take on heroic fantasy strictly a masculine thing, or am I just not thinking of the examples of female writers who do it? I suppose you could count Elizabeth Bear's Iskryne, but it's not strictly epic. So either there's an intrinsic testosterone component to postmodern deconstruction of heroic tropes (or, in fact, there's an intrinsic testosterone component to heroic dudes swinging swords on an epic scale) or my memory is playing up even more than usual. Who am I not thinking of, female fantasy-deconstruction-wise? Help out my fatigued and rapidly deteriorating brain.

Subject line, of course, courtesy of Goats. Read Goats. It'll put hair on your chest. Surreal, wayward hair.

Current Mood: confused

I've always wanted to use that for a subject line. Life Goal Achieved!

I buy, as I have many times confessed, an awful lot of books online. Mostly this is because I have a pitiful saving throw versus Literary Shiny, and actual disposable income with which to indulge it. However, a lot of this is also because I read an awful lot of blogs by science fiction and fantasy writers (viz. left sidebar and my Friends page), and they are forever mentioning either (a) books they read and enjoyed, and (b) books they themselves have recently published. Amid my burgeoning shelves in category (a) we find, for example, Lud-in-the-Mist and The House Called Hadlows, both courtesy Neil Gaiman, and Libba Bray, courtesy Sarah Rees Brennan, excellent recommendations all. In category (b) are a large number of burgeoning-shelves culprits, but also, courtesy Elizabeth Bear, my current reading matter. This is a suitably large and be-tentacled tome entitled New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird, and containing stories by her, among other luminaries including Neil Gaiman, China Miévelle, Charles Stross, Cheri Priest and Michael Marshall Smith. It is, in short, a High Status Collection.

It's been an interesting week or so of reading, and Cthulhu be praised, has not made my dream-life any odder than it is usually, although frankly that isn't saying much. I am struck, however, by the really strange variation in quality among these stories. I'd judge that about a third of them are somewhat pedestrian, slightly arbitrary, nothing special. Another third are clever, effective, chilling, nicely done. The final third are blow-your-socks-off-wonderful, with added TNT; mostly these are by the Big Names, but not always, to which I say, strength to your elbow, lesser mortals who are rising like R'lyeh, and whose other writings I shall now proceed to seek out and order online. It's the Circle of Books!

As an exercise in Upbeat, I shall now proceed to burble enthusiastically about the really good ones.

Neil Gaiman's story in this anthology isn't "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar", the one everyone knows; it's "A Study In Emerald", which I think I first read in Fragile Things, but the Victorian newspaper mock-up online version of which is perfectly marvellous. It's one of those stories whose twists and oddments sneak up on you, so I shan't say anything other than it's a combination of Cthulhu and Sherlock Holmes pastiche, it's desperately chilling, and, this being Gaiman, the voice is pitch-perfect. It was lovely to have an excuse to read it again.
Marc Laidlaw's "The Vicar of R'lyeh" is notable both for its oddly effective crossover between Lovecraftian horror and the mannered English countryside of Trollope, Austen and Hardy, and its ability to configure the crunches and compromises of the corporate coding environment as chilling Cthulhoid horror. It's the one story in this anthology I really enjoyed while feeling that the writer didn't quite pull it off, but it's still a striking piece.
Michael Marshall Smith's "Fair Exchange" is Innsmouth in urban London, its voice all lower-class Brit, its denizens lesser criminals and fundamentally anti-social dole drones. Evil, the story says, is no less evil for being really petty.
William Browning Spencer is no-one I'd ever heard of before, and sounds suspiciously like an overly-literate alias. He is responsible both for the story "The Essayist in the Wilderness", and for the fact that I've just spent forty-five minutes and several hundred rand on Amazon Marketplace to discover his other work and purchase same. This story is possibly my favourite in the anthology (OK, favourite after "Emerald"), because it's, once again, an immaculate exercise in voice, but also has a restrained, blackly funny, lateral sort of comic horror which creeps up on you very, very slowly and mostly by dint of being just very slightly wrong. I haven't had this much fun reading in a very long time.
Elizabeth Bear's "Shoggoths in Bloom" is deservedly a Hugo novelette winner; it's an example of that rare and wonderful thing, a Lovecraftian pastiche which is deeply and sensitively political, and which achieves the almost impossible feat of creating empathy for a Lovecraftian horror. It's also a late 1930s period piece, and its mythos elements are beautifully enmeshed in pre-war politics; its awareness of American and German racism is a thoroughly satisfying antidote to Lovecraft's own bigotry.
Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette's collaboration, "Mongoose", is a deeply weird and lateral sf story about Kadath Space Station and its infestation of weird other-dimensional raths and toves and bandersnatches, which you hunt with an alien phase-tentacled beastie called a cheshire. It made me very happy. Lovecraft/Lewis Carroll crossovers are as inevitable as all get-out.
Finally, China Miéville's "Details" is about perception. He's always about perception. Here, horror is about perception, which is really the nub of it, isn't it? Once you've seen the horror, you can't unsee it. You're screwed.

I am struck by how many times in the above list I've referenced voice; even when I haven't mentioned it specifically, these stories do voice, or at least perspective, very well. It seems to be one of the classic features of horror: the writer needs to be able to immerse you in the world and feelings of the protagonist for horror to actually be effective. It's why Stephen King is as good as he is. For all that the Cthulhu mythos is about unimaginably massive, alien, indifferent forces in a vast and uncaring universe, their effects must be personal for us to apprehend their power. It's why a lot of these stories are better than Lovecraft in some ways. No-one touches him for rendering the indescribable, but he didn't, ultimately, depict people particularly well, probably because he didn't like them much. I think really good writers do.

Current Mood: nameless horror

Much as I enjoy noodling around on the piano reproducing pop tunes as my wayward fancy takes me, it's all too often that I encounter Actual Pianists who rub my nose inescapably in the fact that it would be extreme hubris to even think of myself as a two-bit hack. This is another Youtube discovery not entirely unrelated to yesterday's Piano Guys. Apart from being a rather fun piano piece all on its lonesome, as a distillation of a full orchestra it's quite something. (It's also reminding me of quite how much of the Skyrim music is ripped off from this, or from LotR). His Harry Potter version is also lovely, but I rather like the ending on this one.

Watch on YouTube

It's also obscurely comforting to discover that the guy's a professional who does this sort of score-creation for Yamaha. I'm able to vaguely think "ah, corporate shill" and go my merry way with the inferiority complex marginally mitigated.

Apropos of nothing at all, a random concatenation of ideas has just reminded me of last night's Salty Cracker (La Boheme in Sea Point, lovely food) at which the usual wayward puppy conversation suddenly reminded me of a dream I had the other night. I dreamed I seduced C.S. Lewis at a garden party, more or less directly as a result of feeling horribly embarrassed. I'd just spent twenty minutes declaiming to this amiable bespectacled gent about fantasy novels, finishing up with a condescending supposition that he'd probably never heard of C.S. Lewis's Ransom trilogy, but they're very interesting books despite their overly heavy Christian bit, at which point I suddenly realised I was talking to the author himself. (I plead in mitigation that he's been dead for a while, I wasn't to know). Shamed and irritated, I seduced him, presumably as a form of distraction (or possibly a subversive attack on the overly heavy Christian bit). Memo to self: do not recount this one to therapist, I'm not entirely sure I want to know what it means.

Words cannot express how grateful I am that it's Friday. My exhaustion levels form an interestingly steeply-pitched graph that starts at "manageable" on Monday and then wantonly climbs to the weekend.

Current Mood: ded
Current Music: Pirates piano solo

I started reading pulp fantasy, as opposed to children's fantasy novels, at university. The role-playing crowd introduced me to people like Feist and Eddings, who I happily grafted onto the solid groundwork of a childhood spent reading Tolkien and Susan Cooper and E. Nesbit and Earthsea, and my grandfather's considerable, if rather random, collection of Golden Age sf.

Anne McCaffrey I stumbled on all by myself. I was perennially broke in undergrad, owing to non-wealthy parents and the horrible exchange rate between Zim and South Africa, and insufficient gumption for it to have occurred to me to go out and find a part-time job. I used to haunt second hand book stores, a habit picked up from schooldays. There was a little junk shop in Mowbray, just the Tugwell side of Shoprite, that had a single shelf of books. One Friday afternoon I wandered past there and found something called Dragonsong. There was also the sequel, Dragonsinger: Harper of Pern, but I was being too cautious with money to buy them both. I took Dragonsong back to my res room and devoured it whole that evening, in a state of suspended enchantment that I suspect was shared by a lot of you who are female and met McCaffrey in your teens. The wish-fulfilment elements of the fire lizards, the fascination of the setting, the whole musical element, Menolly's growth out of her marginalised life - I desired more, passionately.

I couldn't go back and buy the sequel because I left for the airport to go back home to Zim for the vac really early on Saturday morning. The desperate need for more of the same world led me to overcome the mouse-like introversion of my first year, and actually voluntarily speak to the girl in the res room next door, who was likewise a Zimbabwean. She was leaving a few days later. I gave her money for the book, and asked her to buy it for me and bring it up to Zim, which she cheerfully agreed to do.

I remember this all astonishingly vividly, given that it happened over twenty years ago. Her house wasn't far from ours in Harare, up on a hill; I remember finding my way there one evening, and having a perfunctory chat with the girl, whose name I can't remember; I have a vivid mental image of her rummaging around in her not-yet-unpacked suitcase to find the book for me. I must have hit her for it the instant she got back. The whole episode is outlined in my memory by the tense, thrumming expectation of actually getting my hands on that book, of continuing the immersion I'd started a few weeks before and from which I'd been horribly excluded. I don't even remember reading Dragonsinger for the first time, but boy howdy, do I remember desiring it.

A lot of Pern is, objectively speaking, fairly grotty: its world-building is prone to holes, McCaffrey's storytelling suffers at time from pacing issues, her prose is occasionally awkward, and she tends to recycle plots. A lot of the dragon/human interaction is frankly the stuff of adolescent fantasy, and the sexual politics are downright dodgy at times. Notwithstanding all of this, it's a world that for a lot of fantasy geeks has profoundly shaped our experience of the genre. The Elizabeth Bear take on animal-influenced sex may point to the huge problems with McCaffrey's over-romanticised version, but Pern's dragons perfectly encapsulate the profound human desire at the heart of a hell of a lot of fantasy, which is for an ideal of communication and connection with non-human creatures. The novels explore, transform and enable, at base, the traditional adolescent female love of horses, with all that that relationship allows in the way of validation and power. Pern's semi-medieval, semi-sf environments cunningly use elements of both discourses to both challenge and empower their protagonists, who tend to be real people, individual and compelling even when, like Lessa, they're not entirely likeable, and whose construction represents huge leaps for the representation of female characters at the time the novels were written. I subject my fantasy/sf collection to periodic weeding, lest the bookshelf crisis become critical, but there's still a row of Pern novels there, and every now and then I re-read them, because they're comfortable friends and still hold the resonance of their meaning to a much younger me.

Anne McCaffrey's recent death is thus a huge sadness. I can't always say that her books have unqualified literary value, but their unqualified significance to me, and to people like me, is never in doubt. She was an icon in the field. I'm sorry she's gone.

Current Mood: sad

The knell of blogdoom the internets over is the moment when one's mother asks, with polite parental concern, why one hasn't been blogging to the regular (slightly obsessive) schedule. Oops, busted. The reasons for my recent non-bloggery are many and varied, but mostly it's because I've spent the last week solid playing Skyrim, the sequel to Oblivion. It's probably fortunate that the inexorable roll of time sent me back to work this morning, only semi-fatigued and vaguely functional, otherwise I might still be spending twelve hours a day bashing my way around its Vikingoid, very beautiful and snow-encrusted haunts.

Skyrim and its immediate ancestors are the fantasy, sword-wielding, magic-slinging, hack-and-slash equivalent to a first-person shooter, but with far stronger RPG elements - character class specialisation, rather a nifty experience/level system, the occasional need for a moral choice in a quest outcome. As a substitute for the intricate companion interactions of Dragon Age it ain't up to much, not least because I really have no compelling desire to unpick it analytically via the medium of bloggery. However, some observations:

Glory, but its landscapes are exquisite. I love that I can bash my way off across the countryside in any direction, with only the minor impediment of meticulously-detailed precipices, canyons, fortress walls and those bloody ice trolls to prevent me, while stumbling over an apparently endless plethora of random mini-quests. The countryside is unreasonably beautiful, whether tundra or snowscape or forest or cave, and the level of detail on plants and stones and what have you is exquisite.
Its people, conversely, simply look weird. Possibly I'm over-habituated to the unreasonably beautiful visual aesthetic of Dragon Age, but somewhere in the bowels of the setting there appears to be a check-box labelled "Enable gnarly troglodyte people", and it's resolutely checked. Their Elves are ugly. Their Elves! How can you have ugly Elves? It's against all nature. But it explains why they don't employ a romance option. No-one's attractive enough.
Fundamentally, one makes a living in these settings by wandering around the countryside finding graves, ancient burial chambers and lost-civilisation ruins to rob, an activity rendered only mildly non-trivial by the screaming hordes of undead, bandits and renegade necromancers. However, I still cannot bring myself to steal things from the living. Fortunately the game labels all illegal theft objects in red, so they're easy to avoid.
The equivalent of the Morrowind cliff racer, i.e. "low-grade monster most likely to make me squeak by sneaking up behind me to attack unexpectedly", is the skeever, a sort of hefty rat thing whose tails are useful in alchemy. They're weeny, but nasty because they attack below knee level where I can't see them and have usually gnawed me for a reasonable total of Tiny Animal Crits (non-Rolemaster players move along, nothing to see here) before I've worked out what's happening.
I must say, publically and with resolute definition, that the mouse-controlled looking around is an abomination unto Nuggan. I seem to be hard-wired to key movement, which means I lack all control and finesse with the mouse. This isn't too much of an issue until I'm in a combat with multiple enemies, at which point I absolutely lose track of where everyone is and "wild swings" doesn't begin to cover it. There's a reason why I never hire hirelings. It's not worth the swearing as, yet again, I accidentally decapitate one. Also, the game balance is weird. I'm playing on the lowest level of difficulty, and still find certain combats horribly challenging, possibly owing to aforementioned lack of mouse skills. But killing dragons is easy. Go figure.
I love buying houses. And furnishing houses. And filling the houses up with random bits of stuff I procured during aforementioned grave-robbing expeditions and can't bear to sell because they look cool. (Troll skulls! The glowy axe I refuse to give to the Daedra lord on the grounds that he's evil and the quest pissed me off. Dwemer centurion dynamo! It glows!). Survey says I'm probably a girl. However, the logic and interface of putting things down, particularly in specific places, has been directly imported from Oblivion without any much-needed refinements, and consequently blows goats.
This game is craft-ridden to an extent which makes me ridiculously happy. You don't just pick up ingredients to make potions, you find ore to make armour, or tan the hides of the creatures you kill for leather, and then improve the items to increase their value and efficacy. Then you enchant them, at vast expense and difficulty. If you wander around with a pickaxe in your backpack you may stumble around veins of ore which you can merrily mine, before refining in a smelter. I think the SCA has infected me unduly, I adore this aspect of the game.
Skyrim bards only know three songs, one of them scurrilous and the other given to radical re-interpretation depending on whether the town/singer supports the Empire or the rebellion. You don't hear the third much, which is a pity because it's beautiful, hauntingly Nordic-sounding and, unlike the first two, actually good.
I am very happy with this game, but I have to say its habit of randomly crashing several times a day for no reason is rather mitigating the immersion experience. Dammit.

My first day back at work was, for some reason probably not unconnected to guilt levels, ridiculously productive. However, I'm dead. I think this fatigue thing still needs management. Probably by playing Skyrim self-indulgently. Alas.

Current Mood: vaguely Viking

dicedcaret once incautiously asked me to explain structuralism, which inevitably led to a voluble email exchange from which he emerged dazed and staggering, and brushing Russian Formalists off himself like coat lint. (They're sticky). The Russian Formalists are the major big gun in my campaign to bring English literary criticism kicking and screaming back into the century before the Century of the Fruitbat, i.e. the one before postmodernism. (Yes, I just accused postmodernism of being a fruitbat). As represented by the distinct sub-school led by Vladimir Propp, the Russians advocate the structuralist analysis of literature, i.e. in terms of an individual text's participation in a larger structure of meaning, which rather often tends to be in terms of genre.

Since I deal with fairy tale, this is important: at the most basic level, fairy tale proffers itself as participating in a universal structure of meaning and form, however illusionary this universality might be. (This is where postmodernism comes in: it joyously explodes notions of universal structure in order to insist that all meaning is contextual and nothing is universal. I also enjoy this, particularly since if you use an interaction of structuralist and postmodernist criticism in your academic writing you can completely piss off two major and opposing schools of thought at once, thus giving yourself a really good excuse for a floundering career).

All of this is important, because it explains why I utterly fell for Catherynne M. Valente's Deathless. Cat Valente is still my literary girl crush: she's an intensely crafted and self-conscious writer, whose abilities with prose cause me to lie voluptuously on the sofa with her books for hours at a time while beautiful words work their way down my body like lovers and my toes wriggle in delight. Deathless is based on the Russian folk tale "Koschei the Deathless", which is a marvellous agglomeration of fairy-tale motifs: ogre hearts hidden in eggs, useless Princes called Ivan, bird-grooms, bride-thefts, Baba Yaga, and Marya Morevna, the princess who slays whole armies. Valente's retelling sets the fairy-tale amid the startling political changes of early twentieth-century Russia. (The bird-grooms respectively hail from the Tsar's guard, the White Guard and the Red Army, with the bulk of the novel set in a Soviet Russia which co-exists with a fairy-tale realm).

This shouldn't work. It works like whoa and dammit: it creates a brilliant, incredible, unlikely, inevitable creature which you can't help but desire hopelessly even while it kicks you repeatedly in the teeth.

It's not just the novel's sense of Russian cold and cruelty, which equally apply to its folklore and its politics. The thing is that communism and fairy tale are both structuralist paradigms. (You knew I was going to get back to Vladimir Propp). Both fairy tale and communism insist on a transcendent, structural reality, a sense in which meaning exists universally on a level above the real. The sparse, stripped-down, essentialist meanings of fairy tale have a dreadful resonance with the sparse, stripped-down, essentialist rigours of life under communist rule. Both encodings believe all too terribly in their own universal rightness, the inescapable inevitability of their narratives. In Valente's hands they don't even conflict; they speak the same language, and the story's protagonists drift from one paradigm to another almost without noticing.

The result is desperately illuminating. The story's viewpoint is that of Marya Morevna, not the annoying Ivan, which is a relief; the tale becomes one of agency, female and political, as well as a love story, one about the bargains and sacrifices of marriage. For all of its novel-length detail and complexity, it retains both the starkness of fairy-tale narrative and its sense of fairy tale's inevitable place in the starkness of Russian life. The result shouldn't be seductive - particularly given my rooted dislike of political writing - but it is. It's an implacably brilliant book. Read it. And, possibly, weep.

Current Mood: fangirly
Current Music: The Cure

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Freckles & Doubt

With my mastery of narrative structure I should be ruling the cosmos by now.

Entries tagged with fantasy

love in the vessel of time

Dark? what ideal conditions for night!

just another brick in the wall

Day 102: shower thoughts

another five things

five more things

lost sheep

a suffusion of yellow

indifferent strange

words, some of them of an unladylike and Anglo-Saxon nature

do not interfere with the nature of causality

all those wasted hours we used to know

You need a seed and a dark place.

the dwarves of yore were surprisingly hot

Tolkien's representation of hobbits was highly wrong and also bad

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

like which fury Hell hath no

naught to life but fragile dragons' wings

sword, axe and spear, O!

yolk seeping from their skin like light

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December 2024

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