Kaleidoglide

I am promoting two things with this link

2009-12-19T09:09:00.003+05:30

One is this post on io9 about Avatar. It is a good post.

And two, if you scroll down through the comments, is this magnificent rant by commentor Moff at 3:32 pm. Sublime.

Of all the varieties of irritating comment out there, the absolute most annoying has to be "Why can't you just watch the movie for what it is??? Why can't you just enjoy it? Why do you have toanalyze it???"

If you have posted such a comment, or if you are about to post such a comment, here or anywhere else, let me just advise you: Shut up. Shut the fuck up. Shut your goddamn fucking mouth. SHUT. UP.

First of all, when we analyze art, when we look for deeper meaning in it, we are enjoying it for what it is. Because that is one of the things about art, be it highbrow, lowbrow, mainstream, or avant-garde: Some sort of thought went into its making -- even if the thought was, "I'm going to do this as thoughtlessly as possible"! -- and as a result, some sort of thought can be gotten from its reception. That is why, among other things, artists (including, for instance, James Cameron) really like to talk about their work.

Now, that doesn't mean you have to think about a work of art. I don't know anyone who thinks every work they encounter ought to only be enjoyed through conscious, active analysis -- or if I do, they're pretty annoying themselves. And I know many people who prefer not to think about much of what they consume, and with them I have no argument. I also have no argument with people who disagree with another person's thoughts about a work of art. That should go without saying. Finally, this should also go without saying, but since it apparently doesn't: Believe me, the person who is annoying you so much by thinking about the art? They have already considered your revolutionary "just enjoy it" strategy, because it is not actually revolutionary at all. It is the default state for most of humanity.

So when you go out of your way to suggest that people should be thinking less -- that not using one's capacity for reason is an admirable position to take, and one that should be actively advocated -- you are not saying anything particularly intelligent. And unless you live on a parallel version of Earth where too many people are thinking too deeply and critically about the world around them and what's going on in their own heads, you're not helping anything; on the contrary, you're acting as an advocate for entropy.

And most annoyingly of all, you're contributing to the fucking conversation yourselves when you make your stupid, stupid comments. You are basically saying, "I think people shouldn't think so much and share their thoughts, that's my thought that I have to share." If you really think people should just enjoy the movie without thinking about it, then why the fuck did you (1) click on the post in the first place, and (2) bother to leave a comment? If it bugs you so much, GO WATCH A GODDAMN FUNNY CAT VIDEO.

Orcs and football and racism, oh my.

2009-12-12T18:15:00.003+05:30

Terry Pratchett in the Guardian on orcs and football hooliganism:

Ever since I first read Tolkien at the age of 13, I was worried about the orcs. They were totally and irrevocably bad. It was a flat given. No possibility of redemption for an orc, no chance of getting a job somewhere involving fluffy animals or flowers.
This is no reflection on Tolkien. We are all prisoners in the aspic of our time. But now, I think, people have learned not to think that any race or culture is naturally or irredeemably bad. We have seen the world from space and it isn't flat.
I have waited decades to write about Nutt; I can remember the excesses of football hooliganism that began in the 1960s and have only recently been cleaned up. It was a world of scaffolding-pole clubs and Stanley knives slashing railway seats and faces. The orcs, with a scarf or two, would have fitted right in in those days. More recently, an inflatable banana is the worst thing that's brandished; it would appear that the leopard can change his shorts.

China Miéville on orcs and racism:

In the broader sense, I absolutely do think that the implicit politics of our narratives, whether we are consciously "meaning" them or not, matter, and that therefore we should be as thoughtful about them as possible. That doesn't mean we'll always succeed in political perspicacity—which doesn't mean the same thing as tiptoeing —but we should try. So for example: If you have a world in which Orcs are evil, and you depict them as evil, I don't know how that maps onto the question of "political correctness." However, the point is not that you're misrepresenting Orcs (if you invented this world, that's how Orcs are), but that you have replicated the logic of racism, which is that large groups of people are "defined" by an abstract supposedly essential element called "race," whatever else you were doing or intended. And that's not an innocent thing to do. Maybe you have a race of female vampires who destroy men's strength. They really do operate like that in your world. But I think you're kidding yourself if you think that that idea just appeared ex nihilo in your head and has nothing to do with the incredibly strong, and incredibly patriarchal, anxiety about the destructive power of women's sexuality in our very real world. These things are not reducible to our "intent"—we all inherit all kinds of bits and pieces of cultural bumf, plenty of them racist and sexist and homophobic, because that's how our world works, so how could you avoid it?

And Ros-who-is-amazing on football and racism. Slightly more harmful than an inflatable banana.

When this first started, the season before last, I had a racist moment myself. I looked at the banners and thought oh wow, well. One day Mario Balotelli is going to score the winning goal in a World Cup final, and it will shut everyone up and we will all look back to the abuse he was subjected to as a teenager in sad stupefaction. It was a stupid kneejerk fantasy that made me happy for about a minute. It was obviously rubbish. Mario's future success, and the future improvement of his character, and the thought that maybe somehow someday he is going to morph into the best, nicest, handsomest, most successful footballer ever created, will not stop racism against him. It will not retroactively correct tifosi's failures because he triumphed in spite of them. It will not be the final proof of his Italianness to those who sing that black people cannot be real Italians.

Because Mario's character is really not the point at all.

Little Things

2009-12-10T00:37:00.003+05:30

I was perhaps disproportionately pleased this morning to see this story in the Times of India*:

While pronouncing the verdict in the Dhaula Kuan rape case where a 20-year-old girl from Mizoram was gangraped by four men in a moving car the judge extensively criticized the prevalent practice of defence counsels of putting a question mark on the victim's character to prove that her statement is unreliable. "It cannot be said that a lady who has already lost her virginity is an unreliable lady,'' ASJ Gupta said in the judgement. ..."Definition of rape is categoric to the effect that sexual intercourse is done without the consent or against the will, meaning thereby that an adult can have sexual intercourse with some other person only with his/her will,'' the judge said.

This is the sort of thing we should all be able to take for granted - that if one was raped one would be able to accuse one's rapist without being put on trial for...what, exactly? And that judges will be familiar with the definition of the term rape, and should be able therefore to apply it. It should be obvious, yet it never happens that way, and I retain the right to be disproportionately elated when it does.

Here's the Outlook story on the same case.

* Especially since the last thing I'd read in the TOI was also rape related - the Delhi Times coverage a few weeks ago of the Madhur Bhandarkar case that argued that a) Rape can't be rape if it happens multiple times and b) rape conviction laws are like, totally unfair to men. (Luckily, this evening someone linked me to this, which totally restores my faith in the paper).

Robert Holdstock and some incoherent gushing about Mythago Wood

2009-12-03T23:02:00.005+05:30

Many of you are probably aware by now that Robert Holdstock died a couple of days ago. I loved the man's work, and wanted to link to this wonderful obituary in the Guardian by Jon Courtenay Grimwood:

He wrote dozens of books – in the late 1970s and early 80s, he published one every three or four months, under numerous names – but Rob will remain most famous for this breakout novel, a study of what it means to be a storyteller and the dark wells that novelists tap.
Written to the music of Vaughan Williams, and showing Rob's detailed knowledge of prehistory, Mythago Wood was at odds with readers' expectations of literary fantasy at the time. Rob's world was brutal, disturbing and almost unknowable, rather than being simply our world in medieval fancy dress.
Set in the late 1940s, in a small Hertfordshire forest that has been undisturbed since the last ice age, where time flows more slowly and the forest protects itself by disorientating those who try to enter, Mythago Wood is a history, not of the British Isles, but of our pre-Christian, shamanistic subconscious.

Holdstock isn't a writer I've talked about much on this blog. I haven't read all of his work (or even all of the Mythago cycle books), and I rarely reread him. I occasionally recommend him (most recently Merlin's Wood to a friend who has hardly read any fantasy but loves Idylls of the King). But I'd been thinking about his work in the week or so before his death becase Unmana asked me about books that people just beginning to read fantasy ought to read, and it was clear to me that Mythago Wood was one of them. I remember reading it for the first time (I was about 16) and being overwhelmed by the depth, and the cleverness, and the way it worked. This was simultaneously an exploration of the subconscious, and a piece of fiction that hit me hardest at that subconscious level. There's so much to say about these books, and how much they fed my brain then, and continue to now. And yet the strongest memory I have of the series is not a particularly clever moment at all. It's that bit from the first book, when Stephen and Guiwenneth are in the Huxley bathroom and she's looking at the bath fittings and he's looking at her hair, and it's all sunlight and shadow and smell.

Holdstock's most recent (and last, I suppose) book was published earlier this year. This man was genuinely important as a writer (and apparently a pretty amazing person too); these books are treasures, and I haven't done enough (like this guy, for example) to tell people about them. Read them.

Other people's words

2009-11-30T22:54:00.003+05:30

Via Deepa D., this wonderful, true speech about writing and children and stories by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, "The danger of a single story".

(Here's a transcript, via RoseFox)

I'd linked several months ago to Deepa's excellent post "I didn't dream of Dragons", but it's still worth a reread.

Yes, this.

2009-11-25T19:51:00.002+05:30

From Green Light Dhaba, a couple of weeks ago

When my child was in fifth, he was told he needed to improve in three very important writing genres: application for leave; telegraph writing; and notice writing. When I asked his teacher why these genres were important for 11 year olds to master, I was told, "Ah, but they need to learn them for the tenth boards." I smiled and nodded. What else could I do? But the truth is, if our children spend five years learning how to write a proper telegraph, then we are in deep trouble, indeed. We need to teach children to write things that actually matter to them, because that's what good writers do. (Future employers, relax: if you ask a good writer to write a notice or a telegraph in real life, she will figure out how to do it properly in no time.)

And from John Dougherty, today.

But, she went on, she can’t do that often. Instead, she has to spend precious time telling her class the meaning of phrases such as ‘subordinate clause’ - not because she believes that at 10 they need to know what a subordinate clause is, but because their writing has to use subordinate clauses to be marked at Level 5 in their SATS, and the only way to ensure they do this is to tell them (a) what a subordinate clause is and (b) that if they don’t use them they won’t get a Level 5.

There are not words to describe how furious, how utterly, impotently enraged I am that good teachers are forced to reduce the beauteous thing that is language to a series of components that, if assembled according to the Official Plan, will tick the correct box on some faceless, brainless imbecile’s clipboard. This is wrong. It’s stupid. It’s the same thinking that is now leading culture-free, drivellingly anti-intellectual philistines to suggest that it’s possible and even desirable to programme a mindless, soulless, heartless, garbage-in-garbage-out computer to recognise and mark good writing.

Oh hey internet

2009-11-21T12:12:00.004+05:30

Crossed Genres is a fantastic magazine, and everyone should be reading it. It's also rather short on funds right now, so I'm hoping some of the people who read this will a) go buy it and learn for yourselves that it's really good and b) tell more people to do the same. We need magazines like this one to continue to exist.

Wholesome TV for kids

2009-11-16T10:20:00.009+05:30

Last week I was sitting around with my grandparents and youngest cousin (who has just started primary school). The cousin was watching TV, which is how I ended up seeing an episode of Chhota Bheem, a cartoon on Pogo.

Here are the main characters of the show:

Three of the people in this picture are villains. I bet you can't guess which ones. It couldn't have anything to do with that subtle colour gradation, could it?

This is what Bheem, the main character is like (taken from here):

(all pictures can be embiggened by clicking)

This is Kalia, the bad guy. His name, FFS, is Kalia.

Kalia also has henchpersons of sorts, twins called Dholu and Bholu. They're not as bad as Kalia. Colourwise, they're somewhere between Kalia and Bheem.

Incidentally, here's the show's main female character; a role model for little girls everywhere.

She is "simple" (always a useful trait in a woman), really likes housework, and is feminine even while being able to play with the boys - which is a relief considering she views the only other young female character in the show as a rival for Bheem's attention.

This article in Mint quotes parents who applaud these new cartoons (including Chhota Bheem), not only because they're entertaining and well made but because they apparently inculcate "traditional values". I don't believe that literature, television, or any other form of media directed at children is under any particular obligation to impart the right set of values, just because they're children and impressionable. Nor do I think that Chhota Bheem is such a powerful piece of art that it's going to singlehandedly convince my young cousin (who does not live in a household where this sort of thing is discussed/debunked on a regular basis) of the validity of traditional gender roles, or of forms of bigotry relating to skin colour and how melanin turns you evil. But that's just the thing, these are traditional roles. Which means that Chhota Bheem doesn't have to do anything singlehandedly, because all these ideas are already out there, influencing Young Cousin (and me, and you, and everyone) and all this show has to do is tap into this larger set of narratives about bad, dark-skinned people and fair, docile girls.

And the reason the previous paragraph reads like The Complete Idiot's Guide To Ideology (assuming such a thing exists) is because I don't know what level of basic political awareness I can take for granted anymore. Because it's 2009 and the creators of this show are apparently both clueless and unchallenged.

Bread And

2009-11-12T00:22:00.005+05:30

Poster seen in various places around Dublin

(click to embiggen)

But wait? What is that bit of text at the bottom?

"Acrobats, Dogs, Kangaroos, Emus, Horses African Zulus & much much more....."

Ah. Well that...makes sense? What is this thing, does anyone know?

WHAT

2009-11-05T00:25:00.004+05:30

Just...what.

No, I have no comment to make on these products. Except that they appear not to be for sale at the moment, which almost makes me think there might be a god.

(Via Bookshelves of Doom)

Books what I

2009-11-03T18:23:00.005+05:30

I've been reading stuff. Here's some of what I have been reading.

Leviathan – Scott Westerfeld

Official review will be out in the New Indian Express at some point in the near future, but I loved this. I'm rather wishing I'd managed to get the edition with all the gears and suchlike on the cover, but the artwork really is phenomenally good, and Westerfeld is an amazing writer. I like his main characters (even more so on a reread) and from the hints given about the second book in this series, Behemoth, I suspect that it has been written entirely for my delectation. I cannot wait. Here's the trailer, anyway. It's rather amazing.

Unseen Academicals – Terry Pratchett

In recent years there has always been a new Terry Pratchett book on my birthday. This year's seemed like it would be a good one: a return to the Discworld (after the rather awesome detour into Nation, his alternate history Victorian YA that came out last year), a return to the Wizards, who haven't been heard of in a while, and some football. The Wizards are required for reasons of economy to field a football team – a task for which they are spectacularly unsuited, though the Librarian is an excellent goalkeeper. Luckily, Trevor Likely, son of legendary Dimwell captain Dave Likely, works at the University and is able to initiate them into the world of the Shove, where who you support (and how you show it) matters far more than the game itself, which most of them have never seen. Meanwhile, Trevor must also look after his friend Mr. Nutt who says he's a goblin but is possibly Something Else altogether and looks suspiciously like Wayne Rooney on the cover. The Nutt plot is something of a return to the earlier Discworld books; Pratchett uses the character to take on an element of a classic work of fantasy (I'm trying very hard not to give the plot away). Unfortunately, while I agree entirely with the conclusions he seems to come to, it comes across as rather too earnest. Then there's Glenda, who I ought to have all sorts of problems with – she's fat and competent and has a secret weakness for romance novels, and when she gets her romance it's with a character who no one else particularly wants. I love her anyway.

The Reef – Mark Charan Newton.

I'd been wanting to read this for a while, particularly since reading Newton's second book, Nights of Villjamur (which I really liked) this summer. I finally found it a couple of weeks ago in the secondhand section of Chapters and was unreasonably excited. The Reef is a coral reef that becomes the focus of a number of interconnecting plots involving scientists, terrorists and various forms of aquatic life including sirens, ichthyocentaurs, and (it's not a spoiler if the cover illustration gives it away, is it?) a giant squid/kraken-monster. It's obvious that Newton's writing (and, I think, his gender politics but that's another matter entirely) have matured considerably since he wrote this, the prose occasionally shifts from brilliant (luckily there's plenty of that) to a bit awkward and it could have used more editing. However, in terms of ideas I found it richer and more ambitious than NOV. I'm not sure how far it's supposed to be set in the same universe as his Legends of the Red Sun; elements (the Rumel, the random bits of old machinery lying around) from one seem to have made their way into the other. I'm hoping he returns to this setting at some point in the future (after the current series is finished with) – there's a lot in it that is fascinating and that I'd love to see developed. In any case, I feel that the Legends of the Red Sun books would be vastly improved by the addition of a Squidbeast.

I am Scrooge: A Zombie Story for Christmas – Adam Roberts

Like most people, I'm a bit sick of zombies at this point. Adam Roberts' Zombie infested version of Dickens' Christmas Carol sounded like a good idea had I not been suffering from zombie overkill. But the preface (in which Roberts hopes that the idea behind the book will “thump upon the boarded-up windows of [the readers'] houses pleasantly, and no one wish to remake it as a major motion picture starring Will Smith”) sold me, and with such gems as “the churchman's nose was bulbous and red, a fleshy appendage, but Marley bit into it as eagerly as if it had been a ripe strawberry” on the first page, I assumed this would be entertaining. And it really is, but I don't think you could read it all at once. In small doses, well spaced out, the zombie jokes are funny and the illustrations (credited to one Zom Leech) are hilarious. Read at a stretch, though, Queen Victoria saying “we are not Zom-used” might drive anyone to commit violence.

Things We Are Not – (ed) Christopher Fletcher

I'm no good at reviewing anthologies of short stories by different authors. But this is a really good collection of queer short fiction. The title story, by Brandon Bell, is probably the best thing about the collection; working within a whole set of popcultural references that delighted me, Bell still manages a story that is not about these references. Eden Robins' “Switch” was another story that stood out for me, with the sort of nonchalant weirdness that I actually associate more with the beginnings of speculative fiction novels. Perhaps this is why I was so annoyed when it ended. Then there's “Reila's Machine” by Therese Arkenberg and “The World in His Throat” by Lisa Shapter; good, classic science fiction – and “Pos-psi-bilities” by Jay Kozzi that is a sort of coming-of-age story with a comparatively slight Sfnal element. It's a fantastic collection, it's available here or on Amazon, and I think you ought to read it.

The Ask and the Answer – Patrick Ness

When I read Patrick Ness' The Knife of Never Letting Go in January I was rushing between continents (it was something I bought in an airport and read on a plane) and as a result I don't think I ever officially gushed about it here. But I did thrust it at a lot of people I met – as dystopian, science fictional, gender-aware (it won a Tiptree award earlier this year) YA literature it was exactly the sort of thing I was likely to love. The Ask and the Answer takes off from the rather cliffhanger-ish moment that ended the previous book. Todd and Viola, Ness' protagonists, are separated, and set to work in different parts of the town. While Todd's work lies among the Spackle, the original inhabitants of the planet, Viola becomes entangled with a terrorist group of sorts, that wishes to remove the truly sinister Mayor Prentiss from power. As Martin Lewis says in this review, this is not an adventure story, but a war novel. I'd forgotten just how relentless Ness is sometimes; I don't know when I'm going to read this again because it is emotionally so exhausting. I don't know where the third book (which I expect will be every bit as brilliant as the first two) will take the story, but I can't imagine it'll be anywhere pleasant.

What have you been reading?

Mother tongues

2009-10-20T21:29:00.003+05:30

By now it feels like about half of the people in this city have congratulated me on how well I speak English, and I have gotten very good at smiling through gritted teeth. So really, I can do nothing better that quote from this mad/awesome/explosive interview with Ashok Banker at the World SF News blog.

I’ve met this particular cultural bogey before and it remains as unfunny as ever! My mother tongue was English, not Hindi, and in fact, there are more English-speaking people in India than in the US [...] I grew up speaking only English, learned Hindi only later in school because it was a compulsory subject (as were either Marathi or French – I took French), and English remains the only language I’m completely fluent in even today.

(I picked French too, after a year of Sanskrit established that I was completely useless at it).

In which I tell you what to read

2009-10-17T21:06:00.002+05:30

Mostly though, what the other boys called him -- what everyone in the village called him -- was Parish Fool. Cause his mum didn't have no money to dress him in aught but a suit of rags, stitched up from scraps of handmedowns and castoffs what had been worn to nothing and chucked away. A right motley it was, in every sodding shade under the sun. Every shade what's been faded and filthed to a shade of dirt and dust, that is. So they calls him the Parish Fool for it, shouts, Where's yer bells? and, Tell us a joke! Fucking cunts.
•
But we don't call him Poor Dear or Parish Fool, us Scruffians. Don't call him none of those names the groanhuffs use in their stories about him neither. Cause what do groanhuffs know? All's they've done is heard our tales and passed em along in a game of Chinese Whispers, getting em all mixed up, like. Peer-a-Door and Pierce-a- Veil, they calls him! Dozy twats. Still, we gots to call him summat. Hero needs a name, don't he? So we Scruffians calls him Jack, cause that were a word for any Scruffian-to-be in those days.

If you wish to read what I have been reading (and you should) go here and here. I am a big fan of Hal Duncan's work in general, but now that he's playing around with playground games and children's rhymes (as well as myth and politics and storytelling and the like) I think my head is likely to explode with the happy. I wanted to quote massive chunks of "Jack Scallywag", because it's really good, but I don't want to give too much away. I hope you'll buy it, though, (it is entirely in my interest that writers I like not starve) and I really hope there will be more of these Scruffians stories.

And once you've gone over and read those (and you will, won't you?) maybe you should read Vellum and Ink and Escape from Hell! (the last of which really needs to be moviefied). And then this series, and perhaps this. It's all worth it.

High expectations

2009-10-06T21:54:00.009+05:30

One of the more memorable moments in the new Dorian Gray film (of which I did not approve*) is a scene where Dorian is partaking of tea and scones. As he sips his tea and slathers jam onto a scone, we are treated to flashbacks of his recent debauched activities. There is whipping and screaming and blood that is visually very like the strawberry jam that plays a central role in his seemingly innocent high tea.

In the three weeks or so since we watched the film, my friend T has consumed vast quantities of scones, with increasing desperation and disappointment. Why, he asks, when the scones themselves, weighted down with jam, are so decadent, are no orgies forthcoming?

I myself expect nothing of scones. Baked goods are fundamentally wholesome in any case, however hard they try. But I do sympathise.

I first encountered fondue as a child through Asterix in Switzerland. This was a mistake.I grew up under the impression that this

(click for larger image)

would lead inevitably to this

and maybe some of this.

It looked exciting.

Years later, when I finally encountered fondue in real life, it was something of an anticlimax. It was delicious, of course, and cheese is capable of a decadence that baked goods can only dream of. Still, it was bread and cheese. Where were my feisty Roman matrons? My nine year old self was severely displeased.

And this is why, I think, the frequent association of food and sex is not necessarily a great thing. Think of that nine year old. Think of T, sitting at home with a plate of scones, looking around him hopefully. It's harsh.

* I did approve of the kiss between Ben Chaplin and Ben Barnes, though. More Ben Chaplin, please.

cfs and a bit of useful information

2009-09-10T16:51:00.008+05:30

So, Crossed Genres has an upcoming LGBTQ themed edition, and they're currently calling for submissions. This is the ad:

Unfortunately, Flash Fiction Online have chosen not to run this ad because it is "sexually themed" (because, the editor clarifies, "GLBTQ issues are inextricably linked to sex"). I mention this because it's useful to writers of queer fiction to know where they are and are not likely to be accepted.

In the meantime, Crossed Genres are still calling for submissions. And they clearly are queer-fiction-friendly.

EDIT: Submissions are closed.

Pride/ The Crowded Shadows

2009-09-01T02:24:00.011+05:30

September the first is Outer Alliance pride day.

As a member of the Outer Alliance, I advocate for queer speculative fiction and those who create, publish and support it, whatever their sexual orientation and gender identity. I make sure this is reflected in my actions and my work.

Since I haven't written any fiction (queer or otherwise) in a while, I'm going to to talk about someone else's work instead. Some of you will remember this post a few months ago when I talked about being disappointed in the lack of gay men (or indeed women though men seemed more likely) in Celine Kiernan's The Poison Throne. What I couldn't discuss at the time was the rather important relationship between two male characters in the next book in the series. But The Crowded Shadows is finally out and I'm free to talk about it as much as I like. I should add that I asked Celine if I could write something about her book for today and she went out of her way (and she was away on holiday)to get it to me on time.

The first time I read The Poison Throne I stayed up all night and just gulped it down. It's an incredibly fast-paced fantasy, there's tons of political intrigue, and it's utterly uncompromising when it comes to killing people off. I was expecting more of the same from The Crowded Shadows.

The second book in the series is a complete change of pace from the first, however. It helped that The Poison Throne was set in a relatively confined space, if you can call a castle confined. At the end of that book all three main characters leave to go out into a world that the reader knows very little about. Which is why, I suppose, so much of The Crowded Shadows is about world-building. It's rather skilfully done, seeing that the entire action of the book takes place in the wilderness. But it does mean that the plot moves slowly - a large chunk of the book has the main characters travelling by themselves and by the end of it they still haven't reached their destination. But then there are the sections involving the Loups-Garous where the text seems to pick up some of Christopher's frenzy and rushes breathlessly through them.

The world-building itself is interesting. Partly because Kiernan bases the geography (and aspects of the culture) of her world so heavily on our own, making the minor differences particularly worth noticing. I'm not sure yet (and I can't be until the final book of the trilogy) how uncritically or otherwise she's doing this, but I have hopes. And as the book progresses we do finally find out more about these characters; about Razi and Christopher's friendship, about Wynter's family and why she has that awful name.

Plot-wise, as I've said, not a great deal happens in this part of the trilogy. Relationship-wise, it is fascinating. I was not particularly invested in the relationship between Ashkr and Sol on a first reading - on a second, knowing what is to come, it can be gutwrenching. And setting it among the Merron, where it is accepted with as little question as any heterosexual relationship works for me as well. It saddens me that that relationship is unlikely to play a role in the next book - the events of this one would make it seem impossible.

However, for me the most interesting relationship in this series is still the one between Chris and Razi. This is in part because Wynter's relationships with the two men are relatively uncomplicated; and Wynter herself has so far not been particularly interesting to me. I don't know if this is because she's the narrator - we haven't really had the chance to see her and what makes her interesting through the eyes of her companions. I'm hoping she will show some amazing diplomatic skills in the next book and I will be made to love her. The main male characters are both fascinating in their own right (Razi particularly so) and Wyn deserves a chance to be more awesome.

But my interest in Razi and Christopher is also because I still believe that in only slightly different circumstances that relationship could have been physical as well. I know the author doesn't mean it that way, that it's supposed to be "just" a very deep, intense friendship. But if either of these men were a woman I couldn't not see it as an incredibly strong romance. If the author hadn't made it clear in the first book that this was not the case, I'd think this was probably what it was.

So I guess even if it were not for Sol and Ashkr that this would be a queer review based on my reading of the text? I don't know, and I suspect the author and I are never really going to agree on this, and that's fine. But I like the book and if it didn't make me lose sleep as its predecessor did, it did make me cry a bit.

Toilet humour

2009-08-31T07:42:00.007+05:30

Samuel Beckett estate, you have made me sad.

I came to Beckett in the most unliterary of ways. I was fifteen, there was a boy, he was older than me and probably very, very pretentious. And I wanted to know what had excited him so much and I read Company, then some of the shorter plays, and it went on from there. At seventeen I thought the fart-counting in Molloy was hilarious and got raised eyebrows from friends. In college I writhed in a back bench when gloomy classmates whined about the depressingness of Waiting for Godot which I had finally read, a few years after I'd started reading the man's work.

There's a wonderful introduction by Salman Rushdie (who I love most when he's talking about other writers he loves) in one of the Grove Centenary Beckett collections that expresses a lot of what I feel for this writer. Here's a bit:

Death was as you might say still a word in a book to me. I had not at that time washed my father's short, heavy corpse or murmured a farewell to the open-mouthed body of the first woman I ever loved or wept tears of rage when I was denied by circumstance the right to stand beside my mother's grave. Consequently, I still felt immortal, and immortals deal differently with the subject of mortality, knowing themselves to be immune from that strange, incurable affliction. Thus, when as a young man I first faced these texts that deal so intensely with the matter of our common ending, which Henry James had called the Distinguished Thing but which, in Beckett, is always grubbily undistinguished, a bleak prat-falling business made up of flatulence, impotence and humiliation, I experienced the books, their ferocious hurling at death of immense slabs of undifferentiated prose, as essentially fabulous, fantastic tales told by the voices of antic ghosts. I experienced them, in sum, as comedies, and so they are, they are comedies, but not of the sort I then imagined them to be, darker, and, yes, even heroic, for all that comedy scoffs at heroes, pulls down their drawers and pushes custard pie into their faces, still there remains, in the comedy of these broken, scrabbling personages, a stale whiff of odorous heroism. Some of this I when green in judgement only half perceived or neglected entirely to grasp. However, in failing to respond glumly to an oeuvre that wears glumness like a favourite unwashed shirt, I got something half right, at least.

I'm 23, and I suspect that over the next howeversomany decades my way of reading Beckett is going to change too. And that's fine. Because I've always felt welcomed by his work; it has never situated itself above me. And that is at least partly because it's never been on its dignity with me. The slapstick, the toilet humour, the banana peels; they're important .

I know that the technical aspects of the plays are vital as well, and that Beckett himself did not like even minor deviations from his directions in productions with which he was involved. And I don't blame him. But I can't imagine that the man who wrote Murphy (whose main character wants his ashes flushed down a toilet - the novel ends instead with them scattered on a pub floor "with the sand, the beer, the butts, the glass, the matches, the spits, the vomit") would be particularly bothered by this version of his play.

[Fun fact: On the evening I first heard about this story I discovered "wait for me Godot!" scrawled on the inside of a pub toilet wall. Positively copasetic.]

Quote

2009-08-28T19:37:00.000+05:30

SADY: like, the idea is that dudes can’t interpret the word “no” correctly, because they are less smart than your dog, and therefore should they accidentally rape someone who is saying “no” a lot you have to give them the benefit of the doubt. like, better luck next time, timmy!

Different From the Others

2009-08-23T00:02:00.005+05:30

I recently watched for the first time Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, featuring Conrad Veidt as Cesare the Somnambulist. It's startlingly beautiful and extremely clever. However, in the process I also discovered that Conrad Veidt had (during the course of an incredibly prolific career) been in Different From the Others, a film that advocated tolerance of homosexuality and was against paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code. The movie was made, amazingly in 1919 (175 was revoked entirely only in 1994).

Someone has rather kindly uploaded the whole thing to Youtube, and you can watch it here. My favourite part is probably this bit below (starting at about 6:20). I'm not sure if it's revolutionary, hilarious, or a delightful mix of both.

The "female gonads" bit never fails to grab me. The Doctor, incidentally, is Dr. Magnus Hirschfield.

The movie was banned soon after it was released, and many of the prints were destroyed during the Nazi regime. Still, I love them for trying.

Links: in case you haven't been obsessively monitoring my sidebar

2009-08-17T00:10:00.006+05:30

Here are some things I think you should read:

Laura Atkins on white privilege in children's books.

Hal Duncan being amazing. John C. Wright has since deleted the post that inspired Duncan's epic reply - which is rather a pity because some of the replies in the comments were magnificent as well. Oh well.

More epic replies - this time the Angry Black Woman on Paul DiFillipo's comments about The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

Neesha Meminger at Justine Larbelestier's blog. The Liar cover has generated some amazing essays, and I only wish I could keep up with them all. This is very much a 101 sort of post, but it's a good one.

Pradipta Sarkar, who is one of my favourite people in meatspace, on how not to impress an editor.

Jai Arjun Singh, another of my favourite people both on and off the internet, on freedom from religion. Comments are worth a read too.

I am by no means a biased nixwilliams fangirl...

2009-07-30T01:36:00.001+05:30

...but I think everyone should listen to this because it is hilarious.

But not Jesus

2009-07-22T04:31:00.002+05:30

Tender Morsels and loss of innocence (the horror)

2009-07-19T04:46:00.000+05:30

When I was first told that I was going to be reviewing something titled Tender Morsels (and before I'd realised it was that Margo Lanagan book that people seemed so impressed with) I wasn't sure what to expect. But what the title did not make me think of was a "paedophile website". I wonder what that says about the Daily Mail's Danuta Kean.

The Daily Mail article is (predictably) the worst, but there's been quite a bit of horror and clutching of pearls across the British media over Lanagan's book and the cruel, brutal way in which authors are snatching away children's innocence. (It's not like we've been through this before or anything anyway).

There's plenty to criticise about these articles - including the writers' seeming inability to see a difference between seven year olds and fifteen year olds, as well as the odd belief that children's books have never been violent before. (Flowers in the Attic? The Chocolate War? How about Watership Down, that scared the life out of me?)

But what fascinates me most about this particular point of view is that it takes for granted that violence is simply not a part of children's lives unless forcefully introduced by malevolent writers. It's a world where there's no schoolyard bullying, and if there is it's because the bully is insecure and misunderstood and everyone is friends in the end. It's certainly a world where there is no sexualised violence. No children are abused by members of their family or other adults they know. No one is raped. Homophobic bullying never leads to death. Everything is lovely.

And apart from one big news story every year or so about how all these children are being abused and nobody's talking about it, nobody talks about it. We'll still get outraged columns about how teenagers are getting more violent and attacking each other (what is going on? how can this be?) but not where things like the family and the church are concerned. Not enough, considering the sheer enormity of these statistics.

I'm not trying to suggest that Lanagan in any way wrote Tender Morsels for the purpose of educating people about sexual violence, or to raise awareness for young readers (though I believe that if the book does those things too, that is a good thing). But consider a child (or a teenager, since this particular book hasn't been targeted towards younger readers) for whom sexual violence is already a part of life; and who, like so many people, has been unable to get it out there or talk about it or begin any sort of process that would allow her (or him) to heal. I can't help feeling that some people need for books like this (that will admit the existence of violence, confront it honestly, allow its full horror to be expressed) to be available. I could write at length on how good Tender Morsels is, and how it both impressed me and gutted me, but for reasons apart from it being a very good book (though the two are clearly interconnected), I'm glad it exists.