I’ve heard it said that in Texas or California, when the first snowflakes start to fall, every car on the road starts skipping. Whether or not that’s true or not I don’t know, but certainly here in good old Holland, where we pride ourselves on our old fashioned Dutch winters, the first day of snow saw eighthundred kilometers of traffic jams and the complete disarray of the railways. Luckily the metro and buses were still running and I got home with no problems, but I wouldn’t have wanted to travel anywhere outside Amsterdam this weekend…
What amused and annoyed me in equal measures was the reporting in the main news broadcast tonight. First we got a look at the chaos on the road, full with cheerful people stoically commenting on how long it would take them to get home, all accepting that snow in the Netherlands means slippery roads, lower speeds and long long traffic jams. Then we went to the railways and there we only got complaining travellers frustrated about the delays and cancelled trains and how badly the railway people were handling things. Granted, when you’re driving a car you still have some illusion of control while it can be incredibly frustrating when you don’t know when you can travel, how you are going to travel and if you can actually travel in the first place, but the tone of the reporting was meaningful. The same weather that was shown as an act of god in the first item, in the second item was blamed on the railways lack of preparation…
I’m with Andrew Weiss on this; putting out prequels to Watchmen is only slighty less obnoxious than imagining a need for a prequel to Maus, but so much other cultural landmarks, both high and low, have been remade in the past few decades that it was only time before Watchmen got its turn. It’s what happens when “intellectual properties” (ugh) are owned by companies only interested in the next sure thing, the next bestseller, who know full well that whatever internet outrage there is today, many of the same people will end up buying these things anyway, curious as they are to see what a Darwyn Cooke (retro kitsch with little originality) or a J. Michael Straczynski (let’s hope it’s not a long miniseries) will make of it. Few comics fans can tell shit from shinola anyway, not when presented in a $99 Absolute Edition Hardcover.
In the end, what remains impressive is how long it took DC ultimately to throw all their scruples to the wind and do what they’ve been wanting to do ever since Watchmen turned out to be a hit, to do what’s in the company’s DNA, what they always do when they have a hit: exploit the hell out of it and get more like it out there on the stands. It’s what comics publishers have always done, chase the trends, sling shit to the wall and if it sticks, sling more. At the time they barely and only halfhearted recognised that not doing this would be more profitable this time, though not before driving away Moore himself. What DC finally realised was that Watchmen, along with The Dark Knight Returns and Swamp Thing, as well as a handful of lesser titles gave them prestige, a reputation as a the more creator friendly and innovative of the Big Two. They got themselves a boatload of British writers, people like Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison and Pete Milligan et all to repeat the magic that Moore got going with Watchmen, got it with Sandman and ultimately got Vertigo, a whole line of slightly off kilter not quite superhero titles for those who had outgrown the DC universe, the one really smart bit of business DC has gotten together in the past four decades. The rest of the company may have been just as dumb and exploitative as Marvel (who never got as much credit for Epic as DC did for Vertigo) or Image at their worst, but Vertigo made it acceptable.
But the American comics industry still crashed and burned and nobody but Steve Bissette still cares about creators right and self publishing and boycotting Marvel for its treatment of Jack Kirby and its heirs. And Watchmen, which had remained in print and a steady seller for the company all those years turned hot again, what with the movie and everything and the old itch to exploit it better, to get people to not just buy new and more deluxe versions of it popped up again. More than a quarter of a century after its original publication it’s finally safe to give into it, even if it’s pointless. The suits will have their way, the second rate talent making the comics will think they’re making art or doing a homage and that DC will still respect them in the morning, the fans will lap it up anyway.
And so ends the first month of the last year of the world, if we can believe all those new age hucksters shilling for that supposed Mayan prophecy. I’ll believe it when I see it. Meanwhile this is the start of the fifth year I’ve been doing these monthly roundups, not to mention the eleventh year of my Booklog. Just like happened last year I had to start the new year reading through the backlog of books I’d gotten from the Middelburg library, as I stayed with my parents over Christmas and had gotten more books out than I turned out to be able to read while there — shouldn’t have played so much Colonists of Catan I guess.
I also started a new reading project this month, by working my way through some of Sandra’s favourite books this year. The first of which was Wendy Williams’ Kraken, who in fact left a nice comment at my review, which was appreciated. Not sure which of Sandra’s books I’ll be reading this month, but I’m leaning towards trying one of her gastronomic books, perhaps one of her M. K. Fishers, or a Bemelmans volume, or perhaps Ruth Brandon’s The People’s Chef, which Sandra was raving about a year or so ago.
In the meantime, here are the books I read this month, in order. Eight books in total, mostly non-fiction as I worked my way through that cache of library books.
The King’s Name — Jo Walton
““The first I knew about the civil war was when my sister Aurien poisoned me.” Surely one of the better openings to a fantasy novel and the rest of the book doesn’t disappoint either. Sequel to The King’s Peace.
Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army 1610-1715 — John A. Lynn
An indepth look at the French Army and its soldiers during the century that Louis XIV turned France into the most powerful nation in Europe.
Kraken — Wendy Williams
A short, but interesting look at cephalopods — squid, octopussies, cuttlefish, nautiluses — and their importance for medical research, as well as why they’re just cool in their own right. Sandra loved cephalopods and so do I.
Mediterranean Front — Alan Moorehead
If journalism is history as a first draft, this is history as second draft: the experiences of Australian war correspondent Alan Moorehead during the first year of the war in the desert in WWII.
War, State and Society in England and the Netherlands, 1477-1559 — Steven Gunn, David Grummitt & Hans Cools
Not entirely succesfull comparative history of England and what we’d now would call the Benelux or Low Countries, during the period which arguably determined the modern shape of both countries.
The Crisis of the Twelfth Century — Thomas N. Bisson
In the Long Twelfth Century, here defined from roughly 1066 to the early decades of the thirteenth century, Europe went through a crisis of lordship, as every knight with a castle made himself into a lord. Another dense, thick sociological history, interesting but hard going at times.
City of the Chasch — Jack Vance
A classic Vancian novel, set on the mad world of Tshcai and the first in a tetralogy, infamous for its second entry: Servants of the Wankh… I’ve read this a long long time ago in Dutch.
A Year of Battle — Alan Moorehead
The second book in Alan Moorehead’s Africa trilogy, about the second year of the Desert War, now mostly fought between the British and Commonwealth forces against Rommel.
If you stay awake late enough, eventually you remember everything. All your usual defenses dissolve. Your mind is weary, and there is nothing in your white, silent room to distract it. Your exhausted brain can no longer apply the pressure needed to repress your memories, and they all come back, all of them, every one, and especially the ones that prove you are the worst version of yourself: the lies, the evasions, the unreturned emails, the shoplifted packs of gum. And, of course, every single ungenerous thing you have ever thought, no matter how fleetingly or how long ago, about the people you love most. Anxiety cascades: just when you’ve drained one disaster from your mind, another breaks the dam. The panic and shame that overcome you when you find a really old to-do list and realize you haven’t done a single item on it? Multiply that feeling by the number of minutes left until sunrise. You can tell yourself to be reasonable, to count your blessings, to get it together, but such reassurances will ring hollow. As Fitzgerald put it, at three o’clock in the morning a forgotten package feels as tragic as a death sentence.
Insomnia is an old friend, a disease that has been with us since the first homonid managed to walk upright, but it’s particularly suited to our current post-modern, post-industrial, networked but atomised lives. You’re never as alone as when your partner is asleep next to you and you’re trying desperately to claw back some few hours of futile rest while the clock ticks endlessly forward and you know the moment that the alarm will go off creeps closer and close, but for now the endless, sleepless night stretches in front of you and all your inner defences have crumpled and you’re there alone, with just the darkest, most despondent parts of your soul to keep you company.
As a child in the eighties it was nightmares of nuclear holocaust, no; the anticipation of nightmares about nuclear holocaust that would keep me awake at night, turning on the brighest light in my room and looking for anything to take my mind of what was waiting in the dark, reading the simplest, most upbeat little kids books I could swipe from my little brothers, hoping that would calm my brains enough to go to sleep, perchance not to dream — sometimes it even worked.
As a teenager, it was Sunday nights and having to go back to school the next morning that would keep me awake, aware of how much I did not want to go and how little homework I had done. That existential anxiety still rules my Sunday nights, even though the best part of being an adult is that you can leave your job behind at four o’clock and not have to think about. The nightmares have become more mundane, anxiety dreams about being in bookstores with huge selections of everything I ever wanted to read but the books slipping through my hands, or costing more than I could pay, endless dreams of trying to catch a train and get ready to go to the station, always against the background of the monstrously swollen geography of my hometown, always dissolving into frustration, five, ten, fifteen times a night.
But worse than that is stumbling into bed late on a weekday and not falling immediately asleep, but lying there tossing and turning, alone or with somebody next to you fast asleep, either having to get up early or knowning you can sleep late the next morning, it doesn’t matter, it’s all awful. A few years back, in 2004, when I had been made redundant in a reorganisation of the company I worked for (long since swallowed up by a larger company and that in turn by a yet larger one), there were weeks and months when I didn’t need to get up in the morning and so could go to bed late, but there was always a point when I was lying in the darkness and Radio 4 would end with Sailing By and the Shipping Forecast and I’d be scolding myself for not going to bed at a reasonable hour. And now sometimes I do go to bed reasonably early, at eleven or twelve to get up the next morning at six and there I’m lying and suddenly I hear that tune again at a quarter to two and I know I won’t have slept enough again and will pay for it…
Damien G. Walter’s post about 7 literary Sci-Fi and Fantasy novels you must read annoyed me from the start, with its misspelling of science fiction as “sci-fi” and its demand I must read these books; no I don’t. I hate that sort of hucksterism. Good books you don’t have to read, good books you want to read.
Those are just minor irritations though, the real problems start with the introduction:
At any given moment on the inter-webs there are probably dozens of irrate Sci-Fi / Fantasy fans getting agitated about those damn literary authors coming and writing genre, while genre writers themselves miss out on the credit they deserve. Which is about as silly as shouting at someone for stealing your flowers when they have plucked some bluebells in the forest. (Unless you happen to own an entire forest. Do you? Well OK then.) SF and Fantasy are common ground that any writer can build their house upon, but pretending to own them just makes you look silly.
I’m sure there are fantasy and sf fans who are annoyed just by the ide of socalled literary writers poaching on their terrain, but they are in the minority. Reasonable fans have no problem with non-genre science fiction or fantasy, what they have a problem with is with:
– Mainstream writers who deny they’re writing science fiction when they clearly are writing science ficion, aka the Atwood syndrome.
– Mainstream writers who write science fiction that’s outdated, turgid and using well established sf tropes genre writers have long mined out, in a way that makes it clear said writers have never read any science fiction themselves and are unaware they’ve reinvented the wheel yet who still get lauded for their cleverness in doing so — Ishiguro disease.
The latter is something that’s luckily gotten rarer as science fiction itself became more mainstream, but the first still happens more often than it should. Neither is a concern you can wave away with an analogy about plucking bluebells. It’s not fannish defensiveness to be annoyed by this. Writers like Atwood who deny writing science fiction help reinforce the idea that science fiction is something you need to be ashamed off, something dirty, while writers who just regurgitate stale old ideas do science fiction no good either.
Walter goes on:
And it’s doubly silly if you’re an aspiring writer of the fantastic, because you may be hurling away the best chance to learn you will ever get. If as a writer you are only as good as what you read, then how good can you expect to be if your book diet is filled with derivative works of pulp fiction? A fast food diet may please the taste buds, but you wouldn’t expect to dine out on Big Macs every day and become an olympic athlete. So why expect to write even a good book without reading them first?
If I see one more pulp fiction/junk food metaphor I’ll scream and scream until I get sick. I can you know. Why equate fantasy and science fiction with “derivative works of pulp fiction”? Is Walter really saying there are no science fiction books, no fantasy writers that can equal literary novels, mainstream writers? Delany, Russ, Aldiss, Lem, LeGuin, Dunsany, Wolfe, Moorcock, Harrison, Jones, McHugh, Gentle, all these and many more cannot hold themselves with the best literary novelists, these are no writers you have to work for to get their writing, that offer as much intellectual stimulation? If you truly think that, you’re not likely to convince me your opinion on the “7 literary Sci-Fi and Fantasy novels I must read” is going to be worth much; if not, why say it?
What make’s these novels distinctly ‘literary’ as opposed to the genre novels they resemble? Put simply, they are better. More ambitious, deeper in meaning, both intellectual and poetic. They might be harder work for readers trained to the easily digested conventions of commercial fiction. But if you make the effort to read these books on their own terms, there are incredible feats of imagination to discover in their pages. They feature many of the tropes of genre SF & Fantasy, but in the hands of writers who understand what those fantastic metaphors are really all about. But most of all these are books which reveal something about what it is to be human and living in our strange world. If genre novels create fantasy worlds to escape in to, these books show the fantastic reality of the world we all live in.
Again, there are no science fiction or fantasy writers who do that for you? You can only think of these genres as escapism, pulp fiction, not something that can ever “reveal something about what it is to be human and living in our strange world”? Why bother reading it then?
Now the actual list is …not bad, to be honest, if a bit dated, with The Road (2006) being the most modern work on it, but the introduction just ruffles all my feathers. It seems needlessly dismissive of science fiction and fantasy, approaching its readers as junk food devouring slobs who have to be insulted into reading the right books. Had Walter just stuck to listing these books and not gone for the hard sell, this would’ve been an interesting post. Now it’s just annoying and snobbish. At a time when there are quite a few literary writers who dabble in science fiction without being traumatised if somebody calls their works that and sf writers crossing over with few problems, even if they have to lose an initial here or there, it seems particularly silly to revoke this supposed division under the guise of getting these sf slobs to read some proper books.
Yesterday my parents had come over for the day and I thought it would be nice to make some apple crumble, having been inspired by this guy. Unlike Vuijlsteke though I hadn’t had the sense to take pictures, so you’ll have to take my word for it that it went alright for something that I had never done before, thanks in no small part to this very simple to follow recipe. This is the sort of thing Sandra used to do before she got too ill, so it was only natural that I started to think of her again.
Not that she’s much out of my thoughts anyway, her absence running like a subconscious thread through my day to day life. I’ll be doing stuff, looking around me and in some way be reminded of her again. With cooking especially, because she put so much of her heart and soul in it, took so much pleasure in it. She was a much better cook than I ever was. Whereas I would depend on premixed sauces and stuff she’d make meals from scratch and quicker than I could open a package. Cooking ran in her family, her father having been a cook in the army if I remember correctly, having also worked as a chef afterwards. He taught her the tricks of the trade, of how a professional kitchen works and she kep using these for the rest of her life.
She was an excellent baker, with apple crumble being one of her staples, together with bread pudding, banoffie pie and brownies, both the regular and the enhanced kind. It’s not recommended by the way to eat one of those, decide nothing is happening and then eat three more. That was an interesting evening, even if I spent most of it staring at my own hands. Groovy.
But also did classic Georgia barbeque (having lived and worked there in the eighties, telling stories of stopping at a roadside shack after work and picking up barbeque and some melon, not to mention having an R. C. “coler” and moon pie for lunch. Then there were the Sunday roasts, the Christmas dinners, the… Sandra put a lot of love in her food and she showed her love through food, through getting you to eat right and eat well. I try to keep some of that alive by taking the time sometimes to look at food as more than just something to keep the body going, by not going for the cheap prepackaged snacks but make my own.
