2012 – Page 64 – Wis[s]e Words

Insomnia

Published on January 31, 20121 Comment

(The following post is courtesy of Sore Eyes.)

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 works hard to annoy me

Published on January 30, 2012Leave a comment

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.

Apple crumble

Published on January 29, 20123 Comments

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.

How the internet works

Published on January 29, 2012Leave a comment

How do things like this get made?

MetaFilter regular Ad hominem explains:

Nyan cat is like most things on the Internet. It is a confluence of various parts, gathered and assembled that somehow make up an magical whole.

First there was the song Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya that features vocaloid Htsune Miku.

Then there was a remix of the song using a voice synthesizer with the Momone Momo voice that added the nyan lyrics.

A gif of a cat with a pop tart body somehow popped up because a guy was taking drawing requests online and people kept asking for drawings of cats and pop tarts so he just drew one drawing that contained both. He called it Pop Tart Cat.

How it all got added together is the magical part. The gif got mashed up with the song and uploaded to YouTube titled “nyan cat” and we are left with the pinnacle of 21st century culture, Nyan Cat. A “crowdsourced” work of art with no definite purpose or meaning combining disparate elements harvested from the Internet.

Explains so much about the twentyfirst century so far, doesn’t it? It’s silly, it’s dumb, but an endless source of creativity nonetheless and certainly more fun and harmless than what socalled responsible people were up to in the real world…

Fantasy: inherently conservative?

Published on January 28, 2012Leave a comment

For a change, why don’t we take a post that I mostly agree with and take a side issue to nitpick? Here’s a short extract from Gareth Rees’ excellent credo for critics

This objection eventually amounts to a denial of the legitimacy of criticism on political or moral grounds: that an author’s choice of setting and political ethos for a work of fiction cannot be subject to criticism. Brahm: “Writing does not need to be didactic or satirical in order to be important or insightful: you seem to view the situation as that either Martin should be condemned because he supports the medieval feudalist system or that he should be damned because his work is not a satire and therefore meaningless. Why he can’t simply write a story in a medieval world, that realistically shows the workings and limitations of the system as well as the mindsets of those that inhabit it, is beyond me.”

Ethical criticism has got itself a bad name because it’s at the root of the Victorian idea that books must be morally improving. But you can reject that position without denying the legitimacy of ethical criticism tout court. I don’t necessarily agree with every point McCalmont makes but I think his argument is basically right: fiction that treats of kings and queens without any kind of satire, irony or other form of undermining is implicitly endorsing conservative and authoritarian ideas.

I think that is wrong, or at least not the whole truth. Sure, on the one hand there are fantasy authors, with the most obvious example being Tolkien himself, who do believe in the idea of a rightful king and all the baggage that implies, while on the other hand there are legions of lesser writers following the footsteps of a Tolkien, unthinkingly taking the same bagage with them, but that doesn’t mean that all fantasy set in a medievaloid setting with kings and queens has this bagage, or that fantasy authors explicitely have to reject these ideas not to have it. There needs to be room for writers who want to use a medieval like setting to tell stories that aren’t political in the sense Gareth is talking about, who take the political and sociological implications of such a setting as a given, rather than something to be endorsed or condemned.