Luckily for humanity, our potential new sapient overlords turned out to be more interested in clowning around than taking over the world. Found via MeFi
(The funniest thing Sandra ever saw a young jackdaw do was land on a very, very hot and steep slate roof in the middle of summer, then glide down to the ground going ow ow ow in jackdawsian as he burned his claws…)
The King’s Name
Jo Walton
320 pages
published in 2001
“The first I knew about the civil war was when my sister Aurien poisoned me.”
As opening sentences go, the one that opens The King’s Name is great, starting off the sequel to Jo Walton’s The King’s Peace with a bang. It’s been five years after the end of the previous book, the peace that Sulien and her lord king Urdo had fought for so hard has held all these years, but there have been some rumblings amongst the kings and rulers of the countries of Tir Tanagiri about the high king’s rule. But for Sulien there was no real indication for danger until her sister poisoned her. Luckily one of her companions was quick enough to recognise it as poison and not a sudden drunkness and manages to get her back to her own lands, which is the only reason she survived. And then she comes home and her own steward tries it too. Something more is going on than just a grudge her sister may have held against her. Clearly she needs to warn Urdo and rejoin him to fight for the peace again…
With The King’s Name Jo Walton’s histoire à clef becomes more explicitely Arthurian, with Urdo as king Arthur, his wife Elenn as Guinever and Sulien as a distaff Lancelot, with the traditional love affair not between the queen and Sulien/Lancelot, but implied between Urdo/Arthur and Sulien. It’s long been supposed that the night Sulien spent with Urdo in his command tent early in her career was one of passion rather than exhaustion, with Sulien’s son Darien as the result. The civil war, started through the manipulations of the Modred equivalent Morthu, is of course also an Arthurian theme, the war that ends the Golden Age, kills the hero-king and restarts history. Not quite what happens here and don’t think that if you know the Arthurian template you know what Jo Walton is doing here.
Take a look:
Peter Pontiac is the closest thing the Netherlands has to a Robert Crumb or Spain Rodrigez, a cartoonist who started doing underground comix and alternative magazine illustrations in the late sixties and hasn’t stop since, kept working in the underground tradition of self expression yet constantly maturing as a cartoonist. That the Amsterdam library is now honouring him with an exhibition in the main library is no more than his due.
Examples of his work can be seen in the video above, as well as on website. It should be obvious how much he has been inspired by especially American underground cartoonists and also how much he created his own style from it. His most mature work is probably the (auto-)biographical Kraut about his father’s experiences in World War II fighting for the wrong side — Pontiac’s real name being Peter Pollmann, but earlier work like his punk opera Requim Fortissimo is excellent too. For those wanting to sample his work, the recent Oog&Blik collection Rhythm collection most of his comics.
Even the arch-technocratic Crooked Timber is a bit distraught at the European Central Bank’s policies:
I’ve spoken to people at the European Central Bank – they are very smart, and very sincerely believe that the best path to long term prosperity is through enforced austerity. They are also – by design – nearly completely insulated from democratic pressure. And despite claiming that they are apolitical, they are in fact playing a profoundly political role, dictating the kinds of domestic institutional reforms that states need to implement if they want to continue getting ECB support.
This means that ECB decision makers are under no very great obligation to think about why they might be wrong, up to the point where complete disaster occurs. And disaster is very likely, if the lessons of the gold standard in pre-World War II Europe tell us anything at all. Enforced austerity does not produce economic growth. What it does produce is political instability.
The people at the ECB may very well be smart — or at least middleclass and polite– but you will never convince them of any facts their paychecks depend on denying. They cannot be reasoned with, they can only be forced to abandon their neoliberal economic orthodoxies and since they cannot be forced through the ballot, it will have to be by the bullet. The radical austerity policies the ECB, IMF, EU and all the other parts of the alphabet soup are enforcing on Europe are pushed through not to benefit the voters, but the banks. Simplistic? Yes, but closer through the truth than what you read in respectable newspapers or hear explained on the news.
Politics and the mainstream media together form a closed system, where only limited deviancy from the orthodoxy is accepted and which has been carefully designed to give the impression of democratic control while making sure to limit any influence ordinary voters might have. Anybody who paid attention could see this in the runup to the War on Iraq: on a single day two million people marched in London alone, millions more across the world but it didn’t stop the war, didn’t even slow it down. It wasn’t an election year and therefore it was easy to ignore the voters: let them march, let them write letter to the editor that won’t be published, let them vent their outrage on Question Time or Any Questions, the smart people know it won’t matter. Give it a month or a year and the smart people can all pretend everybody was in favour of the war; well everybody who counted anyway.
Yeah, sure, Blair had to give up being prime minister a couple of years later, when the smart money was already shifting towards the Tories anyway, but he’s got millions in the banks thanks to cushy jobs given to him by his grateful friends in the private sector and all the respectable newspapers and televion newsshows still take him seriously as peace envoy to the Middle East. Some people might spit on him in the streets, but when was the last time Tony walked anywhere anyway?
Democracy has been made safe for capitalism again; voting won’t change anything important. And if voting doesn’t work, if the ballot is powerless, then the bullet remains…
The last couple of months, both before and after Sandra’s death, I’ve been busy putting her book collection into Librarything, both because I was doing that anyway for my own books and as a memorial to her tastes in reading. As you can see from the relative sizes of our collections (and not everything has been catalogued yet) she was always much more picky in which books she bought, much more discriminating. She didn’t buy books she could get from the library, nor was hesitant to recycle books once she read them if she didn’t feel it worthwhile to keep them. Whereas I’ve always had a tendency to hoard, Sandra always argued that if she felt the need to reread some cheap thriller or detective novel, it would be easy enough to buy it again and besides we’re running out of shelf space already.
What she kept therefore were books she knew she would want to reread, that she knew she would not be able to get easily and were important enough in their own right as well as to her personally. While she didn’t mind recycling modern detective novels e.g., she did collect classic Golden Age writers like Ngaio Marsh, Agatha Christie, Patricia Wentworth, Gladys Mitchell and especially Margery Allignham. These were books that she reread often enough and had enough sentimental worth to her to keep. She also had a thing for classic literature and argued that any library should have at least some Dickens or Thackeray in them.
When we merged our libraries there was remarkable little overlap: she read science fiction and fantasy, which with comics collections make up the majority of my books, but felt no need to collect them, whereas I had only a few detective books. She was also much more interested in pure quill horror than I was, with Peter Straub and Stephen King amongst the modern writers being particular favourites, but where her preferences mostly lay with the Victorian/Edwardian and pre-war writers (Benson, M. R. James, Lovecraft, Le Fanu, that lot). She also collected classic humour writers, again with the emphasis on those eras (Benson again, the Mitford sisters, Waughg, classic New Yorker writers like Thurber or Edmund Wilson). She liked social history, if it was abour regular people, especially women and their lives and not too dry and again, especially if it was about 19th century or prewar Britain. There are the science and natural history books, geology especially (Fortey) and oceanology (sucker for squid), the country and travel classics (bit of Bryson, Eric Newby), the cook and gardening books (she was keen and gifted in both departments and thank god my father is the same in the latter or i would’ve no hope of keeping up the garden), also quite a few of those glossy historical thrillers that have been all the rage the past decade, a few other miscellaneous bits and bobs. It’s a collection that’s grown organically, that you can’t really fit into a specific pattern, but which does clearly shows the mind of its curator and her intentions. In many ways it’s a much more interesting collection of books than my own.
Sandra was never shy about sharing her books with me, always recommending new ones for me and through her I discovered a lot of authors: Thackeray, Trollope, Ngaoi Marsh, Richard Fortey, Dawkings, Jessica Mitford, though quite a few I resisted (Dickens for example, perhaps her favourite author). I’ve been thinking of doing a year of Dickens — one each month — in her honour but was worried it would be too limiting and doing some more entry work this afternoon gave me the idea to instead just take any book each month from her collection, starting with Kraken by Wendy Williams this month.