Art & Criticism

three five things make a linkpost

Art & Criticism, Comix, history, Your Happening World
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This was made just for me:

The Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization (DARMC) makes freely available on the internet the best available materials for a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) approach to mapping and spatial analysis of the Roman and medieval worlds. DARMC allows innovative spatial and temporal analyses of all aspects of the civilizations of western Eurasia in the first 1500 years of our era, as well as the generation of original maps illustrating differing aspects of ancient and medieval civilization. A work in progress with no claim to definitiveness, it has been built in less than three years by a dedicated team of Harvard undergraduates, graduate students, research scholars and one professor, with some valuable contributions from younger and more senior scholars at other institutions. For more details on who we are, please see the People page.

DARMC’s coverage begins under the Roman empire and extends nearly a thousand years toward the present by encompassing the medieval world. Although the initial post-Roman focus has been on medieval Europe, Byzantium and the Crusades have not been neglected, and we have begun to include the essential third leg of the tripod of medieval civilization, the Islamic world.

““If you’re going to do a piece of work in three days, you have to have everything properly prepared.” Michael Moorcock on how to write a novel in three days. Patrick Nielsen Hayden comments that a lot of aspiring writers could learn from this, to just get going and write rather than fiddle until everything’s perfect.

Way to make me feel old Amanda — Nirvana’s Nevermind twenty years old this year. This wasn’t the life changing record to me that it was for other people, but if there’s any album that marks the spot where the nineties begun and the eighties ended, this was it.

The Justice League goes to Hogwarts and a duller idea I cannot imagine. If this ever happened it would be the perfect spiritual heir to those stupid X-Men/Star Trek crossovers Marvel put out in the nineties.

Speaking of rather pointless Marvel titles, the latest installment of Nobody’s Favorites is another one. I actually have this series, bought out of back issue bins on the “this looks interesting and different and is only fifty cents” theory. Never read it.

Wilderness of mirrors

Art & Criticism, Imperialism, Life under Capitalism, Media
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Simon Reynolds reviews an Indonesian rock anthology:

another example of the trend of reissue labels moving into the pasts of foreign countries and finding there a kind of narcissistic mirror image of Western pop and rock, a mirror-image that’s slightly askew. but only very slightly. so Those Shocking, Shaking Days is really hot, fiercely played early 70s hard ‘n’ heavy rock with a bluesy groove funk energy (the kind of stuff Woebot might dice into chunklets for recycling) but betrays zero traces of gamelan or much else Indonesian… so it’s like we’re going abroad but all we’re discovering is another facet of ourselves, our own cultural hegemony…

Which is sorta-kinda another example of what I was getting at yesterday. This isn’t quite cultural appropriation because nothing of the other culture is taken; it’s just feedback from our own cultural imperialism. Importing this feedback just reinforces our own cultural narcissism without engaging with the people behind the product we’re consuming or the cultural context in which they operated. It’s still all about us.

History repeating

Art & Criticism, Music
Published on 1 Comment on History repeating

W. Kasper comes to that inevitable point in the rock critic’s lifecycle that he has to bemoan the kids today:

The most interesting, fruitful aspect of British pop in the 90s was when it was, well, mixed race; if not physically at least sonically. Any innovations (however minor), and the sense that you were hearing something said differently, was related to this (Two Tone had a more important social impact than punk: discuss). Considering this, Britpop was even more hideously reactionary than many assume, which may be why Gorrilaz are more listenable and inoffensive (in a good sense) than Blur. The chronic social/racial stratification of British pop (since the end of the 90s) sealed the lid on its coffin as anything relevant. If experience is anything to go by, ‘the kids’ are now more starkly divided into ‘indie’ (white) or ‘urban’ (black), with all the class division that implies.

Really? I’m not sure this last complaint is a) true or b) different from any other point in British pop history. 2-Tone was only a blip and its most succesful band, Madness, wasn’t all that multiracial. If you look at it from far away British pop has always been about a few pioneers getting inspired (stealing) Black music and making it palatable to a white audience, followed by a backlash as it all becomes a bit too mixed: hence Oasis, or a few years earlier, The Smiths, or even earlier The Kinks: all self-consciously English bands as response to a pop culture that had become too un-English, too American and too dancable. Crossover has always been more rare than coexistence, yet the reality of most people’s musical experience is much more pick ‘n mix than their self indentification as “indie” or “urban” suggests.

The Gollancz fifty

Art & Criticism, fantasy, science fiction
Published on 1 Comment on The Gollancz fifty

This year it will be fifty years since Gollancz started publishing science fiction and fantasy. To celebrate the publisher set up a website listing its fifty best science fiction and fantasy novels (or at least the ones it still has the rights to) and is asking us, their readers to chose our favourites out of these. Twentyfive science fiction and twentyfive fantasy novels are listed and you get to choose one of each. The top five choices will be published in a special “collectable retro-look edition”. A nice idea to celebrate a very important British science fiction and fantasy publisher. I can’t be the only fan who quickly learned to associate yellow covers in the library’s bookcases with proper science fiction….

Given that these lists had to be created out of the books Gollancz still had the rights to, they’re somewhat biased towards contemporary authors, but unfortunatly also heavily biased towards male authors: of the twentyfive science fiction novels, only two are by women. The fantasy list is slightly more balanced, but still only has five novels written by women. Both lists are also very white and anglosaxon. Of course you can argue that given the constraints of having to work from their own backlist meant that these lists would always be imbalanced, but than that only moves the argument to why Gollancz hasn’t had a more diverse publishing list in these fifty years…

Apart from that, these lists are a good excuse to play the usual “bold if you’ve read it, italicise if you own it” game. First the science fiction list, which seems to be the stronger of the two and from which I’ve certainly read the most. On the downside, there are no real surprises in this list either: a mix of obvious classics always present in these lists and contemporary bestselling authors. Many of these books have had special editions recently as well, e.g. in the Science Fiction Masterworks series. Which probably explains why I read so many of them…

  • A Case of Conscience by James Blish
  • Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan
  • Brasyl by Ian McDonald
  • The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin
  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
  • Dune by Frank Herbert
  • Fairyland by Paul McAuley
  • The Female Man by Joanna Russ
  • The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
  • Flood by Stephen Baxter
  • Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
  • Gateway by Frederik Pohl
  • Hyperion by Dan Simmons
  • Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon
  • More than Human by Theodore Sturgeon
  • Pavane by Keith Roberts
  • Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
  • Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds
  • Ringworld by Larry Niven
  • Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
  • Tau Zero by Poul Anderson
  • The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
  • The Separation by Christopher Priest
  • The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
  • Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts

The fantasy list seems to be more heavily biased towards contemporary books, with some odd choices: the complete Book of the New Sun but Stephen R. Donaldson is represented by the first book of the third trilogy in the Thomas Covenant series? Why Eric of all Discworld novels?

  • Beauty by Sheri S. Tepper
  • Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie
  • Book of the New Sun (Vol 1&2) (Vol 3&4) by Gene Wolfe
  • The Book of Skulls by Robert Silverberg
  • Conan Volume One by Robert E. Howard
  • Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris
  • Elric by Michael Moorcock
  • Eric by Terry Pratchett
  • Fevre Dream by George R. R. Martin
  • The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson
  • The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan
  • Graceling by Kristin Cashore
  • Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill
  • I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
  • The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
  • Little, Big by John Crowley
  • Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees
  • Memoirs of a Master Forger by William Heaney
  • Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock
  • The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
  • The Runes of the Earth by Stephen Donaldson
  • Something Wicked this Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
  • Tales of the Dying Earth by Jack Vance
  • Viriconium by M. John Harrison
  • Wolfsangel by M. D. Lachlan

I’m not sure which books of either list I’d choose as my favourite, but I’d think in the end I’d go for Stand on Zanzibar and Mythago Wood, both books by British writers who died too soon and who deserve a bit more attention.

It’s just not an English murder with a Black victim

Art & Criticism, Racism
Published on 1 Comment on It’s just not an English murder with a Black victim

Midsomer Murders creator explains why he wants to keep his murders white:

The ITV1 detective show, which has run for 14 series, ‘wouldn’t work’ if there was any racial diversity in it, producer True-May said.

‘We’re the last bastion of Englishness and I want to keep it that way,’ he told Radio Times.

He insisted he had never been tackled before about the ‘whites only’ rule in the show, which stars John Nettles as Det Ch Insp Tom Barnaby.

He said: ‘I’ve never been picked up on that but quite honestly I wouldn’t want to change it.

‘We just don’t have ethnic minorities involved. Because it wouldn’t be the English village with them. It just wouldn’t work.

‘Suddenly we might be in Slough. Ironically, Causton (one of the main centres of population in the show) is supposed to be Slough. And if you went into Slough you wouldn’t see a white face there.’

Racist, obnoxious, outrageous, call it what you want, but it’s the creative bankruptcy of his statement that explains why I’ve never watched a full eposde of Midsomer Murders. As if you can’t get that specific brand of sophorific excitement with the occasional Black or Asian face, as if the cozy menace can’t be created without some pasty white 1930ties England that never was.