ceridwenanne – Page 24 – Ceridwen Anne

Pete, Drinker of Blood, Part 1

Sometimes I get the impression the universe is messing with me. A couple months ago, I was invited to a group which has as its mandate reading serialized novels – like Dickens or wait, holy cats, Madame Bovary was serialized? (so sayeth wiki) – in the manner they were originally published and consumed. I did my thing where I joined, lurked a bit, thought about serial fiction for a while, and then decided the whole thing was too much like work for me. Now, I’m not calling you weird, Serial Reading Cats, I just lack the patience to read a million page Dickens novel, let alone to take 4987 weeks to get through one. (I know. I am a total philistine when it comes to Dickens, and I’m very sorry for it.) (And I know you’re reading other stuff too.)

But I think the exercise of trying to experience a completed work of art as originally experienced is worthy, if maybe a little doomed. My main experience with serial fiction is television, of course. (Comics are another heavily serialized contemporary form, but I almost always come at them well after the serial arc has been completed.) Though this is changing as the Internets and on-demand media fracture viewerships and toss a barrage of media at us so we’re always bound to miss a continuing series as it unfolds, some of my funnest watching experiences have happened in ongoing serial television. The X-Files was a Friday night destination for me, as was Star Trek, Buffy, BSG, and a bunch of other stuff that will only make me look even more nerdy than I have already freely admitted to. Half of the joy was the addictive buzz of turning down the lights, watching like a maniac, and then squealing like an idiot when the drama was enacted and then set up for the next week. There’s no cheating there. I’ve certainly gulped down series after the fact – Deadwood, Carnivale, even re-watches of Buffy or Firefly (whose on-air experience was seriously screwed in the first place, airing out of order) – but there’s something very different about consuming something that is understood to be finished (if not completed) as it happens versus after the fact. That the wait isn’t really enforced, that the conversation doesn’t have the same unknowing…

Dangit, it sounds like I’m totally bagging this group, and I’m not – I’m just bloviating out loud. The joys of consuming serial art while it’s being produced are social, on another level – these were fictions being consumed by other people too, and the week before the next fix would be punctuated by conversations with other viewers, chopping it up, predicting, nerding out, complaining. That group could function that way for those involved, and that is the beauty of the Internet. (The AVClub’s TV Club does some interesting articles as its critics re-watch series television.) My main serial television right now is Walking Dead, and it’s almost a sport for me to bitch about everyone and everything on that show – good lawd, the dialogue! the “characters”! – only to tune in the next week to see if Walking Dead can pull off another sublime action sequence in among all the godamn stupid whining. And then they do! And then I bitch and praise to everyone who will listen. I didn’t even watch much Sopranos, but I’ve gone to the homes of the HBO’d to eat junk food and watch along with the screaming fans, because it was totally fun.

So, anyway, how the world is messing with me: Scott S. Phillips – who is a friend, in interests of full disclosure – sent me this opening bit of a serial novel he’s just put out. I spent some time checking for cameras, because, seriously, that’s creepy that I’d been thinking about the serial format in contemporary media, and then bang! Here it is. And, based on somewhat limited research by moi, it seems like the serial novel is having a comeback in teh age of teh Internet. It makes sense: bit-sized bits that are easily and cheaply downloadable, which can function as their own advertisement, or let you know without a full commitment that you don’t want any more of that. Instead of putting all your eggs in one basket, and then watching that basket, the writer can sell some eggs and keep laying. And then you can scramble them and…forget it, this metaphor officially does not work. You dig what I’m saying though, right?

Pete, Drinker of Blood begins the story of the titular Pete, a sad-sack vampire who is schlubbing his way through a less than glamorous LA. The principles are established: Pete, the bartender he’s smitten with, and the badass vamp who is likely the antagonist of this story. The pace is good: bang! slowly revealing character and world-building, then bang! I’m admittedly biased, but I love the way Phillips tells stories, the way he turns idiom halfway so it’s surprising, the tragicomic defeatism of his main character. Pete’s obviously not in with the cool crowd, the Anne Riceian dudes in leather pants, who frequent a bar call the Emoglobin (hee!). He’s like a rat-eating Angel, before he got cool again and found Buffy, only he’s never ever been cool in the first place. There’s uneaten hamburgers and classic rock, and an interlude with a tiny model windshield. I guess I don’t want to say more for fear of spoilers, which is a little silly because it’s not like I can spoil something that isn’t even completed. But, you know.

And now the long wait until next month…

Unsafe on Any Screen

I’m really trying here to come up with a Walter Benjamin quote about media studies and engagement with popular culture, and I’m totally failing, which is about right. Obviously, I spend waaaay too much time reading all of y’alls lovely, personal reviews of all kinds of books. Books I would never read; books I have been warned away from; books I’ve been ordered to read; books I have on the long and growing list that I will never complete because some day I’m going to die.

Even though I have less engagement with movies, as an art form, I compulsively read movie reviews as well. I have the reviewers I trust, and the reviewers I know that I can take anything they say and turn it inside out, so that a bad review becomes a recommendation. I have a passing interest in trash movies, but not a full-blown love affair. Mostly my affection for bad movies leads back to Mystery Science Theater 3000, and the times I spent with my family watching MST3K. My immediate family, growing up, was all-female, and I still have the warmest of memories of watching bad movies on Thanksgiving, with my mother & sister, in lieu of the football that was de rigueur in most co-ed households.

Scott S. Phillips doesn’t just have nostalgia to warm him when he watches grindhouse trash, he has a full-blown and well articulated love. This is awesome, and makes for a fine collection of movie reviews. Leonard Maltin, you may fu*k yourself. Many of the movies reviewed in this slender volume cannot be found on Netflix or even in your local video store, should you have such antiquated things in your location. You have to seek these movies out. They are made by people on no budget, with a group of friends, and a maniacal laugh. Or they were made on a budget and then disappeared. Phillips has an encyclopedic knowledge of the pedigree and taxonomy of trash cinema, so that he can draw lines between this director and that, this actor, this imprint, etc. Awesome.

I get the impression that this book started life as a blog, so some of the reviews are annoying short. Kind of like my – and many people’s – early Goodreads reviews. But once he starts cooking, man, what a joy to behold. He has really weird grading scales: one about how many greased gorillas he’d fight to watch the film in question, and one about how many scotches, or whiskeys? it takes to get through the film. I endorse this. The scotch metric in particular, not because I especially love scotch, but because it can be either a bad or a good thing that a particular film is awarded the high scotch metric. I feel this way about a thousand things: that they are awesome, but they make me drink, or that they are terrible, and they make me drink. Or they are nothing at all and I remain sober. It gets at the whole deep ambivalence I feel towards so much stuff, even the stuff I love, in an intensely satisfying way. My only real complaint is that there is no index. At least the reviews are alphabetical.

What it comes down to is that I’m as fascinated by the critical process as I am with the art/trash in question, and this book is as much a love letter to the silly fun we have while watching bad movies as it is to the movies themselves. His exuberance is infectious, like an alien pathogen beamed down to a small Italian village that infects a scantily clad babe. It’s going to eat someone’s brains, but it might just take its top off before it does so.

Keep circulating the tapes.

Unsafe on Any Screen: Cinematic Sleaze and Cheese

A Career Guide to Your Job in Hell

A collection of stories about shit jobs; this is a good idea. The intro by one of the editors was very funny, and it’s disappointing he didn’t write more about his shit job experiences. So. To the individual stories.

“All Pretty Sanitary” by Scott S. Phillips. A classic shitty job: garbage man. I mean, it’s what pops into your head first if someone says “shitty job.” And how could that job get worse? This story displays all of Scott’s freaking awesome anecdotal stylin’s, but I wanted more. More! Give me more!! I am a demanding reader.

“Fernando and Yaya” by Nathan Long. Speaking of the anecdotal style, this story is a pretty classic story told over beers, a story in a line of stories told over an evening, smooth and practiced, but not particularly deep. This is not a dis. A friend of mine’s father had this theory that everyone on earth had to hold at least one of four jobs: wait staff, cab driver, *cough cough*, and I can’t remember. You had to be at the lowest for a while, so you would have compassion when you weren’t.

“Hum” by Alex Howerton. It is very, very difficult to write crazy well, especially in the first person. Very difficult. There were flashes here of humor, and the occasional phrase made me sit up. Over all, this was not a success, partially because it was so predictable, and partially because the madness starts too early. Short form crazy may be even harder to pull off, because there’s not enough time to establish sanity and then have it imperceptibly shift. I’m not a clockwatcher though; I don’t do office jobs. Maybe this would work for you poor folk.

“Avian Evisceration Device” by Robert E. Vardeman. Ooo, now this was fun. Light on character, but that’s totally not the point. A Twilight Zone-ish creature feature about the poor assholes who have to clean the dead birds from the wind farm blades. Emphasis on assholes, and birds, not the dead kind.

“Serving Madame” by Scott B. Denning. So far, the standout of this collection. I don’t want to say too much for fear of spoilers, but a lovely tale of blood and death and society and…the jobs that society creates when it’s fucked up, and how the fucked up gravitate to those jobs, and are fulfilled. Creeper fiction, sneaking into my brain so days later I’m like, omg, what did you just say?? Very good.

“Another Day, Another Labor” by Brandie Tarvin. Far too on-the-nose for me, or something. A modern recasting of the Labors of Hercules – honestly, I don’t know whether to put this in the spoiler box or not, because it seemed both over-obvious and under-determined. There’s a line between mythic and cliche, and for this reader, it was on the wrong side.

“Brass” by Victor Milan. Soldier-y griping about the brass in an sf environment. The language is snappy sf jargon, a joy to read if you like this sort of thing, but probably just annoying to people who do not like hyper-stylized genre prose. It’s tricky to ask a reader to get invested in all that made up stuff in such a short format, so I stuck to bathing in the alien and not paying much attention, which worked for me. I’m not a big fan of soldier stories, but I am big fan of genre specific stylin’s. So there you go.

“The Day of the Gerbils” by John Jos. Miller. Another anecdote, this one more in the uphill-both-ways vein, but very tight story at that. The narrator – Imma call him John – works at a rat farm in Upstate New York in his youth, mucking cages. Very nice character sketches, and a long denouement that was perfect; how the shit job transmutes into story fodder and a connection with the past. Nice. (But, here’s where I’ll put the complaint about bad formatting in the print edition. Seriously, clean it up for the next run, and I do think this deserves another run.)

“Other People’s Stuff, or A House-sitter’s Progress” by Scott Phillips. God, I loved the narrative distance in this one, a series of titled microfictions chronicling the various homes a house-sitter sits on in her time as a watcher of other people’s stuff. Because of the nature of my work, I spend a lot of time in other people’s houses, and it’s a pretty interesting navigation, how much I see, or choose to ignore, the ways we navigate intrusions on our homes, as both intruder and intruded upon.

If I were going to write something about all the houses I’ve been in, it would be about the pets. Freud’s jibber-jabber about your childhood ain’t got nothing on what animals you choose to live with as a exegesis of your psyche, of a family psyche. My partner once wrote a song about a pug who tried to bite me when he escaped, circled the lawn, and then shat extravagantly in the front yard. “Gus. Gus. Shaped like a bus.” I have learned to love poodles, the standard kind; they are the best dogs ever, despite their cinematic depictions. (I’m working around one now, named Sally, and I love her forever.)

Cats, cats are funny. You only see maybe 25% of them, the others only theoretical. That quarter loves the damn plastic though. There was this one time I worked in a house with cats so evil the woman made me put her number on speed dial. Once, a cleaning lady had been trapped in a closet by the menacing cats, and you can laugh, but I can totally see how that happened. When we went to wash out brushes, down in the basement where the cats were cordoned, one of us stood guard with a broom while the other cleaned. They growled in a freaky Doppler effect the whole time. Yeesh.

Anyways, now I’m just telling my own anecdotes, which is a nice effect of this collection. What was your first job? Your worst job? Your weirdest job? We’ve all had shit jobs, and if we haven’t, we’re probably assholes. The shit job is the human condition, baby.

(And while I did pay for this copy, I know a couple of the authors, fwiw.)

Mists of Avalon: My Mythic Past

Many moons ago, when Clintons roamed the earth, I was in my first year of college. The broomball ice rink had melted, the grass was greening where it wasn’t yellowed by frat boy pee, and I dragged my mother’s copy of The Mists of Avalon out in front of the dorm with a blanket, and read. And read and read. People would come by, and bother me about stuff like eating and sleeping and classes, and I would wave them on, obsessed with the story I was reading, and the spring, and the sun.

This is by far my favorite reading experience. It was like a drug, like sex, like neither of these things, like itself. I would read, and my elbows would go numb, so I would lay on my back until my thumbs hurt, and then flip over again. I had read some Zimmer Bradley in high school and enjoyed it, Firebrand and the one about trapeze artists, but I hadn’t been swallowed by the story, hadn’t consumed it in turn, like I did with this book. She blew my post-adolescent mind with her view of history, of legend, of the long, dark story of men and women.

She tells the Arthurian legend, but not in any way I had experienced it before. The protagonist is Morgan la Fey, who is usually one of the villains. Here she is a priestess of the Old Religion, the Druids, trying to hold her own as the Christians insinuate and change the whole of society around her. It’s not one of those perfect pasts; I remember long passages about the mind-numbing banality that is women’s work in any given culture. Gwenhyfar is something of a silly girl, Aurthur a bit of a clueless jock. Morgana prays to the goddess Ceridwen a bunch too, which warmed my heart, as that is what my parents named me. And tattoos! And sex! And a bunch of other stuff that had never, ever occurred to me before, because I was young, and it was spring, and maybe I was a little sheltered, but in a good way.

Zimmer Bradley broke new ground with this book, in terms of feminist re-imaginings of the classics. She didn’t just put Morgan la Fey in a leather bustier, and have her shoot sex arrows at Arthur. (Hey man, I’m as sex-positive as the next feminist, but I’m pretty sure putting a historical figure in a bustier has nothing to do with wage parity.) She changed the form, used the language and modes of mass produced fantasy for women to utterly subvert the ideas of literature, of women’s literature.

I don’t know if you’ve watched soaps recently, but mostly characters sit around the kitchen and talk about other characters. It’s like this mirror world, reflected back from the kitchens where the shows are watched. Zimmer Bradley uses this kind of comfortable feminine form to turn the legend upside down and shake all the change out of its pockets. History is important, right? the purview of important men and their important modes of speech. Zimmer Bradley tackles this most manly of subjects using the language of women, and it was a stroke of genius. (Although, the Arthur stuff is maybe the most girly of all the big legends: no unified text, a sort of gossipy, back-and-forth quality of many of the tales, love triangles, love potions. I mean, Knights of the Round Table? You might as well be the Knights of the Giant Metaphorical Vagina. But, whatever.)

I’ve never read The Mists of Avalon again, and I don’t think I ever will. It’s too located in my own private history, too perfect. I have a feeling returning this book would be cringe-inducing, and I’d be confronted by a story in need of an editor and an unsubtle view of men and women and religion. My memory is a way to experience my younger self, and my rating reflects that. It’s spring again, and I’m feeling nostalgic for springs past, for books past, for selves past. You’d probably have to be a naive, confident girl from the Midwest, living at the beginning of the end of the millennium, to love this book like I do. It’s possible you may have whatever oddball collection of character traits that will make you love this book too. I hope so.

Sunshine: Not Talking about that Other Vampire Book for Teens

I’ve been falling behind on my reviewing, and as a consequence, my memory begins to drift and the shape of the thing looses focus. Add in the fact I felt kind of bowled over by the torrential first person narrator in this one, and a few weeks after my read, I have this clear, loud image of Sunshine, the character, still ringing in my mind, and a series of afterimages burnt on my eyes, and not such a good grasp on connectives and plot. So.

I don’t think I’ve read an opening as good as the one in Sunshine by Robin McKinley for a long while. It starts with a lot of chat and gossip, laying out this relationship of that, origins, trivia. I’m just snuggling down for a sprawling family drama, and then McKinley his me with it: this is a profoundly alternate future, after a magical world war that decimated much of the world’s population. She never backstories this too much, which I count as a strength, not just because I bore easily when world-building builds the world too worldbuildily, but also because I felt it made sense for the narrator to have a hazy sense of history. The Vietnam War was going on when I was born, and I couldn’t give anything but the sketchiest of timelines for the conflict itself, but I could identify aspects of the culture now that could be traced back to not just the conflict itself, but the secondary social conflicts going on in the US at the time. And that’s the way Sunshine talks about the magical wars, not with a series of dates of skirmishes, but as the starting point for world view and cultural expressions. I mean, this is a little dorky, but I really enjoyed the really concrete ways that Sunshine talked about neighborhood activism, civic boundaries, hell, even building codes.

Then another hit when Sunshine – her real name is Rae, thank heavens – is abducted by ghoulish vampires and left like livestock with another captive vampire who appears to be starving. It’s a hideous, claustrophobic situation, made better by the fact that none of these vamps, not even the captive with whom she comes to an understanding of mutual necessity, is anything but an inhuman monster. I’m not a huge fan of vampires in contemporary fiction, I think because the whole sex/death thing tends to be weighted too far to the sex side of the equation. One time when I was living in the dorms, and my only source of DVDs was a small town public library – gather round, children, and hear how I walked uphill both ways – I checked out the creaky old 1932 film Vampyr. The titular vampire – it’s in German, hence the emo spelling – is a ghoul, an old woman who crawls out of her grave and murders. When they put her down, it’s bloody and messy, not a discrete spray of ash or some cheery fire. You’ve gotta get your hands in it, death. These vamps are more like that ghoulish woman than they are like certain neutered sparklers I can think of. (Oh, hai, I’m ur one Twilight reference in this review, cuz I think they may be obligatory.)

I’m not going to get into the latter plot too much, partially because the mechanics of it are mostly gone to me, but Sunshine spends the rest of the book in a profound state of shock and trauma, babbling out her ordinary existence almost like a ward against death and its embodiments. She’s a talker, Rae, as a narrator, often spending hundreds of words on her job, her baking, the minutia of arranging her bandages. But especially the baking. It was a little frustrating at first for me, and likely it will annoy lots of readers, but eventually I learned to stop worrying and love the baking. For one thing, I just like when characters work at real jobs. And all the politics and hierarchy of a family, within a kitchen, within a restaurant, within a community were a smart way to convey this world to me. But then I also liked the way her voluminous chatter was a sign of her near-death trauma and her working through it through life and it’s mundanity.

I know there’s other stuff I wanted to say, but I can’t think of it now. I’ll just end with some stray thoughts:

I liked that Sunshine has a boyfriend, even though she has this weird, glancingly sexual connection with the vampire. I liked that she and her boyfriend had a relationship full of silence and lacuna, but that it was still real in its own, soundless way. The scene where she and her boyfriend make love in the sunlight was one that stuck with me, partially because it was so fragile and unsaid.

I enjoyed the descriptions of the vampire’s home, which was so cliche and overwrought. It was a clever nod to the vampire conventions, one that Con, the vampire, shrugs about. Yes, well, that’s what created me, and I won’t tear it down, but that’s not what I am.

The magic in this book works so well for me, because it it was humdrum and daily. The abandoned charms were especially nice, shuttering in the glovebox.

The ending? Ah, the ending. No spoilers, but it is open and unfinished, in a way, hand in hand, and out into the darkness. It would be more than nice if McKinley revisited this world, though I do not think she will. I’ll just comfort myself by imagining good things, and that’s a kind of completeness in itself. In a book about adolescence’s end, the leap is as important as the landing.

Bickering as Courting: The Native Star

This was another insomnia read, picked up in the dark hours when no one but me is awake. Pretty much with an insomnia read I’m just looking for readability, which is one of those terms that is probably not that helpful. Maybe I should go onto Karen’s Reader’s Advisory group and try to define this readable beast.

Tone: light to medium
Pace: fast
Setting: not contemporary, possibly with magic, aliens, gadgets or other neat ideas that are fun to watch play out
Romance: light
Narrator: inobtrusive

Admittedly, these are just my criteria, but this is my insomnia and I’m sticking to it.

The Native Star by M.K. Hobson, on the dust jacket, is likened to Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, which I think works insofar as they are both mild alt-histories with magic as the alternate part of history, but the tone and pacing are very, very different. I would not want to read anything with footnotes, as much fun as they are in Strange & Norrell, in the odd hours. And as much as I love Strange & Norrell , the pace is glaaaacial. (And not to be be bitch, I think Strange & Norrell is a better book, by whatever odd metric I have for judging writing and content, fwiw. Just not better in the middle of the night.)

But! The other thing I like about likening this to Strange & Norrell is that neither one is steampunk, a label I see applied to this one. Forsooth, arguing about genre is a losing business, but just because something is an alternate history set in the late 1800s, that isn’t enough to make it steampunk. Magic ain’t gadgets, and a certain kind of fetishized retro-technology porn is an inextricable part of the (sub)-genre. But! I’m willing to concede that this is in the odd dash-punk edge of alt-history. I noticed some similarities between the sanguimages from this book and the warlocks in Bitter Seeds – indeed, both are termed warlocks, a nice double entendre on their need for blood to perform magic, and their usefulness in wartime. Tregillis’s book also has magic and something like steampunk – though maybe it’s more gaspunk? Sorry, Ian, wherever you are. I don’t know how to class your book, or this.

It’s like there is a cluster of dash-punk genres – alternate histories that keep coding and recoding history with various magics and the magics of technologies, pushing the true history to reveal itself. Mike has noted that most alt-histories have alt-histories written within them, and Native Star is no different: here, it is a series of pulp novels that comment on the magic-working characters, which is not dissimilar to the pulp novels in Raising Stony Mayhall. I have said this a thousand times before, but I do not care about originality, so if it seems like my comparisons to other books are intended to cut this one down, that is not my intent. This is a genre exercise, whatever that genre may be, and the parameters of the world and characters are individual enough to put down any talk of being a poor copy. I mean, points for a giant oil-soaked killer raccoon alone, if novelty is your bag.

So far, this is the worst book report ever, me blathering about things only interesting to me. So, to the plot summary:

The Native Star starts with a small town witch, Emily, with money problems putting the whammy on the town babbitt, in an move that backfires into zombies and some irate townspeople. She ends up with a magical stone lodged in her hand – don’t ask – and then the story is off and tumbling in a post-Civil War Old West. Her compatriot through these tumbles is a man called Dreadnought Stanton, which is possibly the stupidest name ever, and I never did figure why Emily was the only character with a non-stupid name. The beginning rankled a bit, what with the silly names and the poor characterizations – yes, Emily is smart but uneducated; yes, Dreadnought (ugh) is a stuffed shirt patrician type, but with seeeekrits. But – and this so rarely seems to happen for me – the characterizations completely tighten up as the book progresses, the stock characters thawing into something resembling humans. The action is well-written, and the banter ranging from not-distracting to super fun. I was expecting certain inevitable twists that ended up being different enough from my expectations to be satisfying. I’ll just say: fuck yeah, hubris!

I even came to peace with the names, which end up being often Dickensian and sly. There’s a lot of really funny hat-tips in this book, like the bounty hunter with an Italian accent who seems to have walked off the set of a Spaghetti Western. I found this delightful, especially because it was underplayed. And – this is going to be huge tangent – but can someone please write on of these dash-punk action thrillers in the Reconstruction South? There seems to be a lot of fictions that center on the myth of the Old West in narrating our American discomfort with Manifest Destiny, the Civil War, and – you know – all that blood let to forge the melting pot in the first place. And how the culture wars still rage along lines set down at the time.

The bestest of these fictions, to me, is the HBO series Deadwood, but there’s plenty more stories in that well, from Eastwood’s Unforgiven to the sublime moody weirdness of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. This book opens with magical carpetbaggers slitting the throats of conciliatory but angry Southern merchants, and, hot damn, I really wish there had been more of that, as much fun as the Old West stuff was. But the dash-punk genre seems to encode these anxieties into magic or gasmasks or whatever, so I guess I can’t expect them to take on the Reconstruction South, when pretty much no one wants to touch that live wire, genre or not. Hobson does take on Grant’s presidency and the war obliquely, in a way I haven’t completely teased out yet, so that is something. (And I’m shit for history, really, so it would be cool if someones like Eric or Matt read this and gave me a book report. I’ll totally mail this to you. Kthxbai.)

So. There are things I could bitch about (not excited about the Native characters) and things I could praise (excited by the proto-feminist characters), but what it comes down to is that this was the right book at the right time. And not just to sound like I’m faint-praising this book for being a pretty midnight tumble, I spent the day thinking about the characters and the alt-history, unknotting some later plot developments and choices. There’s a lot of smart and funny here in all of the relentless action. Hot damn, that’s something, insomnia or not.

The Coldest War & The Long Con

I’m a late Cold War baby. I didn’t have my parents’ experience of growing up in a world of weapons escalation, the Iron Curtain* descending, the Korean War, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile crisis, etc etc. The Cold War was decidedly hotter for the generation preceding mine. When I came on the scene, it was more about Sting songs suggesting Russians might not eat babies – though still with the conditional: if the Russians love their children too. By the time we saw the Berlin Wall come down, various ex-pats from Pink Floyd were invited to come and give a concert of songs from the Wall. I actually watched parts of this in West Germany, in the living room of my German cousins. I still find this whole concert both absolutely appalling and brutally perfect, historically speaking – kinda like Elton John repurposing a song about Marilyn Monroe for Lady Di. Just, yuck.

Anyway, point being, I’m a late Cold War baby, and my experience of the Cold War is almost completely pop cultural. I remember quite vividly watching The Day After on my grandparents’ somewhat filmy television – imdb informs me it aired in 1983, which would put me at 9 years old, just the age of my son now – and growing increasingly freaked out. Not so much the attacks, which are pretty standard disaster porn fare from the era, but the dread of the long denouement, one that ends, as much as it ends, in despair. My parents sent me to bed – they saw the freak out – long before The Day After was over. I only know the ending because I sought it out a couple of years back, suspecting that that was the film that sparked my life-long bone-crunching fear of zombies. Which, yep, that’s the genesis.

I dreamed of nuclear annihilation for years: the mushroom clouds blooming in the distance, the hot wind, the feel of my body in a painful disintegration. I never died in these dreams – I’m not sure about the folklore that says that if you die in dreams, you die in real life, because I have certainly died in dreams, just not these ones. (Of course, maybe I’m in some weird Gibsonian afterlife, typing on into the void. Seems unlikely though.) In these nuclear dreams I lived in agony, the world on fire. Dead but not, crawling.

However, I was seriously freaked out by Gretel in Bitter Seeds, as Gretel is a prescient sociopath created by Nazis, and undoubtedly the Big Bad in both books. I mean, just, eeek. Her brother, Klaus, is a little luggage-y in the first book – he’s mostly there to be eyes on Gretel, because you can’t give Gretel, the big prescient bad, her own pov without completely destroying narrative tension. In this book, Klaus really comes to life, becoming a character I just absolutely adored. Marsh is still a little iffy to me – I felt like his personality had been mothballed for 15 or whatever number of years in some respects, though the stuff with his wife had the ugly, brutal reality of love’s long, slow death.

All this blither blather, I assure you, has something to do with The Coldest War by Ian Tregillis . I’m trying desperately to avoid spoilers, because this is one of those books that hinges so very, very much on its ending. The Coldest War is the continuation of Bitter Seeds, an alternate history of WWII wherein the Nazis have developed steampunkish Übermench, and as a counter, the British have harnessed the chthonic power of Eidolons, Lovecraftian horrors par excellence.** There’s some lumpinesses to the first book that are worked out a bit here. Tregillis’s characterization is a little weak in the first book, especially when dealing with characters like Marsh’s wife and kid, which seem to pop into being with big bullseyes on their heads, redshirts just waiting for an away mission to die to prove the situation is serious.

So here we are, in the Cold War that is and isn’t like our own Cold War, monsters and ubermench, Soviets and race wars, oil and the firebombing of civilian targets, and what struck me was the inevitability of nuclear disaster. Why haven’t we blown ourselves to shit yet? I’m not dreaming of it anymore, my cells burning as I scream in dreaming living death, but it’s not like we’ve somehow precluded this eventuality. The warlock children who have been raised to speak the Lovecraftian language of the Eidolons at one point tie a push-pin into Sante Fe, NM, and I shuddered, shuddered.

Alternate history is, sometimes, our imagining the worst of all possible worlds, the difficult cultural superego who passes judgment and offers dubious salvations. We imagine monsters who can see what we do, and they can see what we’ve done. Holy shit. I mean, I was only 9, but I wonder a little about my cute little childhood nuclear terror and the fact that my country dropped The Bomb on civilians, on cities. I don’t want to get into a big thing about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the inevitability or the necessity of their destruction. When I saw a recreation of Big Boy in the Los Alamos museum, when I saw the recreation of the Enola Gay in the Imperial War museum in London, I burst into tears. History is an inevitability. I know it doesn’t do any good, but I’m so sorry.

What do you call survivor’s guilt, when your country, your people, perpetrated the attack? I’m sorry that history is shitty and sucks? I know, I’m at least a generation from the people who made these decisions, more like two, but I’m not exempt from my culture and my history. I’m an American, and proud of it in many, many ways. And in others I want to crawl into the basement and cry for a long, long time. I mean, I don’t want this to devolve into a bunch of typical liberal hand-wringing or whatnot, I just want to say that history is both personal and horribly impersonal, and our entrances and exits into that great narrative stream are punctuated by both easy upset and shocking convergences. So there.

I suspect I’m not making a ton of sense, because I’ve drinking since noon – vacation rules! Richard and I were talking about this book while I was reading, while the newest Captain America movie played in the background – which is super funny, because Ian totes looks like skinny Captain America, before the serum – and we posited that there are three ways a plot with a prescient sociopathic villain can go:

1.) Turns out, Gretel isn’t actually a psycho. (Or, lolsyke, nevermind everything I ever said about my characters.)
2.) Some random, unforeseeable event defeats Gretel. (Also called Making Shit Up so Things Can Turn Out Right.)
3.) Secret option 3, which means Ian is badass and awesome.

I’m happy to say this book is solidly in secret option 3 territory, and there was a moment there when several conceptual things came together that were so freaking awesome. I had the shit scared out of me by Gretel in book one, which was deepened here in many ways. There’s this thing really early on where Gretel needs a jar, and it turns out she engineered the death of Heike (which happens midway through the first book, and you kind of just think that sequence is there to how you what a badass Gretel is, like Darth Vader crushing some throats). But then it turns out she engineered this death so that Heike’s brain would be jarified and brought to the Soviet Union so that Gretel could dump the contents and use it for a very prosaic purpose. Just, holy shit. This whole series is a long con, the longest con. And as scared as I am of Gretel, I’m more terrified of what scares her. And what scares her is what scares me, and has scared me since I was 9. The inevitability of history is a godamn bitch.

*Just wiki’d the source of this term, because weirdly, we were just talking about Churchill at work, and my client piped up that Churchill was the origin of the term Iron Curtain. Which, turns out, not exactly. Fothermucking Goebbels used it during the War, and it has some roots in the bible or something. Holy god, reading that wiki page made my arms tingle, what with how this book deals with the War, the Cold War, and Everything. Sometimes life is freaky.

**Here, right before I’m about to be critical of Bitter Seeds is probably as good a time as any to announce that I’m friends with Mr. Tregillis, for full disclosure. I also know that Ian doesn’t read reviews, so I could probably be as big a bitch as I wanted here, not that I want to.

Bitter Seeds

In interests of full disclosure, I should say that I love Ian Tregillis with all my heart, even though that ~~bastard~~ awesome houseguest never sent me a galley or ARC or whatever they are called so I could read it before it came out for the general public. Okay, he send a digital copy to my husband, but I turned my nose up at it, because I hate reading serious stuff on computer screens because there is something unserious about them. So, you know, whatever.

Still, though, Ian, the non-writer Ian, the friend I know, is fabulous and strange, and I can’t believe Tor got John Jude Palencar to do the art for his book, because that’s like wrapping some thing I love in another thing I love, and the whole idea makes me swoon. Go to the libraries, folks; queue this up on your Amazon. The minute this comes out I’m holing up and reading it all damn day.

—-

Okay, admittedly I didn’t hole up and read it all damn day, but I am excited to finally have this in my hot little hands.

—-

Last Sunday, while I was gulping this down in a haze, I folded up this book and curled up for a nap. Then I fell hard into a nightmare featuring Gretel, who is the biggest bad in this book, which is saying something. I was in a bare room made of concrete block with a concrete floor, with windows near the ceiling, like I was in a basement. I have no idea why or how I was in this room, but I was alone, and then I wasn’t. She was there, her long black hair braided down with the ominous wires, giving me a half-smile. ARG OH GAWD WAKE UP.

An alternate history, Bitter Seeds runs the second world war with steampunk (gaspunk?) Übermensch on the Axis side and warlocks on the Allied. There was a long conversation about the intersection between the various genres of historical fiction, alternate history, and science fiction on Mike’s review of this book, which really got me thinking about all the ways in which history is coded and turned into narrative. Some of the coding is literal – one of the more fascinating aspects of WWII for me is the shadow war that went on using cyphers and codes, all the way up to the Navajo code talkers who used their own language, albeit in a simplified, reworked way, to pass vital informations. It still manages to blow my mind when I think about this Native language, suppressed for years, overrun, the Navajo people limned into an America that is qualified as a Native America, and how this encoded people and language were hooked up to wires that then transmitted a vital imperial information. ZOMG.

Of course, breaking a code is never good enough, which the Allies did early with Enigma, they had to then obfuscate where that information was coming from. If the Axis knew their correspondence was insecure, then they would have changed the codes. False information about the information gathering system has to be relayed and planted – false spies, false documents, false events then encode how knowledge is gathered. No, we haven’t broken your codes; we have some spy in place, or whatever. This lead to all manner of horrifying calculus: bombings allowed to do their damage to protect the source of information, people sent to sure death to protect the codes and broken codes. It’s the kind of thing that hurts to think about, even though we sit on the lee side of the war, and can figleaf the equations with the knowledge that ultimately, the Allies won, and the equations added up to something.

(I’m not sure why I’m balking from using the pronoun “we” in this situation, even though that’s what I keep typing before I key back and write Allies. My family had some dogs in that fight: a grandfather in the South Pacific, great-uncles in France, a grandmother home with a war-baby unsure that her husband would ever come home. But as an American mongrel, I also had cousins removed in the German army and the Danish resistance, in-laws in the camps, a grandfather too old to be a soldier so instead a school teacher. I’ve always thought it would be fascinating to take a group of folk – anyone really – a world map, and a bunch of push pins and string, and chart the movements of our (grand)parents in the War – which still continues to be the war one means if one says “war” out of context – and watch the earth criss-cross. I’m not sure what this would accomplish, but the image of this this web is what stops my sense of “we”, I think. What did you do in the war, dada?)

As usual, I’m horribly off topic. Sort of. I believe that alternate histories are almost coded into the narrative of the War itself, into the narrative of history. When one hears the story of the British retreat at Dunkirk – the scrambling and madness on the beach as the British try to arrange transport – the sense of how close the German army was, how if they had just turned and looked, they would have been able to end the British capacity to mount the later counter-attacks – one sees how close history is, how intimately random. Gretel, the clairvoyant Nazi creation, sees the retreat at Dunkirk and the event does run to this terrible conclusion.

Future sight – something that has always kind of bugged me in fiction – almost reads as our backwards retellings. The Nazis were evil – this is self-evident historically, so much so that even mention of them in argument has its own conversation ending term – one has Godwined the conversation. But during the war, the Holocaust was only understood in hints – it was coded – again, so much so, that when one views the horrifying footage of the camps being liberated, there are always these weird testimonials from Allied troops giving name, rank and serial number. I saw this – they say – I am real and so is this. Our understanding of their evil is backwards – not false – in some ways – it is something based on later knowledge. The evil of the Nazis was countered in many different ways, but if the center of that evil was not self-love and other-hate, but a cold, calculated personal self-interest of a single sociopath, what would the Allies have to do to counter that? Especially because they did not understand that that was what they were fighting? Ugh. Cue blood-bath.

Anyway, massive digression notwithstanding, I think this book codes technology, and that ruptures the narrative of the War along lines I’d never considered. The British warlocks – which is a nice piece of nomenclature, non? – negotiate with large, chtonic powers so outside their grasp that it’s almost funny, beings who require blood in a real, non-metaphorical way: the tip of a finger, a pub full of folk, a train car full of people…where is this going to end? Nowhere good. The Nazis, famously less squeamish about taking a shovel to the back of child’s skull for the “greater” “good” – create a creature even they fear – a prescient sociopath – the Gretel of my dream – who has her own agenda.

It’s easy to run the war many ways and have the Axis win, even provisionally – don’t attack Russia (didn’t Napoleon teach you anything?), don’t attack Pearl Harbor (would the US and its isolationism ever gotten involved otherwise?) – but here I think the question is about how the Germans ran off so many brilliant thinkers: Einstein, Freud, Benjamin (who killed himself days before the papers for him to leave came through), and well, a whole freaking passel of German scientists who bolstered American and British war technologies to the obvious detriment of the Reich’s plan. I don’t think it’s an accident that Gretel – and her brother, who is our pov proxy for Gretel – are gypsy children, war orphans from the previous war, and so insanely pivotal to the Nazi cause that their “bad blood” isn’t so much overlooked as feared to the point of being ignored. I almost need a chart here – one like my push-pinned map – that accounts for a Nazi sense of purity of blood with a purity of will, and how those concepts ultimately implode when in contact with one another.

Gretel, her brother, and the other children who survive the heinous, thankfully only loosely sketched machinations of Van Westarp – mad scientist extraordinaire – to become the embodiment of will-to-power, are the coded terror of the oven, the camp, the cleansing, one that has its own agenda, an agenda that is to live in defiance, because living IS defiance. Gretel scares the shit out of me, partially because the thought of survival in the face of such institutional, casual hatred makes me want to lay down and die. We – we? – can honor survival, but it comes at a cost, one that can often be measured in pints, as in blood. Pints to quarts, quarts to gallons, and after the gallon, how do we even quantify anymore?

I’ve always liked “The Empire Strikes Back” most of the Star Wars trilogy – I live in an alternate history where the prequels don’t exist, and Lucas never mutilated my childhood – partially because it’s the darkest of the trilogy, laying out the Oedipal conflict without the hard, unsatisfying conclusion of synthesis. But part of my unfinished satisfaction draws from the fact of conclusion – without an ending, even an unsatisfying one, it would just hang, undone. I have some criticisms of Bitter Seeds, as a stand-alone work: my unlove of love triangles, my sense that sometimes the research of the history overtakes the thrust of the story, but my happiest of gripes is that I want to read more. This story is not done: the War has gone Cold – actually literally cold as the ice freezes Europe as the Soviets make their play – and the hot war reaches its chilly détente. Publish the next, now. Get to it, Ian. I wait.

Nox: Elegies

I’ve been tossing around like an insomniac deciding what to read next. I’ve been off fiction for grown-ups for a while, for various personal reasons. I had cause to push Autobiography of Red into someone’s hands this weekend, which gave me cause to pull this artifact out and consider it again. I know Nox by Anne Carson is going to kill me; I know that. But it is winter, and the snow falls glittery and insulating over the back porch, and it may be the best kind of sarcophagus in which to consider Carson and her grief. I’ll have to read it at night, so the kids don’t wreck the accordion pages. There’s something funny about that – the way this object, this book, is bait for children – when I know the heart-break I will find in the less physical parts of its being. We shall see. I shall see.

I wrote a whole review, and it vanished with an ill-timed key-stoke. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Now I will have to recreate it from memory, like a life in retrospect.

—–

In the mayhem of the holidays, I dug through a box of old photographs, and found myself there, younger. It was a shock. The best photo I have from high school, with all of the players smiling out from under their bangs, has a weird stain in the middle that leaves rings on our faces. I can’t find the negative. Seeing the photo made me have the memory of s smell, something like carpet, and tobacco lingering on fingers after you smoke, and the carbon dioxide smell of soda as it fizzes.

——

This poem has struck me dumb. Our lives hinge in the double meaning of that word.

—–

I don’t like collage, or fragments, as a rule. Many years ago, some artistic jerk-off stacked up a bunch of water mines dredged out of the Atlantic as an art instillation at the local modern art museum. Above it, the words:

bits and pieces
put together to present
a semblance of a whole

Hipsters on the corner of 27th and Hennepin – Hennepin Ave cuts across the grid pattern of the streets, so the apartment sits at the end of a point of land, visible to the clog of rush hour traffic – hung a statement on white sheets on their porch:

bits and pieces
float in flatulence
in my bowl

The hipsters were right: sometimes fragments put together are just shit. But. To quote better poets than I:

A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.

But sometimes fragments are all we have, and metonymy is as good as completeness. A memory of smell invoked by the damaged image of a damaged time.

——

But still, it moves.

——

Carson is a translator, which makes her a poet, or possibly the other way around. Causality is a tricky business. She gropes in a dark room for a light switch. Sometimes she finds it. Sometimes she doesn’t, and the thing that makes her a poet is that she can give the darkness shape.

——

I choke up when I talk about this poem. I don’t know why, because it is not confessional or manipulative. It is not meant to play me like an instrument. It plays itself, and the tears are in the silences between the notes.

——

I also don’t know why I’m calling this a poem. It’s too tactile for that. The accordion pages bear the marks of the staples, which have been recorded like music, a record. Remember when you could pronounce that two ways and have it mean something? Record the verb, and record the noun. On one page, there is the sketch of a shadow, and when you turn the page, you realize it is the shadow of the photographer, their mother, laid out in the grass. You realize, I said, distancing. I realize, I guess is closer to the truth of it.

——

This is almost voyeurism, but for the silence, the muteness. This is no confessional. There is no pat Freudian conclusion to the fragments, to the eulogy, just a bit here and there with odd tears between them. If I were speaking these words, you would know whether I meant tears, like from your eyes, or tears, like something rended. I’m not speaking them though, and the translation hangs. I didn’t know until I typed these words that there was any ambiguity.

——

I read this on the couch, wrapped in blankets because I’m cheap and the house is cold. My daughter came and wriggled next to me and watched the pages move, connected to one another the way they are, and also watched whatever dumb movie I put on to distract her. She was warm, and smelled like childhood.

Sappho: A Garland

In my current Carson inspired insanity, I’ve ordered her translation of Sappho’s fragments, entitled If Not, Winter. It is winging to my house now. I thought I’d reread this, my first and only meeting with Sappho, before I meet with Carson and her words. I have a really great anecdote about this translation, but I’ll wait to tell it later, because it is late and I’m tipsy.

——-

I’m just going to take a deep breath and review this, because it’s not going to get any easier letting it sit on currently-reading for the rest of the year. I love this book. I love Sappho. I can’t really remember why I picked this up many, many moons ago, but I did, and it was the most fragile, most glass-spun, earthy, moonlit poetry I’d ever encountered. Its fragility is really strange though, more a product of history than the thinness of the words themselves; Sappho is not thin. Like many of the writers from the ancient world, her work comes down in scraps and quotes. Out of volumes, 500 lines remain. Many or most of them are not contiguous.

I spent a chunk of my matriculation reading poetry, because I fell in love with the Romantics and the early Modernists. I loved the transition between the almost-backward-looking period of Romanticism and how it turns, changes, molded by fire and mechanization and the Great War. How you can go from Wordsworth crying about how he can’t believe:

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

To crispy old T. S. Eliot who writes:

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

It’s the same: the narrator standing with his toes in the water, considering the awesome power of the Old Gods, but the tone is so much different. Disbelief as sorrow, or disbelief as murder, as suicide.

Or take the sonnet. There’s lots of sonnets about The Muse of Poetry, and how she gets chained in verse – this is pun on lines usually, because poets are as immature as the rest of us. Take this, from the boy Keats, at the very, very beginning of the Romantic movement:

If by dull rhymes our English must be chain’d,
And, like Andromeda, the Sonnet sweet
Fetter’d, in spite of pained loveliness;
Let us find out, if we must be constrain’d,
Sandals more interwoven and complete
To fit the naked foot of poesy;

Along comes Millay – who rocks so hard she burns the house down – and she twists this image of Andromeda’s foot into a Monty Python style smash in “Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare”:

O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,
When first the shaft into his vision shone
Of light anatomized! Euclid alone
Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they
Who, though once only and then but far away,
Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.

Do you see how funny this is??? She is not unaware of the double meanings of the word “shaft”, is all I’m saying. The Muse puts her foot down. All this joking doesn’t negate the power of Keats, I would say, but it’s such a fascinating turn in world view.

I am so avoiding talking about Sappho.

I don’t feel like I can talk about the Classics, and Sappho is a hard woman to look in the face. I have no training, none. I can shit-talk a little bit about prosody, because I really earnestly love the dusty, pointless end of analyzing poetry. This is what I love so much about it: it’s so freaking outdated and imprecise. Prosody is still sitting around adjusting its spats, just waiting for someone to come along and blow it out of the water like Chomsky did with linguistics. (We can argue about Chomsky all day, but he really did a number on all that sentence-diagramming bullshit with his generative grammar, thank Proteus and his Horn.) The note on translation in this book is so far gone into talking about unbelievably arcane prosodic knowledge that I could not even pretend to keep up, which makes me want to hug the translator a bit. You go with your bad self!! You have clearly thought about this so much more than I!!

So I’ll just tell the anecdote that I mentioned at the first, even though it isn’t anywhere as funny as I let on. I plead mild inebriation.

I got married about a dozen years ago. Richard and I are atheists, but we didn’t want to give our grandmothers heart attacks or make a big thing about it, because weddings are already difficult enough. We had a heckuva time trying to find an officiant to our wedding. We first talked with a New Age woman whom I really respect, but her weddings are total hokum and verbal bloat. I’m not ragging on her – she’s a really wonderful person – but I had profound aesthetic differences in how I wanted the wedding to go. But I was young, and stupid, and I was all like, it will be fine! We will work it out! Thankfully, she fired us. She understood better than we that we were not well matched.

Then, in the scramble, we were referred to a man named Waldo Asp. I am not making this up. He was named Waldo because he was born on Walden Pond a la Thoreau, which I am also not making up. He was a minister and a philosophy professor, which I continue not to make up. And thank the Lord whom I don’t necessarily believe in, he was both lazy and incredibly well-versed in marriage ceremonies.

We wrote our own vows, mostly stripping out any reference to God from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer that I was raised with. (My quip on the matter: I may not believe in God, but it’s a Episcopal God I do not believe in; the rest of you Gods I haven’t gotten around to disbelieving in.) I was exceedingly pleased with myself for adding in a line from Sappho – much of her poetic output was from marriage ceremonies, because she was an officiant of some kind herself – because I thought I was being all subversive, yo. Waldo took one look at the line, and was all casual, hey, did you know there is music for this section of poetry? Would you like me to sing it in plainsong?

WOULD I??? ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME???

So he did. It was pretty great.

I don’t really know what that has to do with this collection, and I’m sorry I’m so far off topic. These are amazing verses, amazing partially because they are not verses, but often just individual lines, just the word “chick-peas” and then the page is torn and then there is no more. It kills me that there isn’t more recorded, because Sappho’s verses spark and hiss like a downed power line. I’m looking forward to Carson’s take on Sappho, but I suspect that this will always be the collection in my heart.