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reading and other entertainment Wednesday
Jul. 26th, 2023 02:14 pmReading: I bought (ebooks of) a bunch of titles by Paul Magrs, because he was Sad on Twitter about feeling irrelevant/left out of sff. And . . . I absolutely don't mean this in a disparaging way, but so far I think his best work is what I read first, his Eighth Doctor Adventure novels and DW short stories. I think the scaffolding of an established world and characters frees him up to be as weird and intellectually daring as he wants. In his original work he seems more constrained, like he's trying to be marketable.
Anyway. I've read his first two Brenda & Effie novels (supernatural mysteries in Whitby, investigated by two old ladies, neither of whom is quite what she seems). They're fun and have some genuinely moving moments; I'm not sure when they were first published, but I wonder if some of what seem like pretty well established tropes and plot developments now were more groundbreaking then. Recommended if you want a popcorn read with a lot of comedy and a touch of light horror.
I'm also reading The Kind Worth Saving, by Peter Swanson, a mystery about a private detective who's been hired by a wife who wants proof that her husband is having an affair; there's a second narrative track from the wife's POV as a teenage girl, in which we start to see that much, much more is going on than our detective is aware of.
So far it's an intelligent, decently written book, perhaps a bit show-offy about the fact that our main character (a former English teacher) and therefore our author have Read the Literary Classics. However it is book 2 of a series; normally in mysteries that doesn't matter much, but I seem to have missed important character backstory, and also there seem to be major spoilers in this book for the plot of the first one. I'll have more opinions once I've read it all.
Listening: I'm most of the way through S3 of Old Gods of Appalachia, and I think I may be becoming a bit, er, disenchanted. The show seems to be becoming less creative as it goes on and reveals more of the world.
Most of the magic has turned out to be based in bog-standard European neopaganism (Cam Collins leans heavily into this in the episodes she writes, Steve Shell less so in his), with a layer of borrowings from Lovecraft. The neopaganism is there in both the premise (the green vs the dark) and a lot of the details like a witch's ritual knives. I don't want to overstate this--it's not The Mists of Avalon, though honestly I think there's a resemblance now and then--but when the magic gets weirder and more specific, like the Man from the Railroad, I like it better.
There's also a lot of reliance on tropes that I find dull at best and dodgy at worst. The whole darkness = evil thing is a well known pitfall in horror, and I think could have been easily avoided here by using more creative metaphors. And I really, really dislike the presence and the growing importance of magical bloodlines. I can understand, from a storytelling perspective, why having groups of interrelated characters is useful. But the trope comes with heteronormative baggage and potentially even some "blood and soil" bullshit. To be clear, I think the creators are doing their absolute best to avoid going there. But I'd rather they had thought deeper into their magical system and avoided the problem by avoiding this fraught trope.
The show's critique of capitalism and big corporations is appealing, of course, but not always well thought out in worldbuilding terms. (If you're the head of a powerful corporation, why would you do a deal with monsters that results in you being so isolated from the world that you can't enjoy your wealth and power? Conversely, if you have deals with dark gods going on, why bother with union-busting? It seems a bit petty.) And at times it veers into "development is bad because it's bad," territory, which I don't always care for. Sometimes, more and easier movement between rural areas and the rest of the world is good, actually.
On a more petty level, I'm tired of confrontations that are either video game levels or boss fights. And if I can spot it, as ignorant of video games as I am, it must be really, really obvious to other listeners.
I'm still listening to Old Gods, but I don't have as high hopes for it as I did.
Watching: nothing, though I do want to see both Barbie and Oppenheimer. Barbie I'll probably end up waiting to watch on stream, because I like to see movies alone but I do NOT want to be a solo middle-aged man at the Barbie movie. As for Oppenheimer . . . I'm not really that interested, but some of the reaction has gotten my back up.
(*The Allies deliberately bombed civilian areas in Germany and Japan as much as possible, because destroying Axis industrial capacity was key to winning the war. One way you destroy industrial capacity is by making workers homeless, hungry, exhausted, and if possible, dead. And the awful thing is, we'd still better all be glad the Allies won, because the other side was a thousand times worse.)
Other people are bringing up the way the Manhattan Project kicked Hispanos off the lands they'd farmed and ranched for generations (bad, but I also keep wanting to ask how their Spanish conquistador ancestors got that land and who they took it from). And the suffering, from cancer and other radiation-induced illnesses, of thousands of down-winders. As though Oppenheimer somehow was personally responsible for all this. As though, maybe, winning the fucking war--and the Nazis were working on an atomic bomb too, they were just bad at it--wasn't so overwhelmingly important that the US accepted the suffering and death of millions, including a lot of young men who were conscripted into the military whether they liked it or not.
I know there's significant debate among historians about whether dropping the atomic bombs was necessary. I don't follow it closely enough to know all the arguments and evidence, but I suspect the truth lies somewhere around "not absolutely necessary, but it saved a lot of Allied lives and probably Japanese lives too."
Anyway, I'm baffled by the moralism of people who can, eighty years after the fact, lament that we didn't keep our hands clean when fighting a total war against opponents who in one case didn't object to committing genocide, and in the other case deliberately embraced it as a goal.
Wars are bad. Wars ARE atrocity. But sometimes, winning them prevents worse.
(To be clear: I want the US to massively cut its military spending. I want everyone to eliminate nukes. I want wars not to happen. I want honesty from the US government about the effects of atomic testing and proper compensation for injured people or their survivors. It's just the fucking "oh, the US is so guilty, guilty" thing that I can't stand. It reminds me a bit of those self-described leftists who support Putin's Russia because the US is a nasty imperial power. Yes, we fucking are. And Putin is doing his best to be bigger and nastier, not to mention ruling his own country as an outright dictatorship. Supporting Russia is not progressiveand to hell with Glenn Greenwald, his fellow travellers, and all the deluded tankies who think he has a point.)
So, yeah, apparently I'm a little bit pissed off. I didn't realize I had that much of a rant in me until I started writing it. My original point was that I mostly want to see Oppenheimer as a fuck-you, which may not be strong enough motivation to actually see it.
Anyway. I've read his first two Brenda & Effie novels (supernatural mysteries in Whitby, investigated by two old ladies, neither of whom is quite what she seems). They're fun and have some genuinely moving moments; I'm not sure when they were first published, but I wonder if some of what seem like pretty well established tropes and plot developments now were more groundbreaking then. Recommended if you want a popcorn read with a lot of comedy and a touch of light horror.
I'm also reading The Kind Worth Saving, by Peter Swanson, a mystery about a private detective who's been hired by a wife who wants proof that her husband is having an affair; there's a second narrative track from the wife's POV as a teenage girl, in which we start to see that much, much more is going on than our detective is aware of.
So far it's an intelligent, decently written book, perhaps a bit show-offy about the fact that our main character (a former English teacher) and therefore our author have Read the Literary Classics. However it is book 2 of a series; normally in mysteries that doesn't matter much, but I seem to have missed important character backstory, and also there seem to be major spoilers in this book for the plot of the first one. I'll have more opinions once I've read it all.
Listening: I'm most of the way through S3 of Old Gods of Appalachia, and I think I may be becoming a bit, er, disenchanted. The show seems to be becoming less creative as it goes on and reveals more of the world.
More on this under the cut; it's not super spoilery, being mostly focused on premise and metaphors, but may be more spoilery than you'd like.
Most of the magic has turned out to be based in bog-standard European neopaganism (Cam Collins leans heavily into this in the episodes she writes, Steve Shell less so in his), with a layer of borrowings from Lovecraft. The neopaganism is there in both the premise (the green vs the dark) and a lot of the details like a witch's ritual knives. I don't want to overstate this--it's not The Mists of Avalon, though honestly I think there's a resemblance now and then--but when the magic gets weirder and more specific, like the Man from the Railroad, I like it better.
There's also a lot of reliance on tropes that I find dull at best and dodgy at worst. The whole darkness = evil thing is a well known pitfall in horror, and I think could have been easily avoided here by using more creative metaphors. And I really, really dislike the presence and the growing importance of magical bloodlines. I can understand, from a storytelling perspective, why having groups of interrelated characters is useful. But the trope comes with heteronormative baggage and potentially even some "blood and soil" bullshit. To be clear, I think the creators are doing their absolute best to avoid going there. But I'd rather they had thought deeper into their magical system and avoided the problem by avoiding this fraught trope.
The show's critique of capitalism and big corporations is appealing, of course, but not always well thought out in worldbuilding terms. (If you're the head of a powerful corporation, why would you do a deal with monsters that results in you being so isolated from the world that you can't enjoy your wealth and power? Conversely, if you have deals with dark gods going on, why bother with union-busting? It seems a bit petty.) And at times it veers into "development is bad because it's bad," territory, which I don't always care for. Sometimes, more and easier movement between rural areas and the rest of the world is good, actually.
On a more petty level, I'm tired of confrontations that are either video game levels or boss fights. And if I can spot it, as ignorant of video games as I am, it must be really, really obvious to other listeners.
I'm still listening to Old Gods, but I don't have as high hopes for it as I did.
Watching: nothing, though I do want to see both Barbie and Oppenheimer. Barbie I'll probably end up waiting to watch on stream, because I like to see movies alone but I do NOT want to be a solo middle-aged man at the Barbie movie. As for Oppenheimer . . . I'm not really that interested, but some of the reaction has gotten my back up.
Under the cut, a bit of a rant and some probably unpopular opinions.
Some people are on very high horses about how the bombing of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime, as though the whole of the Second World War wasn't one long war crime.* And as though Japan didn't commit systematic atrocities against civilians throughout its conquered Asian territories, atrocities that Japanese governments have mostly refused to even admit to while burnishing up the image of innocent Japan every time those August anniversaries roll around.(*The Allies deliberately bombed civilian areas in Germany and Japan as much as possible, because destroying Axis industrial capacity was key to winning the war. One way you destroy industrial capacity is by making workers homeless, hungry, exhausted, and if possible, dead. And the awful thing is, we'd still better all be glad the Allies won, because the other side was a thousand times worse.)
Other people are bringing up the way the Manhattan Project kicked Hispanos off the lands they'd farmed and ranched for generations (bad, but I also keep wanting to ask how their Spanish conquistador ancestors got that land and who they took it from). And the suffering, from cancer and other radiation-induced illnesses, of thousands of down-winders. As though Oppenheimer somehow was personally responsible for all this. As though, maybe, winning the fucking war--and the Nazis were working on an atomic bomb too, they were just bad at it--wasn't so overwhelmingly important that the US accepted the suffering and death of millions, including a lot of young men who were conscripted into the military whether they liked it or not.
I know there's significant debate among historians about whether dropping the atomic bombs was necessary. I don't follow it closely enough to know all the arguments and evidence, but I suspect the truth lies somewhere around "not absolutely necessary, but it saved a lot of Allied lives and probably Japanese lives too."
Anyway, I'm baffled by the moralism of people who can, eighty years after the fact, lament that we didn't keep our hands clean when fighting a total war against opponents who in one case didn't object to committing genocide, and in the other case deliberately embraced it as a goal.
Wars are bad. Wars ARE atrocity. But sometimes, winning them prevents worse.
(To be clear: I want the US to massively cut its military spending. I want everyone to eliminate nukes. I want wars not to happen. I want honesty from the US government about the effects of atomic testing and proper compensation for injured people or their survivors. It's just the fucking "oh, the US is so guilty, guilty" thing that I can't stand. It reminds me a bit of those self-described leftists who support Putin's Russia because the US is a nasty imperial power. Yes, we fucking are. And Putin is doing his best to be bigger and nastier, not to mention ruling his own country as an outright dictatorship. Supporting Russia is not progressive
So, yeah, apparently I'm a little bit pissed off. I didn't realize I had that much of a rant in me until I started writing it. My original point was that I mostly want to see Oppenheimer as a fuck-you, which may not be strong enough motivation to actually see it.
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