This topic is one of five given to me by sylver_spiders on Livejournal. Feel free to request topics from me in a comment.
I suspect that I started calling to social activities "adventures" to take the edge off the stress of organising them. I am not a take-charge-and-organise person by nature; I have a strong preference for being a follower, or at most proposing amendments to plans that are mostly complete. In the last several years, however, circumstances have tended to demand that I either step up and organise things myself or accept that I will not see most of my friends.1
At any rate, my socially-retarded self2 of a few years ago quailed at the thought of asking questions like "would you like to come out for dinner?" of anyone but very close friends, but could manage suggesting a "food adventure" to just about anybody. As the trend caught on it became even easier, because "adventure" was a generally understood and accepted social shorthand. I don't need to use the term this way nowadays, but it was really useful at the time.
One of the things I liked (and like) most about adventures is the implication that anything is possible. (A few years ago I went on innumerable supermarket adventures, which were always much more fun than simply going to the supermarket.) There is also a sense that very little planning or responsibility has to be involved, and that any participants in an adventure are prepared to simply see what happens. If I "organise" an adventure these days it is usually an attempt to welcome disparate people to join me in doing something fun, without feeling like I have to be personally responsible for each person having an excellent time and everyone present getting along really well.3
In the last eighteen months or so,4 adventures have taken on an additional, personal meaning for me. Because my activities have been quite severely curtailed, many of the everyday things that used to be a matter of routine have become more difficult, sometimes assuming epic proportions. That could have left me feeling overwhelmed by unmanageable tasks (and sometimes, to be honest, it does), but my self-imposed conditioning means I can see just about anything I do as an adventure of sorts. And that makes life seem pretty okay, even when it isn't.
More recently my health has prevented me from either organising many events or accepting many invitations, so my intention is not to make pointed remarks. At least, not about the current situation. [↩]
I mean this quite literally. There were a lot of things that I just did not know how to do. Fortunately, I don't think my social retardation was of a kind to make me That Guy™ at parties; it just made me feel very awkward and stressed out about things. [↩]
This does not usually work, but I live in hope. [↩]
Actually, on closer inspection it's more like twenty-one months. Hrm. [↩]
I don't remember ever wanting to have children. I have always been too selfish,1 too horrified by the potential of genetics and environment to create disaster, and not even slightly interested in making more people.
What's more, for all that I like children I find myself less and less excited about them. This may be because my friends' children tend to be smothered by swarms of adoring, as-yet-childless friends; I like making faces at very small children on public transport, and I like interacting with children that I meet, but I am not one to cluck and dote and I find that sort of behaviour unappealing in others.
The idea of bringing up a child has a certain savour, but I can't connect it to my own reality at all. I think that being an awesome parent is a hugely valuable thing to do — perhaps one of the most important things a person can do — but I couldn't feel right about doing it unless it became the primary focus of my existence. In the absence of a massive paradigm shift, that will not be happening.
And yet there is something reassuring in a song whose narrator finds himself with a brand new baby and not a clue what to do about it. Totally lost, he nevertheless does a thing and then another thing, because there is a baby that needs things done for it. It sounds to me as though they will get by just fine.
I am not an especially selfish person, but I am not talking about some kind of high-flown, radical enlightened selfishness here. There are things that I am just not prepared to give up. [↩]
When I was a young 'un I read quite a bit of fantasy fiction. I devoured Tolkien,1 Susan Cooper and Victor Kelleher, but I also read Anne McCaffrey and Terry Brooks and whatever other high-volume fantasy I could find on the shelves of my school library.
Somewhere along the line, as I read more "literature" and grew addicted to well-wrought language and compelling ideas, I realised that an awful lot of what I was reading was neither well-written nor interesting. Never one for moderation, I concluded that fantasy was generally terrible and stopped reading it altogether. Well-meaning attempts by friends and loved ones to lure me back into the fold with Terry Pratchett or Janny Wurtz failed miserably.
In the last few years I have discovered a handful of authors who have restored my belief in Fantasy Fiction That Does Not Suck. Most of the credit belongs to George R. R. Martin, Robin Hobb, and the subject of todays post:2 Steven Erikson.
There are a few things that make Erikson's "Malazan Book of the Fallen" series stand out for me:
It is (or will be) ten books long, and he has been publishing them at a rate of about one per year. He only has one to go. (Compare and contrast: Robert Jordan, George R.R. Martin.) And these are substantial books, not something to knock out in a spare weekend.
Erikson has created his own world/universe from scratch, and it isn't drawn from the Tolkienesque elves/dwarves/dragons/wizards memepool at all. This means that the process of discovery is ongoing — and because he has created a deep, interesting world, it is also fascinating.
This is some of the least racist/classist/sexist/homophobic/etc fiction I have read. (More on that in a moment.)
The reader is dropped in the middle of a time of upheaval, with all sorts of factions and interests in play, and shown how events unfold. There are almost no good guys and almost no bad guys.
Erikson does not pull any punches. Important, beloved characters can have just about anything happen to them; a medieval-type world is not presented as a bucolic, honorable sort of place; heroes have skeletons in their closets, and not the kind that can be nobly overcome.
One of the things I love most about this series is Erikson's egalitarian approach. There are male and female characters who are violent, lethal soldiers, or charming seducers, or brilliant mages. Characters of all colours - brown, black, white, grey, pink, bronze, blue - are important political and military figures, everyday folks the reader can identify with, and everybody in between. Same-sex attraction is fairly uncommon but not stigmatised or remarkable. Characters from "barbarian" cultures are not simply savages (noble or otherwise), and all sorts of body types are represented without being stereotyped.
It is so rare that I read fantasy that makes me cringe so little.
I recently read two books in the series back to back, a not insignificant undertaking. Here is what I thought about them:
Memories of Ice ★★★★☆
The third book in the series sees things take a turn for the epic. Considering what has already happened in Gardens of the Moon and Deadhouse Gates this hardly seems possible, but as the world's system of gods, ascendants and other powers is slowly revealed we discover just how little we have seen until now. If I have a gripe about this book, it's that the unrelenting significance of everything that happens can cause what I will term epicity fatigue, and the down-to-earth characters that kept things grounded in the first couple of books are suddenly rocketing out of reach of the hapless reader.
Erikson's treatment of his snarled mess of intrigue and his unfamiliar, foreign world is pretty great. Rather than spoon-feeding us, or resorting to having characters explain things they already know to each other, he leaves us to flounder in confusion and pick things up as we go along. The moments of revelation when something falls into place is much more rewarding as a result. He also turns the notion of dramatic irony on its head, frequently having characters bring each other up to speed offstage and then carrying on with the story. This is frustrating at times, but I can only salute its effrontery (and effectiveness).
Finally, I must mention that this book affected me emotionally in a way I never expected. I think it was largely because the character of Itkovian resonated with me more than any other fictional character I can remember;3 this is not something I expect from fantasy at all. An extended scene near the end of the book made me more or less fall apart, and I had tears pouring down my face for several pages even after I managed to read on.
Perhaps it is abnormal of me, but saying that it gives rise to uncontrollable emotional expression is just about the highest praise I can give a book.
House of Chains ★★★☆☆ Memories of Ice was a hard act to follow, but I think House of Chains would have been a bit of a letdown anyway. The focus is mainly on characters I find entirely unsympathetic and not especially interesting, and a very large chunk at the start of the book was really not enjoyable to read at all.
That being said, there were yet more revelations about the way Erikson's world is held together, and I appreciated the return of the story to a more mundane footing. There are also new sides revealed to old, supposedly-familiar characters, and some wonderfully subtle nods to events from previous books. And just when you thought Erikson must have run out of atrocities and taboos, he shoves a big handful of new ones into your face.
House of Chains is my least favourite book in the series so far, but that only dissuaded me from reading the next immediately. I am not really disappointed by it in any meaningful way, and still have high hopes for the rest of the series.
Including the Silmarillion, for which I have a deep and abiding love to this day. [↩]
conrad_zaar over at Livejournal gave me five things to write about, as mandated by one of the few blog-memes I always enjoy both reading and writing. I am posting each Thing separately, because I am being baroque and wordy and a single post would be far too unwieldy.
(Anyone who wants to join in the fun can post a comment. I'll give you five words/phrases to write about.)
Nethack was my introduction to the world of roguelike games. It made me the ASCII purist I am today. It kept me in QWERTY training after I had switched to Dvorak for all of my personal keyboard use,1 allowing me to remain generally employable. Thanks to Nethack I spent hours upon hours engrossed in terminal screens and Usenet discussions, as well as developing a persistent tendency to see the emoticon :D as a dragon standing next to a newt.
So it's a pity that I don't like it very much any more.
Nethack had (and has) a lot going for it. It's a ridiculously complex game that requires strategy, tactics and luck; it's a mélange of fantasy references, silly in-jokes and puns; it offers various different playing experiences, both built into the game and added by the playing community in the form of voluntary "conduct" challenges.
Its arbitrary lethality was one of the things I liked most about it, especially at first. While still mostly unspoiled I would blunder about happily, discovering new and strange things and (more often than not) getting killed by them. In a normal game this would have boosted me along some sort of learning curve, but a combination of my own lack of application and Nethack's deliberate, obstructive difficulty meant that I never really got anywhere until I had accumulated information from lurking on rec.games.roguelike.nethack for a while.
Unfortunately, once I was spoiled enough to progress further in the game I discovered that the rest of it was actually quite dull. It's an unfortunate and perhaps ironic fact that the really challenging, difficult part of Nethack is the part that everyone has to play, and only relative experts ever get as far as the easy part. Once I had ascended2 once I could have tried again with a different character type or extra conducts … but I had no desire to play through a boring game again, even (or perhaps especially) in a more difficult mode. Even the early levels are pretty boring if one is playing through them prudently with the aim of getting further.
I still have quite a lot of affection for Nethack. I like its silly item interactions, its funny messages, and its bewildering array of ways to die. It's just that an occasional reference is more than enough to satisfy my appetite. If I want to play a roguelike that is actually fun and challenging I will play Crawl every time.3
Crawl has the additional bonus of being under active development. Nethack's DevTeam, although it may well have "thought of everything", has been largely silent for about six years now. [↩]
"Horseradish Road" is an unsettling song. The album version1 is all subdued acoustic guitar and cold, pizzicato violin. Even Darnielle's vocals sound detached and a little distant - a far cry from the snarling, swooning, effervescent narrator-character who, in all his incarnations, dominates just about every Mountain Goats record. The only clue to the fragility of his composure is the way his voice cracks and quavers, just once, a minute and seven seconds in.
But there must be more to it than that. The Mountain Goats catalogue does have its emotionally distant (or distanced) narrators, with their songs of "I" and sometimes "you" but never any trace of a "we". These songs are invariably discomfiting, but their stories usually give the listener something on which to hang the uneasiness.
At just under two and a half minutes in length, "Horseradish Road" is an impressive convergence of recurring Mountain Goats themes: a couple held together by nothing any outsider will be able to fathom;2 a long drive from one unspecified destination to another;3 tiny concrete details married to broad presentiments of doom; diegetic music; tacit invitations to the listener to seek out oblique meanings and connections;4 terrible crimes, both legal and interpersonal, and the resultant guilt (or lack thereof).
And yet the song is not really about any of those things - except, perhaps, the very last.
The concept of karma gets bandied about by all sorts of people, to all sorts of ends. Popular usage in mainstream Western culture seems to suggest that it is a magical force that swoops about the place rewarding the virtuous and punishing the wicked. A crudely-fashioned god for the modern atheist, perhaps, to relieve the pressure of personal responsibility.5 The raw material for said god is a variation on the idea of cause and effect that, depending on who you ask, applies to intentional actions or all actions or everything up to and including thoughtcrime.
The narrator of "Horseradish Road" doesn't care what it means. He has probably never even considered the word. All he has is his fatalism and a paralysing fear of his own just deserts. Not for him self-deceiving promises to reform; not for him hopes of salvation. He knows the score. The score is: I am a bad person, and you are a bad person too, and boy are there ever going to be consequences.
From The Coroner's Gambit, which was finally revealed to me in all its glory as I struggled to write about this song. [↩]
Not the fabled Alpha Couple, though, this time. We have not yet met the Alpha Couple in this series, but you can be certain that we will. [↩]
This might be metaphorical rather than literal in "Horseradish Road", but then again it might not. [↩]
The song mentions Elgar's Enigma Variations and Maria Callas; the musical project Enigma released a song called "Callas Went Away" featuring vocal samples from her. I don't for a moment suspect that this has anything to do with anything. [↩]
Whoops, let's not start me harping on that tune. [↩]
