The Wages of Large Mammal Bias
Aug. 15th, 2019 03:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landingtreeI have a smartphone, so that I won't be left behind when the singularity comes. And I have a corkboard -- I don't know what kind of rapture is corkboard-reliant, but whatever it is, I'm ready. Currently the board supports one inspirational quote and the phylogeny of the eukaryotes.
I did not sign up to the Behavior and Conservation Ecology project about whether the height of chew card placement makes a difference to the accuracy of rat monitoring. I did not sign up to the project about the effects of different kinds of street lamp on moths. No, I had to sign up for seal habitat preference, because seals and the places they live are exciting. Never mind that you can't get within twenty meters of a seal to measure things like the inclination of the rock it's sitting on, or the fact that none of the five of us in our group turn out to be legally able to drive the others anywhere. From the proposal of two seal colony sites and twelve variables measured in multiple transects, we have shriveled like plant tissue in a salt bath to one or possibly two variables, measured at one site. And as a measure of the enthusiasm of the rest of the group, the fact that only one of the four of them replied to my email trying to establish whether we had a full driver's license among us before groups were locked in is not encouraging. My overall enthusiasm for my studies is still sitting at 'Good that this is their last year.' On the other hand -- the lectures for that course have made a hairpin turn in the right direction. One of the dullest lecturers I've ever been lectured by withdraws like a cloud from the sun. What we now have interesting, interested, information-dense lectures on threats to the biosphere.
...
I just finished reading A Verse From Babylon, by Jeannelle M. Ferreira. Beautifully exact writing of place and people, in moments of texture and light and gesture. The place is the Warsaw Ghetto; the people were real, and did not survive it. This is a very good book, and although it is very short I read at least two other books between starting and finishing it because I couldn't bear to read it quickly. I will lend it with enthusiasm to anyone who thinks that would work out emotionally to being a good idea.
One of the books I read between the start and the end of that one was The Scholars of Night, by John M. Ford. (Why yes, I did let myself buy a number of books on Amazon recently). There seems not much point my writing about a John Ford book having read it only once. This is a Cold War spy novel in which one of the spies is, tangentially, Christopher Marlowe, and another one may be an archangel, and questions are in play involving where games give way to reality, and where reality starts to forget that it isn't a game; given all those things, I kept expecting macro-scale twists which didn't happen, or if they happened they were too oblique for me to notice as more than a distant rustling of significance ungrasped. I'm still waiting to feel warm or affectionate towards a John Ford book, as opposed to interested and impressed -- a degree of male gaziness doesn't help, insightful and compassionate though it may be -- but the three I've read all leave me thinking that the more I read them the more I may like them. (This one certainly leaves me feeling newly enthusiastic about boardgames, which seems to be a side effect of his books generally).
I did not sign up to the Behavior and Conservation Ecology project about whether the height of chew card placement makes a difference to the accuracy of rat monitoring. I did not sign up to the project about the effects of different kinds of street lamp on moths. No, I had to sign up for seal habitat preference, because seals and the places they live are exciting. Never mind that you can't get within twenty meters of a seal to measure things like the inclination of the rock it's sitting on, or the fact that none of the five of us in our group turn out to be legally able to drive the others anywhere. From the proposal of two seal colony sites and twelve variables measured in multiple transects, we have shriveled like plant tissue in a salt bath to one or possibly two variables, measured at one site. And as a measure of the enthusiasm of the rest of the group, the fact that only one of the four of them replied to my email trying to establish whether we had a full driver's license among us before groups were locked in is not encouraging. My overall enthusiasm for my studies is still sitting at 'Good that this is their last year.' On the other hand -- the lectures for that course have made a hairpin turn in the right direction. One of the dullest lecturers I've ever been lectured by withdraws like a cloud from the sun. What we now have interesting, interested, information-dense lectures on threats to the biosphere.
...
I just finished reading A Verse From Babylon, by Jeannelle M. Ferreira. Beautifully exact writing of place and people, in moments of texture and light and gesture. The place is the Warsaw Ghetto; the people were real, and did not survive it. This is a very good book, and although it is very short I read at least two other books between starting and finishing it because I couldn't bear to read it quickly. I will lend it with enthusiasm to anyone who thinks that would work out emotionally to being a good idea.
One of the books I read between the start and the end of that one was The Scholars of Night, by John M. Ford. (Why yes, I did let myself buy a number of books on Amazon recently). There seems not much point my writing about a John Ford book having read it only once. This is a Cold War spy novel in which one of the spies is, tangentially, Christopher Marlowe, and another one may be an archangel, and questions are in play involving where games give way to reality, and where reality starts to forget that it isn't a game; given all those things, I kept expecting macro-scale twists which didn't happen, or if they happened they were too oblique for me to notice as more than a distant rustling of significance ungrasped. I'm still waiting to feel warm or affectionate towards a John Ford book, as opposed to interested and impressed -- a degree of male gaziness doesn't help, insightful and compassionate though it may be -- but the three I've read all leave me thinking that the more I read them the more I may like them. (This one certainly leaves me feeling newly enthusiastic about boardgames, which seems to be a side effect of his books generally).
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Date: 2019-08-15 05:00 am (UTC)HA. I laugh because it is true.
Which three have you read? I must admit Scholars of Night is the only Ford I have not been able to bring myself to reread (whenever it was I read it first I had even less clue what was going on than I usually do on first read, which is not much). I would dearly love to have a book club where people told me what was Actually Going On in any of Ford's books. Maybe I should see whether anyone wants to do one on my DW...
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Date: 2019-08-15 07:01 am (UTC)Maybe I should see whether anyone wants to do one on my DW...
That sounds fun! Though at the same time it doesn't feel to me as though there's much purchase for explanations like 'The butler did it!' because everything is so braided... More like 'Chapter five turns on a pun involving rats and Edward the Seventh.'
I followed the mechanics of what was happening in Scholars... well enough, I think? Not well enough to state with certainty that they made sense or, say, write them down. It' more a version of the questions I had after The Dragon Waiting, I'm not sure why any given thing in the story wasn't something else, and I don't know how deeply I should even be looking for reasons.
Spoilers follow.
So it seems to have been a Faust story? How much was it one? I was wondering if Raphael was primarily a joke on the phrase 'on the side of the angels', while also the whole time wondering if the possibility of him being an actual angel was a bluff, or whether he was going to don wings and halo at some point, or whether nuclear Armageddon was going to be biblical also...
For the whole second half of the book there's the woman codenamed Wagner, and there's the woman accompanying the scholar protagonist, and nobody but that woman could know the things Wagner knew. Except at a certain point it occurred to me that the other person who could know those things was in fact the scholar protagonist, and I started combing my memory for reasons he couldn't be Wagner, or have had Wagner switch places with him at some point -- after all, he's meant to be a consummate roleplayer who had a deep friendship with Wagner's dead lover, and it would have transformed the things I was feeling uneasy about re. male gaze -- and really I think I'm too primed by Diana Wynne Jones to go 'Aha! Someone is someone else!' when that sort of thing's largely irrelevant, but I don't know why Wagner wouldn't have been given her real name earlier, unless it's to keep people like me making theories about who else she could be, and then getting to the bit where someone says, "It really isn't a game, is it?"
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Date: 2019-08-15 05:46 pm (UTC)...I am pretty sure Wagner and the other woman are the same, and the Scholar protagonist is not the same as Wagner. I think Wagner wasn't given her real name simply because JMF has this Thing about never giving any information the reader can work out herself :)
...and speaking of which, re male gaze, I'm now thinking about all the other books I've read by him and, umm, yeah. I do think his older stuff is a little worse about it, mind you.
Though at the same time it doesn't feel to me as though there's much purchase for explanations like 'The butler did it!' because everything is so braided... More like 'Chapter five turns on a pun involving rats and Edward the Seventh.'
Ha. Yes. And also "and at the same time he is commenting on current theories involving the use of rats in medieval times." gah!
But I don't know, I have trouble with both? Partially because I'm not a very analytical reader, and partially because I read them too early in life (when I was even less analytical and had much less of the relevant cultural knowledge). It took me what in retrospect seems like a very long time (several reads) to work out the fairly simple arc of Dragon Waiting being "Byzantium is trying to take over England and Our Heroes stop it." (I did understand at least some of the fascinating alternate-history Richard III/Princes/Bosworth stuff, at least.)
no subject
Date: 2019-08-16 01:38 am (UTC)Hopefully we can set up a chain of people each of whom need different bits of JMF explained! I still have no idea why it was a Faust story, or whether it was mostly one, (well, I bet it was mostly about five different things), or whether it was a good one.
and, for example, didn't even recognize Wagner as a name that would have some significance in the Faustian story.
Oh. Huh. Nor did I. I don't think I've actually read Faust so much as osmosed the story -- though I did see part of a film of the Marlowe play, which made retroactive sense of Terry Pratchett's Eric. (Sidenote: I read his Maskerade before even having heard of Phantom of the Opera. Really must read it again sometime now I know what it's a satire of).
I think Raphael (and in general his interestingly-named protagonists) is not actually an angel but that the symbolic weight of his name is always going to be leaned on a lot.
At the point when, on the page he appears, Raphael is actually described as looking like a non-human entity manifest in a human body I went, 'Okay, this has passed 'suggestive hints' and moved into 'possibly trolling the reader?' I already have the possibly-unhelpful instinct that anything stated that clearly in a JMF novel must be some level of bluff or pun.
...and speaking of which, re male gaze, I'm now thinking about all the other books I've read by him and, umm, yeah. I do think his older stuff is a little worse about it, mind you.
I did appreciate the bit in The Dragon Waiting where Wise Old Wizard is trying to solve a woman's problems and runs into an extremely socially competent duchess who proceeds to solve them better.
All this reminds me of reading Gene Wolfe, both for the complexity, and the uncaught puns and references, and for the male gaze which I don't quite know the writer isn't somehow working with deliberately. Although if the absence of sexism is deeply encoded I feel okay about saying it doesn't count.
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Date: 2019-08-15 05:15 pm (UTC)I read The Scholars of Night (and have a rather baffled review of it) but I do not recall literally anything mentioned in this review. Angels? Faust? I know nothing! All I remember is that there was a lost manuscript by Marlowe whose relevance to anything totally escaped me, and at the end a nuclear war was averted but I wasn't sure how.
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Date: 2019-08-15 05:54 pm (UTC)...yeah, I didn't get anything about Angels or Faust at all when I read it. I don't think Faust is ever mentioned explicitly, but there's, like, Marlowe and codename Wagner and from my vague memories I can see there could be this "man tempted by power" Faustian thing now that landingtree mentioned it, but there was no way I would have figured it out by myself. I was just really confused the whole time!
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Date: 2019-08-15 06:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-16 01:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-15 10:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-16 12:01 am (UTC)If you like Star Trek (which was my gateway drug to Ford) The Final Reflection is a book about Klingons and Klingon culture (it was later jossed by the other ST series) set a generation before ST:TOS. (Kid!Spock has a cameo with his parents, and McCoy is mentioned as a baby in diapers, but besides that it's all original characters except for a very brief frame at the beginning and end.) This is probably my favorite because the ST universe gives some familiarity to it, while he still makes something rich and strange out of it.
I also really like Web of Angels (cyberpunk before there was cyberpunk) and Princes of the Air (sort of a cross between space opera and heist hijinks), which are early Ford, and whose plots I found a bit easier to parse than Dragon Waiting. (I thiiiiink I have figured out most of what is happening in both of these books!) Although WoA is a bit cringe-worthy with the fridging (which didn't bother me when I first read it, but probably would if I read it for the first time now)
Growing Up Weightless is sort of a YA book, set on the moon, that has a lot of allusions to Heinlein's moon writing (and probably other ones, but that was the one that stood out to me). I don't like it as much as the above, but being a YA-ish sort of book is kind of nice. I don't think I have quite figured this one out (yet?) but I think part of the issue is that I don't think the characters know exactly what is going on either.
Finally, the most accessible Ford in my opinion is his other ST novel, How Much for Just the Planet?, the plot of which is that the ST:TOS crew find themselves in a musical comedy. He was a man before his time!
no subject
Date: 2019-08-16 01:54 am (UTC)Those are the two I could currently lend you, and the Star Trek ones are kindleable -- the rest are out of print but Amazon has them. (I've hunted in bookshops, but only ever seen copies of The Dragon Waiting.
As a tangent, if you wanted more Pamela Dean, there's a collection with her stories called Points of Departure available on Kindle which doesn't come up on her author page, because it's co-written with Patricia Wrede. I do not like the Wrede stories much -- mostly they tell me that characters on the model of Granny Weatherwax have to be done very well to prevent me from finding them rather irritating -- but they mostly aren't essential to the plot of the other ones, and anyway, you might like them more than I do. There is a most interesting religion based on the desirability of suicide which winds up being far more of a wise force for social good than one would think a suicide cult could be. And good cats, and at one point a rather Howlish skillful-yet-maddening-to-work-with wizard. I mention this here because the John Ford stories set in that world should arrive in my letterbox sometime soon, and I'm hoping those have his virtues while also being more immediately fathomable, being shorter and all set in a world that isn't ours and so perhaps can't have the same depth of puzzling references.