Reading Well: The Peripheral by William Gibson

Posted on March 22, 2016 by Daniel (@MKNN)

With The Peripheral (2014), William Gibson has returned to his wheelhouse: an incisive and disturbing vision of the near-future with engaging protagonists and sharp, snappy writing.

Whether it is the hero of the book, Flynne (reprising a steampunk role originated by Y.T. in Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash) providing a fantastically sympathetic and engaging character or the amazing notion of a server that, when logged into, generates a new splinter in the timeline of history, or Gibson’s prescient take on the possible near-term future (a series of unrelated, but interlocked, disasters that decimate the poor while leaving the privileged largely untouched), The Peripheral delivers.

The one shortcoming for me were the initial chapters: it took a while to figure out the alternating narratives, which are also temporally displaced, but (a) that may have been due to my being initially inattentive and (b) once Gibson hits his stride, you won’t want to put it down.

Gibson remains an important voice in contemporary science fiction: it’s pulp, but it’s smart, writerly, entertaining pulp.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Gibson is fantastic at making economical choices in his balance of dialog, characterization, and description. He creates worlds and scenes that are viscerally real with a minimum of words: scenes that I would stretch to pages he communicates in sentences.

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Reading Well: A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

Posted on March 16, 2016 by Daniel (@MKNN)

You will know if you will enjoy A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014) by the end of the second chapter. The first is told by a ghost, observing those involved in his own demise; the second is in a deep Jamaican patois that dominates the rest of the many hundred pages of Marlon James‘ sprawling, ambitious novel.

For many, the patois will be too dense and off-putting. For me, those first two chapters were absolutely intoxicating, generating a momentum that carried me well into the rest of the book. I don’t know if I have read as enticing a beginning to a longer work since the opening chapter of Wolf Hall.

And this is a long work: nearly 700 pages, covering several decades of modern Jamaican history, centering on the build-up to and the fall-out from a failed attempt on the life of Bob Marley (mentioned in the book almost exclusively as The Singer). The main characters are drawn from the Jamaican underworld, and the book is often quite explicit regarding violent, sexual, and drug-related activities. It’s also (usually) successful in sketching characters that are more than caricatures, and whose activities have complex and nuanced motivations–something often missing in fiction located in these contexts.

Substituting Jamaica for Baltimore, there are strong parallels between A Brief History of Seven Killings and The Wire: memorable characters engaged in a variety of ethically compromised situations set against a context that illuminates the complex interactions between governmental, industrial, and illegal organizations as they struggle with and against each other. There are two additional forces in play here as well: international relations that surround drug and industry trade (as well as development efforts) from Jamaica to the USA (and other countries in the hemisphere) and the presence of Marley, a larger than life figure whose shadow looms in the background throughout the story.

That said, The Wire is arugably the best long-form TV series of all time; A Brief History of Seven Killings is a very good book, and perhaps even a great one.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Have the courage to work in dialect/patois the way James does. The risks of alienating a significant portion of your audience are high, but he pulls it off, without being self conscious of it, without pandering.

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Reading Well: Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall

Posted on March 9, 2016 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Daughters of the North (2007, originally published as The Carhullan Army) by Sarah Hall sits in the very thin area of overlap between literary and post-apocalyptic fiction. As such, it is a significantly higher level of craft than most of the latter category, and that certainly softens my opinion of it: there is an elegance to her writing that moves Daughters of the North well beyond “compelling page-turner.”

Hall is a writer to watch, and a write-up of her longer (and, at least from a writing perspective, “more serious”) novel, The Electric Michelangelo, should appear at some point. But I read this first.

I love her writing, which is complex, evocative, and emotionally direct, here telling an explicitly feminist story set in a Britain ravaged by war and environmental disaster. The protagonist finds her way to a camp populated by an exclusively female, armed resistance, and the book follows her struggles to survive alongside, integrate with, and ultimately take up arms alongside them.

While the ending is a bit slapdash, it’s an enjoyable read, and the setting is realized magnificently. Indeed, that is what first drew me to Hall’s writing: her ability to capture a certain geography, the bramble and gorse land that sits between England and Scotland, is quite special.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

There are writers who seem to share a surreal bond with a specific sense of place, and Hall is one: she feels utterly confident and utterly at home writing about that specific geography, filling the hills and valleys with emotional content as well as evocative description.

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Reading Well: Some Sing, Some Cry by Ntozake Shange & Ifa Bayeza

Posted on March 3, 2016 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Some Sing, Some Cry (2010) is a novel by Ntozake Shange and her sister (and playwright) Ifa Bayeza that belongs to a long tradition of explorations of the African-American experience through the eyes of a single family (in this case, the Mayfields). They are a musical family, and as such comparisons to Richard Powers‘ The Time of our Singing may come to mind, but the book has more in common with Alex Haley‘s Roots. Despite its centrality to the narrative, Some Sing, Some Cry is not a book about music. It’s a book about the struggles of being dark-skinned in the Americas, and about the ways those struggles are (and are not) able to be overcome.

It’s a magnificent book, especially in its early going, when the Mayfields emerge from the rural South, splintering into groups that find themselves in New York City and, initially via the military, overseas. The time periods are evoked with care and with love, and the rhythms of life–from the differing creoles, dialects, and slang employed by the different characters to the details of the settings to the historical events that weave in and out of their lives–are portrayed with grace, wit, and veracity.

The characters are compelling, and–the matriarchs especially–are strong enough to stay embedded in your memory, and their power is sufficient to overwhelm the last 100 pages or so, where coincidence plays a bit too strong of a role in the resolution of several plot lines and the scenes over the past 40 years or so feel much more rushed than the earlier material.

Some Sing, Some Cry deserves to be read widely, deserves to be thought about with care and compassion, and deserves a place among the minor classics of American literature.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Create a sweeping narrative that maintains character and consistency across over a century of realistically detailed historical narrative.

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@The Movies with PopPop: Chi-Raq

Posted on February 20, 2016 by Daniel (@MKNN)

We saw Chi-Raq, Spike Lee’s most recent “joint” a couple of weeks ago. I’ve delayed trying to write about it as I’m still not sure I can get it right! We’ll see…

I think Chi-Raq is Spike’s strongest movie to date – and yet in some ways a failure. I’d venture to call it a failed masterpiece that has to be seen.

As it came and went quickly (we saw it in Netflix within 6 weeks of when it had opened), here’s some background in case you missed it. Chi-Raq is both the title and the name of a lead character. It derives from Chicago and Iraq and is intended to have us contemplate the incredible stupid loss of life in both places – more people have been murdered in Chicago over recent years than Americans were killed in the entire Iraq fiasco. The movie deals with the situation that has produced this – the miserable schools, lack of employment opportunities, white flight and ghettoization, drugs and their role in economic opportunity, unstable families, gangs as the path to self-esteem and reputation, overall cheapness of life, and the incredible collateral damage of all that on black lives. (Among the many criticisms of the film were that it “unfairly” targets Chicago, implies a universal from a local situation, limits itself to black-on-black crime, etc. In actuality, it’s an incredible plea that all black lives matter.)

With incredible ambition, Spike addresses these issues, educating on their causes, and making it clear that change has to start from the perpetrators and victims themselves – another source of some criticism. (Also unfair in that it’s quite clear that he’s nor framing an either/or but a both/and in which without change from within, no level of programs from without will do the trick.)

Now all that may sound like a downer, but Spike has delivered a rollicking, sexy, musical, theatrical, fast moving, satirical, linguistically indelicate, arousing film that makes all these points. He has based the film on Lysistrata, Aristophanes‘ 3000-year-old comedy of the women of Greece uniting to end the Peloponnesian War by withholding sex from their men until they stop the war. In Spike’s terms, “no peace, no pussy.” The film adheres closer to the Lysistrata model than one might at first think, including scenes of alliances across traditional enemies, of sexual teasing, of old men basically seeking exemption, of the strike spreading well beyond the Chicago neighborhood in which it starts. And, much of the film is in rhyming couplets or iambic pentameter, or rap.

Incredibly ambitious, brilliantly adapting Lysistrata to deliver an extraordinarily powerful message, attempting to show current Chicago issues within the entire history of black oppression in the US, I think it falls just short of a masterpiece – some plot elements don’t quite work, some questions are left hanging, and of course there are certain hard combinations of deep insight and incredible naiveté, and of individuation and stereotype. There’s also some remarkable acting, not only by stalwarts like Samuel Jackson, Angela Bassett, John Cusack and Wesley Snipes, but also by newcomers (at least to me) like Nick Cannon and Teyonah Parris as the leads Chi-Raq and Lysistrata.

Whatever your politics and whatever your stance towards Spike Lee, this is an important movie to see – and probably to see again.

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Reading Well: Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis

Posted on February 8, 2016 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Blackout and All Clear (both published in 2010) by Connie Willis are really one story, but each book is sizable (400 pages plus), so I can see how publishing them as a duology made sense. The core premise of the novel is a future where graduate students in history-related disciplines are now able to travel back in time (subject to some limitations and some imprecision in the exact time, and place of their arrival), providing first-person observations of past events. Our main characters are all studying WWII, and are placed around the European theater, mostly in England.

The novels straddle two genres, time-travel and historical fiction, and is more successful on the latter than the former, so let’s start there.

The research and historical granularity is fantastic: this is one of those works of fiction that ends up educating in illuminating ways, adding greatly to the reader’s sense of what WWII “might have been like.” Willis does a good job of weaving the role of foresight into the narrative: the historians know what area of London is going to be bombed heavily over the next days, but they need to act on that knowledge while camouflaging their behavior.

And this gets into a core time-travel conundrum: what is the impact on the past of any change to the past, even that of observation? This is an ongoing concern in the book, but it feels more like a narrative device than a tangible risk; certainly it seems less immediate than the bombs and the bullets. Despite their repeated anxiety, there never seems to be the true threat of a Man in the High Castle outcome, where the graduate students’ behavior leads to a German victory.

I haven’t mentioned the characters because they blended together quite significantly for me: there were affections and animosities, a love affair or two, but what kept me reading to the end of the second book was the history and the details of how different narratives in WWII threaded together by the end. Even knowing “how it all turned out,” it remained a page turner, as the amount of damage and devastation meant, even if England’s victory was historically assured, the fates of the individuals never were.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Historical veracity. I am in awe of research, and of finding ways to fit a narrative to what actually happened, without being inevitably drawn into plot twists that deviate from the research in significant ways.

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Reading Well: All Our Names by Dinaw Mengestu

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Daniel (@MKNN)

All Our Names (2014) by Dinaw Mengestu is a book about loneliness, isolation, and dislocation. It tries to be a love story, but the strength of the book lies in the other stuff.

The novel unfolds in two parallel parts: one is set in Uganda, sometime in the late 1960s/early 1970s and the second in the USA, perhaps in the 1980s. The chapters alternate in point of view, between Helen, a white, Midwestern social worker, and (not) Isaac.

The latter is the more complicated story to tell: our narrator migrated to Uganda, likely from southern Ethiopia, as a young man and there was radicalized and fell in love with another young student, whose name was Isaac. The two young men are swept into a revolutionary resistance to the current government, Isaac moreso than the narrator, an arc that culminates in Isaac giving the narrator his identity papers, including a visa for America. Which is where he meets Helen. The two of them fall in love and struggle with the inherent difficulties of everyday, systemic, and targeted racism.

The structure dictates a constant back-and-forth in time, as Helen’s chapters are all in the later timeline, while Isaac’s progress from the time in Uganda forward.

Mengestu’s power is an ability to convey heartbreak, the longing for identity and companionship and understanding that is at the center of (not) Isaac’s life. There is a poignancy to the writing, an understanding that it is profoundly unlikely that things end well, but there can still be moments of joy and pleasure along the way. It’s not a book of large revelations, and if you have even a passing familiarity with the history of the two time periods involved, there will be little new on display.

But the characters will stay with you: Helen is drawn warmly and sympathetically, and the mysteries of (not) Isaac represent a great accomplishment, a protagonist that is constantly obscured by his own past, but remains emotionally clear in the reader’s mind.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

The relationship with Isaac is stunning. I don’t remember if there is a sexual component that is revealed, but it doesn’t really matter: it is tender, respectful, and passionate in its idealism. He captures a certain youthful abandon, and then manages to make the older (not) Isaac both continuous with the younger, but also wiser, more cautious.

Aging a character is difficult, and Mengestu does it very well.

 

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Reading Well: Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Mercy, and Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie

Posted on January 14, 2016 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Ann Leckie‘s Ancillary Trilogy is among the most imaginative science fiction debuts you will find. They are very much of the genre, so if spaceships and alien cultures aren’t your thing, you should probably pass on this one.

But, if they are, it’s well worth the ride. The ingenuity centers around her conception of a spaceship as a hive mind spread across many, many bodies: our hero, Breq, (it is possible that all of the characters in Ancillary Justice are female; at a minimum, the overwhelming majority of them are–warning, here be subtext) used to be a spaceship called The Justice of Toren. When she was a spaceship, she was both the ship itself (with massive computing power at her disposal) and several dozen of its crew, whose bodies could be anywhere on or off the ship.

Leckie does a fantastic job communicating the range of perception and intentionality this requires: there are chapters where you are reading several scenes simultaneously, all being combined into the overall perspective the ship itself.

I did say used to above: the plot of the book hinges on Breq having been dislocated from being a ship, her consciousness stuffed into a single, vulnerable and all-too-easily damaged, human body.

The trilogy unfolds somewhere in a triangle formed from space opera, political thriller, and social commentary, and Leckie balances them all quite well. If that sounds interesting, these are strongly recommended.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Two things: first, the creativity in the simultaneous perception scenes is really fantastic, and struck me as solving (not in the only way, but in one reasonable way) an age-old problem in the genre. Second, Leckie is fearless in her culture creation. I could never name a race the Rrrrrrrrrr, as she does, without forcing myself into contortions to explain the linguistics behind it, which she most definitely does not. I think her way is more courageous and even, perhaps, better.

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@The Movies with PopPop: The Story of the Weeping Camel

Posted on January 10, 2016 by Daniel (@MKNN)

And now for something completely different…

The Story of the Weeping Camel, a 2003 award winning documentary by Byambasuren Davaa and Luigi Falorni, follows the life of a contemporary nomadic Mongolian family in the Gobi desert who raise camels and sheep. It focuses on the season when the camels – very strange looking camels who were not used in making Lawrence of Arabia – are giving birth, and what occurs after one of the camels refuses her calf. The family, 3 or 4 generations who share a compound, eventually have to rely on an ancient ritual involving special ceremonies, foods and music, and requiring their sending for a stringed instrument virtuoso to come and assist.

What’s remarkable is the success of the film in capturing the life style of the family, its rhythms and strengths, and in individualizing each member of the family, their roles, and their harmony. It’s remarkably absorbing and I think remarkably successful in giving a picture of the lives of highly traditional people within a modern world. By the end, I thought I understood these folks, and thought their lives and lifestyle to be “just like ours” while of course totally different.

A very special cinematic experience. I even thought some of the camels were cute – anyone who’s been with camels know how unlikely that is!

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Reading Well: Last Call by Tim Powers

Posted on January 7, 2016 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Last Call by Tim Powers mixes many of my favorite things: neo-Egyptian mythology, tarot cards with the power to fundamentally disrupt reality, and, of course, poker. Or, in this case, a pseudo-poker game called Assumption, played with a full deck of tarot cards. The name derives from the ability of the ultimate winner to assume the physical body of other players, enabling effective immortality for the lucky few.

The book is a mix of noir procedural and revenge story, with the protagonist managing to out-hustle the bad guys, both at “regular” poker and the other games. There are a lot of vaguely magical trappings: people have affinities to different elemental powers, and there are a variety of ghouls and ghosts and golems, both helpful and not, that are found on the California coast and inhabiting the various extravagances of late-twentieth century Las Vegas. These are intriguing, and if it falls into the wide history of fiction that appropriates various magical and mythological systems in problematic ways, it does so relatively harmlessly.

It’s enjoyable, and a page turner, and even surprisingly creative at points.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Juggle a half-dozen plot lines, slowly pulling them together into a nice knot at the end that is, with a deft pull, neatly unraveled. Powers knows his craft, and never lets the story careen out of control.

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