Roadrunner Twice

After returning from New York, I went ahead with my periodic caffeine purge, where I quit coffee and tea for a couple months. It used to happen accidentally on summer break, and now I do it on purpose.

Every time I do this, I get a "right on" from like two people and an "AUGH, why?" from about twenty people. And I kind of fumble around and am like "It's... just a thing I do?"

It's mostly because I'm curious, I think. About how much I rely on things, about the nature of habits, about what my body and brain are up to these days. Stuff like that.

Anyway, it's fairly easy, so why not? Mild headache for like five or six days, and then you're in the clear and you maybe learn something interesting.

(And what am I learning? Well:

• It's actually just as easy to wake up and get going in the morning, maybe easier.
• I was getting really sleepy in the afternoon for a while, but that might have been a withdrawal symptom, because it's mostly gone.
• I feel weirdly calm most of the time. That's... really nice.
• My guts seem happy I've stopped coffee. VERY happy. That is probably all the detail I should go into about that.
• Not noticing a difference in my sleep quality, because I slept well already.
• This is easier than the last caffeine purge I did, which was honestly a bit rough. Maybe the vitamin D I started taking between then and now is making a difference?

That's about it. Other than that, life without coffee is about the same as life with it, except that I miss the taste of coffee.)

This boy is, in fact, half a year behind on book posts. I think what happened was that I was trying to do “real” reviews on a few books I was super excited about, and forgot that I hate doing real reviews and will do anything to avoid them, so… I guess I got a lot of work done on other stuff. ANYWAY—

Laurie J. Marks – Fire Logic, Earth Logic, and Water Logic

Nov. something, Dec. 18, and Dec. 29, 2012

This whole series was stellar, and all of you should read them. I am eagerly awaiting the final volume.

I was going to try to say some smart things about these, but got tied up trying to track down which other people said which smart things about them first. So I’ll just point to this review and that review and say they probably covered most of the interesting ground w/r/t thematic content and how thoroughly the series isn’t the subgenre it appears to be.

There are so many things I loved about these books, but it’s been enough time since I read them that I’m at a bit of a loss. The upshot is that they are doing things I’ve never seen done in a fantasy novel, the character writing is really good, and the various romances that drive a lot of the story are pretty smokin’.

Irrelevant detour: I’d had a copy of book 3 sitting around for like three years ($1 at one of those Small Beer Press warehouse sales) before getting around to reading it. Wonder what the next “holy shit” that’s just been mouldering on the shelf will be.

Maggie Helwig – Girls Fall Down

Nov. 23, 2012

Good lord, I enjoyed this book INTENSELY. It’s sour and dark, a swirl of hot and cold.

It’s about the city of Toronto, sort of, kind of. It’s actually about two old flames who meet again after being long apart, and about the existentially frightening problems they’re each dealing with. But the city is the POV for a large chunk of the story, and the city functions as a character, as a third old flame dealing with existentially frightening problems of its own (including the titular mass psychogenic illness of unexplained fainting in the subways).

You know that city-POV thing in China Miéville’s early books, where it leaps playfully from district to district and from impression to brief impression, giving an illusion of an impossibly detailed outline of the whole? It’s kind of like that, but even better, and not undermined by the various other weaknesses (character especially) in early Miéville. (Insert frustrated rant about Iron Council and Perdido Street Station here.)

Anyway, the character writing is excellent, including the city-as-character, but I might call the sentence-to-sentence prose the star of the show, because it is straight-up world class. It was just a delight to read.

Yeah, so I totally witnessed a car accident while I was out on my motorcycle ride, and it was pretty fucked up. The geometry didn’t quite make sense to me, but it seems like what happened was that a guy in a red truck ran the red light, a gal in a silver SUV with the green light nailed him, and pushed his truck so hard that it ran into a third car, who I think was in the oncoming lane.

Everyone was walking and not obviously injured, and the third guy’s dogs weren’t injured either. As for me, I had been across the intersection in the left turn lane, waiting for the light, so I was totally uninvolved. I stopped to see if anyone needed anything, and so did another gal; she got some police on the scene, and since it looked like I didn’t have anything to contribute, I left.

I felt unaffected by the whole thing to an extent that was almost weird. It didn't even get my heart rate going. I think maybe it's because I was deep in my evaluate-threats/adjust-position loop, which tends to shut a lot of other psychic noise off, and they were far enough away that I didn't consider them a threat and still had to keep scanning behind me for anyone coming up too fast.

I actually really enjoy the noise-dampening effect of that loop, and it's a big part of why I ride, but it was weird to see it suppress what I would consider my normal reaction. Pretty okay with it though, since getting freaked out would really not have gotten anything useful done.

And that was my evening. How’re you?

Yo, I think I'm done with finger shoes. The pair of Vivos I've been wearing lets my toes spread out just about as well, but without any of the wacky chafing or uncomfortable over-spreading, and it is DEFINITELY better for running. It's only March, and I'm basically back where I was in summer (6-7 miles on a whim) with pretty much zero training.

(Autocorrect tried to turn that title into Reinsert???)

So TMBG's newsletter linked this New Yorker review (which is extremely wrong about The Else, their second-best record of all time), and it had something in the sidebar about Anne Hathaway, and that reminded me that I still needed to look up this game Isaac and Robert were telling me about. And, uh.

Anne Hathaway: Erotic Mouthscape

Not safe for anywhere.

Poking around afterwards, in a mild state of shell shock, I found that it was part of a Twine-based game jam on Porpentine's site. So I ended up playing a bunch of Twine games.

Porpentine appears to be the real deal, and I've had good luck with her shorter stuff -- "All I want is for all of my friends to become insanely powerful" is basically perfect. Cry$tal Warrior Ke$ha isssss uuuhhhhhhhh. I'm gonna dive into her longer and freakier stuff later, starting with Howling Dogs. Following her trail led me to some other peoples' stuff too:

• "Develop a Leather-based Bloodstream" okay sure thing will do
• Mastaba Snoopy is pretty incredible.
• Seven Hours Pass (arrrggghhhh)
• Sabbat is one detailed fuckin demon kit.
• And actually, I played my first Twine last month, when Christine Love posted Even Cowgirls Bleed, which is an excellent evolution of the form.
• Rat Chaos

(A technical note: watch out for mojibake. It you see any textual garbage, change your browser's charset to UTF-8.)

I also ran into THIS little tangent (part one, part two), which, I can't tell if they're talking about an actual game they played or having us on or writing some collaborative story or what? Google appears to know NOTHING about this game aside from these two posts, and it may or may not be real.

Anyway I'm definitely going to make a Twine game.

I was taking a lazy Sunday and reading a thing.

This is interesting, but I’m 1/3 through April 2003 and am about 90% positive it’s fiction. Anyone else have a take? jwz.org/shesaflightris…

— Motor Sprite (nfagerlund) January 28, 2013

Working theory: the author is an American and more specifically a white Southerner. Their old money/new money paradigm leaks in a bit.

— Motor Sprite (nfagerlund) January 28, 2013

Could go a couple ways on gender, but I will say they seem to have no idea what young girls read.

— Motor Sprite (nfagerlund) January 28, 2013

I should specify in re: that last one that I'm not setting myself up as some expert on what girls read; it's just that the author really seemed at a loss about it. They wanted to establish Isabella as a former bookish kid, but were only writing about books in the extreme abstract, as though they were completely fungible. I don't like or trust that device, and consider it a hallmark of spice-rack mix-and-serve characterization; real bookish kids are repeatedly changed by the various specific things they read, and the nature and identity of those books will crowd in at the edges whenever that bookish kid talks about the experience of reading.

Anyway, having skimmed the rest of it:

• I remain convinced that it was fictional, that weird Esquire article aside.
• I don’t know that I can wholeheartedly recommend it -- the writing after the first few entries gets pretty out of hand.

But I find its position in its genre interesting, mostly because of the much sleazier and less innocuous batch that rolled through in the last year or so. (The Amina hoaxer and his peers, I’m thinking of.) Note that this one isn’t using any larger social agenda as a hook, isn’t exploitative of any particular real-life group, is explicitly set up to discourage the audience from thinking they’ve Got To Do Something About This, acknowledges up front that we’ve no particular reason to not think it’s fictional. It’s a much more humane use of the blog hoax form; almost quaint, in a way, if you get me.

And trying-too-hard prose style aside, there were a few gems of posts in there, so I'm cool with having spent the afternoon on it. That one about her classmate’s mom slipping her some opiates at the slumber party, and all the other girls mistaking her drugged-out amusement for wisdom beyond her age and securing her social status at school for years? That was some funny shit.

Via dreamwidth_meta comes this article about Tumblr's David Karp. It is about the most New York Timesy thing I can possibly imagine. Did the reporter even bother to talk to a single Tumblr user? Does he personally know any? WHO KNOWS. Let's tell a story about some dude being special and quirky. With a tangy ambiguous moral edge involving advertising. YEAHHHH. Unf. Something something something West Village.

Anyway, that reminds me I still want to write my Hey Let's All Talk About Tumblr For a Few Hours essay one of these days. I've been using it off and on for the last year or two, and it's one of the oddest and most subtly frustrating tools I've ever seen, and I remain honestly a little afraid of it.

EDIT: On the way home, something occurred to me: Nora Ephron totally called this one in one of the forwards to Wallflower, in which she said something to the effect of: when she was working on one of her early magazine jobs, for some at-the-time tragically disregarded rag (I can't remember, was this Cosmo? Or was that a different job?), she would get assigned a profile of someone and end up unable to cadge any fucking access. So she'd have to do some actual reporting, chasing down ex-associates and peripheral figures, hashing through public records, digging up dirt, assembling cultural context, and then if she actually managed to get fifteen minutes with the subject she would damn well make it count.

The above-linked useless article is a perfect example of the toxic influence of access. Note that it contains no actual reporting or assemblage of context.

EDIT AGAIN: Whoops, never mind. Via granulac comes something even New York Timesier and even more idiotic. (No, this has nothing to do with Tumblr, but damned if I'm going to give that link its own tweet.)

Reminder: I have a poll running over here about pen names and gender, and would love your input, especially if you came here from Twitter or Facebook (in which case just leave an anon comment).

Anyway! More of last year’s reviews: Two books and a 5-volume comic series.

Mitsuru Adachi – Itsumo Misora (in scanlation)

Nov. 24

Years and years ago, I actually bought all five volumes of this in Japanese just because I liked the art, and was able to follow the story up through most of vol. 4. But then I hit the wall when it suddenly changed from a psychic kids sports comic into a pop-stars-and-actors/apocalypse-prevention-squad comic.

That’s still a weird transition, and it didn’t really work for me. I get the feeling this isn’t Adachi’s best work; it certainly wasn’t as good as the stuff in Short Program, and the volume of Cross Game I was poking at was vastly more coherent and engrossing. I think the art was pulling a lot of weight that should have been spread out among the dialogue, plotting, and pace. And I’d forgotten how jarring Adachi’s random (and often creepily underage) cheesecake can get.

Still, though, some fantastic cartooning in there. Wish it’d been attached to a story that worked better. (Yes, okay, fine, I’ll read Cross Game.)

Nora Ephron – Wallflower at the Orgy

Nov. 30

Some of these were really quite wonderful essays, notwithstanding the author’s comments about her former self in the more recent of the two forwards. (She refers to past-Nora as “dippy,” lol. I definitely need to start using that word.) The pieces are… of their time, let’s say, but they remain interesting.

In particular, the Helen Gurley Brown piece is — I don’t even have words for it. (…“mouseburger???”) And it was super weird to read a profile of Ayn Rand from back before her creepy-ass followers took over the government and demolished the economy.

T.A. Pratt – Blood Engines

Dec. 24

I read the prequel to this one back in 2009 and still feel that it was basically useless. But then rushthatspeaks gave the whole series a really glowing review, and since they have generally fantastic taste, I decided to eventually give the series another chance.

Thus, when I went digging through my old files* and discovered an old promo copy of Marla Mason: book one, I went ahead and started reading.

Lo and behold, it totally didn’t suck!

Mind you, it was trashy and infodumpy. And the characters all kind of talk the same. But it had a fully functional plot that surprised me at least once! And it embraced the fact that Cool Badass protagonists are generally murderous asshole criminals and ran with it, without making Marla totally unlikable. And it kept the level of destruction high enough to actually justify everyone’s OMG WE’RE SO HOSED attitude about the proceedings. And things didn’t all turn out inappropriately OK. There were non-traditional solutions. It was fun.

I’m still not convinced we need more than a handful of folk writing this kind of urban fantasy, but this was a decent argument for why Pratt may as well be one of that handful, so ok, cool. Rush claims the second book is an order of magnitude better; I have it showing up at Powell’s in a few days,** and plan to read it someday when I’m brain-fried and want to watch some things go boom.

_____

* Spurred by discovering that someone had finally made device on which it wasn’t painful to read a PDF. That’s what, only 15 years or so after the format became fucking inescapable? Great job, team.

** This post is laggy; I actually already read it.

Martha Wells – The Siren Depths

Dec. 8

Book three of Martha Wells’ TOTALLY EXCELLENT Raksura books. Just as good as the previous two. Look, if you like fantasy shit at all and haven’t read these, you really ought to. Six dollar DRM-free ebooks: one – two – three, bam. They’re on Kindle or whatever too.

So something occurred to me as I was reading this one: the Fell are crypto-vampires. Wells did a thorough enough job at deviating from the template that it took me a long time to figure it out: they don’t suck blood, they eat meat; they’re not undead, they’re living creatures with their own ecology. They don’t transform some victims into copies of themselves, although, well, they sort of try; it’s complicated. Etc. But they do show up looking beautiful and reveal their true nature later. They can influence people’s minds and hypnotize them. Their victims invite them in. And more to the heart of it, they’re intelligent and organized predators, who resemble their victims in a way that very few monsters do, and who can manipulate and toy with their prey’s emotions in a way that more strictly monstrous predators neither can do nor feel driven to.

And by divorcing vampiric nature from its home genre, Wells gets to… well wait, she actually gets two things. First is that the Fell have their gloves off — they aren’t rare, they don’t have any vestigial folkloric weaknesses, and they destroy and eat whole civilizations because they feel like it. The second is that she can get straight to the interesting vampire problems. To wit: are they people? And if so, does it even matter? And if it doesn’t matter, what does that say about being a person?

Because they don’t seem capable of remorse or compassion. They can’t be reasoned with; they’ll stop at nothing to kill and eat you, and will say anything that might get them what they want. They’re intelligent, though. And they seem to have genuine emotions and interior lives, sometimes, but they also know how to imitate emotions to manipulate their prey, so who can really tell if they actually feel anything? And yet. They seem so like us, sometimes; surely there’s something in there, right? And meantime, while we’ve been equivocating about this, they’ve eaten your family, and are smiling and telling you they didn’t mean it. They’re a whole species of Carcer from Night Watch.

And it’s even trickier in these books, because there’s already a certain confusion regarding who’s people; there are dozens if not hundreds of intelligent species on this planet, and plenty of them have no way of communicating with each other, and it probably gets hard to tell warfare from predation sometimes.

Anyway, those questions have been sticking with me, as have some lingering thoughts about the relationship between Arbora and Aeriat. But as always with Wells, the real show is her excellent character writing, and wow I had a great time with it. Moon in particular has benefited a lot from the series lasting for a few books. In the first, when you were still getting used to the bizarre world situation, he was spending a lot of his time functioning as reader surrogate. In the last two books, now that the rules are established and he can move around a lot more fluently, it’s become more apparent how badly psychologically damaged he really is (which in turn has shed a lot of light on how he was acting in the first book). And in spite of all that, he’s really likable! He’s brave and altruistic and a hard worker, and if he acts like a complete dumbass sometimes, well, it’s nothing a decade of therapy wouldn’t fix.

Jade spends a lot of time absent from this book, but she’s very much present by contrast with the queens from the other court, who make it obvious how lucky Moon got with her. (Malachite is awesome as hell, but JESUS.)

but this fried tempeh is really terrible.