20190628.0430

Of the six posts in this webspace I've made in previous years on this date--2011, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018--that from 2014 seems the most relevant to me at the moment. In that piece, I offer an amateurish review of the Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Game fourth-edition supplement, Sword and Fan. Now, while the game has since progressed into a fifth edition, and with a different company holding the rights to the intellectual property, I find the supplement--and the line of which it is part--still of some use. I play and administer games in it, and am gearing up to help run yet another game that will make much use of the materials in the book. Revisiting the review, therefore, seems like a useful thing to do.
There are problems in the piece, of course. As I note, it is amateurish, overly brief and skimpy on details that would likely make for a better piece of writing. (Indeed, the scholar that is still within me chafes at the lack of specific textual detail and explication thereof. And I was a scholar then, or at least was trying to be so, so the lack is even less acceptable from then than it would be from now, when I am more or less out of academe.) Too, certain features expected of book reviews are flatly absent; I do not give the ISBN or the MSRP, for example, both of which are standard features of book reviews. (I see enough of them, both in my pleasure reading and in the scholarly reading I should have done more of when I was trying to be a scholar. I ought to know better.) Neither is a point in favor of my writing's quality.
But I do follow the overall form of a review, giving a brief synopsis of the contents before identifying problems I found in the text and expounding on what it does well. And, following a form I learned while doing freelance writing I still miss--largely because of the pay, yes, but also because of the ways in which it forced me to sharpen my writing and to expand my skills with it (including working in AP style and beginning to learn HTML coding)--I spend more words on what Sword and Fan does well than what it does poorly. My overall notion is that the book is a good one, and it helps to have subtle textual features align to that idea. Neglecting problems is a foolhardy thing, but if the overall idea is that a thing is good, it makes sense to put more words into noting how it is good than how it is bad. It's not paratext, as such; it is in the words themselves. But it is not in the denotations of those words--or even the connotations of the individual words. It is in the connotations of perceived effort as indicated by the number of words. So that much is to the good in the review, at least.
Written reviews are not particularly prized for RPG products at this point--or even at the point when I wrote my review of Sword and Fan. I should be making videos, probably, or at least including graphics to encapsulate and condense my prose for ease of reading. In another webspace, I likely would. But in this one, I remain bound to text (and with some light attention to paratext, I admit). Whether that is a good thing or not, I am not at all certain.

20190124.0430

Not long ago, my wife bought me a new cell phone, a LG Stylo 3. It had been a thing that we had discussed doing, something prompted in part by my work in social media. (I freelance as a social media consultant, among others.) I was glad to receive the phone; I have tended to lag behind others in such things, to be sure, and although I still do not have a top-of-the-line model, the phone I have now is a substantial upgrade from the one I had previously. So far, I have been pleased with its capabilities, pleased with the ways in which it has made some of the work I do easier. And I am, of course, grateful to my wonderful wife for providing me the equipment.
That said, the phone does have quite an annoying feature. On it, I am inundated with advertisements. The phone will, at random moments when active but not in use, present me with ads for apps--some of which, I already have installed. I may go to check the time on my phone, or exit a timer, or end a call, or send a text message--and an ad for some app will pop up. The individual ad is easily dismissed, of course, but I am annoyed by the fact that I have to dismiss them. They are annoyances only, of course; I am not hindered by them, or even much delayed. But they are annoyances, and, given how I grew up and by what I was nurtured, I am of the opinion that technologies are supposed to reduce the number of annoyances with which I am presented. Perhaps it is a naïve opinion to retain, given the entanglements of capitalism and technological development, but it is still one that informs my daily deeds.
I do not know what setting on my phone it is that allows such things, else I would have remedied the issue, but, since I do not know it, I find myself annoyed by the frequent intrusion of ads into my life. I have tended to try to make my home a place of respite from such; my family does not have television service, and we are careful about the branding on our clothes and the goods we buy. To have the ads pop up on my phone as they are doing--not while amid other apps, where such would be reasonably expected, but at odd intervals during other kinds of use--stands out the more strongly to me, therefore. Maybe, were I less attuned to such or less insistent that such things be minimized in my home-space, I would not find myself so concerned, and I am mindful that such problem as it is is a small one I am fortunate to be able to have. I know more are not able to be in such a situation than are, and not all who are able are immersed in it. But I am attuned and insistent, so I am concerned, and I am not pleased by it.

20160219.0607

Today is Ms. 8's second birthday. I have discussed the occasion and commemoration of her birth before, of course (here and here, respectively), and I am happy to note that Ms. 8 seems not to need to be in the hospital this time around. It is the first birthday for which that appears to be true, and I hope that nothing happens during the day that will cause a change to that status. She remains a wonder, strong and clever, inquisitive and assertive, affectionate and just smart-ass enough to be entertaining. I am lucky to have such a daughter, increasingly so, even if she does oblige me to do a whole lot more work than would otherwise have been the case. (I shall have revenge, of course. She will have chores to do when she has a few more years on her. And she has me for a father...muwahahahahaa!)

On that note, work continues. I pushed through another freelance write-up yesterday, one treating Pierce Brown's Morning Star. I had not read its two predecessor volumes, so there was a bit of a learning curve for me to face, but the work was enjoyable. Without saying too much about it or giving a more formal review (I have one in the write-up), I can note that it is firmly embedded in science fiction genre conventions, as a number of figures and surface descriptions echo earlier masterworks of the genre--and some that are not quite "master" works. Had I the time to go back and read the earlier volumes (which may happen, depending on client needs), I would be inclined to write a paper tracing some of those references. I do not think it would be hard to do, but I know I will not be the one to do it. Time, as I note, is a concern, and I already have many other projects.

Grading will continue, as well. Three sets of papers are due to come in today. I doubt any of them will be complete; I have not yet had one that is this semester (which annoys in one sense but pleases in another, as fewer papers submitted means fewer papers need grading). Given the assignment, I do have a relatively tight turnaround on them, and given how my classes handled the last such assignment, there is some reason for me to offer commentary on the work. Students this term seem to be taking my comments to heart, much more than I have come to expect across years of teaching. It is rewarding to see my concerns addressed, and I can hope that the tendency will continue. Perhaps it will manifest well in teaching evaluations later on, whether those conducted institutionally or those conducted less formally but more publicly. I do not think it can hurt--when I attend to the grading after my daughter has had her birthday.

20151222.0745

Another brief note:

I have been sleeping in what was once my bedroom. It is a strange experience, one that simultaneously tries to evoke nostalgia and points out the impossibility not returning to how things once might have been but probably were not. As I type on my tablet, which I do not do nearly so well as I work on an actual keyboard, I find myself once again musing.

My brother and I went to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens yesterday. The movie is worth watching, between Episodes VI and V in quality. Surprises near the end, subtle homage to the original trilogy, and selected invocations of the now-lapsed EU make for nerd-pleasing amid a solid story. Ms. 8 will hopefully be well-behaved enough for the next one to see it with her father.

20151109.0610

Work continues, of course. I am a quarter of the way through the write-up I currently have in progress, and I am pleased at that amount of work, since it happened after grading a stack of papers and reading the novel to be written up. I may well be able to get the piece done today (depending on how Ms. 8 acts and if or when she takes a nap), which will be helpful. More grading is coming in, and the litany of other things I need to do remains more or less as it is. (I am contemplating a creative piece on the subject, in fact.) If I can get the job done, then, I will be the better off--and not only because of the money my work will bring in.

As I was working on the part of the piece I got done yesterday, I realized that I have something of a formula for writing book reviews (which I do as part of the freelance work, as well as occasionally in this webspace, as noted here). I did not arrive at the pattern through reading a number of reviews--I tend to avoid them, in fact, whether they are of the academic variety encountered in journals or of the literary, such as appear in the pages of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction--so I have no idea how representative those I write are. But they continue to attract favorable attention, so the pattern on which I write reviews suggests itself as being a decent one.

I normally open with an identification of the work, minimally noting the author, title, ISBN, and cost in the format of reading; for the write-ups, I include the year of publication, as well. A summary follows, outlining the major plot thread or threads in loosely sketched-out terms. The next paragraph identifies problems with the text, ranging from typographical anomalies (such as in this example) to proofreading failures (as in this one, albeit not positioned where I normally have it, but the example is early in my writing) to complaints about alignment within milieu (see here) and to breaches of credulity (as in this example). The following paragraph, usually the concluding, moves back to what works well in the text--and for the freelance write-ups, I make sure that the favorable receives more attention (demonstrated by words spent on the matter) than the unfavorable, as I have been cautioned to do, since the works I write up sell well and the write-ups are directed at those likely to find the works to their liking. (Audience awareness matters.)

Generally, the exercise takes between 300 and 500 words; the write-ups favor the shorter reviews, while my work in this webspace favors the longer (insofar as 500 words can really be called "long"). Paragraphs are reasonably evenly distributed, as adjusted for concerns noted above. And they tend to work well for what I need them to do, either communicating my overall impressions of a work so that I can go back later and treat it in a more rigorously scholarly fashion or setting me up to earn an extra few dollars for my household and family. Both serve me well.

20150903.0601

The book I read for the freelance project I am currently completing is the new David Lagercrantz novel, The Girl in the Spider's Web (ISBN 9780385354295, $13.99 as a NOOK® Book). It is a continuation of Stieg Larsson's Millennium series, which I recall being wildly popular both before and after it was optioned into movie form. I suppose that I see the appeal, although I do not feel it, myself. (I will reserve a number of criticisms of the text for the write-up I will be completing today in its 5,800 words of glory. Those I treat here will not be those I treat there, although some comments may correspond.) I find it an utterly conventional action-thriller text, almost formulaic in its structure, and I am disappointed to not find something else in it, some novelty that would make for surprise. As it is, I have not read the preceding texts, and I found nothing in the work that I did not expect to see.

The strange thing is that I like getting what I expect, and much the same kind of thing that The Girl in the Spider's Web offers--in other media. I watch movies largely for escapist reasons; I am capable of applying critical faculties to film to some extent, to be sure (I am not trained in film studies per se, but the kinds of conventions that are often deployed in them are similar or identical to those deployed in narrative text, so I can make the same kinds of arguments), but I tend not to do so. I use film to go away from the burden of thought as much as for any other reason, and adherence to convention and the expected does much to that purpose. So I cannot say that I oppose conventionalism in the text simply because it is conventional, not without opening myself to allegations of hypocrisy with which I am not comfortable (as opposed to those with which I am).

But there is still something in reading conventionalism that annoys. Perhaps it is because I am habituated to reading in the ways that I am, ways that make reading an active thing that engages my faculties more powerfully because I must act upon the words rather than only being acted upon by them, that Lagercrantz's text sits oddly. Reading is not passive for me; I do not turn pages--electronic or physical--to have something before my eyes, but to have something with which to occupy my mind. (Or, as it happens, to make money, so I must be temperate in some complaints; it is not as if I am not being compensated for my efforts.) The Girl in the Spider's Web seems to me to be constructed to reward passivity, to work better for readers who read in the same way that I watch movies--and there are more of them than there are of readers who read as I do. (Again, I profit from this, so I must temper my complaints, but I still find it annoying.)

20150819.0548

Today, I am following up on something I did just over a year ago, for yesterday, I read Robin Hobb's most recent novel, Fool's Quest (ISBN 978-0-553-39292-0, US$28 in hardcover). I did so a week after its release, admittedly, so others will have already written and published reviews, but that does not mean I will not add my own, noting that the book is the second in the Fitz and the Fool Trilogy and so a furtherance of the narrative arc begun in 1996 with Assassin's Apprentice. In the text, Fitz experiences the consequences of his failures, not only of the guise of Holder Tom Badgerlock, but also of his older failures from earlier series (the Farseer and Tawny Man trilogies); his daughter, Bee, has been taken, and he is not able to recover her, although he does retrieve others who had been assigned to his care. Oddly, however, his secret identity is revealed and he is exalted to the full royal dignity that had long been denied him due to his bastard birth--the "Fitz" with which his name begins is an accurate descriptor--and so removed from his earlier quiet work as a royal assassin. It does not remove him, however, from his desire for vengeance upon those who have wronged him and his, and the book concludes with Fitz en route to those who sent ruin upon him--and with his daughter, alive despite the beliefs and efforts of many, fleeing in an uncertain direction.

I have long expressed my appreciation for Hobb's work, both directly and tacitly in the form of several papers and my master's thesis focusing on her corpus. I will doubtlessly do so again. That does not mean there are not places where I find fault with the novel. The revelation of FitzChivalry Farseer as still alive (despite prevailing belief that he is decades dead) seems out of place, and while it is pushed through by a character whose mental deterioration becomes clear later in the text, it still reads as somehow inauthentic and sudden, out of place with the rest of the narrative. Consequences of that revelation seem somehow subdued; they occur, certainly, but not with the vigor that would be expected (and that the subject of the revelation, to his credit and his author's, does expect).

Even so, I find much to laud in the text. As ever, Fitz's narrative voice is strong and reads well. Bee's narrative voice, which emerges at points in the text, is also handled well, and is far more distinct from Fitz's than is the narrative voice of the Soldier Son trilogy. The welcome introduction of chapters with "outside" materials, present in earlier volumes of the work, continues, helping to orient the reader in broader understanding of the milieu. And the work does explore some of the implications of its milieu's features, as fantasy and science fiction do not do often enough. The growth and spread of dragons has consequences, and those consequences are made far more visible in Fool's Quest than in many other works. Too, the presence of an organized, generational group of prophets has terrible overtones, and those are explored, at least to some degree, in the novel. The line of reasoning Hobb explicates through The Fool is one that makes sense, corresponding with likely actions in the readers' world if there were to be such a thing as Clerres in it, making the impending confrontation in the third volume of the work--still yet to come--all the more ominous. Hopefully, Hobb will continue her practice of relatively rapid writing, not leaving her readers in the situation of Martin's; the third volume of Fitz and the Fool promises to be quite the read.

20150408.0709

I did, in fact, spend most of yesterday sitting at my computer and writing for money. And that meant I re-read a novel, which is not necessarily the worst thing to do while trying to avoid the heat that presages summer. That meant that I had opportunity to consider the words I was re-reading more closely than I had the first time I went through and read, and while I could not necessarily write for pay what I would want to write, this webspace offers a bit more...flexibility to me. Hence the following:

Steve Berry's The Patriot Threat (ISBN 978-1-4668-6260-9, $12.99 as a NOOK® Book) continues the Cotton Malone series as it follows Malone through pursuit of the fugitive Anan Wayne Howell and into a decades-long conspiracy to bilk the populace of the United States. In the world of the novel, the Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is fraudulent, certified as in effect by a secretary of state who knew the certification to be false, and knowingly retained by those in power through FDR's administration, when documentation about the falsehood was lost. Malone and the federal agents who accompany him, as well as officials at the highest levels of government, uncover the conspiracy and destroy the only surviving copies of the documents that prove it, ensuring that the secret can never be uncovered again.

Throughout the novel, Berry's characters rail against taxation and the social policies put into place by the FDR administration while praising such capitalist icons as Andrew Mellon. Malone is perhaps most moderate in his comments, but even the President of the United States lambasts his predecessor, joining several others in doing so. Although the novel disclaims itself as a work of fact, it clearly stakes out a position aligned with the fugitive Howell--whose reasoning is accepted by a number of characters, including Malone, even as its fulfillment is denied in favor of retaining the system of revenue generation upon which the United States has come to depend--and against the validity of the income tax system at work in the United States. The obvious historical research informing the novel and conducing to its substantial verisimilitude (which is, in all honesty, something for which to commend Berry) also vitiates against the formal disclaimer in the authorial notes at the end of the book. Such a disclaimer reads much as Chaucer's Retraction, either a pro forma thing meant to insulate or a knowing, tongue-in-cheek comment that would be delivered in an overwrought voice if read aloud and indicating therefore the actual belief in its opposite. In effect, the book is a paean to the falsity of the Sixteenth Amendment. That it was published near the end of the tax season is perhaps coincidence, but a telling one if so.

Again, I know that some will say "It's just a story." I have addressed the point before (here and here, if not elsewhere), and I will state again that stories inform perceptions and approaches to the world. The heavy-handedness with which Berry's book approaches the issue of taxation--indeed, of conservative socioeconomic ideology, generally--will doubtlessly serve to reconfirm for many readers a worldview conducive to regression. As a medievalist, I know that the "good ol' days" were not so good; I do not look forward to their return.

20141010.0631

I recently received a copy of the Legend of the Five Rings (L5R) RPG supplement The Book of Void (ISBN 978-1-59472-073-4, MSRP US$39.99) and read through it. It is a relatively slim volume, approximately 200 pages, so it did not take me long to read through the six chapters ("The Void of War," "The Void of Magic," "The Void of Peace," "The Void Within," "The World Is Not the World," and "Nazo Mori: The Forest of Enigmas") and the appendix in which the mechanics introduced to the game are related. Throughout, the book makes a valiant attempt to relate the philosophical, cosmological, theological, and epistemological concepts associated with the Void--a "fifth element" in the traditional four-elements scheme--to the milieu of L5R as a whole. While it necessarily falls short of a full accounting--a gaming manual cannot serve as a deep investigation of such concepts and still do what it needs to do as a gaming manual--The Book of Void does admirably at suggesting the pervasiveness of Void in the physical, social, and spiritual settings of L5R.

It also does better than many L5R supplements at offering narrative. Any tabletop RPG is fundamentally an exercise in storytelling, and having exemplary narratives does much to foster continued tale-weaving. The Book of Void follows other L5R supplements in beginning its text and each of its chapters with a vignette; more than most of the other supplements, though, it provides narratives within the text, not only using them to illustrate aspects of in-game culture, but actually ascribing stories the vaunted mechanical functions prized by many gamers. (As a scholar of literature and a believer in its transformative power, I am pleased to see that stories within the game have life of their own, at least in a fashion, and can work transformative power upon their audiences.) It does have the effect of making the book something of a miscellany, but cultures are not neat and tidy; having a miscellany suggests an authentic messiness for the L5R milieu, easing Coleridgean suspension of disbelief and allowing for a better narrative immersion.

This is not to say that the book is perfect, however. The producing company has long-standing habit of not proofreading as well as it ought to, and while The Book of Void appears to suffer less from that habit than have other texts, it still has surface-level problems that distract and annoy. Too, Chapter Six seems to take a Lovecraftian tack which, if realized, would have profound implications for the theology and cosmology of the game. (The book motions toward, but does not fully engage, them in other places.) The authors seem unwilling to pursue the Lovecraftian overtones, however, or to do so fully; the text seems to shy away from presenting Cthulhoid imagery where it would work quite well. The reasoning presented is that the players should have options, and while allowing them means that players who own the text cannot be certain what they will face when they play the game, it also means that the narrative force is somewhat weakened. For a game that relies upon narrative for its play, this is a problem.

Even so, however, The Book of Void is a fine supplement. It refines earlier discussions in the game and adds new ones to be had, and it presents mechanics that are reasonably well balanced for play (as well as suggestions for how to keep them that way). It does both amid a number of smaller stories that illumine the milieu for the benefit of those of us who tell stories within it, and that is something to be appreciated.

20440817.0907

I recently received a copy of Robin Hobb's Fool's Assassin (ISBN 978-0-553-39242-5 and US$28.00 in hardcover), the first book of the Fitz and the Fool Trilogy and a continuation of the Realm of the Elderlings stories begun in 1996's Assassin's Apprentice. It traces later adventures of FitzChivalry Farseer as he lives for many years in the guise of Tom Badgerlock, Holder of Withywoods--a gentry position as a caretaker for a high-ranking noble's estate. In the course of the novel, he and his wife, Molly, experience a miraculous late birth and the unusual consequences of it, as well as the tragic return of an old friend from a faraway land. Compelling and accessible, the book shows that the trilogy it begins has great promise as a successor to the Farseer and Tawny Man Trilogies.

That said, there are some problems in the text. At several points, the actions taken by the eponymous protagonist seem out of line with his character, as demonstrated in the six books which narrate his earlier life. For example, his inability to maintain upkeep on Withywoods even before the unfortunate events there (that understandably distract him) seems at odds with his long life with Hap near Forge from the beginnings of the Tawny Man series. His inattention to certain other characters is also...odd for him. Too, there is the issue of Bee; she seems to be the product of particular bloodlines discussed in earlier Elderlings books. In itself, this is not a problem--but her full sister, Nettle, shows none of the traits of that descent despite having the same parentage. A Punnett square could demonstrate why this occurs, of course, but the descriptions of those bloodlines in the earlier texts seems to indicate that the confluence of them operates outside normal genetics.

Even so, Fool's Assassin is an engaging read. Hobb continues to use the first-person retrospective narration that typifies the novels dealing with FitzChivalry Farseer--although there is an interweaving of narration from another character that came as a bit of a shock initially. Hobb also continues to use the device of opening chapters with snippets from in-milieu documents, offering context for the narrative and extending the correspondence of her Tolkienian sub-creation to the readerly primary world. (The device extends at least as far back as Asmiov's opening the chapters of many of his Foundation novels with quotations from the Encyclopedia Galactica. Its deployment embeds Hobb thoroughly in the conventions of traditional fantasy and science fiction, making her departures from those generic norms more acceptable to readers accustomed to them.) The nuancing of distinctions among the gentry--although not as much among the nobility--of the Six Duchies is also helpful; one of the common features of mainstream fantasy literature is the relative non-distinction within broad social strata (noted here), and the inclusion of more detail in that line helps to make the milieu more authentic. Scholars will have much to say about the text, and more general readers will doubtlessly find it worth the time it takes to read; what more can be asked of a text?

20140628.0840

I yesterday received a copy of the newest addition to the Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Game, Sword and Fan. Written by Marie Brennan and others, the book presents information about the world of Rokugan taken from the perspectives of two major in-milieu texts: the Book of Sun Tao (modeled after Sunzi's Art of War) and Otomo Madoko's The Subtlety of the Court (an extended application of the Book of Sun Tao to diplomatic settings). Discussed are strategy and tactics (and the differences between the two), the use of cavalry, in-milieu factional conflicts, refined etiquette, seasonal politics, and outsider politics; new game mechanics are presented in an appendix in the back. Overall, the volume is an excellent addition to the materials for the fourth edition of the L5RRPG.

This is not to say the volume is perfect; there are some flaws which mar the otherwise superb work. One is minor, but annoying: erratically throughout the text, italicization is misused. This is not in the sense of putting into italics what should not be; it is in the sense of individual characters within words that are otherwise italicized (and should be) appearing in plain type. It suggests a lack of attention to detail and implies that other parts of the text may not have received the kind of inspection and consideration that they ought. The implication is confirmed by how clunky some of the mechanics in the appendix are. Some of the quirks in the presented techniques make sense, given their thematic flavor and the need to be adaptable across more than twelve hundred years of in-milieu history. Others, however, seem to be heavy-handed attempts to balance power, and while power-balance in a game meant to be fun for all players is good, principles of good storytelling (with which L5R and RPGs generally are concerned) suggest that the mechanisms underlying the story be kept hidden.

There is far more good in the text than bad, however. The extended discussions of battlefield and courtly strategies and tactics are welcome. In particular, the more exacting discussions of etiquette and protocol included in the three political chapters are helpful; much of the culture of Rokugan appears in its forms of etiquette, and help in navigating those forms promotes engagement with the milieu and thus a more immersive storytelling experience. Too, the major fictional thread that unites the book is handled well. Detailing a conflict over a particular province, it exemplifies the theories discussed in the main text of the book, including that of the ultimate power of the political over the directly martial. Further, the way in which the vignettes are divided creates the impression of a long time spent in study on a read-through of the book. The events depicted span some time, and reading through the book carries the reader through that time. At the end, then, the reader has the impression of having been deeply in contemplation of the work across a significant span, fostering a sense of wisdom that appropriately echoes the study of major cultural touchstones.

Sword and Fan will doubtlessly be useful to me as I run more games and play in them. I have the notion that it will also be useful away from the gaming table, which I appreciate and may, at some point, discuss in this webspace.

20131016.0636

Yesterday, Stephen R. Donaldson's The Last Dark, which purports to be the final volume of the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, was released.  I have a copy, and I have already read it, staying up until half past midnight or so to finish the book as I was compelled to do.  And I was compelled; despite its problems, the book is well worth reading.

Something I have noticed in final volumes of fantasy series is that authors often try to bring in every available loose thread in the milieu.  Every character given page-space earlier in the series comes back (whether it makes sense or not), every group finds itself represented in the final pages, and often through devices that seem too much of deus ex machina to be believed--even when a wizard has done it.  The Last Dark does this; I will not go into details so as to not offer specific spoilers (it is only the second day of release, after all, and not many read so quickly as I do), but I was several times struck by the...oddity of specific characters appearing when and how they did.

Too, Donaldson's depiction of women remains...problematic.  From my work at such events as the South Central Modern Language Association conference and the International Congress on Medieval Studies, I am given to understand that Donaldson is...unpopular among those literary scholars who treat fantasy literature, in no small part because he repeatedly portrays women...unfavorably, either as dependents or as victims (to a far greater extent than the men in his Covenant books, who frequently victimize women in addition to being themselves victims).  I understand the attitude; I understand not wanting to endorse a series whose eponymous protagonist makes himself a rapist within the first hundred pages of a narrative arc spanning three dozen years.  And I am trying to negotiate that understanding with my captivation by the narrative and my burgeoning interpretation of the milieu and the actions taken within it.

This is not the first time I have written about Donaldson's work.  Now, as then, I find much of value in it.  Now, as then, some of it is in the way his diction forces me to increase my own knowledge of words; as I have noted, my vocabulary is far from small, and I was once again sent to the dictionary to understand the language Donaldson chooses in the work.  Once again, though, I find that his use is excellent, doing much to bear out the old adage about the right word and the nearly right word; I am too much beset by bugs.  And, despite the problems of deus ex machina and misogyny noted above, the plot is compelling and, for the most part, characters' reactions are sensible, given the narrative constraints--the end of the world at hand in the last book is happening in The Last Dark, and the circumstance permits what would otherwise be...odd behavior.  That there is some resolution--substantial, really--also satisfies; I have not read the books since their beginning (I have not been alive long enough), but I have read them for many years, and I am pleased to see the series come to an ending that makes sense.

20130603.0738

I tend to be up and about fairly early, usually rising around 5 in the morning.  It is a habit I first developed back in high school, when I would walk the mile from my house to what was then the school, and it is one I returned to in my undergraduate days, when I had an hour-long commute along the twin asphalt ribbon of Interstate 10 in the Texas Hill Country.  And it has confused a great many of those who have known about it, people who tend to sleep in as much as they can in favor of staying up late into the night (I usually find my way to bed at around midnight or a little earlier).

What they frequently do not understand is that there is much of value in getting up and getting going while the day is yet young.  As the weather warms yet more, the precious hours of coolness in the mornings become more attractive.  Too, there is commonly a quiet about things that is of aid in finding peace amid the concerns of the world; even those who must be at work while the world is yet dark, diligent and proficient, are hushed in their motions and words.  And so I have tended to find it a good time to put in place my own words; in the relative quiet, I can hear the voice within me dictate what my fingers, stroking keys, will leave behind.

As I write, of course, the day is emerging fully, and the din of The City (never truly silenced, although muted between last call and first light) is building.  The noise of news (or what passes for it) and people going to work (or not) swells in a cacophonous crescendo that will soon drive out such stillness and serenity as city streets ever permit.  I am hardly unable to write in such surroundings, of course; I do much writing (if not enough to please me), and not all of it can be done as I would ideally have it.  And there is always more of it for me to do.  Letters, entries in my journal, posts to this and other blogs, comments on student work, the documents upon which my current institution seems to depend, papers for conferences and presentations, reviews of books, summaries of what I read, and small scraps of verse all call to me to be done, and even I cannot be awake in all the quiet hours to attend to them.  Too, they take more time than there is quiet to be found.

Still, when I write in the quiet hours that are vanishing away for the day, I have not got to block out the many distractions that threaten my focus.  I can attend more fully to the tasks that present themselves, and it is to be hoped that I do better with them therefore.  For as my writing is, making it worse would not do well at all.

20130602.0957

This morning, I read Robin Hobb's The Willful Princess and the Piebald Prince.  The text expands upon a narrative thread referenced (among others) in one of the commentaries that Hobb uses to introduce chapters in her Six Duchies novels--in this case, an excerpt from the "Legend of the Piebald Prince" (Royal 641-42).  In doing so, The Willful Princess and the Piebald Prince does seem to engage in a bit of a temporal paradox, but even so, it offers an entertaining and well written story that offers a useful glimpse of the implied history of the Six Duchies.

That the tale suggests its narrator is somehow aware of future events is noted fairly early in the novella.  The narrator remarks on the name of a character: "His name was Lostler.  Now some will say that his name was Sly, and some will even call him Sly o' the Wit when they sing of him.  I never heard him called by such a name" (38-39).  The name is the same by which the character is referenced in the "Legend," and while it is true that the perceptions of names change over time (as Hobb addresses elsewhere in her Six Duchies corpus), the change seems a bit too rapid to be described as taking place within the frame of the novella.  The narrator reports events she witnessed, marking the shift as taking place within living memory--and the change from "Lostler" to "Sly" is a bit much for one or two generations of speakers to make.  It suggests, rather, a bit of narrative slippage, and one consonant with the awareness of future time the Willful narrator exhibits from the beginning of the text (9).

Even so, Hobb writes an excellent story, one well worth the short time taken to read it (my copy offers less than 175 pages of text, and that in a large and easily-read print).  The narrative voice is again in the first-person retrospective that typifies much of Hobb's corpus, a humanizing gesture that does much to foster willing suspension of disbelief.  The suspension is further eased by the ample establishment of the narrator's particular authority to discuss the matter; the repeated insistence on providing a true and faithful account is one likely to ring true for early twenty-first century readers who are themselves concerned with offering what may be taken as authoritative assertions of personal and historical authenticity.

In addition, Hobb continues to work in The Willful Princess and the Piebald Prince to present whole, detailed characters, rather than the flat archetypes too frequently present in fantasy literature.  Each of the prime actors in the text is possessed of sensible motivations, qualities that are themselves virtuous, and all too human flaws that render those virtues far less at times.  In brief, those in the text read as people, rather than as mere characters or caricatures; there is an evident sense of history and doings unseen in the narrative yet present and relevant somehow to the main story presented in the text.  It is quite compelling.

Of particular note to me is that the text avoids a flaw I have unfortunately had to point out in some of Hobb's other work.  Although the novella is rather short, it does not feel unduly rushed.  The denouement is brief, yes, but its brevity makes sense, in terms both of form and of content.  It is swift but not frenetic, which I appreciate greatly.  And if it is the case that a particular plot point at the end of the book is fairly common, it is one that is foreshadowed within the text itself and in some of the comments in earlier volumes of the Six Duchies works, so that it feels and organic part of the text rather than something forced into it.

Also, Hobb again manages to address social issues in the work.  Queer studies will have something to say about The Willful Princess and the Piebald Prince no less than other works in the Six Duchies milieu, as will gender studies.  Marxist criticism is likely to be particularly applicable to the text, as well.  The question of what certain major threads of the Six Duchies milieu signify is also further complicated by the text, so that my own work with Hobb's corpus will find more to do--and I appreciate having tasks to which to turn my mind.

Works Cited
~Hobb, Robin. Royal Assassin. New York: Bantam, 1997. Print.
~---. The Willful Princess and the Piebald Prince. Illus. Jon Foster. Burton, MI: Subterranean Press, 2013. Print.

20130412.1936

Yesterday, I bought and read through Robin Hobb's recent novel, Blood of Dragons.  Doing so has prompted me to make a few informal comments about the new book.  It is the fourth volume of the Rain Wilds Chronicles, and therefore the continuation of a major narrative arc begun in Hobb's 1996 Assassin's Apprentice--an arc about which I have written repeatedly and at some length.  As with earlier volumes in the Rain Wilds Chronicles, Blood of Dragons brings together some of the narrative threads from the Six Duchies (Farseer and Tawny Man trilogies) and Bingtown (Liveship Traders) novels, series of books occupying the same milieu but not always consonant in their deep histories and cosmologies.

It is true that the fanboy in me looks for a harmonious and consistent backstory, a cohesive history from which the current narrative can spring--and as Hobb refines her understanding of her narrative world as it exists before her readers can enter it, its pre-plot existence changes.  Sometimes, as I think I may have commented before, it forces Hobb into something close to a deus ex machina in the attempt to account for the discrepancy.  This tends to happen at the end of individual series, in which action ends up feeling rushed and the various devices that conspire to resolve plot points come off as forced rather than arising organically from the narrative.  It is an occasional weakness in Hobb's prose--which is a shame, really, because Hobb does excellent work in terms of character development and investigation of psychology.

A couple of other things, possibly problematic, occurred to me as I read the text, particularly the (to my eye) too-rushed ending.  Hobb's dragons borrow much from those of Anne McCaffrey; although they are much less accommodating than McCaffrey's, Hobb's dragons communicate in much the same way as those of Pern, and their...exhalations...are accentuated by what they consume.  Too, the character of Hest Finbok emerges as something not unlike Christian Grey (in some respects; in at least one other, he is very much the inverse of James's character).  How much of either is simply Hobb responding to sub-cultural and mainstream-cultural concerns is not yet clear to me--I did only read the book yesterday, and more formal study will take more time.

I am convinced, however, that there is much in the text worth studying.  The very shifting histories that frustrate the fanboy in me delight the academic I have trained to be.  History, the story we tell ourselves about what happened in the past, changes depending on the writer and the reader, so it makes sense that those within a milieu but who approach a thing from different parts of the milieu will interpret events differently.  That there is disagreement among the texts regarding "what really happened" makes the series Blood of Dragons concludes more authentic than it would otherwise be; the frustration of easy answers draws Hobb's Elderlings milieu closer to that in which her readers exist, with effects addressed by J.R.R. Tolkien in "On Fairy-Stories."  The changing understanding of the deep history actually makes for better writing, overall.

Also, in Blood of Dragons, Hobb, continues to delve into issues of prejudice--and not only one form of prejudice.  Instead, hers is an multi-pronged investigation of the culturally disfavored, reflecting a sensitivity to discrimination as it still manifests in the United States.  Queer studies, particularly, would benefit from attending to her Elderlings works; I am not suited to carrying out that particular investigation (my training suits me to look elsewhere), but I would be very interested in reading what such a treatment would have to say about the matter.  The proximal approach of gender studies would also be fruitful to take with the novel and its antecedents.  And I am certain that I will be turning my attentions to the text--and to the series it completes--in my conference work to come, if not in posts to this blog.

Blood of Dragons is not a perfect text, certainly.  It is, however, one that I enjoyed reading as a general reader (yes, I do still read for enjoyment), as a student of literature generally and of fantasy literature more specifically, and as a scholar whose projects have frequently focused on Hobb's corpus.  Even were I not going to be working on papers about it (much as I am working on a paper about the Tawny Man trilogy that precedes it both in the milieu and in the "real" world), I would read it again.

20120208.1947

Earlier today, I finished reading the most recent novel by Robin Hobb, City of Dragons.  It is the third volume of the Rain Wilds Chronicles and the twelfth novel set in the Elderlings milieu.  Those who know me know that I have long been an avid reader of Hobb's writing; my first scholarly publication and my master's thesis are based upon her works, as are at least two conference papers I have presented at the South Central Modern Language Association conference.

Like the earlier two volumes of the Rain Wilds series, City of Dragons is a relatively slim volume, only slightly over three hundred thirty pages.  In it, however, Hobb, adeptly furthers a multi-threaded narrative that displays continued engagement with and evidently evolving opinions on a number of issues that have pervaded the books set in the Elderlings milieu: homosexuality, gender relations and normative gender roles, and globalization come to mind.  As a scholar, I am pleased to see that Hobb persists in addressing those themes; a number of possible papers suddenly have a lot more material with which to work, and since I am coming up on having more time to write papers (with the dissertation thankfully in its final stages), I look forward to going forward with additional materials.

In addition to my scholarly persona's delight in the book, my fanboyish side was pleased to see some of what goes on in the pages Hobb has recently released.  In her Tawny Man trilogy, Hobb makes efforts to address divergences of perception between her Farseer and Liveship Traders novels, which both take place in the Elderlings milieu but which take different approaches to some of the same materials.  The differences between the two series can be accounted for in part because of their order of composition; it is to be expected that an author's ideas will change as the author moves ahead writing.  But the way in which Hobb tries to paper over the divergence in the Tawny Man series, which unifies narrative threads from the Farseer and Liveship Traders trilogies, is heavy-handed, smacking of the retcon that so offends a great many of speculative and fantastic fiction's core fanbase.

I love what Hobb writes, so I hate to admit that I saw it as a flaw.  But I did.

City of Dragons draws a narrative thread out of the Farseer trilogy, serving to integrate the Elderlings milieu books into a more cohesive whole in that it does so more gracefully and subtly than is the case in earlier books.  I have no intention of offering spoilers, so I will not point out the details of it, but there is a scene which takes place in a location familiar to readers of the Farseer trilogy and, in fact, works with the unintended consequences of the Farseer visit to the location.  Those who remember the earlier novel will be delighted to see the nod to that work, while those who are not will not be shut out.  It makes sense in itself, without recourse to Hobb's other works, which I appreciate for the greater craft it takes to provide such a reference as can be seen by those who know but does not exclude those who do not.

Overall, I found the book to be an excellent read, and I look forward to the book which is, from the ending of City of Dragons, certain to be on its way.

20101220.1046

I noted in my last post that I had received my copy of Profession 2010. Some days later, after a holiday party and several sets of exam-gradings, I have finally finished my first reading of it, and as with the previous issues, I find myself quite pleased with the text.

The 2010 issue is divided into some four sections. The first, centering around the Presidential Forum, discusses translation studies, which is a seemingly strongly emergent field of inquiry in the humanities and one which piques my interest both as one who does work as a medievalist (which almost always involves some translation) and as a teacher at a school largely populated by non-native speakers of English. The second discusses disability and language, a field with which I have had only limited contact. The third is a less-organized grouping of articles discussing a variety of subjects (including one relevant to this blog and all blogs, generally), while the fourth is the "Forum" in which Philip Goldstein and Gerald Graff argue about what the latter states in Profession 2009.

A concept that I had had earlier but that I find reinforced by the translation studies section of Profession 2010 is the notion that translation traditionally relies on the concept--not entirely accurate--that there is a single, stable version of a given language, which can be converted into a single, stable version of another language. For example, Naoki Sakai directly addresses the futility of the idea in "Translation and the Figure of Border: Toward the Apprehension of Translation as a Social Action." Professor Sakai notes that "The unity of language cannot be given in experience because it is nothing but a regulative idea, enabling us to comprehend related data about languages" (27); Sakai cites Kant's definition of the regulative idea as one not actually in evidence but applied so as to make possible systematic interpretation of present evidence (I am, of course, paraphrasing). In Sakai's view, the concept of unified language accompanies unified nation-hood, and both are comparatively recent concepts that are artificially developed (30-31), and as such, both are contingent upon an Other (32). Sakai's viewpoint opens up any translated text to postcolonial analysis, really, and so the article serves to undergird more critical work.

More work on translation is, in fact, called for by the articles in the translation studies cluster in Profession 2010. As part of this, Catherine Porter notes that there is demand for qualified, productive translators (7), seemingly as an imminently understandable response to globalism and the breakdown of sociolinguistic hegemony. Verena Conley expands upon the notion, stating that "the global circulation of languages and cultures that, intersecting and interacting multifariously, are the foundation no longer for Towers of Babel but for myriad networks in and between which translations proliferate" (19). And it is in this multiplicity of sociolinguistic interaction that my teaching begins to be affected.

As I noted, many if not most of my students are not native speakers of English. By the time they reach my classes, though, they are expected to be able to function at the collegiate level (whatever that means) in English, largely as a result of having taken and passed a long sequence of ESL courses offered by my institution. In large part, they are; the tasks I set before them, they accomplish, perhaps not spectacularly well, but competently.

But there are always some who manage to slide through and should not have. I know I am not always as patient with them as I ought to be (though in one or two cases, I have been far more forgiving than is entirely appropriate). Still, at what point do I actually enter the sequence? I know that much of what I do is explicitly the development of vocabulary and specific modes of thought and inquiry which are derived at length from culturally-specific underlying concepts, and that the cultures spawning them are not the same which give rise to my students (including many of the native speakers, though I am not about to go into that particular discussion at the moment). Am I not then simply doing what we might call a more advanced level of ESL? Or is it something different altogether?

Ideas?

Works Cited
~Conley, Verena. "Living in Translation." Profession 2010 (2010): 18-24. Print.
~Porter, Catherine. Introduction. Profession 2010 (2010): 5-8. Print.
~Sakai, Naoki. "Translation and the Figure of Border: Toward the Apprehension of Translation as a Social Action." Profession 2010 (2010): 25-34. Print.

20101022.1834

I just finished reading Stephen R. Donaldson's latest book, Against All Things Ending.

Wow.

The book is sizable, well over 500 pages, but its physical size matches the immensity of the goings-on in the pages. In it, the end of a world is very much at hand, and the tragedies embedded in the very beginnings of that world are made manifest.

As with every volume of the series, Donaldson's command of language is exquisite. The extent of the man's vocabulary continues to be a delight. Reading him forces me to improve myself; I have to go to the dictionary every time I read him, and my own vocabulary is far from small. Donaldson's choice of words, though, is not a flashy thing; he does not write as though to show off that his knowledge of the lexicon is as it is. Instead, the words he uses are that right words; when he writes of "roynish" creatures or of the "caducity" of a formerly-fat character, or of the "atavistic vertigo" that afflicts the titular character, he does so because those words singly encapsulate phrases of meaning whose recitation would belabor and the text.

That text already does quite a bit. It is not easy, after all, to maintain the level of tension of the impending end of the world without sending the reader past the willingness to suspend disbelief, and Donaldson does do so, leaving the reader, following an uneasy triumph, facing the imminent final cataclysm but entirely without seeming contrivance (the victories are too partial and too dearly bought for the common stuff of fantasy). Nor yet is it easy to bring the reader into the minds of those who are not, for various reasons, wholly sane without losing comprehensibility--yet Donaldson succeeds in this.

The text, though enthralling, is not perfect. Page 511 displays a proofreading error (though it may well be that only my having spent time grading papers today attuned me to seeing such things). Also, like earlier volumes of the collected Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, there are incidences of the titular character enacting violence against women (in one particularly jarring case, against his own daughter--though not of the kind that that phrase would commonly bring to mind), which, coupled with his leprosy and his distinct lack of prowess--the more so in this volume than even in others--makes of him very much an anti-hero. But the book is very much more about a particular woman, the exigencies of her choices, and the ultimate revelation to her that the only choice that is ultimately effective is the choice to trust to others.

That is one of the major messages of the books, that trust in others is always necessary for success, even if it does invite the possibility of betrayal. Another is the reminder that there are always consequences for the acts we do, and that many of them are neither those we would intend nor those we would endure if given the choice. But the most important, perhaps, is that hope remains while life endures: while we continue to choose and to work to an ending of our design, however poor our situation looks, something might happen that none of us expect.

20100506.1630

That I have been a bit slothful in my reading should be evident from the fact that I only today cracked open my copy of the Modern Language Association's Profession 2009. I am not through with it yet, but I have already found an article in it that piqued my interest: Mark Edmundson's "Against Readings."

I take issue with some comments Edmundson makes in the article, namely in the following paragraph:

But primary socialization doesn't work for everyone. There are always people--how many it's tough to know, but surely a minority--who don't see their own natures fully reflected in the values that they're supposed to inherit or assume. They feel out of joint with their times. The gay kid grows up in a family that thinks homosexuality is a sin. The young guy with a potent individualistic streak can't bear the drippy collectivism foisted on him by his ex-hippie parents and his purportedly progressive school. The girl who is supposed to be a chip off the old legal block and sit some day on the court only wants to draw and paint. The guy destined (in his mom's heart) for Princeton is born to be a carpenter and has no real worldly ambitions, no matter how often he's upbraided. (57)

Two things in particular attract my attention in this. The first is the assertion that only a minority fail to see themselves "fully reflected" by the prevailing sociocultural mores promulgated by mainstream media and most public education; I think this false. The "values [kids] are supposed to inherit or assume" (57) are in large part derived from romanticized notions of what it means to be "American,"* which typically means "white, Anglo-Saxon-derived, Protestant, middle-class, suburban American." Despite popular portrayal, such a population is not a majority (US Census Bureau), and even within that group (to which I belong, with all the problems that entails), there are a number of people who are aware of their non-conformity to the standards advanced--as evidenced, among other things, by the prevalence of eating disorders and the increasingly-reported separation of youth populations into distinct, often mutually hostile, sub-cultural groups. People abuse themselves and one another in attempts to "fit in," an abuse systematic and prevalent such that it is not "surely a minority" as Edmundson avers (57); those who already belong, or feel that they do, do not work to "fit in."

The second thing I noted, and with which I disagree, is the final sentence in the paragraph. My objection to this is purely anecdotal, and betrays in no small part my own familial structure and concern. And it is this: since when is a desire to work in a building trade not among the approved list of "real worldly ambitions" for people to have? The disdain for skilled manual labor implied in the comment speaks to at least part of the reason that such salt-of-the-earth people as fill my family look upon academics (such as myself) a bit askance; there is a perception that those of us who work in scholarly disciplines look down upon those who work with their hands--and it is one that is, in all too many cases, true. It is not surprising that a group perceived as dismissive of another group should be held in low esteem by that other group.

But even with my objections in place, the thrust of Edmundson's article, that "we need to befriend the texts that we choose to teach" (63), is spot on. I agree with him in his assertion that those of us who deal with the criticism and interpretation of text (at varying degrees of professionalism and proficiency, admittedly) tend to stray so far into abstract, arcane intellectual ideas of how texts work and what functions they perform that we lose sight of the immediate effects they often have, not just on the "untutored" or "casual" reader, but on the very people who study them so assiduously (us). How many of those of us who entered into literary study did not do so because we love reading? And how many of us who love reading love it for how it makes us feel, what it allows our minds to do?

Edmundson is correct in noting that those who teach literature "set the scene for secular conversion" (60). The modern university is an outgrowth of the monastery, and though it has come to be seen as a bastion of anti-religious thought and ideology, it retains at its core the study of the inner being of humanity. There is a great need to understand the physical realities of our existence, and so the sciences need to be taught and studied. But there is as great a need to understand that which makes us human, that which proceeds from our humanity and which is the exemplification of it, and it is in the attaining of such understanding that those of us whose work is in the humanities must remain grounded. At root, we are here to figure out what it is that we are, and the conversion experience that Edmundson describes is one tool among many that helps us to learn it.

Accordingly, it is incumbent upon us to aid others in discovering their own experiences of understanding, their own instances of the "golden moment" of the realization of commonality and community (Edmundson 58). And that means that we cannot reject the personal, gut-level reaction. We cannot rely entirely upon it, certainly, and there is much to be said in favor of the application of outside ideas to a text (Lord knows I do so often enough), but Edmundson is right: "it all begins by befriending the text" (64).

My own teaching experience bears this out. The experiences of most of my students have been greatly divergent from my own; I am lucky enough to have been raised in a household that assigns prime importance to education (and I know that saying so makes me sound like the child of privilege that I in many ways am), and I know that a great many of those who have sat in my classrooms have not been fortunate in that particular way. Even so, I believe--because they have told me after they were no longer enrolled in my classes--that a number of my students have come to appreciate the written word more or differently than they had before sitting in my class, and that they came to do so as a result of my own enthusiasm for the texts I discussed and the materials I taught. In short, because I befriended the text (to use Edmundson's term), I showed the students that such a thing could be done, and in my teaching I explicitly (and repeatedly) invite them to do the same.

This is at variance with the way many of them have been taught--and even the way that I was, in many cases. All too often, the classroom instructor--at whatever level--does not engage with the text at a personal level. And while, again, I believe in the value of a systematic, scholarly approach to text, students quickly become bored with and disinterested in (and even hostile towards) such teaching. Because it does not even acknowledge the possibility of simple human impact, it tacitly rejects that possibility. And in rejecting the humane, it closes off what is, at least at first, the only entree into the reading that students reliably have.

The works we teach are, as Edmundson notes, "the testaments of human beings who have lived and suffered in the world. They too deserve honor and respect" (63), and we can show them that respect by affirming their humanity--and ours, which is shown in so doing--in their impact upon us, personally. And while the approach may not work for everyone (not that any do), it certainly cannot hurt.

*I am aware that Edmundson does not specifically restrict his argument to persons growing up in the United States of America. I make the inference that he does so based on his employment by the University of Virginia, his specific reference to his own childhood "growing up outside Boston" (58), and the Americo-centrism of the MLA. Then again, I am Americo-centrist, so I'm not complaining much, but full disclosure and all that...

Works Cited
Edmundson, Mark. "Against Readings." Profession 2009 (2009): 56-65. Print.
US Census Bureau. American FactFinder. US Census Bureau, n.d. Web. May 6, 2010.