The Science Fiction and Fantasy publisher DAW has been publishing quite a few of the best writers with which the field currently is blessed, including, but not limited to, this year's World Fantasy Award winner, Nnedi Okorafor, Tanya Huff and Patrick Rothfuss. Katharine Kerr, creator of the great Deverry Fantasy series, is another DAW writer giving us consistently highly entertaining, smart and very well written books.
Katharine Kerr's latest series, the Nola O'Grady Novels, are, in order of publication -- License to Enscorcell, Water to Burn, and the most recent, published 02/07/12, Apocalypse to Go. The series is urban fantasy, located in an alternate San Francisco. Among these novels' strengths is the strong sense of real place, despite it being an alternate San Francisco, situated in a universe different from ours in many respects. This palpable sense of reality helps the reader to effortlessly suspend disbelief and submerge in the story.
One of the urban fantasy conventions is the protagonist generally is paired with another equal but different companion. This would be Israeli Interpol agent Ari Nathan, Irish Nola's partner in the super-secret supernatural government agency that is secret even from the (many) other government secret agencies. The conflict of potential divided loyalties is equal to the conflict at times as to who is giving orders, who is in charge and who makes the decisions. This makes for an interesting relationship, which becomes even more interesting as Nola's close-knit, if difficult, Irish family becomes a part of the mix of diverse worlds, supernatural creatures, murders, kidnappings and missions to save the world.
While Kerr's Nola O'Grady novels do conform to the conventions of urban fantasy, she puts a stamp of originality on each of them. The originality partly rises out of her fine grasp of how novels are plotted and structured, and partly through Kerr's splendid command of language. You hear it in the way the characters talk to us the readers, talk to and about each other. The interchanges and observations are conventionally genre 'smart,' yet on Kerr's pages they come through as naturally hip, not self-consciously wise-cracking attempts to talk the supernatural noir talk. But then the author lives in the state where noir and its language on the page and on the screen were invented to large degree.
Because of the unexpected actions of Nola's family, and also because the language in this world of Kerr's balances tension and lightness, this reader has often been put in mind of the first and best novels of Roger Zelazny's wonderful Amber series. I vividly recall reading non-stop Nine Princes in Amber the first time, hardly able to stop and take a breath. This is high praise. Go Kerr!
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Monday, January 30, 2012
*How The Irish Became White*
Noel Ignatiev's labor history, How the Irish Became White (1995) Rutledge, makes transparent why election campaigns are still rousing the electorate with divisive racist and immigration fireworks, instead of focusing on the lack of decent paying jobs in this country and what we can do to turn that around.
Notes, from the Afterword:
p 180 - 181
[ If this book has a target, it is the New Labor History, associated in America with the name of Herbert Gutman. The New Labor History shifted attention away from unions and other institutions toward the daily life of working people. It broke new ground in examining the roll of the family, the community, and the culture in forming the working class. In treating working people as the subjects of their own activity, it broke with the labor historians who preceded it. However, in its attitude toward the race problem it continued the tradition established earlier within Old Left circles, of substituting an abstract notion of the working class for the lived experience of working people. Ft 8 Unable to deny entirely the record of white labor in accepting and promoting racial distinctions, the new labor historians treated it as peripheral to the main line of working class formation and struggle. Rarely did they ask what the labor move-
p 181
ment looked like from the perspective of the slave worker kept in bondage by the alliance of slaveholders, financiers, and white laborers known as the Democratic Party. Or the free black worker denied land and employment, or the Chinese worker barred from the country, by the power of organized labor. In failing to do so they were reneging on their promise to write history “from the bottom up.”
One explanation that can be offered for the Gutman school’s blind spot on race is that it was motivated by the search for a tradition that could serve as the sarting point for the sort of labor movement they hoped would emerge – the famous “usable past.” The selective lens used in the search involved denial, and denial led to apologetics. … ]
Ft 8 Old Left labor historians, notwithstanding valuable work they did on Afro American history, never allowed the race question to interfere with their celebration of what they called the labor movement. …. the problem I’m addressing is … failure to locate slavery and freedom in their proper place in the history of the working class in America. …. ]
p 184
In other words when it comes to the history of labor struggle in the U.S. all of this is a sidebar to the real, big, story
Afterword: outlines how
[ “David Walker’s Appeal, Nat Turner’s rebellion, the development of the Afro-American church and the black press, the underground railroad and the vigilance committees, abolitionism, John Brown, the Civil War, the withdrawal of labor from the plantation, the black soldiers, Negroes as voters and citizens, forty acres and a mule, the overthrow of Reconstruction – all these were prelude, part of the debate over slavery and the Negro; the “real” struggle between capital and labor is about to begin.” ]
p 185
See HtIBW chapters re frequent riots in the urban north; predominately Irish immigrants freely beat and murdered free blacks and burned their homes, churches and lecture halls - as part of the pleasure wage of whiteness) which allowed“many workers [to] define themselves as white,” and for which, if jailed, seldom indicted, if sent to trial, seldom found guilty, if hardly ever found guilty, were never sentenced.
[ …. The author [Alexander Sexton] sees little difficulty in understanding how the theory of white superiority arose out of the need to vindicate a class of people that grew rich from the slave trade, slavery, and the expropriation of land from nonwhite populations; the more formidable problem is to explain why nonslaveholding whites acquiesced either in planter dominance or its justifations. The Rise and Fall, then is a study of the role of white supremacy in legitimating the changing class coalitions that ruled the U.S. in the nineteenth century.
Contrary to the fictions of the white labor apologists, “The hard side of racism generally appeared in nineteenth-century America as a corollary to egalitarianism (186). Whiggery was shaped, above all, by class position; within the Whig social hierarchy, “racial difference could be viewed … [as] simply one among many” (70). Northern Whig employers felt the greatest threat from the insurgent immigrant population, while their attitude toward nonwhites was often one of tolerant condescension. For the Jacksonians, needing to cement a coalition based on white egalitarianism, racial distinctions were central. “Their natural proclivity was to the hard side of racism” (120). Accordingly, “class differentials dissolved into a sentimental oneness of the white herrenvolk”(123).
David Roediger also explores the problem of white ideology, with specific attention to the working class. He asks “why the white working class settles for being white” (6) and finds the answer in Du Bois’s notion of the “public and psychological wage.” The “pleasures of whiteness could function as a wage” (6). To trace the evolution and effects of that wage is the task of The Wages of Whiteness. Although Roediger locates himself within the “broad tradition” of the New Labor History, and uses Marxist tools, he acknowledges tht “the new labor history has hesitated to
p 186
explore ‘whiteness’ and white supremacy as creations in part, of the white working class itself” (9) and that “the main body of writing by white Marxists in the United States has both ‘naturalized’ whiteness and oversimplified race, reproduc[ing] the weaknesses of both American liberalism and neo conserativism” (6).
“Working class formation and the systematic development of a sense of whiteness went hand in hand for the U.S. white working class,” writes Roediger (8). If the color line paid a “public and psychological wage, “The cost was a debased republicanism,” condemnation to “lifelong wage labor” (55). He concludes with an appropriate symbol: by the end of Reconstruction, “white workers were still tragically set on keeping even John Henry out of the House of Labor” (181). ]
One more day and it's Black History Month, you all.
Notes, from the Afterword:
p 180 - 181
[ If this book has a target, it is the New Labor History, associated in America with the name of Herbert Gutman. The New Labor History shifted attention away from unions and other institutions toward the daily life of working people. It broke new ground in examining the roll of the family, the community, and the culture in forming the working class. In treating working people as the subjects of their own activity, it broke with the labor historians who preceded it. However, in its attitude toward the race problem it continued the tradition established earlier within Old Left circles, of substituting an abstract notion of the working class for the lived experience of working people. Ft 8 Unable to deny entirely the record of white labor in accepting and promoting racial distinctions, the new labor historians treated it as peripheral to the main line of working class formation and struggle. Rarely did they ask what the labor move-
p 181
ment looked like from the perspective of the slave worker kept in bondage by the alliance of slaveholders, financiers, and white laborers known as the Democratic Party. Or the free black worker denied land and employment, or the Chinese worker barred from the country, by the power of organized labor. In failing to do so they were reneging on their promise to write history “from the bottom up.”
One explanation that can be offered for the Gutman school’s blind spot on race is that it was motivated by the search for a tradition that could serve as the sarting point for the sort of labor movement they hoped would emerge – the famous “usable past.” The selective lens used in the search involved denial, and denial led to apologetics. … ]
Ft 8 Old Left labor historians, notwithstanding valuable work they did on Afro American history, never allowed the race question to interfere with their celebration of what they called the labor movement. …. the problem I’m addressing is … failure to locate slavery and freedom in their proper place in the history of the working class in America. …. ]
p 184
In other words when it comes to the history of labor struggle in the U.S. all of this is a sidebar to the real, big, story
Afterword: outlines how
[ “David Walker’s Appeal, Nat Turner’s rebellion, the development of the Afro-American church and the black press, the underground railroad and the vigilance committees, abolitionism, John Brown, the Civil War, the withdrawal of labor from the plantation, the black soldiers, Negroes as voters and citizens, forty acres and a mule, the overthrow of Reconstruction – all these were prelude, part of the debate over slavery and the Negro; the “real” struggle between capital and labor is about to begin.” ]
p 185
See HtIBW chapters re frequent riots in the urban north; predominately Irish immigrants freely beat and murdered free blacks and burned their homes, churches and lecture halls - as part of the pleasure wage of whiteness) which allowed“many workers [to] define themselves as white,” and for which, if jailed, seldom indicted, if sent to trial, seldom found guilty, if hardly ever found guilty, were never sentenced.
[ …. The author [Alexander Sexton] sees little difficulty in understanding how the theory of white superiority arose out of the need to vindicate a class of people that grew rich from the slave trade, slavery, and the expropriation of land from nonwhite populations; the more formidable problem is to explain why nonslaveholding whites acquiesced either in planter dominance or its justifations. The Rise and Fall, then is a study of the role of white supremacy in legitimating the changing class coalitions that ruled the U.S. in the nineteenth century.
Contrary to the fictions of the white labor apologists, “The hard side of racism generally appeared in nineteenth-century America as a corollary to egalitarianism (186). Whiggery was shaped, above all, by class position; within the Whig social hierarchy, “racial difference could be viewed … [as] simply one among many” (70). Northern Whig employers felt the greatest threat from the insurgent immigrant population, while their attitude toward nonwhites was often one of tolerant condescension. For the Jacksonians, needing to cement a coalition based on white egalitarianism, racial distinctions were central. “Their natural proclivity was to the hard side of racism” (120). Accordingly, “class differentials dissolved into a sentimental oneness of the white herrenvolk”(123).
David Roediger also explores the problem of white ideology, with specific attention to the working class. He asks “why the white working class settles for being white” (6) and finds the answer in Du Bois’s notion of the “public and psychological wage.” The “pleasures of whiteness could function as a wage” (6). To trace the evolution and effects of that wage is the task of The Wages of Whiteness. Although Roediger locates himself within the “broad tradition” of the New Labor History, and uses Marxist tools, he acknowledges tht “the new labor history has hesitated to
p 186
explore ‘whiteness’ and white supremacy as creations in part, of the white working class itself” (9) and that “the main body of writing by white Marxists in the United States has both ‘naturalized’ whiteness and oversimplified race, reproduc[ing] the weaknesses of both American liberalism and neo conserativism” (6).
“Working class formation and the systematic development of a sense of whiteness went hand in hand for the U.S. white working class,” writes Roediger (8). If the color line paid a “public and psychological wage, “The cost was a debased republicanism,” condemnation to “lifelong wage labor” (55). He concludes with an appropriate symbol: by the end of Reconstruction, “white workers were still tragically set on keeping even John Henry out of the House of Labor” (181). ]
One more day and it's Black History Month, you all.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
A Favorite Meme Rides Again!Open the nearest book at page 45 and read the first sentence, which will predict your sex life for the next year.
Open the nearest book at page 45 and read the first sentence, which will predict your sex life for the next year.
" This identification of the Frontiersman as a dangerous character persisted beyond the colonial period, and affected Metropolitan response to all subsequent Frontiers."
Fatal Environment -- Richard Slotkin
Slotkin has become one of my essential thinkers, like Robert Farris Thompson and Fernand Braudel. I keep their books within reach at all times
" This identification of the Frontiersman as a dangerous character persisted beyond the colonial period, and affected Metropolitan response to all subsequent Frontiers."
Fatal Environment -- Richard Slotkin
Slotkin has become one of my essential thinkers, like Robert Farris Thompson and Fernand Braudel. I keep their books within reach at all times
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Visions of the POTUS
In the after-concert socializing last night a friend whose classes have resumed shared this bit with me re his freshman students.
Somehow or other he used Romney as an example of something in one of his classes. He recalled that one cannot take for granted anything that one of his age knows as a matter of course. So he asked the class, "You know who Romney is?"
A lot of blank stares, then one student asks, "Isn't he one of those white dudes who wants to president or something?"
His freshman are so young and thus non-historical that a lot of them take the office of the POTUS being held by a black person as a matter of course.
Somehow or other he used Romney as an example of something in one of his classes. He recalled that one cannot take for granted anything that one of his age knows as a matter of course. So he asked the class, "You know who Romney is?"
A lot of blank stares, then one student asks, "Isn't he one of those white dudes who wants to president or something?"
His freshman are so young and thus non-historical that a lot of them take the office of the POTUS being held by a black person as a matter of course.
Friday, January 20, 2012
*New York Diaries: 1609 - 2009* ed. by Teresa Carpenter & Dwight Garner
New York Diaries: 1609 - 2009 ed. by Teresa Carpenter and Dwight Garner (2012); Modern Library.
On May 20, 1948, Jack Kerouac is waiting to hear from a publisher about his first novel, The Town and the City, during which he thinks about the cultural difference between New York and other parts of the country as he's known it:
On May 20, 1948, Jack Kerouac is waiting to hear from a publisher about his first novel, The Town and the City, during which he thinks about the cultural difference between New York and other parts of the country as he's known it:
No word from Scribner’s. Their silence and businesslike judicious patience is driving me crazy with tension, worry, expectation, disappointment — everything. And the novel is yet unfinished, really, and the time has come to start typing it and straightening it out. What a job in this weary life of mine, this lazy life. But I’ll get down to it. The news that Jesse James is still alive is very thrilling news to me, and my mother too, but we’ve noticed that it doesn’t seem to impress the New York world at all — which does bear out, in its own way, what I say about New York, that it is a heaven for European culture and not American culture. I don’t get personally mad these things any more, because that is overdoing things in the name of culture and at the expense of general humanity, but still, I get personally mad at those who scoff at the significance of Jesse James, bandit or no, to the regular American with a sense of his nation’s past.”
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
*The Long Ships* - Winter Recreation
The Swedish author, Frans G. Bengtsson's The Long Ships, is an old-fashioned historical novel, in the sense of Scott and Dumas having a child, while the Polish Nobel for Literature Prize winner, Henryk Sienkiewicz's brilliant historical novels stand in as Godparents. Allow me the lazy cutpasta from wiki:
[ "With Fire and Sword (Ogniem i mieczem, 1884), which took place during the 17th century Cossack revolt known as the Khmelnytsky Uprising; made into a movie with the same title. A video game based on the novel, Mount&Blade: With Fire & Sword, has been released by Turkish studio TaleWorlds.;[5]
The Deluge, (Potop, 1886), describing the Swedish invasion of Poland known as The Deluge; made into a movie with the same title;
Fire in the Steppe also called Pan Michael (Pan Wołodyjowski, 1888), which took place during wars with the Ottoman Empire in the late 17th century; made into a film titled Colonel Wolodyjowski.
The Teutonic Knights, also translated as The Knights of the Cross, (Krzyżacy, 1900, relating to the Battle of Grunwald); made into a movie with the same title in 1960 by Aleksander Ford." ]
These are among my favorite historical fictions, whether as novels or films -- the films are splendid recreations of time, place and historical events. However, Sienkiewicz's novelist's narrative voice at least, is somewhat humorless, though not entirely so. There is some situational comic moments -- and if one can imagine oneself into the milieu it is funny.
It's interesting to contrast these four writers' sense of comic as they are all different. Scott finds most of his humor in character -- he deliberately writes comic characters. Dumas's sense of the comic is that of bouyant reparte among characters in conflict, whether they are friends or enemies, that often leads to a ridiculous and dangerous contretemps that resolves via an equally witty series of antic words and actions among the actors within the scene. Yes it's difficult not to visualize these scenes as upon a theater's stage, as Dumas's characters were as successful there as on the pages within book.
What is different about Bengtsson's humor is that the narrative voice contains an ironic lighteness, a twentieth century quality (though Bengtsson was born in 1894, the novel's first section was published in 1941 and the second in 1945). The narrative voice puts a slight distance between the reader and Bengtsson's characters. This is mostly pointed at 10th century Christianity and its aggressively proselytizing priests, as judged so wanting in real gods and real manhood, by the tenths century Scandinavians, Muslims, Jews and Saxons. As we read along it seems that Bengstsson's novel may likely haven been a resource-inspiration for several of the current nordic adventure series (the hero is named Orm -- and it seems that the protagonists of all these current series is named Orm) from Robert Low to M.D. Lachlan.
Though I will say that Bengtsson feels to me a more consistently graceful writer than Bernard Cornwell, Cornwell's protagonist of his Saxon Stories, Uthred, is as finely created a protagonist as Bengstsson's Orm -- whether or not he was influenced by The Long Ships.
Tales filled with the men of the old sagas and their companions, their adventures a-viking and their strife with each other -- these are what I love to read or watch, snugby my fire in my bed, in the dark, frigid days and nights of winter. The Long Ships fills this desire to perfection.
[ "With Fire and Sword (Ogniem i mieczem, 1884), which took place during the 17th century Cossack revolt known as the Khmelnytsky Uprising; made into a movie with the same title. A video game based on the novel, Mount&Blade: With Fire & Sword, has been released by Turkish studio TaleWorlds.;[5]
The Deluge, (Potop, 1886), describing the Swedish invasion of Poland known as The Deluge; made into a movie with the same title;
Fire in the Steppe also called Pan Michael (Pan Wołodyjowski, 1888), which took place during wars with the Ottoman Empire in the late 17th century; made into a film titled Colonel Wolodyjowski.
The Teutonic Knights, also translated as The Knights of the Cross, (Krzyżacy, 1900, relating to the Battle of Grunwald); made into a movie with the same title in 1960 by Aleksander Ford." ]
These are among my favorite historical fictions, whether as novels or films -- the films are splendid recreations of time, place and historical events. However, Sienkiewicz's novelist's narrative voice at least, is somewhat humorless, though not entirely so. There is some situational comic moments -- and if one can imagine oneself into the milieu it is funny.
It's interesting to contrast these four writers' sense of comic as they are all different. Scott finds most of his humor in character -- he deliberately writes comic characters. Dumas's sense of the comic is that of bouyant reparte among characters in conflict, whether they are friends or enemies, that often leads to a ridiculous and dangerous contretemps that resolves via an equally witty series of antic words and actions among the actors within the scene. Yes it's difficult not to visualize these scenes as upon a theater's stage, as Dumas's characters were as successful there as on the pages within book.
What is different about Bengtsson's humor is that the narrative voice contains an ironic lighteness, a twentieth century quality (though Bengtsson was born in 1894, the novel's first section was published in 1941 and the second in 1945). The narrative voice puts a slight distance between the reader and Bengtsson's characters. This is mostly pointed at 10th century Christianity and its aggressively proselytizing priests, as judged so wanting in real gods and real manhood, by the tenths century Scandinavians, Muslims, Jews and Saxons. As we read along it seems that Bengstsson's novel may likely haven been a resource-inspiration for several of the current nordic adventure series (the hero is named Orm -- and it seems that the protagonists of all these current series is named Orm) from Robert Low to M.D. Lachlan.
Though I will say that Bengtsson feels to me a more consistently graceful writer than Bernard Cornwell, Cornwell's protagonist of his Saxon Stories, Uthred, is as finely created a protagonist as Bengstsson's Orm -- whether or not he was influenced by The Long Ships.
Tales filled with the men of the old sagas and their companions, their adventures a-viking and their strife with each other -- these are what I love to read or watch, snug
Monday, January 16, 2012
Why We Have Martin Luther King Day
Smoky Robinson, Def Poetry Jam:
From an amigo in Maryland:
[ "Martin Luther King Jr. expressed a view that black Americans, as well as other disadvantaged Americans, should be compensated for historical wrongs. In an interview conducted for Playboy in 1965, he said that granting black Americans only equality could not realistically close the economic gap between them and whites. King said that he did not seek a full restitution of wages lost to slavery, which he believed impossible, but proposed a government compensatory program of $50 billion over ten years to all disadvantaged groups. He posited that "the money spent would be more than amply justified by the benefits that would accrue to the nation through a spectacular decline in school dropouts, family breakups, crime rates, illegitimacy, swollen relief rolls, rioting and other social evils".[77]:365–7 He presented this idea as an application of the common law regarding settlement of unpaid labor, but clarified that he felt that the money should not be spent exclusively on blacks. He stated, "It should benefit the disadvantaged of all races" " ]
Wonderful Martin Luther King birthday party yesterday, Uptown. Five different gumbo, from five different contributors, each one distinct from the others, each equally delicious.
Among other highlights of this wonderful gathering, we met the daughter of one of the song writers for Harry Belafonte's album, Calypso. Note, this is the first album to ever have sold a million copies. He was also the first sex symbol to emerge from the folk music trend. El V had memorized all the music and the words on Calypso by the time he was five. History. It lives. We speak with it every day.
From an amigo in Maryland:
[ "Martin Luther King Jr. expressed a view that black Americans, as well as other disadvantaged Americans, should be compensated for historical wrongs. In an interview conducted for Playboy in 1965, he said that granting black Americans only equality could not realistically close the economic gap between them and whites. King said that he did not seek a full restitution of wages lost to slavery, which he believed impossible, but proposed a government compensatory program of $50 billion over ten years to all disadvantaged groups. He posited that "the money spent would be more than amply justified by the benefits that would accrue to the nation through a spectacular decline in school dropouts, family breakups, crime rates, illegitimacy, swollen relief rolls, rioting and other social evils".[77]:365–7 He presented this idea as an application of the common law regarding settlement of unpaid labor, but clarified that he felt that the money should not be spent exclusively on blacks. He stated, "It should benefit the disadvantaged of all races" " ]
Wonderful Martin Luther King birthday party yesterday, Uptown. Five different gumbo, from five different contributors, each one distinct from the others, each equally delicious.
Among other highlights of this wonderful gathering, we met the daughter of one of the song writers for Harry Belafonte's album, Calypso. Note, this is the first album to ever have sold a million copies. He was also the first sex symbol to emerge from the folk music trend. El V had memorized all the music and the words on Calypso by the time he was five. History. It lives. We speak with it every day.
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