Feet of Clay is the 19th Discworld novel, the third Watch novel,
and probably not the best place to start. You could read only
Guards! Guards! and
Men at Arms before this one, though, if
you wanted.
This story opens with a golem selling another golem to a factory owner,
obviously not caring about the price. This is followed by two murders:
an elderly priest, and the curator of a dwarven bread museum. (Dwarf
bread is a much-feared weapon of war.) Meanwhile, assassins are still
trying to kill Watch Commander Vimes, who has an appointment to get a coat
of arms. A dwarf named Cheery Littlebottom is joining the Watch. And
Lord Vetinari, the ruler of Ankh-Morpork, has been poisoned.
There's a lot going on in this book, and while it's all in some sense
related, it's more interwoven than part of a single story. The result
felt to me like a day-in-the-life episode of a cop show: a lot of
character development, a few largely separate plot lines so that the
characters have something to do, and the development of a few long-running
themes that are neither started nor concluded in this book. We check in
on all the individual Watch members we've met to date, add new ones, and
at the end of the book everyone is roughly back to where they were when
the book started.
This is, to be clear, not a bad thing for a book to do. It relies on the
reader already caring about the characters and being invested in the long
arc of the series, but both of those are true of me, so it worked. Cheery
is a good addition, giving Pratchett an opportunity to explore gender
nonconformity with a twist (all dwarfs are expected to act the same way
regardless of gender, which doesn't work for Cheery) and, even better,
giving Angua more scenes. Angua is among my favorite Watch characters,
although I wish she'd gotten more of a resolution for her relationship
anxiety in this book.
The primary plot is about golems, which on Discworld are used in factories
because they work nonstop, have no other needs, and do whatever they're
told. Nearly everyone in Ankh-Morpork considers them machinery. If
you've read any Discworld books before, you will find it unsurprising that
Pratchett calls that belief into question, but the ways he gets there, and
the links between the golem plot and the other plot threads, have a few
good twists and turns.
Reading this, I was reminded vividly of
Orwell's discussion of Charles Dickens:
It seems that in every attack Dickens makes upon society he is always
pointing to a change of spirit rather than a change of structure. It
is hopeless to try and pin him down to any definite remedy, still more
to any political doctrine. His approach is always along the moral
plane, and his attitude is sufficiently summed up in that remark about
Strong's school being as different from Creakle's "as good is from
evil." Two things can be very much alike and yet abysmally different.
Heaven and Hell are in the same place. Useless to change institutions
without a "change of heart" that, essentially, is what he is always
saying.
If that were all, he might be no more than a cheer-up writer, a
reactionary humbug. A "change of heart" is in fact the alibi of
people who do not wish to endanger the status quo. But Dickens is not
a humbug, except in minor matters, and the strongest single impression
one carries away from his books is that of a hatred of tyranny.
and later:
His radicalism is of the vaguest kind, and yet one always knows that
it is there. That is the difference between being a moralist and a
politician. He has no constructive suggestions, not even a clear
grasp of the nature of the society he is attacking, only an emotional
perception that something is wrong, all he can finally say is, "Behave
decently," which, as I suggested earlier, is not necessarily so
shallow as it sounds. Most revolutionaries are potential Tories,
because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the
shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is,
they see no need for any other. Dickens has not this kind of mental
coarseness. The vagueness of his discontent is the mark of its
permanence. What he is out against is not this or that institution,
but, as Chesterton put it, "an expression on the human face."
I think Pratchett is, in that sense, a Dickensian writer, and it shows all
through Discworld. He does write political crises (there is one in this
book), but the crises are moral or personal, not ideological or
structural. The Watch novels are often concerned with systems of
government, but focus primarily on the popular appeal of kings, the skill
of the Patrician, and the greed of those who would maneuver for power.
Pratchett does not write (at least so far) about the proper role of
government, the impact of Vetinari's policies (or even what those policies
may be), or political theory in any deep sense. What he does write about,
at great length, is morality, fairness, and a deeply generous humanism,
all of which are central to the golem plot.
Vimes is a great protagonist for this type of story. He's grumpy,
cynical, stubborn, and prejudiced, and we learn in this book that he's a
descendant of the Discworld version of Oliver Cromwell. He can be
reflexively self-centered, and he has no clear idea how to use his
newfound resources. But he behaves decently towards people, in both big
and small things, for reasons that the reader feels he could never
adequately explain, but which are rooted in empathy and an instinctual
sense of fairness. It's fun to watch him grumble his way through the plot
while making snide comments about mysteries and detectives.
I do have to complain a bit about one of those mysteries, though. I would
have enjoyed the plot around Vetinari's poisoning more if Pratchett hadn't
mercilessly teased readers who know a bit about French history. An
allusion or two would have been fun, but he kept dropping references while
having Vimes ignore them, and I found the overall effect both frustrating
and irritating. That and a few other bits, like Angua's uncommunicative
angst, fell flat for me. Thankfully, several other excellent scenes made
up for them, such as Nobby's high society party and everything about the
College of Heralds. Also, Vimes's impish PDA (smartphone without the
phone, for those younger than I am) remains absurdly good commentary on
the annoyances of portable digital devices despite an original publication
date of 1996.
Feet of Clay is less focused than the previous Watch novels and
more of a series book than most Discworld novels. You're reading about
characters introduced in previous books with problems that will continue
into subsequent books. The plot and the mysteries are there to drive the
story but seem relatively incidental to the characterization. This isn't
a complaint; at this point in the series, I'm in it for the long haul, and
I liked the variation. As usual, Pratchett is stronger for me when he's
not overly focused on parody. His own characters are as good as the
material he's been parodying, and I'm happy to see them get a book that's
not overshadowed by another material.
If you've read this far in the series, or even in just the Watch novels,
recommended.
Followed by Hogfather in publication order and, thematically, by
Jingo.
Rating: 8 out of 10
Maskerade is the 18th book of the Discworld series, but you
probably could start here. You'd miss the introduction of Granny
Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, which might be a bit confusing, but I suspect
you could pick it up as you went if you wanted. This is a sequel of sorts
to Lords and Ladies, but not in a very
immediate sense.
Granny is getting distracted and less interested in day-to-day witching in
Lancre. This is not good; Granny is incredibly powerful, and bored and
distracted witches can go to dark places. Nanny is concerned. Granny
needs something to do, and their coven needs a third. It's not been the
same since they lost their maiden member.
Nanny's solution to this problem is two-pronged. First, they'd had their
eye on a local girl named Agnes, who had magic but who wasn't interested
in being a witch. Perhaps it was time to recruit her anyway, even though
she'd left Lancre for Ankh-Morpork. And second, Granny needs something to
light a fire under her, something that will get her outraged and ready to
engage with the world. Something like a cookbook of aphrodisiac recipes
attributed to the Witch of Lancre.
Agnes, meanwhile, is auditioning for the opera. She's a sensible person,
cursed her whole life by having a wonderful personality, but a part of her
deep inside wants to be called Perdita X. Dream and have a dramatic life.
Having a wonderful personality can be very frustrating, but no one in
Lancre took either that desire or her name seriously. Perhaps the opera
is somewhere where she can find the life she's looking for, along with
another opportunity to try on the Perdita name. One thing she can do is
sing; that's where all of her magic went.
The Ankh-Morpork opera is indeed dramatic. It's also losing an astounding
amount of money for its new owner, who foolishly thought owning an opera
would be a good retirement project after running a cheese business. And
it's haunted by a ghost, a very tangible ghost who has started killing
people.
I think this is my favorite Discworld novel to date (although with a
caveat about the ending that I'll get to in a moment). It's certainly the
one that had me laughing out loud the most. Agnes (including her Perdita
personality aspect) shot to the top of my list of favorite Discworld
characters, in part because I found her sensible personality so utterly
relatable. She is fascinated by drama, she wants to be in the middle of
it and let her inner Perdita goth character revel in it, and yet she
cannot help being practical and unflappable even when surrounded by people
who use far too many exclamation points. It's one thing to want drama in
the abstract; it's quite another to be heedlessly dramatic in the moment,
when there's an obviously reasonable thing to do instead. Pratchett
writes this wonderfully.
The other half of the story follows Granny and Nanny, who are unstoppable
forces of nature and a wonderful team. They have the sort of
long-standing, unshakable adult friendship between very unlike people
that's full of banter and minor irritations layered on top of a deep
mutual understanding and respect. Once they decide to start investigating
this supposed opera ghost, they divvy up the investigative work with
hardly a word exchanged. Planning isn't necessary; they both know each
other's strengths.
We've gotten a lot of Granny's skills in previous books. Maskerade
gives Nanny a chance to show off her skills, and it's a delight. She
effortlessly becomes the sort of friendly grandmother who blends in so
well that no one questions why she's there, and thus manages to be in the
middle of every important event. Granny watches and thinks and theorizes;
Nanny simply gets into the middle of everything and talks to everyone
until people tell her what she wants to know. There's no real doubt that
the two of them are going to get to the bottom of anything they want to
get to the bottom of, but watching how they get there is a delight.
I love how Pratchett handles that sort of magical power from a
world-building perspective. Ankh-Morpork is the Big City, the center of
political power in most of the Discworld books, and Granny and Nanny are
from the boondocks. By convention, that means they should either be awed
or confused by the city, or gain power in the city by transforming it in
some way to match their area of power. This isn't how Pratchett writes
witches at all. Their magic is in understanding people, and the people in
Ankh-Morpork are just as much people as the people in Lancre. The
differences of the city may warrant an occasional grumpy aside, but the
witches are fully as capable of navigating the city as they are their home
town.
Maskerade is, of course, a parody of opera and musicals, with
Phantom of the Opera playing the central role in much the same
way that Macbeth did in Wyrd
Sisters. Agnes ends up doing the singing for a beautiful, thin actress
named Christine, who can't sing at all despite being an opera star, uses a
truly astonishing excess of exclamation points, and strategically faints
at the first sign of danger. (And, despite all of this, is still likable
in that way that it's impossible to be really upset at a puppy.) She
is the special chosen focus of the ghost, whose murderous taunting is a
direct parody of the Phantom. That was a sufficiently obvious reference
that even I picked up on it, despite being familiar with Phantom of
the Opera only via the soundtrack.
Apart from that, though, the references were lost on me, since I'm neither
a musical nor an opera fan. That didn't hurt my enjoyment of the book in
the slightest; in fact, I suspect it's part of why it's in my top tier of
Discworld books. One of my complaints about Discworld to date is that
Pratchett often overdoes the parody to the extent that it gets in the way
of his own (excellent) characters and story. Maybe it's better to read
Discworld novels where one doesn't recognize the material being parodied
and thus doesn't keep getting distracted by references.
It's probably worth mentioning that Agnes is a large woman and there are
several jokes about her weight in Maskerade. I think they're the
good sort of jokes, about how absurd human bodies can be, not the mean
sort? Pratchett never implies her weight is any sort of moral failing or
something she should change; quite the contrary, Nanny considers it a sign
of solid Lancre genes. But there is some fat discrimination in the opera
itself, since one of the things Pratchett is commenting on is the switch
from full-bodied female opera singers to thin actresses matching an
idealized beauty standard. Christine is the latter, but she can't sing,
and the solution is for Agnes to sing for her from behind, something that
was also done in real opera. I'm not a good judge of how well this plot
line was handled; be aware, going in, if this may bother you.
What did bother me was the ending, and more generally the degree to which
Granny and Nanny felt comfortable making decisions about Agnes's life
without consulting her or appearing to care what she thought of their
conclusions. Pratchett seemed to be on their side, emphasizing how well
they know people. But Agnes left Lancre and avoided the witches for a
reason, and that reason is not honored in much the same way that Lancre
refused to honor her desire to go by Perdita. This doesn't seem to be
malicious, and Agnes herself is a little uncertain about her choice of
identity, but it still rubbed me the wrong way. I felt like Agnes got
steamrolled by both the other characters and by Pratchett, and it's the
one thing about this book that I didn't like. Hopefully future Discworld
books about these characters revisit Agnes's agency.
Overall, though, this was great, and a huge improvement over
Interesting Times. I'm excited for the
next witches book.
Followed in publication order by Feet of Clay, and later by
Carpe Jugulum in the thematic sense.
Rating: 8 out of 10
Interesting Times is the seventeenth Discworld novel and certainly
not the place to start. At the least, you will probably want to read
The Colour of Magic and
The Light Fantastic before this book,
since it's a sequel to those (although Rincewind has had some intervening
adventures).
Lord Vetinari has received a message from the Counterweight Continent, the
first in ten years, cryptically demanding the Great Wizzard be sent
immediately.
The Agatean Empire is one of the most powerful states on the Disc.
Thankfully for everyone else, it normally suits its rulers to believe that
the lands outside their walls are inhabited only by ghosts. No one is
inclined to try to change their minds or otherwise draw their attention.
Accordingly, the Great Wizard must be sent, a task that Vetinari
efficiently delegates to the Archchancellor. There is only the small
matter of determining who the Great Wizzard is, and why it was spelled
with two z's.
Discworld readers with a better memory than I will recall Rincewind's hat.
Why the Counterweight Continent would demanding a wizard notorious for his
near-total inability to perform magic is a puzzle for other people.
Rincewind is promptly located by a magical computer, and nearly as
promptly transported across the Disc, swapping him for an unnecessarily
exciting object of roughly equivalent mass and hurling him into an
unexpected rescue of Cohen the Barbarian. Rincewind predictably reacts by
running away, although not fast or far enough to keep him from being
entangled in a glorious popular uprising. Or, well, something that has
aspirations of being glorious, and popular, and an uprising.
I hate to say this, because Pratchett is an ethically thoughtful writer to
whom I am willing to give the benefit of many doubts, but this book was
kind of racist.
The Agatean Empire is modeled after China, and the Rincewind books tend to
be the broadest and most obvious parodies, so that was already a recipe
for some trouble. Some of the social parody is not too objectionable,
albeit not my thing. I find ethnic stereotypes and making fun of
funny-sounding names in other languages (like a city named Hunghung) to be
in poor taste, but Pratchett makes fun of everyone's names and cultures
rather equally. (Also, I admit that some of the water buffalo jokes,
despite the stereotypes, were pretty good.) If it had stopped there, it
would have prompted some eye-rolling but not much comment.
Unfortunately, a significant portion of the plot depends on the idea that
the population of the Agatean Empire has been so brainwashed into
obedience that they have a hard time even imagining resistance, and even
their revolutionaries are so polite that the best they can manage for
slogans are things like "Timely Demise to All Enemies!" What they need
are a bunch of outsiders, such as Rincewind or Cohen and his gang. More
details would be spoilers, but there are several deliberate uses of
Ankh-Morpork as a revolutionary inspiration and a great deal of narrative
hand-wringing over how awful it is to so completely convince people they
are slaves that you don't need chains.
There is a depressingly tedious tendency of western writers, even
otherwise thoughtful and well-meaning ones like Pratchett, to adopt a
simplistic ranking of political systems on a crude measure of freedom.
That analysis immediately encounters the problem that lots of people who
live within systems that rate poorly on this one-dimensional scale seem
inadequately upset about circumstances that are "obviously" horrific
oppression. This should raise questions about the validity of the
assumptions, but those assumptions are so unquestionable that the writer
instead decides the people who are insufficiently upset about their lack
of freedom must be defective. The more racist writers attribute that
defectiveness to racial characteristics. The less racist writers, like
Pratchett, attribute that defectiveness to brainwashing and systemic evil,
which is not quite as bad as overt racism but still rests on a foundation
of smug cultural superiority.
Krister Stendahl, a bishop of the Church of Sweden, coined three famous
rules for understanding other religions:
When you are trying to understand another religion, you should ask the
adherents of that religion and not its enemies.
Don't compare your best to their worst.
Leave room for "holy envy."
This is excellent advice that should also be applied to politics. Most
systems exist for some reason. The differences from your preferred system
are easy to see, particularly those that strike you as horrible. But
often there are countervailing advantages that are less obvious, and those
are more psychologically difficult to understand and objectively analyze.
You might find they have something that you wish your system had, which
causes discomfort if you're convinced you have the best political system
in the world, or are making yourself feel better about the abuses of your
local politics by assuring yourself that at least you're better than those
people.
I was particularly irritated to see this sort of simplistic stereotyping
in Discworld given that Ankh-Morpork, the setting of most of the Discworld
novels, is an authoritarian dictatorship. Vetinari quite capably
maintains his hold on power, and yet this is not taken as a sign that the
city's inhabitants have been brainwashed into considering themselves
slaves. Instead, he's shown as adept at maintaining the stability of a
precarious system with a lot of competing forces and a high potential for
destructive chaos. Vetinari is an awful person, but he may be better than
anyone who would replace him. Hmm.
This sort of complexity is permitted in the "local" city, but as soon as
we end up in an analog of China, the rulers are evil, the system lacks any
justification, and the peasants only don't revolt because they've been
trained to believe they can't. Gah.
I was muttering about this all the way through Interesting Times,
which is a shame because, outside of the ham-handed political plot, it has
some great Pratchett moments. Rincewind's approach to any and all danger
is a running (sorry) gag that keeps working, and Cohen and his gang of
absurdly competent decrepit barbarians are both funnier here than they
have been in any previous book and the rare highly-positive portrayal of
old people in fantasy adventures who are not wizards or crones. Pretty
Butterfly is a great character who deserved to be in a better plot. And I
loved the trouble that Rincewind had with the Agatean tonal language,
which is an excuse for Pratchett to write dialog full of frustrated
non-sequiturs when Rincewind mispronounces a word.
I do have to grumble about the Luggage, though. From a world-building
perspective its subplot makes sense, but the Luggage was always the best
character in the Rincewind stories, and the way it lost all of its
specialness here was oddly sad and depressing. Pratchett also failed to
convince me of the drastic retcon of The Colour of Magic and
The Light Fantastic that he does here (and which I can't talk about
in detail due to spoilers), in part because it's entangled in the
orientalism of the plot.
I'm not sure Pratchett could write a bad book, and I still enjoyed reading
Interesting Times, but I don't think he gave the politics his
normal care, attention, and thoughtful humanism. I hope later books in
this part of the Disc add more nuance, and are less confident and
judgmental. I can't really recommend this one, even though it has some
merits.
Also, just for the record, "may you live in interesting times" is
not
a Chinese curse. It's an English saying that likely was attributed to
China to make it sound exotic, which is the sort of landmine that
good-natured parody of other people's cultures needs to be wary of.
Followed in publication order by Maskerade, and in Rincewind's
personal timeline by The Last Continent.
Rating: 6 out of 10
As a follow-up to yesterday's post listing my favourite memoirs and biographies I read in 2021, today I'll be outlining my favourite works of non-fiction.
Books that just missed the cut include: The Unusual Suspect by Ben Machell for its thrilleresque narrative of a modern-day Robin Hood (and if you get to the end, a completely unexpected twist); Paul Fussell's Class: A Guide to the American Status System as an amusing chaser of sorts to Kate Fox's Watching the English; John Carey's Little History of Poetry for its exhilarating summation of almost four millennia of verse; David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years for numerous historical insights, not least its rejoinder to our dangerously misleading view of ancient barter systems; and, although I didn't treasure everything about it, I won't hesitate to gift Pen Vogler's Scoff to a number of friends over the next year. The weakest book of non-fiction I read this year was undoubtedly Roger Scruton's How to Be a Conservative: I much preferred The Decadent Society for Ross Douthat for my yearly ration of the 'intellectual right'.
I also very much enjoyed reading a number of classic texts from academic sociology, but they are difficult to recommend or even summarise. These included One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Frederic Jameson and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber. 'These are heavy books', remarks John Proctor in Arthur Miller's The Crucible...
All round-up posts for 2021: Memoir/biography, Non-fiction (this post) & Fiction (coming soon).
Hidden Valley Road (2020)
Robert Kolker
A compelling and disturbing account of the Galvin family six of whom were diagnosed with schizophrenia which details a journey through the study and misunderstanding of the condition. The story of the Galvin family offers a parallel history of the science of schizophrenia itself, from the era of institutionalisation, lobotomies and the 'schizo mother', to the contemporary search for genetic markers for the disease... all amidst fundamental disagreements about the nature of schizophrenia and, indeed, of all illnesses of the mind. Samples of the Galvins' DNA informed decades of research which, curiously, continues to this day, potentially offering paths to treatment, prediction and even eradication of the disease, although on this last point I fancy that I detect a kind of neo-Victorian hubris that we alone will be the ones to find a cure. Either way, a gentle yet ultimately tragic view of a curiously 'American' family, where the inherent lack of narrative satisfaction brings a frustration and sadness of its own.
Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape (2021)
Cat Flyn
In this disarmingly lyrical book, Cat Flyn addresses the twin questions of what happens after humans are gone and how far can our damage to nature be undone. From the forbidden areas of post-war France to the mining regions of Scotland, Islands of Abandonment explores the extraordinary places where humans no longer live in an attempt to give us a glimpse into what happens when mankind's impact on nature is, for one reason or another, forced to stop. Needless to say, if anxieties in this area are not curdling away in your subconscious mind, you are probably in some kind of denial.
Through a journey into desolate, eerie and ravaged areas in the world, this artfully-written study offers profound insights into human nature, eschewing the usual dry sawdust of Wikipedia trivia. Indeed, I summed it up to a close friend remarking that, through some kind of hilarious administrative error, the book's publisher accidentally dispatched a poet instead of a scientist to write this book. With glimmers of hope within the (mostly) tragic travelogue, Islands of Abandonment is not only a compelling read, but also a fascinating insight into the relationship between Nature and Man.
The Anatomy of Fascism (2004)
Robert O. Paxton
Everyone is absolutely sure they know what fascism is... or at least they feel confident choosing from a buffet of features to suit the political mood. To be sure, this is not a new phenomenon: even as 'early' as 1946, George Orwell complained in Politics and the English Language that the word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable . Still, it has proved uncommonly hard to define the core nature of fascism and what differentiates it from related political movements. This is still of great significance in the twenty-first century, for the definition ultimately determines where the powerful label of 'fascist' can be applied today.
Part of the enjoyment of reading this book was having my own cosy definition thoroughly dismantled and replaced with a robust system of abstractions and common themes. This is achieved through a study of the intellectual origins of fascism and how it played out in the streets of Berlin, Rome and Paris. Moreover, unlike Strongmen (see above), fascisms that failed to gain meaningful power are analysed too, including Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. Curiously enough, Paxton's own definition of fascism is left to the final chapter, and by the time you reach it, you get an anti-climatic feeling of it being redundant. Indeed, whatever it actually is, fascism is really not quite like any other 'isms' at all, so to try and classify it like one might be a mistake.
In his introduction, Paxton warns that many of those infamous images associated with fascism (eg. Hitler in Triumph of the Will, Mussolini speaking from a balcony, etc.) have the ability to induce facile errors about the fascist leader and the apparent compliance of the crowd. (Contemporary accounts often record how sceptical the common man was of the leader's political message, even if they were transfixed by their oratorical bombast.) As it happens, I thus believe I had something of an advantage of reading this via an audiobook, and completely avoided re-absorbing these iconic images. To me, this was an implicit reminder that, however you choose to reduce it to a definition, fascism is undoubtedly the most visual of all political forms, presenting itself to us in vivid and iconic primary images: ranks of disciplined marching youths, coloured-shirted militants beating up members of demonised minorities; the post-war pictures from the concentration camps...
Still, regardless of you choose to read it, The Anatomy of Fascism is a powerful book that can teach a great deal about fascism in particular and history in general.
What Good are the Arts? (2005)
John CareyWhat Good are the Arts? takes a delightfully sceptical look at the nature of art, and cuts through the sanctimony and cant that inevitably surrounds them. It begins by revealing the flaws in lofty aesthetic theories and, along the way, debunks the claims that art makes us better people. They may certainly bring joy into your life, but by no means do the fine arts make you automatically virtuous. Carey also rejects the entire enterprise of separating things into things that are art and things that are not, making a thoroughly convincing case that there is no transcendental category containing so-called 'true' works of art.
But what is perhaps equally important to what Carey is claiming is the way he does all this. As in, this is an extremely enjoyable book to read, with not only a fine sense of pace and language, but a devilish sense of humour as well. To be clear, What Good are the Arts? it is no crotchety monograph: Leo Tolstoy's *What Is Art? (1897) is hilarious to read in similar ways, but you can't avoid feeling its cantankerous tone holds Tolstoy's argument back. By contrast, Carey makes his argument in a playful sort of manner, in a way that made me slightly sad to read other polemics throughout the year. It's definitely not that modern genre of boomer jeremiad about the young, political correctness or, heaven forbid, 'cancel culture'... which, incidentally, made Carey's 2014 memoir, The Unexpected Professor something of a disappointing follow-up.
Just for fun, Carey later undermines his own argument by arguing at length for the value of one art in particular. Literature, Carey asserts, is the only art capable of reasoning and the only art with the ability to criticise. Perhaps so, and Carey spends a chapter or so contending that fiction has the exclusive power to inspire the mind and move the heart towards practical ends... or at least far better than any work of conceptual art.
Whilst reading this book I found myself taking down innumerable quotations and laughing at the jokes far more than I disagreed. And the sustained and intellectual style of polemic makes this a pretty strong candidate for my favourite overall book of the year.
Review: Out of Office, by Charlie Warzel & Anne Helen Petersen
Publisher:
Alfred A. Knopf
Copyright:
2021
ISBN:
0-593-32010-7
Format:
Kindle
Pages:
260
Out of Office opens with the provocative assertion that you were
not working from home during the pandemic, even if you were among the 42%
of Americans who were able to work remotely.
You were, quite literally, doing your job from home.
But you weren't working from home. You were laboring in confinement
and under duress. Others have described it as living at work. You
were frantically tapping out an email while trying to make lunch and
supervise distance learning. You were stuck alone in a cramped
apartment for weeks, unable to see friends or family, exhausted, and
managing a level of stress you didn't know was possible. Work became
life, and life became work. You weren't thriving. You were
surviving.
The stated goal of this book is to reclaim the concept of working from
home, not only from the pandemic, but also from the boundary-destroying
metastasis of work into non-work life. It does work towards that goal,
but the description of what would be required for working from home to
live up to its promise becomes a sweeping critique of the organization and
conception of work, leaving it nearly as applicable to those who continue
working from an office. Turns out that the main problem with working from
home is the work part, not the "from home" part.
This was a fascinating book to read in conjunction with
A World Without Email. Warzel and
Petersen do the the structural and political analysis that I sometimes
wish Newport would do more of, but as a result offer less concrete advice.
Both, however, have similar diagnoses of the core problems of the sort of
modern office work that could be done from home: it's poorly organized,
poorly managed, and desperately inefficient. Rather than attempting to
fix those problems, which is difficult, structural, and requires thought
and institutional cooperation, we're compensating by working more. This
both doesn't work and isn't sustainable.
Newport has a background in productivity books and a love of systems and
protocols, so his focus in A World Without Email is on building
better systems of communication and organization of work. Warzel and
Petersen come from a background of reporting and cultural critique, so
they put more focus on power imbalances and power-serving myths about the
American dream. Where Newport sees an easy-to-deploy ad hoc work style
that isn't fit for purpose, Warzel and Petersen are more willing to point
out intentional exploitation of workers in the guise of flexibility. But
they arrive at some similar conclusions. The way office work is organized
is not leading to more productivity. Tools like Slack encourage the
public performance of apparent productivity at the cost of the attention
and focus required to do meaningful work. And the process is making us
miserable.
Out of Office is, in part, a discussion of what would be required
to do better work with less stress, but it also shares a goal with Newport
and some (but not most) corners of productivity writing: spend less time
and energy on work. The goal of Out of Office is not to get more
work done. It's to work more efficiently and sustainably and thus work
less. To reclaim the promise of flexibility so that it benefits the
employee and not the employer. To recognize, in the authors' words, that
the office can be a bully, locking people in to commute schedules and
unnatural work patterns, although it also provides valuable moments of
spontaneous human connection. Out of Office tries to envision a
style of work that includes the office sometimes, home sometimes, time
during the day to attend to personal chores or simply to take a mental
break from an unnatural eight hours (or more) of continuous focus,
universal design, real worker-centric flexibility, and an end to the
constant productivity ratchet where faster work simply means more work for
the same pay.
That's a lot of topics for a short book, and structurally this is a grab
bag. Some sections will land and some won't. Loom's video messages sound
like a nightmare to me, and I rolled my eyes heavily at the VR boosterism,
reluctant as it may be. The section on DEI (diversity, equity, and
inclusion) was a valiant effort that at least gestures towards the dismal
track record of most such efforts, but still left me unconvinced that
anyone knows how to improve diversity in an existing organization without
far more brute-force approaches than anyone with power is usually willing
to consider. But there's enough here, and the authors move through topics
quickly enough, that a section that isn't working for you will soon be
over.
And some of the sections that do work are great. For example, the whole
discussion of management.
Many of these companies view middle management as bloat, waste, what
David Graeber would call a "bullshit job." But that's because bad
management is a waste; you're paying someone more money to essentially
annoy everyone around them. And the more people experience that sort
of bad management, and think of it as "just the way it is," the less
they're going to value management in general.
I admit to a lot of confirmation bias here, since I've been ranting about
this for years, but management must be the most wide-spread professional
job for which we ignore both training and capability and assume that
anyone who can do any type of useful work can also manage people doing
that work. It's simply not true, it creates workplaces full of horrible
management, and that in turn creates a deep and unhelpful cynicism about
all management.
There is still a tendency on the left to frame this problem in terms of
class struggle, on the reasonable grounds that for decades under
"scientific management" of manufacturing that's what it was. Managers
were there to overwork workers and extract more profits for the owners,
and labor unions were there to fight back against managers. But while
some of this does happen in the sort of office work this book is focused
on, I think Warzel and Petersen correctly point to a different cause.
"The reason she was underpaid on the team was not because her boss was
cackling in the corner. It was because nobody told the boss it was
their responsibility to look at the fucking spreadsheet."
We don't train managers, we have no clear expectations for what managers
should do, we don't meaningfully measure their performance, we accept a
high-overhead and high-chaos workstyle based on ad hoc one-to-one
communication that de-emphasizes management, and many managers have never
seen good management and therefore have no idea what they're supposed to
be doing. The management problem for many office workers is less
malicious management than incompetent management, or simply no effective
management at all apart from an occasional reorg and a complicated and
mind-numbing annual review form.
The last section of this book (apart from concluding letters to bosses and
workers) is on community, and more specifically on extracting time and
energy from work (via the roadmap in previous chapters) and instead
investing it in the people around you. Much ink has been spilled about
the collapse of American civic life, about how we went from a nation of
joiners to a nation of isolated individual workers with weak and failing
community institutions. Warzel and Petersen correctly lay some blame for
this at the foot of work, and see the reorganization of work and an
increase in work from home (and thus a decrease in commutes) as an
opportunity to reverse that trend.
David Brooks recently filled in for Ezra Klein on his podcast and
talked with University of Chicago professor Leon Kass, which I listened
to shortly after reading this book. In one segment, they talked about
marriage and complained about the decline in marriage rates. They were
looking for causes in people's moral upbringing, in their life priorities,
in the lack of aspiration for permanence in kids these days, and in any
other personal or moral failing that would allow them to be smugly
judgmental. It was a truly remarkable thing to witness. Neither man at
any point in the conversation mentioned either money or time.
Back in the world most Americans live in, real wages have been stagnant
for decades, student loan debt is skyrocketing as people desperately try
to keep up with the ever-shifting requirements for a halfway-decent job,
and work has expanded to fill all hours of the day, even for people who
don't have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. Employers have fully
embraced a "flexible" workforce via layoffs, micro-optimizing work
scheduling, eliminating benefits, relying on contract and gig labor, and
embracing exceptional levels of employee turnover. The American worker
has far less of money, time, and stability, three important foundations
for marriage and family as well as participation in most other civic
institutions. People like Brooks and Kass stubbornly cling to their
feelings of moral superiority instead of seeing a resource crisis. Work
has stolen the resources that people previously put into those other areas
of their life. And it's not even using those resources effectively.
That's, in a way, a restatement of the topic of this book. Our current
way of organizing work is not sustainable, healthy, or wise. Working from
home may be part of a strategy for changing it. The pandemic has already
heavily disrupted work, and some of those changes, including increased
working from home, seem likely to stick. That provides a narrow
opportunity to renegotiate our arrangement with work and try to make those
changes stick.
I largely agree with the analysis, but I'm pessimistic. I think the
authors are as well. We're very bad at social change, and there will be
immense pressure for everything to go "back to normal." Those in the best
bargaining position to renegotiate work for themselves are not in the
habit of sharing that renegotiation with anyone else. But I'm somewhat
heartened by how much public discussion there currently is about a more
fundamental renegotiation of the rules of office work. I'm also reminded
of a deceptively profound aphorism from economist Herbert Stein: "If
something cannot go on forever, it will stop."
This book is a bit uneven and is more of a collection of related thoughts
than a cohesive argument, but if you are hungry for more worker-centric
analyses of the dynamics of office work (inside or outside the office), I
think it's worth reading.
Rating: 7 out of 10
Soul Music is the sixteenth Discworld novel and something of a plot
sequel to Reaper Man (although more of a
sequel to the earlier Mort). I would
not start reading the Discworld books here.
Susan is a student in the Quirm College for Young Ladies with an uncanny
habit of turning invisible. Well, not invisible exactly; rather, people
tend to forget that she's there, even when they're in the middle of
talking to her. It's disconcerting for the teachers, but convenient when
one is uninterested in Literature and would rather read a book.
She listened with half an ear to what the rest of the class was doing.
It was a poem about daffodils.
Apparently the poet had liked them very much.
Susan was quite stoic about this. It was a free country. People
could like daffodils if they wanted to. They just should not, in
Susan's very definite opinion, be allowed to take up more than a page
to say so.
She got on with her education. In her opinion, school kept on trying
to interfere with it.
Around her, the poet's vision was being taken apart with inexpert
tools.
Susan's determinedly practical education is interrupted by the Death of
Rats, with the help of a talking raven and Binky the horse, and without a
lot of help from Susan, who is decidedly uninterested in being the sort of
girl who goes on adventures. Adventures have a different opinion, since
Susan's grandfather is Death. And Death has wandered off again.
Meanwhile, the bard Imp y Celyn, after an enormous row with his father,
has gone to Ankh-Morpork. This is not going well; among other things, the
Guild of Musicians and their monopoly and membership dues came as a
surprise. But he does meet a dwarf and a troll in the waiting room of the
Guild, and then buys an unusual music instrument in the sort of mysterious
shop that everyone knows has been in that location forever, but which no
one has seen before.
I'm not sure there is such a thing as a bad Discworld novel, but there is
such a thing as an average Discworld novel. At least for me, Soul
Music is one of those. There are some humorous bits, a few good jokes,
one great character, and some nice bits of philosophy, but I found the
plot forgettable and occasionally annoying. Susan is great. Imp is...
not, which is made worse by the fact the reader is eventually expected to
believe Susan cares enough about Imp to drive the plot.
Discworld has always been a mix of parody and Pratchett's own original
creation, and I have always liked the original creation substantially more
than the parody. Soul Music is a parody of rock music, complete
with Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler as an unethical music promoter. The troll
Imp meets makes music by beating rocks together, so they decide to call
their genre "music with rocks in it." The magical instrument Imp buys has
twelve strings and a solid body. Imp y Celyn means "bud of the holly."
You know, like Buddy Holly. Get it?
Pratchett's reference density is often on the edge of overwhelming the
book, but for some reason the parody references in this one felt unusually
forced and obvious to me. I did laugh occasionally, but by the end of the
story the rock music plot had worn out its welcome. This is not helped by
the ending being a mostly incoherent muddle of another parody (admittedly
featuring an excellent motorcycle scene). Unlike
Moving Pictures, which is a similar
parody of Hollywood, Pratchett didn't seem to have much insightful to say
about music. Maybe this will be more your thing if you like constant
Blues Brothers references.
Susan, on the other hand, is wonderful, and for me is the reason to read
this book. She is a delightfully atypical protagonist, and her
interactions with the teachers and other students at the girl's school are
thoroughly enjoyable. I would have happily read a whole book about her,
and more broadly about Death and his family and new-found curiosity about
the world. The Death of Rats was also fun, although more so in
combination with the raven to translate. I wish this part of her story
had a more coherent ending, but I'm looking forward to seeing her in
future books.
Despite my complaints, the parody part of this book wasn't bad. It just
wasn't as good as the rest of the book. I wanted a better platform for
Susan's introduction than a lot of music and band references. If you
really like Pratchett's parodies, your mileage may vary. For me, this
book was fun but forgettable.
Followed, in publication order, by Interesting Times. The next
Death book is Hogfather.
Rating: 7 out of 10
Following on from 2020 in Fiction: In 2020 I read a couple of collections
of short fiction from some of my favourite authors.
I started the year with Christopher Priest's Episodes. The stories within are
collected from throughout his long career, and vary in style and tone. Priest
wrote new little prologues and epilogues for each of the stories, explaining
the context in which they were written. I really enjoyed this additional view
into their construction.
By contrast, Adam Robert's Adam Robots presents the stories on their own
terms. Each of the stories is written in a different mode: one as golden-age
SF, another as a kind of Cyberpunk, for example, although they all blend or
confound sub-genres to some degree. I'm not clever enough to have decoded all
their secrets on a first read, and I would have appreciated some "Cliff's Notes on
any deeper meaning or intent.
Ted Chiang's Exhalation was up to the fantastic standard of his earlier
collection and had some extremely thoughtful explorations of philosophical
ideas. All the stories are strong but one stuck in my mind the longest:
Omphalos)
With my daughter I finished three of Terry Pratchett's short story collections
aimed at children: Dragon at Crumbling Castle; The Witch's Vacuum Cleaner
and The Time-Travelling Caveman. If you are a Pratchett fan and you've
overlooked these because they're aimed at children, take another look. The
quality varies, but there are some true gems in these. Several stories take
place in common settings, either the town of Blackbury, in Gritshire (and the
adjacent Even Moor), or the Welsh border-town of Llandanffwnfafegettupagogo.
The sad thing was knowing that once I'd finished them (and the fourth, Father
Christmas's Fake Beard) that was it: there will be no more.
8/31 of the "books" I read in 2020 were issues of Interzone. Counting them as
"books" for my annual reading goal has encouraged me to read full issues,
whereas before I would likely have only read a couple of stories from each
issue. Reading full issues has rekindled the enjoyment I got out of it when I
first discovered the magazine at the turn of the Century. I am starting to
recognise stories by authors that have written stories in other issues, as well
as common themes from the current era weaving their way into the work (Trump,
Brexit, etc.) No doubt the Pandemic will leave its mark on 2021's stories.
No doubt it was someone's idea of a joke to release Silence of the Lambs on Valentine's Day, thirty years ago today. Although it references Valentines at one point and hints at a deeper relationship between Starling and Lecter, it was clearly too tempting to jeopardise so many date nights. After all, how many couples were going to enjoy their ribeyes medium-rare after watching this?
Given the muted success of Manhunter (1986), Silence of the Lambs was our first real introduction to Dr. Lecter. Indeed, many of the best scenes in this film are introductions: Starling's first encounter with Lecter is probably the best introduction in the whole of cinema, but our preceding introduction to the asylum's factotum carries a lot of cultural weight too, if only because the camera's measured pan around the environment before alighting on Barney has been emulated by so many first-person video games since.
We first see Buffalo Bill at the thirty-two minute mark. (Or, more tellingly, he sees us.) Delaying the viewer's introduction to the film's villain is the mark of a secure and confident screenplay, even if it was popularised by the budget-restricted Jaws (1975) which hides the eponymous shark for one hour and 21 minutes.
It is no mistake that the first thing we see of Starling do is, quite literally, pull herself up out of the unknown. With all of the focus on the Starling Lecter repartee, the viewer's first introduction to Starling is as underappreciated as she herself is to the FBI. Indeed, even before Starling tells Lecter her innermost dreams, we learn almost everything we need to about Starling in the first few minutes: we see her training on an obstacle course in the forest, the unused rope telling us that she is here entirely voluntarily. And we can surely guess why; the passing grade for a woman in the FBI is to top of the class, and Starling's not going to let an early February in Virginia get in the way of that.
We need to wait a full three minutes before we get our first line of dialogue, and in just eight words ("Crawford wants to see you in his office...") we get our confirmation about the FBI too. With no other information other than he can send a messenger out into the cold, we can intuit that Crawford tends to get what Crawford wants. It's just plain "Crawford" too; everyone knows his actual title, his power, "his" office.
The opening minutes also introduce us to the film's use of visual hierarchy. Our Hermes towers above Starling throughout the brief exchange (she must push herself even to stay within the camera's frame). Later, Starling always descends to meet her demons: to the asylum's basement to visit Lecter and down the stairs to meet Buffalo Bill. Conversely, she feels safe enough to reveal her innermost self to Lecter on the fifth floor of the courthouse. (Bong Joon-ho's Parasite (2019) uses elevation in an analogous way, although a little more subtly.)
The messenger turns to watch Starling run off to Crawford. Are his eyes involuntarily following the movement or he is impressed by Starling's gumption? Or, almost two decades after John Berger's male gaze, is he simply checking her out? The film, thankfully, leaves it to us.
Crawford is our next real introduction, and our glimpse into the film's sympathetic treatment of law enforcement. Note that the first thing that the head of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit does is to lie to Starling about the reason to interview Lecter, despite it being coded as justified within the film's logic. We learn in the book that even Barney deceives Starling, recording her conversations with Lecter and selling her out to the press. (Buffalo Bill always lies to Starling, of course, but I think we can forgive him for that.) Crawford's quasi-compliment of "You grilled me pretty hard on the Bureau's civil rights record in the Hoover years..." then encourages the viewer to conclude that the FBI's has been a paragon of virtue since 1972... All this (as well as her stellar academic record, Crawford's wielding of Starling's fragile femininity at the funeral home and the cool reception she receives from a power-suited Senator Ruth Martin), Starling must be constantly asking herself what it must take for anyone to take her seriously. Indeed, it would be unsurprising if she takes unnecessary risks to make that happen.
The cold open of Hannibal (2001) makes for a worthy comparison. The audience remembers they loved the dialogue between Starling and Lecter, so it is clumsily mentioned. We remember Barney too, so he is shoehorned in as well. Lacking the confidence to introduce new signifiers to its universe, Red Dragon (2002) aside, the hollow, 'clip show' feel of Hannibal is a taste of the zero-calorie sequels to come in the next two decades.
The film is not perfect, and likely never was. Much has been written on the fairly transparent transphobia in Buffalo Bill's desire to wear a suit made out of women's skin, but the film then doubles down on its unflattering portrayal by trying to have it both ways. Starling tells the camera that "there's no correlation between transsexualism and violence," and Lecter (the film's psychoanalytic authority, remember) assures us that Buffalo Bill is "not a real transsexual" anyway. Yet despite those caveats, we are continually shown a TERFy cartoon of a man in a wig tucking his "precious" between his legs and an absurdly phallic gun. And, just we didn't quite get the message, a decent collection of Nazi memorabilia.
The film's director repeated the novel's contention that Buffalo Bill is not actually transgender, but someone so damaged that they are seeking some kind of transformation. This, for a brief moment, almost sounds true, and the film's deranged depiction of what it might be like to be transgender combined with its ambivalence feels distinctly disingenuous to me, especially given that on an audience and Oscar-adjusted basis Silence of the Lambs may very well be the most transphobic film to come out of Hollywood. Still, I remain torn on the death of the author, especially when I discover that Jonathan Demme went on to direct Philadelphia (1993), likely the most positive film about homophobia and HIV.
Nevertheless, as an adaption of Thomas Harris' original novel, the movie is almost flawless. The screenplay excises red herrings and tuns down the volume on some secondary characters. Crucially for the format, it amplifies Lecter's genius by not revealing that he knew everything all along and cuts Buffalo Bill's origin story for good measure too good horror, after all, does not achieve its effect on the screen, but in the mind of the viewer. The added benefit of removing material from the original means that the film has time to slowly ratchet up the tension, and can remain patient and respectful of the viewer's intelligence throughout: it is, you could almost say, "Ready when you are, Sgt. Pembury". Otherwise, the film does not deviate too far from the original, taking the most liberty when it interleaves two narratives for the famous 'two doorbells' feint.
Dr. Lecter's upright stance when we meet him reminds me of the third act of Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious (1946), another picture freighted with meaningful stairs. Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956) began the now-shopworn trope of concealing a weapon in a flower box.
Two other points of deviation from the novel might be worthy of mention. In the book, a great deal is made of Dr. Lecter's penchant for Bach's Goldberg Variations, inducing a cultural resonance with other cinematic villains who have a taste for high art. It is also stressed in the book that it is the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould's recording too, although this is likely an attempt by Harris to demonstrate his own refined sensibilities Lecter would surely have prefered a more historically-informed performance on the harpsichord. Yet it is glaringly obvious that it isn't Gould playing in the film at all; Gould's hypercanonical 1955 recording is faster and focused, whilst his 1981 release is much slower and contemplative. No doubt tedious issues around rights prevented the use of either recording, but I like to imagine that Gould himself nixed the idea.
The second change revolves around the film's most iconic quote. Deep underground, Dr. Lecter tries to spook Starling:
A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.
The novel has this as "some fava beans and a big Amarone". No doubt the movie-going audience could not be trusted to know what an Amarone was, just as they were not to capable of recognising a philosopher. Nevertheless, substituting Chianti works better here as it cleverly foreshadows Tuscany (we discover that Lecter is living in Florence in the sequel), and it avoids the un-Lecterian tautology of 'big' Amarone's, I am reliably informed, are big-bodied wines. Like Buffalo Bill's victims.
Yet that's not all. "The audience", according to TV Tropes:
... believe Lecter is merely confessing to one of his crimes. What most people would not know is that a common treatment for Lecter's "brand of crazy" is to use drugs of a class known as MAOIs (monoamine oxidase inhibitors). There are several things one must not eat when taking MAOIs, as they can case fatally low blood pressure, and as a physician and psychiatrist himself, Dr. Lecter would be well aware of this. These things include liver, fava beans, and red wine. In short, Lecter was telling Clarice that he was off his medication.
I could write more, but as they say, I'm having an old friend for dinner. The starling may be a common bird, but The Silence of the Lambs is that extremely rara avis indeed the film that's better than the book. Ta ta...
Men at Arms is the fifteenth Discworld novel and a direct plot
sequel to Guards! Guards!. You could
start here without missing too much, but starting with Guards!
Guards! would make more sense. And of course there are cameos (and one
major appearance) by other characters who are established in previous
books.
Carrot, the adopted dwarf who joined the watch in Guards! Guards!,
has been promoted to corporal. He is now in charge of training new
recruits, a role that is more important because of the Night Watch's new
Patrician-ordered diversity initiative. The Watch must reflect the ethnic
makeup of the city. That means admitting a troll, a dwarf... and a woman?
Trolls and dwarfs hate each other because dwarfs mine precious things out
of rock and trolls are composed of precious things embedded in rocks, so
relations between the new recruits are tense. Captain Vimes is leaving
the Watch, and no one is sure who would or could replace him. (The reason
for this is a minor spoiler for Guards! Guards!) A magical weapon
is stolen from the Assassin's Guild. And a string of murders begins,
murders that Vimes is forbidden by Lord Vetinari from investigating and
therefore clearly is going to investigate.
This is an odd moment at which to read this book.
The Night Watch are not precisely a police force, although they are moving
in that direction. Their role in Ankh-Morpork is made much stranger by
the guild system, in which the Thieves' Guild is responsible for theft and
for dealing with people who steal outside of the quota of the guild. But
Men at Arms is in part a story about ethics, about what it means to
be a police officer, and about what it looks like when someone is very
good at that job.
Since I live in the United States, that makes it hard to avoid reading
Men at Arms in the context of the current upheavals about police
racism, use of force, and lack of accountability. Men at Arms can
indeed be read that way; community relations, diversity in the police
force, the merits of making two groups who hate each other work together,
and the allure of violence are all themes Pratchett is working with in
this novel. But they're from the perspective of a UK author writing in
1993 about a tiny city guard without any of the machinery of modern
police, so I kept seeing a point of clear similarity and then being
slightly wrong-footed by the details. It also felt odd to read a book
where the cops are the heroes, much in the style of a detective show.
This is in no way a problem with the book, and in a way it was helpful
perspective, but it was a strange reading experience.
Cuddy had only been a guard for a few days but already he had absorbed
one important and basic fact: it is almost impossible for anyone to be
in a street without breaking the law.
Vimes and Carrot are both excellent police officers, but in entirely
different ways. Vimes treats being a cop as a working-class job and is
inclined towards glumness and depression, but is doggedly persistent and
unable to leave a problem alone. His ethics are covered by a thick layer
of world-weary cynicism. Carrot is his polar opposite in personality:
bright, endlessly cheerful, effortlessly charismatic, and determined to
get along with everyone. On first appearance, this contrast makes Vimes
seem wise and Carrot seem a bit dim. That is exactly what Pratchett is
playing with and undermining in Men at Arms.
Beneath Vimes's cynicism, he's nearly as idealistic as Carrot, even though
he arrives at his ideals through grim contrariness. Carrot, meanwhile, is
nowhere near as dim as he appears to be. He's certain about how he wants
to interact with others and is willing to stick with that approach no
matter how bad of an idea it may appear to be, but he's more self-aware
than he appears. He and Vimes are identical in the strength of their
internal self-definition. Vimes shows it through the persistent, grumpy
stubbornness of a man devoted to doing an often-unpleasant job, whereas
Carrot verbally steamrolls people by refusing to believe they won't do the
right thing.
Colon thought Carrot was simple. Carrot often struck people as
simple. And he was. Where people went wrong was thinking that simple
meant the same thing as stupid.
There's a lot going on in this book apart from the profiles of two very
different models of cop. Alongside the mystery (which doubles as pointed
commentary on the corrupting influence of violence and personal weaponry),
there's a lot about dwarf/troll relations, a deeper look at the
Ankh-Morpork guilds (including a horribly creepy clown guild), another
look at how good Lord Vetinari is at running the city by anticipating how
other people will react, a sarcastic dog named Gaspode (originally seen in
Moving Pictures), and Pratchett's usual
collection of memorable lines. It is also the origin of the
now-rightfully-famous Vimes boots theory:
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because
they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus
allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars.
But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or
two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about
ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and
wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in
Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man
who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be
keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could
only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in
the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic
unfairness.
Men at Arms regularly makes lists of the best Discworld novels, and
I can see why. At this point in the series, Pratchett has hit his stride.
The plots have gotten deeper and more complex without losing the funny
moments, movie and book references, and glorious turns of phrase. There
is also a lot of life philosophy and deep characterization when one pays
close attention to the characters.
He was one of those people who would recoil from an assault on
strength, but attack weakness without mercy.
My one complaint is that I found it a bit overstuffed with both characters
and subplots, and as a result had a hard time following the details of the
plot. I found myself wanting a timeline of the murders or a better recap
from one of the characters. As always with Pratchett, the digressions are
wonderful, but they do occasionally come at the cost of plot clarity.
I'm not sure I recommend the present moment in the United States as the
best time to read this book, although perhaps there is no better time for
Carrot and Vimes to remind us what good cops look like. But regardless of
when one reads it, it's an excellent book, one of the best in the
Discworld series to this point.
Followed, in publication order, by Soul Music. The next Watch book
is Feet of Clay.
Rating: 8 out of 10
Small Gods is the thirteenth Discworld novel, but it features new
characters and is unrelated to any of the previous books. Some reading
order guides show it as following Pyramids in an "ancient civilizations" track, but its only
relationship with that book is some minor thematic similarities. You
could start here with Discworld if you wanted to.
Brutha is a novice in the hierarchy of the church of the Great God Om, and
his elders are convinced he'll probably die a novice. He's just not
particularly bright, you see. But he is very obedient, and he doesn't mind
doing hard work, and there's nothing exactly wrong with him, except that
he looks at people with startling intensity when they're talking to him.
Almost as if he's listening.
All that seems about to change, however, when the Great God Om himself
approaches Brutha and starts talking to him. Not that Brutha is at all
convinced at first that this is happening, particularly given that Om
appears in the form of a small, battered, one-eyed tortoise who was
dropped into the church garden by an eagle attempting to break his shell.
Small Gods is, as you might have guessed, a parody of religion, at
least large, organized religion with fixed hierarchies, organizations
called the Quisition that like to torture people, and terrifyingly devout
deacons who are certain of themselves in ways that no human ever should
be. It's also an interesting bit of Discworld metaphysics: gods gain
power from worship (a very old idea in fantasy), and when they don't get
enough worship, they end up much diminished and even adrift in the desert.
Or trapped in the form of a small tortoise. One might wonder how Om ended
up in his present condition given the vast and extremely authoritarian
church devoted to his worship, but that's the heart of Pratchett's rather
pointed parody: large religious organizations end up being about
themselves, rather than about the god they supposedly worship, to such an
extent that they don't provide any worship at all.
Brutha is not thinking of things like this. Once he's finally convinced
that Om is who he claims to be, he provides worship and belief of a very
practical but wholehearted and unshakable sort, just as he does
everything else in life. That makes him the eighth prophet of Om as
prophecy foretold, but it's far from clear how that will be of any
practical use. Or how Om will come back into power. And meanwhile,
Brutha has come to the attention of Vorbis, the head of the Exquisitors,
who does not know about the tortoise (and wouldn't believe if he did), but
who has a use for Brutha's other talent: his eidetic memory.
In typical Pratchett fashion, the story expands to include a variety of
other memorable characters from the neighboring city of Ephebe, a country
full of gods and philosophers. Vorbis's aims here are unclear at the
start of the book, but Vorbis being who he is, they can't be good. Brutha
is drawn along in his wake. Meanwhile, Om is constantly watching for an
opportunity to regain his lost power and worshipful following, and also to
avoid being eaten.
Despite the humorous components, Small Gods is rather serious about
religion and about its villain. It's also a touch repetitive; Om's lack
of power and constant fretting about it, Brutha's earnest but naive
loyalty, and Vorbis's malevolent determination are repeatedly stressed and
get a little old. Some bits in Ephebe are quite fun, but the action is a
bit disjointed, partly because the protagonist is rarely the motive force
in the plot. There are also some extended scenes of trudging through the
desert that I thought dragged a bit. But Pratchett hits some powerful
notes in his critique of religion, and there are a few bits with Death at
the end of the book that I thought were among the better pieces of
Discworld philosophy. And when Brutha gets a chance to use his one talent
of memory, I greatly enjoyed the resulting scenes. He hits just the right
combination of modesty, capability, and earnestness.
I know a lot of Pratchett readers really like Small Gods. I'm not
one of those; I thought it was about average for the Discworld series (at
least among the books I've read so far). But average for Discworld is
still pretty good, and its new setting makes it a plausible place to start
(or to take a break from the other Discworld plot threads).
Followed, in publication order, by Lords and Ladies. I don't
believe it has a direct plot sequel.
Rating: 7 out of 10
Conversations is a really nice, actively
developed, up to date XMPP client for Android that has the nice feature of
telling you what XEPs
are supported by the server one is using:
Some days ago, me and Valhalla
played the game of trying to see what happens when one turns them all on: I
would send her screenshots from my Conversations, and she would poke at her
Prosody to try and turn things on:
Valhalla eventually managed to get all features activated, purely using
packages from Jessie+Backports:
The result was a chat system in which I could see the same conversation history
on my phone and on my laptop (with gajim)(https://gajim.org/), and have it
synced even after a device has been offline,
We could send each other rich media like photos,
and could do OMEMO encryption (same as
Signal) in
group chats.
I now have an XMPP setup which has all the features of the recent fancy chat
systems, and on top of that it runs, client and server, on Free Software, which
can be audited, it is federated and I can self-host my own server in my own VPS
if I want to, with packages supported in Debian.
Valhalla has documented the whole procedure.
If you make a client for a protocol with lots of extension, do like
Conversations and implement a status page with the features you'd like to have
on the server, and little green indicators showing which are available: it
is quite a good motivator for getting them all supported.
Now that I've gone down the signal road, when can I get off of it?
The two contenders I've found for more politically conscious mobile-friendly instant messaging are Tox and XMPP.
And the problems to solve are:
Implement end-to-end encryption
Receive messages the moment they are sent without draining the battery
The biggest problem is that there is no easy way to send push messages
between my app and your app. For me to send a push to one of your app s users
on iOS, I must first obtain an APNs SSL certificate/key pair from you, and
one of your user s push token that uniquely identifies their device to
Apple. These push tokens are potentially sensitive information because they
allow Apple to locate your device (in order to send it a push).
So, even if we manage to get one of these two standards for push notifications up and running, we have only succeeded in solving Signal's centralization problem, not the dependence on Google Play Services and Apple Push Network (in fact it's quite mysterious to me how you could even use the Prosody implementation of Push Notifications with GCM or APN).
So... what we really would need would be to figure out how to implement one of these two push standards and then get it to work with an alternative to GCM and APN (perhaps MQTT)? Which, I think would require changes to the XMPP client.
Geez. I may be on Signal longer than I planned.
Terry Pratchett dies, aged
66.
It looks like his last novel will be The Long Utopia, the fourth book in the
Long Earth series, co-written with Stephen Baxter.
DON T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death. JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.
Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
Thank you for everything you wrote. Each and every line was a gem, with another gem hidden inside.
2013 is nearly all finished up and so I thought I'd spend a little time
writing up what was noteable in the last twelve months. When I did so I
found an unfinished draft from the year before. It would be a shame for
it to go to waste, so here it is.
2012 was an interesting year in many respects with personal highs
and lows. Every year I see a lots of "round-up"-style blog posts
on the web, titled things like "2012 in music", which attempt to summarize the
highlights of the year in that particular context. Here's JWZ's
effort, for example.
Often they are prefixed with statements like "2012 was a strong year for music"
or whatever. For me, 2012 was not a particularly great year. I discovered quite
a lot of stuff that I love that was new to me, but not new in any other sense.
In Music, there were a bunch of come-back albums that made the headlines. I
picked up both of Orbital's Wonky and Brian Eno's Lux (debatably a
comeback: his first ambient record since 1983, his first solo effort since
2005, but his fourth collaborative effort on Warp in the naughties). I've
enjoyed them both, but I've already forgotten Wonky and I still haven't fully
embraced Lux (and On Land has not been knocked from the top spot when I
want to listen to ambience.) There was also Throbbing Gristle's (or X-TG)
final effort, a semi/post-TG, partly posthumous double-album swan song effort
which, even more than Lux, I still haven't fully digested. In all honesty I
think it was eclipsed by the surprise one-off release of a live recording of a
TG side project featuring Nik Void of Factory Floor: Carter Tutti Void's
Transverse, which is excellent. Ostensibly a four-track release, there's a
studio excerpt V4 studio (Slap 1) which is available from (at least)
Amazon.
There's also a much more obscure fifth "unreleased" track cruX which I managed
to "buy" from one of the web shops for zero cost.
The other big musical surprise for me last year was Beth Jeans Houghton and the
Hooves of Destiny: Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose. I knew nothing of BJH,
although it turns out I've heard some of her singles repeatedly on Radio 6, but
her band's guitarist Ed Blazey and his partner lived in the flat below me
briefly. In that time I managed to get to the pub with him just once, but he
kindly gave me a copy of their album on 12" afterwards. It reminds me a bit of
Goldfrapp circa "Seventh Tree": I really like it and I'm looking forward to
whatever they do next.
Reznor's How To Destroy Angels squeezed out An Omen EP which failed to set
my world on fire as a coherent collection, despite a few strong songs
individually.
In movies, sadly once again I'd say most of the things I recall seeing would be
"also rans". Prometheus was a disappointment, although I will probably rewatch
it in 2D at least once. The final Batman was fun although not groundbreaking to
me and it didn't surpass Ledger's efforts in The Dark Knight. Inception remains
my favourite Nolan by a long shot. Looper is perhaps the stand-out, not least
because it came from nowhere and I managed to avoid any hype.
In games, I moaned about having moaning about too many
games, most of which are much older than 2012. I started
Borderlands 2 after enjoying Borderlands (disqualified on age grounds) but
to this day haven't persued it much further. I mostly played the two similar
meta-games: The Playstation Plus download free games in a fixed time period
and the more sporadic but bountiful humble bundle whack-a-mole. More on
these another time.
In reading, as is typical I mostly read stuff that was not written in 2012.
Of that which was, Charles Stross's The Apocalypse Codex was an
improvement over The Fuller Memorandum which I did not enjoy much, but in
general I'm finding I much prefer Stross's older work to his newer; David
Byrne's How Music Works was my first (and currently last) Google Books ebook
purchase, and I read it entirely on a Nexus 7. I thoroughly enjoyed the book
but the experience has not made a convert of me away from paper. He leans
heavily on his own experiences which is inevitable but fortunately they are
wide and numerous. Iain Banks' Stonemouth was an enjoyable romp around a
fictional Scottish town (one which, I am reliably informed, is incredibly
realistical rendered). One of his "mainstream" novels, It avoided a particular
plot pattern that I've grown to dread with Banks, much to my suprise (and
pleasure). Finally, the stand-out pleasant surprise novel of the year was
Pratchett and Baxter's The Long Earth. With a plot device not unlike Banks'
Transition or Stross's Family Trade series, the pair managed to write a
journey-book capturing the sense-of-wonder that these multiverse plots are
good for. (Or perhaps I have a weakness for them). It's hard to find the lines
between Baxter and Pratchett's writing, but the debatably-reincarnated Tibetan
Monk-cum-Artificial Intelligence 'Lobsang' must surely be Pratchett's.
Pratchett managed to squeeze out another non-Discworld novel (Dodger) as well
as a long-overdue short story collection, although I haven't read either of
them yet.
On to 2013's write-up...
Somalia's chief exports appear to be morally-ambiguous Salon articles about piracy and sophomoric evidence against libertarianism. However, it is the former topic that Captain Phillips concerns itself with, inspired by the hijacking of the Maersk Alabama container ship in 2009.
What is truth? In the end, Captain Phillips does not rise above Pontius Pilate in providing an answer, but it certainly tries using more refined instruments than irony or leaden sarcasm.
This motif pervades the film. Obviously, it is based on a "true story" and brings aboard that baggage, but it also permeates the plot in a much deeper sense. For example, Phillips and the US Navy lie almost compulsively to the pirates, whilst the pirates only really lie once (where they put Phillips in greater danger).
Notice further that Phillips only starts to tell the truth when he thinks all hope is lost. These telling observations become even more fascinating when you realise that they must be based on the testimony of the, well, liars. Clearly, deception is a weapon to be monopolised and there are few limits on what good guys can or should lie about if they believe they can save lives.
Even Phillip's nickname ("Irish") is a falsehood he straight-up admits he is an American citizen.
Futhermore, there is an utterly disarming epilogue where Phillips is being treated for shock by clinical efficient medical staff. Not only will this scuttle any "blanket around the shoulders" clich but is probably a highly accurate portrayal of what actually happens post-trauma. This echoes the kind of truth Werner Herzog aims for in his filmmaking as well his guilt-inducing duality between uncomfortable lingering and compulsive viewing.
Lastly, a starter for a meta-discussion: can a film based on real-world events even be "spoilered"? Hearing headlines on the radio before you read your newspaper hardly robs you of a literary journey...
Captain Phillips does have some quotidian problems. Firstly, the only tool for ratcheting up tension is for the Somalians to launch verbal broadsides at the Americans, with each compromise somehow escalating the situation. This technique is effective but well before the climatic rescue scene where it is really needed it has been subject to the most extreme diminishing returns.
(I cannot be the first to notice the "Africans festooned with guns shouting incomphensively" trope I hope it is based on a Babel-esque mechanism of disorientation from miscommunication rather than anything more unsavoury.)
The racist idea that Africans prefer an AK-47 rotated about the Z-axis is socially constructed.
Secondly, the US Navy acts like a teacher with an Ofsted inspector observing quietly from the corner of the classroom; far too well-behaved it suspends belief, with no post-kill gloating or even the tiniest of post-arrest congratulations. Whilst nobody wants to see the Navy overreact badly to other military branches getting all the glory, nobody wants to see a suspiciously bland recruitment vehicle either. Paradoxically, this hermetic treatment made me unduly fascinated by them as if they were part of some military "uncanny valley". Two quick observations:
All US Somali interactions are recorded by a naval officer. No doubt a value-for-money defense against a USS Abu Ghraib, but knowing the plot is based on factual events, it was perhaps a little too Baudrillardian to ponder how the presence of the Navy's cameras in a scene actually lent weight to the film's version of events, crucially without me even knowing whether the parallel "real-life" footage is verifiable or not.
The navigational computers not only seem to require lines to drawn repeatedly between points of interest, but the Maersk Alabama's arbitrary relabelling as MOTHERSHIP seems to imply that an officer could humourously rename a radar contact to something unbecoming of a 12A classification.
The drone footage: I'd love to write an essay about how Call of Duty might have influenced (or even be) cinema.
Finally, despite the title, the film is actually about two captains; the skillful liar Phillips and ... well, that's the real problem. Whilst Captain Muse is certainly no caricatured Hook, we are offered little depth beyond a "You're not just a fisherman" faux-revelation that leads nowhere. I was left inventing reasons for his akrasia so that he made any sense whatsoever.
One could charitably argue that the film attempts to stay objective on Muse, but the inability for the film to take any obvious ethical stance actually seems to confuse and then compromise the narrative. What deeper truth is actually being revealed? Is this film or documentary?
Worse still, the moral vacuum is invariably filled by the viewer's existing political outlook: are Somali pirates victims of circumstance who are forced into (alas, regrettable) swashbuckling adventures to pacify plank-threatening warlords? Or are they violent and dangerous criminals who habour an irrational resentment against the West, flimsily represented by material goods in shipping containers?
Your improvised answer to this Rorschach test will always sit more haphazardly in the film than any pre-constructed treatment ever could.
6/10
Somalia's chief exports appear to be morally-ambiguous Salon articles about piracy and sophomoric evidence against libertarianism. However, it is the former topic that Captain Phillips concerns itself with, inspired by the hijacking of the Maersk Alabama container ship in 2009.
What is truth? In the end, Captain Phillips does not rise above Pontius Pilate in providing an answer, but it certainly tries using more refined instruments than irony or leaden sarcasm.
This motif pervades the film. Obviously, it is based on a "true story" and brings aboard all that well-travelled baggage, but it also permeates the plot in a much deeper sense. For example, Phillips and the US Navy lie almost compulsively to the pirates, whilst the pirates only really lie once where they put Phillips in greater danger.
Notice further that Phillips only starts to tell the truth when he thinks all hope is lost. These telling observations become even more fascinating when you realise that they must be based on the testimony of the, well, liars. Clearly, deception is a weapon to be monopolised and there are few limits on what good guys can or should lie about if they believe they can save lives.
Even Phillip's nickname ("Irish") is a falsehood he straight-up admits he is an American citizen.
Lastly, there is an utterly disarming epilogue where Phillips is being treated for shock by clinical efficient medical staff. Not only will it scuttle any "blanket around the shoulders" clich but is probably a highly accurate portrayal of what actually happens post-trauma. This echoes the kind of truth Werner Herzog often aims for in his filmmaking as well his guilt-inducing duality between uncomfortable lingering and compulsive viewing.
Another angle worthy of discussion: can a film based on real-world events even be "spoilered"? Hearing headlines on the before you read the newspaper hardly robs you of a literary journey...
Captain Phillips does have some quotidian problems. Firstly, the only tool for ratcheting up tension is for the Somalians to launch verbal broadsides at the Americans, with each compromise somehow escalating the situation further. This technique is genuinely effective but well before the climatic rescue scene where it is really needed it has been subject to the most extreme diminishing returns.
(I cannot be the first to notice the "Africans festooned with guns shouting incomphensively" trope I hope it is based on a Babel-esque mechanism of disorientation and miscommunication rather than anything, frankly, unsavoury.)
The racist idea that Africans prefer a AK-47 rotated about the Z-axis is socially constructed.
Secondly, the US Navy acts like a teacher with an Ofsted inspector observing quietly from the corner of the classroom; far too well-behaved it suspends belief, with no post-kill gloating or even the tiniest of post-arrest congratulations. Whilst nobody wants to see the Navy overreact badly to other military branches getting all the glory, nobody wants to see a suspiciously bland recruitment vehicle either. Paradoxically, this hermetic treatment made me unduly fascinated by them, as if they were part of some military "uncanny valley". Two quick observations:
All US Somali interactions are recorded by a naval officer. No doubt a value-for-money defense against a USS Abu Ghraib, but knowing the plot is based on a factual events, it was perhaps a little too Baudrillardian to ponder how the presence of the Navy's cameras in a scene actually lent weight to the film's version of events, crucially without me even knowing whether the parallel "real life" footage is verifiable or not.
The navigational computers not only seem to require lines to drawn repeatedly between points of interest, but the Maersk Alabama's arbitrary relabelling as MOTHERSHIP seems to imply that an officer could humourously rename a contact to something unbecoming of a 12A classification.
The drone footage: I'd love to read (or write) an essay about how Call of Duty might have influenced cinema.
Finally, despite the title, the film is actually about two captains; the skillful liar Phillips and ... well, that's the real problem. Whilst Captain Muse is certainly no caricatured Hook, we are offered little depth beyond a "You're not just a fisherman" faux-revelation that leads nowhere. I was left inventing reasons for his akrasia so that he made any sense whatsoever.
One could charitably argue that the film attempts to stay objective on Muse, but the inability for the film to take any obvious ethical stance actually seems to confuse and then compromise the narrative. What deeper truth is actually being revealed? Is this film or documentary?
Worse still, the moral vacuum is invariably filled by the viewer's existing political outlook: are Somali pirates victims of circumstance who are forced into (alas, regrettable) swashbuckling adventures to pacify plank-threatening warlords? Or are they violent and dangerous criminals who habour an irrational resentment against the West, flimsily represented by material goods in shipping containers?
Your improvised answer to this Rorschach test will always sit more haphazardly in the film than any pre-constructed treatment ever could.
6/10
I read a lot this year - I'll write more about that and reflections on
goodreads in another post - but most of the things I read weren't published
in 2013. (I should also write a bit about my thoughts on e-readers). However,
it seems I have enough to write about 2013's novels to make a round-up post
worthwhile, so here we go.
This year, crime author Robert Galbraith published his first novel The
Cuckoo's Calling. I'd never have heard of it if Galbraith was not outed as an
alias for Joanne "JK" Rowling. Clues that Rowling was working on a detective
story exist as early as a Guardian preview article in
2012
for her last novel, The Casual Vacancy. Further hints, for me, that this was
no first-time author were the taglines from Ian Rankin and Val McDermid on the
cover, writers of a calibre I'd be surprised a new author could attract.
However I don't know whether they were on the pre-unveiling cover or not.
Rowling was upset be outed, having enjoyed the freedom to write without the
baggage of expectation that she is subject to. I hope she's pleased: prior to
her unmasking the novel was warmly received by the (admittedly relatively
small) number of people who read it.
And a very good novel it is too. It starts with a genre clich of a
grizzled, meloncholy detective, Mr. Cormoran Strike, in an upstairs office with
a neon light flickering through the window, but fleshes the story out
both forwards - a client, a mysterious death - and backwards - how did Mr.
Strike end up in that upstairs office - living out of it, no less? As is
traditional for the genre there's a very clever twist.
What I really enjoyed about Cormoran Strike was Galbraith/Rowling moving
quickly from Chandler-esque everyman to a well fleshed-out, complex
protagonist, intertwining the development of the character with the unfolding
of the wider plot. I'm looking forward to the sequel, expected in 2014.
A second surprise favourite this year was Lauren Beukes' time-tripping crime
story The Shining Girls. A monsterous murder of women somehow finds a room
in Chicago that lets him travel through time (or perhaps the room finds him).
He uses this facility to stalk and murder a set of Shining Girls: women who,
for one reason or another, literally 'shine' in his perception of them. One
such woman survives his first attack and decides to try and find out who
attacked her, and why.
The crimes are described in a brutal fashion which - from a distance - resemble
the sometimes glorified violence for which crime fiction is sometimes criticised,
but the focus of the story is very much on the victims: they are fully fleshed
out characters and each death is felt by the reader as a genuine tragedy.
I discovered Beukes when her earlier novel Zoo City was included in a Humble
eBook bundle. On reading The Shining Girls I felt that the novel deserved to
be more widely known than I would expect it to be trapped in the ghetto of
genre fiction, so I was pleased to discover that the very mainstream Richard
and Judy Book Club discovered it.
In established author news, Terry Pratchett, having adopted speech recognition
for writing (to combat his debilitating Alzheimer's) has seemingly managed to
accelerate his rate of production and squeezed out at least two this year: The
Long War with Stephen Baxter is the sequel to 2012's The Long Earth which I
very much enjoyed, but it really felt like "difficult second novel" to me.
Hopefully there'll be a third.
Raising Steam, the 40th Discworld novel, was an enjoyable romp around the
concept of steam trains, featuring the relatively new Moist von Lipwig who has
managed to become one of my favourite Discworld characters. I can't think of
much more to say about the novel, really. It's a Discworld novel, probably not
the best introduction to the series for a new reader, but will give a reader
familiar with the franchise everything they expect, and possibly no more.
Iain Banks sadly died this year, shortly after the publication of his
last novel, The Quarry. It's sat on my hardback shelf for the time being. I
couldn't bring myself to read it in 2013. I did read his last SF offering from
the year prior, The Hydrogen Sonata. Sadly, yet coincidentally, both of these
books examine the nature of living and dying, The Quarry in particular from
the point of view of a terminal cancer sufferer. I have a small backlog of
unread Banks fiction which I want to take my time over with.
Finally, whilst not really a book, I thoroughly enjoyed the BBC's 2013
adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. Natalie Dormer wrote a
piece
on the making of the drama which should serve as a good introduction. At the
time of writing, most of the programmes have disappeared from iPlayer, but I
would be surprised if this wasn't released commercially at some point.
Since becoming interested in triathlon in October of last year, my goal in 2013 was not to just finish a "70.3" (or "Half-Ironman"), but to complete one in under 5 hours.
At the time, each discipline was woefully inadequate; I had not swum in over a decade, my cycling was average and I had only begun running again after years away from exercise.
The somewhat arbitrary target time would dictate my training. For example, the high proportion of time spent on the bike combined with the injury-sensitive nature of running meant that cycling would have a highest return on investment of the three disciplines. Despite that, I would need to take the run seriously but carefully - I decided to enter a series of monthly 10K races where I could steadily reduce my times over the year.
Races themselves formed a crucial part of my preparation and a carefully balanced race calendar was surprisingly important, balancing upcoming milestones that would provide an achievable goal as well as uncovering weaknesses in enough time so they could be worked on.
Whilst I did post about my first triathlon, I felt no compulsion with the interleaving five or six races as I was evaluating them in the context of the 70.3 rather than as races in their own right.
Swim
Distance
1900m
Time
37:42
Whilst this wasn't my worst open water swim, it was certainly not my best. The first 500m was straightforward, but I lost my form over the next 500m and I overcompensated with excessive kick. My calves responded by cramping badly two or three times after that, losing both momentum and time.
Curiously, whenever I could identify my speed relative to my effort (for example, by some underwater reeds) I could use that as feedback and my rotation (etc.) would temporarily return. Pool swimming always has markers of this kind, whilst a murky lake does not.
In conclusion, my lack of open water training outside of races held me back more than I expected.
Bike
Distance
52 miles
Time
2:22 (21.9 mph average)
I had thoroughly absorbed the advice that you should prepare for your primary race so that it feels like another day at the office. On this criterion, the bike leg was almost perfect.
My nutrition strategy energy drink every 5 minutes, gel every 30 minutes worked fine until mile 35 where I felt like I had taken on too much fluid (and no time to take a bathroom break).
I had a temporary hiccup with my rear derailleur but my "tame" 52/34 12x28 gearing was vindicated on the climbs, although in retrospect that might mostly be schadenfreude.
Tens of hours acclimatising to a time trial bike was rewarded by being able to spend the entire leg in "aero" position (ignoring 90-degree turns or serious gradients), improving efficiency.
Run
Distance
13.1 miles (21km)
Time
1:54:18 (5:25/km)
I had prepared a chart which provided the pace I required based on the race time at the start of the run. I would then only need to monitor my run pace instead of repeatedly extrapolating a finish time as even basic arithmetic can become impossible when fatigued.
This strategy was chosen as I was too risk-adverse to aim for a faster time than strictly required; the downside of missing the target from aiming too high and "blowing up" outweighed going a few minutes faster overall. Despite that, I ran half-marathon personal best.
Unfortunately, due to pressing the wrong watch button after the swim, the chart was worthless unless I could assume the race started exactly at 6:30AM. With no other option I decided to trust that with some padding, but the uncertainly it added was unsettling. Adding to that feeling, my left hip started to twinge at 7K, something it has never done before.
My plan was to get to 16K, take a caffeine gel and then keep ratcheting up the pace until the finish. In my long run training I could speed up to a 4:10/km pace but after 5 hours of racing and being reasonably sure I was going to reach my goal, the best I could summon was 4:45/km.
My form completely shot, I crossed the finish line and got into a fetal position in the shade behind a tent, scaring the race organisers for a few minutes.
Overall
Total time
4:56:50
Writing this the day after the race, I am still a little unsure of how I feel. I am obviously extremely content that I reached my goal but given the volume and detail of preparation it was not a huge surprise to me on race day that I did so.
This combined with the "real" work and progress being achieved throughout the training seems to have robbed the event of some element of triumph it could have had, but that in itself was somewhat expected.
Where next? I had always dismissed the consensus view of needing to take a decent break after the season has ended but now I am looking forward to putting triathlon-specific training on hold for a while and explore other things. I highly doubt this will be my last triathlon though.
(Full results)
As a follow-up to yesterday's post listing my favourite 
We first see Buffalo Bill at the thirty-two minute mark. (Or, more tellingly, he sees us.) Delaying the viewer's introduction to the film's villain is the mark of a secure and confident screenplay, even if it was popularised by the budget-restricted Jaws (1975) which hides the eponymous shark for one hour and 21 minutes.
The messenger turns to watch Starling run off to Crawford. Are his eyes involuntarily following the movement or he is impressed by Starling's gumption? Or, almost two decades after John Berger's male gaze, is he simply checking her out? The film, thankfully, leaves it to us.
The cold open of Hannibal (2001) makes for a worthy comparison. The audience remembers they loved the dialogue between Starling and Lecter, so it is clumsily mentioned. We remember Barney too, so he is shoehorned in as well. Lacking the confidence to introduce new signifiers to its universe, Red Dragon (2002) aside, the hollow, 'clip show' feel of Hannibal is a taste of the zero-calorie sequels to come in the next two decades.
Dr. Lecter's upright stance when we meet him reminds me of the third act of Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious (1946), another picture freighted with meaningful stairs. Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956) began the now-shopworn trope of concealing a weapon in a flower box.
Some days ago, me and 
Valhalla eventually managed to get all features activated, purely using
packages from Jessie+Backports:
The result was a chat system in which I could see the same conversation history
on my phone and on my laptop (with gajim)(https://gajim.org/), and have it
Somalia's chief exports appear to be morally-ambiguous Salon articles about piracy and sophomoric evidence against libertarianism. However, it is the former topic that Captain Phillips concerns itself with, inspired by the hijacking of the 
Since becoming interested in triathlon in October of last year, my goal in 2013 was not to just finish a "70.3" (or "Half-Ironman"), but to complete one in under 5 hours.
At the time, each discipline was woefully inadequate; I had not swum in over a decade, my cycling was average and I had only begun running again after years away from exercise.
The somewhat arbitrary target time would dictate my training. For example, the high proportion of time spent on the bike combined with the injury-sensitive nature of running meant that cycling would have a highest return on investment of the three disciplines. Despite that, I would need to take the run seriously but carefully - I decided to enter a series of monthly 10K races where I could steadily reduce my times over the year.
Races themselves formed a crucial part of my preparation and a carefully balanced race calendar was surprisingly important, balancing upcoming milestones that would provide an achievable goal as well as uncovering weaknesses in enough time so they could be worked on.
Whilst I did post about 
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