Floating weightless, calling, calling home April 28, 2021
Posted by dolorosa12 in reviews, television.Tags: anna winger, deutschland 83, deutschland 86, deutschland 89
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It’s 1983, and a young man runs, in panic, through bucolic German farmland. The sun is shining, and he flees as if death is at his heels. After several moments, the scene changes to more suburban surroundings, and we follow the young man into a brightly-lit supermarket. Once inside, the man is disoriented and overwhelmed, rendered immobile by the dazzling array of riches on the supermarket shelves. The sheer variety and abundance of what’s on offer to shoppers stops him in his tracks, and we see, in those silent moments, an utter transformation take place, as he realises everything he’s been told about the deprivations and hardships suffered by the capitalists in the West was a lie. Meanwhile, upbeat 1980s synthpop plays. Those early moments of showrunner Anna Winger’s Deutschland 83 tell you exactly what you’re going to get: a TV show that’s hard to pigeonhole, at once political drama, tense spy thriller, family saga, black comedy, with a healthy dollop of Ostalgie and a blaring 1980s soundtrack. The first season was followed with Deutschland 86, and, later Deutschland 89, which has just concluded airing in the UK. It’s a show that keeps you guessing, uncertain — the effect is as disorienting for the viewer as living in the dying days of the DDR is for the show’s East German characters. Over the course of its six-year chronology, it tells the stories of seemingly unimportant people swept up in the seismic shifts of geopolitics and history.
The first season, set in 1983, begins when 24-year-old border guard Martin Rauch finds himself in Bonn, in West Germany, blackmailed into spying on the West German military for the HVA (East German foreign intelligence), constantly terrified of discovery, and slowly realising that everything he was told about the West was a lie. Meanwhile, he meets an interesting cast of West German characters, and comes to know more about his own family history. In Season 2, Martin has been exiled to Angola, but is called by into the spying fold, ostensibly to help the anti-apartheid movement, but in reality cynically to undermine it, as the DDR’s desparation for cash has led to them selling arms to the apartheid regime. (The East German government did a lot of extremely shady things to raise money in those years, including selling blood abroad without checking it for HIV, selling arms to both sides in the Iran-Iraq war, and even appropriating antiques and funds from its own citizens and selling them abroad.) The third and final season begins with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then gives viewers a whirlwind tour around Germany on the brink of reunification, as well as other parts of Europe emerging from behind the crumbling Iron Curtain.
All three series anchor their characters’ personal stories with real historical events — the Able Archer 83 crisis in Season 1, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Season 2, and, in Season 3, terrorist attacks by the Red Army Faction which led to the murder of the head of Deutsche Bank — as well as the fall of the Wall, the reunfication of Germany, and the violent collapse of the Ceaușescu in Romania. While I think this works well, as the series progresses, I have to admit I found parts of it less convincing, as the contortions it required to justify Martin’s involvement in such affairs became ever more flimsy and tenuous. The spying element always felt like the weakest of the show, because it required us to treat the rather hapless and sentimental Martin as a ruthlessly competent spy, quick to inspire trust across both sides of the political divide. (And the fact that so many women kept falling into bed with him felt even more silly — James Bond he is not!)
Where the show truly succeeded was as a family drama, letting the tensions, secrets, and small deceptions and revalations play out against the tense backdrop of the Stati surveillance state, and the no less claustrophobic atmosphere of the upper echelons of political and military authority in the West. The show had a great knack for puncturing the absurdity of the dying days of the Cold War — the assumptions on both sides are shown to be false, the power they’re used to prop up is hollow, and this shines through most clearly in the experiences of the show’s characters. There’s a particular poignancy in watching the series from a distance of thirty years: all the characters’ efforts to make better a world whose end was imminent seem bittersweet and futile. There is suffering and cruelty — indeed, some characters face moments of genuine menace and danger — but there is love, too, and people just trying to muddle through their own complicated lives.
There are some great moments of farcical humour, too. When Martin finally manages to smuggle out the requisite information for his East German handlers in Season 1, it’s in a file format compatible with a computer that no one in East Germany possesses, so there is a mad scramble to try to locate the requisite equipment. In Season 3, when the wall comes down, one Stasi functionary anxiously demands that all the shredders in the building be fetched immediately. An underling whispers something urgently in his ear, and he revises the request: ‘bring me all the functioning shredders in the building.’ These humorous moments are a great contrast to the scary and serious politics and spycraft — but they also do a great job of puncturing the seemingly unshakeable authority of the dictatorial regime, and perhaps offer insight into how ordinary people in the 1980s gained the courage to question the realities of their lives. They could see the whole thing was a house of cards, and they simply required the right moment to knock everything down.
So, did the show stick the landing? I’m not convinced. The conclusion was so absurdly, melodramatically over the top that it pushed the suspension of disbelief even further than I was prepared to tolerate. But, in the end, I found that this didn’t matter. The destination made little sense, but the journey to get there had been so gripping and enjoyable that I felt the whole thing had been worthwhile.
Scatter like paper in the eye of the storm March 20, 2021
Posted by dolorosa12 in blogging, fandom, internet.Tags: musings, online literary community
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Several years ago, one of my friends created his own social media platform. Frustrated with the atmosphere of despair and apocalypticism he was encountering daily on Twitter and Facebook, he envisaged a community that was slower paced, calmer, and just more cheerful than what had come to be the typical experience on the biggest social media platforms. The space he created was just that — an oasis of calm, inhabited only by those in the know, which mainly meant his good friends, and a handful of people from those friends’ social circles. The site has a robust code of conduct, but what really keeps it pleasant, relaxed and peaceful is its miniscule user base, and probably the fact that most users know each other well. Just as they wouldn’t typically create disharmony in one another’s living rooms or over coffee at a cafe table, the community is full of essentially like-minded people who have little interest in discord and conflict in their shared online space.
I’ve been online for a little over thirteen years, which is not long in internet terms, but it’s long enough to have witnessed a migration from message boards (supplemented with IRC or MSN chatrooms for those who wanted real-time socialising) to Livejournal and the comments sections of blogs hosted on Blogspot or WordPress, and from there to Tumblr, and from there to Twitter. (There’s something of a migration to Discord happening at the moment, but people who are hanging out there have gone where I can’t follow.) With each move, communication became more and more abbreviated, happened at greater speed, and gave people less control over who was viewing, and able to share, their words. And I can remember that what tempted me onto the newer, shinier platforms was not that ‘everyone’ had moved there, but rather that various friends would sing their praises in contrast to wherever we were hanging out before, and in particular that they would enthuse that people were more pleasant, less argumentative, and in general had created a better community than whatever we were experiencing on previous platforms. (The idea of Twitter, and later Tumblr, being sold to me as less argumentative, abusive communities looks laughable in hindsight, but that was really the rhetoric at the time.)
I don’t want to pretend these earlier, Web 1.0 platforms were amazing utopias. I witnessed many a message board kerfuffle, and in the years in which Livejournal was in its heyday there were numerous community-shattering episodes, vicious arguments, microaggressions, scams, and situations which became downright abusive. However, there are two elements that these platforms share that I think their later replacements lack which did something to at least soften the blow when tensions, arguments or hostilities flared up.
The first is the slower pace. Although I did witness particularly lively comment sections, or forum threads that ballooned rapidly over the course of a few hours, the need to actually put something into the world (even if it was a single word or emoticon in a comment) meant that participation involved some sort of active contribution, rather than simply passively clicking ‘retweet’ or ‘reblog’ and shoving content in front of the eyes of hundreds, thousands, or millions of followers. This, combined with the ability to limit who was able to read, interact with (and therefore share) one’s words meant that there was an element of self-selection into communities of vaguely like-minded people with shared interests and outlooks. Everything felt more like an active choice, and conversations unfolded over several days (or sometimes even weeks and months) in a handful of circumscribed locations.
I would argue that the second, more damaging element is the need for many people — particularly those who make a living by writing words — to monetise whatever platform they happen to be using. Back in the day, the overlapping book-reviewing, professional writing (and editing, and publishing industry) and transformative fandom communities in which I participated had more of the sense of various groups of friends, hanging out together, discussing shared interests. No doubt there was a degree of pressure on the writers and aspiring writers to use their blogs to further their careers, but those with publishing contracts could rely on marketing professionals employed by their publishers to shoulder a lot more of the load when it came to actually selling their books. These days, of course, there is an expectation that the writers do this marketing work themselves, that they’re active on social media, and those seeking to enter the industry require an extensive Twitter following to demonstrate a large potential readership. This, of course, rewards those who are Extremely Online, active on Twitter (which means in practice alert to, and involved in, lots of painful arguments, and having to think their thoughts in real time, in public, all day long), and makes things a lot more fraught. In addition, as it becomes harder and harder to earn a decent living through publishing books (or newspaper articles, or criticism and commentary) alone, writers in these industries have to seek out new ways to monetise their online presence, leading to Patreon, Substack, and tip jars. All the latter have significant issues (in fact, in the past few days the problems inherent in Substack have been laid bare in particularly stark terms).
In the past few years, I’ve witnessed author after author cut back on their Twitter presence — moving from active, constant access and conversation to something more akin to blasting out updates —presumably burnt out. I can’t say I blame them: I find Twitter a difficult space to inhabit, but at least I don’t have to be there, as for me it is purely a social space. When it doesn’t bring me happiness (which, to be honest, is most of the time; I’m not built for constant, real-time grief and despair at the cruelty and pain of the world, which is basically what my Twitter experience is like) I can remove myself from the space. I have no solution to the cruel bind in which a lot of people find themselves: stuck on a platform they find stressful and upsetting, required to be there for economic reasons. (The saddest thing of all is that a lot of authors have said that social media presence has minimal impact on book sales — it’s just that there’s an expectation they be there.) Interestingly, over the past few months, I’ve witnessed another phenomenon: various people on Twitter lamenting the end of the old blogging community, saying how much they miss Livejournal, and so on. While I wouldn’t recommend a return to LJ, there are similar spaces online (Dreamwidth above all has a small, but dedicated, active community), and all that’s really lacking is the will — and, one suspects, the time, the energy and the guarantee of a relatively smooth pipeline funneling subscribers to paying platforms.
My personal opinion is that we will always be let down by platforms that are not created and controlled solely by the community which uses them. Dreamwidth works because it was built by people who were sick of being let down by other platforms changing their terms of service in order to monetise them, to the detriment of their long-term users — and it’s still mainly used by that same core of users. My friend’s tiny social network is similar. Crucially, neither platform has ads, and neither platform sells its users’ data. For obvious reasons, such platforms are not going to make their creators any money, nor is it easy for users to monetise their presence. And because money has been removed as a possibility, their userbase remains relatively small, conversations unfold in a leisurely way, and there is less awkwardness about parasocial relationships. My feeling is that if enough people genuinely miss those kinds of slow-moving, conversation-rich Web 1.0 spaces, they will return to them (or build new versions), but only if they can let go of the idea that their entire online presence needs to be monetised. I don’t blame people who lack the energy for that — it’s harder and harder to make a sustainable living through the written word, and people’s decisions will obviously be driven by their own circumstances. It’s a fraught situation, and there are no easy answers.
All the walls of dreaming, they were torn wide open January 31, 2021
Posted by dolorosa12 in books, reviews.Tags: all my dangerous friends, oh if tomorrow comes, paved with bones and good intentions, reviews, samantha shannon, the bone season, the mask falling
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The first question a lot of people will be asking about The Mask Falling, the fourth novel in Samantha Shannon’s dystopian fantasy Bone Season series, is was it worth the wait? As a fan of Isobelle Carmody, who took more than thirty years to complete her own series of dystpian science fiction (and who had a gap of ten years in between some books in the series!), I have to laugh a bit at anyone who feels that a gap of less than four years (with an epic doorstopper, and multiple novellas, published during this time) is an interminable wait! But yes, it was worth the wait. The Mask Falling is an accomplished, twisty, emotionaly wrenching story that plays to Shannon’s considerable strengths as an author.
I’d been wanting two things from The Bone Season books for a while now: a look at the wider world beyond the islands of Britain and Ireland, and a deeper exploration of Paige and Arcturus’s* relationship. With the pair dropped into Scion Paris as fugitives on an undercover mission, I got both things in The Mask Falling. The book sees Paige trying to navigate treacherous waters, pulled in different directions by the criminal clairvoyant syndicate in Paris, the demands of her own syndicate back in London, the mysterious Domino resistance network, and other groups with agendas of their own. The book takes place against a backdrop of increasing crackdowns and violence against voyants, an aggressive militaristic expansion of Scion’s borders, and various dystopian horrors spreading into formerly safe places.
Each book in the series so far has tackled a slightly different genre — The Bone Season was a prison break, The Mime Order was a murder mystery, and The Song Rising was a heist. The Mask Falling is a spy novel, and, perhaps as a nod to its French setting, is influenced in part by real-world accounts of World War II-era spies operating in Vichy France. Many such spies were women, a pattern reflected in Shannon’s novel. She did a grat job of depicting the rather callous treatment of such operatives by their handlers and wider network — the scale of the threat they face means that all operatives (even those as supernaturally gifted as Paige) are by necessity somewhat disposable, and the handlers cannot afford to accommodate operatives’ physical illness or deep, unresolved psychological trauma.
The book’s depiction of trauma recovery was extraordinary, and one of its strongest features. Shannon does a great job of depicting Paige’s intersecting traumas — not just those caused by her recent experiences of torture in The Song Rising, but also the wounds in her childhood caused by the invasion of her country by a totalitarian regime, the violent reprisals against its resistance movement, and her long exile at the heart of a hostile enemy country. It’s not just that she has a fear of water and a ruptured relationship with Arcturus due to her more recent expeirences — she reacts badly to Scion invasions of free countries due to her childhood in Ireland, and oscillates widly between instant, all-in trust of people, and guarded, cautious distancing from potential allies due to a lifetime of exile, exploitation and betrayal. In particular, because her few experiences of community and (a veneer of) protection came in situations where she was viewed as an asset, a weapon to be wielded, she struggles to trust that anyone could value her for herself, rather than for her powers, role in the syndicate, or political symbolism.
This combination of traumas means she responds badly to danger and crises — tending to either leap into situations all dreamwalking guns blazing without cautiously considering the consequences, or otherwise be easily manipulated by enemies who know exactly how to push her buttons. There were several such moments in The Mask Falling, and they broke my heart. As a fellow survivor of (very different forms of) trauma, I applaud the care, compassion, and empathy with which Samantha Shannon has written Paige’s story in this book.
The Mask Falling is a perfect midpoint to this brilliant dystopian series. It broadens and deepens our understanding of this richly imagined world, and every new corner explored feels lived-in and redolent with history. Old characters return after several books’ absence, and we have a clearer view of their roles and motivations. We meet new characters who draw Paige’s story forward. She and Arcturus finally have the time to think about their relationship — shared traumas, deceptions, power imbalances and all. And the book ends on a cliffhanger that had me both cursing Shannon’s diabolical genius, and applauding her skill at drawing so many different threads together into such a intriguing tapestry. I cannot wait for the next book!
*Arcturus is the name of the character Paige — and the narrative — has previously referred to as ‘Warden’. But as he points out early on in The Mask Falling, Warden is a title, and he and Paige share an intimacy that makes her use of his name, rather than his title, far more appropriate. As Paige switches to referring to him as Arcturus in this book, I do the same in this review, and in any future discussion of the series.
Outside the frame September 26, 2020
Posted by dolorosa12 in books, childhood, reviews.Tags: adèle geras, the girls in the velvet frame
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Adèle Geras’s children’s book, The Girls in the Velvet Frame, has been one of my very favourites since I was eight or nine years old and plucked it off a shelf in my local public library. Over the past few months, I’ve been revisiting a lot of these old favourites, as their gentle familiarity has been comforting and nourishing during the stress of the pandemic. I have to say that this book in particular holds up really, really well: it was published in 1978, I first read it in the mid-’90s, and it remains the same warm, kind, hopeful story. It’s the literary equivalent of a soft, heavy blanket or a bowl of hot soup.
The book is a gentle piece of children’s historical fiction — the story of a widowed Jewish mother and her five daughters, struggling to get by in genteel poverty in 1913 Jerusalem. Each daughter — shy thirteen-year-old Rifka, who has long shouldered a parent-like responsibility in the family, cynical eleven-year-old Chava, sensitive, bookish, romantic eight-year-old Naomi, fastidious six-year-old Dvora, and mischievous three-year-old Shoshie — is carefully drawn, and the reader gets a strong sense not just of their individual personalities, but how they fit into the family dynamic. The result is a quiet, meandering story which reads as both a vivid picture of a specific time and place, and also a series of evocative portraits of the people who inhabit its pages.
There are three narrative threads running through the story: the first steps towards Rifka’s arranged marriage (she and David, the boy in question, are unbelievably shy, and their slow courtship, under the watchful eyes of both of their respective families, is adorably awkward), the girls’ glamorous unmarried aunt Mimi rekindling an old love affair with Max, a man she knew back in her younger, wilder days (the scandal being that he’s a Christian), and the sisters’ and Mimi’s attempt to track down the girls’ older brother Isaac, who travelled to New York to seek his fortune, and vanished without so much as a letter, causing anguish and heartbreak for his mother. Each of these threads is carefully and exquisitely written, woven beautifully with the quiet, everyday lives of the family. I was struck, on rereading the book, how busy the sisters and their mother Sarah always were: all their conversations and emotional moments take place simultaneously with incidental pieces of work: peeling vegetables, boiling water, mending clothing or planning the evening meal. Even at rest, their hands are constantly working. (Mimi’s house, in contrast, is an oasis of repose, like a tiny jewellery box filled with sugared almonds and Turkish Delight — is it any wonder the girls love to visit?)
In truth, The Girls in the Velvet Frame is a celebration of the quiet, powerful, ordinary lives and work of girls and women: cooking, cleaning, caring for smaller children, stretching every last penny (there’s lots of discussion of hand-me-down dresses, bathing in the kitchen so as not to waste hot water, and so on). This work is at the heart of the story, and is given the dignity and primacy that it would have had (and still does have) in millions of similar women’s lives. The book is also a celebration of community and neighbourliness, vividly depicting the networks of care and obligation stretching outside a single household, and, indeed, across oceans. In our current circumstances, we could do with being reminded of the value and beauty and power of this sense of community as much as possible!
Short and sweet(ish) July 14, 2020
Posted by dolorosa12 in books, novellas, reviews.Tags: aliette de bodard, dominion of the fallen, of dragons feasts and murders, oh if tomorrow comes, samantha shannon, the bone season, the bone season series, the dawn chorus
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I am very happy with this new trend of authors publishing novellas set in the same universe as their series of novels. It seems to lead to works which explore relationships, characters, or corners of their imagined worlds that there just wasn’t space for in the novels — and therefore gives their fictional worlds and characters more space and three dimensionality. This kind of novella can be used to make space for missing moments in the preceding narrative, or — my very favourite kind of story — show what happens after the final page is closed. I’m a nosy reader: I want to know what happens after the story ends, and what the characters do in their downtime, in moments of cosy domesticity.
The answer to that in Aliette de Bodard’s novella Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders is ‘solve a murder mystery.’ Her characters certainly don’t get much in the way of downtime! The book sees Thuan and Asmodeus — dragon prince and fallen angel respectively, joint heads of the fallen House Hawthorn — return to the kingdom under the Seine to celebrate Tết with Thuan’s family. But any hope of a peaceful, pleasant holiday is shattered almost immediately, when the pair uncover a murder, a potential coup, and a court rife with tension, plotting, and corruption. One of the things I loved most about this couple in the preceding novels in de Bodard’s Dominion of the Fallen series was their contrasting — and conflicting — ways of dealing with problems: Thuan preferring to work within existing systems and come up with a diplomatic solution, his husband Asmodeus preferring to blast his way through any impediment with threats and violence. These contrasts are on full display in Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders, to excellent effect — but what the novella also shows is how those contrasts are complementary, and when these two formidable supernatural husbands work together, things have a way of working themselves out. I really appreciated this element of the story: for all that it is a fast-paced whodunnit (as well as an exploration of the poisoning effects of institutional corruption), it’s a relationship study as much as it is a murder mystery, written with exquisite subtlety.
Samantha Shannon’s The Dawn Chorus also brings its central relationship to the fore. This novella has two interwoven strands: flashbacks to missing moments in the earliest book in Shannon’s Bone Season dystopian series, and scenes which take place in the immediate aftermath of the third novel. The series really doesn’t give its characters much time to breathe, and in some ways The Dawn Chorus represents just that kind of pause — it gives the narrator, revolutionary Paige Mahoney, and her friend, former captor, and sometime lover, the Rephaite Warden — the space to work through the various tensions, traumas, and sheer overwhelming emotions generated by their terrifying existence and complicated relationship. It’s a story about recovering from trauma (and fiercely independent, untrusting Paige letting Warden help her recover) — its action picks up just after Paige has been rescued from weeks of torture and her impending execution — but in spite of this heavy subject matter it’s also a rare chance for the two characters to be alone for almost the first time since they met. Theirs is a relationship that carries a lot of baggage — they met in seriously unequal circumstances, and the novella is in part a way for them to finally address that openly — and matters aren’t helped by the fact that Paige’s torturer constantly brought up this relationship as yet another weapon to wound her. But here, for once, in their safe house in Paris, Warden and Paige’s relationship doesn’t have to be a performance for either their enemies or their allies. Now they simply need to work out what that relationship does look like, away from the eyes of others.
I really hope to see a lot more such novellas from both authors, set in their two respective dystopian universes. I particularly appreciate that in these kinds of books, both de Bodard and Shannon can give a lot more prominence to emotions, romantic relationships, and self-reflection than is possible to give the characters in either main series of novels. The novellas both flesh out, and give further emotional context to, characters’ actions in the wider series. I’d been stuck in a bit of a reading slump, but reading these two novellas in quick succession has made my next choice of books clear: a reread of both The Bone Season and the Dominion of the Fallen series!
A wave of justice June 14, 2020
Posted by dolorosa12 in books, reviews.Tags: books, reviews, s a chakraborty, the daevabad trilogy, the empire of gold
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Trilogies are tricky, and ending them in a satisfying way is the trickiest thing of all. S.A. Chakraborty had a lot of tangled threads in her Daevabad trilogy to weave into a coherent final tapestry — characters, beings and peoples with grievances lasting millennia, the struggle for power in a magical otherworld built on political feuds and entrenched inequality, her heroine Nahri’s mysterious origins, forbidden love, unrequited love, and at least one love triangle — but she managed this with gusto in the excellent final book, The Empire of Gold. I’ve done pretty much nothing other than read this book for the entire weekend, and now that it’s finished I wish there was more!
The Daevabad books take place in a fantasy otherworld populated with magical beings — djinn, marid, peri and ghouls, as well as their part-human descendents — inspired by Islamic folklore. The Daevabad of the series’ title is the capital city of a vast djinn empire, the site of endless political struggles between different ruling groups. At the end of the second book in the series, Daevabad’s tyrannical king Ghassan al-Qahtani had been violently overthrown, sending the city’s fragile stability into chaotic disarray, and replacing his dictatorial rule with something even worse. The trio of point-of-view characters: Ghassan’s earnest, virtuous and inflexible son Ali, the centuries-old Dara, and Nahri, raised on the streets of Cairo and possessing magical healing powers are all trying to figure out where they stand in relation to this abrupt change in political power, and how they should respond to it.
The Daevabad trilogy is about a lot of things. It’s a coming-of-age story for both Ali and Nahri, a journey of self-discovery. Nahri slowly transforms from a prickly, guarded street urchin who survived on scams and trickery to a woman with a family both blood and chosen, connections, and a fierce sense of ethics, and something to fight for. Ali’s is a change from rigid dogmatism to a more empathetic and compassionate understanding of others’ frailties. The books are also a wonderful vehicle for Chakraborty to showcase her vast and well-researched knowledge of history, mythology and folklore. But above all else the series is about what it means to truly build a just and equal society. It is about the sacrifices and personal growth necessary for those at the top of the political heap to realise that they have no divine right to rule, and that their empire of gold is built on the bones of those they dismiss as nothing. It is about Dara, coming to understand that he is viewed by those he admires as a weapon to be wielded, and that there is no possible justification for the monstrous violence he has wrought over the centuries for his cause. It is about Ali, understanding at last that replacing his cruel father with another ruling dynasty — no matter how good their intentions — will not bring about lasting peace and an equitable society. And it is a rebuke to any arguments that would claim that stability is more important than justice.
I’m tired of epic or political fantasy whose triumphant conclusion is to replace an unjust ruler with another leader deemed more worthy, rather than questioning the entire system of rule, and I’m really glad that Chakraborty didn’t go down this route in her trilogy — much as I love both Ali and Nahri, it would have felt like a hollow victory. I’m also tired of redemption equals death narratives, so again I am relieved that the series gave Dara a truer kind of redemption, one which was difficult, harder work, and longer lasting than a single sacrificial act. The series is in a way a love letter to the Islamic world and the various different cultures which form it, and the fact that the series ended with a celebration of multi-ethnic, multicultural communities was a very nice touch. It was entirely fitting to me that the series should end with the dismantling of Daevabad’s structural inequalities by a former prince with a love of books, economics, and the nerdy work of public servants, and a young woman with healing gifts whose dream was to build and staff a hospital open to all. The work of healers and community-builders is less glamorous than flashy acts of violence or supernatural prowess, but it is, of course, the most powerful form of magic in the world.
Seas of freedom May 12, 2020
Posted by dolorosa12 in fangirl, reviews, television.Tags: black sails, reviews
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To begin with some tortured mixed metaphors, I’m generally late to every party, but when it comes to Black Sails I was so late that the bandwagon didn’t so much as pass me by as vanish into the distance. However, there’s nothing like a global pandemic to force you to make a serious dent in the Netflix (or in this case, Prime) backlog — and Black Sails has definitely been the highlight of my isolation binge-watching so far.
Set in the final days of the so-called ‘Golden Age of Piracy,’ Black Sails is intended as something of a prequel to Treasure Island, following both the various pirate crews on their raids and adventures around the Caribbean, and the stories of the communities back on land of which they are a part. Although the show initially starts out with the sort of formulaic sexposition and gore common to historical TV series wanting to establish themselves as properly ‘gritty,’ this soon makes way for an intelligent exploration of power, the persuasiveness of storytelling, and the iniquities of empire. The show sprinkles heavily fictionalised versions of real-world historical figures (including a number of then-notorious pirates) with characters from Stevenson’s novel and others created specifically for the show.
While the narrative of the show is engaging enough — a mixture of treasure hunts and violent raids interspersed with the intense political machinations at sea and on land to establish a community free from the interference of the British (or indeed any other) Empire, where the show really shines is in its characters, and their relationships. A show in which most characters are either pirates or members of the flourishing black market of land-dwelling traders who work with them might be forgiven for revelling nihilistically in the violence and harshness of such characters’ lives — and yet at every stage instead it emphasises their care for, connection with, and interdepency on one another. This is, of course, in stark contrast to the colonising forces they oppose. The pirate characters are at their most vulnerable when they forget their need for each other, and tend to make their most foolish mistakes in moments of selfishness or disconnection from their peers and community. A recurring theme of the show is the futility of the different pirate crews and other major players competing with, and double crossing each other — that were they to pool their resources, combine their diverse skills and make common cause they would be formidable and unstoppable. Of course, the volatility of the personalities involves makes this impossible, and the show instead is a fast-paced journey of constantly shifting, unstable alliances, as impermanent and dangerous as the treacherous seas on which they sail.
The show is very much concerned with the dispossessed and outcast. Freed and/or escaped slaves feature heavily, at some points allying with the pirates, in other instances recognising that doing so would put them in situations of terrible vulnerability. There are disaffected exiled Jacobites, religious and political dissenters, women who are clearly more competent than the men around them but who must exercise their authority slantwise without those men realising it’s happening. And, as viewers discover partway through the series, the spark that lit the particular powder keg and caused the action of the entire show to unfold was an illicit, polyamorous, queer relationship that the powers-that-be judged intolerable.*
Inevitably, my favourite character was Max, the sex-worker-turned brothel madam-turned power behind the throne, closely followed by her sometime lovers, sometime antagonists Jack Rackham and Anne Bonny. I’m less interested in obvious heroes or tragic revolutionaries: give me those whose every inch is focused on survival, compromising, bargaining, and blustering all the way. It was characters like these who tempered the nihilistic, burn-it-all-down fervour of their fellow outlaws, reminding them — and viewers — that victory alone is insufficient without a sustainable community to return to and fight for.
Black Sails reminded me in some ways of the TV series Spartacus, which also aired, as the former did originally, on the US cable channel Starz. Both are ridiculous, over-the-top, filled with nudity and stylised violence, and yet they grapple with meaty, serious questions. Should dispossessed people continue a futile fight against the overwhelming might of empire, and is it worth the cost? What does it take to build a genuinely equitable community? At what point does the clarity and purity of a single-minded war against tyranny become unsustainable? Will a pretty story be a greater recruiter to the cause than the messy truth? These are not easy questions, and Black Sails offers no easy answers — just carries its audience forward along the restless sea.
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*For those worried that Black Sails follows the tedious pattern of queer relationships that end in tragedy, rest assured that although it may appear that way at first, it subverts this trope in the most astonishing way.
Bullet journalling April 18, 2020
Posted by dolorosa12 in blogging, life.Tags: bullet journal, stationery
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One of my friends asked me a while back to talk about my bullet journal, how I use it, and so on. I want to preface this post by saying that I have always been someone who loved stationery, writing by hand, and expending a lot of time and energy on making written work look pretty. (When I was in primary and secondary school I had this extremely elaborate set up with different coloured gel pens etc, and teachers used to hold up my exercise books and tell other students to be as neat and organised as me. It was a whole thing.) I explain this upfront because none of what I do is necessary: all you need for bullet journalling is a blank notebook and a pen. This entire monetised Youtube/Instagram industry has sprung up with elaborate bullet journal setups created by people (mainly women) whose sole job is to monetise their bullet journals, and if this is not your job (and, unlike me, you don’t enjoy spending a lot of time making written work look neat and pretty), it can become yet another thing to feel inadequate about. It’s meant to be a system of organisation and planning — not something that you have to spend a lot of money on or feel like you’re failing as a woman.
I use quite a lot of stationery for my bullet journal: the standard Leuchtturm dotted notebook (I pick a different colour each year), four fountain pens inked with different colours, and a bunch of dual-tipped brush pens. Also washi tape.
My bullet journal has numbered pages, so I have a table of contents at the beginning, which I update as I add new content. After the table of contents, I have a thumbnail calendar so that I can see the date of every day of the year at a glance.
I followed this with a cleaning schedule which lists daily, weekly, monthly and seasonal cleaning tasks. This is more aspiration than reality — I’ve been sticking to it a lot better now that I’m working from home and have a bit more free time, but generally I don’t always keep up with the longer term cleaning tasks.
After this I have two running lists which I add to throughout the year: one is a list of books that I hear about over the year, tracking whether they’re available in my public library and/or whether I bought them. I get a lot of indirect book recommendations via various online communities I’m part of, my husband also keeps an eye out for the sorts of books I’m likely to enjoy, but I can’t keep up with every book’s release date, nor afford to buy every book I hear about. This is a good way for me to keep track of things. I normally give my public library a timeframe of about three months after UK publication date to buy a copy of a book I might want to read, after which point I assume they won’t buy it (UK public libraries have very little money and are very unlikely to buy books based on patron requests). I then decide whether or not I want to buy my own copy. (Sometimes the book is by an author I really like and I will buy it immediately upon publication date, but I don’t generally do that for new-to-me authors unless they’ve been recommended by the handful of people whose tastes I know align with my own.) Frequently I wait longer, until the ebook is discounted, which generally happens eventually if I am patient.
I have a similar running list of other items (clothes, expensive toiletries, alcohol and stationery) that I would like to buy — again, I cannot afford to just buy everything I desire immediately, so I add to and refer back to the list whenever I feel I am financially able to buy one of the items. These lists are also helpful for suggestions for birthday and Christmas presents at the end of the year — most of the family members who buy presents for me like to have suggestions, and I can point them to things on these lists.
Almost every year I have not bought/been given everything on these running lists, so when I start a new bullet journal I look over the lists and decide what I want to keep on them, and what should be removed.
After these spreads, I move on to the actual planner aspect of the bullet journal — everything I’ve been talking about so far is extra, but if you’re wanting just to use the journal for the purpose for which it was originally intended, start at this point.
Ryder Carroll, the original inventor of the bullet journal system, separated long term planning from monthly planning, and both of these from weekly events/tasks. I tried this for one year, and realised that I was never looking at the monthly or long term plans, so after that year I just did weekly planning. You can look on the bullet journal website if you want to see how Carroll sets up his journal.
As I said, I skipped two parts of Carroll’s setup, and moved straight to the weekly planner. Every month I divide the left-hand pages into thirds, leaving the facing right-hand pages for that month blank. I have a setup where the first three thirds are Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, then I flip over the page and the next three left-hand page thirds are Thursday, Friday, and Saturday/Sunday combined. I then use Ryder Carroll’s key to indicate events (e.g. a meeting, a class I’m teaching, the time a flight is leaving, or a meal in a restaurant, for example), tasks I want to achieve on that day, tasks I have completed on that day, tasks which I haven’t achieved that day and want to move to a different date to work on, and tasks that I no longer need to complete at all. See below for this setup:
I have a system where I write details and tasks in light blue ink, the time of work-related events in green, and the time of personal/social-related events in red. On the right-hand facing page (not shown), I use a darker blue pen for notes relating to any of the events/tasks I’m trying to achieve in that three-day period. For example, if I were attending a conference on one of those days, I might have notes from the conference presentations I attended. If I have a staff meeeting at work, there might be notes for the meeting minutes. If I’m writing new content for my work website and aiming to have it finished by a certain day, I might put notes relating to that content on the right-hand facing page next to the date I want to complete the task.
I rule up the weekly planner on a month-by-month basis, i.e. every day in a particular month is written into the journal all in one go (although I generally add events and tasks on a weekly basis, usually first thing on the start of my work week on Monday; more tasks might of course be added later in the week if they crop up). I know some people just write these weekly spreads one week at a time and use the following pages for something else if required, but I like to have the whole month in sequence — it feels incomplete and messy to have the month broken up and feels wrong in a way that I find hard to explain.
After the final day in each month, I have the following two spreads, always in this order: habit tracker, and books/films/shows log.
I fill in each square on the habit tracker if I complete that goal on that day. Again, it is more aspiration than reality. The aim is not to have every square filled in for every habit — some are meant to be daily, others weekly or monthly. The habits I’m trying to track/achieve are:
- Morning reading — I have found that if I read a book while eating breakfast, rather than looking at social media (in particular Twitter), I have better mental health, so I aim to do this daily.
- Daily cleaning — hopefully fairly self-explanatory. This is tracking whether I do all the tasks marked as ‘daily’ on my cleaning schedule.
- Weekly/monthly cleaning — as above, but once a week rather than every day
- Swimming — at the moment, in the current version of the spread, it reads ‘exercise’ as my gym is closed due to the pandemic and I’m going running instead of swimming. I aim to swim/exercise three times a week.
- Wrist/neck yoga — I get very bad pains in my neck, shoulders, arms and wrists from working at a computer, so I aim to do a particular sequence of stretches at least once a day every workday.
- Monthly WordPress — my goal is to write at least one longform blog post on this blog.
- Weekly long-term projects — last year this was ‘weekly teaching coursework’, and the year before that it was ‘weekly CILIP (librarianship professional body in the UK; I was completing a portfolio to become a chartered librarian)’. I have always been someone who likes to break long-term tasks into small chunks, working a little bit at a time rather than all in a big rush at the end. When I have projects that cannot be completed in a week, instead of listing them in my weekly events/tasks planner, I aim to work on them for at least an hour each week, and use the habit tracker to check if I achieve this aim.
- Face morning/night — I have a skincare routine, but I’m lazy about it. I like having the box to colour in as motivation.
- Electric toothbrush — as above, but re: using my electric rather than manual toothbrush.
- Yoga — My aim used to be at least once a week, but I’ve bumped that up to daily now that I’m working from home.
After the habit tracker, I have a log of books read, TV shows and films watched, and, if applicable, concerts/shows/exhibitions attended. (I have a colour code for this, because of course I do.)
Since 2019, my aim has been to write something in review of each of these stories/films/TV shows in some online space within a month of having read/watched them, so I use the log to track my progress in that.
When the month is over, I set up the next month in the same way, and repeat until the year has ended.
I know people who use bullet journals in a much more meditative way, almost as an aid to mental health, or who have set them up more as a traditional journal with narrative and reflection on their life and emotions, but for me it is purely an organisational tool, albeit one in which I invest a substantial amount of time (an amount of time some might feel is unnecessary when there are apps for phones which achieve absolutely everything I have laboriously laid out on paper). But I am someone who a) finds notifications on my phone really distracting and stressful, b) only remembers things if I write them down, and c) needs to have everything in a single physical location to keep track of it, the setup I’ve developed just works for me. It’s evolved over the four years I’ve been bullet journalling, but I think it’s finally in the form which works optimally for me.
The sound of their own angry voices February 22, 2020
Posted by dolorosa12 in books, reviews.Tags: catch and kill, jodi kantor, megan twohey, ronan farrow, she said, this is my feminism
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Due to a serendipitous set of heavily discounted ebooks, I found myself in the somewhat unexpected position of reading two books about the journalists involved in breaking the silence on Harvey Weinstein in quick succession: Ronan Farrow’s account, Catch and Kill, and She Said by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey. While I’m not sure I would have done this deliberately, it certainly didn’t feel like overkill, and the two books are different enough that I got something out of them, and felt like I had a better overall picture of how the situation unfolded by reading both.
I think overall I preferred Farrow’s book (and if I recall correctly, I preferred his New Yorker article to Kantor and Twohey’s article in the New York Times as well) — he put more of himself into the story, and for me that made it more interesting. If you’ve read his New Yorker article, you will know that not only was he struggling to get a potentially contentious and controversial story out into the world, resisted at every stage by Weinstein, his lawyers, a decades-long Hollywood culture of silence, but he was also, apparently, up against rather scary interference from a private intelligence agency run by ex-Mossad agents, with agents surveilling his apartment, manipulating potential sources, and monitoring their affairs. At points throughout the book it feels less like an account of investigative journalism or holding a powerful, abusive man to account, and more like a spy thriller. Kantor and Twohey either experienced none of this, or they chose to leave it out of their own book.
It was interesting, also, to see the contrast in what each journalist found difficult in breaking this story. Farrow, initially trying to publish it with NBC, spent what appeared to be months fighting with the network’s hostility and sheer refusal to air his story (they constantly fobbed him off, discouraged him, so enmeshed were they in Weinstein’s world, and attempting to bury sexual abuse scandals of their own), but seemed to have had little difficulty persuading Weinstein’s former victims to talk to him, even on the record. In contrast, Kantor and Twohey had the full support of the New York Times, but appeared to have had endless problems convincing the women to talk to them or go public. As is now known, Farrow eventually gave up with NBC and took his story to the New Yorker, where it got a much more receptive ride, being published — after rigorous fact-checking — shortly after Kantor and Twohey broke the story for the New York Times.
Both books were, in their way, a celebration of long-form investigative journalism: the importance of giving journalists the time, support, and resources necessary to examine an issue from all angles, let sources talk at length, and marshall the various legal arguments necessary for when the man at the heart of the story mounted his inevitable and aggressive challenge. I’m really glad that both sets of journalists ultimately got the support they were given to pursue this story to the bitter end, especially given other journalists had been trying, and failing for decades to get the story out there, and the terrible cost borne by the various women Weinstein had used and discarded along the way.
What both accounts also made abundantly, depressingly clear was that it was less their own efforts — and the courage shown by their various sources — that meant this story got told, but rather the fact that Weinstein was no longer making money for the various people around him. Cut loose from Disney several years ago, and with less apparent ability to make or break an actor’s career or a film’s critical success, he was eventually seen as a liability and allowed to fall from grace by those who had previously shielded him from the consequences of his actions. I found that very telling. It’s tempting to look at the #MeToo movement as a long-overdue righting of numerous wrongs, and point at the various high profile abusers whose accusers have finally been able to speak their truths — but how many of those men have actually suffered real, material consequences? At worst, some of them have had to disappear from the public eye for a while. Very few have faced consequences worse than that, and those that have are mainly those who were no longer earning money for the various hangers-on around them. The world might finally have started to believe women, but it still doesn’t give our words weight, or feel that the horrors that so many of us have experienced are of any great significance. It is satisfying, in the accounts of Farrow, and Kantor and Twohey, to read of at least one situation in which women were, finally, heard.
The ruins of the garden January 26, 2020
Posted by dolorosa12 in books, reviews.Tags: all my dangerous friends, mary watson, the wicker light, the wren hunt, ya literature
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Books making use of Irish mythology and medieval Irish literature are a really hard sell for me: when you have a PhD in the subject, it’s very hard to be objective with stories that merrily disregard the scholarship, or go all in for a romanticised, Celtic Twilight approach. So I approached Mary Watson’s duology, The Wren Hunt, and The Wicker Light — which posit that families of feuding druids survived in secret into the present day, working magic and battling for control of various objects of power — with great trepidation. I shouldn’t have worried: while I did have to switch off the academic corner of my mind when it came to some components of her druid families’ history (and how their magic expressed itself), the actual story she’d built around this mythological scaffolding was incredible.
This YA series is set in Kilshamble, a fictional small town in an indeterminate Irish location (but within commuting distance of Dublin). Unbenknownst to the town’s residents, their home has been a battleground for centuries for two branches of a secret community of druids: the judges, and the augurs. The Wren Hunt, the first novel, is narrated by Wren Silke, a teenage girl brought up by augurs and sent on a dangerous mission to infiltrate the organisation in charge of their judge enemies. The Wicker Light is told from two viewpoints: David, a judge boy caught up in his family’s political machinations and escalating war with the augurs, and Zara, a girl outside this druidic battleground who stumbles on its secrets.
But what the series is actually about is the painful, visceral horror of growing up with trauma, raised by parents who are at best disappointing, and at worst outright abusive. Both Wren and David have been raised by parents (or parental figures) who view them as weapons to be wielded, keeping secrets from them the better to mould them into perfect, unquestioning, loyal soldiers. Zara’s father is a liar and a cheat, and his actions are destroying his marriage, leaving Zara’s mother emotionally absent and unable to recognise or mitigate her daughter’s deep pain. The druidic magic which permeates every corner of the characters’ lives is violent, cruel, and violating, bound up in an honour culture of brutal loyalty for the sake of the cause, and a tendency among both judges and augurs to view their foot soldiers as expendable. The bitter weight of parental expectation becomes monstrous and frightening.
The solution, in the face of all this cruelty, is kindness, truth, and an active rejection of familial cycles of abuse and violence. The judges’ and augurs’ battle of life and death is played out in rural Irish fields and hedgerows, ruined houses, and the gossipy high streets of small, insular towns, and Watson evokes brilliantly the secretive claustrophobia of living in such a small community where everyone knows everyone else’s business, and the weight of distant historical slights is still felt centuries later. Her teenage narrators must each individually make the choice to move beyond that: to reach out, to think creatively and compassionately, to end the war, and, hardest of all, to think of themselves not as weapons but as people. The result is at once satisfying, hopeful, and healing.
