What Are You Reading Wednesday

[rushthatspeaks]

What I have been up to: we have had houseguests continuously since December 20th, except the three days when Ruth and I went to Montreal for New Year's, which was lovely and relaxing. Since New Year's large chunks of Sassafrass have been in town, and we have been doing intensive rehearsal of the Norse show (coming soon to Balticon 47, this Memorial Day weekend, in which Thrud is the Filk GoH and the rest of us are Featured Filkers as amazingly you cannot make seventeen people Guest of Honor). In case anyone wondered, staging an opera is difficult.

Also I had some email difficulties, which turned out to be an attempt at hacking my email, making Google lock the account down. Have regained access but not yet managed to go over my computer for malware because Sassafrass.

As stress relief I wrote a fanfic novella, which because my brain does this sort of thing to me turned out to be the direct sequel to somebody else's fic in a really, really obvious way, so I have sent it off to her to see if she minds. Or, as Ruth put it, I managed to find a way to get a possible rejection slip on fanfiction I WIN. *facepalm* Note: this does not work as stress relief.

So what I have been reading: More Work for the Undertaker, Margery Allingham.

This is the thirteenth of Margery Allingham's Albert Campion novels, which are Golden Age detective fiction set contemporaneously to when they were written, beginning in the late nineteen-twenties. I have now gotten to just post-WWII. I don't know why these are not better known, I really don't.

Albert Campion, the series detective, starts in the first book as an obvious Lord Peter Wimsey knockoff intended to be a side character, but then walks forward, takes over the entire book, and propels the entire series. He's in an interesting position for a series detective because he never outright joins the police and he has serious and genuine ties to both the underworld and the aristocracy, which means that nobody but nobody trusts him unequivocally. The world around him is fascinating, too, because as far as I can tell Allingham simply wrote the books in precisely the same gently SF-nal AU in which Stella Gibbons set Cold Comfort Farm. People use airplanes very differently than they did in real life, for instance. But, unlike the Gibbons (or for that matter Sayers) the world-historical continues on as it really did, so that we get a real view of the difference between the way people thought about detective stories and the gently SF-nal in the twenties and the very late forties, as the world moves on and Campion grows up.

Plus, each novel is an attempt at a completely different kind of mystery, which Allingham will go back to later if she feels she muffed it but otherwise not repeat. So we have only one cozy country-house, only one locked-room, one high-finance-skulduggery, and so on. This means you are not reading the same book over and over, and that despite being thirteen books in I have not yet gotten to the one everyone says is her best.

As far as the attitudes of the time, Allingham is mostly very much better at women than anyone but Sayers, and about what you'd expect in terms of race and class, i.e. Oh God but not noticeably worse than her contemporaries. Except book ten. Don't read book ten. It is a grotesque anomaly of All The Sexism Suddenly, and in a way where I am pretty sure Allingham didn't even actually mean it but felt it necessary for the specific type of mystery she was trying in that installment, because it comes out of nowhere and never gets remotely that bad again. But when I say sexism, I mean that what I was mentally comparing it to was C.S. Lewis's 'The Shoddy Lands', which is ridiculous in a series where what I have been comparing everything else to is Sayers. Just don't. Fortunately book ten is completely irrelevant to the overarching plot of the series so may be avoided without the fear of missing anything.

Book thirteen, the one I'm halfway through, is a postwar crumbling-eccentric-penniless-aristocracy-hold-dark-secrets mystery, and I am enjoying the heck out of it.

What I read last:

The first book I read this year was Samuel R. Delany's The Mad Man, in Montreal, because Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders was the best novel I read last year and I recognized a symbol in that from the four pages of The Mad Man I had read about five years ago before running away. I wanted to see what that symbol meant in the older novel to deepen my understanding of the new one.

I was pleased to find that after eight hundred-odd pages of Delany's pornography in Spiders, I am way more able to deal with it than I was five years ago, so I was able to discover that The Mad Man is a fully-fleshed-out and fascinating novel-- among other things, it's a satire on academia, a detective story, the logical fictional extrapolation of Delany's nonfiction work in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (or possibly vice versa, I haven't checked the publication dates), and an unusual and fascinating meditation on AIDS. The title comes from the protagonist completely losing all his fear of AIDS, because he has decided that he has rationally and with all the information available to him limited his risk factors as best he can, and either he won't get it or there is no way for him not to get it or he already has it, and in none of those situations is fear a sustainable response. He just doesn't have the emotional capacity to sustain that amount of fear forever. Which as far as society is concerned may make him nuts. There are also other symbols tied in to the title, of course, since this is Delany, but that's the one I thought was unique in fiction as I've seen it.

The book did not quite work for me because Delany is working on the sociological belief that in a position where there are both a gift economy and a money-based economy working with the same materials the money-based economy will fear and attempt to stamp out the gift economy with all the resources at its disposal, and I have first-hand experience that that is not the case. Delany's belief that it is is tied in to the more sensationalist aspects of the book's plot and therefore does not come across with the grounding of lived experience the rest of it has, meaning that this reads to me as an extrapolation which he flat-out got wrong, an unusual experience with Delany. But the rest of the book was a pleasant literary thriller, which I recommend to anyone who is thinking about the evolution of thinking on AIDS, as well as to anyone who can handle the scat porn.

Since finishing that I have quite literally been working too hard and been too scheduled to have time to read more than half an Allingham, which is ludicrous considering I am me and had better stop soon.

What I am planning to read next: No definite plans. Some things on the TBR pile: Zuleika Dobson, Max Beerbohm. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany. Wisconsin Death Trip. The Viriconium omnibus, M. John Harrison, reread for an essay. The recent Megan Abbott YA. New Engineering, Yoichi Yamamoto. Heart of Thomas, Moto Hagio. Bitter Seeds, Ian Tregillis. I'll probably wind up picking up one of those pretty much at random.

Have my summary of 2012 from 2012 In Review at Strange Horizons, featuring my praise as I said of Delany, of Elizabeth Wein and of Anne Ursu, among others. Have also been too busy to manage to link to this and I am sorry, but it exists now.

Comments

[aedifica]

I'll look forward to reading whatever you have to say about Dhalgren!

[rushthatspeaks]

I have not read it before, and I'm really looking forward to it!

[wrabbit]

I like the televised Campion series.

Have you read Delany's Nova? It is the only book of his I have read and I did not like it, but I have heard nothing but recommendations for his later novels.

[rushthatspeaks]

There's a televised Campion series? Oooooh.

I read Nova like fifteen years ago and barely remember it, except that it was clearly a more conventional novel using way more conventional SF-nal tropes than anything else I have read by Delany, which is why I barely remember it. It also has not inspired the urge to reread. I couldn't get through the Fall of the Towers trilogy, which were his first novels, but everything else I've read by him I have liked enough to reread and have reread enough to know well.

[wrabbit]

Yes. Peter Davison is hilarious as Campion.

Okay. Maybe I'll try something more recent by Delany, when I get over Nova.

[rushthatspeaks]

I like Peter Davison. Will definitely look that up.

If you weren't fond of Nova, my suggested starting point for Delany is actually The Motion of Light in Water, his autobiography, which is one of the best memoirs I have ever read. His best novel that I have read (I am not all the way through him yet) is Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand, though it does open a bit slowly.

[kore]

I LOVE Light in Water, love love love. All my linguist-type friends hate it, but my favourite SD is still probably Babel-17, just because when I first read it, it was such a revelation - poly relationships! geeky heroine! who wasn't penumatic and blonde! and so on.

[kore]

....ooh, Davison?

[kore]

I typed this whole thing about how Caitlin Kiernan is not indeed reinventing herself as Anita Blake or whatever before realizing, OH, RIGHT, SOMEONE ELSE WROTE THAT.

WHOOPS.

Allingham

[alexinleeds.com]

I've never read any of Allingham's books but Campion sounds like a great character and I must admit, the promise of reading something that isn't steeped in sexism from that era does appeal. I just can't face Christie any more these days.

[oracne]

The Campion adaptations with Peter Davison are pretty fun.

Yay DHALGREN! When you're done, for comparison, you might also want to read the (much shorter) EMPIRE STAR - they have a similarity in construction. In fact, I should re-read those two together. In my Copious Free Time.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I do like the Allinghams, but I wanted to make sure you knew of another author doing the "one of each kind" thing in mysteries: Boris Akunin? Did I learn of him from you?

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I know about Boris Akunin, but I'm not sure whether you'd have heard of him from me? I find him more conceptually interesting than readable and have had problems getting my library to cough them up in any kind of order, so I've read I think two of the nun ones and one of the Erast Fandorin.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I find the nun ones far, far less interesting/readable than the Fandorin ones.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

People use airplanes very differently than they did in real life, for instance.

I hadn't really noticed this, although it might just be that I don't know enough about historical aviation. green_trilobite, however, agrees it's a feature of the later books, which leads me to suspect it's due to the presence of Lady Amanda in the Allingham-verse.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I love Lady Amanda and her aviation! It does turn up a bit in the earlier books, in that the aristocracy use airplanes and private landing fields for personal travel in a way which just wasn't a thing in real life but which a lot of people anticipated as likely. And then Lady Amanda maintains aviation as a focus in the series.

[chomiji]

Balticon, huh? Maybe we'll have to go this year!

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

That would be awesome! We are doing a fully-costumed two-hour musical (a cappella with occasional drum) retelling of much of Norse mythology.

[sovay]

Note: this does not work as stress relief.

It's very hot, though.

Fortunately book ten is completely irrelevant to the overarching plot of the series so may be avoided without the fear of missing anything.

It is the one I don't re-read, except that one time to see if it was as bad as I remembered; it was and I stopped.

Delany's belief that it is is tied in to the more sensationalist aspects of the book's plot and therefore does not come across with the grounding of lived experience the rest of it has, meaning that this reads to me as an extrapolation which he flat-out got wrong, an unusual experience with Delany.

That is a really interesting direction for a novel to fail in. Is the rest of the book otherwise realist, allowing for satire?

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I'm never going to reread that Allingham, either. It was just horrific.

The rest of The Mad Man is-- well, it's really hard to qualify its degree of realism, because it is pornography, which is explicitly not a realist mode. The pornography is relegated to a section of the protagonist's life, his sex life, which is distinct from the rest of his life, although one of the very interesting points the protagonist makes is that while most people would call his sex life his private life, his takes place almost entirely in public among and with strangers and should therefore not be considered as part of a private sphere but as part of his public persona. The plot of the novel involves a certain amount of blurring of boundaries between the protagonist's sex life and the other parts of him, both intentional on his part and not. The part of his life concerned with academia is entirely satirical and should be taken as such (pretty vicious, too). The portion of his life concerned with having to deal with logistics, with paying rent and working at a temp agency and laundry and non-sexual friendships, is entirely realistic and pragmatic in a way unusual even in a literary novel. The portion of his life which involves thinking about AIDS is also brutally pragmatic, but explicitly political, violently angry, and very clear that he is talking about things for which sufficient data does not at the time exist.

The gift-economy vs. capitalist-economy clash literally takes place in a nexus between every single one of these parts of his life. It's the crux of the novel's plot, the place where everything comes together in a set of parallelisms with earlier characters and in which every facet of the protagonist intersects with every other facet in a violent and very dangerous-to-him way.

So while one or more of the threads are non-naturalistic, and at least one is not intended to be read straightforwardly, I can't see this nexus as being intended as entirely anticlimactic, which it would have to be if it were more than moderately satirical. And it doesn't have the codings the book has established for its less naturalistic sequences; the physical choreography of it is described using the pragmatic tone. Therefore my reading is that this idea is a serious point which Delany intended to make seriously and which he considered to be a plausible way of describing the world, and I sigh and shake my head because see above re directly contrary to my own lived experience. But given the sheer number of genres at play and the complexity of the interactions between them, it is quite possible that I am mistaken.

[q10.livejournal.com]

i have not read The Mad Man, but my understanding (based on sources like this one) is that a number of its components are loosely inspired by the life and death of Richard Montague, a logician and semantics whose work informs a lot of what i'm going to be teaching this coming semester. Montague is not an especially well-known figure outside of the worlds of logic and formal semantics, but his career, eccentricities, and untimely death have apparently manged to inspire at least three fictionalizations (besides the two in the linked review, there's one called The Semantics of Murder), none of which have, to my knowledge, been especially well-received among those with personal or scholarly knowledge of Montague, his life, for his work.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Wow, that linked article really shows the dangers of relying on secondary sources. I accept, based on it, that Delany did in fact base The Mad Man on Montague; that much seems beyond dispute. Thank you very much for pointing me at the article, because I did not know that. However, not having read The Mad Man himself but having read a detailed survey of it, the author of the linked article has completely misrepresented everything the book is trying to do when it is being a satire on academia, and has missed the political reasoning behind the sex. Which is fair, except that if he'd read the book himself he might or might not have a different opinion of it as a representation of Montague, and I certainly don't know enough to say which.

[q10.livejournal.com]

Where does the Arnold indicate he didn't read The Mad Man? He says that a survey brought its existence to his attention, but then seems to present himself (perhaps misleadingly) as having read it (perhaps not carefully). Having found the survey he cites, it looks like he had some source besides it, because he mentions some things not mentioned in the survey, so I think the natural inference is that he read the book, but read it differently (and possibly worse) than you did. In any case, my main reason for linking it was as a reference for the Montague connection, not as an assessment of the merits of the book.

(But is it in fact portraying an analytic philosophy grad student doing biographical research on a contemporary philosopher? Because that would be pretty anomalous.)

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Ah, I may have missed him mentioning that he read it, but the inaccuracies made it seem as though he were relying on secondary knowledge. *goes and reads survey* Huh. Reading the book after reading that could have produced that result. The survey isn't bad at all but fundamentally misclassifies the book's genre as naturalistic instead of pornographic; Delany considers pornography to be a non-naturalistic genre and writes it that way.

That plus not noticing that the protagonist is a history of philosophy grad student, not an analytic philosophy grad, is what I think's going on there. Protag starts by wanting to be in analytic philosophy and Revolutionize Everything, is gently informed that he is not actually all that and a bag of chips, and switches courses of study. His adviser is trying to make biographical studies of contemporary philosophers more acceptable in history of philosophy-- I don't know anything about where that was in the late seventies.

Thank you for both articles, it's always fascinating to see what other people have to write about the books I am reading.

[q10.livejournal.com]

That would be fairly unusual history of philosophy too (at least for the kind of history of philosophy done in philosophy departments - I can't speak to how it's done in other areas), I think both now and in the late 70s, but if the point is that it's unusual and that this is a part of effort to normalize it, that of course makes the anomaly a non-issue. Also the book getting something like this wrong would presumably not be a really serious complaint.

Anyway, as best I can tell, Arnold doesn't say whether he read it or not, but given the available evidence the write-up reads more like he did. (I'm also not actually sure Sacha Arnold is a ‘he’, although I've been following your usage here.)

This was all mainly my way of trying to plant in your brain the suggestion that you could read some of the other books fictionalizing the same historical figure and write some amusing comparison reviews of your own, although I'm glad you're finding the other materials I linked to interesting-and-annoying as opposed to merely annoying.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Succumbed to Homestuck at last?

I think seventeen guests of honor sounds like a fine number.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

I so love your reviews. Reading Zuleika Dobson and Dhalgren at the same time would be insanely fascinating.

Nine

[tilivenn.livejournal.com]

I'm curious what your experience with the coexistence of gift and money economies is.

Also, your mention of an ambition of reading Dhalgren, which is also an ambition that I have, reminds me that I would find it really awesome to be reading a book at approximately the same time as you, or otherwise to read a book in such a way that we could talk about it a bunch. Are you the kind of person who enjoys it when someone who is reading something you like sends you periodic updates on their thoughts about it?

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I love Allingham, too - and don't understand why she gets brushed aside, except for The Tiger in the Smoke which is always described as the best of her books and is my least favourite (because I prefer detection to thrillers).