links

[rushthatspeaks]

My review of Clockwork Phoenix 4, edited by Mike Allen and containing stories by many awesome people, is live at Strange Horizons. Short version: I liked it a lot and think it is one of the major anthologies of the year. Also, I am now really looking forward to Nicole Kornher-Stace's upcoming-eventual novel, because her short story in this anthology is one of the best short stories I have read in the last few years.

I wanted to point this out because when was the last time anyone saw the U.S. government, any branch, go out of its way to do a moral and awesome thing without being asked, prompted to, or expected to by anybody? A gay married man in Florida is approved for a green card. The relevant bit, emphasis mine: "For the last two years, the agency [Immigration and Citizenship] has kept a list of same-sex couples whose green card petitions were denied, the officials said, anticipating that the Supreme Court would eventually weigh in on DOMA. Those denials will now be reversed without couples having to present new applications, if no other issues have arisen." Immigration is an agency that has done a lot of frankly terrible shit over the years and is still in the process of doing it. This is the best thing I have ever heard of them doing, period. I cried.

My friend Tili is trying to review all of the print nominees for this year's Hugos before Worldcon. True, that's not before the voting deadline, but it will still be interesting for those of us who haven't managed to read all of them, and her review of Captain Vorpatril's Alliance interests me by using romance novel reading protocols a lot more than most other reviews of that book I've seen.

Recent travel journal is still forthcoming, but I lost a thing I have a(n already-past) deadline on to the vagaries of vacation internet and I have to finish reconstructing it first.

A couple of very short reviews of recent media:

The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman. The reason I keep reading Gaiman is that, although my opinion of him as a novelist is basically that he is terrible at it, he visibly improves with each novel he writes, so that I keep hoping he'll write something which justifies one-tenth of the hype. Also it is interesting watching somebody improve. Anansi Boys was a completely respectable cute little unambitious comic novel. This one is a completely respectable, quite ambitious non-comic novel! Points, Mr. Gaiman! It is the best novel he has yet written! Now if only it were doing one single thing not already accomplished by Peter S. Beagle's Tamsin. But hey, maybe the next one will be both this good and contain some elements I haven't seen elsewhere. This is what progress looks like. I await his next book with interest, assuming it is not related to American Gods, because that cosmology is too borked to sustain serious fiction. If he does another American Gods sequel, I await his book-after-next with interest.

Berberian Sound Studio (2012), dir. Peter Strickland, starring Toby Jones, Cosimo Fusco, Susanna Cappellaro, etcetera. I want to write a fuller review of this, but in case that doesn't happen for some reason: this is the best horror film I have seen since... uh, since sovay and I watched Kaneto Shindo's Kuroneko (1968), and the best recent horror movie I have seen since... wow, I'm not sure I've ever seen a horror film this good in the year it came out, I usually catch up to them later. SO GOOD. The premise is that the protagonist is a sound guy hired to work on what turns out to be an extremely nasty Italian giallo movie at some point in probably the late seventies, and what follows is an amazing exploration of the uses of sound in a movie, the intersections of art with ideals, and, and this is why I am flailing happily about this, a nuanced and detailed examination of gender both in horror fiction and in the horror fiction industry in a way which does not fall into any of the classic tropes and cliches on the subject and in fact explicitly brings them up in order to discard them. The fictional giallo (almost unshown, only described) is at the same time a piece of cheesy homage fun for those of us familiar with the genre, like Argento on even more id-fuel, hilarious and nostalgic, and so screamingly misogynistic that its content is violently distressing to everyone involved with it... except its director, its producer, and its writer. The horror in the best horror fiction is horror that is based on real life: the horror in Berberian Sound Studio follows you right off the screen. [Note: without even any explicitly shown sexual violence. Major points for that too.] Will also show you fascinating details about sound in film in an era slightly before our own in tech, and is full of ridiculously good acting.

Comments

[starlady]

Out of curiosity, what do you think of Gaiman's non-adult books? I really like Coraline, Stardust, and The Graveyard Book, but I have not really liked his adult novels.

[rushthatspeaks]

Gaiman really is chronological for me. I like The Graveyard Book okay, since it is fairly recent, although I wish it had not taken its structure from The Jungle Book quite so thoroughly. The movie of Coraline is lovely but the book feels very thin to me.

Stardust is another kettle of fish entirely, because I liked it just fine until I found out that he had written it after having read Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist, of which I consider it a pale imitation. It is reasonable to write something that turns out to be a pale imitation of a book one has never read, but something which turns out to be a pale imitation of a book one has read, well, different issue.

[starlady]

nods Coraline remains one of the creepiest books I have read; I enjoyed the movie, too, though I had some quarrels with some of the adaptation choices Laika made. I would also agree that Lud-in-the-Mist is superior, but I am interested in the way its influence has manifested in later works including Gaiman's.

Andrea Horbinski OTW Board, 2013-15 Mechademia Editorial Assistant

[kore]

Wow, in what way did you think it was like Tamsin (which I thought was much much better)? -- Not meant to be challenging, I just read both and didn't see that many similarities. I really didn't like Lane, sigh.

[rushthatspeaks]

Tamsin is way better, no question. The Beagle and the Gaiman both feel to me as though they're trying to do fantasy rooted deeply in house-in-English-landscape, tied to the land and the perspective of a person who is a child and who is looking back on it from less childish times. But instead of the historical weirdness and magic springing up from all directions of Tamsin, Lane is focused on more generalized mythology and things more resembling what one sees in other fantasy. So instead of Our Lady of the Elder Tree we get a Triple Goddess archetype, that sort of thing.

Lane does not have deep time, or at least not the deep time of humans, and while it is reasonable that a seven-year-old not be aware of historical layering, I still feel the existence of human history would affect things in the narrative more than it turns out to do. The pre-human or non-human magic in Tamsin is more convincing because of the magic that is so tangled up with humans.

In British landscape myth, therefore, Tamsin just works way better for me.

[kore]

'The Beagle and the Gaiman both feel to me as though they're trying to do fantasy rooted deeply in house-in-English-landscape, tied to the land and the perspective of a person who is a child and who is looking back on it from less childish times. But instead of the historical weirdness and magic springing up from all directions of Tamsin, Lane is focused on more generalized mythology and things more resembling what one sees in other fantasy. So instead of Our Lady of the Elder Tree we get a Triple Goddess archetype, that sort of thing.'


Ohhh! DUH, that makes sense, and yes, I do agree. Tamsin is just a magical (heh) book - I adore it.

[skygiants]

I was going to ask this Tamsin similarities question, so thank you for answering it! I haven't read Ocean at the End of the Lane yet, but Tamsin is my favorite Beagle book bar none, and if it were doing the specific things that I love Tamsin for doing it would have to jump much higher on my list; however, it sounds like the places it overlaps with Tamsin do not particularly overlap with Tamsin's me-directed hot buttons.

[kore]

I think I was originally puzzled by the comparison because the most me-directed hot button in Tamsin -- the narrative by a maturing girl about her friendship with another girl -- just isn't in Ocean, period (it's not in any of Gaiman's books -- I get fed up with how the protagonists are always so seriously lumpen ((Richard, Nob, Shadow)) and the secondary characters-of-colour are so much more interesting, and also Doomed.....AND with how the girls/women exist only as Learning Opportunities for the male protagonists. Gahh). Tamsin for me is part of the really slim field of Bildungsroman fantasies focused on girls (this includes Juniper Gentian & Rosemary, Among Others, going back to Wrinkle in Time maybe, &c).

[rushthatspeaks]

Yeah. Agreed. I would like Lane *so much better* if the protagonist were female, by the way. Except then it would actually just be DWJ's Time of the Ghost only not as good.

Tamsin is a book I will love forever although I occasionally see Beagle at cons and have to physically stifle the urge to say 'so, about Tamsin, you do realize your protagonist is a lesbian?'

(I did not stifle the urge to ask whether the Man Who Laughs in The Innkeeper's Song is actually Schmendrick, and got exactly what I deserved: giggled at and told that Beagle knows but is not going to tell me. Should have figured.)

[intothespin]

I am so pleased not to be alone in my bewilderment over the general reaction to Gaiman's novels. I feel like the bitter hipster cliche who likes bands only when they're small and indie, but I feel like he put everything he had into Sandman, and a considerable amount of what he had into Signal to Noise, and everything since has been coasting.

Okay, I am also bitter about how Neverwhere seems to have retroactively become looked at the fount of a certain kind of urban fantasy, despite a good fifteen years of earlier examples, primarily by women.

P.S. Have you read Kohrner-Stace's first novel?

[kore]

I feel like he put everything he had into Sandman, and a considerable amount of what he had into Signal to Noise, and everything since has been coasting.

Oh, you are so not alone there. There's also a weird kind of fairy-gold effect for me -- I read American Gods, enjoyed the hell out of it, and then reread it again years later and it seemed....paler and thinner. Same thing happened with Coraline, Neverwhere, &c (and oh GOD, the sexism issues in Neverwhere and Graveyard Book, gahhh).

.....it also really annoyed me that critics raved about Graveyard Book and didn't pick up on its considerable debt to Beagle's Fine and Private Place.

[sovay]

.....it also really annoyed me that critics raved about Graveyard Book and didn't pick up on its considerable debt to Beagle's Fine and Private Place.

Well, that answers the question of whether I'll ever try to read it.

[edit] and then reread it again years later and it seemed....paler and thinner.

His rhythms don't work for prose, let alone novels. I was thinking about this a few nights ago while re-reading Smoke and Mirrors (1998) for the first time since college, when I borrowed it from the same friend who turned me on to Sandman. I had been really unimpressed by the collection; it felt like an assortment of sketches, with interludes of poetry that were just the same prose with line breaks. It all felt very thin, end-on: no weight to any of the language, no texture. I think he's gotten more graceful since, but there's still the same sense of surfaces for me. The language itself doesn't go deeper. The structures of the story feel hampered by it; they can't reach down as far as they need to. I don't feel the same way about his narrative voice in comics, and that interests me, although not to the point that I want to do a full prose re-read to pin down why the same voice works with illustrations but not without. Somebody who isn't me totally should, though, and then I can read it.

[kore]

Well, that answers the question of whether I'll ever try to read it.

It just flummoxicated me no end because he was all KiplingKiplingKipling, and to a fantasy reader, 'person living in a graveyard but going out into the real world eventually' is Fine and Private Place -- I don't mean it's plagiarism or anything, but Beagle's not even as obscure as he used to me, and I think Place has never been out of print (could be wrong on that).

there's still the same sense of surfaces for me. The language itself doesn't go deeper. The structures of the story feel hampered by it; they can't reach down as far as they need to. I don't feel the same way about his narrative voice in comics, and that interests me, although not to the point that I want to do a full prose re-read to pin down why the same voice works with illustrations but not without. Somebody who isn't me totally should, though, and then I can read it.

Yeah, I feel the same way -- I don't know if he was hampered by essentially fitting words to pictures for so long, or if the pictures supply something essential missing in his prose style, or what.

[jinian]

Well, there's going to be a test case of whether Gaiman can go back to comics, at least, or whether he has been Ruined By Success (or learning to write better novels).

Also, I completely agree with the fairy-gold effect -- what a great way to put it. I'm not a very critical reader most of the time, and there's a charm to first readings of most of Gaiman's novels that makes them seem pretty good until I look again.

[intothespin]

Maybe I should reread American Gods and Neverwhere, and I will like them better this time! They felt pretty thin the first time around. I liked Anansi Boys, Coraline, and Stardust better partly because they weren't trying to be Huge and Serious. Although I guess Neverwhere wasn't particularly trying for that, either.

[kore]

There's one truly devastating moment in Neverwhere when the Marquis (WHY COULDN'T THE BOOK HAVE BEEN ABOUT HIM, ahem) says something about the reality of the homeless (I can't find my copy, or I'd quote it) and it just badly punctures the whole fantasy of the book, because all of a sudden the reality of desperate people punches through, and the book doesn't really care about them. It's hard to describe, but it just really stomps on the brakes of the narrative for me.

[rushthatspeaks]

I have not read Kornher-Stace's first novel. Is it any good?

The reaction to Neverwhere embitters me, too, for many of the same reasons.

And I have never understood the general praise of Gaiman's novels, because he's really good at writing comics. Sandman is great, Signal to Noise is wonderful, but comics and novels are totally different forms. I've seen several novelists successfully write comics without a runup in quality (Joe Hill, China Mieville), but I have never seen a writer who started in comics switch to novels without a serious learning curve and some lousy work in novel form (Warren Ellis, Greg Rucka, Mike Carey, and of course Gaiman). Gaiman started writing novels and I was like, well, he's learning slowly, maybe someday he'll be good at this, and then people started giving him awards and I facepalmed. There is no quicker way to short-circuit a learning process than by giving somebody All The Awards.

I do think he's still showing growth, or I wouldn't keep reading the books, but aargh why do so many people love his existing books so much aargh?

[shippen_stand]

I was also glad to read that someone didn't gush at every Gaiman scribble. I loved Sandman, and (you kids get off my lawn) read it when it came out each month. I've liked a lot of his other things, but I've often wondered how his work will hold up over the long haul. I think people will wonder what the hype was about.

[intothespin]

I have not read Kornher-Stace's first novel. Is it any good?

I was hoping you could tell me! I got it a while ago because it sounded totally like my kind of thing, but "The Winter Triptych" was such a slog I ended up putting Desideria off.

I've only read one of Rucka's novels and thought it was pretty good but not my kind of thing, but it was one of the later ones. Caitlin Kiernan seems to have done better at novels than comics, but then I didn't particularly like her comics. And she did short fiction before comics, I think.

I feel like I've also seen clunkers go the other way, novelists who don't get how graphics change the pacing, but I can't think of any names just now.

[kore]

Gaiman started writing novels and I was like, well, he's learning slowly, maybe someday he'll be good at this, and then people started giving him awards and I facepalmed. There is no quicker way to short-circuit a learning process than by giving somebody All The Awards.

YEAH, that's just about what happened. It also annoys me that a lot of his books work on the so-called Two-Man Con, and that's his go-to plot -- except Graveyard, which he admits is Kipling (but nobody reads Kipling anymore, so). I love Sandman too, but I think stringing together weekly episodes along an overarching plot line is a lot different from building events into chapters which form a continuous novel.

[rinue]

Oh, my. I hadn't heard about the Immigration agency doing that. Thank you so much for sharing this wonderful thing.

[rushthatspeaks]

You're welcome! I just-- that has been so pleasant to think about and I want everybody to know about it; behavior like this on the part of the government needs to be encouraged.

[truelove]

The news about immigration just made my day entirely. I've never heard anything so wonderful as that -- that they've been tracking this and will re-process those applications now, that's just.

It made my day, and I'm trying not to tear up at work. So thank you for sharing that.

[msilverstar]

Wonderful news about the Immigration Department stepping up. Whenever anyone says there's no different between the two major parties, I think of this kind of thing.

And I always like reading your reviews! So I made this feed: tilisokolov_feed because I'll never remember to check wordpress.

[(Anonymous)]

This is Tili - I don't have a Dreamwidth, but I do have an LJ which will also have posts linking to each new review: http://tilivenn.livejournal.com/ Also the page itself has an RSS feed, and one can sign up to get new posts by e-mail. Thank you for setting up a Dreamwidth crosspost! I hope you enjoy the reviews.

Also of course, thank you, Rush, for linking to me.

[sovay]

Berberian Sound Studio

Aaaaargh. Where did you see this? For complex and slightly family-related reasons, I missed it the weekend it played at the Brattle.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

It is available on-demand at iTunes. For cinematographic reasons, it should probably be viewed on as large a screen as possible-- we watched it on B.'s iPad, and that was too small. A large monitor should work, I think, or a television.

[gwynnega]

Berberian Sound Studio sounds amazing.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

SO GOOD. IT IS SO GOOD.

[(Anonymous)]

I was really, really surprised to see La Migra do the right thing here. Really, and very pleasantly, surprised.

(Commenting anonymously because I currently have dealings with said agency and do not want be connected with a public comment about it.)

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Fair enough! I was very surprised too, especially with the whole thing where they actively went out of their way.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Envying you a lot for having seen Berberian Sound Studio. The closest I've come to doing that thus far has been downloading the OST, which is certainly freaky, even without context.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

B. and I got it on-demand at iTunes. I don't know whether that is applicable to Canada, but probably worth a look?

Also, if you get it for home viewing, watch it on the largest screen you have. There are several very low-light shots which will benefit from size and lack of ambient glare. We had it on an iPad, which was officially manageable but Too Small.

IT IS SO GOOD.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

I reveal my Luddite status by admitting I've never ordered a movie from iTunes, though I've watched a DVD on my laptop. My TV and my Internet aren't actually connected right now, which sort of sucks, because my screen is very large indeed. this is also why I own so damn many DVDs.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Personally I do not know from iTunes, but B. has an iPad, and had to figure out all his comics-buying, so he can manage to find things on iTunes, which is the part that confuses me. ... technically, I guess we have an iPad in the house too, but.

When Berberian comes out on DVD I am going to buy it, and I am now actively engaged in trying to track down a copy of the director's first feature, Katalin Varga, which sounds amazing too.

[landofnowhere]

My reaction on hearing about The Ocean at the End of the Lane was "this sounds like Neil Gaiman riffing on Fire and Hemlock"! Is that in fact accurate?

I'm looking forward to reading the book, but not enough to buy a copy for myself -- I'll get it from the library when I can.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

... not so much. It has some DWJ influence around the edges, but if pressed to compare it to a single DWJ novel I would say 'like Time of the Ghost, only nowhere near as dark and a chunk less complicated'. It does not have the history/fairytale/ballad substrate that Fire and Hemlock does so well.

[landofnowhere]

Cool, thanks for letting me know!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Gaiman: word.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Heh. It's nice to hear agreement there-- a lot of the time I feel like the only person who thinks the way I do about him.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

snurri was saying something similar on FB, but less detailed.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I thought I didn't care for Gaiman much because of the horror element. Does Ocean have much of that? Because I luuurrrrve Tamsin (though I don't think it's wildly original either, it's a book that sucks me in every time, over and over).

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Oh dear. I think you may be asking the wrong person about that, because my immediate reaction to this question was 'there's a horror element in Gaiman?' I guess, looking back, that his work does have many things that also feature in horror, but I have never so much as been mildly unsettled by Gaiman's content because it is just not the sort of thing that bothers me.

My immediate reaction to trying to figure out how much horror there might be in Lane is to say that there is one scene that is probably conceptually distressing for child abuse reasons, and that in general if you can tolerate the way people behave to each other in Diana Wynne Jones' Time of the Ghost it should be fine. But I could be totally wrong, because I consider Tamsin to have way more horror in it than anything I've ever read by Gaiman. So, grain of salt, all that.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Well, of course now someone on the DWJ list says they agree with the reviewers who found it Gaiman's scariest book ever. So who knows?

I think one of Gaiman's books struck me as no fun if you weren't scared (which I wasn't) and another struck me as too scary to tackle (Coraline, probably -- "The New Mother" scared me witless way back when). I tend to be either, "yeah, yeah, yeah, horror tropes, yawn" (this happens a lot with the Harry Potter books, though I find plenty else about them reasonably fun) or "SHIT NO GET THIS BOOK AWAY FROM ME," with not much in between.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton made the State Department much more gay-supportive, mostly by personal fiat. It does seem more impressive when it's a department of faceless bureaucrats doing something good, though.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

I so love your reviews, here and elsewhere.

Every now and the government governs. It's astounding when it happens.

Nine