"Puppet wrangler? There weren't any puppets in this movie!" – Crow T. Robot
Today, I went to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 with friends — it was pretty good, although rather long and occasionally a little boring — and I did the Sunday crossword. Oh, and I watched this past week’s episode of Fringe and am currently reading more of We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
Not exactly an exciting day, but a decent enough ending to the four-day weekend. Tomorrow, it’s back to work for what promises to be a busy three days.
So, what did I do today, the second day of my four-day weekend?
Well, I read some. Last night, I started Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and I read a few more chapters of it today. I’m really quite enjoying it. I’m familiar with Jackson’s work — it’s almost impossible not to be, given the annual award named in her honor — but I think I’ve only ever read the one short story, the one practically every school child has read, “The Lottery.” This week, though, I bought a copy of the Library of America’s collected volume of her work, and I’ve been thoroughly enjoying it.
I watched just a little TV, namely this week’s great episode of Community and another episode of QI. I also watched The Bicycle Thieves, which I’d been meaning to watch for quite awhile. It’s one of those movies that shows up all the time on all-time best-of lists, groundbreaking and hugely influential, and it’s not hard to see why. Mostly, though, it’s just a really touching story of a man looking for a job, and a wonderful look at post-World War II Italy.
And I dropped off a package for my father at UPS, then went and bought myself a new toothbrush. Such is the exciting life of leisure I lead.
Because I had the day off, today felt an awful lot like Saturday. So I’m pleasantly…well, not quite surprised, of course, but nonetheless pleased to “discover” that tomorrow is Saturday, “too.”
The Forgotten English word for today is “dollydaw,” meaning “one foolishly indulged,” which seems altogether apt.
It was a quiet day all told, and aside from a quick trip to the supermarket to pick up some cold cuts for lunch and milk for later, I spent it mostly just hanging around the house. I helped my father replace a light bulb on the stairs, then put the screens back on the kitchen windows. Exciting stuff.
I also did a little reading, finishing Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit, which I can’t say I really loved. There’s a strong dystopian idea at the heart of the novel, and it has a lot of promise, but ultimately the world that Holmqvist creates felt very thinly sketched and unconvincing. I didn’t find the characters particularly compelling or believable, and I was much more intrigued by the idea of the book than its execution. I feel like Holmqvist kind of gets at the problem herself near the end of the novel:
My new writing project had remained more or less untouched over the past few months. The only thing I had done was to read through what I had already written: thirty pages or so, a good start — though I say so myself. But a good start doesn’t go far, not if you no longer have any idea how you want the narrative to proceed, and particularly if you can no longer remember what you wanted to achieve with the story. It was as if the train had left, the train carrying the theme and my motivation.
I think there’s an intriguing novel to be built from the idea of rendering certain segments of the population “dispensable” — even segments that, conspicuously, mirror the author’s own biography — but this just wasn’t it for me. Maybe it was the translation, maybe it was having read it so soon after Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale — by which this suffers considerably in comparison. Whatever the reason, despite its modest triumphs and moments, the book just ultimately felt underdeveloped and unconvincing.
I would like to get back to the Censor and agree to lose the shits, take the odd Jesus Christ out and lose Oh fuck off, but to retain ‘fart in your general direction’, ‘castanets of your testicles’ and ‘oral sex’ and ask him for an ‘A’ rating on that basis.
A bias doesn’t mean that you think that what a certain candidate says is idiotic; a bias means that not matter what he says, you’ll attack him. Or, if it’s a bias in favor of him, no matter what he says, you’ll forgive him, or simply choose not to draw attention to what doesn’t make him look good. You know your opinion after you read the day’s paper; you know your bias before you open it.
I submit that the insistence on Victoriana in steampunk is akin to insisting on castles and European dragons in fantasy: limiting, and rather missing the point. It confuses cause and consequence, since it is fantasy that shapes the dragon, not the dragon that shapes the fantasy. I want the cogs and copper to be acknowledged as products, not producers, of steampunk, and to unpack all the possibilities within it.
I think I like the idea of calling this subgenre “retrofuturism,” with steampunk just one sub-subgenre of that. While, of course, differentiating the whole thing from alternate history, since that posits a specific branching point, a moment in history — the Nazis win, the South doesn’t lose, etc. — rather than an historical era. It’s only the ubiquity of steampunk that, to my mind, is the problem — insofar as this is a problem; it’s the fact that it chokes out other retrofuturistic viewpoints, necessitates a very specific and limiting aesthetic, keeps retrofutrism tethered (much like steampunk’s zeppelins) to specific countries, eras, worldviews.
If steampunk were just one type of story, rather than the all-consuming and defining aspect of retrofuturism, I think we’d be seeing less backlash against it.