Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

My friend Lois shared this post about the difference between Supper and Dinner, and the meaning of dinner changed as a result of industrialisation and the rise of the middle class. 

Meanwhile, this week’s my newsletter will feature a short semi-essay about the origins and goals of of the Short Fiction Lab series. If you’ve read Eight Minutes of Usable Daylight and Winged, With Sharp Teeth, and you’re curious about the behind-the-scenes stuff, there’s still time to sign up.

I just finished Sharp Ends, Joe Abercrombie’s collection of short stories set in the same world as his First Law Trilogy. It was a weirdly enjoyable colleection–the stuff that I loved, I really, really loved. The story I disliked proved to be a major stumbling block, though, and meant I left the book 80% read for the better part of nine months before finally finishing things off. There is, however, something to be said for Abercrombie’s riffs on the sword-and-sorcery partnership featuring Shev and the Lioness of Hesslop. They recur several times through the colleciton, and remain a constant delight. 

Meanwhile, I’ve just started reading The Clock Strikes, a novella in Sean Cunningham’s Hawthorne House series. Still early, but I’m extraordinarily jealous of the rather beautiful cover:

It’s a book about sorcerers and werewolves and time travel, which is not a combination you get everyday. I’m quite excited to see how Sean pulls it off. 

Goodreads informs me that I’ve got to read another 11 books to hit my stated goal of reading 80 books this year.

Personally, I think thats achievable, so long as I include the thesis reading alongside the fiction books. 

The free period for Winged, With Sharp Teeth is over, which means I’m now sitting here and prodding the numbers with surprise, saying things like, “Really? That many people from the German store? Who’d have thought it?”

Some people went on and pre-ordered Eight Minutes of Usable Daylight, which is out now if you live in Australia and out in approximately eight hours from now if you’re in the United States.

Alas, I cannot tell when the Germans will get it, for I’ve not had to get into the habit of doing that math off the top of my head over the last week. I did try to Google it, but the math stymied me–there’s a reason I work with words wherever possible.

Yesterday was a bit of a lumpen, unexpected day. I had plans, but they did not come together. I progressed stories, but the writing was hard. On the plus side, I did get Amazon-based print version of The Birdcage Heart & Other Strange Tales submitted, although that’s primarily US and UK focused. Australian folks are better served holding off until I get the local print-on-demand up and running. 

Which is, all in all, the kind of day I’d expected: One step at a time. Don’t look down. 

#

The inimitable Australian reviewer, Grant Watson, took a look at Creed II this week and seems to have enjoyed it. He also linked back to the long essay he wrote about the first Creed, which was an extraordinary film whose subtler qualities Watson takes the time to explicate in his essay.

I mention this because I became a fan of the Rocky franchise through Grant’s blog, back when he reviewed all of them. I grew up in the eighties, during the period where Stallone and the ongoing nature of the franchise were a running joke, but I’d somehow managed to avoid all of them and had no intention of rectifying that. 

Then Grant started reviewing them, one by one, charting the vagaries of the series from the beginning, and I was sufficiently intrigued to pick up a boxed set of movies and work my way through.

And yes, there are films where the excesses of the eighties are in full display, with the occasional moment of bugfuck crazy where children are left with robot babysitters and Rocky comes home from Russia to find his son has aged about a decade. 

But the original Rocky is still a damned fine piece of filmmaking and you develop a huge appreciation for Stallone’s take on the character when you watch the whole thing. I find myself looking forward to seeing Creed II, when I get the chance.

If I can’t convince you, go take a look at Grant’s thoughts on the matter. He lays out a very convincing argument. 

#

My beloved and I have been watching the Brazilian Netflix series 3% over the last week, and I’m deeply impressed by the show. It’s low-budget, but works within its limitations extremely well, conveying its dystopic vision with little flourishes and a focus on the emotional state of the characters.

I’m not sure that the second season is working as well for me, largely because they move away from the constraints that made season one work so well, but I’d still recommend it to anyone who thinks dystopia-focused young adult is out of juice as a genre. 

I’m reading Randall Garrett’s collection of LORD DARCY stories at the moment, and it’s proving to be hard going. The kind of book I dip into a story at a time, then set aside for a long stretch while I go find something that’s more my speed as a reader. I have issues with Garrett’s pacing, but that’s a conceit of the genre–he’s essentially doing Sherlock Holmes stories in an alternate universe where magic exists and thaumaturgical forensics is a studied art–and I have never been a voracious reader of the pure mystery story. 

I’m making a concreted effort to finish the collection because it plays into my thesis, being a significant source of inspiration behind Elizabeth Bear’s New Amsterdam stories featuring the forensic sorcerer Abigail Irene Garrett and the immortal vampire detective Sebastien de Ulloa. Those stories I devoured at a rapid clip when I first encountered them, immediately pre-ordering collections every time they were announced.

The difference isn’t just that the two writers are different, but that they way Bear approach’s her characters have been informed by thirty or forty years of detective stories since then. They’re flawed investigators, with their own conflicts and desires, compared to Garrett’s Lord Darcy. They’re still iconic characters, in the pattern described by Robin Laws, but their iconic nature stems from conflicts that are at the core of who they are. Emotional and moral wounds that will not heal over the course of the story, but may be played out in the microcosm of the investigation at hand.

It’s a shift that played out in TV over a similar period, bourn of changes to the consumption model that injected more serialisation into the traditional episodic model where character change meant risking the loss of audience members who missed pivotal episodes. It’s interesting to watch a similar shift in approach here in fiction.