Books – Nicolas Demers

Book Review: The Fault in Our Stars

There I was in Chapters the other day, not looking for any particular book, and ended up walking out with: volume 2 of The Unwritten, Alison Bechdel’s latest graphic novel Are You My Mother, and John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars. I’d never read any of his books before, though I’ve been a huge fan of Vlogbrothers and Crash Course for months.

There I was in Chapters the other day, not looking for any particular book, and ended up walking out with volume 2 of The Unwritten, Alison Bechdel’s latest graphic novel Are You My Mother?, and John Green‘s The Fault in Our Stars. I’d never read any of his books before, though I’ve been a huge fan of Vlogbrothers and Crash Course for months.

And I told myself I couldn’t start on any of these until I finished Contes du lundi (currently reading) and Faitheist (next on my list). But of course I couldn’t resist. I went through my new acquisitions right away, saving TFiOS for last.

At first it wasn’t the magnificent opus I was expecting. Engaging, moving, brutally honest? Definitely. Hilarious and nerdy? No doubt. Smart and thought-provoking while still totally unpretentious? Oh yeah. Through all of it, I could hear John Green’s voice in the narration. Hard not to, really, I’ve been listening to that voice on my computer for the better part of a year—silly and bouncy when he talks about the Dead Baby Orphanage or whatever, low and quiet and thoughtful during his Thoughts From Places. Every side of him is in Stars, and they manage to mesh together perfectly.

But still, except for a few passages, the first ten chapters didn’t really touch me. That all changed when Gus and Hazel arrived in Amsterdam. I don’t know if John (is it okay if I call him John?) wrote the Amsterdam parts in Amsterdam and the Indianapolis parts in Indianapolis, and if that explains why the Amsterdam parts felt more alive and magical; and now I’m thinking that was deliberate, that that whole trip was magical because it was a granted wish in a world that is not a wish-granting factory. And now I’m thinking maybe I’m overanalysing this. Wouldn’t be the first time.

Regardless, I started to perk up here:

“Are these houses very old?” asked my mom.
“Many of the canal houses date from the Golden Age, the seventeenth century,” he said. “Our city has a rich history, even though many tourists are only wanting to see the Red Light District.” He paused. “Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.”

I don’t know why that last sentence intrigued me so much. It kind of sounded like something John might say, except he’s never talked about sin in his videos…

But I kind of lost it a few pages later:

There were elm trees everywhere along the canals, and these seeds were blowing out of them. But they didn’t look like seeds. They looked for all the world like miniaturized rose petals drained of their color. These pale petals were gathering in the wind like flocking birds—thousands of them, like a spring snowstorm.
The old man who’d given up his seat saw us noticing and said, in English, “Amsterdam’s spring snow. The iepen throw confetti to greet the spring.”

I don’t know what elm tree seeds look like, so in my mind all I saw were Vancouver’s cherry blossoms, all shades of pink, brightening up the city just a couple weeks ago. A symbol of renewal and hope but also of the impermanence of all things and if that’s not the perfect accompaniment for two dying teenagers on the trip of a lifetime, I don’t know what is. In my head I was with Hazel and Gus, looking up at the elm tree snow, and I felt so sad for them but also happy because they were having an amazing time and now I wish so badly to visit Amsterdam myself, and I didn’t know if I wanted to laugh or cry so I settled for both.

Talk of champagne as bottled stars (‘Come quickly, I am tasting the stars.’; “We have bottled all the stars this evening, my young friends.”) made me think of Esther Earl, and I know Hazel is not Esther, but how can you not make the connection?

I’m not a fan of champagne and it never tasted like stars to me, but it’s such a beautiful image that next time I drink champagne I’ll think of stars—and, for what it’s worth, I’ll make a wish.

What I Used To Write

Talk about a blast from the past. A few months ago my folks found a few binders full of notes and writings from long ago, and asked me to take a look at it before throwing it out. What a find!

Talk about a blast from the past. A few months ago my folks found a few binders full of notes and writings from long ago, and asked me to take a look at it before throwing it out. What a find! The treasure trove includes:

Some printouts of my finished short stories, written around 1994, plus 2/3 of the final version of my first novel (finished 1992). Plus the maps that went with the novel. Can’t have a cool fantasy novel without maps, dontchaknow.
Notes and drafts for two more short stories, which I finished but don’t have the final versions of anymore; reams of notes on poems and various half-finished projects; all written 1994–1995
A dream journal I kept up for a few months in ’94. A self-hypnosis journal around the same time
Drafts of my Web site (first online in September 1995). Including notes of me learning HTML, and printouts of some of the pages.
Notes about my evolving spirituality—not beliefs, because at that time I was sliding into agnosticism, but playing around with symbols, rituals and made-up mythology.
Various odds and ends: a couple pages of quotes I really liked; episode guides to Star Trek: TNG and Space: 1999 for some reason; notes on an unsent letter to Phil Farrand, with feedback on nits he missed and criticism of his occasional heterosexist attitude; a map for an AD&D campaign I briefly DM’d sometime in the mid-80’s. The overall plotline, IIRC, was “inspired” (by which I mean, “ripped off”) from Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné and Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant; maps and world-building notes for another AD&D campaign, a couple of years later, that I never got to play in.

I’m throwing most of it away. The story notes, the poetry? Gone. The dream and self-hypnosis journals? Outta here. The novel? Recycled (no, I don’t have a soft copy). The Web site drafts? Like you really need to ask.

Let’s be honest here, aside from the very temporary nostalgia value, I’ve got no reason to reread any of this stuff. It’s coming at me from long ago and far away, and is pretty well irrelevant. There’s nothing useful this motley assortment of words can give me. I haven’t written fiction or poetry in over ten years, and have no particular desire to pick it up again. I haven’t played D&D since the early ’90’s, and likewise don’t miss it. And if the journal isn’t helping me remember any of these dreams from 15 years ago, what good is it?

And, with all due respect to my younger self: my prose and poetry was mostly crap. I mean, there’s a reason why I never tried to publish any of it, with one exception. The novel was mediocre clichéd sword-and-sorcery fantasy, the shorts were a little better but mostly written for myself as creativity exercises, and the poems… okay, some of them weren’t bad. I put a few up on my site for a while, back in the day. But still, nothing to write home about, and I took them down when I began blogging more regularly.

The self-hypnosis stuff… yeah. I was trying so hard to deal with my many issues, and figure out where my life was going, but I didn’t really know how to go about it. I was so used to living inside my own head anyway, so this seemed like a good idea. In hindsight, it proved mostly just a lot of mental masturbation. I say “mostly” because I did get a couple of useful insights and actions out of it. I guess it was a bit like cognitive therapy, except without a trained professional.

The spirituality stuff was more interesting, but even then (late ’95–early ’96) pretty much on the decline. I’d gone through my my kinda-Pagan phase and was sliding into agnosticism, then atheism. None of these made-up rituals and things were ever that useful—see “mental masturbation” above—and I eventually dropped them by late ’97 (after I started identifying as atheist, but that’s a whole ‘nother story).

Still…

Still, in a more or less direct way, it’s all got me to where I am now. That first site evolved over many iterations, leading to this here blog, plus giving me the skills and confidence to branch out in the last year. Those fantasy stories got me used to putting words on paper or computer screen, which led to articles in student papers, and eventually this blog.

Doesn’t mean I need to spend much time navel-gazing, fun though it could be. It’s a brand new day, a brand new year, and I need to look forward, not backward. I’ll just take a few select pieces that have real sentimental value, and move on.

Apology to Alan Turing

The UK government apologises for its treatment of Alan Turing.

The UK government apologises for its treatment of Alan Turing:

Earlier this year I stood with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama to honour the service and the sacrifice of the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago. And just last week, we marked the 70 years which have passed since the British government declared its willingness to take up arms against Fascism and declared the outbreak of World War Two. So I am both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists, historians and LGBT activists, we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship; that of code-breaker Alan Turing.

Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ – in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence – and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison – was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later.

A pointless feel-good exercise? Too little too late? A fitting tribute to a national hero? I don’t know. Maybe all of the above, but on the whole I’m happy with it. Turing damn well deserves some recognition for being one of the founding fathers of computer science, not to mention his cracking of the Enigma ciphers. And who knows what other contributions he may have made, if he’d lived? In his last years Turing researched neural nets and artificial intelligence, amongst other topics. He might have helped drive not one but two information revolutions.

I read Andrew Hodges’ excellent biography Alan Turing: The Enigma not too long after coming out. Borrowed it from the library, which is a shame because I’d really like to reread it now. An abridged version (also maintained by Andrew Hodges) is available online which, shameless plug, was the basis of an article I co-wrote in my first semester at SFU.

And in all the discussion surrounding this apology, I found a link to an excellent short story that sort of answers my previous question. What might have Turing done, if he’d lived (and was helped by a time traveller)? Check it out

A couple of belated book reviews

Hey, didn’t I resolve in January to read fiction and then to blog about it? Why yes I did.

Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City

I’d started Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City in April, shortly after finishing The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky, and eventually finished it on my vacation in June. And just like Five Books, as with the previous book, I had a hard time getting into it. The problem, I think, was that there wasn’t any plot, just a bunch of characters living their lives and interacting.

But it grew on me. The lack of an overall plot stopped bothering me, and I just let Maupin lead me by the hand into the lives of these oddballs—not as sideshow freaks, but as interesting people who made San Francisco the city he loved. And hey, I can definitely relate to Mary Ann, the innocent newcomer.

Mary Ann Singleton was twenty-five years old when she saw San Francisco for the first time.

She came to the city alone for an eight-day vacation. On the fifth night she drank three Irish coffees at the Buena Vista, realized that her Mood Ring was blue, and decided to phone her mother in Cleveland.

Hee. “Mood Ring.”

And another sign of the times: all the scenes of cruising (both hetero and otherwise) at Safeways and laundromats. I mean, granted, they didn’t have the internet back then, but did people really do that? Oh my god, maybe they still do that! Have I been blind to all the hooking up going on at the Safeway on Davie? Damn, I’ll have to pay more attention in the future.

William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land

I totally forgot about this book, until I dug it up again in Ottawa, and decided to bring it back with me.

A bit of history: way back when, I borrowed from a friend a complete compilation of HP Lovecraft’s stories, in three large volumes. The second (IIRC) contained a review by Lovecraft of about a dozen horror/fantasy novels of the era. One of them, The Night Land, sounded intriguing—a story of the far future, where the last remnants of humankind are huddled in a massive fortress and the rest of the Earth is filled with horrible monsters. Lovecraft appreciated the weird and creepy settings, but objected to the silly pseudo-Olde-Fashioned Writing style, and the schmaltzy love story that drove the plot.

Don’t ask me how I got my hands on an obscure horror novel published in 1912, but I did. And say what you will about Lovecraft (like, that he was a creepy misogynistic bigot), but when it came to fiction the guy knew his shit. Everything he said in his review was absolutely on the nose. In fact, rereading The Night Land the second time around was even more painful than I remembered:

And I stood me up, and did peer about for any dread matter; but all seemed proper, and I began to stamp my feet against the earth, as that I would drive it from me, and this I do say as a whimsy, and I swung mine arms, as often you shall do in the cold days; and so I was presently something warmed. And I dismantled my cloak, and wrapped it around me, and did feel that the Diskos [his weapon, like a circular vibro-blade] was safe to my hip.

Then did I sit me down, and did glow a little with relish, in that I should now eat four of the tablets; for, indeed, these were my proper due, by reason of my shiftless fasting ere I came so wotless to my slumbering.

Now imagine 500+ pages of that. And I’ve spared you the really nauseating parts after he rescues his lady-love and takes her back to the Pyramid. They alternate between being all lovey-dovey, and her being an arbitrarily silly bitch so the big strong protector male has to hit her a few times so she’ll behave. Yeah, I’d forgotten how stunningly sexist the book was, and “Well, it was written in 1912” isn’t much of an excuse. Hodgson deliberately went for old-fashioned, not just in the language but the story dynamics, creating something I’d describe as “medieval”. As much as I hate doing it on principle, I had to skim a lot of passages until I got to the next plot point or action scene.

Some bits were interesting, though. The description of the Evil Forces was indeed pretty cool, as was the narrator’s musing that most of this future Earth wasn’t so much evil as just alien; dangerous to humans, sure, but not actively hostile to them, and still not without beauty.

At one point the protagonist was wondering if Naani (the love interest) had had other lovers between the present day and this future (because they’ve both been reincarnated many times) and actually got jealous over the possibility. That was just so silly to me that I felt sure the whole novel was a subtle deconstruction of the reincarnation romance trope. However, everything else seemed to be played completely straight, so I don’t know.

Bottom line: meh. It was kind of interesting as a specimen of old-time literature, but it fails as a love story, and only somewhat succeeds as horror and adventure. Only hardcore fans would enjoy this.

What’s inspiring me

AdamSchwabe.com: a wonderfully clean, minimalist site. Not just in the look; note that a lot of common blog functionality is missing: Category listings or tag cloud? Browsable archives? Blogroll? It has none of these things, and doesn’t especially need them. What it does have is a beautiful and effective navigation scheme that uses colour to let you know exactly where you are, and a layout that lets the eye flow naturally to the content. Hey, that’s what you get when the author’s a user interface designer. AdamSchwabe.com teaches me that less is indeed more.

Plus, it’s what introduced me to colourlovers.com, so bonus points there.

Avalonstar:distortion is the total opposite in many ways. It’s dark. It’s busy. But you know what? it works. The author puts in tons of fun little extra bits, from “Welcome to Avalonstar” in Japanese to the closing “</and this would be the end>” tag at the very bottom. The site is fun to read. If you can pull it off, more can definitely be more.

Mind you, a design is nothing without content, and the two above sites has it in spades. And that’s something else for me to work on (not that I haven’t already).

Elements: Architecture in detail. Not a website, but a book. The other day I was in The Book Warehouse on Davie, and this caught my eye right from the top shelf. Aside from the lovely shots of contemporary architecture, the book’s message is that the devil is in the details. For the whole to work, all the components have to be working first.

Oh, and that day I also bought Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, Terry Pratchett’s Nation, A Hat Full of Sky and Wintersmith. They didn’t have The Wee Free Men, though. Bummer.

Book Review: The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky

Wow, that took a while. So much for my New Year’s resolution to read a novel a month, eh?

I started on this book in late January, after skipping through three quarters of the Mortal Engines quartet. Then I was taking a class, which left me with very little time and energy for such frivolities. But the class ended, and on Easter weekend I decided to pick it up again. I was immediately hooked, and devoured it in a three-day binge of more-or-less nonstop reading.

Wow, that took a while. So much for my New Year’s resolution to read a novel a month, eh?

I met Karen X. Tulchinsky years ago; she was leading a writing workshop, one night a week for… I don’t remember how many weeks. This was before I started blogging, but I was interested in writing. And meeting guys who were also interested in writing. The workshop didn’t help in that area, but otherwise I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Ms. Tulchinsky was a great teacher, very friendly and supportive.

Now that I think about it, I’ve gotten the same impression from her previous books—one short story collection and two novels, all dealing with the trials and joys of being a Jewish dyke. I’m rereading some of the stories in In Her Nature, and (to this non-Jewish non-dyke) the history, the culture, the Yiddish, they never seem forced or self-conscious. Just a simple This is who I am. This is who we are. Sure, it’s okay to laugh along.

This latest book is different, though. It’s “queer” only in the loosest sense—only a couple of characters, including the titular narrator, are gay—but it’s still there, part of the tapestry of human experience. Another difference is that it’s not set in the present day (except for the framing narration at the start of each section, most of the action takes place in the 30’s and 40’s), and thus deals much more heavily in presenting Canada as it was then, and Canadian Jews as they were then. We know all the dates and facts about the Depression, about World War II, D-Day, about antisemitism. But the magic lies in making all that history come to life, and Tulchinsky pulls it off, brilliantly mixing the personal dramas with the wide sweep of historical events.

Interesting technique to really grab the reader: Tulchinsky writes in present-tense narration. Nice choice; it felt so natural I took a hundred pages to even notice.

This being a historical novel, the details are made up but the story is true. Toronto youths wearing Swastika badges, fighting Jewish kids; the Christie Pits riot; the disastrous Battle of Dieppe; pogroms in Tsarist Russia. All these things happened. And though Sonny “The Charger” Lapinsky never actually existed, other Jewish boxers lived and fought during the Depression. Though Yacov Lapinsky never existed, the stories he told of his escape from Russia are deeply rooted in reality—a lot more than I realised then, probably. Because, as I said, I’ve been rereading In Her Nature and one of the short stories there (“Canadian Shmadian”) contains some parts of those tales; surely they come courtesy of Tulchinsky’s older relatives.

Most of the novel’s events are related in chronological order, starting on the day after the Christie Pits riot in August 1933. Throughout the book we’re told all the facts, how that day affected the Lapinsky family: Sonny’s anger, Izzy’s brain damage. But in the last chapters take us back to the riot, and even though I knew exactly how things would turn out, I still couldn’t stop reading. Now that’s impressive.

The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky is a masterpiece: engrossing, educational, full of human drama that’s still not without comedy. Tulchinsky has done a wonderful job of honouring her family by creating this ficionalised, though still true, tale.

“There is grandeur in this view of life…”

In the last chapter of The Origin of Species, Darwin recapped all the evidence he so carefully and meticulously presenting for his theory of common descent. And then took a step back to ponder where it was all going, and what it all meant.

In the last chapter of The Origin of Species, Darwin recapped all the evidence he had so meticulously presented for his theory of common descent. And then took a step back to ponder where it was all going, and what it all meant.

When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every production of nature as one which has had a history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, nearly in the same way as when we look at any great mechanical invention as the summing up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting, I speak from experience, will the study of natural history become!

He predicted that the theory would open up rich new fields of scientific research in biology, geology, paleontology, psychology and anthropology. Armed with the understanding that all individuals of all species are related, however distantly, that species have been shaped by their environments over the eons, scientists would look backwards, and outwards, free of counterproductive labels and dogmas, answering many current questions and discovering even more interesting questions to ask. This prediction would prove to be correct. As Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote, “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”

And then he went one step further:

When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.

What ennobles them? Simply having such a long and complex history. They—and all their ancestors—were lucky or tough enough to survive everything Nature could throw at them. Every being now living, worm or eagle, peasant or aristocrat, is descended from a long line of survivors. That’s a pedigree anyone should be proud of.

Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity. And of the species now living very few will transmit progeny of any kind to a far distant futurity; for the manner in which all organic beings are grouped, shows that the greater number of species of each genus, and all the species of many genera, have left no descendants, but have become utterly extinct.

Is it all doom and gloom, though? Not at all.

As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Silurian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of equally inappreciable length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.

I don’t know about that “perfection,” but hey, that’s Victorians for you.

It’s interesting to note how Darwin’s attitude contrasts with that of creationists, then or now. To them, the idea of being related to apes is just as abhorrent as the idea the Bible isn’t literally true. Animals aren’t ennobled by their connection with us; it’s we who are demeaned by our connection with them. The only way Humankind can be seen as special is through our creation, not our history or achievements. And they certainly don’t look forward to a far distant future where our descendants—however different they’ll be from us—will continue to thrive.

The book concludes with a final appeal, not to the truth, but the beauty of his theory.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Darwin’s no poet, I grant you, but this passage works. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the theory of evolution—with its notions of deep time and the fundamental interconnectedness of all living beings—tells a far more satisfying story than any creation myth our various cultures have cooked up. Our long journey from the trees—and before that, from the swamps and the seas—has made us what we are, flaws and all. We dishonour our ancestors by ignoring their struggles, their achievements, and yes, their failures. We honour them by remembering their lives, and continuing the journey they made possible for us.

Happy 200^th, Mr. Darwin.

Book Review: Mortal Engines, Predator’s Gold, Infernal Devices

One of my new year’s resolutions is to read more literature, and then to blog about it. This post is more of a prologue to that, because the books it reviews don’t really count as literature.

So a month or two ago I was browsing TVTropes, and came upon this entry right here. A post-apocalyptic future with mobile cities that eat each other? This was way too intriguing to pass up. I decided to only order the first three books since the last, A Darkling Plain, is only out in hardback.

One of my new year’s resolutions is to read more literature, and then to blog about it. This post is more of a prologue to that, because the books it reviews don’t really count as literature.

All in all, the series was pretty good. Not great, mind you, and I don’t think I would have given it all those awards, but a pleasant little adventure story. There are a lot of clever bits, including the basic premise of Traction Cities, and various shout outs. The plot and characters, though… they were less impressive. The author’s presence was too visible, I think, moving the players around on his board, and I just couldn’t suspend my disbelief. Likewise, Hester Shaw’s evolution from Action Girl to full-on murderous sociopath felt arbitrary and forced.

Incidentally, though the series does pretty consistently depict a savagely town-eat-town world, it falls prey to the Apocalypse Not trope. In Mortal Engines the Hunting Ground was in bad shape and getting worse, with slim pickings for London. Yet in Infernal Devices, we see many cities of varied sizes coexisting, with something of a common culture. Not to mention the lands of the Anti-Traction League.

Writing-wise, the first book needed some polish. The plot seemed even more forced (honestly, it was pretty clear this was Philip Reeve’s first stab at novel writing), and there were a couple of odd bits—like passages switching to the present tense for no clear reason—that should have been caught by an editor.

Still, I was entertained, and that’s what counts, right? I’ll be sure to pick up A Darkling Plain when it comes out in paperback.

Next up: Karen X. Tulchinksy’s The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky

Graphic Novel Review: Fun Home

I love Alison Bechdel’s Dykes To Watch Out For, and have from the day I came out and picked up my first GO-Info (strip # 140, “The Last Tango”, where Mo and Harriet have sex one last time before breaking up for good). Until it ended earlier this year, it was the first thing I read when picking up Xtra! West, and I could always count on it to make me laugh make me think, or both. I own all the collected books, including The Indelible Alison Bechdel.

Fun Home Cover
Well you should see my story-reading baby
You should hear the things that she says
She says “Hon, drop dead, I’d rather go to bed
With Gabriel García Márquez
Cuddle up with William S. Burroughs
Leave on the light for bell hooks
I’ve been flirtin’ with Pierre Burton
‘Cause he’s so smart in his books”

—Moxy Früvous, “My Baby Loves A Bunch Of Authors”

I love Alison Bechdel’s Dykes To Watch Out For, and have from the day I came out and picked up my first GO-Info (strip # 140, “The Last Tango”, where Mo and Harriet have sex one last time before breaking up for good). Until it ended earlier this year, it was the first thing I read when picking up Xtra! West, and I could always count on it to make me laugh, make me think, or both. I own all the collected books, including The Indelible Alison Bechdel.

But, there was one book of hers missing from my collection: a non-DTWOF book I didn’t even know existed until this summer, when I saw it as part of an exhibition on animation and comics at the Art Gallery. I read it all the way through in one sitting, absolutely captivated. It’s poignant, disturbing in parts, brutally honest, yet at the same time masterfully intellectual and literate. A couple of weeks ago I bought it as a Christmas present to myself, and I’ve been compulsively rereading it over and over again. I guess this post is a way to get it out of my head.

In brief, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is the story of Bechdel’s growing up, and her complicated relationship with her father. A few weeks after coming out to her parents at age 19, she learned he was gay. A few months later he was dead, possibly having committed suicide. Fun Home is Bechdel’s attempt to work out the threads of his life, her own life, and how the two intersected.

But Fun Home is more than a memoir. It’s a story about stories: specifically, the books that Alison and her father both loved—and for the last couple of years of his life, the only way they related to each other. Fun Home is peppered with allusions and quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Albert Camus, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Colette and Greek mythology, among many others, but they never (well, hardly ever) feel forced. Without bogging things down in tedious literary analysis, they provide just enough insight to not only enrich the story but get me excited about reading the originals as well.

Alison (I feel a bit awkward referring to her by her first name, but what can you do?) found her taste for The Classics in grade 12, but before that, her relationship with her father was mostly distant, even hostile at times. Bruce Bechdel, it seems, was not an easy man to live with. A remote, authoritarian father and husband, prone to bouts of rage, he spent much of his spare time reading or restoring his family’s 19^th century home. He was obsessed with beauty, but it was a narrow, oppressive kind of beauty, shallow and fragile, with no room for other people’s needs or tastes. The home he recreated was an artfully arranged, jumbo-sized closet, as much a museum as a place to live.

Everything in Bruce Bechdel’s world had to be just so, and that included his only daughter Alison. They were polar opposites in many ways, butch girl and sissy man; him trying to dress her up into a perfect model of femininity, her resisting his efforts as best she could. His intent is ambiguous: it’s not clear if she was just another canvas on which to work his art, or if he was actually trying to quash her budding queerness.

“Is that what you want to look like?” There are so many things wrong with that question. Is looking butch a worse sin than queerness? Would it have been better for her to look pretty, marry and have affairs with high school students on the sly?

Closeted father aside, there’s a lot I can relate to in Alison’s story. Both my parents are teachers as well (retired now) and have never been very demonstrative either. Like Alison, I realised I was gay before I had sex. And again like her, I bought a truckload of books upon coming out—biographies, histories, politics, humour, psychology, anything really, I wasn’t too choosy back then.

And actually, that part was familiar. The Indelible Alison Bechdel reprinted her coming-out story; originally published in 1993, it focused on the immediate circumstances surrounding her revelation, making contact with the local gay community, and ending with her first time with another woman. But in the meantime bookish, intellectual Alison had plowed through many, many books in an attempt to find, and understand, her new community. The masturbation scene above was played for giggles in 1993 but turned into something more serious in 2006, almost transcendent, a necessary step in her journey. Only the “good for a wank” brought it down to earth a bit.

Okay, I promised myself I wouldn’t be doing any high-falutin’ literary analysis (“Marlow’s steamer? penis. The Congo? vagina” Hee) but there are a few details that jumped out at me. Consider the picture on her professor’s office wall. It so happens (thank you Wikipedia!) that “The Descent of Minerva to Ithaca” is one of a series of engravings John Flaxman did to illustrate the Odyssey. Guess which book was studied in this English class? That’s right: Joyce’s Ulysses.

There’s more, though. This meeting took place the exact same day Alison realised she was a lesbian. And in the 1993 version of her coming-out story, she compares her revelation to the birth of Athena. “You know the story. She springs, fully grown and in complete armor, from Zeus’s head.”

Was that picture really there in her professor’s office? I don’t think it matters much. In a few instances, Alison points out a stray detail and insists it was in fact real. This still leaves many unaccounted for, but that’s fine. In a memoir, factual accuracy may sometimes take a back seat. I’ll trust that the story is true enough, and move on.

So there you have it. Honestly, going through Fun Home again and again has left me exhausted, but in a good way. I grieve for a man who died before he ever had the chance to truly live, but celebrate the life of a woman who escaped his labyrinth and created something truly beautiful. And maybe, one of these days, I’ll feel brave enough to tackle Proust.

Arthur C. Clarke: 1917–2008

Well, damn.

I guess part of me thought he’d live forever, or at least long enough to see all the marvels he imagined or predicted. Hell, he saw geostationary satellites and global telecommunications become reality, why not space elevators or Martian colonies or deep-space travel as well?

Well, damn.

As a young nerd I read a number of his books: Dolphin Island was first, I think, way back in high school English class, though I haven’t picked it up since. There were also some of the classics, like 2001, Childhood’s End, The Sands of Mars, Rendezvous With Rama (never got into the sequels), The Fountains of Paradise. I loved them all, but my favourite was and still is The Songs of Distant Earth. Almost every page is gold, from the arrival of the Magellans to Thalassa to Moses Kaldor’s discussion of God (a theme Clarke picks up every now and then in his fiction), the conflicts, the heartbreaks, the dramas big and small, as well as the scorps’ evolution to semi-sentience. Like much of his work before and since, Songs shows us a very optimistic future. It’s a future where humanity has grown up, and mostly left aggression and bigotry behind; where we can find peace without sacrificing progress, and without losing our essential nature. A future where race, religion, gender and sexuality are just not that big a deal, and the boundaries of love and family are wider and more flexible.

Lieutenant Horton was an amusing companion, but Loren was glad to get rid of him as soon as the electrofusion currents had welded his broken bones. As Loren discovered in somewhat wearisome detail, the young engineer had fallen in with a gang of hairy hunks whose second main interest in life appeared to be riding microjet surfboards up vertical waves. Horton had found, the hard way, that it was even more dangerous than it looked.

“I’m quite surprised,” Loren had interjected at one point in a rather seamy narrative. “I’d have sworn you were ninety percent hetero.”

“Ninety-two, according to my profile,” Horton said cheerfully. “But I like to check my calibration from time to time.”

The lieutenant was only half joking. Somewhere he had heard that hundred percenters were so rare that they were classed as pathological.

Heh. Yes, it’s completely gratuitous, but Clarke pulls it off, and I can’t tell you what that kind of writing meant to my still-closeted teen self. I like to think it eventually helped me come out to myself, or at least made the way smoother by defusing any internalised homophobia I may have had.

More recently I bought his Collected Stories, a massive sampling of his short stories from 1937 to 1997. Though it’s hard to pick a favourite amongst all these gems, I’m very fond of the “White Hart” stories. Written in the 40’s and 50’s, these take place in the (probably partly real) London pub “White Hart,” a hangout of writers and engineering geeks. These loosely connected tales of university life and improbable inventions, full of dry, low-key British humour, remind me of P.G. Wodehouse’s stories—though with nutty professors and eccentric inventors instead of useless upper-class twits.

I also have to give a special nod to The Wire Continuum, the last one in the collection. Co-written with Stephen Baxter (another fave author of mine), this is a sequel to the very first story in the book, entitled Travel by Wire! A cute but unremarkable story of matter transmission through power lines is re-explored sixty years later as these two stupendously smart and talented minds play at finding applications to this technology. We’re treated to surgical teleportation, faster-than-light communication, instantaneous extrasolar travel and finally, the direct linking of minds leading to an evolutionary quantum leap for humankind. Some of these ideas are further fleshed out in The Light of Other Days, another Baxter/Clarke collaboration.

Finally, there’s an essay of his I reread regularly: “Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘Credo'”, appearing in the September/October 2001 issue of Skeptical Inquirer (one of several specials they did on science and religion). I found it a bit rambling and unfocussed, which I guess is understandable when you’re trying to talk about God and what others have said about God. But the grand vision, gentle humour and warm optimism are pure Clarke.

I began this essay by saying that men have debated the problems of existence for thousands of years—and that is precisely why I am skeptical about most of the answers. One of the great lessons of modern science is that millennia are only moments. It is not likely that ultimate questions will be settled in such short periods of time, or that we will really know much about the universe while we are still crawling around in the playpen of the Solar System.

He concludes by quoting form his earlier book Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible. I get chills every time I read this passage.

Our galaxy is now in the brief springtime of its life—a springtime made glorious by such brilliant blue-white stars as Vega and Sirius, and, on a more humble scale, our own Sun. Not until all these have flamed through their incandescent youth, in a few fleeting billions of years, will the real history of the universe begin.

It will be a history illuminated only by the reds and infrareds of dully glowing stars that would be almost invisible to our eyes; yet the somber hues of that all-but-eternal universe may be full of color and beauty to whatever strange beings have adapted to it. They will know that before them lie, not the millions of years in which we measure eras of geology, nor the billions of years which span the past lives of the stars, but years to be counted literally in trillions.

They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge. They will be like gods, because no gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command. But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of Creation; for we knew the universe when it was young.