Category: Culture

Let’s just talk about the truck


The flag on the back is the Christian flag, which is commonly flown in King, North Carolina. Also note the bumper stickers in the lower photo.

We could talk about why a surplus military vehicle belonging to the Pfafftown (North Carolina) militia, a right-wing paramilitary group, showed up at the polling place for the Nov. 7 municipal elections in King. We could talk about how, in the previous two elections in King, assault charges have been filed because of encounters between members of the conservative majority and the liberal minority. We could talk about how Republicans and churchgoers are upset because an atheist is running for the King town council. We could talk about how it’s part of my duty, as a local political operative, to be concerned about what happens at the polls on election days. But let’s don’t talk about any of that. I’m burned out on tomfool right-wing drama. Let’s talk about the truck instead.

Because I’m a nerd with a Y chromosome, I find these trucks fascinating, just as cool machines. It happens that, only a couple of months ago, in writing book 3 of the Ursa Major series, I needed a truck like this for a fictional military operation. I had never seen such a truck, so I had to do some research on military vehicles. I never just make stuff up, when stuff must correspond to reality! I do whatever research is necessary. I found the army’s operator’s manual for the truck, which is 452 pages long. I admit without shame that it was fascinating reading, and that the truck almost becomes a character in the novel, the way Jake’s Jeep did in book 1, Fugue in Ursa Major.

I believe the truck in the photo is an M923A2 dropside cargo truck. These trucks come in about 30 different configurations, including dump trucks, wreckers, and vans. It has a Cummins diesel engine, all-wheel drive, and all sorts of cool features that harden it for military use. If you like fine machines (from aircraft to communications apparatus), you’ve got to love military specs.

The driver said he bought this truck for $10,000 a few years ago. I’m sure he drives it to church and to watch people vote. But I shudder to imagine where else.

Umberto Eco


Sean Connery and Christian Slater in “The Name of the Rose”

The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco, 1980. English translation 1983.

What? I’m reviewing a book that was first published 37 years ago? Oh well. No one ever accused me of being au courant.

I have tried several times in the past to read Umberto Eco’s The Name of Rose, as well as Foucault’s Pendulum. I have always been driven back by the dry wordiness of Eco’s prose. This time I resolved to finish The Name of the Rose no matter how big a chore it might be, partly as an exercise in better understanding why some writers earn far more generous reputations than they deserve.

First, let’s talk about the film, from 1986. Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and with a superb cast including Sean Connery, F. Murray Abraham and the young Christian Slater, the film — I thought, at least — was one of the best and most memorable films of the 1980s. But the film didn’t make much money in the United States, though people in more intelligent parts of the world loved it. Roger Ebert wrote, “What we have here is the setup for a wonderful movie. What we get is a very confused story.”

I don’t agree with Ebert. The screenwriters actually did a brilliant job of stripping out most of Eco’s confusion, endless declamation and disquisition, and sticking to the plot — your basic murder mystery. It was said that Eco didn’t much like the screenplay, precisely because all that erudition got cut (as it had to be).

Eco was a scholar — no doubt a good one — with a wide range of interests. The Name of the Rose drew on his background as a medievalist. Obviously Eco was fascinated by the theological debates of the late medieval period. Also obviously, the setting and the plot for The Name of the Rose were chosen because they provided a basis for page after page of theological hairsplitting by monks of different orders. To Eco’s credit, these endless orations on Christian theology can be funny in their absurdity, and Eco leaves it to the reader to discern what fools his monks are. William of Baskerville, however, is at least a nice fool. And his teenage novice Adso (Christian Slater), with his naiveté and surging hormones, is a very fine foil for so much useless learnedness.

(Incidentally, the chief subject of Eco’s theological debate is whether Christ was poor. The Franciscan order certainly believed in the poverty of Christ, and they got crossways with some popes and with the Inquisition. If you’re interested in the details of all that, I’ll leave you to read The Name of the Rose. But it is worth pointing out, I think, how the church is still divided by the question of poverty, with a few Christians remaining who actually care about the poor, and with other Christians giving their money to birdbrain preachers who live in multimillion-dollar mansions like little popes and fly around on the Lord’s business in private jets. If this history repeated itself, then Christians who care today about the poor would be burned at the stake.)

But what I conclude about Umberto Eco is in many ways similar to what I conclude about Neal Stephenson, the science fiction writer. Both, I would guess, are somewhere well along on the autism spectrum. Both are fine thinkers — but without the least trace of feeling. Stephenson, like Eco, set one of his novels in a monastery (Anathem) and for the same reason — so that their characters can talk, talk, talk about abstractions that they find interesting. But their characters, like the authors, totally lack feeling. I also would argue that the best moments in fiction occur when a character is so driven to despair or ecstasy that the character is compelled to sing. When an author sings, that’s when you learn what motivates the author to write in the first place. For a fine discussion on moments in fiction that sing, see E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel.

In any case, with writers like Eco and Stephenson, one of the most powerful and meaningful ingredients of good fiction is totally missing. Both Eco and Stephenson are so blind to the feeling element of fiction that they seem unaware of the flatness of their characters and make no attempt to simulate the missing ingredient. Adso knows how to suffer some where sex is involved, but Adso cannot sing.

That said, I love brainy fiction — Isaac Asimov, for example. I have great respect for (and considerable interest in) the erudition to be found in Neal Stephenson’s and Umberto Eco’s novels. But it’s not enough, and that’s a shame.

Why is linguistics so rarefied?

I think a lot about language. I often have questions about language that are very difficult to find answers to. That’s not true of most sciences. If I have a question about physics (insofar as there are answers to questions about physics), I can find an answer in no time. (As a science fiction writer, I often have questions about physics.) In Oratorio in Ursa Major, I have a character who is a linguist. The research for her character, and for some of the things she needed to say, was damnably difficult.

For an example of a pretty trivial linguistics question, I had been wondering why so many personal pronouns and possessive adjectives rhyme, at least in the three languages that I know something about:

English: Me, thee, he, she, we • mine, thine

French: Me, te, se • nous, vous • mon, ton, son • ma, ta, sa • notre, votre

Spanish: Nosotros, vosotros • nuestra, vuestra • tu, su

My first question would be, is this accidental? It doesn’t seem to be accidental. If it’s not accidental, why should this be?

In this particular case, I was able to find a pretty good answer by Googling. Googling led me to a book that contains a collection of papers from the 14th International Conference on Historical Linguistics in Vancouver in 1999. Google Books, as usual, provides only part of the book. The complete book can be bought for $156 (!). But a paper by Johanna Nichols from the University of California at Berkeley titled “Why ‘Me’ and ‘Thee’?” provided a pretty good answer. The answer is that, no, it’s not accidental. It’s also a feature of 152 languages that she compared.

The paper refers to these kinds of words as “lexical sets.” In lexical sets, rhyming, alliteration, and other sorts of vocal patterns (collectively called phonosymbolism) are repeated: Mama, papa.

As I understand her academic explanation for why this might be, it boils down to this: Lexical sets that rhyme or that are otherwise phonosymbolic appeal to people of all languages. Because it’s appealing, it spreads and becomes entrenched.

That makes sense to me, and I’ll consider the question answered.

But it’s also interesting to note that, compared with other fields (such as, say, anthropology) far fewer people get Ph.D.’s in linguistics. In my life, I have met only one Ph.D. in linguistics. That was someone in New York, the friend of a friend who is an anthropologist. (Do they all know each other so they can ask either other questions?) Also, most smaller liberal arts schools don’t even have linguistics programs. The list of universities with stellar linguistics programs is very short.

The downside of this for us lay folks and non-scholars is that linguistics is very nearly out of our reach. You’ll find almost nothing in your public library. Googling won’t get you very far. And though the books are out there, they are very, very expensive. One book I’d like to have, for example, is The English Language: A Linguistic History, from the Oxford University Press. It costs $110, and it takes Amazon two to four weeks to get it, which probably means that it has to be shipped from the U.K.

I’d kill for a friend who is a linguist. Unless I move to Amherst or Oxford or Palo Alto, that probably is not going to happen.

Preserving culture


Foxfire students interviewing Aunt Arie — photo by Foxfire Fund, Inc.

There are some strange ideas kicking around these days about what it means to preserve culture. But preserving culture is hard work and a labor of love.

Many, many people are doing this work. It involves books, books, and more books. It is being done with film and photography, with museums, with special events such as fiddlers’ conventions and food festivals, with archeology, and by scholars from many departments of the universities including linguists, historians, anthropologists, and even the music department.

Nor is white trash culture, or Southern culture, or Appalachian culture, being neglected. Far from it! It isn’t culture that white supremicists such as Peter Cvjetanovic seek to preserve. It’s privilege, injustice, and some sort of perverse notion of purity.

We might call the people who do the real work culture workers. And though preserving culture is a labor of love, there is so much demand for the products of culture workers that many people can make a living at it — scholars and writers, for example.

As I have argued in other posts, there is much that is sick in the conservative mind. They look to the past, but they look only to an arbitrary and falsely glorified moment in the past when their ilk were dominant. They selectively ignore the rest of the past. In doing so the conservative mind is blind to privilege and injustice and to the factors that rotted their moment of glory. I have no problem with statues, but the intention behind most statues is not to preserve culture. Rather, it’s to preserve glory.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

One of the things that bothers the dickens out of me is how disinterested many people are in preserving their own personal histories and their own family histories. Some may go so far as to sign up for Ancestry.com and try to build lists of their ancestors, working on line. But how many people bother to get to know great-aunt Matilda before she dies, ask her about what life was like eighty years ago, and then write it down? In most families, collective memory rarely extends beyond two or three generations.

If the white racist Peter Cvjetanovic actually knew any history, he would know that cultures have been melding together throughout human history. As for the moment he glorifies, he also would be sensitive to African-American history, to how African-Americans helped to build this country, and to how African-Americans still have not achieved their full and fair share of justice and equality. But conservatives don’t care about justice unless it involves punishing people they don’t like.

Preserving culture is work that all of us can and should do. Now that I’m retired and don’t have to work for a living, culture work really is my life’s work from now on.

Those who have read my novels know how concerned I am about the loss of pagan Celtic culture to Rome and to Rome’s predatory religion. The damage to Celtic culture was so severe that it was a genocide, actually. Our only means of reconstructing that culture is to absorb what exists in the written records, look at what archeologists have learned, and then use one’s imagination. Where lost Celtic culture is concerned, many writers are doing that.

I don’t plan to publish my memoir for many years, but 150,000 words of it is written. We all should write our memoirs. I was very flattered when Ken asked me if he could interview me and videotape it as an oral history. He did the same thing with his parents. He ended up with so much video that he wasn’t sure where to store it. That is the kind of work it takes to preserve history and culture. All kids have that capability now. All that’s needed is a smart phone that shoots video.

While open-minded people are actually doing this work, small minds are mistaking the preservation of hatred and privilege for the preservation of culture.

That photograph of Peter Cvjetanovic — holding a torch, his face contorted with hatred — has quickly become a cultural icon. It’s a photograph that will still give people the creeps a hundred years from now. Cvjetanovic has contributed to the cultural record, that’s for sure. But in the exact opposite of the way he intended.

Total eclipse

I saw the eclipse inside the zone of totality at Franklin, North Carolina. Franklin is in the Great Smoky Mountains and is inside the Nantahala National Forest. I was with two friends, and we turned it into a tailgate party followed by dinner in Asheville.

This was my second total eclipse, so I knew what to expect: roosters crowing (check), birds confused (check), and cold chills imagining how terrifying a total eclipse must have been for our early ancestors, who didn’t know what was happening. Some of the locals were trying to make money off the eclipse and were charging $30 for parking. We found our own place — a business that was closed, with two big shade trees in front. We trespassed there (politely), and no one seemed to mind. In fact two carloads of students from Charlotte, admiring our spot, stopped and asked if they could join us, and of course we said yes. There were people everywhere.

The traffic jams were epic. On the way from Asheville to Franklin, there were two severe traffic jams caused by fender-benders. The return trip to Asheville should have taken little more than an hour, but instead it was four and a half hours of stop-and-go bumper-to-bumper traffic. Still, everyone was patient and polite — no honking and no rudeness. Everyone seemed to be trying to make the best of it. Some people got out of their cars to share food and drink with friends they were traveling with. Stopped traffic is a bit spooky to me. It puts me in mind of conditions like those in the movie “War of the Worlds,” or zombie apocalypse movies (of which, for the record, I am not a fan).

We had reservations for dinner at the restaurant that is reputed to be the best in Asheville — the Admiral — but we had to call and cancel our reservations because we were so delayed. We ended up at the Storm restaurant in old Asheville.

A friend who watched the eclipse in Athens, Georgia (well outside the zone of totality), texted me this: “The light here was like I always imagined Lothlorien: golden but slightly dark around the edges, like early dusk except the sun was overhead, so it had this surreal quality. It was mildly mood-altering. Lovely.”

When I took the photo above, someone else was driving.

Game of Thrones

In looking through the blog logs yesterday, I noticed that someone searched for “Game of Thrones.” It seems odd in retrospect that I haven’t really blogged about the greatest achievement in fantasy since Tolkien, both in literature and in television. (I’m open to the argument that George R.R. Martin’s achievement has surpassed Tolkien’s.)

The reason, really, is that I’m so into Game of Thrones that, if I started writing here about Game of Thrones, there’d be no end to it. I would become a Game of Thrones boor. Besides, everyone writes about Game of Thrones. Each Monday morning after a new episode, the media cover last night’s happenings in Game of Thrones just like a news event. On a slow news day, Game of Thrones is a big story. The real world blurs into the Game of Thrones world. That in itself is tremendously exciting and serves as a reminder of the power of stories and the power of fantasy — not to mention our need for escape and distraction (especially on Sunday nights when so many hardworking people are dreading the reality of Monday morning).

Since the very beginning, with Season 1 in 2011, Ken and I have spent untold hours discussing each episode and developing what I would call Acorn Abbey’s theory of story analysis (which is pretty well developed and taken very seriously). If Ken is here, the discussion happens at the table, at breakfast and dinner. If Ken is away, the discussion happens in emails. Game of Thrones matters. If you’re a writer, you want to understand how Martin does what he does. You also become very attached to these characters. You have to know what happens to them.

Ken has pointed out how, in many ways, the genre of the two-hour movie is increasingly passé. Even when there are sequels, two-hour movies can’t accomplish what a series can accomplish — world building, character development, complex intertangled plots, a deep exploration of time, place, people and ideas. No doubt it was literature that led the way. Isaac Asimov started his Foundation series in 1951, and the Robot series in 1954. Though I think that Tolkien did not really think of The Lord of the Rings as a series when he wrote it, it was broken into volumes for publishing (starting in 1954). Now everyone writes series. Yes, most of them are bad. You’ve all heard Sturgeon’s law: “Sure, 90 percent of science fiction is crap. That’s because 90 percent of everything is crap.” Theodore Sturgeon was, of course, a science fiction writer.

If you’re a Game of Thrones fan, none of this needs saying. If you’re not, then it’s not too late. The books are as close as Amazon. Everything is available on DVD and Blu-ray. The two HBO apps, HBO Now and HBO Go, keep all seasons available for streaming.

And tonight at 9: Season 7, episode 5.

How to win: Torture the language and muddle the story

I pay very little attention to the science fiction and fantasy publishing industry anymore. Almost every book I try to read, I end up flinging away in frustration after the first few pages. Almost no one knows how to write, and almost no one knows how to tell a story.

Instead, what passes for “good writing” is innovation in quirkiness. Last night at the World Science Fiction Convention in Helsinki, the Hugo award for the best novel of 2017 was won by N.K. Jemisin for The Obelisk Gate. I have not read this novel, nor will I. Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature saves me a lot of money and time, because I can fling books without having to buy them.

The quirk that Jemisin applied in The Obelisk Gate was to write the narrative in the second person, and in the present tense. And there is just enough dialogue in Amazon’s free sample to reveal that the characters are jerks who talk just like the here-and-now people in television’s meanest sitcoms.

This is the kind of writing that will win you a Hugo these days:

And this is the kind of characters and dialogue that will get you a Hugo these days:

Who am I protest? N.K. Jemisin sells lots of books, and I don’t. But I have to ask: Why does jerks arguing make good dialogue? I stand my ground: The best writing style is a style that the reader never even notices, a window into the story that is as transparent as possible. And though villains are necessary, there had better be some characters to fall in love with.

Here’s yet another Hugo winner that will be completely forgotten, and good riddance, before the pages have started turning yellow.

Not quite canary

For the past few months, I’ve been rereading Winston Graham’s Poldark novels. I’m now on book 8. I would rate Winston Graham as one of the best novelists of the 20th Century, but that’s a post for another day. This post is about wine — dessert wine in particular.

In the Poldark novels, the poor folk drink gin. Everybody drinks ale. The gentry drink wine. The menfolk drink brandy. The gentry also drink a lot of dessert wines, and not necessarily with dessert — port (Demelza’s favorite drink), and canary.

If I ever knew what canary is, I had forgotten, and I had to look it up. It’s a sweet white (or yellow) wine. It was popular in Elizabethan England and on into the 18th Century. The wine was imported from the Canary Islands, and presumably that’s how it got its name. I would like to think, though, that the wine was a canary yellow. That’s how I visualize it, when they drink it in the novels.

I understand that winemakers in the Canary Islands are trying to have a comeback. But if anything resembling 18th Century canary wine is available today, I wouldn’t know where to get it. But there is sweet yellow dessert wine that is pretty hard to find and that also deserves a comeback — sauternes, which is made in Bordeaux.

I was suprised to see Trader Joe’s selling little bottles of 2011 sauternes. It wasn’t cheap, but the canary color was irresistible.

Some Googling showed that wine reviewers have mentioned sauternes occasionally in the past few years. One such reviewer disparaged the idea of drinking sweet wines with desserts — too much sweet, he said. Rather, he suggested having sauternes with lobster. I’m not likely to be making any lobster dishes any time soon. Maybe banana pudding?

This sauternes is only 13 percent alcohol. It would seem the fermentation is stopped early, when there is still lots of sugar in the wine. As I understand it, the grapes for sauternes are left on the vine for a while, partly to shrivel and dry (making a very concentrated juice) and partly so that bacteria specific to sauternes can grow in the grapes.

Also from Googling, I learned that someone in Scotland makes a scotch whiskey that is aged in sauternes casks. I have to try that.

The Brontës: To Walk Invisible

For literature lovers, “To Walk Invisible” is a must-see. It’s a two-hour, two-part British production about the Brontë sisters, shown this spring in the U.S. on PBS and now available on DVD.

It is an extremely strange production, and it will give Brontë fans hours of arguing and brooding material. As far as I know, Juliet Barker’s massive tome of a biography of the Brontës (1994) remains the go-to biography. I have not read the entire book (it’s 1,004 pages, and I bought it years ago partly as a reference), but I have read much of it. Based on the Barker biography, I would have said that the chief feature of the sisters’ life in their Yorkshire parsonage would have been unremitting boredom relieved only by imagination. But “To Walk Invisible” shows the household in constant turmoil, a turmoil caused mainly by Branwell’s alcoholism and his overall dysfunction.

The casting is superb. How is it possible that Ireland and the British Isles go and and on producing such superb young actors and actresses? Is it their training? Normally I am quite good at following regional accents in the British Isles, but the northern accents in “To Walk Invisible” were a challenge, especially Emily’s, played by Chloe Pirrie, who is Scottish. Finn Atkins, who plays Charlotte, is English. Charlie Murphy, who plays Anne, is Irish. So I can’t vouch for the authenticity of their northern accents, but they sure threw me. If the dialogue is a problem, you can turn on English subtitles. Jonathan Pryce is a superb Patrick Brontë, and Pryce speaks a perfect Oxford-Cambridge English.

Whether or not Brontë scholars would give their seal of approval to the accuracy of the details of the events and dialogue and turmoil inside the Brontë parsonage (mostly I think they would not), this is a beautiful production. It also gets out onto the moors, dogs and all. Any telling of the Brontës’ story is going to be heartbreaking and heavy on pathos, in that they died far too young and far too unhappy. Only Charlotte lived long enough to enjoy her fame. But a part of appreciating the Brontë contribution to English literature is an appreciation of how badly they suffered to produce it.

Coming Dec. 15: The Last Jedi

Today Disney released a teaser for the next Star Wars Film, “The Last Jedi.” The film will be released Dec. 15.

It is thrilling to see Gwendolyn Christie cast in the new film. She is the 6’3″ British actress who plays Brienne in HBO’s “Game of Thrones.” It’s heartwarming to see new scenes with Carrie Fisher, who is now dead. She had already filmed her scenes before her death. It appears that we will return to Ireland’s Skellig Michael, one of the most magical places in the world.

Those of us who would curl up and die without stories are looking forward to Season 7 of “Game of Thrones,” which starts tomorrow. And looking forward to “The Last Jedi” should see us safely through til Christmas.


⬆︎ Gwendolyn Christie