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Aurora
Saw the aurora last night, for the first time ever. I don’t know what I expected. I waited until the sun was good and set and then I poked my head out the back door just shy of the motion sensor on my neighbour’s flood light. There was a pale haze in the sky, like a long thin cloud. Off to the west, the sky was noticeably pinkish. To the naked eye it all looked sort of blurry, more the suggestion of an aurora than an actual aurora, like in the pictures.
Sam and I hopped in the car and drove out towards Weardale, where the sky gets Dark. All along the road outside of Sunniside and Tow Law we saw people parked up on the verges, faces skyward. We parked up above Wolsingham and took some pictures by the side of the road. I think that by this point the geomagnetic storm or whatever was weakening. We still captured some pretty magical pictures, and it was fun to tool through the countryside in the middle of the night on a Thursday.
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The Bright Sword
by Lev Grossman
Published 2024 670 pagesThere’s a lot to like in this tale-telling from post-Roman Britain! Collum is an aspiring knight from the Hebrides who makes the long journey down to Camelot (maybe somewhere around Gloucester?) only to find that Arthur is already dead and the Knights of the Round Table are dead and scattered (mostly dead) in the wake of the Lancelot-Grail cycle. Undeterred, Collum rallies the benchwarmers for a last adventure across the porous boundaries dividing our world from the world of fairies and gods.
This world has much to recommend it! The magical world feels at once erratic but internally consistent, with such a distinct British twang to it that I struggle to believe that Grossman hasn’t spent time here. In the book (as in reality), the past remains eternally present: not something that happened and then got written down—but something that you can walk up to and touch. Standing stones, Roman roads, ruined churches, ancient oaks: these are high fantasy tropes but they’re also common features of dog walks within 25 minutes of our front door. The Bright Sword whisks me away to a dream of Britain, but it also plants me back where I am and reminds me that the place I live has been around for a long, long time.
A handful of nitpicks:
- Much like the world of fairy in which much of this book takes place, things get a little disorganised around the middle. The adventure sort of sputters and reignites, knights are picked off individually, characters swoop in on wings of magic and then dematerialise.
- There are frequent digressions to pad out backstories—at times, it feels, only to underscore someone’s death.
- The role of the Christian God waffles: He shows favour only intermittently and at one point declares that He is forsaking Britain entirely (the consequences of which continue to be felt among its people to this very day).
- Grossman also falls into the trap of belabouring the attractiveness of the main love interest, sometimes to the point of distraction. I’m personally not a fan of that, but maybe some people need to be reminded when a woman is attractive.
- I don’t know. What else?
- There are maybe one too many “twists”. Most of them don’t pay off, like Collum’s fairy heritage; I wish I’d have just been told up front.
- Finally, there were a number of moments in the book where it felt like there was a narrative pause to allow the audience to applaud, which doesn’t make sense because this is a book. They usually do it in superhero movies when a cameo happens. The narrative will work it's way up to a badass manoeuvre and then we'll get a one-line paragraph with a bit of ensuing filler.
The battles are hard-won, though, which I appreciated. Collum is good at fighting but he’s not Chosen One-good.
Overall: a romp. On the strength of the world of this book I wandered into a bookshop made out of a converted Methodist chapel and purchased a 60-year-old copy of The Once and Future King.
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Actually good stuff continues to be good
Yesterday I wrote about a trend towards plainness and dullness as exemplary of the foibles of Modernism. Yes, the diversity of colour in art is decreasing. Yes, Mark Rothko's colour fields are getting more and more expensive. Yes, the places that we live and work are increasingly converging on dull beige boxes.
But:
These are both a ton of fun! The bottom one is nearly 60 years old. What they lack in colour they more than make up for in sheer panache.
I think that at least some of the explanation for the observation that things from the past are more aesthetically pleasing comes down to plain old survivorship bias. Neither of these hold a candle to Nôtre-Dame de Paris, but I'll bet they knock the socks off 99% of NDdP's contemporaries.
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Bad stuff is now good stuff
Feels like there’s a weird amount of dialogue about how things suck these days and that they used to be good:
I liked this comment in particular:
There was an article posted on here[1] a while back that I only just found again, introducing the term "expedience." The idea was that we think we live in a world where people have to have "the best" sweater, be on "the best" social network, drive "the best" car, etc. But when you look at what really WINS, it's not the best, it's the most "expedient" - i.e. sufficiently good, with built-in social proof, inoculated of buyer's remorse, etc.
There is a tangent here that intersects with refinement culture as well. Among the group of society that (subconsciously) care about these "expedient" choices, you see everyone and everything start to look the same.
The "article posted on here" referred to in the first paragraph is this one (in a discussion, actually, about one of Robin Sloan's books—though not the one that I read recently, and which I didn't like very much.)
Or Alexander Scott on Tartaria and the aesthetics of the modern world vs the old world: Scott bemoans that societies the world over have given up on elaborate, technical aesthetics in the last century or so, converging on a sort of modernist middle ground of steel and glass (or equivalents across artistic disciplines) lacking in interest or staying power.
Personally I wouldn’t mind if architecture and style were a bit more diverse and interesting these days—why are we no longer building for thousands of years? (Expedience? Scott also seems to have some hypotheses, most of which revolve around wealthy people being public weirdos.) Pretty much everywhere has an extensive and rich history of building, dress, and art—but in broad strokes the money has moved towards generic “global” art, architecture, and music. Maybe that’s a function of the explosion of communication technology in the last 50 years.
And as a counterpoint the average westerner’s diet is orders of magnitude more diverse and interesting today than it was even 100 years ago. Aaand fashion continues to push boundaries by mixing and remixing cultures.
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Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
by Robin Sloan
Published 2012 288 pagesNot a ton to review here. I don't generally knock books for being derivative—smart writers can do a lot of exciting things with established forms or narratives—but unfortunately, Robin Sloan doesn't. Maybe I'm not the target audience? I'm not sure what readers are meant to get out of this: the common fantasy tropes are so thinly veiled that even the protagonist makes repeated reference to them as they happen.
Clay Jannon gets fired from his cringe design job and takes up as the clerk of a bookstore in San Francisco. It turns out that the bookstore is a front for a shadowy Secret Society with sinister vibes but which, it turns out, doesn't actually do anything but own a typeface and write a lot of autobiographies that no one reads. There's some weak inciting action and Clay has to rely on all of his friends to get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding an encrypted old book. He does so, eventually.
Google, the multi-trillion dollar advertising company, makes continuous and gratuitous appearances that in no way holds them to account. Characters get extended descriptions of what clothes they're wearing in lieu of proper development. Clay's love interest exists exclusively as a reason to go into Google's offices. Her personality is that she wears a red shirt that makes her boobs look good. Oh and Clay's Ron Weasley is a tech founder for a company that models boob physics. He is Clay's closest friend and his work is portrayed as being a bit funny but fundamentally toothless and also very lucrative. He spends most of the novel spending money and chatting up girls about how great boobs are. Boobs take up an inordinate amount of space in this book, which is ostensibly about secret societies at the intersection of art and technology, or whatever it was that Steve Jobs said that time.
Peak 2012 content.
Further reading: this comment about how Harry Potter would read if written in the style of this book.
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