Obscurorant 2.0

Train Song

The Silver Fox — Fri, 18 May 2012 03:59:36 +0000

“As the design of the station made quite explicit, railways were never just functional. They were about travel as pleasure, travel as adventure, travel as the archetypical modern experience. Patrons and clients were not supposed to just buy a ticket and go; they were meant to linger and imagine and dream (which is one reason why “platform tickets” came into being and were very much used). That is why stations were designed, often quite deliberately, on the model of cathedrals, with their spaces and facilities divided into naves, apses, side chapels, and ancillary offices and rituals.”
-Tony Judt, The Glory of the Rails

The picture above is from Life magazine, taken by Walker Evans in 1962. You may find more pictures of train stations at The Passion of Former Days. I cannot help but find them to be very evocative and romantic images.

Turn Your Radio On

The Silver Fox — Fri, 11 May 2012 01:11:17 +0000

Radio was enormously important to me growing up. I remember (and I will no doubt date myself here) tuning in to Casey Kasem’s weekly countdown because it was important to know what songs to listen to, and what was cool and there was no internet thirty years ago to tell me these things or help me sort through my options, of which there weren’t a lot circa 1982. Later on I started to go to school in Boston and when the guys turned on WFNX (back when it was legitimately different from anything else you were likely to encounter on the airwaves, excluding the college stations clustered ‘left of the dial’ whose existence I somehow * overlooked ) radio again showed me things, sounds, that were different:

A lot of what was cool and exciting about radio has vanished into the corporate maw, but there are still good listens to be had in the Boston area, even outside the college stations we’re fortunate to have here. My current favorite radio station is 95.9 WATD, broadcasting out of Marshfield. The station is a favorite because:

-It is locally owned and operated, which means you will hear Boston and New England accents, no generic radio voices, and lots of charmingly inept commercials for local businesses. I like this – WATD sounds like it is broadcasting here in Massachusetts, not Anywhere, USA. Yay local flavor!

-It is a full-service station, featuring not only news, traffic, weather and music, but other, more eclectic programs. I’m not actually interested in a radio show about birds or boating but I think it’s cool that people who are passionate about these things can find relevant shows on the radio.

-It still plays the music that was considered ‘oldies’ when I was growing up, several times a week. I can’t think of anywhere else to find this music, since WODS now plays considers music from the 80s to be ‘oldies.’ The Oldies With Ron Dwyer show fits the bill perfectly, with a large variety of old pop songs. You’re just as likely to hear an obscure B-side as a #1 hit, just as likely to hear Perry Como as Elvis. Yesterday’s Memories is a fine show as well.

But what really won my affection is WATD’s latest programming addition: the Alternative . I gripe about WODS playing songs from the 80s, but I wouldn’t mind an ‘oldies’ show or format aimed at my generation. I just want it to be a good one, and Chris Atwood’s show fits the bill. Any DJ that spins (Feels Like) Heaven is all right with me. I just wish WATD would give the Alternative more than one Friday per month.

I should also mention Easy 99.1. You may insert your joke about the middle-aged dude listening to a radio station called Easy 99.1 here, but if you like Sinatra, adult pop, or the Great American Songbook Ron Della Chiesa’s Strictly Sinatra definitely worth a listen.

*Somehow = I was clueless, a condition that would continue to trouble me until well into my second decade of life.

Out of Nowheresville

The Silver Fox — Sat, 05 May 2012 01:37:11 +0000

Walton, Jo (2011). Among Others. NY: Tor Books. 304 pages.

Among Others is the tale, in the form of a diary, of young woman by the name Mori (short for Morwenna) Phelps. As the book opens Mori has run away from her mother following the death of her twin sister, and gone to live with her long-estranged father and his cold and distant family, who promptly pack her off to boarding school. Also she can do magic and talk to fairies.

Now that description may sound like the set up for your standard kind of YA fantasy novel, with a Chosen One who discovers hidden powers and an inevitable destiny to confront the Dark Lord and save the world, but you would be wrong. None of the above happens – in fact there is very little at all happening in Among Others. Mori navigates the strange currents of boarding school, and reads a lot of science fiction. A lot. Among Others is not about quests or confrontations or battles, it’s about what happens after those things happen. Mori herself notes:

“Tolkien understood about the things that happen after the end. Because this is after the end, this is all the Scouring of the Shire, this is figuring out how to live in the time that wasn’t supposed to happen after the glorious last stand. I saved the world, or I think I did, and look, the world is still here, with sunsets and interlibrary loans. And it doesn’t care about me any more than the Shire cared about Frodo.”

Please don’t get the idea that the lack of Big! Plot! Points! in Among Others makes for a dull or uninteresting read. Mori is an engaging diarist, whip smart and perceptive, but still a somewhat awkward teenage girl, trying to find her place in and come to terms with this strange world of adulthood. Also very interesting – at least for me – was the strong pull of the past generated by Walton’s Wayback Machine: the late 70s/early 80s setting of Among Others. Mori moves through a time I remember well, a time before the internet mainstreamed geek culture, a time when comic books and superheroes were decidedly not cool, let alone the subject of blockbuster films. Her perpetual hunt for new books to consume reminded me of my own. There was no Amazon (obviously), no huge bookstores like Barnes & Noble or Borders with shelf after shelf to browse, just your local, independent bookstore which if you were lucky had a decent selection of science fiction and fantasy*, and of course the library. And you learned about worthwhile books and authors by and large through word-of-mouth or your own experience.

Anyhoo, I highly recommend Among Others, and not just for the nostalgia.

*I was lucky. My local back on those days, the Voyager book store, had plenty of science fiction and fantasy available, as well as a fully stocked gaming section, which in those days meant loads and loads of Dungeons & Dragons (and lesser known role playing games) books and supplements, in addition to Avalon Hill wargames.

Confession (Harmony Rocket #4)

The Silver Fox — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 00:50:55 +0000

Anything I write about plans for reading this or that book by this or that author should be taken with a grain of salt, since I am very prone to getting lost in the wilderness of books and wandering off in an unanticipated direction. Caveat reader, or something like that, and with that here’s what I’ve been reading and plan to read. You’ve been warned.

On the non-fiction side of things I finished The Missing of the Somme feeling not as impressed as I thought I would be. Parts I found intelligent and moving, such as Dyer’s description of the moment of silence on the first Remembrance Day, but during others – the descriptions of sculptures on various memorials – I had to force myself to slow down and read every word. In a longer book I might have given in to temptation and skimmed but since Missing is less than 150 pages I decided I could lump it and read every page.

My current non-fiction read is Running the Books, and I’m enjoying it. Now, as far as fiction goes…

The Game of Thrones re-read proceeds at a leisurely pace and is likely to remain leisurely, at least until I reach the two most recent, and for me as yet unread, entries A Feast For Crows and A Dance With Dragons.

I finished Downbelow Station and wanting to spend more time in the imagined future of Cherryh’s Alliance-Union universe I borrowed Merchanter’s Luck from the library and read it last weekend. I was able to do this because Merchanter’s Luck is ‘only’ about 200 pages long, and reading it filled me with nostalgia for the days when this, rather than the brick-size tomes that speculative fiction comes in today. Two of my favorite books from childhood, John Maddox Robert’s Space Angel and Nancy Springer’s The Silver Sun, were also this length, perfect for multiple re-readings. When I returned to both of these books in later years I was realized how easily the authors could have expended the length of either – The Silver Sun in could have been a trilogy easily – and I’m glad that for whatever reason (market forces maybe) that both Robert and Springer wrote ‘short’ books.* Sometimes I wish more authors of fantasy and science fiction would follow this practice.

Howl’s Moving Castle was superb, and I’m filled with a kind of quiet but joyous satisfaction at all of the Diana Wynne Jones I have yet to read. I also finished Jo Walton’s Among Others, a book I enjoyed so much it deserves its own post.

Another subject that deserves its own post is Jo Walton’s column at Tor books, for pointing me in the direction of all sorts of great books and writers. The latest is Anthony Price, the author of the David Audley series of novels. Last year I read the bulk of Charles McCarry’s Paul Christopher and was looking for more in the same vein i.e well-crafted, literate spy fiction and so in a library feeding frenzy last weekend I picked up The ’44 Vintage, my current fiction read. It’s only about 200 pages, which I consider a good sign.

*I do wish Roberts would pen a worthy sequel to Space Angel.

Something I Learned Today

The Silver Fox — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 01:51:00 +0000

Music blog One Week//One Band is featuring the Hoodoo Gurus this week. Take a gander, and then get thee Mars Needs Guitars and Stone Age Romeos, two albums full of great power pop.

Previous series there feature two of my other favorites, The Replacements and Husker Du.

Fool Such As I

The Silver Fox — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 02:10:41 +0000

You never know what piece of flotsam will call to life a long-slumbering memory. If you view these pictures of Libraries of the Rich and Famous and scroll down to the last one, you’ll learn that the library depicted is enormous (70,000 books worth $4 million) and belongs to noted academic Richard Macksey. Many years ago, as an appallingly clueless freshman, I enrolled in one of his classes. The exact name escapes me, but it was detective and mystery fiction, from its more traditional forms to The Crying of Lot 49 and Borges’ work. As I said above I was clueless. I never took another class with Mr. Macksey, never read Proust and needless to say never got anywhere near his famous library. Later in my collegiate career I demonstrated I still hadn’t learned anything by taking a class with Orest Ranum and again managing to remain ignorant of the man’s career and accomplishments and exactly how much one could learn from him.

I still plan to attempt Proust though, and maybe I can teach my children to be less oblivious of the opportunities life puts in your path.

Compositions For The Young And Old

The Silver Fox — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 00:45:12 +0000

My reading became extremely scattershot over the last week or so. Irritation with A Game of Thrones led me to pick up C.J. Cherryh’s Downbelow Station, a book I previously attempted last spring in the wake of the Brain Incident. Now both are sitting on my nightstand, stacked atop two from the library, Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones, because the movie adaptation was excellent and I’ve never read anything by her before, and Jo Walton’s Among Others, which brings us full circle since it was some her writing that led me to try Cherryh’s work. These last two I haven’t started yet, but I couldn’t avoid the temptation to bring them home with me. The library is bad like that, and strolling through the stacks in the children’s room with Madeleine I kept noticing all sorts of titles I wanted to read – necessary to scout out good books for Madeleine and Dash to read when older. I also noticed that (Ursula) LeGuin and (Madeleine) L’Engle sit side by side on the shelves, ready for lucky first-time readers to discover them together, which I believe to be an excellent arrangement.

After all that, the non-fiction front feels like a bit of let down. I finished Storm of Steel, which despite being a slim volume seemed to go on forever, and moved on to The Missing of the Somme. I remain in the trenches.

I’ve also been thinking of more ‘lost’ books from way-back times. In both 3rd and 4th grade, my teachers read to the class. Some of these books I remember clearly, How To Eat Fried Worms for example, but I’m not having much luck in fully recalling some of the others. There was the one about a family of dolls, living in a dollhouse, who came to life when their owners were absent. This may have been The Doll’s House, by Rumer Godden, but I’d have to read it to be sure. Another book concerned the adventures of a child, or children, who discovered a mysterious grease that when applied, allowed perpetual motion in machines. I haven’t been able to track that one down, nor another story of which I have even vaguer memories: children using museum-piece civil war cannon to defeat the bad guys. I think maybe there was an island involved.

During the same years I also remember reading The Wolf King, by Ann Turnbull, and several entries in the Three Investigators series, which back then still had the Alfred Hitchcock name attached, or at least the editions I read still did. Mostly I remember liking it for the hideout the Investigators used, a trailer buried in the middle of a salvage yard.

I Wanna Be Sedated

The Silver Fox — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 04:06:26 +0000

It is both surreal and terrifying when your ER doctor asks if you have a preferred neurosurgeon. The predominant emotion at any given moment that follows will be determined by the level of opiates flowing through your body at any given moment that follows.

We did not have a preferred neurosurgeon. We did however, find ourselves with an excellent one. He did a fine job, making the incision right along the edge of my hair. You wouldn’t notice the scar unless you already know to look, but it’s there, following the arc of the widow’s peak on the right side of my head. I have gotten in the habit of tracing the path of the scar with my fingers, absent-mindedly rubbing it while I read, or think, or stare at a computer screen.

In the right kind of light, if I tilt my head to the correct angle, I can see the slightly raised bumps on my head that mark the location of the dime-sized pieces of metal (titanium steel I believe) that covered the holes and held my skull together following the surgery.

This morning when I walked into the kitchen Herself kissed me and said “Happy Brainiversary.” I’m delighted to be here to celebrate.

Waiting For The Kill

The Silver Fox — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 03:17:27 +0000

There are certain books I could happily read over and over again. The Lord of the Rings comes to mind. I read it probably two dozen times by the time I reached junior high, and still return to its pages periodically.

A Game of Thrones is not proving to be one of those books. I’ve embarked on the reread I mentioned a while back, and parts of the book are a struggle to get through the second time. The cartoon villainy of Queen Cersei and Prince Joffrey grates, as does Ned Stark’s stiff-necked plan of disaster for his family and Sansa’s medieval mean girl act. So I’m not loving Game as unreservedly as I do Tolkien’s work, although I am deriving enjoyment from the paying renewed attention to the story lines of Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen, two characters I believe will feature very prominently in the final volumes, as well as the Tyrion Lannister, the Omar Little of this saga.

Speaking of Tolkien and rereads, I can’t remember if I previously linked to this piece by Gene Wolfe on The Lord of the Rings. I was rereading it last week and was moved to track down the name and full text of the C.S. Lewis poem that Wolfe quotes. The name of the poem is Cliché Came Out of its Cage and I think the second part is as apt a summation of the ‘Northern Thing’ as any I’ve come across. I think that though the ‘Northern Thing’ runs like a cold, clear stream through Tolkien’s writing of Middle Earth, it flows closest to the surface in The Silmarillion, which is more akin to the old sagas than to a novel like The Lord of the Rings.

Anyway, here are the lines I’m referring to:

“Think, then, that under heaven-roof the little disc of the earth,
Fortified Midgard, lies encircled by the ravening Worm.
Over its icy bastions faces of giant and troll
Look in, ready to invade it. The Wolf, admittedly, is bound;
But the bond will break, the Beast run free. The weary gods,
Scarred with old wounds the one-eyed Odin, Tyr who has lost a hand,
Will limp to their stations for the Last defence. Make it your hope
To be counted worthy on that day to stand beside them;
For the end of man is to partake of their defeat and die
His second, final death in good company. The stupid, strong
Unteachable monsters are certain to be victorious at last,
And every man of decent blood is on the losing side.
Take as your model the tall women with yellow hair in plaits
Who walked back into burning houses to die with men,
Or him who as the death spear entered into his vitals
Made critical comments on its workmanship and aim.
Are these the Pagans you spoke of? Know your betters and crouch, dogs;
You that have Vichy water in your veins and worship the event
Your goddess History (whom your fathers called the strumpet Fortune).”

By way of comparison, here is an excerpt from The Silmarillion:

“Last of all Hurin stood alone. Then he cast aside his shield, and wielded an axe two-handed; and it is sung that the axe smoked in the black blood of the troll-guard of Gothmog until it withered, and each time that he slew Hurin cried:”Aure entuluva! Day shall come again!” Seventy times he uttered that cry; but they took him at last alive, by the command of Morgoth, for the Orcs grappled him with their hands, which clung to him still though he hewed off their arms…”

Nor, despite Hobbits to mediate between the reader and Tolkien’s world, is the the sentiment missing from The Lord of the Rings. Call to mind Eomer before the walls of Gondor:

“…for he thought to make a great shield-wall at the last, and stand, and fight there on foot till all fell, and do deeds of song on the fields of Pelennor, though no man should be left in the West to remember the last king of the Mark. So he rode to a green hillock and there set his banner, and the White Horse ran rippling in the wind.

Out of doubt, out of dark to the day’s rising
I come singing in the sun, sword unsheathing.
To hope’s end I rode and to heart’s breaking:
Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!

These staves he spoke, yet he laughed as he said them. For once more lust of battle was on him; and he was still unscathed, and he was young, and he was king: the lord of a fell people.”

In case you’re not a giant Tolkien nerd like myself, here’s what the man himself meant by the ‘Northern Thing:

“It is the strength of the northern mythological imagination that it faced this problem, put the monsters in the centre, gave them Victory but no honour, and found a potent but terrible solution in naked will and courage. ‘As a working theory absolutely impregnable.’ So potent is it, that while the older southern imagination has faded for ever into literary ornament, the northern has power, as it were, to revive its spirit even in our own times.It can work, even as it did work with the goðlauss viking, without gods: martial heroism as its own end. But we may remember that the poet of Beowulf saw clearly: the wages of heroism is death.”
-from Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics

The Music Scene

The Silver Fox — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 03:35:42 +0000

I’ve never been to fight shy of borrowing from a home skillet, so here are some songs currently residing on my iPod’s ‘EarWorms’ playlist.

Snowflake – Kate Bush

A ten minute song written from a snowflake’s point-of-view and performed by Kate Bush’s son? Yeah, I’m surprised as you are to find it here, but I have to admit I’ve found it haunting since first listen.

Mission Bells – Armistice

The rest of the EP left me kind of cold, but this song has been on the list since early last year.

Johnny Appleseed – Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros

I first heard this while watching The Future Is Unwritten and it immediately jumped in my head. (Note to self: seek out more of Strummer and the Mescaleros.)

Bhang, Bhang, I’m a Burnout – Dum Dum Girls

I love this sound.

When You Were Mine – John Heart Jackie

The second great cover of this song. (Yes, the first is obviously Lauper’s version.) No video, but look – free download!

On Battleship Hill – PJ Harvey

A song, indeed an album that is an appropriate sound track as I work my way through Storm of Steel towards The Missing of the Somme.