29 thoughts on “Utilitarian Review 9/22/12”

1. I cannot imagine a universe in which you will like Game of Thrones.

2. I read Martin’s Wild Card series way back when…but didn’t much enjoy his contributions, I have to admit. (I think Roger Zelazny wrote a story or two, right? I quite liked those then — goodness knows what I’d think of the Chronicles of Amber now, though I have fond memories….)

   Do you dislike Game of Thrones? I thought everybody loved it….

3. There are not much fantasy books that are worth a reading, with only a few books by Moorcock and Leiber providing to be exceptional. Martin took the same road like LeGuin and others before him – starting with interesting contributions to the SF genre and ending up writing fantasy stuff for commercial purposes.
   Anyway, here´s the reading list: Just finished eight issues of Tales Of the Unexpected and found it to be one of the weakest interpretations of The Spectre that has ever been published.
   Reviewing purposes: Much more to my liking was š! #10: ‘Sea Stories’, an international anthology of short comics released by Latvian collective Kush Komikss. It did show a wide range of artistic craftmanship featuring unusual ideas in suitable execution – a really beautiful book.
   Same goes for ‘Voyage Aux Iles De La Désolation’ by French comic artist Emmanuel Lepage. Both comics are, to the greatest possible extent, centered around the sea, so those reviews will get published by a special interest magazine that focuses on martime issues…I just hope their editors won´t water it down in the end.

4. Reading: About 100 pages into The Days of Henry Thoreau: A Biography
   by Walter Harding which is a nice supplement to Thoreau’s Journals (I’ve been slowly reading for a couple years) which don’t really work as autobiography and Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind by Robert Richardson (read last year) which is more about the thought/writing. Far too amused that the local doctor in Concord was Josiah Bartlett.

   Kamisaka Sekka: Rinpa Traditionalist, Modern Designer by Andreas Marks which is primarily reproductions of some of Sekka’s woodcut books. Really beautiful work that I first discovered earlier this summer in a Rinpa show at the Met. More patterny/designy/minimal than the Hokusai/Hiroshige type woodcut.

   Love & Rockets New Stories 5, which I was disappointed with. Maybe it will read better in retrospect in the future, but right now I not so into the shifted focus of Jaime’s stories (the gangsters and the Vivian character especially).

   Also Martin tom Dieck and Jens Balzer’s Salut Deleuze, which is an odd comic. It repeats the same sequence 4 or 5 times with slight edits, as a kind of evocation of Deleuze’s difference and repetition.

5. Noah: I too could not get anywhere in reading Game of Thrones. I have been watching the tv series, though I find it pretty hit or miss (though not as much as Boardwalk Empire, which I may be giving up on completely).

6. I think there’s plenty of good fantasy; C S Lewis, Le Guin’s Earthsea Books, Tolkien, Patricia Wrede’s Enchanted Forest series…not so sure about Moorcock and Lieber (haven’t read those in a while.)

   But there’s certainly a lot of dreck too….

7. I reread some Lieber’s Fafhrd/Gray Mouser stories last year and did not get very far with them. Was much more successful with R.E. Howard’s Conan stories.

8. Yeah, Games of Thrones…. Don’t get attached, everybody dies. (I won’t read it. Too depressing.)

   There’s lots of good fantasy, if you know where to look, but it depends on what you like. Noah, you might enjoy Jo Walton’s retelling of Jane Austen with dragons.

   I read basically nothing because I have been working on my overdue essay for Hatefest and it’s clocking in at pretty damn long. I guess I did read a bit about monochromatic color schemes in fiber art.

9. Oh yeah PS.. I am reading Gottschalk’s “The Emergence of Christian Science in American Religious Life” and Anne Fadiman’s “The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down.”

10. There isn’t any good reason to read Game of Thrones. Not unless you plan on earning money through writing about it. Just watch the TV series. It’s more faithful than most fantasy book adaptations out there.

11. I think the whole fantasy genre is dubious by it´s nature. Leiber´s best book is “Our Lady Of Darkness”, a lovecraftian homage/persiflage, though it´s not “true” fantasy.

    Ah, Jens Balzer! Dude wrote an article for Berliner Zeitung about this year´s Comic-Salon in Erlangen. Therein he lamented about contemporary comics becoming much too serious and being consistently unfunny. I´m still wondering where Balzer did attend: That panel with Disney´s European artists (followed by a highly frequented signing of new releases at their German publisher´s booth)? Or was it the one with Rags Morales and Guillem March discussing the New 52 reboot (Okay, that one was unfunny as hell but not serious at all)? But yeah, Martin tom Diek is a wonderful artist, so thanks for bringing that to my mind again.

12. “There isn’t any good reason to read Game of Thrones. Not unless you plan on earning money through writing about it.”

    Zing!

13. When you finish A House and Its Head I have numerous questions about what actually happens in that novel (ie, plot summery). Would you believe it, I could find nothing online or in the library to clear up my questions, so I look forward to discussing it with a person of ordinary intelligence.

14. Hey Lev! I can’t promise that I’ll be able to follow it…though it seems entertaining so far.

    “There isn’t any good reason to read Game of Thrones. Not unless you plan on earning money through writing about it.”

    That was in fact my vague motivation.

15. The Viriconium series by M. John Harrison is a fantasy series that tracks with my relationship with the genre. It begins with quest adventure, turns Lynchian, then segues into something vaguely Calvinoesque. Corners the coveted “not for everyone” market.

16. It is pretty ridiculous the amount of commentary that’s out there on A Song of Ice and Fire. Score one for Suat. However, I’d say one reason that I find it worth reading is Vom’s reason for not reading it: it’s depressing, because Martin actually does create characters that I get emotionally involved with. I just almost never care about characters in this way, preferring a more abstract approach to storytelling. His writing could use some tightening up, to be sure, but he really knows how to punch you in the face repeatedly. He shows, doesn’t merely tell. And his moral problematics could sustain as much academic attention as most novels that are more readily apparent to that style of critique.

    I’ve been investigating current fantasy lit: I read the first 2 books of Joe Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy. It was decent vacation reading, and I might as well finish it. Also, I read the first book of K.J. Parker’s Engineer trilogy. I’ve been noticing that current fantasy authors don’t know the difference between ‘who’ and ‘whom’. They also have difficulty with the subjunctive ‘were’. Aren’t there editors out there? This is a particular problem when the author is trying to convey a difference in class through language (a barbarian has about as much grammatical skill as a high-bred, city-dwelling aristocrat). It’s the opposite problem in Gene Wolfe, who [sic] I’ve also been recently reading, where everyone sounds like a walking thesaurus. Nevertheless, there are some interesting thought experiment-type setups on capitalism and technology in Parker’s book and Abercrombie is damn good when describing fighting. I’ll probably finish both series after some SF novels and a book on the FBI, but that’ll be enough from both authors.

    And I just started Graham Harman’s collection of essays, Towards Speculative Realism. The one essay I’ve read so far compares Whitehead and Heidegger on their theories of objects. If you hate all the religious mumbo jumbo surrounding Heidegger, try Harman’s version.

    I’ve also been reading, here and there, John Gray’s Straw Dogs, which is the book for you if Heidegger is too much the humanist for your worldview. Talk about depressing …

17. Read Gene Wolfe recently; it’s quite good.

18. Thanks Noah! It is awfully enjoyable, that’s why I was surprised there was so little discussion of it.

19. The New Sun series, Noah? That’s what I’ve been reading.

    Here’s a good interview with Wolfe.

20. It absolutely is, Noah, but beware his late self-consciously “literary” stuff.

    ‘The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories (and Other Stories)’ (no, that’s not a stutter) is a great launching pad into Wolfe.

    George Martin wrote what I consider to be the best modern vampire novel, ‘Fevre Dream’, as well as one of the all-time classic Science Fiction short stories, ‘Sandkings’.

    I wish he’d get this Thrones monkey off his back. I want more variety!

    Oh, and Leiber is wonderful.

21. I read the second Barks collection from Fantagraphics, which was splendid, but…they could really use some tightening up on the backmatter commentary. Some of that stuff is embarrassing, although not as bad as Greg Sadowski’s commentary in his Toth volume. (Incidentally, what is up with annotations that recount in detail the plot? I already know what happens in the story — I just read it!)

    I also read Rupert Thomson’s Death of a Murderer which was depressingly banal and often cheesy. There were times when I felt like I was reading a Stephen King novel, and not one of the good ones. I’ve really liked the other Thomson I’ve read, so this was a massive disappointment, one of those books that makes you wonder what the hell the reviewers were thinking. Were they accidentally reading some other, homonymous book?

    And I saw a repertory screening of John Huston’s Freud biopic, which was a the exact opposite of disappointing, uh, appointing I guess. Really restrained, subtle and with dream sequences, filmed with avant garde techniques, that shit all over the cheeseball dream sequence in Vertigo. Great buttoned-down central performance from Montgomery Clift. Just great all round.

22. That Freud flick has a really good Goldsmith scores, but I’ve never seen the film.

    I have Thompson’s Book of Revelation waiting on the shelf — have you read that? It sounded up my alley.

23. Ayo’s essay is really worth checking out, especially in light of the recent interview w/Marra over on TCJ.

24. See, I always had an okay impression of GRRM because I read Sandkings as a kid and thought it read fine. But Game of Thrones made his reputation, earned him big bucks, and consistently gets voted one of the best fantasy series ever. He definitely wants to keep riding that horse. I will say that it is infinitely better than David Eddings’ Belgariad though. That’s probably the worst fantasy series I’ve read.

    Noah: So did you read all 4 (actually 5) books in the New Sun series? The best place to start with Wolfe is his novella, The Fifth Head of Cerberus. That’s way better than anything GRRM has ever written.

25. Yes; I think I’ve read the four books…didn’t realize there was a fifth? I agree it’s much better than the Martin I’ve read. Certainly there’s nothing in Wolfe as by-the-numbers as those first pages of Game of Thrones.

    And the Belgariad is horrible…but I don’t know that it’s worse than the Dragonlance books. There’s no shortage of terrible fantasy series to choose from….

26. The fifth book is called The Urth of the New Sun and was written several years after. I believe Wolfe has said that he was influenced (as a Catholic) by Chesterton and Aquinas. He also claims to have read almost all of C.S. Lewis(?) I do think your fave Lewis would have liked the series as a whole if he had been around to read it.

27. Charles, I was surprised to see Goldsmith’s name in the credits. Didn’t realise he’d been around that long, always thought of him as an 80s guy.

    Book of Revelation is also on my to-read shelf, but I have read The Insult and Divided Kingdom which are both excellent (and Five Gates of Hell, many years ago as a teenager). But Death of a Murderer…it was like finding out Paul Thomas Anderson had directed Sideways [substitute your own preferred examples as necessary]

28. I’m reading IJOCA.

29. “Read Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Moral Man, Immoral Society,” which is really surprisingly Marxist — maybe the neo-cons skip that one?”

    Well, they probably read it in their Marxist college days….

    Just finished up Yuichi Yokoyama’s “Garden.” Easily my favorite comics release since “Red Colored Elegy.”

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