Month: August 2020

In which I have no patience for white nonsense

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, PoliticsLeave a comment

So it’s happened again, another unarmed young Black man who posed no threat whatsoever shot in the back multiple times by police officers. Amazingly, as of right now Jacob Blake is still alive, despite being shot seven times at point-blank range by someone who was attempting to murder him.

I just had a student lose a younger brother– a nine-year-old– to a gunshot. And neither of these things will ever stop, because America loves guns more than it loves children or Black people combined, and white people in this country will put up with absolutely anything so long as they can see people of color nearby who have it worse than they do.

I finished up with my classes today and decided to do something I don’t do very often, which is go take a swim in the pool by myself. Before I did, I spent a moment randomly scrolling through TikTok and found a video by a Black woman who was clearly reacting to Blake’s shooting. I duetted the video– which, for those of you who don’t do TikTok, is basically that app’s version of Twitter’s comment-RT, but did mine over a black background and just put “Nothing I need to add here; BLACK LIVES MATTER” in my side of the screen. I was basically just doing a signal boost.

(Which turned out utterly unnecessary, as the account I was duetting was MUCH bigger than mine, but whatever.)

Well an hour later I got out of the pool and discovered that my most famous TikTok video is now one that I don’t actually appear in. It’s gone very mildly viral (very mildly; I only have about 40 followers and don’t have much reach there) but for some reason it was getting a lot more commentary and Likes than usual, especially compared to the number of views.

And, man, y’all, there’s a whole lot of racists on TikTok. I am desperately tired of white people who somehow in August of 2020 still want to pretend that any of the following are true:

  • That “All Lives Matter.” No, they don’t, and this has been explained to you repeatedly, and I assume at this point anyone who says this is either a racist or too stupid to live.
  • That “Blue Lives Matter.” There is no such thing as Blue Lives, and you are a racist— and an asshole– if you try this one. Cops choose to be cops. This is not a thing.
  • Oh if you just follow instructions you’ll be fine. Not true, not at all. Especially when there’s five different cops all barking different sets of instructions at you. Also: Tamir Rice. Also: Philando Castile. Also: Charles Kinsey.
  • If they weren’t doing anything wrong, they’d have been fine. Also not true! See: Tamir Rice again. See: Breanna Taylor. See: Botham Jean. See: Atatiana Jefferson.

Cops kill Black people because cops in this country are racist and overfunded and overarmed and utterly fucking out of control. The police are a street gang with no accountability whatsoever. I also had to contend with this piece of risible horse shit today:

Oh, I absolutely do want to do these things, and frankly I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t. And I am far from the only fucking one. Shut the fuck up, Joy Behar, and take your idiot bullshit with you. I’m not in the mood.

At any rate, I’ve discovered that you can’t delete comments on TikTok once they’re made, but you can block commenters, and I’ve been making sure that no one gets a chance to be dumb twice. Because unless I actually do get paid to educate you, I don’t get paid to educate you, especially for something that by this point in this year of all times you should bloody fucking already know.

Enough of this bullshit. Be better, white people.

#REVIEW: Greyhound (2020)

On By Luther M. SilerIn movies, Reviews2 Comments

My dad and my brother and my sister-in-law came over yesterday to celebrate the boy’s birthday– he doesn’t get a party with his friends, unfortunately, because 2020– and toward the end of the evening my brother kind of randomly noticed that Greyhound was available through the Apple TV+ subscription I got the last time I upgraded my phone. I had never heard of it and initially scoffed at the idea of watching Yet Another Tom Hanks Movie, but I either got overruled or didn’t fight the idea too hard, take your pick– and, well, the short version is that you now have another reason to have an Apple TV+ subscription beyond basking in the crazy that is See. Which, for the record, we eventually finished, and I recommend on every level except the story, which never gets less dumb. If you can buy the basic premise, you should check it out.

But this piece is about Greyhound. The premise is refreshingly simple: it is 1942, not long after the United States entered World War II, and Hanks, who also wrote the screenplay, plays Naval Commander Ernest Krause. Krause commands a destroyer that, along with another four combat-capable ships, is escorting a convoy of troop carrier, supply and merchant ships across the Atlantic to England. It is Krause’s first such command.

The problem with that trip was the period of time– about three or four days– where the convoy is out of range of Allied air cover, being too far from both North America and England for planes to be able to make a round trip. This made convoys like this, if not easy prey for German U-Boats, at least a lot easier. And the Greyhound’s convoy catches more grief than most, first sinking a single U-Boat and then encountering a Wolfpack of six of them. The convoy takes multiple losses over the course of the film’s surprisingly terse and compact 90 minutes, and Krause neither sleeps nor eats at any point during the film– in fact, the movie makes a point of repeated attempts by the mess crew to get him to eat something, all of which are interrupted.

If you’re into World War II films, you could do an awful lot worse than this movie, and honestly for my money it’s better than Saving Private Ryan in every way except for the action scenes– this movie clearly didn’t have a Spielberg-level budget. The action’s not bad by any means, but the interesting thing about a movie entirely about fighting submarines is that so much of the threat is imaginary. There’s something lurking out there, trying to kill you, and these guys are literally trying to track submarines by listening real hard and keeping track of where they are and where they think the Germans are by using grease pens on glass. I know little about naval warfare and can’t really vouch for accuracy, but it feels right, for lack of a better word.

The simple fact is, in the hands of a lesser director or a lesser actor this movie could have been a serious mess. The movie only leaves Hanks’ perspective for very brief scenes, occasionally cutting to the sonar operator or a couple of other characters, but never for more than a minute or two, and we never see a single German soldier or have a single scene shot inside a U-Boat, although we do get to hear the German commander taunting the Greyhound over the radio a couple of times. Even Hanks’ dialogue is largely incomprehensible beyond pure function— I mean, I can imagine what “Full rudder right!” means, but I don’t know, and that’s the most comprehensible of his orders. I would say easily 75% of his dialogue is either barking orders or reacting to positional data relayed to him from sonar or radar. I feel like it shouldn’t work, but it does.

This probably isn’t worth actually picking up an Apple TV+ subscription for– but if you’re one of the people who, like me, upgraded your iPhone and got a free year of the service, definitely set aside an hour and a half on a Saturday night and give it a look. It’s suspenseful, well-directed, powerfully acted, and generally a solid and well-crafted piece of filmmaking. Give it a shot.

Taking tonight off

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

The boy’s birthday is tomorrow and we have family over, so I’ll see y’all Sunday.

In which I ascend

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek1 Comment

…to the highest imaginable levels of nerd.

I have created an unboxing video.

Witness:

#REVIEW: Harrow the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews4 Comments

Honest truth: I almost don’t want to write this, because in general I don’t like to write reviews of books I didn’t like. I have now read Tamsyn Muir’s debut, Gideon the Ninth, twice, and … well, it is a book that has some flaws. There are at least twice as many characters as there need to be, for starters, and each of them has at least three or four different ways they’re referred to throughout the text, so the book can be a nightmare to keep everyone straight. And I only realized at the sixty-fifth page of Harrow that the title character in this book, who was a major character in the first one, was named Harrowhark and not Harrowhawk. It took two complete readings of Gideon and a chunk of Harrow for me to get that.

So: I am not the world’s most careful reader, y’all. it’s a fact. I don’t love that about myself, but it’s still true. And I have said many, many times in this space that I prefer my narratives nice and straightforward.

Harrow the Ninth features the following:

  • An unreliable narrator who spends a lot of time hallucinating and is never clear on whether anything she’s experiencing is real
  • A bunch of other characters who lie all the Goddamned time
  • An unclear, time-jumpy, back-and-forth timeline
  • Multiple competing notions of reality
  • The main character being both dead and alive at the same time
  • Multiple other characters being both dead and alive at the same time
  • Perhaps 70% of the text in second-person, with a first-person narrator of those second-person sections, except the person who seems to be the narrator of those sections explicitly denies doing so late in the book
  • Wholesale rewriting of the events in the first book

I could not give you a plot summary of Harrow the Ninth if my Goddamned life depended on it. I finished all 510 damn pages of it and I have no idea what happened in it. Why did I do that? Because my main praise of Gideon the Ninth remains true– that Tamsyn Muir can write a hell of a sentence, and there were bits on nearly every page that I would just sit and admire for a moment before moving on. It’s just that they don’t stitch together into anything that, at least for me, was even remotely coherent or understandable. One gripe from the first book, that there were too many poorly-distinguished characters and that between the too many characters they had at least three times as many different names, is not the case here. The cast is much smaller. But the worldbuilding is still an utter mess. I have no idea at all what a regular person’s life might be like in this world, or really even if there are any regular people. One of the characters is actually God? But, like, I don’t know who he’s God to, other than maybe these five or six other people in the book? Why are God’s main servants necromancers? Why does the House system exist in the first place? Are there people out there who aren’t part of a House at all?

No fuckin’ clue.

There’s some shit with giant monsters and what I think is a metaphor for the underworld; I have no fucking idea what the deal is. Everybody’s ten thousand years old. At one point there’s a minor side character with an Eminem reference in his name.

The punch line to all of this is that I went and looked at reviews of this book on Goodreads after I finished it, and everyone seems to more or less agree with everything I just said, except that a whole lot of them seem to have considered all of this a positive, and … I just can’t. The really ridiculous thing is that this is a trilogy and Book 3 is still forthcoming and I am probably going to buy it. I can’t tell you for the life of me if Gideon or Harrow are even alive at the end of this book but I don’t want to miss the final book in the trilogy.

It doesn’t make any damn sense, I know, but that doesn’t stop it from being true.

At any rate, I decided to call that three stars, because I can’t take this book and reduce it to a star rating. Right now I just want to find someone else who also read it and just go somewhere and stare at each other for an hour.

In which I am confuzzled

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Proving that I will never understand how things get popular on the Internet, the Notre Dame post from yesterday evening has blown up, getting something like four or five times the number of normal views a post gets on its first day and so far about twice as many as a second day usually gets. Why? No clue. It’s getting most of its hits through Twitter clickthroughs, which makes even less sense, as the only thing that posts to Twitter is this:

https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1295846370784555008

I almost wonder if the tweet got quietly featured on Buzzfeed or something like that, because with only 3 likes and 3 RTs it should barely have gotten any attention at all, but it’s getting much more interaction than my tweets usually get, and for no clear reason.

Ahh, internet, never stop being strange.

Notre Dame has reported another seventy-odd cases since I posted that, by the way, and the numbers did not show up in the county-level dashboard I usually look at, which is kind of alarming. These kids absolutely live in my county and not all of them live on campus; if there’s an outbreak (and there is), it’s not going to be physically confined anywhere. Keep in mind, too, that South Bend also has IUSB, St. Mary’s, Holy Cross, Bethel University and Ivy Tech in the immediate area. I haven’t seen numbers from those campuses– truthfully I’m not even sure they’re all back yet– but I’m sure they aren’t going to be a lot better. St. Mary’s is a women’s college so maybe we can hope they have a bit more sense, but I’m not holding my breath or anything like that.

In other news, today was the one-week mark of school starting and for the first time I’m done with everything I have to do today other than attendance and I have tomorrow’s lesson ready, and not only is it not 9:00 PM but the school day technically isn’t even over yet. I fucked up hard yesterday; today’s lesson is all vocabulary involving the real number system and in both the TikTok explainer and the video I shot I managed to both leave the word “integer” out of the presentation and move the definitions for whole numbers and natural numbers “up” in the roster, so to speak. In other words, the word “integers” wasn’t there, the definition of whole number was actually the definition of integer, and the definition of natural number was actually the definition of whole number. I mean, I noticed it, which was good, but I didn’t actually notice it until I’d started uploading everything to YouTube and it still meant I had to completely redo the TikTok and partially re-record the video, then re-upload everything, and by the time I was done it was nearly 9:30 PM.

My attendance is dropping, too, which is both predictable and alarming. I don’t really know what to do about it, though. I need to spend a chunk of time on Friday calling families; we’ll see if I can get through to any of my no-shows and infrequent flyers.

In which no one could have guessed

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

I’m mostly just putting this here for the sake of posterity, but Notre Dame today announced, after reporting twice as many Covid-19 cases yesterday as the entire rest of the county, that they were going to lock everyone in their dorms for two weeks (that’ll go well) and that off-campus (this will also go well) students should not come onto campus while they do virtual learning. If, within two weeks, the numbers aren’t better, they’re sending everyone home.

They’ve been back for, like, two weeks, max, and — get this — tested every single student before allowing them back on campus. And this still happened.

Go ahead. Put some money on what happens next. I dare you.

Author Interview: Lisbeth Campbell, author of THE VANISHED QUEEN

On By Luther M. SilerIn ReadingLeave a comment

Hey, all, Luther here. I got to see a VERY early draft of The Vanished Queen, and made some comments and suggestions, so I got to read an ARC before it came out. It’s good. You should read it. This is Lisbeth’s debut novel, and she agreed to do a brief interview with me. The book releases today, everywhere finer novels are sold.

Tell us a bit about yourself.  What made you into an author?

I started writing when I was a kid and knew by the time I was a teenager that I wanted to be a writer. After that it was just persistence. There have been long fallow spells but I always come back to it. I was a voracious reader as a child – I would check out 10 library books and be done with them within a few days if it was summer vacation – and I loved the worlds I was able to experience in reading. So I think part of what got me going was the desire to recreate the moments I especially liked. Then I discovered worldbuilding of my own, and I was unleashed. When I was younger, I wrote a lot of poetry too, because I revel in language, but it didn’t stick the way storytelling did.

What was your journey with this particular book like?  I’m fascinated at how different the final version was than the one I read a few years ago; I don’t think I’ve ever revised anything that significantly.

This book was the book that would not let go. I started in 1995, I think, and wrote something which had curses and plagues and demons and quests and meditations on historiography. It went through multiple revisions and even got to go out visiting once, but nothing happened. 

In 2015 I picked it up once more, thinking that the market had changed and I could fix stuff in just a few months. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha….. I beat my head against a wall for a long time, scrapped the second half for the umpteenth time, and realized that Mirantha, the missing and presumed murdered queen, belonged. Once I brought her in as a character through her journal I didn’t know what to do in the present of the novel. That was when I sent it to you. 

You told me very usefully that it was a ghost story, and I reconfigured a lot of the early stuff, but I still ran into a dead end. So I sent it to a professional editor and asked for big picture comments. She told me that my prose was lovely and the bones of the story were good, but that even with the journal I was not letting the queen have her story. She also said Anza, one of my main characters, was too passive (as you note below).

So I gave Anza a personal stake: her father had been executed by the king. She had a reason to fight. Suddenly the rest of the story became a lot clearer. Her connection to Mirantha, which had always felt crucial to me but had no good basis within the narrative, was a connection of shared grief. I wrote and revised that draft in slightly less than a year.

I got an agent whose completely understood the story, and I revised again with her guidance, three times. After it sold I did three more revisions for my editor. All of these revisions focused on the last quarter of the book and making it more revolutionary. So by now all that is left of the very first version is the characters and a few early scenes, which have been much reworked. I’ve saved everything, and who knows, the outtakes might turn into a story or scenes in another novel.

How much did the “real world” impact on how you wrote this story?  I know this book was started prior to the Current Unpleasantness, but I imagine it’s difficult to write a book in 2020 about a resistance against the rule of a despotic king without certain parallels forcing their way into the story.

The election of 2016 and its aftermath significantly affected the writing of this book. The story I wanted to write had always been about resisting tyranny. After 2016 I was writing to a different audience than I had been (including myself). I was writing for Americans who needed a vision of how to resist tyranny because of real life. The story was not just about Anza and Mirantha; it was suddenly deeply personal. I did not try to avoid parallels – I sought them out.

One thing in particular was added when I was incandescent with rage at the outcome of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. Nothing had ever made it so clear how much women are silenced and disbelieved. Mirantha’s situation became much more vivid to me, and I gave her my anger. I have always been fascinated by Cassandra, so the theme of the disbelieved woman was already present, but I sharpened it after seeing what happened to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.

Let’s talk about Anza herself a bit.  Where did she come from?  She was a very different character in the version of the book that I read– quite a bit more passive, for one thing, and straight, for another.  I’ve seen you talk about how her bisexuality sort of forced its way onto the page; (feel free to reword that) how much about her characterization surprised you?

The change in Anza from a witness to an active resistance fighter was because her passivity was dragging the book down. I do believe that witnessing can be an act of agency, but it just wasn’t working here. As soon as I gave her a personal motive (stakes!!) and altered some other things about her backstory, which I won’t go into here because spoilers, the book acquired much more strength and shape. 

As far as her sexuality goes, she was attracted to her roommate in my head in one of the very early versions, but I let the roommate go and the bisexuality with her, partly because I didn’t know what to do with the bisexuality and partly because it was a distraction. When I picked the book up again in 2015, Anza got the hots for every attractive young person (female or male) who crossed her path. But her bisexuality was still distracting from the rest of the story so I kept it out. At some point I realized that what was really going on with her was her coming to realize she sucks at relationships. Her self-discovery is not about queerness. It’s about learning how she screwed up in her interactions with people. And that story is not a distraction from the story of revolution, which is a story of relationship. So I let her be bi. I like queernorm worlds, because that is how the world ought to be.

As to where she came from initially, I have no idea. My characters just emerge on their own and do their own thing.

Any plans to continue with this world in the future?  Any other projects you’d like to let us know about?

Right now I have no plans to continue with this world. But I can certainly see a novel set ten or fifteen years later that plays out what happens afterward. 

My big novel project at the moment is something I am describing as a mash-up of The Secret History, Richard III (Shakespeare version), and “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” with steam trains. The elevator pitch tag line is “Political intrigue, dangerous magic, and found family.” It’s about a nine year old king who is dethroned by his uncle. One of the characters has a back story involving magic and murder at college. That’s as much as I want to say, because there’s always the chance that it will crash and burn. I sputter out at times, and publishing is weird.

I want to thank Lisbeth for popping by and talking to us about the book today. The Vanished Queen is available in hardcover and ebook, and you can follow Lisbeth on Twitter at @fictionlisbeth or find her on the Web at lisbethcampbell.com.