Month: December 2020

#Review: RING SHOUT, by P. Djèlí Clark

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I’ve read three of P. Djèlí Clark’s books now, and some commonalities are definitely starting to emerge. Clark does great magic systems and great worldbuilding, and tends to set his books in places and periods of time where you typically don’t get a lot of fantasy and/or horror literature. The Black God’s Drums was set in antebellum New Orleans, The Haunting of Tram Car 015 is somehow a police procedural set in Cairo in 1912, and his most recent book, Ring Shout, is set in Georgia in the early 1920s, as the Ku Klux Klan is experiencing a resurgence and the movie The Birth of a Nation is taking America by storm.

Turns out the Klan is mostly motivated by a demonic force that literally eats hatred, and a surprising number of the members– designated in this book as “Ku Kluxers,” rather than “Klan,” which is applied to humans– are, uh, not really human at all. The three main characters are all part of an organization that can see the Ku Kluxers for what they are, and hunts them. And just in case it’s not obvious, all are Black, and all three are women as well.

I had … an interesting time with this book, where most of the issues I had with it are sort of outside the book itself. First, all three of Clark’s books that I’ve read are from Tor.com’s novella line. Ring Shout comes in at about 180 pages or so of story. And when you have a world that is as interesting as the worlds this guy is creating, I want to know more about them. This story, more than his other work, really felt kind of rushed. The main character, Maryse Boudreaux, has a vision of the Big Bad of the book and meets him just a couple of pages later. One of the main characters is killed off at about the halfway point, but it doesn’t have the emotional impact it ought to because we’ve spent so little time with her. That sort of thing.

I really need this guy to write a full-length novel, is what I’m saying. Or maybe three of them, one sequel to each of the books he’s written so far.

Because when you stop talking about what it isn’t, Ring Shout is pretty damn awesome. Clark’s writing style is as sharp and evocative as ever, and this is the most otherworldly of his books, so he taps into a really Lovecraftian vein that I haven’t seen from him previously, and y’all know I love me some Lovecraft-style horror. Maryse herself is fascinating, and I really enjoy the way Clark handles working in her backstory and the romantic relationship she has with one of the male characters. There is a character who is sort of an advisor to Maryse’s crew who speaks Gullah, and Clark doesn’t translate what she’s saying, and while I did hit up Google this morning to make sure I had properly intuited what “buckrah” meant, you get to a point by the end of the book where you understand what she’s saying pretty well. In the hands of a lesser author, this could have been really annoying; I actually found myself wanting more of Nana Jean by the end of the book. And then there’s Maryse’s sword, which … I’m not even going to tell you about Maryse’s sword. It’s an insanely cool idea, and I gotta leave something for you to find out for yourself.

(Just discovered this is being adapted for TV; I am excited.)

The ending also caught me by surprise. Without getting too far into spoiler territory, you can probably already guess that there’s a big fight against some sort of otherworldly entity at the end of the book (and if you’ve never paid any attention to what the Ku Klux Klan called their officers, it’s like history set itself up for this book to be written,) and you get told through the book that Maryse is going to be forced to make “a choice” during this confrontation, and, well, you are going to form some theories as the book goes on about what that choice is going to be and how it will come about.

And you will be wrong, because whatever you’re thinking, Clark has come up with a moment, here, and it’s a hell of a thing to encounter.

One more thing, and I’m putting it after a separator because I’m not really done thinking about it, and I’m not actually sure it’s an issue: I feel like it is a decision to take the Klan’s evil and, to a large extent, attribute it to inhuman, extraterrestrial/interdimensional forces. I feel like Clark knew he was doing this, or at least that he could be accused of it, because there is a lot of talk about choice in this book, and it’s particularly made clear that a certain subset of the (human) Klan are deliberately giving themselves over to this, no spoilers, Thing that they’re giving themselves over to. But D.W. Griffith’s movie wasn’t a huge success because Griffith was a sorcerer. It was a huge success because enormous swaths of America were just as awful and racist as he was. There is a reading of this book, and I think that reading is at least somewhat valid– after all, I’m talking about it– where the Ku Kluxers somewhat exonerate white America’s complicity in the (actual) Klan. I’m not sure it completely holds up, but it exists, and if you were put off by it I’m not sue I’d argue with you about it.

Grading update

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Quick post tonight, because my eyes are bugging me and my head is full of The Mandalorian but I don’t want to talk about it yet– I did, in the end, refuse to fail any of my students, at least for the semester. I decided any missing work would go in at 40% rather than a 0– 40% because it puts a little bit of a buffer between that and the 50% floor grade I’ve always used for work that was attempted but done poorly. After that, any student between 51 and 59% got bumped up to a D-, and then I did give the higher of the two quarter grades as a semester grade rather than an average. For most of my students that didn’t end up being much of a change; a B+ sliding up to an A- or maybe a D+ going to a C, but there were a few where it was a pretty staggering jump, and I don’t care. If you were an A student one grading period and an F student another grading period, it’s because something happened, not because you suddenly forgot how to add. That actually did happen with two students, and I gave both of them the A.

There were maybe twenty kids who still failed both quarters even with those changes, and those kids got an N, which is effectively a “no grade.” Basically every kid who did something over the course of the semester passed. I don’t know that I’m willing to go to quite these lengths to keep kids from failing in a non-pandemic sort of situation, but that’s the situation we’re in right now, so I’m going to adapt to it.

#Review: THE BURNING GOD, by R.F. Kuang

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… y’all, I don’t have the words.

Okay, I do, but they’re not going to be good enough.

I made the decision to reread The Poppy War and The Dragon Republic, the first two books in R.F. Kuang’s Poppy War trilogy, before diving into the final installment, The Burning God. I read something else in between War and Republic, but then went straight into God after that. And I’m glad I did; this is a complicated series, and I’ve probably literally read 200 books, if not more, since Dragon Republic.

Two things became immediately clear: first, that I hadn’t really given Dragon Republic enough credit, and second, this series is good enough that it ought to be considered canonical. I have read modern series that I loved more– I am waiting quite impatiently for the third volume in Fonda Lee’s Green Bone saga– but I’m having a really hard time right now coming up with one that I thought was better.

And yes, to be 100% clear, I’m saying that Kuang, who is somehow only 24, is a better writer than the likes of Rothfuss and Martin, and almost certainly whoever else you might name at that level.

This remains a difficult series to read, about difficult subjects. Kuang is writing about war, and colonialism, and genocide, and rape, and eugenics, and PTSD, and hatred, and racism, and drug abuse, and any number of other objectively terrible things, and her world is one that generations of war have already torn to bits– as the series begins, the nation of Nikara has known about 20 years of peace, and it’s presented as an aberration– and there aren’t good guys or bad guys so much as there are competing ways for everything to be horrible. While her characters are (or become) generals and emperors and shamans and, effectively, gods, she never lets you lose sight of what the shifting alliances and betrayals and catastrophes are doing to the peasants and common people of her world, and no action is without consequence. In the hands of a less skilled author this would be nihilism; I went after the writers of The Last of Us 2 earlier this year for presenting a world in which no good decisions were possible– but instead it comes off as a hard (and surprisingly realistic, given that the main character can breathe fire) look at the inevitable result of dynastic struggles, religious intolerance and colonialism.

I could talk for hours about how Kuang handles religion in this series; the struggles on earth are literally mirrored in heaven as well, and then when the monotheistic Hesperian system comes into conflict with the Nikaran pantheon all sorts of interesting things happen, because everyone believes their gods are real– and in the Nikaran case those gods are literally providing paranormal abilities to their shamans– and it is never made quite clear whether the Hesperian God is real or not, or whether “science” is the explanation for some of the things that happen in the book. It’s tremendously well-done, and that’s before I get to the part where the gods of the Pantheon are presented as barely-controllable forces of nature who will eventually drive their acolytes insane if they’re not killed first.

I have said this in the review for each of these books; these are not for everybody. They pull no punches and they are graphic, brutal books about broken people. Rin herself, while she’s far more in control of herself in this book than she was in Dragon Republic, is a character that not everyone is going to be able to connect with– she is in over her head and she knows it, and she’s (as she is frequently reminded of by other characters) prone to letting her emotions guide her rather than thinking her actions through, particularly when those actions begin to involve the health and safety of thousands and thousands of people. She fucks up, over and over again, and her mistakes hurt people, over and over. But for me? God, this was so good. I’m going to have a lot of trouble figuring out where to place this in a couple of weeks when I write my end of the year list, because I read it right after rereading the first two, and this piece, as you’ve probably noticed, is more of a review of the entire series than it is The Burning God specifically. But it’s so good. I don’t know what plans Kuang has in the future for this world– this specific trilogy is definitely concluded, but there is definitely room for more stories in Nikara and potentially Hesperia as well, which we never actually see– but I can’t wait to see what she comes up with next. Absolutely phenomenal work.

Today, I …

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment
  • Sent approximately 175 emails (not a joke, and if it’s off it’s too low);
  • Worked with one (1) student for an hour on some missing work;
  • Attended a second-attempt IEP meeting that both the parent and the student declined to attend;
  • Attended a PD, supposedly;
  • Caught up my grading, again;
  • Went to the comic shop;
  • Managed to avoid an argument with a local malcontent about whether he should wear a mask in said comic shop;
  • Filmed a short TikTok video that in, oh, three or four hours has amassed 125,000 views and counting;
  • Ate tasty tortellini soup for dinner;
  • Played Demon’s Souls;
  • Attempted (and failed) to do a small bit of Christmas shopping;
  • Attempted (and succeeded) to manage to not spend money on myself, beyond the aforementioned comic books;
  • Wrote a blog post.

Later, I will …

  • Finish R.F. Kuang’s excellent The Burning God, which will likely be reviewed tomorrow;
  • Sleep.

‘Twas a decent day.

Thinking through my grades

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My final grades for the quarter and for the semester are due … well, actually, I don’t have any idea when they’re due, but they’re going to be finished on Friday before noon. I’ve talked before about how much it rubs me wrong to fail any of my kids this quarter, and I’m currently thinking about what I want to do about my grades right now. Represented above are the actual current grades for my first hour students. The Q1 grade is what they actually received (you can see a couple, like Marge Simpson and Riri Williams, whose grades I nudged up a bit already) and the Q2 grade is their current grade with my current policies on grading– ie, nothing turned in and genuinely attempted receives less than a 50%, but work that is not turned in at all receives a 0.

(There are one or two kids whose grades go down slightly; this is an artifact of me doing this quick and sloppy and a couple of extra credit assignments causing weirdness. Ignore those.)

Ignore the third column of numbers, as it’s just their total number of points. The fourth column is their grade in the 2nd quarter if I change every zero to a 50%. The ones highlighted in yellow are the kids who would still fail the quarter under that arrangement. Highlighted in green are the kids whose grades would have been Fs for the 2nd quarter but move into passing range if I bring up zeroes to 50s. Homey DeClown should also be green; I missed him.

A couple of things stand out. First, note Bruce Wayne, who had a D+ during the first quarter and is pulling a hundred percent during the second quarter. Bruce has not suddenly become a good math student, and interestingly, Bruce’s sister’s grade also shot up. I am attributing this to issues at home during the first quarter. Notice also the grade of Montgomery Burns, who was a stellar student first quarter and who fell apart during second– also not, I presume, because all of his math ability suddenly leaked out of his ear.

I have no reason to believe that this class is any different from the rest of mine. We have been given the option of giving an N grade to kids who simply haven’t shown up; N effectively means No Grade. There is talk about high school students having to retake any grade they got an N on and it will not change a GPA. I am fully expecting them to back off on that requirement and I don’t actually know whether it applies to middle school.

At any rate, of the six kids who would still be failing: Flash Gordon has been in touch all year, and I am absolutely certain that the reason he’s not been in school is that he’s been raising his siblings. He’s passing. I should have passed him first quarter, honestly. Peter Parker, as far as I know (and I’m cognizant of the fact that there’s a lot I don’t know) is the kid you’re thinking of when you talk about the kids who don’t deserve the bump they’d get from me fiddling with their grades, because they made their beds and they should sleep in them. Last year he was a smart kid who chose to fail and frankly e-learning hasn’t noticeably changed his grades. The rest of them have more or less been no-shows and would be good candidates for the N grade.

Also, I’m not averaging semester grades. The semester grade is going to be the higher of the two quarter grades, period. I’m doing that even if I don’t end up bumping the zeroes to 50s. The office can fight me on it if they want to; I don’t think they will and frankly it’s a fight that I think I’m well-positioned to win.

Question

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Photography1 Comment

I’m still considering killing my Instagram account, although the news that Facebook may have to sell them off may have saved it. Will the occasional random context-free photo annoy people?

(I know it’s my blog and I can do what I want. I’m asking anyway.)

On what I want

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, life2 Comments

My wife and I, married thirteen years come next February, typically do not buy each other gifts. My wife is impossible to buy for, as she does not like things, and I am exceptionally easy to buy for but tend to spend money indiscriminately, so buying things from my Amazon wish list, for example, can be kind of a fraught proposition.

I fucked around and got myself into trouble last week, as I came up with a perfectly good Christmas present for my wife and managed to acquire it in a fraction of the time I would have expected it to take and at a fraction of the cost. In other words, not only was I breaking the rules by buying something in the first place, she was going to take one look at it and assume that I had spent way more than I actually spent on it– even though what I did spend for it would generally count as a relatively large amount for us to spend on each other, even in a world where we buy things for each other, which we really don’t.

I hope to hell that sentence makes sense because I’m not rewording it.

Anyway, I went through this brief crisis where I was trying to figure out what my duties were in terms of whether I was going to disclose the gift before Christmas or not, and if I was merely going to disclose its existence or also disclose how much I spent. I ended up, after discussing the matter with my brother and sister-in-law, deciding to tell her what had happened and that I’d spent what I spent on it, so that if she wants to get me something in return (which she isn’t required to do) she has a chance of achieving some sort of parity.

(She won’t. I win this Christmas. She can try again next year if she wants, but I win this one.)

Anyway, the trick to buying me (and a lot of people, really) is to come up with something that I want but would never buy myself, which is kind of a tricky needle to thread, and thinking about it tonight all I’ve been able to come up with are two items that I really don’t need and would just add to the clutter around the house. Guitar Center is going out of business, and part of me really wants to go buy a guitar once I can get them at discount prices. Can I play the guitar? No. I can’t play the ukulele either. I’m not gonna learn. I’m 44 and it is too late to learn a musical instrument. There is, therefore, no reason for me to want one.

It is kind of hilarious to me that the second thing that I came up with was a combat-grade lightsaber, which is also something that someone else should not buy me, because they come with literally a billion available options and are also expensive as hell and the whole idea is completely ridiculous. I do not need a lightsaber, much less a $250 one, and the idea that I’m fixated on a combat-grade one, which has a blade tough enough that they’re supposed to be good for full-contact sparring against someone else, is even more ridiculous.

I’m curious to see if anyone can guess what color blade I’d pick, by the way.

(Oh, and also I’m still fighting off the occasional urge to buy a lathe.)

It’s best to just let me waste my own money, I think.

Star Wars and stuff

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, movies, Reading, Television1 Comment

This post is going to be kind of grab-baggy, so be prepared for that, and there will probably be various and sundry spoilers for various and sundry things, so be prepared to potentially be spoiled somehow on basically anything I mention.

The Mandalorian continues to be … a thing, that I watch. The show annoys me as often as it entertains me, to be honest, and reintroducing Boba fucking Fett back into continuity got directly on my damn nerves no matter how much of a badass Temuera Morrison is in the role. The show’s structure is kind of aggravating, too; I’ve talked before about how video games seem to be imposing their structure on serial storytelling, and this show is really big on episodes that feel exactly like side quests in video games. Plus, for a bounty hunter, Din Djarin sure doesn’t hunt a whole lot of bounties. Baby Yoda (Grogu, whatever; I’m actually fine with the name) has basically eaten the show. That said, I thought the show’s most recent episode did some really interesting narrative stuff, including shortcutting past what I thought was going to be an entire episode about breaking a character out of prison ended up dispensing with the entire “breakout” by basically having one character pull some strings and dealing with it in two minutes.

The show’s budget is also completely out of control, in a good way. It looks gorgeous, and it doesn’t skimp on … really, anything at all. But I feel like I spend at least half of each episode sighing.

While I’m talking about Star Wars, I may as well point out that I’m working my way through The Clone Wars, and … well, that’s a thing I watch too. I’m mostly interested in filling in my knowledge of Ahsoka Tano’s backstory, so sooner or later I’ll move on to Rebels. I’m not loving the show, though, so it’ll probably take a minute. Also, the more time I spend watching Stormtroopers shoot at people and miss or droids shoot at people and miss, the more it starts to actually get on my nerves. Turns out there’s a limit for this stuff after all.

Then again, this has happened:

… and, damn, I am so back in. I didn’t know how much I needed a Patty Jenkins Rogue Squadron movie until seeing this teaser, which blew my damn mind. I spent the whole thing thinking she was either talking about Captain Marvel 2 or, for some reason, Green Lantern, which seems kind of an unlikely announcement for a Disney production. So when she pulls that X-Wing pilot helmet out … damn.

Let’s see, what else? There was a teaser for Ms. Marvel, too:

I have kind of checked out of the MCU since Endgame and especially Far from Home, which is easy for me to say when the global pandemic has seriously curtailed any actual chance I might have to watch any new programming. But this? This is what I want, and Iman Vellani seems like the perfect actress for this role. I also continue to be hugely psyched about WandaVision, mostly because of Monica Rambeau’s presence in the program.

I have reread R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War and The Dragon Republic in the last couple of weeks, and I finally, finally got to start reading The Burning God, book III of that trilogy, today. It was the right call to reread the first two books again, which 1) reminded me of just how phenomenally good the first book was, and 2) made me realize that the second really is just as good as the first one. This series really isn’t for everyone, I still stand by that, but my God is it an amazing piece of work. I can’t wait to see how Kuang wraps up the trilogy with this final book. The rest of my unread shelf can wait.