Heyo, I thought I’d try something new.
Y’see, I’d like to get back to blogging again, but I always feel like I need either some big, elaborate project (like the Moby Dick thing) or some burning idea that I need to get out of my head. I want to turn writing back into a practice, not just something I do in a rush every now and then. So: I’m just gonna write about what I’ve been reading and watching lately, once a month. A nice, easy schedule. Gives me a broad topic to ruminate on and get some thoughts out of my head and onto the screen.
Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs to Die
This recently published novel by Greer Stothers (of tumblr cat fame) was an absolute delight.
I don’t read a lot of contemporary fiction. I’ve tried, and it mostly leaves me cold. I really ought to give it more of a shot, but I feel like it’s so hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, y’know.
This one kind of fell into my lap, so to speak. I’ve been following Greer for years and years on tumblr. They started writing a book on a whim (read: a fit of mania) and then decided to try and get it published, eventually landing a deal with Titan after a lot of searching around. I figured: what the heck, it sounds fun, I’ll pick it up.
It’s a sort of a comedic romantasy book, about a less-than-noble knight who is sentenced to die due to a prophecy that shows that his death is necessary for the defeat of the mad sorcerer, Merulo. So, he runs away and intentionally gets captured by said sorcerer, since he’s the only person who will want him to stay alive.
The writing is very breezey and, for lack of a beter word, tumblr-y. This is both a strength and a weakness at times. The main character, Cameron, doesn’t really have a strong voice, or rather his voice feels like it’s just the voice of the author. A lot of the quips he makes, especially late in the novel, feel like jokes some modern internet user would make, if they were pulling an MST3K on this story.
But still, it had some fun worldbuilding, and the central relationship is strong, though I do think removing the sex scenes had kind of a big effect. It feels like things go from zero to a hundred, and I think that would’ve been evened out by some of those (so to speak). Honestly, I may have enjoyed the journey of the antagonistic elf Glenda more than our main character. She sucks so bad, and is so angry all the time.
Greer’s next book promises to be more explicit, and has an even more intriguing premise, involving an alien brain slug getting isekai’d and then falling in love with a drider.
The Cars That Ate Paris (1974)
One of my favorite podcasts, Blank Check with Griffin and David, has started covering the filmography of Peter Weir, the famed Australian director. I was very excited, but then realized I’d literally only seen two of his movies before: The Truman Show and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. But, those two movies are great, so I’m sure I’ll have a good time watching the rest.
It’s always interesting to go back to a director’s first film, when they had no reputation and no budget and few skills. Sometimes, they can be quite painful to sit through, but The Cars That Ate Paris was one I really connected to.
It’s about a guy who gets trapped in a weird town way out in the middle of nowhere in Australia. Notably: not the outback, the vast interior desert, but rather the idyllic countryside near Sydney. By all appearances, it’s a lovely little village, but it hides a dark secret: the town gets by on murder and theft. They intentionally set traps on nearby roads and then scavenge parts from cars, and either kill any survivors or take them to the hospital and turn them into invalids.
Almost none of this is communicated directly, we see the whole thing from the protagonist Arthur’s eyes. He ends up stuck there both because the car he is in was destroyed and his brother was killed, and also he personally cannot drive, due to anxiety from a past incident where he killed someone behind the wheel.
So the movie is this big, weird ball of anxieties and niceties mashing into each other. He’s essentially held hostage by politeness, inflicted by people professing to be on his side, only trying to help him out. He’s adopted by the mayor, and given a job wrangling patients at the hospital, where he quickly learns the dark secrets I outlined above.
The titular cars are those driven by the youth of the town, who are being raised in this insane, murderous, lawless society and act out accordingly. They build strange death machines and spend all day crashing them into each other. The climax (and some would say only exciting part of the movie) sees the town being destroyed by these cars, as the kids go into full revolt, tearing buildings apart and murdering the elders, as they are killed in turn, like wild animals, melded with their machines.
Now obviously I don’t have the full context of 1970s Australia, but I think a lot of it gets across. It’s a lot of cold war insanity, the idea that you’re living in this society that is responsible for such horrors and you’re just supposed to ignore it and get on with things. Being polite and servile to people who are doing all this evil out in the open.
And in the end, Arthur overcomes his fear of driving in a critical moment, and uses his newfound ability to escape the town, right as it collapses, and the rest of the remaining residents leave on foot, out of fear of their own traps.
The whole thing has a very dreamlike, sedate feel to it, in spite of the horrors lurking underneath. I really, really liked it. Feels very appropriate for this moment in American history as well, I suppose.
Star Trek: The Next Generation
My currently late-night relaxation show, after I finally finished my full-series rewatch of House MD.
This one is a classic, and I have some nostalgia for it, though actually not as much as I do for Voyager, which I watched as it was airing as a kid. TNG was just slightly before my time, starting before I was even born! But, I came back around to it later, mostly to understand pop culture references, and found it to be a true delight.
It’s not the best Star Trek series, for me that’s Deep Space Nine, but it’s like… the standard that I hold every other series against. It’s the kind of competency porn that just puts my mind at ease. A sort of platonic ideal of procedural TV, like Law & Order but in space and with a few dashes of serialization.
Sure, it has some problems, especially early on. But even in the rocky first season, there are some true classic episodes. And I just love the cast so much, and the general tone of… competence. People doing their jobs as well as they can, dealing with circumstances.
There’s something about it that feels so… adult, to me. This is the dream of the 90s: that the world has its problems, but people are working diligently on solving them. It’s not a world on the brink of madness or destruction, there’s no hyperbolic action or philosophy here, it’s just the safe and somewhat sedate play of ideas on the screen.
That’s why I can’t get mad at it even when I disagree with its politics or it fumbles something important. It’s not proselytizing, it’s not didactic, it’s not a desperate plea. Not to say those are necessarily bad things, but it’s nice to have something that just takes things at a very even keel.
Anyway, I’m actually watching it right now, as I write this. I’m in season 3, and it’s just been banger after banger. Just finished the one with the Romulan defector whose whole reason for defecting was an elaborate trap to trick defectors. Good shit.
The Fellowship of the Ring
Another one of my favorite podcasts, Shelved by Genre, is spending this whole year covering all of Tolkien’s Middle Earth books. Well, the real ones anyway, not the ones cobbled together by his son later on. It’s the Year of the Ri- sorry, the Lord of the Year!
The Hobbit is one of my favorite novels, it was the first big “chapter book” I read as a young child. I was having trouble learning to read, but then I had a sort of breakthrough and quickly burned my way through everything available in the classroom. My teacher gave me an old dog-eared copy of The Hobbit and I absolutely adored it.
Then I naturally got Fellowship and… fell off it after maybe two chapters. I was simply too young to appreicate what was going on there, I was utterly bored by all the history and elaborate description of landscapes and the movement of characters through them.
Later on, I saw the movies with some friends in high school and came to love those, and then spent several years playing Lord of the Rings Online. So, bizarrely, I am very familiar with deep-cut lore like the history of Angmar or who the hell Bill Ferny is, but I had never actually read the original novels all the way through… until now.
This time, I’m enjoying it a lot! This book is just so dense and so full of life and love of history and academia in general. Tolkien was something better than a mere nerd, he was a true academic sicko, he clearly lived for this stuff. When you go in with the right frame of mind, it’s so rewarding to engage with.
In the past, I’d always taken for granted the idea that the Shire was a 1:1 analogy for rural England, but it has a bunch of weird little twists, and its own unique history. What’s really going on here, at the birth of the modern fantasy genre, is taking these silly fantastical ideas seriously. Thinking them through to the conclusions. These hobbits and dwarves have histories and material realities, they exist across space and time, not as mere archetypes to be tossed around.
That’s always been the magic trick of fantasy for me, maybe because I started with things like The Hobbit and the Discworld books. It’s not about battles and monsters and heroism, it’s about the history and the logistics of the world. Y’know, the nerd shit.
Of course, that’s only true to a point, it’s not like it reads as a dry history lecture (though it does start off that way). There’s plenty of action and excitement, and the whole thing is just very well-written. It’s a classic for a reason.
Ahhh, that was nice. I think I can keep up with this schedule, I’ll always have things I’ve been doing. May toss some games or other things in there as well. I have been continuing to Get Into Warhammer 40k lately, started putting together my first models (some T’au battlesuits).
The Beige Moth 