My weekend: A fine and private place

 

I like cemeteries. I always have. Not for any mordant reason; just that they're peaceful and picturesque.  I'll talk about this a little more in an upcoming post. Laurel Hill Cemetery was really such a nice little visit. I'd like to return someday soon. Like Disney World, you just can't see the whole place in one day. Jen commented that it was like a small town.

Some of the mausolea (plural of mausoleum, hey you learn something every day, reading my blog) were bigger than my first apartment.

Lily really is my daughter.  When I asked her what she thought of Laurel Hill, without any prompting, she answered, "It's the best cemetery...EVER!" ("X is the best whatever...EVER!!" has been my catchphrase for years.) She's terrified of someone she knows dying, but she hasn't made the connection with cemeteries yet. She recently told me: "Sunnybird is going to die some day, but I love my pillow pet because she's just a stuffed animal and that means that she will never die."

But Lily loved the statues and what she thought were "stone fairies". (When I was recounting the story later, a friend thought I had said "Stoned fairies" and wondered what kind of places I was taking my daughter.)

We were supposed to meet my Philly friends there, but they all wimped out.  Apparently people get murdered here all the time, but I consider that a feature, not a bug. I mean, if you gotta go, how convenient is being murdered in a cemetery? My friend Tom is a huge fan of Firefly, Neil Gaiman and the Phillies and he missed Mal Reynolds and Neil Gaiman showing up at Harry Kalas' monument.

Pictures don't lie, baby

We met them at IKEA instead, and that was quite nice. It was Tom, Jen and Karen. I was reading back through old blog posts on the printed and bound version that I have. (You know, like normal people do) and I noticed that Tom and Jen and Karen had all been part of Lily's life before she was even born. All three of them are really great people for whom I have endless affection. Plus, Tom is a fan of the Sandman, which makes him EXTRA AWESOME! 

I was recounting all of Lily's habits to a friend: "When she was a little baby and still used a pacifier, we had a skull with LED eyes on top of a cabinet. I was holding Lily so it was at about eye level for her. She took her pacifier out and offered it to the skull. Also, she learned her letters by reading tombstones. She consistently claims grey is her favorite color. I can understand that sentiment from the Counting Crows, but from a four-year-old girl?"

My friend replied: "What have you done to your daughter? You're going to have a goth kid on your hands."

And I was like "She was like that when I got her!"

I think the highlight of IKEA was Lily telling Karen that Lady Gaga gave her the "Little Monster" shirt after Karen told her that Lady Gaga calls her fans little monsters.

After that, we went to UU church. They were having a Halloween party and the place looked like a den of inequity. However, since it's a UU church that's what it usually looks like.

The children's sermon

Halloween is the High Holy Day for Unitarians, so I thought they'd do up their church, but it looked pretty much like it always does.  

Business as usual

It was a nice little Halloween party (it had a tray of DIY cookies, with a bunch of frosting tubes and sprinkles.)

Lily was kind of naughty at the party. A little kid reached for the markers Lily was using and she pulled the whole tray away. I asked her how she would feel if she were a little kid and a big four year old girl pulled away the markers from her. She said "Happy!" in that petulant voice four-year-olds use when they're telling pissy, unconvincing lies.

...

Ah well. Still a little monster.

Roger Zelazny Book Review: And Call Me Conrad/This Immortal Bonus Material

Is Conrad the Great God Pan?

 I was going to bundle this in with the second part of the Call Me Conrad review, but I decided to give it its own post in hopes of sparking some debate.

No less an authority than Roger Zelazny himself has said,  “I wanted to leave it open to several interpretations…either Conrad is a mutant or he is the Great God Pan. The book may be read either way.” If this had come from anyone else but Zelazny, I would have discounted it immediately and said it was just scattered metaphor. I mean, it's not like Pan was renowned for smashing robots apart. I never really thought about why Conrad is as he is, but when I read it this time, I was looking for the Pan connection.

So what evidence is there?

I'll leave Conrad's strength and odd appearance and pseudotelepathic wish-fulfillment out of the equation, because they don't support one interpretation over the other.

There's the exchange with Diane.

"I thought all the gods had left the Earth."

"No, they didn't. Just because most of them resemble us doesn't mean they act the same way. When man left he didn't offer to take them along, and gods have some pride, too. But then, maybe they had to stay, anyhow—that thing called ananke, death-destiny. Nobody prevails against it."

So we seem to have evidence of the presence of other surviving gods, and as Faust tells us (as he tells Ananke, actually, in a rather amusing coincidence) "If one imaginary thing exists, then all imaginary things must exist."

But did they really exist, or was Hasan simply transported by the smoke of blossoms of the strige-fleur?

There's the bit with the fauns, where Conrad mesmerizes them with the Pan pipes and one later arrives to deliver him from captivity in the Hot Place.

Myshtigo writes him a message that says

I commend the Earth into the hands of the kallikanzaros. According to legend, this would be a grave mistake. However, I am willing to gamble that you are even a kallikanzaros under false pretenses. You destroy only what you mean to rebuild. Probably you are Great Pan, who only pretended to die.

Even reading it now, in light of the ambiguities, Myshtigo's comment strikes me as something that was not meant to be taken literally. He could have said "You are Alexander the Great returned to life", and I would have taken it to mean that he is someone who embodies Alexander's traits, not someone who is actually Alexander reborn.

Conrad does give it some weight, however, so there may be something there.

Pan?

Machines don't talk that way, do they?

I hope not, anyhow…

Conrad claims that his parents left him exposed on the hillside when he was a baby, as was the custom as the time,  and when they went to retrieve him, he says "Their baby had been a satyr, they said, and they figured that perhaps some Hot creature had had a sort of human child and had abandoned it in the same way we do them—making a swap, actually."

Well, Pan had goat legs, like a satyr, but if he really is the Great God Pan, then he obviously predates the Three Days War (and Hot creature) by several hundred years. It's possible that he's referring to mythological creature with more modern nomenclature, so I'll give that one a pass. More problematic is the village priest who half-baptized him. Pan would have come well before Christianity and the custom of baptism.

What do I think? On the strength of Conrad's recognition and on authorial word of god, I'm not willing to dismiss the Pan theory outright, but if I had to make a choice, I would pick the mutant explination myself.

Roger Zelazny Book Review: And Call Me Conrad/This Immortal Part II

Welcome to the second half of my review of "...and Call Me Conrad". The first part is here.

This one will have spoilers, so continue at your own risk.

One thing I like about Roger Zelazny is how ably he subverts tired tropes. Something that I tend not to like in fiction is a protagonist bluffing outrageously credulous enemies on the flimsiest of pretenses.

Disguised Hero: "So, how is that thing we're working on coming along?"

Villain: "Oh, I'm glad you asked, fellow villain, let me explain, in exhaustive detail-"

Disguised Hero: "Great, but first, what are our weaknesses and how can our enemies best exploit them?"

Lame!

I like that Conrad was more subtle and even has a few specifics to feed Myshtigo and still got caught: "No! It is obvious that you are trying to elicit more information, so I do not think you know very much. What I am doing is still confidential."

Our travelogue continues further into Greece, where Conrad briefly meets with his son Jason. It reminded me very strongly of the Sandman story in the Fables and Reflections TPB that featured his son Orpheus.  Hasan refuses to stand down on his contract against the Vegan, and is stopped only in the nick of time when Conrad dashes the shotgun he had been cleaning from Hasan's grip before it could "accidentally" discharge.

Hasan sat there cleaning his aluminum barreled shotgun. It had a plastic stock and it was real light and handy. As he worked on it, it tilted forward, moved slowly about, pointed itself right at Myshtigo.

He'd done it quite neatly, I must admit that. It was during a period of over half an hour, and he'd advanced the barrel with almost imperceptible movements.

I snarled, though, when its position registered in my cerebrum, and I was at his side in three steps. I struck it from his hands.

It clattered on some small stone about eight feet away. My hand was stinging from the slap I'd given it.

Hasan was on his feet, his teeth shuttling around inside his beard, clicking together like flint and steel. I could almost see the sparks.

"Say it!" I said. "Go ahead, say something! Anything! You know damn well what you were just doing!"

His hands twitched.

"Go ahead!" I said. "Hit me! Just touch me, even. Then what I do to you will be self-defense, provoked assault. Even George won't be able to put you back together again."

"I was only cleaning my shotgun. You've damaged it."

I like Hasan as the phlegmatic killer. He reminds me of Sam as the Buddha in the Lord of Light, when speaking to Yama atop the rock. He takes no offense when Yama calls him a false Buddha, because he knows what he is. Likewise, when Conrad seeks to provoke Hasan into a foolish confrontation by calling him a coward, Hasan answers calmly, "No, I am not."

If you'll forgive a momentary digression, I enjoy the work of Stephen King, but he's a very different writer than Roger Zelazny.  He tends to be more about expressing something so that you remember the scene as a whole, rather than getting you to dwell on the individual sentences that he uses to describe it. Not so with Zelazny. I love his concepts as much I love to the set pieces that illustrate them and the phrases  ("So long as we live there is the great peacock-tail of probability, growing from out of the next moment.") that compose those pieces.

I really enjoy the way Zelazny can distill the essence of a concept and then brew what remains into poetry. Consider this brief passage, especially the bolded part:

Everybody knows that there are some people with an aptitude for music. They can hear a piece once and sit down and play it on the piano or thelinstra. They can pick up a new instrument, and inside a few hours they can sound as if they've been playing it for years. They're good, very good at such things, because they have that talent—the ability to coordinate a special insight with a series of new actions. Hasan was that way with weapons.

Hasan continues to rock with a Princess Bride Shout Out!

"I do not want to kill you, Karagee," he said.

"I share this feeling. I do not wish to be killed.''

The incidental wordplay in the book is great. When Doctor Moreby, an anthropologist who had gone native when studying a cannibalistic tribe (It's a small part, but he's a great villain), captures Conrad's party, he says to them. "I wanted any prisoners whom they came upon brought back alive. Your identities are, shall we say, condiments."

Lorel Sands smokes a meerschaum pipe. That's not remarkable in itself, except for the fact that meerschaum pipes were a minor plot point in Isle of the Dead.  And as long as I'm discussing things that appear in other books, Diane quotes from Book of the Dead, which must have served as a specific inspiration  the Creatures of Light and Darkness, though I didn't realize that until now

" 'In the Great House and in the House of Fire, on that Great Day when all the days and years are numbered, oh let my name be given back to me,' " it said.

"Good for you," I said softly. "Appropriate quote. I recognize the Book of the Dead when I hear it taken in vain."

It's a very good book, right up there with Lord of Light. I can't think of anything I would change about it. I'll end with a passage from the book, because it fits.

"No. I told you that you were heading into danger before, and you were, but you didn't believe me then. This time I feel that things should go well. That's all."

"Granting your accuracy in the past, I still feel you are underestimating that which lies before us."

She rose and stamped her foot.

"You never believe me!"

"Of course I do. It just happens that this time you're wrong, dear."

She swam away then, my mad mermaid, out into the dark waters. After a time she came swimming back.

"Okay," she said, smiling, shaking down gentle rains from her hair.

"Sure."

I caught her ankle, pulled her down beside me and began tickling her.

"Stop that!"

"Hey, I believe you, Cassandra! Really! Hear that? Oh, how about that? I really believe you. Damn! You sure are right!"

"You are a smart-alecky kallikanz— Ouch!"

And she was lovely by the seaside, so I held her in the wet, till the day was all around us, feeling good.

Which is a nice place to end a story.

Isn't it?

Roger Zelazny Book Review: And Call Me Conrad/This Immortal Part I

Welcome back to my Roger Zelazny book reviews. Today I'm looking at the first half of "...And Call me Conrad"/"This Immortal".

I think I owned This Immortal for a good six months before I read it. I bought my first copy when we moved to New Hampshire and lived in proximity of a wonderful specialty book store that carried nothing but sci-fi and fantasy. It had more Zelazny than I had ever seen in one place and I scooped up one copy of everything I didn't have (and often one copy of everything I did have because these were two dollar used book store paperbacks)

I looked at it and kind of shrugged and put it on my bookshelf and forgot about it. It looked slim and lightweight, and the title? This Immortal? It's a Roger Zelazny book. Aren't they all about this or that immortal anyway? It sounded like the name of a Roger Zelazny parody.

I know better now, of course. This Immortal (Like me, Zelazny preferred his original title, "...And Call Me Conrad") is not only a highly enjoyable read,  but also a work of tremendous sophistication from an author who was not yet thirty at the time and not incidental to these two facts, a Hugo award winner (having tied with Dune in 1966).

So that is the tale of how I came so late to one of the strongest works of my favorite author.

It is the story of an earth was devastated in a long ago war. Humanity was largely wiped out (global population is about four million), though many humans live as expatriates on Vegan worlds.

What's a Vegan? They "partake not in the meat, nor the breastmilk, nor the ovum, of any creature, with a face" which allows them to use all of their brainpower because the other 90% is no longer filled up with curds and whey.

Scott Pilgrim shout out!

I have the audio book of this and he pronounces it Vee-gan rather than Vay-gan, and while this in fact is the correct pronunciation, it makes me think of people who eschew any kind of animal in their diet every time I hear it. Vegans in This Immortal are friendly blue aliens who helped humanity after we almost wiped ourselves out, but they engendered some bad will in certain segments of humanity by adapting certain sections of the world for tourism and resorts.

Our lead is Conrad Nomikos, who has gone by other names in his time. He is the Commissioner of Arts, Monuments and Archives for the planet Earth. He's a big man, and strong, like most Zelazny protagonists, but not a handsome one.

His wife is the lovely Cassandra. She can see the future, but no one believes her. The book was written 45 years ago before this kind of thing became a cliche, so I'm willing to give Zelazny a pass on this. (But seriously, when I encounter a character in a more modern genre work named Cassandra, the big surprise is if she's not psychic)

In his capacity as Commissioner, Conrad is retained by a visiting Vegan dignitary in order to serve as a tour guide. When asked why he was selected for this role, he receives the following answer: "I found that you could have been three or four or five other persons, all of them Greeks, and one of them truly amazing. But, of course, Konstantin Korones, one of the older ones, was born two hundred thirty-four years ago. On Christmas. Blue eye, brown eye. Game right leg. Same hairline, at age twenty-three. Same height, and same Bertillion scales."

I was familiar with the Bertlillion system because of a footnote in a criminal justice text when I was working towards my degree in forensic chemistry. It was one of the precursors to modern biometrics and it's no longer used. Zelazny's works do remain remarkably topical, and I think that the occasional anachronism does nothing to diminish them.  (I can even forgive the punch cards that make up the the Central Database in My Name is Legion.)

I like Conrad. My favorite character, however, is Hasan the assassin, with his scarred hands and who "could still face any barrier without blinking those sun-drenched, death-accustomed, yellow eyes…" He's ostensibly along as a bodyguard to another traveler, though Conrad believes he's been retained to eliminate the Vegan also.

"Have you been working for Mister Dos Santos very long?" I asked him.

"For about the period of a month," he replied.

He threw his knife. It struck five inches below the center.

"You are his bodyguard, eh?"

"That is right. I also guard the blue one."

"Don says he fears an attempt on Myshtigo's life. Is there an actual threat, or is he just being safe?"

"It is possible either way, Karagee. I do not know. He pays me only to guard."

"If I paid you more, would you tell me whom you've been hired to kill?"

"I have only been hired to guard, but I would not tell you even if it were otherwise."

"I didn't think so. Let's go get the knives."

The concept of a principled assassin is a bit of a cliche nowadays, but Hasan was subverting the archetype before it was archetypal. He also knows Conrad, of old, when Conrad was Karaghiosis, "the killer, the defender of Earth". He calls "Karagee" in private on several occasions, to which our hero replies "...and call me Conrad," thereby naming the book.

So they embark on their tour. Hasan travels with Rolem his Robot Golem, a kind of mechanized sparring partner. This comes in handy when Conrad receives word of his wife's death and flips the fuck out. He's quite capable of killing the entire party with his bare hands, so Hasan turns up Rolem to maximum (setting him "five times the strength of a human being" and "the reflexes of an adrenalized cat") disables the failsafes, and sets him loose.

I really like the description of how Conrad perceives the events through the filter of his madness:

I looked around. They had stopped coming at me, and it wasn't fair—it wasn't fair that they should stop then when I wanted so badly to see things breaking. So I raised up the man at my feet and slapped him down again. Then I raised him up again and someone yelled "Eh! Karaghiosis!" and began calling me names in broken Greek. I let the man fall back to the ground and turned.

There, before the fire—there were two of them: one tall and bearded, the other squat and heavy and hairless and molded out of a mixture of putty and earth.

"My friend says he will break you, Greek!" called out the tall one, as he did something to the other's back.

I moved toward them and the man of putty and mud sprang at me.

Conrad beats the robot apart with his bare hands and afterward, recovers his wits. It's such a gorgeously written scene. Afterwards his companions offer their condolences in their various ways.

The story was originally edited down and printed in two parts for its original publication and this is about where the first part of the story ended. This part of the review shall now do the same.Come back soon for part 2!

Looking for a new show

So, we've decided to cancel our cable. We've got Netflix and the few shows we watch are generally available for streaming, so no great loss and we save a couple bucks each month. And now we're looking for a new show.

I like "Dead Like Me" and Jen will watch it, but pretty much only because she loves me. And I want to find a show that we can both enjoy. As readers of this blog know, I'm a geek, but I like any show as long as it's got engaging writing.

So are there any gems out there that we're overlooking?