A Burns for All Seasons

I was going to call this post "A Book BURNing for All Seasons", but I thought the reference in the title was already pretty obscure. (Except to Greg: "Boo-urns! Boo-urns!")

So, the Dove World Outreach Center, the little church with the Orwellian name, plans to burn a copy of the Qur'an on September 11th. I'm not sure why, but I think it's something along the lines of "sending a message to those who attacked us".

The President has asked them not to proceed with the burning, asking the pastor to listen to his better angels and saying "You know, part of this country's history is people doing destructive or offensive or harmful things. And yet, we still have to make sure that we're following the laws. And that's part of what I love about this country".

I've criticized Obama for too tepid a response on any number of things, but I think this is exactly the right proper way to act. He hasn't mobilized the National Guard, he hasn't urged Congress to make the act illegal. He has said, as one human being to another, "Dude, it's not against the law, but don't be an asshole."

I'm a fairly strong atheist, but I manage not to be a dick about it, so I get along fine with most people of different faiths. I think it's abhorrent that someone wants to burn the Qur'an, but when you start banning distasteful activities for nebulous public safety reasons, that's a slippery slope.

Every now and again, the issue of a Flag Burning amendment comes up and every time, I remember what Rep. John Conyers said about such a law, that it "elevates a symbol of freedom over freedom itself,"

I don't know if Voltaire originated the quote or merely credited with popularizing it, but "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."

I'll leave you with a quote from A Man for All Seasons:

More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get at the Devil?

Roper: I`d cut down every law in England to do that.

More: "... And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you - where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's, and if you cut them down -- and you're just the man to do it -- do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!"

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Roger Zelazny Book Review: Merlin, son of Corwin stars in Blood of Chaos, Trumps of Amber and Prince of Shadows!

There's the scene in Groundhog Day where Bill Murray's character Phil runs into an annoying acquaintance for the thousandth time and rather than tolerating Ned's idiotic patter, Phil just punches him in the face.

Ned: Phil?
Phil: Ned? [Punches Ned in the face]

If I ever meet Merlin, that's how I'm going to greet him.

Merlin, man! He's essentially the same character as Pol Detson from Madwand and Changeling and I didn't like him then, either.

This is Merlin distilled to his essence: When he meets Caine's Pattern Ghost, Caine slips a knife out of his sleeve with style and panache, and Merlin describes it in the most banal way imaginable.

He smiled and bowed, and his hands crossed and came apart. They’d been empty going in, but the right one held a dagger coming out. It must have come from a sheath strapped to his left forearm, inside the billowy sleeve. He had to have practiced the move a lot, too, to be that fast at it.

That's my emphasis on the last line. American Gods hadn't yet been written, but reading that exchange made me remember that whenever anybody met the fat kid, they always seemed to observe that his lines sound like something he practiced in front of a mirror.

Now I have the image of Caine practicing in front of a mirror, maybe in a green dressing gown. perhaps talking back to his reflection like Travis Bickle. "You talkin' to me?" (And strangely, this is now the second time I've referenced Taxi Driver in this series of Amber reviews.)

Or look at the treatment Borel gets. He was supposed to be the Benedict of the Courts, but when he actually shows up, he gets killed several times, the first of which is when Merlin trips and accidentally stabs him, which serves only to set up a punch line.

The next time he shows up, the implication is that Benedict can keep him busy for a couple hours with minimal effort.

[Benedict] gave me a quick salute with the weapon, at which moment Borel attacked. Benedict used an Italianate sixte which threw both their points off to the side, advancing as he did so. He reached forward quickly then with his left hand and pulled the other's nose. Then he pushed him away, stepped back a pace, and smiled.

"What do you usually charge for lessons?" I overheard him asking as Jurt and I hurried down the path.

I'm surprised he can make it out his door in the morning without stepping on a rake and knocking himself cold.

And that's why I don't like the Merlin series. Because it diminishes what has gone before.

The term Mary Sue gets thrown a lot on the Internet, so much so that it's lost a lot of meaning, and I don't think Merlin is quite in the land of Sueness, but he can certainly see it without a telescope, to steal a phrase from Neil Gaiman. Every woman wants him! Every man wants to be him! Come, Merlin, you are so wonderful, let us lavish gifts upon you!

I think a big part of this is that Zelazny doesn't write women well. In fact, I would expand that to say that he barely writes them at all in his earlier work. They generally have unimportant parts and appear infrequently. Link from Donnerjack is the closest thing to a female protagonist in his work, though that was a collaboration and I have the suspicion that she was more Lindskold's creation than his.

Merlin is characterized by his relationship with the women in his books. Julia has a fairly important role in the whole thing, but she comes across as flat and lifeless. Dara is just a shrew. (I do appreciate the bit of fankwank that posits the theory that the Dara who initially meets with Corwin for their fencing match really is Benedict's great-granddaughter but the one that eventually actually seduces him and the one we see in the Merlin books is really her mother or her grandmother, who had not died at all, accounting for the differences in personality and power. I think it needlessly complicates things, but sure, why not?)

What else bothers me? The names of the books. My friend Tim has observed that almost every Chinese restaurant in America can be made by matching Golden, China or Jade with Bowl, Wok or Wall. I see Zelazny was thinking along these lines when he named the Merlin books: Sign of Chaos, Knight of Shadows,Trumps of Doom, Prince of Chaos, and Blood of Amber. Jesus. I defy you to tell me which is which.

I mean, fuck, Roger, you're writing a sequel to one of the most beloved fantasy series of all time, not naming a Steven Seagal movie.

As much as I want to hate the series, I can't bring myself to do it, because it does have so many cool bits. Merlin is a gigantic tool, of course, but once you subtract him from the series, you have some really cool parts.

"I appreciate your making it clear."

"It's part of the job. So what'll it be?"

I raised my hands and the lines of force twisted like knives at each fingertip. Frakir dangled from my wrist and began to swing in an elaborate pattern.

Scrof smiled. "I not only eat sorcerers, I eat their magic, too. Only a being torn from the primal Chaos can make that claim. So come ahead, if you think you can face that."

"Chaos, eh? Torn from the primal Chaos?"

"Yep. There's not much can stand against it."

"Except maybe a Lord of Chaos," I replied, as I shifted my awareness to various points within my body. Rough work. The faster you do it the more painful it is.

Again, the rattling of the tin sheet.

"You know what the odds are against a Chaos Lord coming this far to go two out of three with a Dweller?" Scrof said.

My arms began to lengthen and I felt my shirt tear across my back as I leaned forward. The bones in my face shifted about and my chest expanded and expanded...

"One out of one should be enough," I replied, when the transformation was complete.

"Shit," Scrof said as I crossed the line.

That really is pretty cool exchange, and I love the concepts introduced in the series. If only the whole thing just weren't so wrapped up with Merlin. I mean, Frakir the strangling cord, the Logrus, the crystal cave, the Broken Pattern! Werewindle! Characters not named Merlin are generally pretty cool. Mandor and Dalt in particular vie with anyone from the original series for my affections.

I did enjoy the short stories set after the Merlin books. Luke's was fun and it's nice to hear Corwin's voice after so long.

Erick Wujcik points out something interesting too. Merlin is supposed to look a lot like Corwin. Jurt, son of the Duke Sawall is supposed to resemble Merlin and thus Corwin very much. So, what's going on here? Sure, they're shape-shifters, and maybe there's a little bit of that going on, but Wujcik notes that certain animals only need to mate once and go on to have multiple births, by storing fertilized eggs, which would probably be a simple matter for a shapeshifter like Dara. Or, he points out, even more simply, she already has Corwin as a prisoner in her personal dungeon and he probably enjoyed her visits more than Lord Rein's...

The Merlin series was something of a disappointment, but even mediocre Zelazny is pretty good. Still, I think I'd like something to cleanse my palate for my next review, so I'll be covering Jack of Shadows, one of my all time favorites!

He knows that beauty lies, but he likes it by his side

We had a reasonably nice Labor Day weekend. Instead of a picnic, we spent the day cleaning out Aunt Mickey's house and dividing up some of her stuff. It was actually a bit less ghoulish than you might expect. It was nice to remember her. Lily had a nice time with her little cousins and we stopped at a cool wooden fort playground on the way back.

Then we stopped for the ice cream we had promised her in order to lure her away from the cool wooden fort.

I also found my new favorite song. Like most cool people, I listen to public radio when I drive into work and I heard this song.I tried to show it to Jen, but she was rolling her eyes so loudly when I said "Hey, check this out! It's my new favorite song!" (because that's how I introduce every song) that she would have been unable to hear it.

That's a really well put together video. Somebody on Youtbube called it "well-lensed", which was an interesting turn of phrase. The lead singer reminds me of my giraffe-loving friend Karen. Also, "The Like" is an unfortunate name for a band in the Facebook era.

It is a really spectacularly evocative piece of work though. Then again, I was in a mood to appreciate beatniks since we had just watched the Iron Giant.

Roger Zelazny Book Review: The Courts of Chaos

Here we are already. I'll probably cover the Merlin books in one post and then move on to some of Zelazny's other work. Lord of Light or Jack of Shadows is probably next. LoL because I found an audio version of it, Jack of Shadows, because it's next chronologically.

I downloaded the Audible app for my phone on Friday. I'd had a membership a while back, but the files are in some weird format that wouldn't play on my cheap mp3 player, so I canceled it. I had only opened it in the first place because that was the only place I could find Lord of Light on audiobook.

When I installed it on my phone, it prompted me for my password, so I signed in using my old account and there was Lord of Light!

Anyways, back to this review. I think Courts is the second weakest of the Corwin Chronicles. It has its moments, but for some reason it doesn't appeal to me as much as the earlier books. I think it's the lack of mystery. I don't know if I'd call it noir precisely, but I don't think it's a stretch to claim that Amber had its roots in some of the same antecedents that inspired Raymond Chandler. Corwin never knows who he can trust for the first four books. He knew, for really the first time, what was going on, and the steps that need to be taken to fix things and this is just going through the motions. It seems like the interesting part of the story was that mystery and that's why CoC is a bit of a letdown for me.This felt like a protracted denouement.

The other problem is structural. It was serialized in Galaxy magazine over the course of four months and it shows. Reading it light of this knowledge, it seems more liked four linked novellas than one complete work. We get the drumbeat of chapter-chapter-chapter-cliffhanger! repeated three times.

The books never feel like they are set in a specific era, but rather the eternal now. Amber herself is timeless and Zelazny shrewdly keeps mum about details on shadow earth, so as not to date the books with some unforeseeable anachronism (My Name is Legion, I'm looking at you and your punch card computers) and it's not so much the substance but the style that makes Courts seem like a period work. All the psychedelic weirdness with the talking ravens and talking trees and talking jackals makes it seem like 1970s to me.

It really is a decent book, and as Jake said elsewhere, even Zelazny on an off day is best than most writer's best work. So I'll quit bitching about the stuff I didn't like and focus on the stuff I did.

The inscribing of the Pattern is beautiful. I recall not liking free verse of the hellrides, and the the first time I read Courts and when I saw that this chapter was going to be more of that, I just skipped to the end. Now, though, it's one of my very favorite passages

. . Cassis, and the smell of the chestnut blossoms. All along the Champs-Elysies the chestnuts were foaming white . . . .

In general I didn't care as much for Brand in CoC as I did in the earlier books. In Oberon, he had some of best lines in the whole saga, and now he's just crazy.


Corwin and Borel.

Corwin's first fight in the chronicles is kicking another dude in the crotch. His final fight is the one everybody remembers.

Drawing Grayswandir, I leaped after him. I caught him just as he had brushed my cloak aside and was struggling to rise. I skewered him where he sat and saw the startled expression on his face as the wound began to flame.

"Oh, basely done!" he cried. "I had hoped for better of thee!"

"This isn't exactly the Olympic Games," I said, brushing some sparks from my cloak.

That's Corwin in a nutshell.

"I saw Deirdre in black armor, swinging an ax." As far as I know, this is the only reference to Deirdre's martial prowess or preference for an axe, but by god, in from fan-produced material about Deirdre, you'd think she sleeps with that axe.

And Benedict, the gods know you grow wiser as time burns its way to entropy, yet you still neglect single examples of the species in your knowledge of people. Perhaps I'll see you smile now this battle's done. Rest, warrior. Another lovely turn of phrase.

And the man clad in black and silver with a silver rose upon him? He would like to think that he has learned something of trust, that he has washed his eyes in some clear spring, that he has polished an ideal or two. Never mind. He may still be only a smart-mouthed meddler, skilled mainly in the minor art of survival, blind as ever the dungeons knew him to the finer shades of irony. Never mind, let it go, let it be. I may never be pleased with him.

The wikipedia summary claims that there "They contact Gérard, who tells them that the multiverse is fine, although seven years have passed." I didn't remember that and it's an awfully specific. , so I reread the final chapters very carefully. The closest thing I found to that line was: Random's last act after defeating the storm was to join with me, drawing power from the Jewel, to reach Gerard through his Trump. They are cold. once more, the cards, and the shadows are themselves again. Amber stands. Years have passed since we departed it, and more may elapse before I return. The others may already have Trumped home, as Random has done, to take up his duties. But I must visit the Courts of Chaos now, because I said that I would, because I may even be needed there.

I always read that as metaphorical, that it felt like years. On reflection, I suppose a literal reading is more likely, but I don't know where he gets seven. It's such a specific claim that I wonder if it's mentioned in the book he cites as a source.

And we have come to the end of the Corwin saga. I'll be back in a day or two with more Zelazny blogging.

Good-bve and hello, as always.

The Joke's on the Joker

I will open with--if you'll excuse a quick dab of philosophy before you know what kind of picture I'm painting*- a hacker koan about Marvin Minsky and Gerald Jay Sussman that illustrates the point I want to make.

In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.

"What are you doing?" asked Minsky.

"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe," Sussman replied.

"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.

"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play," Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.

"Why do you close your eyes?" Sussman asked his teacher.

"So that the room will be empty."

At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

What I actually said was, "If you wire it randomly, it will still have preconceptions of how to play. But you just won't know what those preconceptions are." --Marvin Minsky

So Sussman began working on a program and Marvin Minsky came over and asked him what he was doing? Sussman replied that he was using a certain randomizing technique in his program because he didn't want the machine to have any preconceived notions. Minsky said, "Well, it has them, it's just that you don't know what they are." Minsky continued, telling him that the world is built a certain way, and the most important thing we can do with the world is avoid randomness, and figure out ways by which things can be planned.

I was thinking about the Joker the other day. He might perceive the world differently than most, but he still has to operate within it. If he wants to build some stupid Joker themed robot, he still needs to materials for it, a power supply, equipment to assemble it, and so on. So when he wants to do something, he starts at the same place (desire for the robot) performs intermediate steps that may be quite different, but winds up with the same end result (a robot). In a practical sense, it doesn't matter how he got here from there.

Sure, being quirky is an advantage, but it's not really a super power in complex world of jet-powered apes and time travel, to turn a familiar phrase on its head. I've worked with crazy people, and they spent less time being criminal masterminds and more time masturbating at inappropriate moments and occasionally stabbing me with a fork.

I used to read the Impulse comic book when I worked at Dreamscape. It was about a speedster who had been artificially aged to his early teens, but still only had a couple years of life experience. His personality reflected this. He was goofy, enthusiastic and headstrong. He was being mentored by another speedster, named Max Mercury, whom I mention here only because I think it's cool name.

Anyway, the Riddler came calling one day, and he had a plan where he announced he had planted a bomb somewhere in the city, and was going to drop thousands of easily solved riddles from an airplane, the answers to which would point to the location. His reasoning was that solving them would take enough time that they would delay Impulse long enough so that he could pull off his caper without intervention.

It's been a while since I read it, so here's the exchange, paraphrased.

(Impulse zips on scene)
Riddler: You're back!
Impulse: Yeah, I couldn't figure out the riddles, so I just ran around town and looked under each porch until I found the bomb.
Riddler: Aha, but did you find the second (Impulse zips out) bomb? (Impulse zips back in, holding the bomb.)
Impulse: You mean this one?
Riddler: *facepalm*

Sure, the Riddler's a pretty smart guy (as smart as a guy in green and purple suit covered with question marks can be), but there's a limit to what cleverness can accomplish, when your opponent can perform billions of actions for every one of yours.

This is the flipside of what so many comic fans take as an axiomatic truth, that if Batman has "time to plan", he can accomplish anything and defeat anyone. I liked Grant Morrison's run on JLA as much as anyone, but he did, more than anyone to popularize this line of thinking.

There really is something to be said for brute force.

* Roger Zelazny shout out!