Ambrose & Elsewhere

There are a couple of reasons why, as stated on my badly-needs-to-be-updated profile, “Although I have certain extreme political opinions, I won’t usually vent them here.”

One reason is that I object to the politicization of everything, which was one of the most pernicious consequences of the “culture wars” of recent decades. People who care about politics have the right, even the obligation, to passionately pursue political questions. But there are other things in life: astronomy and pizza and zeppelins and zither-music and cows and tea and verbs and sandwiches and so on. One should be able to discuss any of these topics, even argue about them, without it turning into a shouting match about who-you-voted-for-in-the-last-election-and-who-you’re-voting-for-in-the-next-and-why-that-makes-you-the-devil. The personal may be political, but that’s not all that it is, and the political is awfully damn impersonal. There is a merit in meeting (literally or virtually) with people as people, not the grinning caricatures one finds in a political cartoon.

Another reason, which may really be the same reason, is that partisan politics seems to give many people license to speak and act in stupid and dishonest ways. A classic is when Person A attributes a fallacious assertion to Person B. Then Person B has the triple task of refuting the fallacious assertion, disassociating it from himself and making whatever his real point was. It can’t usually be done.

This ploy may appear cunning, as opposed to stupid, but I think the two traits often overlap. Person A will usually lose more than he can gain in this type of exchange. At best, the mud thrown will splash back and no one will look very good.

In any case, this is not the sound of me taking the pledge to never touch a drop of that politics stuff again. (I certainly plan to keep tabs on Bob “Crazy Eyes” Fletcher, who seems intent on using police powers to enforce political orthodoxy in my hometown.) I just wanted to reassure my reader(s) that this blog is not going to become BowDownBeforeMyPoliticalOpinionsOrFleeMyDogmaticWrath.com. On the other hand, if people do want to argue politics with me, they shouldn’t be surprised that I’m willing to articulate and defend my own positions. To disagree, even strenuously, (over politics, or zither-music, or even more important matters) is not, in my view, an offense nor a justifiable pretext for being offensive.

My last political post provoked such a pleasant conversation, I thought I’d favor the virtual world with my virtual thoughts on McCain’s VP pick. I was going to title it “Palin by Comparison” or “Palin Around” (depending on how the name is pronounced, which I still don’t know). But, in the first place, other people have that covered and, in the second place, something weird is happening on my home turf that doesn’t seem to have been generally talked about.

The Minneapolis Police Department and the Ramsey County Sheriff’s department engaged in a series of raids this morning, targeting several houses in Minneapolis in anticipation of the Republican National Convention across the river in St. Paul. (See the report here; some video from one of the raided houses here.)

The targets of these raids do seem to have been engaged in something serious: political activity not approved by the RNC. Let’s hope they learn their lesson. If people just go around peaceably assembling, criticizing the government, excercising free speech, where will it stop? Fortunately there are friendly people out there with submachine guns and nicknames like “The Terminator” (no, I’m not making that up) who are prepared to stop it so we don’t have to ask that question. Or, it seems, any others.

[Some more details here.]

[Seen at Glenn Greenwald’s blog at Salon.com.]

Hope deferred maketh the heart sick. But when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life.

This is not new, but I just saw it today–I forget where.

Also, discovered a couple of pretty interesting bookblogs today: Vulpes Libris (lj feed here) and the blog of HistoricalNovels.info (lj feed here). Paradoxically, all these bookblogs may cut into my book-reading, but at least they’re guaranteed to make my to-read stacks multiply and replenish the house. Because otherwise there was no danger of that happening.

I’ve been thinking about swashbuckling lately, after reading Martha Wells’ ArmadilloCon report and Sherwood Smith(=sartorias)’s response, and the discussions both provoked.

I thought I didn’t have any reactions, so I didn’t join in, but (now that the threads have gone stale), I find I have two.

One is that I’m glad it’s okay to use “had” again. I understand that excessive use of modal verbs can clutter up a sentence, but anathematizing certain words is almost never good practice for a writer, especially when it’s done by people who don’t understand the dynamics of English very well (which seems to be the case for people who hand out bad writing advice– not coincidentally, I feel). Another group of words I’d like to see rehabilitated is “-ing” words: gerunds and present active participles. I saw this around a lot two or three years ago–the idea that constructions with “-ing” were “weak” (that Dread Word Which Must Not Be Applied to One’s Prose). That was when I realized that, no matter what someone wrote on the internet, someone else would take them seriously, a chilling chillful moment indeed.

The other reaction is about the defining element of swashbuckling. Apparently the consensus at the ArmadilloCon panel was that a swashbuckler chooses his/her path of adventure, rather than being forced into it. Sherwood and others came up with counterexamples, but I thought there was some there there to the ArmadilloCon findings, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

Now, after some reading (a chunk of Count of Monte Cristo) and thinking, I’d say the defining element of the swashbuckler is style. If your hero shoots one of the King’s deer, carries it across his shoulders as he crashes a party of the Regent and plonks the dead beast down on the table in front of wicked Prince John and Sir Guy of Gisbourne, he’s a swashbuckler. If she puts on knightly armor and rides around in the Forest Broceliande in search of adventure and fame, she’s a swashbuckler. (In fact, she’s at least a couple of different swashbucklers.) If he challenges three different Musketeers to duel on the same day, then tosses aside his quarrels to fight alongside them against the Cardinal’s guards, he’s a swashbuckler.

Swashbucklers make a remarkable and memorable display of themselves and their fighting abilities. They may have magnanimous motives for doing so, but at some point they have to seize the spotlight and hold it deliberately. Brandoch Daha is always a swashbuckler; Aragorn almost never is (and never when he’s most interesting).

Anyway, these are my reflections in a swashed buckler; your dented shields may yield another set of images.

The Agony Column podcast interviews intrepid Pyr editor, Lou Anders, in the wake of Denvention 3. (Audio here.) The Morlockocentric will hear some interesting words about two thirds of the way through the interview, but I was also interested to hear what Lou had to say about Mark Chadbourn’s “Age of Misrule” fantasies, among other things that are slated for the Pyr line next year.

There’s a lively Bittercon discussion of monsters going on. As you know, Bob, monsters are a big deal to me, so you’ll find a comment or two from me tucked away in there.

Rather than mope about dying magazines, I thought I’d post this nifty video of portraits from the Roman-era Mediterranean world. Many of them are encaustic mummy paintings which have a weird alive-but-ghostly quality to them.

(Snaffled from David Meadows’ Rogue Classicism.)

Things from my evening ride on the bike trail.

1.) I raced a bunny. Everything was fine, until my shadow fell across it. Then it seemed to mutter the bunny-equivalent of “OMFG!” and took a sharp right turn into a cornfield.

2.) Some sumac leaves are turning that bloody, fiery red that says fall is coming.

3.) I found myself pushing the pedals a lot harder when my iPod switched from “Break on Through” to “Roadhouse Blues.” If I were smart I’d make an exercise playlist with songs in an ascending order of thumpiness. But I’m sure to forget unless I write this down somewhere.

Todd McAulty announced at the Black Gate newsgroup on SFFNet that a free PDF of Black Gate 12 will be available on the website for a limited time. They’re not abandoning print publication, but they are looking toward some kind of electronic publication in addition.

It’s a good issue to offer as a free sample, I think. My story in it is just some of the old sword-and-sorcery hokum about golems and glass lizards where the plot hinges on the narrator’s menarche; REH did it a million times. But the issue also has a Martha Wells story about Ilias and Giliead which should please her many fans and win her some new ones. And there’s a new Dabir and Asim story from Howard Jones. For those who don’t know this series, they’re fantasy-mystery adventures set in the fabled reign of Haroun-al-Rashid. They’ve been appearing for a few years now in various venues, but “Whispers from the Stone” is chronologically the first in the series and a a great place to start. Issue 12 also has new stories from Todd McAulty, Ed Carmien and Constance Cooper, and the lead story is an intriguing story of spiders, theft and death by John Fultz (“Oblivion is the Sweetest Wine”). Then there’s the pulp reprint that Black Gate usually does: this issue it’s the final, long-lost episode of the Tumithak saga. I have an irrational fondness for the Tumithak stories, going back to when I read Asimov’s Before the Golden Age as an impressionable youngster, so my response to this story isn’t wholly rational. As always, the issue is feature-rich with a letters column, reviews of books and games, a new solo-fantasy adventure, John’s editorial and the Knights of the Dinner Table comic. (At first I thought Eddie was an idiot; now I suspect he may be some sort of genius, a suspicion helped along by the silent revelation in this episode that he’s a Mac user.)