Ambrose & Elsewhere

When I heard that John McCain had picked a glamorous, gun-toting, motorcycle-riding, crusading woman to be his running mate (named Sara[h] P., no less), I have to admit I got chills–not altogether unpleasant ones. This is an archetype that powerfully appeals to men and, it seems, women.

Now, though, count me among the bemused. Partly it’s that Governor Palin’s executive record isn’t as great as touted. She left her hometown in a fiscal mess which (given the scale of the budgets involved) rivals the nightmare-in-red-ink that Bush-Cheney have inflicted on the federal level. (See the details of one example of mismanagement here.) She has been lying, persistently, flagrantly, and apparently consciencelessly, about her alleged opposition to the “Bridge to Nowhere” and other (more successful) attempts to corral Federal earmark money for the benefit of Alaska. (“Earmarks” is the term used when the money is for Us, the Good People of This Fair State. “Pork-barrel” is when it’s for Them, the Bad People in Some Other State.) I will leave others to sort out the thorny issues of her foreign policy experience (her state was one thin border away from the ravening hordes of Canada, etc.) and the extent to which one can be the “commander in chief” of a military unit which has another actual commander-in-chief. (See some relevant detail here, but it’s only Wikipedia, so apply salt as needed, directly to the wound if it seems advisable.) Suffice it to say that I don’t think these claims are strong.

The real source of my bemusement, though, comes from Palin’s alleged media appeal. She is easier on the eyes than McCain is, or many a politician of the left, right or center. (McCain himself has been visible moved by her.) But, for me, the spell breaks when she opens her mouth. Irrespective of what she says, her delivery is smug, supercilious, irritated, and nasal. Of all the politicians on either side, I’d say the one whose speaking style most resembles hers is Giuliani. If other voters, particularly in the center, see her (or hear her) this way, I don’t know that she will really help McCain to reach outside his base.

He could have done worse (i.e., by picking almost anyone who ran against him in the primary, with the possible exception of Huckabee). But I think that just illustrates how thin the bench is on the Republican side, when you’re talking about politicians who can operate credibly on the national level. (The Democrats are not much better off, and pretty much lucked out with Obama. I know this will probably get me more lectures about how Obama is not the Messiah–a true fact which is utterly irrelevant–but so be it.)

Rumor has it that these guys will be lurking somewhere in the Great Black Swamp tonight. We may have to brave the mosquitoes and the Headless Motorcyclists and whatnot and go see them.

Some new reviews of Black Gate 12 up: by Sherwood Smith at The Fix (thanks sartorias!) and by Lois Tilton at The Internet Review of Science Fiction (registration required).

Both are pretty generous toward my story (so my egocentric universe hasn’t been knocked off its axis), but LT made the interesting observation that, for her, Morlock wasn’t particularly important to the success of the story (“it is not so much the series character of Morlock that makes this stuff worth reading, but the author’s prose and his skill in creating characters”). This runs contrary to most of the reactions I’ve gathered on and off line (e.g. Matt Wuertz’s persuasive call for “more cowbell”), and it may be an outlier, so to speak. LT has a bias about series in general, which she’s pretty frank about, and that may affect her reading here.

But this is the most striking example I’ve seen yet, in reactions to my own stuff, that precisely what does work for some readers is what puts off others. Probably no one could write something that hits 100% of the potential audience.

That is until they read my next multistage standalone story, Morlock Meets Anti-Morlock: the Morlockening, Only Not Really!

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.