Marie Brennan's Blog, page 78
May 13, 2019
It all started with a Tumblr post . . .
A little over year ago, I linked to a Tumblr conversation my husband had brought to my attention, and noted that debates of that kind are probably a regular feature of Lady Trent’s world, where there are a) dragons and b) a religion based on Judaism. And I said something about wishing I was conversant enough with Judaism to write a short story that would riff on that general idea — maybe not candles on Shabbat, but the intersection of dragons + religion.
A little over a year later, and thanks to the help of Noah Beit-Aharon in particular, I sold “On the Impurity of Dragon-kind” to Uncanny Magazine.
It will be out later this year, probably in their August issue, so as to coincide with the release of Turning Darkness Into Light. And because I must always find new forms of nerdery to explore with this series, the story takes the form of Isabella’s son Jake delivering a dvar Torah as part of his (somewhat belated) bar mitzvah. Whether I wind up writing the other “dragons + Judaism” story idea I had while trying to work this one out, we will see . . .
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May 10, 2019
New Worlds: Foundations of Power
In order to hold power, you need some rationale for why you should have it. This week the New Worlds Patreon delves into some of the foundations of power, and some considerations that go along with them. Comment over there!
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May 9, 2019
A Trip Down Juvenilia Lane, Vol. Not-9
Once upon a time, I started reading through my old notebooks from high school, college, and graduate school, and blogging about what I found therein, preparatory to packaging these things up and sending them off to be archived with my papers at Cushing. I’ve finally picked that project back up again, so let’s take a trip in the Wayback Machine to 2002!
Nothing from here on out is numbered, and pretty soon we’ll lose chronology entirely. For now it holds — this next volume shows me in my first year of grad school — but my notebooks are sorted by size on the shelf, and when I run out of the standard size, it’ll be time to explore the random other crap. I know from glancing through them that one at least will be taking us back to high school and my early fanfic days. What else is waiting for me on that shelf? Who knows!
But for now I’m in grad school, which means this notebook starts off with me being ever so diligent about taking class notes. Barring one line where I noted “writing” with some arrows to indicate the above bit might be useful, there are eight solid pages of nothing but notes from my “history of anthropology” class. Then it diverges briefly into four lines of notes for the early sparks that eventually became Chains and Memory. Then eight more pages and six lines of me musing about the unwritten novel known as TIR and speculation as to whether I should write the Viking revenge epic idea instead, and damning Donald Maass for making me question what I should be working on. 
May 3, 2019
New Worlds: In the Beginning
The New Worlds Patreon is finally tackling a fairly central concept we’ve missed up until now: government! Beginning with the lack thereof, i.e. the largely egalitarian social structure often found among mobile hunter-gatherer groups, and the two types of status that shape how people are treated. Comment over there!
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April 29, 2019
Avengers: Endgame
Outside the cut, no spoilers: I very much liked it. The film did the thing I really needed it to, which was to treat the fallout from Infinity War as a real and meaningful thing, rather than a brief speedbump in the story. At the same time, it wasn’t unrelentingly grim; the script did a good job of working in both gallows humor and situational bits of the sort where the characters are funny without meaning to be, which is something I very much like. The solution to the problem is naturally made from comic book cheese, but of a fairly good kind, and it allowed for an interestingly varied set of scenes on the way to the climax. The middle part of the movie worked in a lot of callbacks to earlier films and characters therefrom, without feeling like they’d been crowbarred in. And as a conclusion to the original three-phase plan for the MCU, I think its payoff works.
And now, spoilers.
Yeah, so that “fallout” thing. I think nearly 45 minutes go by before the characters start moving in the direction of a solution, and it’s an hour and a half before they head out to get the stones; the snap doesn’t get undone until very near the end. I could have used a little more showing the societal effects, but I also recognize that’s not the kind of thing movies are well-suited to exploring, especially not when they’re already three hours long and have a lot to get done. You do, however, get to see the varied responses of a number of the individual survivors, and I loved that the film took the time to show that they didn’t all react the same way. The five-year time skip was a really good idea on that front, making it possible to get past the initial unspeakable shock and grief to what comes after that.
I liked what they did with Thanos. Finding and killing him was a complete let-down, and it was meant to be; revenge accomplished nothing, and left them even more hollow than before. It also put him offstage for a good chunk of the movie, focusing the story on the problem rather than the enemy. But you still need obstacles, of course, so using Nebula as the inadvertent crack through which Thanos could re-enter the story for the climax was fairly elegant.
And I really liked the narrative device of having them go back to retrieve the stones from earlier points in the timeline. I’m not someone with strong feelings about time travel stories and how they should work; for me what mattered is that it set us up for a bunch of different flavors of challenge, from Bruce having to persuade the Ancient One to give him the Time Stone to Cap having to fight himself to oops Loki just walked off with the Tesseract to Thor having an emotional moment with his mother while Rocket conducts an offstage heist to the whole thing with Natasha and Clint. Any time you need to go collect six plot coupons, it really risks becoming tedious, but the variety kept that fresh — and, as I said above, allowed for a lot of great callbacks (the elevator!!!) without it feeling horribly artificial.
I’ve seen polarized reactions about the confrontation over the Soul Stone. Me? I liked it, even though Black Widow dies. It worked for me because it wasn’t a single moment and done; it escalated from “why do I get the feeling we’re talking about different people?” to knocking each other down to using their various gadgets to Nat jumping off the cliff after Clint, and because if he’d been the one to die then it would have felt like he won the argument/took the decision away from her. I recognize that, if viewed from a different angle, his story would have more obviously been the one I am so extremely tired of (Man’s Loved Ones Killed; Man Goes On Bloody Rampage of Revenge), and Nat basically gives him a pass on that, but . . . I believe that’s a pass she really would give. And I’m looking forward to the Black Widow movie, which is supposed to start filming later this year.
The way the other original Avengers got written out also felt good to me. For all that Tony Stark is often a selfish bastard, he does have a track record of making the noble sacrifice or at least taking the huge risk for others; it’s just that he survived all the previous rounds of it. And since Iron Man was the film that started the MCU, having him be the one who dies to end the fight seemed fitting. I was expecting Cap to die (because it’s the kind of thing the character would do, and also I know Chris Evans is done with the role), so having him go the opposite direction and have a life with Peggy was a nice reversal. (Wanted more Peggy. But I recognize that I can’t have everything in a three-hour movie.) Bruce gets his balance with the Hulk; Thor, who really would make a crappy king, leaves it to someone more qualified; Clint gets his family back, and the TV series Marvel is planning will be about Kate Bishop as the new Hawkeye, which pleases me.
Which clears the way for the new guard, and I don’t think it’s an accident how much the ending (in both the climax and the denouement) showcases the new guard being female, POC, or both. Valkyrie is the new Queen of Asgard; Sam is the new Captain America; the first heroes you see return after Bruce uses the stones are the Wakandans; I shamelessly loved the moment where the script assembled all the women together in the battle. Marvel is by no means at perfect balance with diversity, but I am glad to see the MCU let go of the original set rather than milking their tales to infinity and beyond, and shift its focus to the newer faces.
Maybe the best praise I can give the film is that it renewed my appreciation for what has gone before. The MCU is a truly epic undertaking, one I fundamentally would not have believed was possible when Iron Man came out eleven years ago. As someone who admires good series structure, I have to applaud what they’ve pulled off here — all the different strands braiding together over a period of more than a decade. Nobody’s done anything quite like it, and I’m not sure anybody will again.
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April 26, 2019
New Worlds: Photography
Another Friday, another New Worlds Patreon essay! This week I round out the discussion of visual arts with something near and dear to my heart: photography. Is it even an art form? Come and find out why some people say ‘no’!
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April 19, 2019
New Worlds: Painting
I’m not sure why, but it turns out my last two posts about new Patreon essays going up failed to post as scheduled. My apologies for not noticing that! I’ll keep an eye on it this week and manually push it if I have to.
Anyway, this month we’re talking about art! Starting with a discussion of the lines along which we declare things to be Art vs. Not Art, then continuing on to sculpture and, as of this week, painting — less the specifics of style and technique, more the uses to which we put such things. Comment over there (including on the older posts)!
(Edit: yeah, something’s wrong with WP, as this post also missed going live as scheduled. I’ll look into fixing that.)
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April 17, 2019
Smart people saying smart things (II)
This interview is fascinating to me because I know basically nothing about cinematography, except insofar as it’s related to photography. So I love it when somebody gets down into the nitty-gritty details about how decisions regarding lenses and focus contribute to inequality, e.g. the fact that women on average speak about 25% of the time in a film + cinematographic technique that puts only the speaker in a shot in focus = not only are the women on screen silent more often than not, but they’re probably blurry as well. Backlighting, specific camera angles — she compares it all to the practice of airbrushing magazine covers, only there isn’t the same degree of public awareness that this stuff is being used to erase women’s flaws and present a constantly-idealized image. Plus lots of interesting discussion on how the relationship between a director and a director of photography differs between movies and TV, male directors and the YA film genre, etc.
Slacktivist, “We Need to Do Something about Rick Wiles”
On the deep and poisonous stream of anti-Semitism that runs through far too much of white evangelical Christianity. Key quote:
And it doesn’t really matter which “theory” a conspiracist starts with — Moon-landing hoaxers, anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers, young-earthers, chemtrails, fluoridation, Planned Parenthood, Antichrist OWG, blue helmets, black helicopters, whatever — the belief that the Key to Everything is “the startling news that the media isn’t reporting!” always leads, ultimately, to anti-Semitism.
This got me reflecting on my own childhood. My elementary school had a large Jewish contingent; I’m not sure how many, but my mother estimates somewhere between a quarter and a third of my class. It got watered down as we fed into junior high and high school, joining other elementary school catchment areas, but overall, they were almost certainly the largest minority in my area. Large enough that Jewish kids didn’t stand out as unusual to me — at least, not until those two years where they were all going through their Bar and Bat Mitzvah celebrations and I learned that being Jewish meant you got a special birthday party. (I probably went to more parties in junior high than any other period of my life.)
But at the same time, we were also in the neighborhood of this church. (In opening that page, I note that a section which used to detail a sexual abuse scandal within the church’s leadership has been removed. A scandal which, for all I know, could have involved kids in my class or my brother’s — the timing was right.) I don’t know how much of that anti-Semitic ideology is present there, or was thirty years ago. But it makes me wonder how much, despite the large presence and general acceptance of Jewish families in our neighborhood, there were still incidents that happened out of my sight or flew over my head. I know the guy I went to prom with gave me the first Left Behind novel to read; I didn’t get more than about ten pages into it because the writing was so execrable, but later I learned that boy howdy are those books anti-Semitic. And there were enough Baptist and evangelical Christians around that I have to imagine some of that was an issue in my community.
Short of randomly calling up my Jewish friends from sixth grade and asking them whether they got shit from our fellow students, I’ll never know. But it’s a sobering thing to consider.
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April 15, 2019
By comparison, this is a relief
All day I’ve been imagining the worst for Notre Dame: a gutted shell, structural collapse, destruction that would take decades to repair.
It isn’t as bad as I feared.
It’s still bad. I saw an aerial photo that showed the entire roof of the cathedral glowing in the night like a cross-shaped pit to hell, which primed me to expect the worst. But things that are good:
There have been no fatalities.
The statues on the spire were removed four days ago because of the renovations.
The clergy, military, and Louvre staff were prompt and organized in evacuating other precious items from the cathedral.
The towers were saved.
This tweet shows the interior; if you look at the photo full size, you can see a fair bit of detail. There’s water on the floor, but only one small portion of the ceiling collapsed, and the stonework throughout much of the nave looks basically untouched to me — not scorched or covered in soot, not damaged, not destroyed.
The superstructure is badly hit, I’m sure, and it’s likely that has caused or will cause problems which aren’t immediately visible. Repairs will still take a long time, and who knows how many days will pass before they can allow visitors again. But after a day of imagining things so much worse than this, it’s a relief to know I overshot — that, though wounded, Notre Dame is still standing.
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Even now, this can happen
The burning of Notre Dame is breaking my heart.
I’ve read a lot of history. I could fill a whole post with nothing but a list of beautiful, significant buildings lost to fire. It’s happened before, many times, for thousands of years, all around the world. But it’s easy to fall into thinking that it can’t happen now. That sure, ordinary buildings may burn, because we can’t protect everything perfectly — but surely, with all our technology, we can keep the important places safe. The ones that matter not just to a few people, or a few hundred, or a few thousand, but millions upon millions.
But we can’t. Disasters still happen. We are not the unchallenged masters of our physical environment; things can still go wrong.
This one hits particularly hard for two reasons. One is that I was just there: when my husband and I visited Paris in 2013 the towers were closed for repairs, but after Imaginales last May I spent a few days there and got to climb up to meet the gargoyles. I haven’t been able to make myself look at many pictures, much less video, but even a glance was enough to give me that punch of I stood there. Right where it’s burning — I was there.
The other is more distant in some ways, but even closer in others. In 1666 the Great Fire of London burned, among other things, St. Paul’s Cathedral. Like Notre Dame, it was under repair at the time; the scaffolding surrounding it gave the spreading fire an easy foothold. That was 450 years ago, of course — but I researched it for In Ashes Lie, and then I wrote about it, immersing myself in that moment of terrible destruction. When I heard the spire of Notre Dame had collapsed . . . the spire of St. Paul’s had been gone for a century, thanks to a lightning strike, but the tower was still there when the Great Fire began. When it fell, it broke through the floor into a subterranean chapel where the booksellers of London had stored their wares for safekeeping. That image lives in my mind still. Notre Dame hits right where it already hurts, where a part of me has been grieving for a building I never saw.
I can’t follow the news right now. I’ll look when it’s over, when we know exactly how bad the damage is. I presume the cathedral will be rebuilt — and I know, because I read history, that this is part of how history works. That our world is a palimpsest, things erased and rewritten and revised and layered atop one another. The St. Paul’s Cathedral that stands now in London isn’t the building that burned in 1666, but it contains some pieces of it, and the cathedrals that went before (more than one) are all part of the story of that place.
But knowing that scar tissue will eventually become part of the beauty doesn’t make it hurt any less right now.
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