Nick Mamatas's Blog, page 44

Wednesday Quick Notes

Here is an interview with me over at LitReactor: Anything about building a “brand” can go fuck itself.

Please check out the latest issue of The Big Click. Historical noir, alligator noir, and more!

FULL BABYISM as FULL COMMUNISM, a FAQ

We get questions, so many questions...


Hey, I didn't know you were having a baby? What gives?
We did not tell the Internet. That's what gives. So you didn't miss anything, really. There was no blogging or tweeting or Facebooking about it, unless you happened to catch the 2am message reading "Keeping the aspidistra flying...again."


So, how did it go, having a baby and all? I love to hear birth stories!
No Internet birth stories. Let's just say it's like they say down at the airport: any landing you can walk away from is a good one.

Why are you even having a baby? Aren't you a leftist, don't you believe in overpopulation!
Oh, you tragic bourgeois, and your radical pose. Marx skewered Malthus. Do you know nothing?!


How exciting? Will you bring him to science fiction conventions and raise him to be a second-generation fan and let him know that when he is among the SF crowd he is among his "tribe" and "people"?
Pardon me, I seem to have developed a momentary twitch.



How can I help?
You can increase my income by buying my book, or taking my Bay Area writing class (starts this Saturday).

Thanks!

Like A Missile, Fired At The Future!

Oliver Panagiotis Borrin Mamatas is born. 3 Nov., 2013 (3/11/13) 1:37AM (the second one this morning, after the clocks moved back). 7 lbs, 11, oz. 21 inches.






Please, increase my income.

LOCUS reviews LOVE IS THE LAW

The November issue of Locus is out (link leads to table of contents, not actual magazine) and it contains a review of Love is the Law. It starts with a justification of the review:

Mamatas admits that his first crime novel, Love Is the Law, contains ‘‘a soupçon of the supernatural,’’ certainly enough, combined with his past work, to warrant its discussion here. Mamatas describes the genesis of his novel thus: his agent suggested he consider writing a YA novel, and Mamatas replied, ‘‘I was thinking a noir about a punk rock Harriet the Spy* who is very into Aleister Crowley.’


Then there's a discussion of the plot, and the review gets evaluative:

The study of the occult is about uncovering that which is hidden, and the metaphysical and practical threads of the mysteries in Dawn’s life converge in a startling and violent conclusion that offers revelation in both the practical sense – there is an actual answer to ‘‘whodunnit’’ – and a mystical one. Anyone who knows anything about noir knows better than to expect a happy ending, but every unhappy ending is unhappy in its own way, and Mamatas delivers a finish that’s uniquely brutal and satisfying.


Well, there you go! What are you waiting for!


I also received, via Twitter a piece of "fanart" inspired by the book. It looks like this:



Is that persuasive? Don't answer right away.







*I have no idea how or why some people have mentioned Nancy Drew in conjunction with this novel, except for top-of-mind "Name a girl!" type activity.

What is a Boycott?

Ender's Game is out now, and given novelist Orson Scott Card's odious opinions on gays and gay marriage—not just against, which was a position every Obama voter in 2008 supported with their vote, but in favor of insurrection in the case of legal gay marriage—there has been a lot of talk of boycotting the film. A lot of talk, most of it nonsensical, as the average moviegoer knows little of OSC despite a few news articles and a lot of Internet stuff, and the average nerd has no idea what a boycott is. A boycott is a collective attempt at economic ostracism. Casually people may talk about boycotting this or that individually, but all that really means is that they are not paying for whatever product they don't like, based on an inventory of their heart as opposed to their income or unrealized desire for a product.


Orson Scott Card, apparently not gay.

In the world of real politics though, a boycott is a weapon. It's an alternative to violence, but it is supposed to hurt nearly as much as violence is. However, boycotts are not moralistic. It is perfectly fine, as Charles Boycott found out, to cut off a target's access to mass communications—the telegraph and the mail. To not allow him to shop in the stores. To let the livestock suffer. In labor struggles, scabs are also boycotted—scabs will not be served in restaurants, will be barred from the grocery, may find themselves turned out of their rooms if possible, etc.

This is important, you see, because in the case of Ender's Game it is not unusual to hear that a boycott would be wrong because people other than Card—the film's above-the-line creative types, for example (though most people don't know much about movies and just say "crew" as if a gaffer will be retroactively billed for working on the movie)—would be hurt.

Yes, of course they would. During the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the company took the unprecedented step of actually stopping service entirely in the days before Christmas 1955, which actually kept white riders from the downtown shopping areas, which reportedly led to some stores shutting down. In 1956, bus routes were limited to primarily white areas of the city, and drivers laid off. Black bus company workers—there were only a handful—were the first to be laid off. And the boycott continued. The mayor of the city tried to appeal to white solidarity, demanding that white families stop paying for taxi fares or driving their maids back and forth. Many ignored the call, but some obeyed, and several black maids found themselves fired. And the boycott continued.

It is perhaps even worth noting that the bus company attorney claimed that the firm itself wanted to be integrated—buses were integrated in Mobile with no issue, and the company had asked to be allowed to move to a "first come, first serve" system—but the local laws forbade it. It wasn't even the bus company's fault, you see! And the boycott continued.

Of course, many boycotts are less intense that the Montgomery bus boycott. I use it as an example here because it is considered the canonical good boycott in American history—when was the last time you heard someone come out against it? There were a number of special circumstances that allowed for this very strict boycott: intense organization in the black community, the difficulty of invisibly breaking the boycott (hard to sneak on an empty bus, hard to be inconspicuous as a black person on the bus), and the relative weakness of the bus company (a local outfit).

But if you were in favor of Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement and the bus boycott, even though a lot of other people got hurt, then there should be no issue with the much milder boycott of Ender's Game. Tor Books is being left untouched. The studio's other films are being left untouched. The movie theaters showing the film are being left untouched. This boycott is the caress of a pudgy little newborn baby hand against the cheek of hatred.

At the same time, it is important to remember that boycotts are economic, not moralistic. The movie isn't being boycotted just because OSC is batshit, but because of his own economic actions as a former member of the board of the National Organization for Marriage, and his own potential future economic actions as a rich dude who wants to play a round of Second Amendment Solution. So the target isn't OSC's conscience—surely a boycott won't make him change his mind about gays—but his wallet. Unnamed sources claim that OSC isn't getting any bit of the gross of the film despite his producer credit, which is one of the more hilarious and lazy attempts at dealing with bad publicity I've seen lately. Gosh, sounds like the sort of thing that someone with a name could have mentioned any time over the past six months...were it true. This includes Card himself! It's not like he wasn't giving interviews earlier this week.

What this means is that the content of the film is immaterial—it doesn't matter whether the movie is a subversive gay romp about the buggers and their little Ender—and it doesn't actually matter if you end up seeing it. It matters if you end up transacting to see it. There's no moral contagion at work; the idea is to keep the box office down. Wait for cable TV, which you already pay for. (Just don't use On Demand, unless the flick hits the Free Movies section!) And there are other alternatives as well, though not ones I would personally recommend, necessarily. Remember what a boycott is—an alternative to violence. Is buying a ticket to the time-traveling turkey cartoon and then walking across the hall to the other theater wrong? Probably. Same with torrenting the movie twenty seconds after reading this post. By the same token, threatening the kid who brought Charles Boycott his mail with a battering—which happened, and worked—was probably wrong too. But it's not the same as actually battering the kid.

That's part of why boycotts are necessarily collective. It's a way of saying, "Look how many people you have annoyed. Would you really like to annoy us further?" Just think of all the pudgy little baby hands, reaching for your eyes...

If You've Forgotten, It's Only Because It Was Terrible!

We asked Feige straight up whether Marvel will deliver fans a solo female superhero movie before DC.

Marvel already did that, not so long ago:

Lou Reed

Lou Reed is dead at 71. For many years, that sentence was impossible to fathom. Surely it would be 51. Maybe 60 at the outside. I was amazed when he was granted a liver transplant last year—why bother?

I first got into him the hard way, via Mistrial and the single "No Money Down", which had a great video of a Lou Reed puppet tearing itself a part. Sadly, the vid, which was one integrated into Beavis and Butthead, is hard to find. Here's the song—which now I realize is a minor work of course—though:



I started working backwards, and forwards, with him, and like anyone from New York loved New York (though he lived in NJ by this time):



On a first date/blind date once, I walked by Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson while walking down Bleecker Street and made note of it to the woman I was with and when she said "Who?" and I made a right turn and left her standing there on the corner forever. I coped many VU bootlegs from a friend of mine with a significant collection, and just became one of the many of zillions of people who enjoyed Lou Reed. I even put up with Songs for Drella.

After that, I lost track of him, though he did enter my consciousness again with two things. The first is Raven, his album about Edgar Allan Poe.




And then I started studying Chen style taiji, which, surprise, so did he!



Which may explain how he made it into his 70s after all.

Friday Quick Notes

First, some Love is the Law reviews and such:

sabotabby writes that it is a bleak, hilarious, clever little** novel (** little==short).

pantryslut writes:

What I loved about Love is the Law:

* Girlpunk point-of-view character.
* She is not perfect and flawless (goodbye Nancy Drew...).
* She is not saddled with a Tragic Origin.
* She is saddled with a complicated family.
* Amaranth is tasty stuff.
* The spot-on critical yet affectionate take on both politics and magic(k).
* It's really funny without being fluffy.


Sue Lange reviews it here: t’s the story of America: subtle and outrageous.

Joseph Tomaras interview me a bit here:

In that respect, it seems similar in some ways to Crowleyan "magick": The notion that one need only find the "correct" slogan acts as a kind of abrahadabra, the stenciled placard as a kind of sigil.

Now I wanted to talk about another book, BTW, by Jarett Kobek. His last novel, which I loved, was Atta, a fictional memoir of the 9/11 terrorist. This one is the opposite: unashamedly autobiographical, with its narrator an American of Turkish Muslim descent bouncing around the parts of America where one doesn't need to drive. Then, after 9/11, to LA. It's interesting to compare it to the broadly similar The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. Both are about literary young men of sorts, both young men–the children of immigrants—are motivated by sex and fear in a way, and both books are funny and well-observed. So why is the more authentic one being published by a small press that cannot corral widows and orphans on the page, and the other got the full New York rollout?

The answer is in the question: BTW is more authentic. More than a decade from 9/11, Kobek is able to show his narrator's foibles and excuses without either minimizing them or wallowing in them. Waldman wallows greatly, saying "Nate had not always been the kind of guy women call an asshole," right up at the top of the second chapter, and then a sentence or two later demonstrating what a nerd he'd been back in those non-asshole days: he wrote a song for math class, a Madonna pastiche, entitled "Like a Cosine (Solved for the Very First Time)." Take that, Nathan P!

There's much alike in the two books, however. From BTW:

bell hooks is phenomenal, and so is Diane di Prima, and I'll lay it on the road for Sandra Cisneros and climb to the high heavens for Dorothy Allison, but Holy Jesus, please save me from their bewildered disciples. Save me from the students of Eugene Lang College.

And from The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P:

And if they hadn't read Svevo or Berhnhard—and let's face it, most hadn't—at least they knew who they were. "Zeno's Conscience, right? Doesn't James Wood, like, love that book?"

Well, somewhat alike, anyway. It's the difference between the new literary territory of the American Muslim experience, versus the fairly well-traveled territory of the Jewish-American experience, enthusiasm about cynicism versus cynicism about enthusiasm, making literary amends versus taking literary revenge, and frankly, one is funnier than the other and that book, BTW, ends up in Izmir. Who can relate to that? Not anyone making decisions in New York publishing. No surprise that BTW is about a guy with little money who does a magazine assignment here or there, and Nathan P is about the titular character after he receives a six-figure advance.


Finally, the case of Maria, supposedly kidnapped by Roma in Greece, ends well enough. Private adoption isn't unusual in Greece. No more "blonde angel" for the Greek media now; she's just another γύφτα. While antiziganism is common in Greece, like anywhere else, this little story became international news almost assuredly because of the rise of fascism in Greece and the rest of the European periphery. Blonde? Why, she can't be Roma, or even a Slav—the gypsies have stolen an Aryan! Golden Dawn is explicit in simply stapling "and Greeks" to the old Aryan Nazi propaganda. We'll see more visual racism and ethnic lumping/splitting like this very soon, and not even necessarily in publishing!

BART

At the risk of being one of those assholes who keeps citing Jacobin—the far-left equivalent of a "Did you hear that thing on NPR?" type—this matches my view on the BART strike more or less completely.

Oh, Internet

Review of my book concludes this weird fusion of the two is about a thousand times more entertaining than it has any right to be. Read it!

First commenter, angry on behalf of white people everywhere, demands to know of the reviewer Do you ever read something and actually enjoy it?