Granskningar och kommentarer

"De hade inte talat mer om det. Det hade varit en öppen fråga mellan dem om man kan se in i sitt eget mörker och om det rentav är ens skyldighet att göra det. Eller om man framkallar mörkret och gör det till sitt eget genom att kela med det."

Intriguing but disappointing. Serviss does come up with a lot of concepts that are, if not entirely brand-new to SF, then at least new enough to feel really innovative. And the sheer lunacy of the plot paired with the dry journalistic I-swear-I'm-an-actual-scientist prose does lead to some chuckles. But the complete lack of any characters whatsoever, the tendency to solve any problem by simply having Edison magically invent something like he's Dr Snuggles, and the... shall we say less-than-well-aged discourse on the supremacy of the Aryan race really drag it down.

Tom Verlaine died and I had to read Patti Smith while spinning Marquee Moon.

(Yes, he's in it.)

As are so many others. A Book of Days is essentially that most pointless of printed books: an instagram feed put down on paper. Each day, a photo or a drawing or an image of some kind, and a short caption. Mostly either people Patti admires, or loves, or misses, or pictures of things she's found on her travels. Brief notes that are sometimes clichéd, and sometimes cut right through to something.

Few people could pull this off. Patti Smith, mostly, does. Despite the format - 366 days - it really works better read cover to cover, turning it - like many of her best songs, if not quite as effectively - into a celebration of influence, of how grounding in everything from simple household objects to mad poets can help you fly.

Or something. Sorry. I can't write about Patti Smith drily.

Now go read her eulogy to Tom. And put on Marquee Moon.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/13/he-was-tom-verlaine

Geijers översättning är inte dum alls för att vara den första seriösa svenska Shakespeareöversättningen. Visst har den åldrats en del på en del ställen ("Bov!"), men det har ju originalet också, och för det mesta går han en väldigt bra balansgång mellan att låta högtidligt ålderdomlig och tydligt talspråklig. Lite värre är att han har svårt att återskapa Shakespeares mångtydighet och ordvitsande, och att han i ett par fall helt enkelt klipper rader eller hela scener som han finner smaklösa. Men i gengäld kan man, om man vill, läsa alltihop på Munkfôrsmål.

I'm not a huge fan of everything in the opening essay, but hey, that's why you get to argue with it.

The (excellent) TV adaptation of Emily (St John?) Mandel's Station Eleven, about a pandemic, was in the works for years before being released mid-pandemic and permanently designating her That Covid Writer. Of course she has to deal with that in this novel. And so we have an actual (albeit 23rd century) version of her in the novel, linked to a bunch of others through time glitches. Which, arguably, is what fiction is; echoes of a moment through different times and narrators.

I'm not sure the ending needs to be as neat as it is. I kind of want it to be messier. And I'm torn between loving how little she changes mankind over 500 years and wanting there to be more that's unexplained. But again, she manages to create characters whose stasis (hey, it's a Covid novel) feels both relatable, horrifying and rich.

You never know what you get with Dylan, and as much as his strength doesn't necessarily lie in prose, this book definitely fits that. So you know what you get with Dylan.

Art is a disagreement. Money is an agreement.
[I paid $45 for this coffee table book.]

- You get a pretty good playlist. I skip the Grateful Dead song after about 9 interminable minutes, otherwise I'm good. Dylan's taste runs pretty much the way you'd expect it to, especially after the last 21 years of his career, but his point holds: They're good songs. It's a craft. It means something.

Though we seldom consider it, music is built in time as surely as a sculptor or welder works in physical space. Music transcends time by living within it, just as reincarnation allows us to transcend life by living it again and again.

- You get a fair amount of boomer whining. Not that he doesn't occasionally have good points, but by the time he gets to his second diatribe about divorce lawyers being the spawn of Satan, I really wish he hadn't.

Entertainers understand that a good story is a basic commodity, one they are not about to give away. The therapist is on the wrong side of that transaction - if you have a lurid story to tell, like you want to fuck your father or make love to your mother, why are you paying a shrink to listen to it? He or she should be paying you.

- You do get some really inspired essays, mixed with some that feels like any music blog ca 2001. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. But he's constantly looking for something. It reminds me why, in my extreme Dylan fandom days, would go through entire tours of bootleg shows to see how a song evolves from night to night.

All the self-styled social critics who read lyrics in a deadpan drone to satirize their lack of profundity only show their own limitations. They are as useless as the police officer reading the transcript of Lenny Bruce's act in the courtroom during his obscenity trial. Just as that police officer misses the essential spark in Lennys performance, so do the others miss the mgic that happens when lyrics are wed to music. Some would call that marriage chemistry, but chemistry seems to based in science and therefore replicable. What happens with words and music is more akin to alchemy, chemistry's wilder, les disciplined precursor, full of experimentation and fraught with failure, with its doomed attempts to turn base metals into gold. People can keep trying to turn music into a science, but in science one and one will always be two.

- Dylan swears. Quite a lot. Huh. He's also occasionally very funny. This is far less surprising.

We have as much responsibility coming out of the booth as going in.

- All these 65 essays, ranging from rejected Wikipedia summaries to free-form prose poetry, pretty much adds up to a story, full of the same sort of rogues' gallery characters he's made a career out of. Not a very focused one, perhaps not even a very modern one, but arguably that's the point; America is still working through the post-war trauma, you can read it through the music it's played itself.

Elvis is gone, the Colonel is gone, Doc Pomus is gone. B.B. and Dr. John are gone. Meanwhile Hilton now owns thirty-one hotels in Las Vegas. The house always wins.

I love Jemisin's writing, and I love the whole concept of the Great Cities series, but yeah, this does feel like what she says in the afterword: Two novels smushed into one. It's very enjoyable, and a decent wrap-up to the 'verse, but it feels like it needed either the third novel or an even more radical rewrite to work completely.