Granskningar och kommentarer

We stare at the spinning vortex of cyclical myth until we fall into a trance - and then we do something shocking at someone else's orders.

On Tyranny is a rant, but a well-read one delivered in cold fury upon the rise of populist, anti-democratic demagogues in general and Trump in particular. With a starting point in the various ways that seemingly secure democracies have failed and descended into mob rule, dictatorship, and mass murder throughout the 20th century, Snyder delivers 20 points on how to defend democracy in troubled times. Essentially, condensing Arendt, von Klemperer, Havel and that lot down into a one-hour read.

The whole notion of disruption is adolescent: It assumes that after the teenagers make a mess, the adults will come and clean it up.
But there are no adults. We own this mess.

it's a chilling, useful little guide, and if it's overly focused on Trump's person and tactics that's hardly surprising - Snyder is American, after all. The one thing it truly lacks is sources. If you believe that a "post-fact" society needs more facts, then having actual sources for many of his statements wouldn't have hurt. When politicians like Trump turn their speeches into one long Gish gallop that would tend to turn the entire text into one long row of footnotes, true, but also even harder to dismiss as just another batch of fake news by those who benefit from that.

An actual plot twist? Hell, an actual plot? Who the hell ordered that?

When Rocky Flintstone gets his Nobel (and hey, Dylan got one) this will be pointed to as the turning point in his career. It's still shit, obviously, and it's increasingly self-consciously shit, but at least he has more fun with it, and that final twist... I blinked.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDMugetfYoI

Litterärt klickbete. "Så blir du en bra författare" skrivet av någon vars främsta merit är att skriva MP:s partiprogram, som innehåller betydligt mer humor än detta.

After a friend (failed artist, of course) commits suicide, our narrator is reunited with some former friends he hasn't met in 20-30 years at what passes for a wake, but is really just yet another opportunity for a gang of aging authors, musicians, critics and actors to hang out, talk about their own genius and talk shit about each other. And he sits there, grieving, in a corner, chewing over one long internal stream-of-consciousness monologue of Captain Haddockisms aimed at the others (perfidious society onanists! crafty, state-sponsored gloryhounds! arch-catholic art abusers!) as he goes over their history together and tries to deal with the fact that they're all growing old and pointless, all their promises given up for comfort and routine, all the ideals they had as the first post-war generation solidified into self-congratulatory nothings, and he's no different.

I expected this to be funny, and it is. I expected it to be cathartic, and it is. I hadn't expected it to be actually quite moving, but it is. Not my last Bernhard.

This is the second rewrite of Lovecraft's Horror at Red Hook I've read this year, after Moore's Neonomicon. I suppose there's a reason that story feels relevant to revisit in the 21st century; on one hand, it's easily one of Lovecraft's most blatantly racist, misogynist and just downright... messy stories. On the other, it's about an America (specifically, a pre-gentrification Brooklyn) struggling to find its identity in the conflict between haves and havenots, Anglos and illegal immigrants (specifially, Syrians), Order and Chaos.

There's always the question if you can rewrite Lovecraft without acknowledging and doing something with the less appetizing bits of his writing. Moore skipped part of that by setting his rewrite in the more-or-less present, post-aforementioned-gentrification, and partly by simply revelling in it through his openly racist narrator. LaValle does something cleverer; brings more life to 1925 New York than Lovecraft did, shifts the focus, offers a counter-narrative, plays a counterpoint on a beat-up blues guitar and Son House's lyrics. There's more than one story in America. As people have pointed out, what's horrible in Lovecraft - the realisation that you're not the centre of the universe, that being a bigoted white man doesn't automatically earn you points with a cold uncaring cosmos - is just what everyone else has always had to live with, and built their stories around.

Who's that writing - John the Revelator

Enter Black Tom, who knows his people always lose, but at least he's going to matter.

3.5/5. The thing about playing in Lovecraft's sandbox - and what a gloriously mad sandbox it is - is that you can't, in good conscience, only take the fantastic worldbuilding and ignore all the blatant racism and gynophobia. That stuff isn't an embarrassing but insignificant detail of HPL's work, it's spun into every thread it's made from, it's part of what makes it tick. So Johnson does the right thing here, letting her middle-aged professor with a wild past do battle not just with zoogs, ghouls and gugs, but in a more low-key way, with the fact that she's living in a world entirely dreamed up by vain, insecure men.

Which is fine. Honestly, it wouldn't have hurt if she'd taken that angle further. There are stretches here that just feel like sub-par HPL (funny thing; Johnson is a far better writer than HPL, which probably hurts the story when she doesn't go as BIG as Lovecraft), but the ending is glorious.