Användarprofil

"Jag uppmanar er alla, mina vänner, att ni aldrig någonsin förvägrar någon vad Gud så rikligen giver er för intet."
- Botfrid Svensson, ca 1120

Hagerman spinner vidare på det hon började gräva upp i Spåren av kungens män och inte minst Minnesbrunnen - om övergången från hednadom till kristendom, från stormannaklaner till kungadöme, från muntligt berättande till skriftlig kanonisering. Försöket att bygga det runt en faktisk människa som levde för 900 år sedan är övertygande, trots ett antal "Man kan anta att..." som väl inte riktigt kan undvikas. Sammanfogandet av historia, arkeologi och det fortsatta medvetna konstruerandet av ett samhälle som konstant fortsätter. Bevisen finns där i vägarna, i byggnaderna och i namnen; nya idéer som fortsätter komma.

Stephen King's only (?) picture book for small children is... pretty much a picture book for small children. Yes, if you've read The Dark Tower Charlie's grin becomes considerably more menacing, and there's something about the illustrations that feel like they belong more to the larger Towerverse than in this book. In the end, the kids won't get it and the fans don't really need it, but I like that it's out there. (Even in Holmberg's typically clumsy Swedish translation.)

Let's talk floating lyrics; the snippets that get repeated in one blues or jazz or folk song after another for generations, that nobody and everybody can lay claim to. Often violent, often repetitive (cf Sinners).

Black women were armed, black women were dangerous and the less money they had the deadlier the weapon they chose.

Snippets that move from field to town to city without changing except in the context and the smoothness of delivery. Old men continuing to sing about love they (or their grandfathers) lost decades ago as if it happened now.

Let's talk jazz. The one truly American music. The one that reinvents itself by design, repeats themes until they become new.

Can't rival the dead for love. Lose every time.

"Chase Infiniti" is easily one of the best names in Pynchon canon, right up there with Zoyd Wheeler, Oedipa Maas, Tyrone Slothrop and Webb Traverse.

Once he would have proclaimed, “Because in this country nobody in power gives a shit about any human life but their own. That forces us to be humane — to attack what matters more than life to the regime and those it serves, their money and their property.” But these days he was saying, “It’s wrong [to use violence] because if you pick up a rifle, the Man picks up a machine gun, by the time you find some machine gun he’s all set up to shoot rockets, begin to see a pattern?” Between these two replies, something had happened to him. He was still preaching humane revolution, but seemed darkly exhausted, unhopeful, snapping at everybody, then apologizing. If anybody caught this change, it was much too late to make a difference.

So I had to reread Vineland for the first time in 20+ years before seeing this. And it's an astonishing adaptation; one of those that ignores at least half of the source material apart from the bare bones, changes the settings and the names to protect the guilty, picks a few details that embody the novel and hits them hard to get across one version of the story. I can't imagine any other way to adapt Pynchon, especially since Vineland is... OK, in a lot of ways, it's one of his more accessible books, with a pretty clear plot and a pretty clear moral, but it's also plotted even more frustratingly than the likes of Gravity's Rainbow and Against the Day. 50 pages intro, 300 pages flashback, 30 pages denouement. And PTA somehow tuns this hilarious but angry and bitter elegy of a novel into a hilarious, angry action movie that keeps me riveted for the whole 2 1/2 hour runtime. Neither version of the story is perfect, neither is completely satisfactory, both deliberately cheat us out of a simple solution.

Picture it: It's 15 years after the revolution failed, all the old revolutionaries have sold out or given up or burned out; the ones that haven't joined the winning side (voluntarily or not) or become good little housewives and consumers spend their days stoned in their trailers, ranting about the good old days. That's Zoyd Wheeler in 1984, that's Bob Ferguson in 202whatever this is set in. The only thing left to do is keep the daughter safe, both from the agents looking for them and from the knowledge of who her overly zealous mother really was. And then the shit hits the fan, and off we go, on the road back into America. Whatever that means, however great it may be.

Brock Vond's genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this story, Brock saw the deep — if he'd allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching — need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family. The hunch he was betting on was that these kid rebels, being halfway there already, would be easy to turn and cheap to develop. They'd only been listening to the wrong music, breathing the wrong smoke, admiring the wrong personalities. They needed some reconditioning.

There's an irony, and I don't know which edge of it lands on top, to the fact that Frenesi in the novel uses a film camera the way Perfidia in the movie uses a gun. The idea that putting the light on something will kill it. We know it won't; Pynchon's proto-cyberpunk of databases and 24-hour TV has given way to billionnaire-owned social media and filter bubbles. So here's the movie version, dodging in and out of shadows, tossing its camera back and forth between Yeats' proverbial best and worst; Sean Penn never better, DiCaprio perfeclty hapless, Taylor a straight line and del Toro an unmovable brick wall. Inbetween them, Prairie/Willa/Infiniti trying to figure out this new world her parents have handed her, where the results are already rigged...

That question runs through novel and film; when have you lost? What is there to fight for? I love some of the additions PTA have made to the story, especially the Christmas Adventurers and the way their quest for purity is simply unsustainable. The revolution will always eat itself, and that doesn't just apply to the ones. We're all screw-ups. There's hope in that. A system that doesn't take our fallibility, and our pigheadedness, into account will always fail. The road is rocky (goddamn, that final car chase) but it's a road.

But as he watched her then, year by year, among these reunion faces her own was growing more and more to look like, continuing to feel no least premonitory sign of governmental interest from over the horizon beyond the mentaldisability checks that arrived faithfully as the moon, he at last began, even out scuffling every day, to relax some, to understand that this had been the place to bring her and himself after all, that for the few years anyway, he must have chosen right for a change, that time they'd come through the slides and storms to put in here, to harbor in Vineland, Vineland the Good.

The road is the place all lost things go.

Easily one of the best new books I've read in a good long while. Cowen spends 5 years walking up and down a 2,000-year-old road, tracking history from his own to his family's to the country's, casting it against Britain in the throes of Brexit and Covid. Mixing autobiography with history with essays with fiction, one of those books that gives librarians a headache. Trust me: Just buy 5 copies and put them on different shelves.

I love books that don't pick a lane. Except of course this one literally does. It does what a road does; it transcends time, and ties everything together in a constant motion.

For so long as the road continues, the future is still ours to shape.

Three short novels - Men In the Sun, All That's Left To You and Returning to Haifa - that still feel mostly up to date despite over 50 years having passed. People having to live their lives on pause, waiting for a change, waiting to return to some sort of normality that never comes; generation upon generation on both sides raised on What Used To Be, and surrounded by both potential and actual violence the second they step out of line. Characters constantly living with that trauma to the point where the decades and the generations bleed together.

The cruelty is the point.

Kids with eerie mental powers get harrassed by mysterious agency and have to band together to control their powers and escape. Yeah, King has written variations on this several times (most notably FIrestarter, I guess), and the actual super-officially-natural element here isn't the most interesting bit about it. But there's a difference between writing it in the 80s and in the digital Trump era; so The Institute becomes a story not just about telechinesis and what happens to you when you start hearing others' thoughts, but also about the organisations that prey on it and how they would work. A story about how people can convince themselves to willingly give up all empathy and become monsters convinced they're the good guys doing What Must Be Done - and doing it so by rote that it's barely even a professional organisation anymore. There's an Omelas angle here that's got some holes in it (many of them deliberate, but not all), and there's some absolutely chilling villain POVs that build on what he did in Doctor Sleep. Above all it's just a good old fashioned King romp that's hard to put down. It's been a while since I read him, and I'm sorry about that.

Like all Biggles novels, it's very much of its time. Johns was probably fairly progressive for his time, with his racism more Kiplingian than Mosleyan. "These poor child-like unfortunates are British subjects [not citizens, obviously] and will be treated as such" etc. Live with that and we have a story clearly inspired by the discoveries of Inca and Maya cities, with a... let's say child-like glee at discovering "lost" civilizations that's pretty contagious. But seriously, can Ginger just fall off a cliff already?

Thanks to Backlisted for putting this on my radar.

Remarkably frank late 50s play, which feels a lot more natural in its examination of things like generational trauma, gender, race and sexuality than many others of its time (at least that I'm familiar with). The rather hokey Swedish translation (1959) does it no favours, though.

Time alone reveals the just;
A villain is detected in a day.

So everyone already knows the Oedipus story, right? But I'd never actually seen or read the original play, so...
1. Wow, we're just dropped into the middle of it. I thought this would start with Oedipus getting the prophecy and THEN doing it all, but he's already the king. Part of the format, I guess - everyone just standing around making speeches at the crowd.
2. Wow, this really is a story of a powerful politician getting exposed for murder and improper sexcapades, trying to weasel out of it... and then actually feeling ashamed about it and taking responsibility for his actions?!? Would never happen.
3. Still, a lot of bits here really still work 2,500 years later - the quick-fire dialogue, the irony of the prophecy and Oedipus' attempts to get around it, and his absolutely heartrending breakdown at the end. People aren't that different.

Electra certainly isn't bad either, though it has even less of a dramatic arc to modern eyes - I want my brother to kill our mother, ooops he's dead, no he's not, stab stab stab. Still, Electra's big speech is pretty damn effective.

And not the strongest *** either, which as an old-school Atkinson fan feels like a shame. There's absolutely good stuff in here, good style as always, an intriguing setting with some good character work, but ultimately that meta story of someone trying to write something he doesn't understand starts to look a little too apropos. The plot is full of the sort of coincidences you'd expect of a Midsomer Murders episode set in a village of a few dozen people - at no point does this feel like a bustling metropolis - and then it just... stops, as if Atkinson just got bored with it.

In which Frankenstein's monster joins SPECTRE to help destroy all the beautiful people in the world, so our Intrepid Asshole has to build a giant robot to defend the right to go on endlessly about every woman's beauty.

Still utterly stupid. Still fun. If I ever stumble across part 3 I should pick it up.