I present a Pandora Hearts themed cake for one Jenny @kahnah23 whose enthusiasm for this story got me to read it years ago and it never left my mind, as intended :)

Hej! Hur mår du? I'm trying to learn swedish for my partner, would you happen to have any tips? Babbel is very useful, but I loved your blog so much I scrolled all the way to the bottom last night so I wanted to ask you. Tack (so? Sa?) Tack sa mycke!

Hej, tack så jättemycket för dina snälla ord! :) I’m really glad if you liked my blog.

I’m not sure I can give much useful advice, but I’ll do my best to describe what worked for me. So, here’s how I’ve been teaching myself Swedish:

I used several grammar reference books at the same time, to get a fuller overview of the language + get to do as many exercises as possible haha. The ones I used were the Routledge essential grammar and comprehensive grammar (as well as one in my own native language but well, that probably won’t be useful to you…). They’re all available as pdfs online. I would pick a grammar topic, scan all my books and do an additional internet search if necessary to compile and condense the information in my notes, then do some exercises. Initially I tried to do one or more topics every day but then found it more productive to alternate “grammar days” with “vocabulary days”

Speaking of which, I approached vocab in a similar way in the beginning: pick a topic, like colours or numerals or body parts, make a list and cram it. For adjectives, I found it an efficient strategy to learn them in pairs of antonyms

I kept a diary in Swedish for some time, which was helpful because that way I learnt and used specific vocabulary relevant to me and my life

I started reading, watching and listening stuff in Swedish quite early on, which I highly recommend to get comfortable with the language. To translate new words, I tried to refer to a monolingual Swedish dictionary as much as possible. Note: I could post a list of particular podcasts/YouTube channels/news resources etc that I liked if you guys want me too! But obviously it largely boils down to what you’re interested in.

Related to the previous point, I follow both teachers of Swedish and Swedish natives on social media to increase immersion

Good old Duolingo was rather nice, especially early on, to get the basic vocab and some grammar down

Quizlet and thematic Tumblr vocab lists proved rather useful too, especially when I wasn’t too lazy to review them

+ Some cool resources I use for Swedish as well as other languages:

Omniglot (a great place to start with any language: basic info + resources)

Glosbe (Reverso context but make it better)

obviously, Wiktionary (useful to look up declensions)

Last but not least, I encourage my followers to add their tips too!

Jag hoppas att det hjälper dig :)

so i don't go here, but you seem really into warhammer right now, so tell me about your favorite wh40k fic you've done. pick something you are particularly proud of.

For this, I went only with my one-shots.

I was torn between Actions Speak Louder Than Words and The Gift of the Rope. I'm going to go with the former, as I think the story behind writing it is probably a bit more interesting.

This story is my most... well, pretty much everything of my 40k fics, besides subscriptions. Most kudos, most comment threads, most hits, most bookmarks. It has since been translated into Chinese (with my blessing). And let me tell you, I had so much anxiety writing this story.

See, the 40k fandom has an exchange at Christmastime, and it's named after a holiday in canon that happens around the same time, called Sanguinala. It's a really wonderful time because it's one of the few 40k-exclusive exchanges, and a lot of people participate who don't usually do exchanges. Among the many amazing writers and artists, participating in this exchange is one of my favorite artists in the fandom. And I thought to myself "Becky, what are you going to do if you get them for your assignment?" And I was like "haha there are like 30 people participating, what are the odds?"

So you can guess what happened. I got them for my assignment.

For the prompts, they had three options. I was only really familiar enough with one of the prompts, so I knew immediately what I was going to write.

So in canon you have these 18 demigod-like characters, called primarchs. And they had a civil war (the sides referred to Loyalist and Traitor) and some of them died and some of them turned into daemons and some of them have gone MIA.

And since you don't go here, I'm going to give you the extreme cliffnotes version of why their prompt was a big deal.

Fast forward 10,000 years. There's only 1 known Loyalist primarch in the current canon for a while who is awake and active... until very recently. A second one is no longer sleeping MIA, and these two primarchs have a history. They are, in fact, 2/3rds of my favorite triad, and the triad is one of my absolute favorite romantic relationships in the fandom.

And whether or not one ships them, so much of the fandom is looking forward to them seeing each other again. We don't know when it's going to happen - but we're hoping that it'll be in a novel in the near future.

40k, in terms of writing fic, is a fandom on the smaller side. There have been a few fics written about this supposed reunion, but I think there were only two when I wrote mine? And the ones written were not smutty, and my fic was going to be smutty.

And my anxiety was getting really bad, and I had writer's block. I'm not as current about a lot of the events in "the present" of 40k. I was afraid to get something wrong.

So, in my last ditch attempt to get inspiration, I picked up the novel that had recently been released that talked about the primarch who recently returned. And its one of the best books I've read for 40k. And I found out later that the author is queer, and it is obvious that he crammed as much queer subtext as he possibly could.

And the very end of the epilogue was what I needed to start writing.

My anxiety didn't vanish because I was writing, but at least I was making progress. Which at this point there was less than a week left before assignments were due. I did not have time to second guess myself. Two friends in the fandom were pre-readers for me, and reassured me it was good.

And I submitted my assignment on time, but it wasn't a version I was super happy with. But then I had a week more to come up with a better ending and edit my submission.

Christmas came around, and the recipient loved it.

This fic deals with aging, and I compare and contrast what we-the-readers once saw them as, to their new reality. How it might manifest. And as their bodies have changed, so have they. They've been through so much, and no one really understands what they're going through but each other.

This fic also gave be a massive confidence boost in regards to my writing, and how I engage with the Canon. 40k is hundreds of novels, with plenty being contradictory. And then there are the things one ignores because its dumb. And then all the AUs one writes because one's favorite character died, and yes I understand the narrative significance, but I love him and want him to be happy. ANYWAYS. My knowledge of current events in the canon were not great, and I knew the recipient knew a lot more than me. That didn't stop them from loving my story.

40k is really unlike any series I've written for before. When I wrote for anime/manga, I could say "this is based on [x] version." When I wrote for Dragon Age, I could say "this is only off of the games," and people would understand the scope. 40k is so nebulous, I'm still honestly figuring it out. And I sometimes wonder if the desire to "know the canon" is a barrier to entry for other writers.

I took a giant chance with this story, and I'm still feeling the benefits.

For the first time in a long time I went to the movies in forever and then to Target. At Target I see some Godiva bars on discount yellow tags and I was ecstatic until I read 70% Cacao, Dark, Salted Caramel and was deflated.

Anyway that's how I felt about seeing The Green Knight. What you thought this was about chocolate?

No see since the pandemic I've been back on my perennial King Arthur kick. I've for a long time since I was a young preteen thought, someday I too will write my own King Arthur epic and it'll be gay, magical, gangster and culty too, but for now I'll make up my own stories for practice and then with every story I got attached too, it got too involved and convoluted to the point that when it came down to actually writing a novel, I threw it all away and made a space opera I only planned in two weeks and wrote in a month. Anyway...so now I've been writing this very gay, magical, gangster and culty take on Final Fantasy XV with my boyfriend and just fell in love with Somnus Lucis Caelum who nobody has any insight about him than to make him the Mordred to Ardyn's Arthur, which is a strange flex, but okay, I thought about what if I wrote a Dark Age prequel about Ardyn and Somnus, but Ardyn becomes king and Somnus his shogun and they play games of seduction and power because I'm twisted like that. Anyway...I was like I'm never going to write this and I have to keep making up characters based on FFXV characters and King Arthur tropes because there's not a lot of stories that take place during the Dark Ages, it's always some Roman Empire story, or High Middle Ages and FFXV gave no room for either society to happen after the fall of Solheim and the rise of King Somnus...so we left with Dark Ages, y'all, the King Arthur comparisons are obvious, but Ardyn is no Arthur and Somnus is no Mordred, Aera is only Guenevere if you make up an affair with Somnus, Gilgamesh is no Bedwyr/Bedivere, but uh...they both amputees and the oldest companions to their respective kings so...I guess. Anyway making an ancestor of Cor Leonis and deciding well he's Owain/Yvain, or am Ignis type as idk Sir Cai/Kay I guess, they both cook, but Cai's more like Seifer Almasy than any FF character... Anyway I'm losing people.

My plan was to just scrap the FFXV prequel, leave my Somnus ideas into Overtime (a gangster and gods story) and just plan an actual King Arthur adaptation. I'd have King Arthur the treasure hunter, leader of a warband turned founder of Camelot who fights giants, giant cats and dogheads, but also fights King Claudas of the Franks and King Aelle of the Saxons and Cerdic a Briton who puts in his lot with the Saxons, etc. It'd been a a glorified turf war, meanwhile Arthur's gotta make alliances with King Pelles, The Fisher King and his strange cult he's founded because, why yes I find the ends justifies the means prophecy of the Holy Grail Quest very culty because Christianity then does not resemble it now. Meanwhile you got the secondary plots of Mordred, Gawain, Lancelot, Percival, Tristam and other's going on because they matter and too many modern King Arthur stories sideline the knights.

So many have always sidelined Mordred as a final boss eldritch abomination in mortal flesh conceived of sin and give him no personality, or complex motives, or even just a relationship with Arthur. I also have noticed the general sidelining of Lancelot, or give him a chad villain upgrade if you must include him at all, and the villainizing of Gawain to the point that you don't even have to have Mordred, or Agravain as a catalyst shit stirrer in court, just slap Gawain's name on Liam Neeson in a top knot and you're good. Mordred can just be a child offscreen until last act...fuck that, while Morgan Le Fay can either be a villainess plotting her cabal through men, or a well-intentioned, ineffectual idiot. Fuck that.

Now Hollywood just be doing King Arthur first acts that suck ass, only for said director to get rewarded failing upwards by giving this same jerk the Aladdin remake. The tonally shitty, crammed in blockbuster mess of a cliche heroe's journey that sucks.

With that background I was excited for The Green Knight. I read an illustrative version as a kid, I read Tolkien's translation as a teenager, I read Simon Armitage's superior, but with liberties taken translation. I was prepped to go knowing that indie, or not they were going to make changes to weave the disjointed poem together. I'm excited that because this movie exists Project Guternberg's finally thrown Jessie Weston's prose rendition up on their website. I'll be reading that at some point when this blows over.

The movie adaptation makes a lot of...choices, many I wouldn't love, but would forgive had their been a payoff. There was none.

The journey was fine, the cinematography was a breath of fresh air after crappy slo mo, glossy action scenes ruined another. Guys, I don't think I want to see a Zack Snyder Excalibur, it'll marginally be better than Guy Ritchie, but that ain't saying anything. Leave Excalibur to the post-Star Wars 80s where it is impeccable for it's time. I liked Green Knight's breathable pacing, it's color palette's in the forests and mountains made up for the muddy grey of every Ridley Scott send up in the castles and villages in every other Dark Ages/Medieval story in the last I don’t know since the shitty 00′s. For all the dark tones when there was blues, greens, yellows or reds, they were vibrant in this movie to contrast the gloom of Britain. The soundtrack was good. This isn't all what makes a movie, but it enhances it so let's get to the story and what I did and didn't like.

Things I Liked: Gawain is still a novice in his career The Costume Dressing Everyone pronounces Gawain's name different. I pronounce it like Gwayne, or Guh Wayne, but here you got Gowen (like Owen), Gowan (like Rowan), or even Garlon who I'm pretty sure is the Fisher King's heir in some versions of that Arthurian story, so uh... The reference to Arthur slaying 960 men with his bare hands (Nennius for the win!) The Waste Land that is implied to be a site of a battle (an important aspect of the Arthurian landscape) The Fox companion No long grisly, drawn out hunting scenes. The Fox lives! No misogynist speeches

Things I'm Mixed: This being a dream, is the magic real? Are the giants? Is the Green Knight a figment of Gawain's imagination from a spell Morgan casted in him to hallucinate? Is Lord and Lady also figments? It's...a way to interpret the poem, but lazy and I don't see why it's got to all fantasy, or all dream...this movie makes it too vague you're stuck picking one camp than to accept it's a fantasy with dream and hallucinatory sequences.

Things I'm Meh: Morgan Le Fay as Gawain's mom. Look I fucking hate Morgause as a character and these two get merged and steal each other's aspects so much at this point the difference is who did they marry, King Urien or King Lot? Both are attributed to being Mordred's mom, Mordred is Gawain's brother...both practice magic depending on certain incarnations, both love and hate Arthur their brother and are in conflict with him. Saint Winifred. I actually liked this sequence, but I don't appreciate her as the tacked on wife in the later dream sequence as like...a contrast between the wife you should marry than the whore next door you don't respect anyway? I don't even know what lesson I'm supposed to get out of the damn dream sequence, or any of it? That Gawain should've married his girlfriend and then he'd be a just ruler? That he shouldn't be king? That he'd never have to make the same heartless, impartial choices? I don't know, he seemed like a king doing king shit because guess what? It never gets easier. Wars will be waged. The world didn't become better because he married the right woman, respected her and lived in obscurity. The world didn't become better because he made her his queen. We certainly don't know the world would be better Gawain had his head chopped off and dead XP They never reveal the Lord and the Green Knight as one and the same because of this shit.

Things I Hated: Arthur withdraws from the challenge because he's old. In poem he takes it on and Gawain takes it so he don't have to and he finds himself more disposable than the king. Gawain only takes the challenge because of arrogance. Arthur and Gawain had no prior personal relationship. I'd not have hated this so much if it wasn't compounded by it cancelling out the first two things. Gawain is portrayed as having no respect for his woman, or any woman, maybe his mother? He has to be pushed by Winifred to regain her head. Gawain is portrayed as arrogant, covetous and ready to pass the buck, or the bare minimum than have any honor or decency. It didn't matter the kid in the wasteland was shithead bandit, the way Gawain acted towards him, when he gets robbed, it almost feels like he deserved it and Gawain doesn't learn a damn lesson. I'll admit him taking the sword to cut his ropes and cutting his hands was a neat sequence, it shows him go from stupid, to almost clever and having will to survive...you know traits he had in the poem, but he stops showing these traits or growing. Basically Gawain has to be dragged kicking and screaming to help people and shows no fortitude when facing temptation, or when showing respect towards others, it's exhausting. You don't make this kind of journey story without character growth. Why are you skipping this? Also is it just me, or is this like when you take Frank Miller Batman and transport him onto a Bill Finger story? This is at best Thomas Malory Gawain (and this is charitable) transported on the earlier Pearl Poet's story. Stop it. It's not tonally correct and goes at odds with the story and the set up characterization you'd need to tell it. Speaking of which, you know how I get through the oof... of Liam Neeson Gawain in Excalibur? By pretending he Agravain instead. Here...I don't even think Gawain could pass as Mordred in spite of his covetous nature, lust and entitlement. Why? because I don't think even Mordred is this dumb to warrant this hubris. Essel being invented as a tacked on love interest just to be shit on utterly and for what? I don't think I have much commentary here as there is no Essel I'm aware of to compare, or stack up. I just notice this trope of like...usually if you include a sex worker in Hollywood she often has a heart of gold, she often has her own sense of values that goes at odds with society, but is more true and less hypocritical than a privileged lady’s. I thought that's what they would've done with the added trope of back at home sweetheart to contrast and pit her against the despicable femme fatale of Lady Bertilak and her adultery and her ladyship...and I'm glad they didn't...but you did nothing with Essel than to shit on her for existing when you made her exist, you know. Lady Bertilak being portrayed as the seductress devil incarnate. Look I know adultery is a touchy taboo, but uh her and Gawain hit it off in the poem, dammit! Her values and his values come to clash, but here it's played off as Gawain is stupid and covetous and Lady Bertilak wants to prove something because...? If my brother's theory that she's a figment of Morgan Le Fay's magic, then I'll take this as a lesson of Gawain is impulsive and covetous and his mom knows it, but he don't want to fuck his mom, but he wants her power, and Morgan wants to teach him a lesson... I guess. Hey we don't have misogynist speeches in this movie, but we'll make sure to have the movie drip with it with no point, or commentary. Pass. Lord guilting, extracting and initiating the same sex kiss and only once. Poem automatically better that Gawain don't have to keep being reminded to keep his part of the bargain and he does it willingly more than once. What he doesn't do is give up his belt...gods how did we get more homophobic as a society that the homoeroticism here is worse? Catholics of the middle ages officially had no issue doing same sex, passionate kissing until it lead to sex. The Ending: The gods damn ending. In the movie as is, Gawain waits to uphold his end of the bargain and get his head chopped off. He imagines, even though we don't get any fuzzy or distortion to indicate this is a dream, but I already knew this was coming, he runs away and comes home, is regarded a hero, he sees his lady, takes her from behind and if you saw Brokeback Mountain (I didn't, but DJ has) you know this is a sign of disrespect to women. He gets her knocked up, pays her off for the kid she wants to keep, he is crowned king, marries the ghostly saint lady he helped retrieve her head earlier from a lake in the movie (this right here is the damn tip off). There's no more dialogue by this point and everything is montaging, so you know by now it's a dream, though nothing is out of focus. He rules as a heartless king, his whore son dies from war he waged, he has a daughter, his wife dies. Gawain then takes off the belt that would've saved his life and his head falls off. This would've been the one good twist, except... In this sequence of events he never had his head cut off so uh... now we back in present day. He decides not to bitch out, Green Knight in a sexy way is like "now off with your head," movie cuts to credits with no resolve...uh what the fuck? What the fuck? This is not good. You wasted the one twist in your dream when idk, you could've...

How I'd fix it: No dream sequence at all. No Incident At Owl Creek twist. Gawain comes home a hero and survivor of this game and ordeal. He wears this belt of shame. He becomes a well-renowned knight, but he bears a shame. One day he goes to take off his belt and his head falls off because he cheated to get this belt and to survive this encounter. There. Done. Improved your high concept movie that couldn't play any of the lessons straight from the damn poem without making everyone an asshole for no reason! Ugh! But nope you had to end it on we don’t know if Gawain lives or dies...because...it's dream magic made from his momma's witchcraft...?

Last Thoughts So then post-credits scene because Marvel because Pirates Of The Caribbean existed. A white girl who looks nothing like Gawain's daughter we see who didn’t pay off, or any child I can remember through this whole movie picks up King Arthur's crown that dream Gawain inherited and puts it on her head. Who is this girl? Are we gonna have an indie equivalent of of the Marvel Movie Universe/Universal Horror Monsters thing with ancient British legends? We gonna get a Life Of Saint Patrick next that crosses over? I don't know. What is this?

Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse (Review)

Roanhorse has effectively cemented herself as a visionary in indigenous futurism with her rich world-building, her casual commentary on the powers that be, and even her dynamic and lovable characters, but I think it’s perfectly clear that this is her debut novel. She definitely gets lost in the sauce plot-wise towards the end, and there are several points where the potential for improvement is obvious. Nonetheless, she’s got me rearing for the next book already, and I will definitely be following this series.

This is the kind of book where I really think you can get the most out of it if you go in blind with very little prior knowledge of the book, and it really is a good one. I encourage yall to give it a go. If you don’t care about getting a little more detail, I’ll go into a spoiler free section.

No Spoilers

Okay, first thing I’ve gotta talk about is the setting. First off, it’s AWESOME. The setting is about 6? 7? years after an apocalypse. The explanation for it is really organic and it informs a lot of how the book proceeds.

Idk if this counts as a spoiler so it’s in its own paragraph, but basically the apocalypse was a series of natural disasters around the world plus a major flood that drowned out most of the continental U.S. except for a few walled off city states. The walls are specifically and emphatically NOT the ones that the Trump administration is gunning for—Roanhorse dismisses that quite quickly. These walls were ones that local communities decided to put up, and they are made of beautiful materials that have cultural significance for the Dine.

My favorite thing about the setting is the societal organization. Dinetah is a really interesting place because of the ubiquity of Dine people & culture, but also because Roanhorse obviously has a lot of really interesting thing to say about what apocalypse means to a people that have already had their apocalypse. They already had foreign invasion and genocide, they already had their numbers chipped away to a shadow of its former size, they already had their land destroyed beyond recognition. So what does it mean when in apocalypse destroys the society that destroyed yours? I think Roanhorse’s answer is that it did more good for the Dine than bad. They are freer and safer in an apocalypse, even DESPITE the presence of monsters everywhere.

One thing I really liked about her approach to Dinetah was the use of language. To quote a journal entry I wrote about this book: “Roanhorse makes creative use of Dine words and language. There is no glossary, and sometimes there isn’t even an in-text translation. English speakers are forced to pick up Dine words with no life preserver just as so many non-English speakers are forced to do the same in our world.” Most of the concepts, like clan powers and ghosts and monsters, have a Dine word attached to them, and you learn to recognize them as you read. She doesn’t remind you of their definition either: you either paid attention the first time it came up or you’re screwed! It was just an interesting stylistic choice, and I enjoyed the experience.

Another note about the setting that I love: I LOOOVE the references to the other citystates. I think one was New Detroit? New Denver? And there was a Mormon citystate (when I read that I screamed) and there was one called Aztlan (!!!!!) which was very exciting for me. I have complicated feelings about Aztlan because I think most people who live in this post-apocalyptic citystate would probably not be indigenous Mexicans but rather americanized mestizo Chicanos who think they have an inherent claim to the land just because they colonized it first, but I think as an indigenous author I can trust her to develop a nuanced view of Aztlan and what that means for Mexican Americans (especially consider the fact that she had several sensitivity readers mentioned in her acknowledgements). I really hope we get a chance to explore those in future books.

Oh, also: there are no white people in this book. Like, none. They reference them in vague terms, but I don’t think there was a location or scene that had a white person even in the background, and there were certainly no speaking parts for white people in this book. So basically I loved that. I do that often in my own writing but it’s so rare in mainstream fiction. There is a family that is not Dine in the book, but they are a large black family. With regards to the writing of the black characters: I noticed that her physical descriptions of them sometimes had words that I’ve seen on lists of What Not To Say About Black Characters (comparing skin color to food, particular words used to describe hair, etc.), but I flipped to the author bio and she apparently is black as well as indigenous so I guess my concerns weren’t really relevant lol. One of these characters is also gay, and I thought his characterization was a little bit weird, but it’s fine I guess.

Now I haven’t seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but I’ve read a spinoff from the same universe and have heard enough about it to see the obvious inspiration that Roanhorse took from it. This is not necessarily a bad thing, of course; Buffy has a very particular energy where it’s fantastically easy to get invested. Maggie Hoskie as a hero is easy to love, and even as someone who doesn’t typically like lengthy action sequences, I found the fighting scenes thrilling. However, at the same time Roanhorse commits some of the same mistakes in writing her female protagonist that Joss Whedon so famously introduced into the mainstream, and there are a few times where it becomes difficult not to roll your eyes.

As I’ve seen other reviewers note, Maggie as a character is very reliant on the men in her life. She describes early on how her life was saved by Niezghani, an immortal godlike monster slayer, and his presence in her thoughts influences nearly every decision she makes throughout the novel. Some people have a problem with this; I personally think this is a fine set-up. The author takes great care to show how unhealthy her relationship with Niezghani is. Even when Maggie is talking about how great and powerful he is, how she should be grateful that he even gives her the time of day, we as a reader can tell something is very wrong with their relationship from the very beginning. I don’t really like the direction Roanhorse went with Niezghani (I’ll get into that in the spoilers section I guess), but I thought this relationship as a premise was fine.

I think where she slipped up a little was in putting her relationship with Kai, a mysterious and charming medicine man who helps her on her investigation/quest/whatever, as the center of the story. I guess technically we’re not certain about this since the whole series isn’t out yet, but I think it’s safe to assume this guy is endgame. The whole first half of the book is spent getting to know Kai, which I think is fine because he is a great character and truly charming. (I’m always suspicious of “”charming”” type characters because more often than not the author makes them annoying and presumptuous.) He actually seems to care about the things that are happening, he doesn’t make assumptions, he understands boundaries, and his kindness is genuine. I like Kai, okay, he’s great. BUT I think that spending so much time with him instead of ruminating with Maggie some more was a mistake.

I can understand WHY roanhorse did this: Maggie is someone who is very wrapped up in her thoughts, and 9 times out of 10 her thoughts are really fuckin depressing. I just think that a lot of time was spent characterizing Kai when it could have been done in less time and more efficiently.

The main thing about Kai is that his skills as a medicine man are very mysterious, and Maggie becomes curious very early on about the nature of his abilities. The answer to her questions, though, aren’t given until very very late in the book. In fact, we don’t understand everything about his medicine man secrets until like 10 pages from the end. I think this is way too late. First off, we don’t get to see him in action very much, and the way things go I really wish we had. Second, Roanhorse just wastes a lot of time in the beginning and crams a whole lot in the end. From a world-building perspective these sections are really cool and fascinating, but plot-wise it’s extremely inefficient that we learn about Kai in bits and pieces like this, especially since all of his secrets kind of come out one after the other all crowded at the end. I don’t know if she got the right balance in that tradeoff.

Another critique I’ve seen people have is that all of Maggie’s problems AS WELL AS the solutions to her problems revolve around the men in her life. I did think it was strange that Maggie was essentially the only major female character in the whole book. There was Rissa, but she was a minor character and didn’t have much agency in the plot. I would say that Maggie did have agency, and the way she carries herself both in conversation and in action both suggest that she is making her own decisions independent of male influence. I see where these critiques are coming from, though, and I agree that more of her story should have been herself rather than obsessing over these men.

Minor spoilers I guess: One scene that I think most socially conscious people rolled their eyes at was the decision to create a plot point where she had to get all dolled up in a sexy outfit because Reasons. And then people had that weird Oh My God So Hot moment that we are all so fond of (/s). Annoying tropes like that rear their ugly faces from time to time, but this is the only one that really irritated me.

Yea. I mean. It’s a good book. I think yall should read it. As I’ve said, the worldbuilding and setting is awesome, the characters are super cool, the action is cool and Actually let’s just get into the spoilers.

SPOILERS

Coyote was one of my favorite characters. I think Roanhorse may have wanted him to be a morally gray could-be-either-side type of character, but I really saw him as a straight up villain just because he never actually did help them in a way that didn’t backfire. I love reading him though; the sheer chaos that he brings to every scene really appealed to my gayer side. I don’t know if this is an aspect to him that is commonly seen in folktales or something, but I did think that he was a little over the top creepy about the sex stuff though. When he said that shit about Maggie jacking off to Niezghani I was just…ok he’s crossin some Lines here. Also he was constantly making Kai and Maggie uncomfortable sexually, so I don’t really get why they were always so willing to trust him. Still, he was SO interesting. Whenever he showed up I was instantly enthralled.

One thing that got on my nerves a little was that from the very beginning, it was very clear that Kai and Maggie being endgame is a given. Don’t get me wrong, Roanhorse put in the work to make them seem like a really organic and natural couple. And I guess it’s kind of respectable that she didn’t try to pretend like it wasn’t gonna happen, cuz we all knew. But I think it was a little annoying that EVERYONE, including Tah and Longarm and Grace and Coyote and Kai and EVEN MAGGIE at times were basically of the attitude that they were just biding time until they eventually hook up one day. She really didn’t have to do all that; I liked them as a couple already!

Okay but plot-wise, I have to say this, but Roanhorse REALLY got lost in the sauce there. The final battles were so complicated, and there were actually 3 different scenes that felt like they could be the final battle but then there was more (the battle where Rissa got gutted, the Niezghani versus Maggie fight, and the Black Mesa battle). I feel like she couldn’t decide on a conclusion for book one and just threw all that in there for good measure. In any case, it made the last third of the book really messy and unfocused.

I think she also had too many Reveals. Like, Niezghani revealed Kai’s identity, Kai reveals his true intentions, Coyote reveals his plan, Maggie reveals her counter-plan, and Coyote reveals the circumstances of her nali’s death. TOO MUCH. It was all so cloudy and confusing towards the end, especially with regards to Coyote’s plan. First of all, I didn’t really understand what his plan was on first read, and I ESPECIALLY didn’t understand why he took the time to explain it to her. Second off, I didn’t understand Maggie’s counterplan (I don’t think it’s explained in too many words?) and I ESPECIALLY didn’t understand how they planned to have Kai survive. (Now that I’ve had time to think about it I suppose it’s related to his fast healing situation probably, and they just decided to murk him and see if he was actually immortal or whatever the fuck.) Also Kai and Maggie had that whole conversation about their love life right in front of Niezghani………messy as fuck and also is this really the time?????

One thing I really liked about the beginning of the book was that Maggie was such an unreliable narrator when it came to Niezghani. Like, it was pretty obvious that he’s garbage from the beginning, but Maggie just idolizes this man and you have to like scream into the book WHYY??? But the only way that she’s able to idolize him that way is that he presents himself as a mentor, as an authority, and maybe not so much as a caring figure as much as someone to look up to. He is, if nothing else, RESPECTABLE. But when he finally shows up in the Maggie v Niezghani fight, he is not respectable. He is overtly cruel in a way everyone, including Maggie, can see. He is overtly manipulative. He is overtly uncaring and honestly terrible. But this portrayal of him is SO MUCH LESS NUANCED than it was at the beginning of the book. I wish Roanhorse had had the guts to make him more complicated. To make him ACT apologetic or ACT like a mentor, but to make him a hypocrite. That, to me, would have been much more interesting. I understand that trauma informed a big part of the reason Maggie trusted him in the first place, but I wanted to meet the smooth and enchanting man that Maggie fell in love with but all I saw was this horrible person who never even tries to hide how horrible he is.

Of course, as this is just the first book, we don’t really know what is to come. Since Niezghani is just chillin under the dirt, I think we can assume that he’ll be back. Nonetheless, I’m a bit disappointed that he was pacified/restrained at the end of this book. I kind of hoped that after this confrontation, Maggie would have an epiphany about all the shit he put her through, and then in following books he would be the main antagonist. They would have various run-ins, but only in the final book has she truly built up the strength to get her comeuppance. Or something like that. I just wanted Niezghani’s role to be stretched out is all. I wanted her arc of truly unpacking all of that mess to be over the course of several books, not just one novel in which she’s also distracted by her budding romance with Kai and also the monster stuff.

So yea. It’s a good book. There’s problems, as I’ve clearly stated, but honestly a lot of them come across to me as rookie errors. This is her debut novel, and I don’t think it’s that weird for her to use these tropes in ways that I as a reader don’t care for. However, I definitely think that the pieces are there for her to make excellent use of her setting and characters and pull together a really energetic and thrilling series. Looking forward to returning to the Sixth World!

This past winter, my husband Adam brought up a news story about a cult leader in Brazil who had been arrested for sexual assault. “That’s not the guy you went to see, is it?” “Of course not,” I answered, “my guy wasn’t a cult leader.” It took several more mentions before I decided to read this story for myself. The predator turned out to be “my guy,” indeed — John of God, whom I’ve credited with helping me find myself. “Did you go there when you hit rock bottom?” Adam asked. “My rock bottom was a decade long.” It came out as a joke; we both laughed. But I wasn’t kidding. My current life as a wife and mother of two girls bears little resemblance to the decade in question — the period of hopelessness and stagnation that enveloped most of my 20s. I needed a good therapist and antidepressants (which I eventually got to). Before that, like many, I turned to spirituality. I studied reiki and meditation. I read Eckhart Tolle, Abraham Hicks, Gary Zukav and countless others. And I traveled from New York to Abadiânia, Brazil, to meet João Teixeira de Faria, known as João de Deus or John of God. For years I referred to that trip as visiting an ashram. In reality, it was the compound of a medium who claimed to channel the spirits of doctors and saviors. Related Video: Growing Up in an Apocalyptic Cult 0:00 4:08 'Nobody even knew it was a cult until way later' John of God wasn’t the first healer I sought out. During my “rock bottom” days, I dropped $200 on a charlatan in Queens, New York. She told me I’d been cursed and wanted me to cough up 200 more for her to de-curse me. Another time, someone recommended a Russian mystic to my mom, who was desperate to help me. He was a Soviet immigrant like us and lived in a dark Brooklyn apartment crammed with Russian Orthodox depictions of Jesus. When I went to see him, he offered to “manually release” my curse, as he held his hands alarmingly close to my crotch. I politely declined, payed him and left. John of God was seemingly on a level above everyone else. I got introduced to him through my uncle Misha, who was fighting cancer. Misha was more sarcastic than pious. He was well-read and took an interest in everything worldly. I would never have expected him to go the spiritual route ― until he got sick. My dad accompanied Misha to see the healer in Brazil. They returned hopeful and with an air of peace. Though I wasn’t physically ill, I wanted to go too. My spirit was broken. My depression first took hold when I immigrated to America at age 8. I restrained sobs in my new, crowded Brooklyn classroom. I pined for the lost order and familiarity of my childhood in Riga, Latvia. It wasn’t a perfect place by any means. Most Jews there, like my own ancestors, were killed during the Holocaust. My family lived in a communal apartment with strangers. The infamous Soviet lines for food and toilet paper were very much a reality. But it was all I had known. In America, I faced bullying and, perhaps, a lifelong identity crisis. Who did I have to be to be liked and accepted? I changed my name — Asya to Jessie — and I hardened myself. Or so I thought. View photos Me in second grade in the Soviet Union. (Courtesy Of Jessie Asya Kanzer) More At 21, when I ended up in a bed I didn’t want to be in with an internship supervisor I didn’t even find attractive, I was bewildered. I had been miserably toiling away in business school, looking for an out. This film production internship was a godsend. I cried as he took off my clothes, the word “No” stuck in my throat. Why did I go to his claustrophobic apartment in the first place? How naïve was I to think he would actually do what he said ― show me the film he was working on? I buried that incident as best I could. But my trust in myself was gone. For the next few years, I struggled to find my footing. When a car ran a red light and crashed into mine, my concussed brain got a much needed respite. I barely minded the scar on my face. Living with my parents, I tried my hand at various jobs. Nothing stuck. I couldn’t make a relationship work, or friendships for that matter. “You’re too high-maintenance,” my best friend told me as I gave her a hard time yet again for having a life away from me. “I need a break.” I wanted my monkey mind to shut up. I wanted to stop picking my skin, making it bleed over every blemish. I wanted to be normal. Using the insurance money I got from the car accident, I purchased airfare for my pilgrimage. I booked an English-speaking guide who would lead a group of us to “The Casa” where the healing took place. I read everything I could about John of God. I filled my suitcase with the light-colored clothing we were supposed to wear there. And I waited in anticipation to leave my broken self behind. View photos Me outside The Casa in Abadiânia, Brazil, where John of God could be found. (Courtesy Of Jessie Asya Kanzer) More Alone in Abadiânia for two weeks, I settled in at a simple pousada (guesthouse) that was walking distance from The Casa. It was a small rural town — quiet, filled with untamed nature. I slept with a broom nearby because strange giant bugs liked to settle above my bed. There was no television or internet to distract me from what I came to do: heal. Meeting the medium was a solemn process. Hundreds of people in white flocked to The Casa every morning — some in wheelchairs, others frail from chemo. In an orderly line, we waited to go before him so he could prescribe our cures. Mine was as follows: Five trips to the local sacred waterfall Four months without sex, alcohol or black pepper Four bottles of blessed herbal capsules A translator quickly scribbled these directions on a small piece of paper. I met many kind people, some of whom journeyed to see the spiritualist yearly ― folks who had dedicated their lives to a commune for the disabled, women with cancer who still had the most positive outlook … and myself, the original me who wasn’t eaten up by fear or loneliness or self-pity. I liked her. View photos En route to The Casa in Abadiânia. (Courtesy Of Jessie Asya Kanzer) More For three hours a day, I sat in meditation in the “current room,” helping to conduct energy for healings. It felt special, purposeful. I napped, hiked, and stood under that freezing holy waterfall. I prayed in front of The Casa’s triangle — a big wooden wall hanging whose three sides represented faith, love and charity. And then I went home. I was ready to start anew, but it took a lot more trial and error to get myself together. I often appealed to the spirits that John of God purported to channel, surrounding myself with crystals from Abadiânia and with a replica of that magic triangle signed by the man himself. As an actress-waitress, I moved to Los Angeles — only to realize I longed for ordinary family life. I became a 30-year-old social media peon back in New York. I read the Tao Te Ching and lived simply. I found love. Uncle Misha passed away a year after my trip. My mom had a photo of him on her mantle that was taken in Brazil — he was resting his chin on his fist like Rodin’s “The Thinker.” He looked whole. Then, in December 2018, João Teixeira de Faria was arrested on charges of rape and statutory rape. Hundreds of allegations were brought against him by women and girls from all over the world, including his own daughter. Even more shockingly, he was accused of running a baby trafficking scheme, where young sex slaves bore children he sold to hopeful parents overseas. Allegedly, the “handmaids” were murdered after 10 years of service. In another disturbing twist, activist Sabrina Bittencourt, whose work led to John of God’s arrest, ended her life by suicide in February. She had left Brazil after receiving death threats from his followers and was living under protection in Barcelona, Spain. She was the mother of three. The guru I sought after getting date-raped was likely a rapist himself — and a madman. I had fallen for him, but I was in good company. Renowned spiritual teacher Wayne Dyer sang John of God’s praises. My idol Oprah Winfrey interviewed him in 2012 and said she felt humbled and filled with a sense of peace. My father and my uncle believed in him, too. When people are sick, whether of body or soul, they will do anything to get better. It was devastating that a “miracle maker” took advantage of those most vulnerable. I’d been a cog in a machine that gave power to a monster. My beatific memories of healing were a farce. I felt lost, yearning to recalibrate. I began the process of erasing John of God from my psyche and from my home. I trashed his magic triangle, which hung in my daughter’s nursery. A delicate rose quartz crystal went in the garbage as well. I kept another crystal from Abadiânia, though. It was heavy and solid. It made me think not of John of God, but of myself — the strong self I started to rediscover there. I remembered also the godly travelers who came together in hope — it was they who brought the peace. I have realized that no one trip or person can fix those of us with demons. It takes a commitment we try to uphold daily — whether in an ashram, a therapist’s office or, like me, in a house in the suburbs, with a husband, two kids and a cat.

I CAME LATE TO Raymond Chandler, and I don’t know if it was in the best or worst possible way. I had my degree in literature, and I had read not a single word by Chandler. It was a rainy afternoon in London and I needed to kill a couple of hours, so I went to see a showing of The Big Sleep. The film I saw, however, wasn’t the 1946 Bogart-Bacall classic (which I’d only heard about), it was the 1978 remake directed by Michael Winner and set improbably, unconvincingly, in England. The film is universally despised. Roger Ebert said it “feels kind of embalmed,” although plot-wise it’s strangely faithful to the novel, and the cast is fantastic — Jimmy Stewart, Candy Clark, Richard Boone, Oliver Reed, with Robert Mitchum as Philip Marlowe. Mitchum has always seemed to me the perfect Marlowe, and far more believably tough and insolent than Humphrey Bogart; I just wish he’d played the part 20 years earlier. He first played Marlowe in 1975 in Farewell, My Lovely, when he was in his late 50s; he was 60 by the time he made The Big Sleep, and he doesn’t look a youthful 60.

You could argue that if Chandler’s genius could shine through that dreadful adaptation, then it’s pretty much unassailable. And shine through it did. I was hooked, and went back to the source. I immediately read The Big Sleep (1939), his first novel, and then the rest of the oeuvre, and I’ve been increasingly hooked ever since. I consider myself an enthusiast rather than an expert or a scholar, although there’s a shelf in my office heavy with Chandler-related volumes: the letters, the biographies, the notebooks, and various Los Angeles–related items that include Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles (1987), Chandlertown: The Los Angeles of Philip Marlowe (1983), and Tailing Philip Marlowe: Three Tours of Los Angeles — Based on the Work of Raymond Chandler (2003). The Annotated Big Sleep, with a short but excellent foreword by Jonathan Lethem, will eventually join them.

But here’s the question: when I read The Big Sleep for the first time (or subsequently, for that matter), was there much in there that I didn’t understand? And I’m not talking about plot matters such as who killed the chauffeur, or why the cute but borderline-insane murderess isn’t prosecuted, but rather matters of fact and vocabulary.

Did I feel the need to reach for the dictionary and look up “swell” when Marlowe says to Vivian Sternwood, “I don’t mind your showing me your legs. They’re very swell legs”? Did I wonder what a jerkin was, or a chiseller, or a bookplate? Was I puzzled by the terms “hot toddy” and “got the wind up”? Did the words parquetry, stucco, or croupier seem unfamiliar? After I’d read that General Sternwood was propped up in “a huge canopied bed like the one Henry the Eighth died in,” did I feel the urge to check the date of Henry VIII’s death?

Honestly, I did not — but Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Dean Rizzuto, the three editors of The Annotated Big Sleep, certainly think that all those things I’ve listed are worthy of explanation, which, I think, raises the question of who reads The Big Sleep and who those annotators think reads The Big Sleep.

Pico Iyer, in his essay “The Mystery of Influence” (2002), says of Marlowe, “Of all the great figures of the twentieth century, he seems one of the most durable, in part because he travels so well and so widely.” And he tells us that Haruki Murakami began his career by translating Chandler into kanji and katakana scripts. It’s not hard to imagine that Japanese readers might find something of the noble, tarnished samurai in Marlowe, though what they make of a line like, “She has to blow and she’s shatting on her uppers. She figures the peeper can get her some dough,” is anybody’s guess. Somehow they cope.

¤

The fact is, it’s rare, if ever, that we read a book and understand every single word, every literary allusion, every local or historical reference, just as we don’t understand every single thing we encounter as we go about our lives. And, of course, with fiction it gets harder depending on the age of the work and our cultural distance from its milieu. In a piece on John Updike’s Rabbit Is Rich (1981), Martin Amis writes, “Like its predecessors, the novel is crammed with allusive topicalities; in a few years’ time it will probably read like a Ben Jonson comedy.” I imagine there may be readers of that essay who could use a little annotation explaining the nature of Ben Jonson’s comedies.

If the common reader happily misses a few references, we tend to take it for granted that the best literary works will require explanations, glosses, and readers’ guides. Many have read James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) with a map of Dublin, Ireland, and a copy of Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses (1988, by Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman) close at hand. Joyce would have been delighted.

Steven C. Weisenburger’s A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon’s Novel (1988) is a great help in understanding much abstruse material in Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 masterwork; although, when I laid hands on the compendium (a good decade after I’d first read the novel), I was thrilled to find that he’d got various things wrong, including not knowing the English meaning of “minge.” And this is one of the joys of annotated volumes: seeing what the editors did and didn’t explain.

And it doesn’t stop at high literature. There’s a subgenre of annotation that seeks not to explain evident difficulties, but to show the complications in apparently uncomplicated texts. Martin Gardner is the boss here. Having annotated Lewis Carroll’s Alice volumes (and declared Carroll to be sexually “innocent”), he went on to annotate books by G. K. Chesterton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), and Ernest Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat: A Ballad of the Republic — Sung in the Year 1888” (1888). His publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, runs a list of annotated volumes that includes The Annotated Little Women (2015), The Annotated Peter Pan (2011), and The Annotated Wizard of Oz (2000). Do these works need annotation? The question is moot, since there’s clearly a market and an audience; and if we’ve learned anything in the last several decades, it’s that scholarship can be applied to popular, or even low, culture, just as successfully as it can be applied to high art.

¤

Raymond Chandler would have understood the dichotomy and might have reveled in the contradictions as they applied to his own work. In writing for a pulp audience, he knew he was slumming, inhabiting the less respected and less examined districts of the city of words. But he was not modest about his talents or his ambitions. He’d had an English classical education at London’s Dulwich College, which contained Marlowe House. He knew that his hero’s name might evoke Christopher Marlowe for some readers, but certainly not for all. The earliest version of Chandler’s detective is named Mallory, as in Thomas Malory, the author of Le Morte d’Arthur (1485), but maybe he came to think that was going too far.

In a 1949 letter to Hardwick Moseley, Chandler wrote, “The aim is not essentially different from the aim of Greek tragedy, but we are dealing with a public that is only semi-literate and we have to make an art of a language they can understand.” His invocation of Grecian heights strikes me as going way too far.

¤

No doubt the “semi-literate” public will not be rushing to read The Annotated Big Sleep, but for the rest of us, there’s a huge amount to enjoy in the book. I found myself more intrigued by the background information than by the editors’ close reading of the text, which sometimes feels like they’re breathing over your shoulder and making arch remarks, telling you how to read (for example, “Carmen is back to her default between the kitten and the tiger — for now”), but no doubt some readers will feel the opposite way.

Some of this background comes into the “who’d have thought it?” category. For instance, we’re told that in the 1930s, Los Angeles had 300 casinos and over 40 newspapers; hard to say which of those numbers is more surprising. Information about the city’s population and ethnic makeup is fascinating. I don’t think many of us regard 1930s Hollywood as the center of Jewish life in Los Angeles. The book quotes the journalist Garet Garrett (not his birth name), who visited the city in 1930 and wrote,

you have to begin with the singular fact that in a population of a million and a quarter, every other person you see has been there less than five years. More than nine out of every ten you see have been there less than fifteen years.

In 1939, the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration authored a book titled California: A Guide to the Golden State. In it, they called Los Angeles the “fifth largest Mexican city in the world” (a distinction that nowadays belongs to Chicago). We also learn that between 1920 and 1930, 30,000 Filipinos migrated to California. They were known as dandies and sharp dressers, which explains Marlowe’s line to Carmen Sternwood that she’s “[c]ute as a Filipino on Saturday night.” I guess this is a racial slur, but as these things go it seems quite gentle.

There are some revelations relating to Marlowe himself — details that are easy to miss or simply skim over. For instance, Marlowe’s description of himself on the novel’s first page, “I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it,” is army slang — “neat, clean, shaved and sober” means ready for inspection. Later, in a description of Marlowe’s apartment, we read he has “an advertising calendar showing the Quints rolling around on a sky-blue floor, in pink dresses.” I had never thought to wonder who the “Quints” were, but we’re told these are the Dionne quintuplets, identical French-Canadian girls born in 1934, the first quintuplets to survive past infancy. A couple of them are still alive, if Wikipedia is to be believed.

There’s also an interesting consideration of Marlowe’s daily rate — $25 plus expenses, which some clients find a bit pricey. It’s the equivalent of $400 in today’s money, which sounds a tidy sum, although considering what Marlowe has to go through to earn his money, it’s not altogether unreasonable.

The annotations make much of the geographical and topographical background to the novel, describing Laurel Canyon, the Pacific Coast Highway, Franklin Avenue, and noting landmarks such as the Sunset Towers and Bullocks on Wilshire. But as becomes obvious to anyone who’s tried to walk in Marlowe’s footsteps (something I did when I first started living in Los Angeles), one of Chandler’s skills was to blend a detailed real city with one of his own invention. So yes, being told that Geiger’s bookshop is on Hollywood Boulevard by the corner of Las Palmas seems utterly precise, but Stanley Rose, who had a bookstore at more or less that location, isn’t much of a model for Geiger: you’d find Rose hanging out in his store talking with Hollywood literati rather than taking nude photographs of drugged heiresses. At other times, Chandler simply made up the names of streets; Laverne Terrace and Alta Brea, for example, sound completely authentic, but you won’t find them on any map.

The editors, inevitably, and reasonably enough, wade into the inscrutable and contested sexuality of Chandler and Marlowe. I’ve never been sure whether Marlowe’s homophobia (as Chandler wouldn’t have called it) was his own, or Chandler’s, or simply something that pulp readers would have expected from a tough guy detective. It’s well known that quite a few people who met Chandler assumed he was gay, but that raises more questions than it answers, and there’s certainly no evidence that he ever had any sexual relationships with men. Still, the annotations are interesting in themselves. They tell us that the “1920s and early ’30s saw no fewer than ten new terms for ‘homosexual’ recorded,” including “queer.” We also learn that, as a result of prohibition, gay and lesbian subcultures had become more accepted in select quarters, while still remaining hidden. Once you were breaking the law by drinking illegally in clubs and speakeasies, you were less likely to cut up rough about seeing some same sex couple and a drag act or two.

The editors also raise the possibility that when Vivian Sternwood, wearing a “mannish shirt and tie,” says to Marlowe, “I was beginning to think perhaps you worked in bed, like Marcel Proust,” she may be accusing him of being gay. I don’t quite buy that, but then, I don’t have to.

I do buy, eagerly, the book’s analysis of the instances where Chandler “cannibalized” his own early stories and incorporated them in the novel. They show, despite Clive James’s insistence to the contrary, that Chandler’s writing improved very rapidly indeed in the six years between the publication of his first short story, “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot” (1933), and The Big Sleep (1939).

The book is illustrated with dozens of images, book and magazine covers, movie stills, maps, period photographs. These are well chosen and very useful. I wish some of them were bigger, especially the maps, and I wish some of those pulp covers were in color, but you can’t have everything.

For what it’s worth, I only found one error, maybe half an error. The book has Le Corbusier as sole designer of the chaise longue basculante: these days Charlotte Perriand is usually given her due as co-designer.

The book’s bibliography is lengthy without being exhibitionistic, and the editors have even managed to track down a treatise on “the lost art of walking,” by one Geoff Nicholson, that contains a short section about Chandler. Top-notch sleuthing. Marlowe would be proud.

¤

Geoff Nicholson is a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Review of Books. His latest novel, The Miranda, is out now.

The post “Marlowe Would Be Proud”: On “The Annotated Big Sleep” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2A54PBv

Great book but quite a few typos There are a lot of typos in this book, otherwise it's a great text book that explains everything well. The only thing I would say is that you have to use another book if you really want to understand the channel pathways. Deadmen's book on acupuncture does a much better better job with the channel pathway and point location pictures and descriptions. Go to Amazon

so I am satisfied. CAM has long been one of the go to texts for the NCCAOM exam. I had purchased an older edition at a used bookstore, only to find there had been very important technical revisions, with critical differences. I then borrowed this text from a classmate. Interestingly, when my own updated version arrived, the new text was 1/2 inch thinner than the older printing of the same edition. I compared the texts, including the tables and images, appendices and chapter headings, and found no difference. Apparently, it is just a thinner paper. Paging through, the paper does seem a little smoother, and it does not really seem flimsy, so I am satisfied. Go to Amazon

Chinese Acupuncture and Moxibustion is an excellent resource! The text traces the history of acupuncture from ancient times and gives a thorough, yet easy to understand, account. Also, the information is invaluable throughout the book! There are detailed diagrams showing the meridians and acupoints, collaterals, as well as such detail as the Foot-Shaoyin or Hand Shaoyang. The General Principles of Treatment are discussed as well as the Principles for Prescription. It is easy to read yet well written and thorough and well worth the cost. This is a book you will want to keep as a resource and reference. Go to Amazon

Three Stars some points locations are way different than Manioca book's Go to Amazon

Required Not my favorite TCM textbook, but my professor's say it will become my favorite after I practice. We'll see. Go to Amazon

Excellent shipping and quality Product as described. Excellent shipping and quality. I am glad to have it. Go to Amazon

Valuable resource The translation to english may make this a confusing read at times, but it is a good book not to be skipped over because of the translation. This book is still well-used by many professionals as a good basic guide and I can already see the value of this book for many years to come. Go to Amazon

... the headaches of cramming if youre a slow learner like me. I need multiple tools to make thongs ... Get this book & the DVD-ROM to save yourself the headaches of cramming if youre a slow learner like me. I need multiple tools to make thongs stick. Combine this book & the same DVD-ROM and save the headaches for something else Go to Amazon

Five Stars Five Stars Five Stars Five Stars missing pages Five Stars Five Stars LOVE IT 😒 Got this book for the acupuncture license preparation. It ...

Great book but quite a few typos There are a lot of typos in this book, otherwise it's a great text book that explains everything well. The only thing I would say is that you have to use another book if you really want to understand the channel pathways. Deadmen's book on acupuncture does a much better better job with the channel pathway and point location pictures and descriptions. Go to Amazon

so I am satisfied. CAM has long been one of the go to texts for the NCCAOM exam. I had purchased an older edition at a used bookstore, only to find there had been very important technical revisions, with critical differences. I then borrowed this text from a classmate. Interestingly, when my own updated version arrived, the new text was 1/2 inch thinner than the older printing of the same edition. I compared the texts, including the tables and images, appendices and chapter headings, and found no difference. Apparently, it is just a thinner paper. Paging through, the paper does seem a little smoother, and it does not really seem flimsy, so I am satisfied. Go to Amazon

Chinese Acupuncture and Moxibustion is an excellent resource! The text traces the history of acupuncture from ancient times and gives a thorough, yet easy to understand, account. Also, the information is invaluable throughout the book! There are detailed diagrams showing the meridians and acupoints, collaterals, as well as such detail as the Foot-Shaoyin or Hand Shaoyang. The General Principles of Treatment are discussed as well as the Principles for Prescription. It is easy to read yet well written and thorough and well worth the cost. This is a book you will want to keep as a resource and reference. Go to Amazon

Three Stars some points locations are way different than Manioca book's Go to Amazon

Required Not my favorite TCM textbook, but my professor's say it will become my favorite after I practice. We'll see. Go to Amazon

Excellent shipping and quality Product as described. Excellent shipping and quality. I am glad to have it. Go to Amazon

Valuable resource The translation to english may make this a confusing read at times, but it is a good book not to be skipped over because of the translation. This book is still well-used by many professionals as a good basic guide and I can already see the value of this book for many years to come. Go to Amazon

... the headaches of cramming if youre a slow learner like me. I need multiple tools to make thongs ... Get this book & the DVD-ROM to save yourself the headaches of cramming if youre a slow learner like me. I need multiple tools to make thongs stick. Combine this book & the same DVD-ROM and save the headaches for something else Go to Amazon

Five Stars Five Stars Five Stars Five Stars missing pages Five Stars Five Stars LOVE IT 😒 Got this book for the acupuncture license preparation. It ...

GOOD CHEER RECORDS HOLIDAY SHOWCASE

I've expressed before my affection for Good Cheer Records, a local label that emerged from the DIY all ages indie rock scene in Portland, but whose personnel have connections and influence in the mainstream of local and national indie music. Geek rockerMo Troper, also a writer for the Portland Mercury (cleverly disguised as Morgan Troper), even scored the coveted Pitchfork review, something which has eluded many of the best bands in town at the moment. Troper, the label's co-founder with Blake Hickman, has vanished to Los Angeles, replaced by Maya Stoner, a performer in several GC bands. Kyle Bates' project Drowse has seen praise from Vice's Noisey blog and SPIN Magazine, while another one of the label's star acts, Little Star, have gotten great reviews all over the place, including here on ROCK AND ROLL PORTLAND, OR. My favorite Good Cheer band, Mr. Bones, is sadly over, but the label, with so many other good acts, has hardly been damaged by these shifts--or a scandal that saw Jackson Walker, a member of Good Cheer band Naked Hour, excommunicated in the wake of his much younger ex-girlfriend's allegations of physical/emotional abuse. Good Cheer's bands are each unique, but broadly speaking they traffic in a hyper-sincere, heart-on-sleeve, guitar-based pop/rock that seems to trace its roots back to the 90's and early 00's, a time before MP3s--or at least a time when a single MP3 took a whole morning to download. It's the art-damaged cool and guitar abuse of bands like Pavement and Sonic Youth injected with the bloodletting melodicism of emo and the sweetness of twee-pop. It's a reminder of the truth in that old quote about Pavement being "the band that launched a thousand Weezers." These tendencies make the label's roster a refreshing departure, perhaps even a necessary counter-reaction, to the various fusions of psychedelic rock, dream pop, and blissed-out oddball party music so often seems to dominate Portlandian "pop". The earnestness of Good Cheer's bands, which the label proudly declares free of "mercenary ambition", makes a lot of what was represented by 2016's now-tainted "Mt. Portland" compilation seem positively decadent. On the other side of the coin, that comp's hip groups, often resented across the music scene for their perceived complacence and supposedly undeserved "fame", offer a sense of easy fun and trippy euphoria that the Good Cheer bands often lack--the label's name is pretty ironic, since good cheer is just about the last thing you'll get from most of these bands. Rather, they provide what Kurt Cobain ambivalently called "the comfort in being sad," the paradoxical sense of suffering as painful but life-affirming. At best that means a strangely joyous catharsis on the other side of the pain, at worst it might be written off as wallowing, navel gazing, and irksome preciousness. It's not for everybody, but it's way up my moody emo kid alley. These bands' music is about intimate feelings--even at its most bombastic, it's introverted almost as a rule, and perhaps that's how they create the feeling that they're Your Special Band, even when you're, as I was on this December Wednesday night, surrounded by a bunch of other people watching them. Good Cheer maintains the sense that their acts are the best band in your shitty hometown, who you see in some basement when you're 17, and finally, you've found a place where you fit in, finally, some people who speak for you. Perhaps the ideal place to see these bands is indeed someone's basement, but it was also fitting to see them in a major mid-sized venue like the Holocene--it was a sign that Good Cheer have emerged from a scrappy underground operation to become a major force in that vague genre known as "Portland pop". I didn't catch the entire show, which crammed six acts, successfully, into three hours, but the first group I caught was ALIEN BOY, one of the moodier bands on this moody label. Frontwoman Sonia Weber sings with the lovelorn yearning of Morrissey, but without the sass--unlike with the Moz, we never wonder if she's just milking it. The guitars hiss like TV static and twinkle like stars seen out a car window in the vanishing autumn, the rhythm section sprinting with teenage energy, paradoxically despondent and enthusiastic. At the Holocene, Weber's vocals seemed pretty off key a lot of the time, but it didn't really matter. The melody's largely in the guitars, and even the melody isn't that important. It's the mood the band creates with all of these elements that makes them such a powerful emotive unit. Even off-key, Weber's vocals are the definite not-so-secret weapon here, her contralto timber pitched perfectly in the dead center of the human vocal spectrum, neither male nor female, and therefore unusually universal in a social order still cleaved traumatically in two by a gender binary inherited from a religious order no one even believes in anymore. The group's latest EP, "Stay Alive", is a fantastic piece of gothic power pop, the fury of the instruments on tracks like "Burning II" contrasted to heart-rending effect with the vulnerability of Weber's vocals. These guys are one of my favorite acts Good Cheer has in its corner for 2017. Next up were a pair of musical twin bands, both involving Kyle Bates: DROWSE and FLOATING ROOM. Drowse is the more ambient of two, creating a storm of darkly psychedelic mood energy, as if Bates were some mad scientist attempting to isolate The Feels in their pure plasma form. Bates has been admirably candid about his struggle with clinical depression, even in his press releases, and some of his music is meant to be a literal translation of these horrifying experiences in musical form. As a person who's visited similar hells, I can definitely relate, and if you haven't, Drowse can give you a taste. It's the kind of music you bathe in almost more than listen to. I find it pretty hard to articulate with a vocabulary developed for pop songs--do yourself a favor and just listen. Undergirding the pure emotional whirlpool is a theoretical edge, at least according to Drowse's bio, which references Roland Barthes and Sarah Manguso alongside Mt. Erie and Unwound. I'm pretty sure those are uncommon influences for an indie music bio. Floating Room is the more conventional indie rock side of Bates' muse, but he still hangs in the background, and Maya Stoner writes lyrics and sings lead, while he continues his role as a sound-sculptor. Under this moniker he deals in his version of the Good Cheer house sound, described on the group's Bandcamp page as "the type of sadness felt at 4 in the morning, reserved for the heartbroken and the nervous." The guitar squalls of Drowse, almost more like weather patterns than music, wash over the structure of the songs like photo filters, providing a depth and texture that the more purely rock n roll acts on Good Cheer can't touch. Eschewing the crunchier "alt rock" guitar tones and punk rock enthusiasms of Alien Boy, Mr. Bones, or Cool American for a generously reverberated, fuzz-soaked, more plodding sound, Floating Room crosses definitively into shoegaze territory. It's gloriously eerie and ice-cold in temperature. It's the perfect soundtrack for walking through the woods in the snow, when all sounds are muffled by the falling flakes a the beautiful deathly calm seems to pervade the landscape--and it is a landscape, one you can seemingly gaze far into. On some tracks, the band is almost too delicate for this world, and the sounds seem made of glass, or icicles, ready to crash and fall the moment the temperature gets back above freezing. It's music for winter, for the low-hanging winter sun, gone as soon as it comes up, peering over the leafless treetops, secretly gathering power again once the solstice has passed. TURTLENECKED, the stage name of Harrison Smith, came up next, playing a very short set. Lanky and nervous, he paced the stage, singing R&B songs about being neurotic and narcissistic and romantic, all from electronic backing tracks played from his laptop. It was a very amusing break from all the intensity--even as he sang about heartbreak or unrequited love, Smith was funny, unlike anyone else who I saw perform that night. The stuff on his Bandcamp is mostly minimal indie pop, just electric guitar and drums, very dressed down and sparse, focused on Smith's deadpan vocals, both snarky and pathetic, but always charismatic. An older album, "Pure Plush Bone Cage", was fuzzier and noisier, but Smith's newer style, clean and clear, works better, matching the music's emotional exhibitionism. This presumably even newer R&B stuff is another pretty much genius leap forward. Turtlenecked captures the fine line between self-pity and self-aggrandizement, or rather signals its non-existence, refusing to apologize for anything--or else apologizing for everything--it doesn't really matter which--who ever believes an apology anyway? Good Cheer's brand can, as I said above, come off as overly precious, but Turtlenecked is an exception--one gets the wonderful sense that he barely even believes himself, but it's only the same sincerity of his labelmates doubling back on itself. Morrissey knows this trick well--it's basically his bread and butter. While most of the Good Cheer bands seem to work as band entities, Harrison Smith of one of the few who doesn't really need a band, or for whom any backing band would only be a backing band. He's just an entertaining and engaging enough figure in his own right--perhaps only Mo Troper, among his labelmates, rivals him for sheer personal charisma. Finally was the band I was most keen on seeing, COOL AMERICAN, named for a brand of Doritos. It's the project of singer-guitarist Nathan Tucker, a serious-looking dude who blew through the set with apparently great anxiety, often failing to sing directly into the microphone, seemingly wound tighter than a human can be wound. The band's tall bass player, Tim Howe, with his goofy grin and a santa hat borrowed from Maya Stoner, provided the necessary humorous counterpoint. Cool American's style is a pleasantly loose but melancholy power pop, filled with breezy riffs, mid-tempo grooves and smoothy shifting tempos and beats. But there's also a punk edge in it--at some point in every song, Tucker upshifts into a cathartic yelp, from which I felt sympathy pangs in my own vocal chords, before this explosion of his nervous energy receded, and he began to recharge again. Tucker's vocal range is limited, but the melody's in the guitars, spinning circles around each other, swirling and looping when they aren't exploding. Probably the most direct example of my Pavement-meets-emo description above, Cool American's unusual combination of mellowness and tension feels very much like West Coast life as I've come to know it, the cycle of putting up a veneer of "no worries" chillness and having it break down in the face of un-chill reality, only to put it up again, because fuck life, life should be better than it is. Better to try and fail to be chill and hopeful than live in cynical detachment. And for all their moodiness, the Good Cheer bands are never cynical. They don't just express heavy feelings, they believe in them, affirming their value and meaning in a society that usually runs scared from them. Unlike so much of the buzzy music in Portland, these bands never come off as careerist--you get the sense that any day one of them might break up because so-and-so had to move away for school or whatever. One could be cynical in response and argue that this sincerity is just another brand, but if so, I'll take it over the glassy-eyed smugness and empty glitz of so much of what passes for indie music these days. Long live Good Cheer.

Great book but quite a few typos There are a lot of typos in this book, otherwise it's a great text book that explains everything well. The only thing I would say is that you have to use another book if you really want to understand the channel pathways. Deadmen's book on acupuncture does a much better better job with the channel pathway and point location pictures and descriptions. Go to Amazon

so I am satisfied. CAM has long been one of the go to texts for the NCCAOM exam. I had purchased an older edition at a used bookstore, only to find there had been very important technical revisions, with critical differences. I then borrowed this text from a classmate. Interestingly, when my own updated version arrived, the new text was 1/2 inch thinner than the older printing of the same edition. I compared the texts, including the tables and images, appendices and chapter headings, and found no difference. Apparently, it is just a thinner paper. Paging through, the paper does seem a little smoother, and it does not really seem flimsy, so I am satisfied. Go to Amazon

Chinese Acupuncture and Moxibustion is an excellent resource! The text traces the history of acupuncture from ancient times and gives a thorough, yet easy to understand, account. Also, the information is invaluable throughout the book! There are detailed diagrams showing the meridians and acupoints, collaterals, as well as such detail as the Foot-Shaoyin or Hand Shaoyang. The General Principles of Treatment are discussed as well as the Principles for Prescription. It is easy to read yet well written and thorough and well worth the cost. This is a book you will want to keep as a resource and reference. Go to Amazon

Three Stars some points locations are way different than Manioca book's Go to Amazon

Required Not my favorite TCM textbook, but my professor's say it will become my favorite after I practice. We'll see. Go to Amazon

Excellent shipping and quality Product as described. Excellent shipping and quality. I am glad to have it. Go to Amazon

Valuable resource The translation to english may make this a confusing read at times, but it is a good book not to be skipped over because of the translation. This book is still well-used by many professionals as a good basic guide and I can already see the value of this book for many years to come. Go to Amazon

... the headaches of cramming if youre a slow learner like me. I need multiple tools to make thongs ... Get this book & the DVD-ROM to save yourself the headaches of cramming if youre a slow learner like me. I need multiple tools to make thongs stick. Combine this book & the same DVD-ROM and save the headaches for something else Go to Amazon

Five Stars Five Stars Five Stars Five Stars missing pages Five Stars Five Stars LOVE IT 😒 Got this book for the acupuncture license preparation. It ...