(b)logophile

This post is about my reaction to the drama in and around the Python community the last few days. It’s about me. It’s not directly about the events themselves (except to summarise), and one of its tentative conclusions is that my opinions about those events are structurally and essentially suspect because of my background. For that reason, and because there’s no way this blog could handle even a trickle of new traffic, I’m going to cen/sor the googleable details and skip linking: I’m not sure this post adds to the general conversation, so I don’t want it swept up in it even by accident. I’m writing it mainly for myself, to get it out of my system, and so I can look back in six months time and check: did I have it more-or-less right? Am I doing better?

(The story is very sad and could be triggery, be warned.)

It’s been awful quiet here, but we’ve been awful busy. I’m writing this from Greece, exactly one week after we arrived. We’ve packed our worldly possessions into Olga’s house (many of them in boxes under the stairs, waiting until we move somewhere more permanent); we’ve set up a standing desk in the bedroom for my temporary office; and we’re about to head off to Thessaloniki for a weekend of music workshops, concerts, and friends.

In the meantime, some natural processes have continued their course:

And some cultural ones also, leading to this announcement in the local paper:

For ease of auto-translation, the text reads:

ΜΕΛΛΟΝΤΕΣ ΓΑΜΟΙ: Ο Ντε Γιάκγερ Σάμσον – Τίκιτου του Πολ Γουιλιαμ Άλμπερτ και της Χέλεν Μαργκαρετ το γένος Πέμπερτον που γεννήθηκε στην Τάκακα της Ν. Ζηλανδίας και κατοικεί στην Ολλανδία και η Γρηγοριάδου ‘Ολγα του Ιωάννη και της Ελένης το γένος Στεφανίδου μου γεννήθηκε στο Αμαρούσιο Αττικής και κατοικεί στην Κατερίνη πρόκειται να παντρευτούν και ο γάμος τους (πολιτικός) θα γίνει στο Δημαρχείο της Κατερίνης.¹

We don’t have a date yet, but since Olga did the official stuff that produced this, I guess this means she says “Yes”. (Romantic, aren’t we?)

Notes:

1. Google makes this of it: “MELLONTES WEDDINGS: De Giakger Samson – Tikitou of Paul William Albert and Helen Margaret nee Pemperton pads born in New Zealand and lives in Holland and Grigoriadou Olga John and Helen nee Stefanidou I was born in Maroussi of Attica and lives in Katerini going to get married and their marriage (politician) will be held at City Hall Katerini.” Almost, google, almost. (“Politician” I get, but “pads”?) [↪]

The weekend project (which I planned to release with much fanfare on Sunday) got bogged down, so instead of writing something myself I’ll point you at a LanguageHat post on fish names. It, in turn, directs you to an Opinionator column on the problems of translation (but don’t skip the LH post: the comments section is as erudite as always and manages to transition from fish names all the way to French stairway architecture). If you enjoy the Opinionator piece, you probably will also like The Delighted States, which is about literary style and translation and the history of the novel, and which I haven’t finished reading so I’m not required to have a fully coherent opinion about it yet.

If that’s not enough to keep you going until my weekend project is finished, there’s nothing I can do for you.

I’m re-reading Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos series, as comfort reading for my winter blues and the stress of our upcoming move.¹ It’s power-fantasy (he’s an assassin! friends with the Empress! on a first-name basis with gods!) but with just enough self-aware edge to make me not feel horribly guilty about enjoying it.² And re-reading the series so far in quick succession is showing up some interesting things about his technique.

Firstly, his plotting is amazing. The very first book has callbacks to things that happened in Vlad’s past, that are call-forwards to several books further down the series. (I’m reading them in publication order, which is nothing at all like internal chronological order, even leaving aside the books which intertwine stories from different parts of Vlad’s life.)

Even in the first book, though, before you’ve really seen this plotting in action, he pulls a very clever trick. He introduces Vlad by showing him at two periods at the same time: in short flashbacks he describes his early childhood, while the majority of the action has him already a fairly powerful person, with special skills and Cool Stuff making him someone to take seriously, and with a number of even more powerful friends who help him out when he runs into something too big to deal with on his own. These skills and friends and so on are essential to the story of that book, but the clever bit is: Brust doesn’t really tell you how he got there. You see the hardcase kid making a start for himself, and then you see the hardcase assassin-made-good with the powerful sorcerous allies, and you take it on faith that there is some line between the two. (Successive books fill out that line a lot, although usually they drop yet more call-forwards in the process.)

The lesson I take from this is: if your main plotline requires some Cool Stuff available to make use of, don’t be afraid to say “I’ve got this Cool Stuff available, and I’ll tell you the story of how I got it some other day”. (The trick is, of course, to avoid giving the impression that you needed said Cool Stuff and that’s exactly why you’ve got it.)³

Lesson number two comes directly from Brust himself: the Cool Stuff Theory of Literature:

The Cool Stuff Theory of Literature is as follows: All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what’s cool. And that works all the way from the external trappings to the level of metaphor, subtext, and the way one uses words. In other words, I happen not to think that full-plate armor and great big honking greatswords are cool. I don’t like ‘em. I like cloaks and rapiers. So I write stories with a lot of cloaks and rapiers in ’em, ’cause that’s cool. Guys who like military hardware, who think advanced military hardware is cool, are not gonna jump all over my books, because they have other ideas about what’s cool.

The novel should be understood as a structure built to accommodate the greatest possible amount of cool stuff.

It’s a variant on the old “write what you know” trope, except it’s better: write what you think is cool.⁴

Lesson number three comes from how Brust deals with food. Vlad started his career running a restaurant, and he’s passionate about food: he often describes it in detail, and one of the books is structured around the courses of a dinner at a fancy restaurant (Dzur). These recipes aren’t just invented nonsense: people have tried them, apparently successfully. The point I take from this, though, is the difference between how Brust deals with food and how say Melville deals with whaling, or O’Brian with rigging: all that attention to detail is for Brust a side dish rather than the main meal. It’s there for colour, sometimes as a structural principle, for subtle characterisation, but never as the main material that the story is about. That’s clever.⁵

The last lesson comes from the scope of the Vlad Taltos series. It’s set in a fictional world with seventeen “Great Houses”, and each novel is named after one of the houses (except for one named after Vlad, and a planned final novel entitled The Last Contract). Bam: seventeen books (and change). But it’s taken Brust thirty years to get to book 14 (Jhereg came out in 1983, and he’s working on Hawk now). I wonder if he might be a bit sick of some aspects of the setting, by now? Maybe his politics or his views on personal relationships have changed, or even how cool he thinks rapiers and cloaks are. Or maybe they haven’t, it’s not really my business, but the point is: it’s a huge constraint to design yourself into such a large structure. Just because he’s getting away with it doesn’t mean that everyone has to try.

Notes:

1. I’m through the one where his marriage breaks down, which wasn’t very comforting at all. [↪]
2. As a schoolkid I enjoyed Stephen Donaldson’s Gap series. That’s the one with the rapist protagonist you’re supposed to feel sorry for. Sorry, no, the other one by him with a rapist protagonist you’re supposed to feel sorry for. The more popular one scared me off early with some disturbing imagery involving giants getting magically lobotomised; I’ve never gone back to see whether I was less disturbed by the rape scene, or just didn’t get that far. [↪]
3. I suspect that Brust has somewhere an outline that fills in all the main details to be covered in the 19 books the series is supposed to run to, although probably not how they are allocated to the books. If that’s true, he’s got a lot of Cool Stuff stored away to help him out of plotholes. [↪]
4. Makes you wonder about Donaldson. [↪]
5. I’m so taken with these ideas that I’m putting some research together for a heavily Brust-inspired novel of my own. (With overwhelming probability this will become not a novel but a series of notes towards a novel, but that’s no reason not to make a start on it.) The food-equivalent for me is, rather obviously, music and music-making. And the biggest hurdle I will face — if I make it over the first one of actually writing anything down — will be avoiding making it so much about music that nobody but me will want to read it. Note the part of the Cool Stuff Theory where your audience has to agree with you about the coolness. [↪]

Last night I forced myself to sleep at 4am, despite not having finished Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander. This afternoon I finished it, and immediately bought the next volume in the series. Yes, they are just as good as everyone says.

It seems I can’t copy/paste from the iOS Kindle app, grumble grump, so here is a much shorter extract than I would otherwise have included, painstakingly copied by hand. Stephen Maturin, a physician and a landsman, is having the niceties of masts and rigging explained to him by Mowett, the master’s mate.

“It is a pleasure to hear a man who thoroughly understands his profession. You are very exact, sir.”

“Oh, I hope the captains will say the same, sir,” cried Mowett. “When next we put into Gibraltar I am to go for my lieutenant’s examination again. Three senior captains sit upon you; and last time a very devilish captain asked me how many fathoms I should need for the main crowfoot, and how long the euphroe was. I could tell him now: it is fifty fathoms of three-quarter-inch line, though you would never credit it, and the euphroe is fourteen inches. I believe I could tell him anything that can even be attempted to be measured, except perhaps for the new mainyard, and I shall measure that with my tape before dinner. Should you like to hear some dimensions, sir?”

“I should like it of all things.”

This gentle humour runs through much of the novel. (As for instance Jack Audrey’s response when Stephen corrects his suggestion that Catalan might be a putain: “Patois — just so. Yet I swear the other is a word: I learnt it somewhere.”) Yet O’Brian manages to switch fluidly into frantic action sequences (Napoleonic sea battles confirm the boredom/terror trope of combat experience) and psychological pressure when the tone needs to change.

The characters are multifaceted and by turns likeable and frustrating; the action is fairly unrelenting (it kept me up until 4am, after all), and the language is a constant joy. The only thing I can say against it is that the series continues to 21 volumes, which is mainly a problem for me since I don’t seem to be able to stop reading them.