Decontamination, part four
Jul. 16th, 2010 02:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mellotron_breakfastThis part is definitely more lighthearted than the last one, which is why it remains public. I write it at this late hour because I just finished working on a transcript so that I wouldn't have to do it tomorrow. There is still one other file, but it's shorter. I am encouraged by my client's new idea to pitch a "free" personal audio recorder and transcription service so that his clients can take research notes throughout the year. It's not free to my client, who I would assume bought the mp3 recorders and most definitely pays me for the transcription service. The files are usually short, but the bottom line is, if all the clients put together generate thirty six files at one minute in length each, that's one more hour of pay than I would be making otherwise. "Short" encompasses things from ten minutes down, and several clients have agreed to this.
Part 1: Conan the Cimmerian Barbarian
Robert E. Howard was a writer of short stories and paperbacks best known to the average person for creating Conan, a muscly lug portrayed on film by Arnold Schwarzenegger and in the future some other guy I don't know much about yet. Howard was, AFAIK, a friend of H.P. Lovecraft, and the connection shows in nearly every story. Monsters are frequently weird toad-headed things with pseudopods or complete freaks that make a mockery of natural evolution; "different branches" of human evolution also appear which sometimes end in thinly disguised racial caricatures; Howard will explain very pointedly that the tusk-mouthed dark-skinned giants aren't people of colour, then go on to call them blacks for the rest of the story.
Some people would write off Howard and Lovecraft as products of their time, though there's something more innocuous about Howard like he's more ignorant or misled by legacy inaccurate anthropological theory than a more vitriolic racist like Lovecraft. Unfortunately, I'm basing this statement on having read only these Chronicles of Howards, while having read a personal essay by Lovecraft and a fairly damning essay regarding HPL by China Mieville. I still look at the gaffes and an author's note lining the history of the peoples described in these books--which turn out to be prehistoric predecessors of ancient Europeans, living in lands that after a series of cataclysmic upheavals eventually becomes Europe and points east and south of there as well--and sigh a bit.
If you can tread around the self-conscious fidgeting and gaffes without ignoring them, you get the fruit of a compulsive writer whose impact on American fantasy fiction is undeniable. You get the work of someone who seemed to love his vision of a long lost time, and perhaps that is one reason why he found reality so inadequate. Let me give you one example where his feelings really poke through.
Barbarism versus civilization comes up frequently in fiction. With Howard, though, instead of having the dashing hero defeat the stomping savages with educated wit and problem solving capabilities, or just having a pistol handy, Conan is the barbarian and that's what helps him survive. He possesses an incredibly hard physical frame and is in tune with instincts, while the people he encounters in more "civilized" places are often physically soft and effete. He survives attacks that would kill most other men, and not only when there's some wine around that magically heals the drinker. He defeats better trained swordsmen simply because they can't match his physical strength or keep pace with his brutally relentless attack.
It's almost as if magic is necessary because Howard needs to provide interesting obstacles. Conan seems to be able to beat any mortal in a sword-fight, or probably a baker's dozen of your average goon, so it would be boring if his only threats were groups of adversaries so massive that even he admits an inability to defeat them all; he needs wizards to conjure up things that are very difficult to kill, or a wizard to give hints about defeating other wizards. He needs giant snakes and statues that come to life, to make things interesting. The fact is, his barbarian status even makes him more resistant to some kinds of magic at times; he can resist things your typical city guy can't because their culture made them more susceptible to a spell. I'd dig that up and cite it if you like. His philosophy is to live for the day, to drink himself stupid, slap bums and shag female supporting characters, and most importantly to taste combat, because though Crom is his people's god he doesn't espouse any belief about what will happen after he dies. He prefers to consider life.
Speaking of bum slapping and female characters, you get a tumult of them across the stories; it seems like there's no continuity. Some women are good, some evil, many the type to scream a lot as he drags them to safety, and they often make themselves useful at one specific point to help rescue his hemmed-in army or put on an acting performance to trick others. Rarely, you get a Pirate Queen as bloodthirsty as he is, and they probably make the best pair I've seen 500 pages in to this likely 800 page tome.
I've heard that the tumult and depictions here are partly the product of Howard not having any healthy relationship with his mother, but rumor is as far as I go; I don't have the material to confirm or deny that.
To finish my commentary here, the side effect of Howard's compulsive writing is that some sentences don't make sense. I know what that's like; in the euphoria of the moment, what you had in mind made perfect sense and what you wrote doesn't actually match what you thought and assumed you had written. I understand things were tougher in the typewriter days, but it doesn't look like he had much proofreading done. Sometimes, it could just be that people used different words or different connotations in the thirties, but other times I really think a word was omitted and some meaning was lost. It goes beyond typographical errors.
I still enjoy the Chronicles, for what it's worth. I have simply been trained to zero in on some of the defects, particularly things you would never get away with today.
Part 2: Parade
During the day, a parade rounded the corner of Queen and Spadina. It caught my interest because of a sign showing a controversial symbol. As I approached, I saw a big claim that the symbol shows up in many cultures, and should be rehabilitated from people who made a negative use of it; yes, this parade said it was a national rehabilitation day for that symbol.
I still have a handout I use as a bookmark, until I decide to chuck it. These look like the same people who claimed to have cloned a human being yet didn't prove it.
Part 3: We're going to walk around the block tonight
Velvet Underground has alternative retro going on Sundays. I figured this out by going there first, then doubling back to two other places just to make sure those had nothing going. It would have saved me a lot of trouble to stay at Velvet. At the end of the night, though, I wasn't out anywhere for long. Thursday, Friday and Saturday left me partied out and I didn't recognize anybody other than Osaze.
There's one more of these to cover, regarding Monday, but that should be a shorter post.
Part 1: Conan the Cimmerian Barbarian
Robert E. Howard was a writer of short stories and paperbacks best known to the average person for creating Conan, a muscly lug portrayed on film by Arnold Schwarzenegger and in the future some other guy I don't know much about yet. Howard was, AFAIK, a friend of H.P. Lovecraft, and the connection shows in nearly every story. Monsters are frequently weird toad-headed things with pseudopods or complete freaks that make a mockery of natural evolution; "different branches" of human evolution also appear which sometimes end in thinly disguised racial caricatures; Howard will explain very pointedly that the tusk-mouthed dark-skinned giants aren't people of colour, then go on to call them blacks for the rest of the story.
Some people would write off Howard and Lovecraft as products of their time, though there's something more innocuous about Howard like he's more ignorant or misled by legacy inaccurate anthropological theory than a more vitriolic racist like Lovecraft. Unfortunately, I'm basing this statement on having read only these Chronicles of Howards, while having read a personal essay by Lovecraft and a fairly damning essay regarding HPL by China Mieville. I still look at the gaffes and an author's note lining the history of the peoples described in these books--which turn out to be prehistoric predecessors of ancient Europeans, living in lands that after a series of cataclysmic upheavals eventually becomes Europe and points east and south of there as well--and sigh a bit.
If you can tread around the self-conscious fidgeting and gaffes without ignoring them, you get the fruit of a compulsive writer whose impact on American fantasy fiction is undeniable. You get the work of someone who seemed to love his vision of a long lost time, and perhaps that is one reason why he found reality so inadequate. Let me give you one example where his feelings really poke through.
Barbarism versus civilization comes up frequently in fiction. With Howard, though, instead of having the dashing hero defeat the stomping savages with educated wit and problem solving capabilities, or just having a pistol handy, Conan is the barbarian and that's what helps him survive. He possesses an incredibly hard physical frame and is in tune with instincts, while the people he encounters in more "civilized" places are often physically soft and effete. He survives attacks that would kill most other men, and not only when there's some wine around that magically heals the drinker. He defeats better trained swordsmen simply because they can't match his physical strength or keep pace with his brutally relentless attack.
It's almost as if magic is necessary because Howard needs to provide interesting obstacles. Conan seems to be able to beat any mortal in a sword-fight, or probably a baker's dozen of your average goon, so it would be boring if his only threats were groups of adversaries so massive that even he admits an inability to defeat them all; he needs wizards to conjure up things that are very difficult to kill, or a wizard to give hints about defeating other wizards. He needs giant snakes and statues that come to life, to make things interesting. The fact is, his barbarian status even makes him more resistant to some kinds of magic at times; he can resist things your typical city guy can't because their culture made them more susceptible to a spell. I'd dig that up and cite it if you like. His philosophy is to live for the day, to drink himself stupid, slap bums and shag female supporting characters, and most importantly to taste combat, because though Crom is his people's god he doesn't espouse any belief about what will happen after he dies. He prefers to consider life.
Speaking of bum slapping and female characters, you get a tumult of them across the stories; it seems like there's no continuity. Some women are good, some evil, many the type to scream a lot as he drags them to safety, and they often make themselves useful at one specific point to help rescue his hemmed-in army or put on an acting performance to trick others. Rarely, you get a Pirate Queen as bloodthirsty as he is, and they probably make the best pair I've seen 500 pages in to this likely 800 page tome.
I've heard that the tumult and depictions here are partly the product of Howard not having any healthy relationship with his mother, but rumor is as far as I go; I don't have the material to confirm or deny that.
To finish my commentary here, the side effect of Howard's compulsive writing is that some sentences don't make sense. I know what that's like; in the euphoria of the moment, what you had in mind made perfect sense and what you wrote doesn't actually match what you thought and assumed you had written. I understand things were tougher in the typewriter days, but it doesn't look like he had much proofreading done. Sometimes, it could just be that people used different words or different connotations in the thirties, but other times I really think a word was omitted and some meaning was lost. It goes beyond typographical errors.
I still enjoy the Chronicles, for what it's worth. I have simply been trained to zero in on some of the defects, particularly things you would never get away with today.
Part 2: Parade
During the day, a parade rounded the corner of Queen and Spadina. It caught my interest because of a sign showing a controversial symbol. As I approached, I saw a big claim that the symbol shows up in many cultures, and should be rehabilitated from people who made a negative use of it; yes, this parade said it was a national rehabilitation day for that symbol.
I still have a handout I use as a bookmark, until I decide to chuck it. These look like the same people who claimed to have cloned a human being yet didn't prove it.
Part 3: We're going to walk around the block tonight
Velvet Underground has alternative retro going on Sundays. I figured this out by going there first, then doubling back to two other places just to make sure those had nothing going. It would have saved me a lot of trouble to stay at Velvet. At the end of the night, though, I wasn't out anywhere for long. Thursday, Friday and Saturday left me partied out and I didn't recognize anybody other than Osaze.
There's one more of these to cover, regarding Monday, but that should be a shorter post.
