Letters From America | Week Two: Lost Souls and Liquor in New Orleans and Florida

Last time we talked properly – that is excepting the intros and outros appended to each of the guest posts you’ll have seen on the site since – I had just arrived in New Orleans, having been knocked for six by the sheer size of everything here in the States. I should perhaps amend that observation now that I’ve seen a smidge more of this massive landmass; after all NOLA was dramatically different from Houston, and Panama City Beach – where I’ve been recovering since – is a whole other kettle of fish again.

But look at me and my seafood-based wordplay! If you didn’t know different, you’d be forgiven for thinking I was having a whale of a time here in America. :D

I am, at that... though New Orleans, as I intimated in the inaugural edition of Letters From America, was rather a shock to the system after the incredibly warm welcome we were treated to in Texas. Long story short: me and mine got off to a bad start on our first night in New Orleans, and though things were looking up by the time we left, I still hadn’t quite come around.

So I didn’t love NOLA, no. But by the end I didn’t despise it either, and after that first night – no gory details today, I’m afraid – to be able to say even that speaks to how much more pleasant the city was once we found our skinny Scottish feet in it.

Wait, I didn’t say the city, did I? You must excuse me – that’s not entirely true. I suppose we were in the city, which is to say surrounded on all sides by endless urban sprawl, but honestly, it hardly felt like it: we didn’t leave the French Quarter once during the entire time we propped up the Best Western on Rampart. Perhaps we should have, quite against all the advice we’d been given... not least because by the end of our stay, I for one was feeling a bit boxed-in.

In fairness to the place, I think the trips I’ve taken to beautiful little European cities like Krakov and Bruges and Bratislava somewhat spoiled me on New Orleans, without me even realising it. All quaint places, I guess, with beer and wine and good food and music in abundance, but none of the nastiness that kept cropping up here, nor the ripe aroma of piss and shit and sick in the air everywhere, and definitely lots less leering. Also: if you’re planning on spending more than a few days in the French Quarter of New Orleans, have your paperwork in order to declare bankruptcy in the midst of your trip.

My nostalgia for the New Orleans Poppy Z. Brite painted so perfectly in the books I swore by as a moderately freaky teenager probably didn’t help matters either. Lost Souls and such; especially the Liquor trilogy Brite ended up capping off her writing career with.

I did wonder how different the French Quarter would have been if I’d only experienced it before the horrors of Hurricane Katrina. I didn’t ask any such thing, obviously. It seemed impolite... not that decency seemed to be any sort of obstacle to the innumerable booths and shops and street-walkers looking to make a quick buck on glorious guided tours of the devastated areas.

But I should digress. At the end of my time in New Orleans, I was certainly keen to get on with the rest of this crazy-with-a-capital-crazy road trip, but we’ll be taking a few happy memories home with us, and it wouldn’t do to overlook them: one born hot and throbbing in Maison on Frenchmen Street – on open mic night and everything – and another, oddly, from a ghost tour with a guy from Haunted History who told some of the best spoken word stories I’ve ever heard. Ever.

So what happened next?

Truth be told, it’s a bit of a blur already. We drove for six hours in a rented Nissan, delighting in all the classic rock radio stations we kept picking up along the way, only to lose mere moments later. We stuck, cleverly, to the right side of the road, which felt wrong on so many levels. Eventually, we arrived at our beautiful apartment in Panama City Beach, and slowly settled in.

And then? Then: beer. On the balcony, and on the beach. A stone’s throw away from the sea and the sand, while the sun split the skies... oh my. I don’t mind saying it’s been kinda sorta stunning here. With Spring Break and March Madness mostly over, there was time and space to let everything we’ve seen and done here in the States to date sink in, and I’m glad of that. It was beginning to feel a bit surreal.

A few hours from the time of this writing, alas, we’ll be leaving Panama City Beach behind, and one of our party as well – though we’ll catch up with her on the back end of this trip. In the interim, the other half and I are heading to a lovely log cabin in the woods of upper Alabama, where by hook or by crook, there will be books!

Sadly there’s only been the one since last week’s Stephen King, but it was – how to describe it? – a bona fide beauty. A masterfully wrought political parable for the larger part, A Song For Arbonne by Guy Gavriel Kay also took in tragedy, romance, fate, friendship, and occasionally even farce. It couldn’t quite eclipse Tigana in my heart - I wonder sometimes if anything ever will - yet it’s certainly the best book I’ve read in a long time.

Do stay tuned for more thoughts of that sort shortly; I should have a review ready before I’m back in Britain. For the moment, my thanks to those of you who recommended it. And to everyone who plumped for The Lions of Al-Rassan instead, take heart in the fact that I abandoned several essential items of clothing in order to bring more books than I’d meant, among them that other Guy Gavriel Kay, which given the magnificence of A Song For Arbonne I’ve half a mind to read immediately.

On the other hand, A Game of Thrones is sat right there. Staring at me, even. The monster.

Speaking of which, how was the premiere of the second season? It kills me that I missed it, but maybe that’s for the best. Maybe this year I wait till I have all the episodes and watch them in one massive whack. Maybe that’ll give me time to read the bloody books I’ve brought all the way across the Atlantic...

Anyway! I’ll be back again next week with another of these sentimental Letters From America, but between times I’ve lined up another round of brilliant guest bloggers for you to look forward to. Remember to give them a warm welcome!

Opinionated Speculations | A Deal With The Devil?

So the press were all over George R. R. Martin in advance of HBO's hugely anticipated of A Game of Thrones, and needless to say, after starving for years on occasional tidbits of news from Not A Blog, when it rained, as the pilot's airdate approached, it poured.

In fact it poured such that a few comments well worth further discussion were rather lost in the downpour provoked by certain provocative pieces, which I'll comment on no further than to say: what utter bloody nonsense.

To wit, then, an incidental bit from The Guardian's chat with the man who would be king.

"Hopefully, the last two books will go a little quicker than this one has, but that doesn't mean they're going to be quick," says Martin. "Realistically, it's going to take me three years to finish the next one at a good pace. I hope it doesn't take me six years like this last one has. I have a million ideas. I have some other novels I want to write. I have a lot of short stories – I love the short story. But I've got to finish this first and then I'll decide what I'm inspired by at that point. If I'm not in some old folks' home." And if he is, no doubt his fans will be haranguing him even there.

I've bolded what particularly interests me from that paragraph. Which is to say, George R. R. Martin wants to be writing other things than A Song of Ice and Fire. And oh, how I wish he could!

Because it's a deal with the devil, isn't it? The series. The saga. On the one hand, real breakthrough success in speculative fiction only seems to come with multi-volume opuses like The Wheel of Time, The Malazan Book of the Fallen and The Kingkiller Chronicles. What is, for some, and will be for others, a lifetime's work. Rarely does a book from a mere trilogy hit The New York Times' list of bestsellers, after all, and still less often will you see self-contained science-fiction or fantasy sell half as well. For speculative fiction to stand a chance of such widespread success, all indicators point to volume seven or eleven of such and such a series being a more likely prospect for bestseller status than even new China Mieville... for what is really no better reason than inertia, as I see it.

Though I expect some might take me to task on that.

Anyway, whatever the cause and effect, that's a pretty darned shady state of affairs. Variety is the spice of life - surely we can agree on that - and while one understands that the industry must supply as demand dictates, the import it puts on sequels and series, and so the dispersal of the same marketing dollars that might help elevate a standalone novel to the realms of runaway success... that over-valuation, and not just on the part of the publisher, serves to stifle innumerable other avenues of genre literature.

Take a minute and think of all that could have been.

What, for instance, might J. K. Rowling have written if she hadn't spend a decade and change on Harry Potter? Or Robert Jordan if The Wheel of Time hadn't taken over his writing life?

Loathe though I am to even mention Robert Jordan, I do so for a dual purpose: both to illustrate the question I'm asking here - shouldn't authors be able to write what they want rather than what readers are seen (and indeed heard) to want? - and equally to demonstrate what happens when an author doesn't acquiesce to the demands of certain elements of his or her readership. For instance when an author has the gall to "pull a Jordan."

You've heard the phrase said, haven't you? Needless to say it's disgusting; absolutely sickening. For the innocents out there, it means to die before you've finished telling your tale, and I'm with George R. R. Martin on this, when he says in The Independent (via a message board post on Fantasy Faction) that "anyone who uses that phrase... is an asshole."

But for all that, it's used often enough. In fact of late, and here we come full circle, it's been put to the aforementioned author as regards A Song of Ice and Fire, a series which George R. R. Martin has spent 15 years of his life writing as is. And of course the guy's getting on - what of it?

It's a credit to the gent that he's as dedicated as he is to the series in question. "I have a million ideas," he writes. "I have some other novels I want to write. I have a lot of short stories – I love the short story. But I've got to finish this first." The long and short of which is, he's 62, it's taken him five years to write the last two volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire, and he's prioritising this one narrative over all the others he'd like to write largely to satisfy the unfathomable sense of entitlement certain very vocal readers feel. Because "nothing is as savage as a horde of starved fantasy fans."

Well, I say: the hell with them.

We all know I've not yet read A Game of Thrones - though I'm loving the HBO series based on the book thus far - but I have read, and adored, Fevre Dream, Dreamsongs and many of Martin's recent anthology contributions. Perhaps I'd feel differently if I'd spent several years on tenterhooks, waiting to see what Winter finally brings, but... you know, I doubt it. All stories are created equal. That these days some stories seem more equal than others is perhaps a truth, but a harsh truth, and a sad one - symptomatic of a very specific problem in a very specific area of very specific era and we're going to need to get over it quick smart, guys. Because it's just as wrongheaded as heads come.

Or are we - I shudder to think - thus entitled? Was that the bargain struck?

Clearly, I don't think so. I believe authors should be able to write what they want when they want rather than writing to a timetable dictated by the whims of what a particular sphere of readers are seen and indeed heard to want. Surely this pressure George R. R. Martin feels should not exist. Surely the vitriol he's been on the receiving end of, simply for taking a little longer than usual to put out A Dance With Dragons, is as outright unreasonable a thing as getting angry at scientists for not curing cancer a bit quicker.

What do you think?

One the one hand you have your sequels and sagas, which come hand in hand with the shot at mainstream success apparently inherent in such things, and on the other you have the freedom to write whatever you please on your own timetable, to no guarantee of sales or even much in the way of support from your publisher. Are these trade-offs fair? Or do I sound like a child here, worrying about what's fair and what's not?

In short, is this particular deal with the devil worth the paper it's written on, far less the blood price of signing the hellish thing?

###


Source: The Guardian

First Impressions | Game of Thrones

Winter... has come.

I'd add to that: and about bloody time, too!


Though the urge has been in overdrive since HBO began promoting the latest addition to their many-studded slate of sophisticated adult dramas, I never did get around to reading any of A Song of Ice and Fire. This despite my quite adoring Fevre Dream and those short stories I cherry-picked from the compendium of all things early George R. R. Martin that is Dreamsongs. This despite my deep-seated fondness for intelligent epic fantasy and all things grim, which I understand now - as I intuited then - the great Game of Thrones indubitably is.


So for me it's been a long road, though not half, nor even a quarter - I'd say somewhere around a sixteenth - as long a road as I'm assured it's been for all those vocal devotees who've hung on every word of every instalment of A Song of Ice and Fire so far. Well, here's hoping this series helps tide those anxious souls over some. For myself, I come to HBO's sumptuous adaptation from a perspective unaffected by any knowledge at all of what's on the horizon, but for the received wisdom that it'll be pretty awesome, probably.


On the strength of this first episode of Game of Thrones alone, then, just this one time, I might be inclined to believe the hype. Tell no-one!

Game of Thrones opens with what appears to be a Wahlberg - though appearances are in this case deceiving - riding through The Wall which divides the South of Westeros from the tortuously frosted North. He and his Night's Watch companions come upon a bleak forest clearing full of dead people, yet the dead seem to have a little life left in 'em still, for they rise up as if they'd never fallen at all and commence beheading the men. The encounter's sole survivor escapes to Winterfell, where he's declaimed as a deserter and a lunatic for his dire rantings about beings thought dead for centures, and decapitated for his trouble.


On the other end of the offending sword, we meet Ned Stark. As Sean Bean. Or perhaps it's the other way around? Let's say that. Certainly, Bean is utterly at home in the role: as the would-be hand man of the King of the Seven Kingdoms he brings grizzled gravitas and a stout-jawed resolve many will remember fondly from The Fellowship of the Ring, while as the powerful patriarch of House Stark he evinces a warmth I hadn't expected - and a coldness, too. His character seems a fascinating one, neatly encapsulated in a couple of this first episode of Game of Thrones' most memorable lines. "The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword," he tells his youngest son after insisting the boy Bran witnesses the aforementioned execution; I would imagine that a fitting mantra for Ned Stark - lifted directly from the novel, perhaps? Later, upon finding a pack of Direwolf cubs huddled around the butchered remains of their mother, he allows to his spread of sons - the bastard Jon Snow and all - the following: "You will train them yourselves, you will feed them yourselves, and if they die, your will bury them yourselves."


Indeed, Westeros feels every bit a world in which the dead - and I would wager there will be many dead when all is said and done - must either resolve to somehow bury their own bodies or be content to decay in the open air. From the chill and forbidding feel of Winterfell alone, where much of this first episode's action occurs, it is too a lavishly realised location: it and its sister continent, Essos across the narrow sea, which with its rugged golden coves and sun-bleached Mediterranean sensibilities appears the polar opposite of Westeros, one bleakly blue-white and the other orange, and earthy. But though in its first 30 seconds alone there is enough stunning fantasy imagery to secure the undying devotion of many a genre fan, Game of Thrones doesn't really seem to be about the sightseeing, for in Essos we're offered an opposing perspective on the struggle for the Iron Throne one imagines will own the day across the narrow sea. Silver-haired siblings Daenerys Targaryen and her banished brother Viserys are all that remains of Westeros' former royal family. Between them they mean to reclaim their rightful place by amassing a vast army, but Essos' forces are a barbarian horde, and the only way into their good graces seems to be by marriage. Thus, Viserys demands Daenerys give herself to Dothraki leader Khal Drogo like a prize pony, and though the prospect does not please her, what other option does she have?

All this and I haven't even mentioned House Lannister - composed of Peter Dinklage as Tyrion, a double-talking dwarf whose "greatest accomplishment" is to be the Queen's brother; the Queen herself, Cersei, to whom Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles' Lena Headey brings the same pained nonchalance she seems to visit upon her every role; the King, of course; and Cersei's brother and lover Jaime, a dirty great meanie by all accounts, however little seen in the first episode of Game of Thrones.


All this and all that and there's more, I gather, and much more still to come. Yet Game of Thrones is not, at the outset, nearly so unwieldy as I'd feared. Pulling double duty as showrunners and head writers, David Benioff and Dan Weiss wisely opt to offer a throughline into this desperately complex world via the Night's Watch man, who passes along the narrative torch to Ned Stark when the latter unceremoniously beheads the former. Only when this hour-long first episode veers too far from Winterfell and the trials ahead of House Stark did I find my interest beginning to slip - and even then David and Dan have the decency to keep such seeming digressions as the incestuous manoeuvring of Cersei and Jaime as brief at this point as the source material will allow.


We're being broken in gently, then. Well thank the heavens for that!


Such restraint means we've had time to align our sympathies just so - though I don't doubt they'll change a great deal in the weeks and months to come. Such focus equates to the natural establishment of certain crucial characters and relationships that could easily have overburdened the narrative's developing momentum. The showrunners clearly have a lot of love for George R. R. Martin's series, and I found that their affection shone through, glinting like a knife in the night even during the darkest moments of this terse introduction to Westeros.

Which isn't to say Game of Thrones is in any way without its share of drawbacks. Headey's lazy imitation worries me already, and though Emilia Clarke does a terrific dazed and confused as Daenerys, there seems precious little dimension to her performance. But perhaps it'll come. I hope so, for hers is a character I am fascinated by already - what with the way she wilfully scalds herself in too hot a bath. The only personage who interests me more is Michelle Fairley's Catelyn Stark, who I dearly hope has more to do in future, for she positively smoulders with tempered frustration in some of her scenes with Sean Bean, while near every other cast member is content to either smirk or sneer.


Then there's the score, which seems dreadfully overbearing during certain key scenes - a relentless racket of dramatic drums that quite ruined a few moments for me - though the theme itself is solid, I'll say that. And oh: and I could do without the contrived cliffhangers in future, thank you very much. The first such - Bran's "fall" from the walls of Winterfell - already strikes me as a cheap way to elevate stakes in no need of elevation.


But we're talking small potatoes, because assuredly Game of Thrones does a great deal with what I'm sure is very little in the grand scheme of things. I was won over in moments - not quite despite myself, for I had been looking forward to this series, but there were no guarantees of quality going in, and coming out, I find myself struggling to restrain my excitement for all that's to come. We'll be looking at a fantasy for the ages here if Game of Thrones continues anything approaching as impressive as it's begun.


Truly, Gods be good that it does.

News Flashing | Seeding The Endgame in A Game of Thrones

A week tomorrow and A Game of Thrones will be gracing your screens and mine. I can hardly wait, needless to say. No, I still haven't made a bond of my word and read the first book of A Song of Ice and Fire - though I did finally buy a copy - but I can't imagine that'll last long, once the show's worked its magic on me. I just don't want to spoil it for myself, not now we're so close. Does that make any sense?

Anyway.

In an interview with D. B. Weiss and David Benioff on TV Guide the other day, ostensibly about all this back-and-forth between George R. R. Martin and Damon Lindelof of Lost fame, the executive producers of HBO's near-as-dammit adaptation of A Game of Thrones went to lengths to assure readers they were't planning on "pulling a Lost" come the last episode of the series. That's the last episode of the last season.

And they know this... how?

Why, because they've been in consultation with the man himself: they've read most of A Dance With Dragons and the author has told them, in so many words, how it all ends. And not just A Dance With Dragons, but A Song of Ice and Fire entire.

A neat nugget of news, in the first. Of particular interest because of the following comment, from Benioff:

"Getting to read that is incredible. It's so much fun, but it's also really helpful for us because George had created such an immaculate beautiful world and we want to make sure that if there are going to be major developments in future seasons, we make sure we seed it properly in the first season."

In short, you GRRM devotees might want to keep your eyes peeled, because these folks, they know. And perhaps what scenes above and beyond the events of the books they deem to add in will be in service to certain story threads pivotal to the end of A Song of Ice and Fire.

You lot'll be better set to spot them than I, no doubt. But bear in mind I totally called Fauxlivia's baby. There really might be something to this...

Screen Shot | A Game of Images of Thrones

A quartet of gorgeous new images from A Game of Thrones, HBO's forthcoming adaptation of a certain George R. R. Martin novel - you've never heard of it already, have you? - just went up over at TVGuide.com. You guys and gals should totally look at them. You'll probably know what they're of and everything.

Me? I just think they're purdy.

Here's the two I've saved as fodder for potential desktops - loathe though I'll be to leave behind the exquisite art from The Way of Kings that's been gracing my screen through 2011 so far:

The other pair, you'll find over here, where embiggening opportunities await.

Hell with it. You know what I'm going to do? By gum, I think I'm going to read this book!

Starting just as soon as my coffee's good and brewed...