Eugene Fischer

Category: Blog

Recent Writing by Friends of Mine

Nonfiction

  • “So This Is New York” – Another personal essay by Evan James, on his first trip to New York and how it doomed the relationship it was intended to strengthen. Includes passages such as, “The image of Martha Stewart gliding into the open-plan work area, trailed by a trotting Chow and two French bulldogs, peppering the air with profanity, made me smile. I still dreamed of working in magazines back then, and hoped to say “fuck” a lot in an editorial office of my own one day.” If you haven’t, also check out his previous Observer piece, “From Brooklyn to P-Town for Bear Week.”
  • “Live Nude Girls” – Genevieve Valentine wrote a crucial piece on the relentlessness of modern attacks on women, as evidenced by the recent attacks on women in the games industry and theft of personal pictures of celebrities. No one cuts to the heart of things quite like Genevieve does.
  • “The Next Generation” – Jonathan Gharrie with a personal essay on bonding with his father over Star Trek, and how the different installments mirror aspects of their lives.

Fiction

  • “Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters Because They Are Terrifying” – Alice Sola Kim’s story in the current issue of Tin House (I have no idea how long it will be available online) about a trio of teenage Korean adoptees and what happens when they try to use magic to connect with the parents who gave them up. Stick-in-your-skull creepy and beautiful, like all of her stories are.
  • “Cimmeria: From the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology” – Theodora Goss with a Borges-inspired story in Lightspeed. I heard her read part of this at ICFA, and was enthralled. Glad it found a home in Lightspeed so I can learn how it ended.

Poetry

GoFundMe doubles down on being awful

In case we needed any further reason to boycott GoFundMe, now they have instituted anti-choice terms of use and are canceling the campaigns of people raising funds for abortions. Because making money off of racists is okay, but helping women pay for legal medical procedures isn’t.

Twenty More Books of 2014

BookMosaic3

My last book roundup only had three graphic novels in it. This bunch, though, more than doubles the number I’ve read all year. My rate has also slowed way, way down. (Though I can claim success for my New Year’s resolution of averaging at least a book per week in 2014. No way to miss that mark now.) For both of these, I blame my August move from Iowa to Texas, which sapped huge amounts of my time and attention.

  1. Mad As Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies by Dave Itzkoff – This was a gift from my friend Samantha Lange, in thanks for introducing her to Network, which she had never previously seen. It’s a fantastic retrospective of Paddy Chayefsky’s career leading up to the film, and a detailed look into the production itself. Easily recommended for other Network obsessives.
  2. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett – My mother had been singing Patchett’s praises to me, and so I read Run, which I liked but did not love. Friends told me, though, that I should give Bel Canto a try anyway. They were right. This is an utterly gorgeous book, in the mix for my favorite I’ve read this year. It is a deft piece of kaleidoscopic insight and tenderness, which manages to create some suspenseful, harrowing moments without ever seeming to ask for them. An incredible book.
  3. The Ghost in the Shell by Shirow Masamune – I’d bounced off this book a few times, but now have finally made it to the end. I think it was more an act of stubbornness than anything else. I’ve enjoyed many of animated projects based on Shirow Masamune’s manga, but find the book itself cold, cursory, almost flippant. He clearly puts a very great deal of thought and attention into the functioning of his imagined future, but the stories themselves seem little more than excuses to get aspects of that future on the page. All of the elements of the famous and influential movie of the same name are in here, but almost completely lacking in the liveliness they had on the screen. I own his other GitS volumes, but it will probably be a while before I get to them.
  4. Incandescence by Greg Egan – I love Greg Egan. I love his writing, yes, but I also just love that he exists. There is every other hard science fiction writer who has ever been, and then, floating above them in a diamond firmament, is Greg Egan. What he is doing in this book is so much harder than mere hard science fiction that it’s almost a new kind of literature altogether. And while I get great intellectual excitement from that, I don’t mean it completely as a compliment. This novel is, well, hard. Difficult. The idea was to come up with a scenario where a culture inventing science would come up with relativity before Newtonian mechanics. He pulls this off, but it makes for a narrative experience that is didactic and difficult to follow. Exciting if you are excited by the beauty of physical ideas, but a lot more like doing homework than most things I approach for entertainment. In some writing on his website, Egan indicates that he expects that readers will need to keep a notebook nearby to draw some diagrams if they are to get the most out of the novel. Again, I love Greg Egan. I love that someone is writing novels that ask their readers to draw free-body diagrams. But I didn’t do it; I just followed what I could and trusted that it all hung together. Perhaps that is why I enjoyed this book less than I have Egan’s others: this book insists on being appreciated on its own terms, and I didn’t want to put in the effort.
  5. So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell – This small novel seems to inspire cultish reverence around Iowa City, so I read it. I enjoyed it. But I don’t really see what all the fuss is about. My experience here may have been soured by overbuilt expectation.
  6. Birds of Prey: Of Like Minds by Gail Simone and Ed Benes
  7. Birds of Prey: Sensei & Student by Gail Simone and Ed Benes – I read these two Birds of Prey volumes sitting on the floor of Karen Meisner’s library during my last visit to Madison. I’ve long been wanting to read the BoP comics, and enjoyed these enough that I expect I will track down the rest of the trades sometime soon.
  8. House of Holes by Nicholson Baker – Verbally clever sex farce. The novelty, and thus the entertainment, wore off for me about 2/3 of the way through. (Suspect I would have loved it if it were a Ralph Bakshi-style cartoon, though.) I’ll give Baker another chance though, on the strength of his prose cleverness and his nonfiction writing about pacifism.
  9. The Hustler by Walter Tevis – I only have two more to go, but it’s starting to look like Walter Tevis never wrote anything that wasn’t good. This, his first novel, is excellent. The prose is rougher than in some of his later work, but in a way that fits the story, so for all I know it was intentional. I watched the Paul Newman movie after I finished the book, and thought it was good in the places where it recapitulated what Tevis wrote, and inexcusable in the places it didn’t. Loved the book, hated the movie.
  10. Seconds by Bryan Lee O’Malley – I’m a huge fan of his previous work, Scott Pilgrim, so I was eager to read this book, though I didn’t expect it to be more of the same. Thus, I wasn’t at all disappointed. While there are a few notes of Pilgrim-esque humor (including one direct callback), Seconds is it’s own book, and a very successful one. It’s about the spirits of places, and about fucking up your life by altering your own history. It’s great.
  11. Dragon Ball vol. 1 by Akira Toriyama
  12. Dragon Ball vol. 2 by Akira Toriyama
  13. Dragon Ball vol. 3 by Akira Toriyama
  14. Dragon Ball vol. 4 by Akira Toriyama
  15. Dragon Ball vol. 5 by Akira Toriyama
  16. Dragon Ball vol. 6 by Akira Toriyama
  17. Dragon Ball vol. 7 by Akira Toriyama – Moving from Iowa to Texas was long, involved, and unpleasant. While I was doing it, I wanted something to read that would take no effort at all, just pure, mindless entertainment. These fit the purpose nicely. I might finish the series someday. I might wait to do it until I’m similarly stressed out again.
  18. The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem – I love Lem. So when I heard that the movie The Congress was based on this Lem novel, I was very excited to watch it with my parents, also Lem fans. It was terrible, a total train wreck of a film. No one should pay to see it. Read the book instead, which is a minor one of his works, but fun and short.
  19. The Adventures of Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware – I read this many years ago, but had forgotten much of it. It’s truly excellent, though given the universal acclaim you probably already knew that. The reread was inspired by [redacted], who identified this as her favorite novel, graphic or otherwise. Also, having recently read Essex County, I was struck by the similarity between this and Lemire’s book. Since they are both collections of work originally serialized, I’d need to know more about the timelines to even begin to guess at vectors of influence.
  20. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness – I have been a fan of Ness’s writing since I read his Chaos Walking trilogy. This book, illustrated by Jim Kay and based on a concept by the late Siobhan Dowd, is gorgeous. Gorgeously written, gorgeously drawn. A heartbreaking fable of stories and loss, and clearly deserving of its multiple awards. I own a copy of Ness’s novel More Than This, and will probably read it soon.

Explain A Film Plot Badly

Last night I tweeted myself to sleep playing along with the hashtag game #ExplainAFilmPlotBadly. These were mine.

Tabclosing: Let’s Pretend Things Never Changed

I’m sort of locked in to using the tabclosing tag for these entries now, but the name has become a pleasant fiction. These days when I want to save something for later reading, I just send it to my Pocket queue. I’ve neglected actually looking at that queue the last couple of months, though, and so my Pocket is stuffed to bursting. Let’s change that a bit. (And pretend we didn’t.)

  • A Brief History of Romantic Friendship – Maria Popova writes about an era when homosocial romance was considered innocuous or laudable, and how growing “sophistication” about sex in the 20th century curtailed the practice.
  • This Is What Gentrification Really Is – Annalee Newitz offers a nuanced, historical view of gentrification as a form of immigration, and examines how (as with other forms of immigration) opinions of it are largely shaped by narrative.
  • ‘Human Props’ stay in luxury homes but live like ghosts – an article that is, more than anything, about companies monetizing the desire to pretend nothing has changed.
  • “Why Did You Shoot Me, I Was Reading A Book?” – Article in Salon by Radley Balko from last year about the militarization of America’s police forces. This has been linked a lot since all the horribleness in Ferguson started.
  • The San Antonio Spurs hired Stars star Becky Hammon to be the first woman employed full-time as an assistant NBA coach. This is historic, but, in typical Spurs fashion, they never mentioned it. In their press release about the signing, they talked exclusively about Hammon’s qualifications and didn’t refer to her gender once. Which, in a Finkbeiner test sense, is exactly what they should do. Here are a bunch of articles about it: from the New York Times, from Esquire, from Rolling Stone, from Pounding The Rock.
  • And finally, “Happy Fun Room,” a science fiction short film by Greg Pak, about a woman who’s gone through a change so severe, she’s blind to things changing again:

Nice Try, Google

Good effort. Almost had it.

Screen Shot 2014-08-24 at 12.10.36 PM

The 21st Century Lynch Mob, Brought To You by GoFundMe

Officer Darren Wilson, the man who shot and killed unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown while he was trying to flee (based on multiple eyewitness reports and, now, the Ferguson PD), has not been charged with any crime. He has not lost his job, or any associated income. He has, however,  attracted a distributed group of enthusiasts donating money to him for so-called “legal defense.” As there is no pending litigation, this amounts to a reward or bounty for killing a black man. The campaigns are being run through GoFundMe, first here and now here. The folks running these “fundraisers” have rebranded themselves as “Shield of Hope charity,” so that donations will be tax deductible.

The donation page quickly filled up with racist commentary. Soon, 4chan trolls piled on (more here). In response to the controversy, GoFundMe decided to delete the offensive comments. Of course, they still kept the money, as evidenced by the number of donators going down while the amount raised went up. At the time of this writing, the two campaigns have raised almost a quarter million dollars, for a profit to GoFundMe of $12,064.

Shaun King has called for a boycott of GoFundMe. Somewhat ironically, there is also a GoFundMe campaign in support of the family of Mike Brown, which will suffer under a boycott. But there are many ways to support the cause of justice that don’t involve giving a 5% cut to a company that is functionally doing PR work for racists by deleting their hateful commentary but keeping the money that came with it. Kickstarter learned that there are some activities that don’t belong on their site.  It’s time for GoFundMe to learn the same lesson. Barring the closing of the racist Darren Wilson support funds and an apology from GoFundMe, I will not donate to any future GoFundMe campaigns.

UPDATE: And looks like the fundraisers may be run by the Ferguson PD itself.

My Desk

(UPDATE: the configuration below ended up changing. Image of final state here.)

I’m still getting my new apartment in Austin put together, but the office is starting to take shape, so I thought I’d share a little of what’s been keeping me away from the internet for so long. Here’s my new desk setup.

Desk2014

The desk itself is a steel juggernaut, six feet wide with three file drawers, two box drawers, and an item tray. Above, on the wall, a cluster of personally meaningful things. On the far left is a National Merit Scholarship certificate. Next to that, a column with a plaque of my high school diploma bearing the NESA seal. Below that a photo of my NESA creative writing class, and below that my Clarion class. On the far right is a sketch by Tom Siddell, author of my favorite webcomic. To the left of that there’s my Bachelor’s of Science degree from Trinity University, and a photo of me with my parents on the day I got it. The middle column has my Masters of Fine Arts diploma from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and in the center a print I inherited from my maternal grandparents, of Gerrit Dou’s “Der Schreibmeister – The Writing Master.”

DerSchreibmeister

#Ferguson

I’m moving into a new apartment and don’t have internet access right now save for via the cellular network, but I spent all night on my phone scrolling through Twitter and marveling at each fresh outrage. If you aren’t following the #Ferguson hashtag right now, you are blind to the current state of American civil liberties. In brief: a police officer in Ferguson, MO murdered an unarmed Black teenager in front of witnesses, the department hid the shooter’s identity, the citizens gathered for protests and vigils, and the police declared a no-fly zone, brought out armored vehicles and snipers and tear gas, began arresting reporters and destroying cameras, and basically instituting martial law with no meaningful oversight. I’ll update this post with links and more information once I’m at a computer.

Update: And actually, by the time I’ve gotten to a computer, it turns out the situation has evolved so much and so rapidly that providing a full roundup would now be too big an undertaking. Fortunately, media outlets have also finally started following the story, so you no longer have to be on Twitter to see it.

Update 2: Nope, Twitter is still, a few days later, by far the best place for information. Follow the #Ferguson hashtag. And for a reasonable roundup, here’s John Oliver.

Changing the World Fantasy Award Trophy

The trophy for the World Fantasy Award is a bust of H. P. Lovecraft, a man who, it’s undeniable, was hugely influential on the body of fantastic literature. He was also an exceptionally hateful and unabashed racist. When Nnedi Okorafor won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 2011, she wrote a thoughtful blog post about winning an award bearing the image of a man who, in life, would have detested her based on her skin. Since then, discussion of the propriety of having Lovecraft on the award statue has grown. Today Daniel José Older (who recently made a great video about why he doesn’t italicize Spanish words in his fiction) put up a Change.org petition to change the World Fantasy Award to a bust of Octavia Butler.

My initial response to this idea was excitement. Octavia Butler is among my favorite writers, and the author of my all-time favorite short story. She was also a woman of color who wrote about issues of race with as much nuance as anyone ever has. So with regard to addressing the things that make Lovecraft a troublesome figure to have on the statue, it’s hard to imagine anyone better. With regard to representing the fantasy genre, though, Butler is an odd choice. She almost never wrote it.

Butler published, by my count, 21 pieces of fiction during her life: 12 novels and 9 shorter works. Of those, there are only two that seem to me to be works of fantasy. Her short story “The Book of Martha” is clearly fantasy; the story is all about the titular character having a conversation with god about how to construct an utopia, given a Rawlsian veil of ignorance. The rest of her short works are all either science fiction or realism. Of her novels, the only one that is arguably fantasy is Kindred,1 in which the main character jumps through time between the 1970s and pre-Civil War United States, for no reason that is ever explained. (Daniel José Older obliquely references the book in his petition.) While this fantastic premise is perhaps enough to qualify it as a work fantasy, this book itself is far more concerned with investigating the social structures of slavery than it is with the fantastic element. The time travel, for all that it powers the plot, gets very little focus. And in terms of tropes and rhetorical structures, the novel has much more in common with historical fiction than it does fantasy. In bookstores I’ve seen it shelved in “literature” or “African American fiction” more often than I’ve seen it in “science fiction and fantasy.” So even if Kindred is fantasy, it’s not very representative, or in-genre influential fantasy, wonderful book though it is. And that still puts Butler’s fantasy output at less than 10% of her oeuvre.

If the choice is between Lovecraft and Butler for the World Fantasy Award, then obviously I’m on Team Butler. But if the choice instead is Lovecraft or Not Lovecraft, then I think I lean toward a different sort of Not Lovecraft: I’m on Team Nobody. Why does the award have to be a person? It isn’t named for a person, it’s named for a genre. No one–not Lovecraft, or Dunsany, or Tolkien–encapsulates an entire genre. I think I’m with Nick Mamatas, who proposed that the award be changed to something symbolic of fantasy. His suggestion was a chimera, which I like. In discussion on Twitter, Kurt Busiek spitballed the idea of a globe with fantastic maps, which could be nice too. The convention could have a design competition, like there is every year for the base of the Hugo award (the trophy for which, it’s worth noting, isn’t a bust of Hugo Gernsback). Doing so would undoubtedly produce a great, artistic design, and it would nicely unify a family of closely related awards: the Hugo is a rocket ship, the Nebula is astral bodies, and the World Fantasy Award would be… something fantastic.

  1. Fledgling has vampires in it, but treats them in a throughly science-fictional, biologically rigorous way. There’s nothing fantasy about it. ↩

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