Ritualized Tuesdays
Warlord is once again the game of choice at Ritualized Tuesdays. Yes, the recent expansion has sparked a buying and deckbuilding frenzy, and I have not been immune (though I may have contracted less severe symptoms than some of my friends.)
I wandered into the Croissanterie with a revised Black Tom/Assassins deck, and proceeded to win about half my matches. I won stealthily, and lost spectacularly, and had a great time, largely because the instruments of my demise were unusual. I particularly enjoyed Jon’s Swiss Army Elf deck (his warlord has all classes), Rhett’s own Black Tom deck, and Bill’s Duchess Brymin Northrog Harem deck (she uses all the burly male Northrog warlords as her fightin’ troops. It’s very funny.). I didn’t get to play Dave, but, from what I saw, the experience would have moved and terrified me–almost as much as Rhett’s Sorceress deck.
Unfortunately, I only brought the one Warlord deck, so I had to take spectator breaks to avoid boredom and undue frustration. I think I’ll be working on a new Freekingdoms deck over the weekend, so I can be better prepared for next Tuesday.
While playing, I had a mini gamer’s epiphany: I like playing Black Tom for the exact same reasons that I enjoy playing Fallen-Alatar in MECCG. If you know me, you know what I mean.
Drive Safely, Guys
My folks left for Windsor this morning. They didn’t stay long enough, and I wish they weren’t quite so far away (St. Bruno was just far enough, in my book [grin]).
Weekend Roundup
Friday: Dina Comes Home!: While my parents were out visiting Dina’s parents in the Townships, I was eagerly awaiting the return of my wife from New York. For some reason, the second week of our separation seemed much longer than the first, and I was a distracted wreck from her last email to me, until the end of the working day.
I went downtown, ran some last-minute errands, and picked up a bouquet of tea roses to welcome her home. I knew her flight was due to arrive at four o’clock, and I had left a variety of signs and messages to welcome her home (I assumed, of course, that the cats would snub her on her immediate return), but I wanted an additional token to bestow upon her. While I was waiting at the bus stop, Dina called me on my cell phone to let me know that her plane arrived late, and that she was jumping in a cab and heading home.
Hooray!
Traffic must have been bad, because I still managed to arrive home before her. So, I made the best of things, found a vase for the roses, set everything up on the desk in the front hall, and waited. And waited. For about half an hour.
Then I saw the cab pull up. I ran out to greet her. The cats tried to run out with me, but I kept them corralled. She seemed tired and relieved to be home.
As expected, the cats ran away from her at the first opportunity.
A short while later, my parents returned from their trip to the in-laws, and we all went over to Souvlaki George’s for a hearty and garlicky meal. Yum!
I slept much better that night, let me tell you. Again, the cats slept guard over the returned Dina.
Saturday: Laundry, and a Wedding: This was a long and lazy day. Dina slept in while I had breakfast with my parents, who are forever getting up before dawn (though I wasn’t up with them at that time, to be sure!). We each read portions of the Saturday Gazette which, for it’s many faults, is still twice the newspaper as the Windsor Star, so my folks enjoyed themselves. Dina eventually joined us, we watched a little TV (including Tradiing Spaces, which I think we’ve given Mom a taste for), and then ordered in pizza at 11:00 because Mom has a list of food she has to eat when she’s back home in Montreal, and Dad’s always hungry.
After the early lunch, my folks donned their wedding finery, looked at maps of Dorval with Dina, and prepared to head out for my second cousin’s wedding. (I never get this term right: Shauna is the daughter of my mother’s first cousin. So, Shauna is Mom’s first cousin, once removed; and is my second cousin. I think that’s the genealogy….I know that’s the parentage.) They looked great! We snapped a couple of pics with Dina’s digital camera, and sent them on their way.
Then, Dina and I got down to something that we couldn’t do with the parents around the apartment.
You got it.
Laundry! (What, like I’m going to tell you everything we do!)
Also, Maggie came over to get her birthday present from Kuan, which I had dutifully schlepped from the States last weekend, and they chatted and caught up while I handled the laundry and kicked around the hot, humid apartment.
After Maggie left, Dina and I went out to pick up more bagels for the folks, some take-out Indian food for supper, and we rented a couple of DVDs (Un Crabe Dans La T�te and The Royal Tennenbaums–reviews to follow, natch). We watched Crabe, and basically stayed up until the folks came back from their wedding excursion. We chatted about the expense and splendour of the wedding, marvelled at the Limoges candy dish they received as a wedding gift, and promptly went to bed.
Sunday: Brunch, Humidity, Fans, Indian Food: Sunday is the day of Big Breakfasts in the Wark household (though not the Wark-Bennett household, out of respect for our unclogged arteries), so I set to work as soon as I got up. Maple-smoked bacon from the butcher in the Townships, scrambled eggs with basil and oregano, many bagels with Neufchatel cheese (less fattening than regular cream cheese–as if that really matters after the bacon), and coffee in our new Thermos-carafe (a Wednesday purchase, after I broke our original coffeepot, and saw that Dina hadn’t cleaned out hers since we moved into the apartment–an interesting biology experiment, though. It very nearly achieved sentience and civilization.)
Then, the humidity fell on us like a warm leaking waterbed. Mom and Dina had an outstanding invitation to visit Maggie for tea, which they decided to accept, but first, we all went to Costco to pick up some supplies, have some photos developed, and grab a quick lunch. We did all those things, and then parted ways: the ladies off to tea, and the gentlemen off home for drinks and naps (what else to do on a Sunday afternoon?). In the meantime, the skies opened and rain fell for the better part of the afternoon. We hoped that it would break the humidity.
It didn’t.. The rain just moved the water around the city. So, when Dina and Mom returned home, Dina and I jumped in the car and headed out to Reno Depot to pick up some more fans to improve the circulation in our stagnant apartment atmosphere. We picked up a rotating tower which, thanks to our slanted floors, wobbles unduly, and we picked up an in-window twin-turbine fan with intake and exhaust settings. The latter fan improved the air flow in the room where my parents were sleeping immeasurably, and made the humidity much easier to bear.
After the fan shopping, we piled into the car and drove to the red Star of India restaurant for the meal that Dad had craved since he arrived in Montreal. Mom was a reluctant participant, but she stuck to the types of food that most resembled what she’s used to having, so she at least ate a full meal. Dina and I took care of everything else. Then, Dad did something else that he had been looking forward to since his last visit to the restaurant: he made off with a free Double Diamond beer stein.
No, he didn’t run off with it. He asked, politely. Last year, he had asked the waiter for a beer stein to take home, and had pointed at his half-full stein. The waiter, understandably confused by the request, inexplicably gave Dad a large Evian bottle full of Double Diamond! For free! When Dad corrected his mistake, the waiter gave him a stein, and let him keep the beer.
Scott, Dina, and I were shocked and amused by what Dad had managed to accomplish, and filed it as part of the Legend of Dad.
The only flaw in this story is that the stein Dad got was chipped, preventing him from fully enjoying it.
Well, this year, the waiter must have remembered Dad, because he made to fill a water bottle with Double Diamond as soon as Dad repeated his request for a stein. This time, Dad stopped him before the beer was transferred, and left the restaurant with a unchipped stein in hand.
We laughed all the way home.
When we did get home, we sat down to watch The Royal Tennenbaums. It certainly wasn’t Dad’s cup of tea (or rebottle of beer) so he turned in, but Mom, Dina and I stayed with the film until the bitter end.j
This morning, Dina and I went to work, and the folks have gone to visit Dad’s brother, Stanley, in St. Hubert for the afternoon. This is their last day in Montreal. I’ll be sorry to see them go. I wish we had had more free time to spend together.
Comics!
Animal Man: Origin of the Species: Grant Morrisson’s early Nineties deconstruction of yet another preposterous DC superhero is remarkably light on the existential angst that would characterize his later efforts (especially Kid Eternity), and is delightfully heavy on the metafiction. This is the second volume of his run on the title (in it’s pre-Vertigo days), and we see Buddy Baker growing into his new pro-animal rights consciousness. We also see the two aliens who granted him his powers trying to repair the continuity damage caused by DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths (heck, the Psycho Pirate appears in this trade!) by retroactively making Animal Man’s new status part of the continuity.
There’s a cute allusion to Alan Moore’s revamp work on Swamp Thing, where the aliens refer to reconstructing Animal Man from the death-memories of Buddy Baker–which is very nearly how Moore explained how Alec Holland became a “ghost dressed in weeds.”
But the real metafiction, which was introduced in the previous’ trade story “The Coyote Gospel” (I’m misremembering the title), lies in the appearance of the artist’s brush on the page, and in characters dissolving into pencil sketches. Yes, it looks like Animal Man will be meeting the Creator: the comics creator, at least.
It’s interesting to see how Morrison has moved from writing comics characters as self-conscious artifacts to writing them as self-actualized mythologies. It’s an interesting shift over the last fifteen years or so.
Green Arrow #15: Ah, Kevin Smith’s last issue. It’s a bit of a fluff piece, with Oliver holding off Onomatopoeia while surgeons finish saving Connor’s life. There’s a fight, no one dies, Onomatopoeia escapes without a trace, and the status quo is all set for the next creative team.
I won’t be there to follow it, not out of disinterest, but as a result of a promise I made to cut down on my regular titles. If those titles had been on time, this would have all happened last month.
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen II #1: Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill have brought their flagship ABC Comics title back for another limited series. The great heroes of pulp Victoriana are treated as comics characters and brought together in a shared universe.
Moore excels at this mode of revisionist fiction. In fact, I would say that writing against existing texts and genres is where his greatest strength lies.
His creativity has expanded past London in this series, and begins in the red sand storms of Mars. Yes, Gullivar (from the travels? Or elsewhere.) and John Carter of Mars (complete with Virginia twang) fight against the tripod molluscs of Mars, only to see them launch there spheroid ships away from their home bases.
Towards Earth.
Raise your hands if you don’t know where this is going and/or aren’t a-quiver with excitement.
(I hope this six-issue series can be published in under a year and a half. Then, I can go back to pining for the 1963 annual. [grin])
Property and Freedom by Richard Pipes
Richard Pipes is a Russian historian and Reganite who believes that freedom is firmly grounded in the notions of property and ownership. Insofar as property is believed to be an inalienable right of the individual, to be possessed and transferred solely at the individual’s discretion, then the government created by those individuals (I’m speaking loosely here), will have to respect the individual’s right to property, and will inevitably turn towards a democratic system of freedom. However, if property is not deemed to be an inherent individual right, but is instead seen to devolve from a supreme power (Nature, God) or potentate (King, Tsar), then the result is oppressive government, massive economic failure, and crimes against humanity.
Where Pipes concentrates on the immovable property of real estate, his theories have a certain validity–the power of the medieval English kings were checked by Parliament’s control of the purse-strings, and when the Crown tried to raise intrusive taxes to further the political agenda, then the landowners rebelled; Russian serfdom was a direct result of a centralist, absolute government that controlled all the land, and saw people as an extension of that territory, to be moved at the monarch’s pleasure. According to Pipes, the Russian disregard for the property rights of the peasantry lead to the human-rights violations of the Leninist and Stalinist regimes, which liquidated entire populations to suit their Five Year Plans.
Russia may be an extreme example, but similar links between property rights and human rights can be found in other countries, including Revolutionary France and Nazi Germany.
Pipes talks a good game, but when he turns his attention towards movable and metaphorical property, such as capital, debentures and contracts, and towards modem contexts, he becomes less of a historian and more of a libertarian fantasist. He goes beyond linking property rights with freedom and human rights to claiming that property is the only human right, and that any government intervention in the free and open exchange of property on the market is an unacceptably dangerous step towards the Stalinist model. Moreover, he declares that all left-leaning social and civil rights projects–even contract law–are fundamentally wrong because they can only be achieved by depriving individuals of their fundamental property rights. Then he begins a screed against school busing programs and college admission requirements, using reducio ad absurdam arguments and Orwellian allusions to create a bureaucratic vision of the future, and I stopped paying attention.
(After all, any position taken reducio ad absurdam can be discounted; the point is that any position can be so discounted by that method. That doesn’t actually enlighten the problem or produce the resolution.)
Pipes refers 1984 and Utopia throughout the book when he describes any government initiative that would seek to reduce the primacy of property rights in the pantheon of human rights. In these works of fiction, the individuals have nothing that is not loaned to them by the bureaucracy and elites, leading towards a joyless, regimented, and fundamentally stifled society. In eliminating property, these governments have eliminated all the competitive desires that unequal distributions of property can produce. But Pipes conveniently overlooks the inequities of a society with only minimal government intervention in the management of property rights, where the wealthy and the middle class bind the working classes/peasantry with near-feudal economic restrictions that are just as morally wrong as if they had been legislated instead of being the end result of a free economy; only once does he admit that the perfectly-libertarian arrangement of parallel government and market is itself a fantasy just as dark and hopless as Utopia and Oceana.
Once is not enough.
Dina’s Coming Home!
Hurry, sweetie!
Docs Out of the Woodwork
Crazily busy at work for the past couple of days. I think my fingers might just type themselves to death…ouch!
My Parents Are In Town
…and they’re loose in the big city. ‘Ware the Windsorites!
(It’s really good to see them again.)
Day Eleven of Dina’s Big Adventure
She went shopping in Greenwich Village and SoHo last night (despite watching countless hours of Sex and the City, I’m not sure what that implies), and saw an endless variety of “Prado” products.
One more day!
Shakespeare\’s Kings by John Julius Norwich
“Never let the truth get in the way of a good story”–an insult when directed at journalists, an admission of inevitable compromise when directed at author. Real life just provides the raw material for the author; material which is then massaged and reinvented in order for the author to create the desired story, and so a devotion to the facts is very often impossible. After all, the story lies in the interstices and connections between facts. From any collection of facts, both author and historian (and even, at arms length, the journalist) have to exercise their judgement to craft a narrative specific to their profession and purpose. That’s because narrative isn’t a vehicle of fact–it’s a vehicle of expression.
How facts are selected, arranged, abandoned, and ignored reveals much about that expression. The audience’s sense of the story changes when they know that certain facts have been excluded or combined or rearranged, and so changes the story itself. That’s how the story engages, how it causes critical controversy…or acclaim.
The charge of historical inaccuracy is often laid on works of art that take real events as their subject, as if deviation from strict factual accuracy, in and of itself, somehow detracted from the works of art themselves. Facts don’t mean anything by themselves. They can’t tell a story. Stories are told about them. Inaccuracies are inevitable–chronicling events is not the same as narrating them–but it’s the nature of the inaccuracies that matters. It’s at this point that the audience exercises their judgement on how this matters–do the inaccuracies support or detract from the story? What sense of the history and truth is the art trying to convey? Do we agree with the artist’s choice of inaccuracies?
(The same problems exist with adaptations.)
There’s always a risk that the history expressed in a work of art, with all its attendant inaccuracies, will supplant the authority of fact, but that is easily mitigated by critical reception.
In Shakespeare’s Kings, British historian John Julius Norwich compares Shakespeare’s history plays and compares the portrayal of the kings and their controversies with the historical record. These plays have established the popular reputation of these historical figures–particularly Henry V and Richard III–and Norwich wanted to see if these reputations were warranted, and to see if Shakespeare managed to compress the events of a lifetime into a two hours’ stage.
His conclusion, that Shakespeare certainly never let the truth get in the way of a good story, but that’s not to say that he fabricated the truth. Very often, Shakespeare achieved his goal of presented complex political/historical information, most often used to explain the motivation of characters, by compressing and collapsing events. If a series of military defeats lead to animosity, then Shakespeare refers to one defeat as representative of all three. He also telescopes the time scale, so that there’s no appreciable lapse of time between battles and defeats, and goes a long way to explain why some characters turn treacherous in an instant. If he invents an event–usually an encounter between nobles that could not have possibly happened, given their placement on the battlefield, or across Europe–it’s to convey political connections and communications succinctly upon the stage–the medium impressing itself on the message. And, of course, some inaccuracies are inherited from his sources, some of whom declaimed all pretence of a historian’s objectivity (itself an inevitable pretence). But these inaccuracies generally serve Shakespeare’s aim of portraying the Plantagenet kings, the Hundred Years’ War, and the War of the Roses.
(Historically, I was surprised to learn how bad some of the Plantagenet kings were, how often they abdicated or were removed from office by Parliament, and how very tenuous were the claims of their successors.)
This is not to say that Shakespeare hasn’t distorted history to dubious ends: Henry V wouldn’t nearly be so acclaimed if Shakespeare presented the failures of the French campaign, portrayed his first request for surrender before the battle at Agincourt, or if he didn’t make excuses for Henry’s wholesale slaughter of prisoners after the battle. By the same token, Richard the III couldn’t possibly have been as deformed as Shakespeare claimed, and may in fact have been a better king than once believed, and a victim of a lasting and persuasive propaganda campaign by the Tudors.
Norwich takes on firm position on these literary and historiographical controversies, but he does craft them into a good story.