Comments on: Oo, that wicked watercraeft!

By: Adrian Spidle

Adrian Spidle — Mon, 02 Aug 2004 20:21:31 +0000

My Personal Experience of the Vietnam War I am a US Merchant Marine Vietnam veteran and a Vietnam era US Navy veteran. I was never a hero but I knew plenty. this is my little story: I’ll never forget September 1964. The long voyage from Bombay and through the straits of Malacca was marked by my poignant view of Singapore as we sailed by. Much to my regret it had been scratched from our itinerary at the last minute but that didn’t keep us from sailing close enough to get a view of that great Asian city. Then, on a steamy hot day, the Clipper wended its way up the Saigon River towards the capital city of Saigon. My watch partner Manny, my buddy Willie and I were leaning on the railing enjoying the breeze in our faces and admiring the translucent green “lawns” that bound the river on both sides. “Oyez, Manolito, what’s with all those lawns around here?” I asked curiously. “Estupido! – Them are rice paddies.” he answered as he and Willie laughed knowingly at me, the no-commonsense college-kid. I will forever be grateful for the experience of working with those street-smart unlicensed seamen as one of them. In those days, the globally-wise working guys on US flag ships were mainly white-trash, Hispanic and or black. Even though they continually made fun of me, I made great friends among them and admired their manly competence and unpretentious bravery. My buddies at MIT and I all thought we were so much smarter than everyone else, and that that was very important and that obviously entitled us highly evolved cognoscenti to rule over the great unwashed masses. Perhaps that explains why, today, I am so unimpressed by the over-educated social theorists who feel so compelled to control our lives so that they fit their ivory tower theories. I was recently reading about a Harvard professor’s research in to why so many highly intelligent people are hopelessly unable to effectively navigate everyday life. It seems that… http://pep.typepad.com/public_enquiry_project/2004/08/my_personal_exp.html

By: Adrian Spidle

Adrian Spidle — Mon, 02 Aug 2004 18:38:34 +0000

August 02, 2004 John Kerry will never win when the electorate finds out that two thirds of all Vietnam Veterans can’t stand him. This is the issue that can determine the outcome of this election if we can get the word out. It will have no impact on the 30% of the electorate who hate Bush and America, but it will keep some Bush haters from voting and it will flip enough of the undecided to totally preclude a Kerry victory. I recently asked a Viet Vet buddy if he knew any Viet Vets who liked Kerry and he thought for a moment. He then said… http://pep.typepad.com/public_enquiry_project/2004/08/john_kerry_will.html

By: Adrian Spidle

Adrian Spidle — Mon, 02 Aug 2004 18:38:31 +0000

By: Adrian Spidle

Adrian Spidle — Mon, 02 Aug 2004 18:37:54 +0000

By: Doug

Doug — Mon, 02 Aug 2004 06:54:14 +0000

“Reviewers called upon to consider a work they just don?t believe could possibly be good, because it?s somehow profoundly the wrong sort of thing, according to them. And then they sort of waste everyone?s time, scrutinizing and pretending it?s some detail that?s vexed them.” This also explains almost all of the reviews of Bill Clinton’s book. Although the more parsimonious explanation on that one may be that the reviewers didn’t actually read the book and instead gave us their personal take on the author. Of the reviews that I’ve seen, only Larry McMurtry’s makes me think that he not only read the book but considered it with some care.

By: ian

ian — Fri, 30 Jul 2004 20:56:55 +0000

There is also the point that watercraft are boats!

By: Carlos

Carlos — Fri, 30 Jul 2004 19:04:13 +0000

I would guess that Miéville picked the knowing use of the weirdly spelled common word from Mary Gentle’s Rats and Gargoyles, where one is used to describe a fifth cardinal direction.

By: Neel Krishnaswami

Neel Krishnaswami — Fri, 30 Jul 2004 17:26:57 +0000

I’m firmly in the camp of liking Mieville’s neologisms. Trying to conceive of it as “heavy lifting in philology” is to miss the point—it’s bricolage, in the sense of Derrida. He’s taking a grab-bag of words, cutting them loose from their original contexts and grafting them onto his fantasy world in order to create new senses for old words. In an important way, this is a more “realistic” kind of linguistic development that Tolkien did, because this is how languages change in real life—when coining a new word, I certainly don’t try to invent a word which fits into a historical evolution of vocabulary. Instead, I try to add new senses to existing words, warping the sound a bit if it’s not a good fit.

By: Doctor Memory

Doctor Memory — Fri, 30 Jul 2004 16:19:34 +0000

(Neel is, I think, articulating my point a bit better than I, so parenthetical props to him, even though I actually liked The Scar quite a bit better than PSS.) In re craeft-vs-craft, that bugged me as well, precisely because it seemed like a (rare) instance of Mieville falling into the same trap that most (all?) of Tolkien’s more slavish imitators do: that of pulling neologisms directly from their ass, not realizing that the reason JRRT got away with it was that he’d done the heavy lifting in philology necessary to make all that gobbledegook sound naturalistic.

By: Ray

Ray — Fri, 30 Jul 2004 08:50:45 +0000

You’ll need to change that title to Cycle of Magick of Ye SongCraefter of Dreamsong’s Wyrd. Someone call Dave Langford, his title generator needs updating…

By: Neel Krishnaswami

Neel Krishnaswami — Fri, 30 Jul 2004 05:26:31 +0000

I haven’t read Iron Council yet, but one of the things I really liked about Perdido Street Station was the way that he made the socialist myth fit in perfectly with the collection of other myths that were used to build the world. The idea of treating the mythology of the union as just a fantastical a device as elves or artificial intelligence or sorcery was a knockout. I didn’t like The Scar nearly as much, pretty much exactly to the extent that he tried to give the socialist myth more reality-weight in it. It had its moments—I really loved the anti-Orientalist moment of truth when the grindylow revealed what they were really after—but all in all it seemed like a much lesser work to me. I think it’s really, really hard to make a piece of fiction work as a political vehicle, simply because it’s so patently obvious that the writer can stack the deck any way he or she likes. That’s why I thought the grindylow worked, and much of the rest didn’t—the hand of the author becoming visible was precisely the point of that scene, because it was needful to make a very pointed and political observation about the conventions of the fantasy genre.

By: peter ramus

peter ramus — Fri, 30 Jul 2004 04:27:34 +0000

Gaah! You mean my four–part Cycle of Dream of Ye Songdreamer of Dreamsong’s Cycle is no go?

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 29 Jul 2004 23:45:05 +0000

I ain’t Lipkin, but I think his issue with “watercraeft” (and, to be honest, mine too) was the hypercliched and of-dubious-necessity spelling of “craft” as “craeft”. Why? To distinguish it from “craft”? But why should this distinction be necessary when the whole point of that sequence is to present the magic as being effected in a very mundane fashion, just like regular construction work (craft)? This kind of creative spelling is a hallmark of very, very poor authors (especially amateur ones) looking for a cheap way to add the illusion of depth to their stories. (Like putting “song” or “dreamer” in the title.) I love Mieville, don’t get me wrong, but I also applied face to palm when I first read that spelling. Maybe he doesn’t bother to read bad fiction, and so didn’t know; maybe he thought he could rehabilitate silly spellings and make them work again; either way, it doesn’t work for me.

By: Kip Manley

Kip Manley — Thu, 29 Jul 2004 23:14:43 +0000

(I should add that the dogged refusal of fantasy in general to deal with politics, economics, or any ethics more complex than FATE and DESTINY is one of my major sticking points with the whole enterprise as she is wrote; Miéville’s attempt to get past that deserves props. But dammit! He shoulda been better! I wanted more! Wahhhh!)

By: Kip Manley

Kip Manley — Thu, 29 Jul 2004 23:10:55 +0000

Ah, but Miéville’s subcreation is hampered—I’d say crippled—by precisely that lack of a red pen: “Miéville seems to have a thousand ideas that strike him as nifty, and he seems to feel compelled to throw them into the novel at any cost” is pretty much the nut of the review, and I bobbed my head in time most vociferously. I won’t knock extra pounds of prose either; beams, eyes, glass houses, stones. But it’s possible to digress, and digress well, just as it’s possible to open up the wonders of a literary subcreation without boring the reader’s socks off. (It helps not to have a generic plot, yes.) Nor was I thrilled with Miéville’s take on gender, neither. —But my own snark is based on a quick and quickly disappointed reading of Perdido Street Station a whiles back; there was hype, from individuals trusted, and his failure to live up to it, come to think of it, added immesurably to the ennui and disaffection I’ve been feeling of late with regards to the whole darn enterprise as she is currently wrote, but that’s a revolver of a different color entirely; don’t mind me. Still, John: a lot of Miéville’s soi-disant inventiveness is due to sampling beats from the AD&D Monster Manual, and “craeft” is an eyeworm: negligible to those who pass over it, inexplicably annoying to those who can’t. Not as bad as “magick,” no, but close enough to grate on my optic nerve something fierce.