#no need for ahistorical trash

[navree]

God that Cleopatra show is so fucking stupid. And the fact their saying its a documentary! Wtf

I haven't watched it and I have no desire to because it's everything I've been railing against for years (she's part of the ptolemaic dynasty! they're literally known for having a christmas wreath for a family tree! she's the culmination of like three hundred years of white macedonians fucking their siblings and their kids over and over again! this woman could be played by kristen stewart and it would be accurate casting!) and I would just get mad. The attempts to try and paint this as in any way historically accurate are especially galling, considering the legacy of the Ptolemies. They came down from Macedonia and literally conquered Egypt for themselves, refused to engage with the culture or the language or the people in any meaningful way until Cleopatra, who then proceeded to miscalculate so spectacularly that she ended up being the catalyst for Egypt becoming a colony for the next two thousand years. The Ptolemies were a bunch of white partiers high flying their way through Egypt and not caring about maintaining the country in any meaningful way and were directly responsible for its waning power in the Mediterranean (Auletes literally needed to beg for Rome's intervention to get his throne back, my God the Ptolemies were pathetic), and to try and heap all that fail-legacy on the idea that Cleopatra was "culturally black" (literally what the fuck does that mean) is honestly a bit insulting. Talk about Cleopatra if you want, but just admit that it's because she's just Egypt's most famous white lady and stop trying to justify it with some idea that she was actually even remotely ethnically Egyptian at all when she certainly wasn't and it's incredibly provable.

And I honestly want Hollywood and the entertainment industry to ask themselves: why do they keep wanting to tell Cleopatra's story? What's the point? Every time anyone tries, it's always framed around two things: her relationship with Julius Caesar and the tumult of that time period, or her relationship with Mark Antony and the tumult of that time period. And in both cases, Egypt and Cleopatra are on the periphery of that story, with the core drama centered around the Romans and their dynamics (Caesar and the Ides and Brutus and Cassius, or Antony and Octavian and the last war of the Republic). That's where the meat is, and Cleopatra's function is to just be a love interest and then die. There's a reason why I vastly prefer reading about Actium in an Antony or Octavian biography, rather than a Cleopatra one; they're the ones with the biggest stakes in the game and whose decisions are shaping the outcome. Octavian didn't even care about Cleopatra, not really, he wanted Egypt for the money but his primarily goal was to get Antony out of the way and assume sole power for himself. There are stories that can center Cleopatra, but those mostly involve her early reign, like her and her father's flight to Rome or her succession issues with her siblings, and we really don't see a lot of media that wants to engage with that at all. So pop culture is focused on Cleopatra as a side character, and I think it's incredibly telling that even then, they still took the white lady and ran with her the most when they refuse to do anything actually interesting, as opposed to looking at stories about actual Egyptians.

There are so many interesting Egyptian figures I wish were getting more press, Egyptians who were actually, you know, ethnically Egyptian. I'm incredibly partial to the late Eighteenth Dynasty and early Nineteeneth Dynasty myself (I have a fondness for the Amarna period in particular) and I would kill to see anything from that, or about Hatshepsut, and I'll even allow for a skipping of Tutankhamun given how done to death he's been. These people all have incredibly fascinating stories where they're, you know, the central figures, where they affect the world and where their actions have weight and consequences. Tell those stories, adapt that history, rather than trying to shove some ridiculous narrative that a woman who owned slaves and who is, I'm sorry, most famous for fucking up, is actually peak representation for your modern American understanding of race and ethnicity. I'd kill for more documentaries about Ancient Egypt and some of these royals, give me them and enough with fucking Cleopatra.

[mogai-sunflowers]

I'm not trying to like... Start a fight? But it's ahistorical to say that the only reason bi sapphics left the lesbian label is because political lesbians drove them out. It's not true. There are many cases of bi sapphic and bi achillian activists who wanted to be defined by their own sexuality and not by their sex acts. It removes the autonomy of bisexuals to claim we all were so weak that lesbian separatists drove us out for feminist reasons when the political lesbians your mentioning, not by name given but it's not really needed, were a fringe group whose harm is indeed large but often over exaggerated. They wouldn't have that power to literally change all of lesbian culture and it's community and make bi sapphics leave. In my opinion, based on historical documents of both lesbian and bisexual activists and writers from the 1920 up til about the 1960s, it was just a natural shift in the community. Bisexuals wanted their own label outside of just being forced to swing between straight and gay depending who we're with and to claim they just got basically shoved out of lesbian bars and slapped with the bi label just.... Isn't true and ignores large swabs of bisexual history in trying to own our identity and the acceptance of bisexuals in mlm and wlw spaces.

I'd love to see counter evidence and I'm not opposed to the mspec lesbian label but as someone who loves and inspects bi History, this narrative that we were simply kicked out and it was the mean lesbian's fault is often used to encourage lesbophobia and simply... Isn't true. I deeply encourage you to check up on bisexual history concerning activists and the separation of the mlm and wlw communities maybe in different places than you haven't prior and how, for most of us, we left the gay and lesbian communities willingly because LGBT enforced biphobia was just as rampant back then as it is today and we wanted our own identity outside of just sex acts.(which deeply did and still dose contribute to the biphobic sediments that bisexuals are flirtatious and unloyal cheaters and liars. it wasn't just cishets calling us that stuff.)

I hope this doesn't sound passive aggressive or demeaning in anyway, that's not what I'm trying to say. I'm just tried of this take that it was mean lesbian supremacists that kicked us out without a source ever to be found and just buckets and buckets of bi activists talking about bisexuality and how they wanted a label and place of their own going completely unnoticed and unacknowledged because it doesn't fit the narrative that often underlines arguments concerning mspec lesbianism next to mono lesbianism ("bi lesbians are great and automatically unproblematic but monosexual/cis lesbians are automatically suspicious and terfy" kind of trash with no introspection into how that's blatantly lesbophobic regardless of any trans/mspec standpoint. Not just bigoted and applying your own stereotype on a fellow queer person because of terfs (also reinforces the terf sediment that terf is just the new word for lesbian) but also just patently not true.)

I fully agree with everything you’re saying, I normally talk only about the political lesbianism aspect because it was pretty violent and it’s what I know most about, I know it’s not the sole reason for what happened. so in that regard I’m sorry for misrepresenting that part of history.

however, I don’t think that pointing out the impact lesbian separatism has had on the community is in opposition to that. lesbian community used to always be about celebrating the joy of love for women, not about not being attracted to men. im not saying there’s anything wrong with being proud of not being attracted to men, or that individuals shouldn’t define themselves that way in relation to their lesbianism, but political lesbianism DEFINITELY reflected a shift that has made the general entity of the lesbian community much less about love for women, which is in my opinion a loss. it’s become more about excluding people based on an attraction quota than it has been about including people who personally resonate with the lesbian label and experience. The exclusionary part came from political lesbianism, and that’s evident in the way so many younger lesbian communities operate nowadays. Bi activism wasn’t about trying to force a rift between the two communities, but rather to acknowledge their general distinctions, so to me it’s not as relevant to the history of lesbian exclusionism. But I don’t know enough about that aspect of history to truly form an opinion on it, so I would really appreciate if you could send some of the sources you’re talking about!!

overall, I agree with you that i and others should take those aspects of queer history into account more, and I’d love to learn more about it, but I don’t think it’s any less important to acknowledge the roots of the exclusionism that so many lesbians face. i do not at all think that lesbian and terf are synonymous and I hate that people think they are, but acknowledging that the roots of radical feminism partially lie within lesbian feminism, isn’t saying that, it’s acknowledging how transphobia and biphobia have played a real part in our history. it’s not “mean lesbians” it’s bigoted people who used their lesbian identity as an excuse to promote exclusionary and reactionary queer politics /info /nm

[thevibrantcolor]

*sighs deeply* i'm going to regret this so much but i'm picking this up.

first of, i want to begin by saying i don't 100% agree with op either. israel as it is is an apartheid state. the fact that palestinians in the wb are under military law while jewish settlers are under civil one makes it a fact. and i do support at the very least a 2 state solution, land exchange, and dismantling of all settlements. factually, according to the most recent palestine/israel Pulse survey in 2023, only 23% of palestinians support for a democratic one-state solution (i know it looks like trash, but this is the official Pulse site https://www.pcpsr.org/en/node/928). so pushing for a one state solution land-for-all right now seems to me like pushing what westerners want onto a conflict in which they spoke over natives enough. you can't separate the complete disinterest in what actual palestinians want from orientalism and western-centrism.

onto your main arguements: jews have always been present in the levant generally and in palestine specifically. this isn't a debate it is a fact. look up hevron, safed, jerusalem or just generally jewish presence in the area after the roman expulsion. jews were always there, only in lower numbers, so the whole "weren't even there for 2000 years" agruement immediately falls apart.

even if you meant the majority weren't in the levant you are wrong again: according to a survey conducted in 2005, 61% of jewish israelis identified as either mizrahi or sephardi (though to be entirely fair by 1995 the israeli government stopped doing these statistics, from what i can gather bc too many households were mixed by that point). either way, that arguement falls too.

how about the "there are no genetic links anymore!!!!" even if we put aside that most arguement i see based on these are straight up race science, wrong again: 1, 2 , 3 , 4, and even this paper that focuses on the european part of the ashki genome says they are also levantine 5. two seconds of google would have shown you that. we are 10 months in to this cruel, stupid, avoidable war and the malicious wave of antisemitism that came with it. at this point you have no excuse for spreading Khazar Theory garbage.

simply put, to say that jews are not connected to the levant generally and palestine-israel specifically is ahistoric, anti-intellectual, unscientific and is based on ignorance and bigotry. specifically here, antisemitism. i could go into archiological findings but that would take an additional 2000 years, and frankly, i already put too much time and energy writing all of this.

but by far, your most malicious, ridiculous argument had to be the good ol' "if they weren't there of xyz amount of time then they are not native anymore!!1!@!" even putting aside allll that i wrote, how most jewish holidays are specifically about the land of yisrael (passover, shavu'ot, tu-bishvat, sukkot, tu-b'av) or are directly connected to it (hanukkah, l"g ba'omer, tisha b'av) what you are basically saying is that nativity has an expiration date. what, if native americans are banned from their ancestor's land for another 400 years they'll be occupiers for moving back? what, if jews were force to flee on mass into israel 400 years earlier they would have still been natives (tm)? no. the nativity of jews is unquestionable just like the cruelty of israel is now. the nativity of jews does not grant them moral immunity, neither does it inherently grant one to palestinians. it is an arguement that both pro- and anti-israelis need to throw to the nearest trash can.

final word before i go, as a half-afghan jew, there is no myth that i loath more than that of the the happy dhimmi. my family was not forced to flee afghanistan in the early 30's because of israel. iraq and surya and other muslim countries didn't create a nazi partties in the 30's and 40's and lynched jews because of israel. the expulsion of almost every single jew out of the levant, along with lynching, segregation and property theft cannot be simply placed on israel. this happened because of antisemitism embedded within the society. you are also welcome to open google about antisemitism in the arab world. in conclusion: ceasefire now, the gov of isreal belongs in jail, jews are native to the levant, nativity doesn't have much to do with morality, read about the subjects you talk about or be rightfully called an antisemite.

"Do you support Israel?"

I don't know - what do you mean by "support Israel"?

Do I support Israel's current war in Gaza? No.

Do I support Israel's right to get its citizens back? Yes.

Do I support Israel's settlements in the West Bank? No.

Do I support Israel's right to exist? Yes.

Do I support Israel's current government and leaders? No.

Do I support Israel's right to defend itself? Yes.

So I dunno, do I "support" Israel or not? What about Palestine?

Do I support reparations for Palestinians in the West Bank? Yes.

Do I support Hamas? No.

Do I support Palestinians in Gaza being free from war? Yes.

Do I support Hamas' violence against Israeli citizens? No.

Do I support Palestine's right to exist? Yes.

And then there's this...

Do I support the destruction of Israel? No.

Do I support the destruction of Palestine? No.

Do I support a world where Israelis don't fear death? Yes.

Do I support a world where Palestinians don't fear death? Yes.

The only way to achieve actual peace in the region is to support peace between Israel and Palestine. You cannot get this if you destroy Israel OR Palestine.

[thewritingpossum]

so i finally read a summary of the king and wow, i thought this movie was just weirdly casted and poorly lighted but it’s also stupid as fuck

[flower-petal-pansexual]

*gently kisses the forehead of battle axe bis and softly tucks them into bed. The candles lightly flickering around as I calmly put them out as darkness envelopes the room. I start to burn some beautiful incense and just before I leave the room I whisper so sweetly my ancient words of wisdom, “My dear I will never give a single possible flying, swimming, or terrestrial fuck about your trash ass, incomplete, half-ass researched, ahistorical, whiny, childish views. As I and many that have come before you have learned may you one day find strength in the true meanings of the infinitly reaching multisexual and multiromantic spectrums commuities. As well as history and fluidity of bisexuality and how you relate to pansexuality, omnisexuality, and others as well. May you put down the weapons the separate and subdued our community. For we are all copies, spitting images, recollections of time long holding the mysteries of love and desire. We are the memories of the past repeating ourselves. The war has already been won, the battle is over. Sleep well for tomorrow is a new dawn. Put down your blade and come sit and have a cup of tea there is no need to harm me. We are one in the same.*

[fromchaostocosmos]

When people get mad at that I say Poland is trash, this just reinforces the idea for me.

I mean Poland also did have Pogroms post Holocaust on Holocaust survivors returning home.

My grandparents family on the maternal fled Poland.

I also will never forget the state of various Jewish cemeteries I visited when I went to Poland when I 12 and how utterly in disrepair some were. I will also never forget seeing one cemetery that had graves riddled with bullet holes from when Nazis had used them for target practice and other graves that been spray painted with swastikas and the words "white power" all in the same cemetery.

Going to Krakow and seeing how utterly devoid and striped of any of the history it once had.

Seeing swastika graffiti on walls in the city. Seeing a memorial to Holocaust that was a bunch of crosses. Going to Majdanek, walking through a gas chamber, and then at some point seeing a sign in Death Camp for tourist shop.

Knowing about how many times articles come out about Poland (and other european countries) where towns "discover" that there is some aspect of their infrastructure that was built with Jewish gravestones.

Lets not forget that Poland currently has laws on the books where they are refusing to take responsibility for their role in the Holocaust and are blaming everything on nazi germany instead. That Poland is actively participating in Holocaust denial.

Also the idea the Poles and Jews were neighbors is laughable. To say they were "living as neighbors" imply a peaceful relationship with equal standing between two parties. That was not the reality and would ahistorical to say so.

Jewish people were isolated, disenfranchised, and treated with the utmost cruelty.

There is nothing cute or sweet about this. I hope those pictures spontaneously combust. Leaving nothing but ash where they one hung. In memory of those they burned for their own greed. And that no matter what they do or try they can't get rid of the ash and burn marks or cover it up. Nothing else needs burn, no one need get hurt. But you dare to use as some prop, fuck you.

Poles in the comments are mostly excusing this. I always think I can’t be shocked by antisemitism anymore only to be proven wrong.

[dangermousie]

2019 END OF YEAR KDrama Post

Wow, I haven’t made one in years. This is going to involve only dramas that came out in 2019 because I watched a hell of a lot dramas made prior to that and trying to figure out which ones will give me a headache.

DRAMAS WATCHED (In order of liking from most to least as opposed to pure quality; I am including if I’ve seen at least two eps AND feel it was enough to make up my mind; yes I realize that’s inaccurate, but that’s my list)

Extraordinary You -  A philosophy and religion course AND a love story, and perfect at both.

My Country - a brutal, passionate, intense masterpiece of a sageuk. This is how they should be.

Crash Landing On You - the two eps that have aired brought my joy in watching kdramas back to me so vividly. This is everything. 

Encounter - the perfect noona romance of the year for me. It seems to have little plot (powerful older woman, idealistic younger man) but the characters made me love them with an unhealthy amount of attachment and the mood is just perfect. 

Haechi - smart traditional sageuk with a heart. This one will make you love it but also respect it in the morning :)

Queen: Love and War - Period, romance, mystery, helpless king and feisty heroine. It’s everything I love in one package. 

Chocolate - if, like me, you like slow old-school melo with genuine grown-ups, this one is for you. Ha Ji Won and Yoon Kye Sang are both incandescent in this. 

One Spring Night - a rare slice of life that worked for me so so much. I rooted for the main OTP like crazy (I did skip all the sister stuff though because boring to me.) It’s just a breath of fresh air.

The Tale of Nokdu - a rare funny youth sageuk that worked for me (except, ironically, for when they tried to be politics-heavy and serious about it.) Wonderful OTP, funny situations and just generally a delight. 

Memories of the Alhambra - I can hear people screaming that I put this so high, but this is a faves ranking, not objective one, and I loved the unusual premise (it ultimately fell apart but it tried), and Hyun Bin’s performance was out of this world and the aaaaagnst and I enjoyed waiting for it each week until almost the end. That ending though!!!!!

Psychopath Diary - this is black comedy at its best and hysterical and smart and somehow got me invested in the hapless protagonist. 

Hotel del Luna - clever and funny and smart. Hong Sisters largely back to form. I found the sageuk parts more engaging than modern ones, but what else is new.

Search WWW - some parts of it worked for me more than others, but it had solid writing and cool characters and some interesting OTP(s). 

Love is Beautiful Life is Wonderful - has the weekend drama slowness but it lovely and fun. 

When the Camellia Blooms - it was well made and the OTP was great and the acting top notch, I just don’t tend to go gaga for slice of life dramas, especially ones involving market ladies, much. 

Flower Crew Joseon Marriage Agency - competently done, pretty period piece about nothing. It was enjoyable and forgettable at once.

Catch the Ghost - I put it as high as I did because the OTP really did have lovely chemistry but the story was a complete mess, the police work made no sense and the heroine’s character was like nails on a chalkboard for me.

Joseon Survival - I got about four episodes in and liked it a lot but then Kang Ji Hwan turned out to be a convicted rapist, they replaced the lead and I didn’t go back. I kind of want to because I liked what I saw and I am madly curious as to whether they changed the main character or just said he had a different face now, no explanation. 

The Last Empress - pure inconsistent trash but so entertaining!

Vagabond - I made it eight episodes in before I realized that I would have as much fun staring at traffic. It’s a competently done actioner but without more, actioners never work for me, so this was a viewer/drama mismatch.

Arthdal  Chronicles - incoherent, visually odd and boring, this is arguably the worst drama this year but I am giving it higher place because the cast really tries (even if it tends to fail because it has nothing to work with) and because it attempted something different even if it failed spectacularly. SO BAD.

Melting Me Softly - yes, my brain was fully melted by this soulless, charmless waste of Ji Chang Wook and my limited free time.

VIP - Any drama that makes the main mystery and thrust of the story who the husband cheated on his wife with is BORING. Seriously, this is not exactly Hercule Poirot. They wasted their cast - I have NO idea why Lee Sang Yoon agreed to be in this as a one note character and Jang Nara is playing a second scorned wife in a row but without even the entertainment value of her previous outing.

Abyss - aptly named. The best thing I can say about it is it didn’t offend me but oh boy was it dull.

Absolute Boyfriend - I loved the manga but it’s time to accept this can never be adapted well. They wasted the cast and that ending was just an insult on top of a trash heap.

The Lies Within - you cast that cast and deliberately have no romance. You are dead to me. 

Woman of 9.9 Billion - competently made, but it’s everything I dislike - dour unpleasant bored people behaving as if they are in a particularly dreary art-house French movie but without any nuance or interest the latter came provide. 

Love with Flaws - shrill, dumb, neither acted nor written by anyone trying at all. 

Rookie Historian Goo Hae Ryung - objectively, it’s not the worst drama on the list, but it’s everything I hate in one package - willfully ahistorical but not cleverly so, male lead incapable of acting, the characters so one-dimensional they disappear, this purports to be a period drama but about as period as a space ship. God, I loathed this. 

FAVORITE DRAMA

Extraordinary You - smart (so mind-bendingly smart) and moving and totally unpredictable and with so many things to say about free will and religion and self and nature of memory and narrative, this had an insane impossible premise and yet somehow managed to do it full justice and stick the landing. 

WORST DRAMA

People with Flaws - this is different from least favorite because even if I loathed e.g., Rookie Historian or Woman of 9.9 Billion, I recognized some positive features; it’s just certain things really rubbed me the wrong way due to personal preferences. But this shrill hot mess of a drama is really everything that’s wrong with dramaworld.

FAVORITE MALE CHARACTER

Prince Yeoning, Haechi - fiercely smart, strong, tormented by the duality of his birth (royal father, servant mother) but not letting this distract him from his purpose, loyal to the bone, and with integrity nothing can shake but where you can feel that it’s not easy and that it costs him.

FAVORITE FEMALE CHARACTER

Eun Dan Oh, Extraordinary You - a go-getter who remakes the world (literally); smart, cheerful, strong, beautifully human. She feels so real and yet is larger than anything around her. 

NEEDS TO BE MURDERED

Yi Seung Gye, My Country - a sociopath destroying lives in his quest for power and control, even the destruction of his own family barely gives him anything but momentary pause. He is the reason for the tragedy of MC. 

FAVORITE SHIP

Eun Dan Oh x Haru, Extraordinary You - their love is literally universe and god-defying. They have loved each other as different people in three separate worlds (and counting), and have defied loss of memory and even loss of self as well as death, the end of worlds, and their god and the narrative and literally anything and everything, to be together.

Runner Up: Soo Hyun x Jin Hyuk, Encounter: tender and decent and his bringing her back to vivid life and the way they love and support and compliment each other.  

Probably gonna be on list if doesn’t go haywire: Crash Landing on You: she is a SK heiress, he’s a NK officer, they have mad chemistry and so much potential.

NOTP:

Tae Mi x Morgan, Search WWW - love the actors, love the chemistry, love the characters in terms of the way they are written, but they are absolutely wrong for each other and there is no future of any sort but misery ahead. None of their issues are resolved but are swept under the rug. It’s a cautionary tale, not a romance. I did a long rant before so not repeating. 

BEST SECONDARY OTP

Scarlett x Ji Hwan, Search WWW - they stole the shippiness in the drama for me. Cooky and adorable and noona romance done right.

FAVORITE SCENE

Haru’s final disappearance, Extraordinary You - the lights start to go out, the world literally dissolving, Eun Oh and Haru clinging to each other, with his telling her she was his beginning and the end. His name, the one she gave him, is the last thing he hears. In a drama full of amazing scenes the very gist of which was defying the very creator and universe and meaning of existence, this was the one that stayed with me the most.

BIGGEST CRUSH

Seo Hwi, My Country - I have a thing for deeply honorable, deeply tortured period badasses with long hair and a death wish (see Choi Young in Faith etc.)

BEST SCENE STEALER CHARACTER

Yi Bang Won, My Country - he started out as an antihero and ended up as arguably a tragic villain (or maybe still an anti-hero) but oh boy, was he magnetic and fascinating and sucking out all the oxygen whenever he was in the scene.

NEEDS A SEQUEL

Memories of the Alhambra - WTF ending was that?! All that misery and no real resolution?! Dammit!

TROPE THAT NEEDS TO DIE

Youth Sageuk - I hate most of them! They are anachronistic and dumb and honestly, what is the point of having fully modern people in period clothes? Just make a modern show and call it a day.

BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENT

Melting Me Softly - Ji Chang Wook’s first project back from the military was an unfunny, unmoving, pointless mess with not an ounce of genuine enjoyment despite the excellent pedigree of everyone involved in front and behind the camera.

Arthdal Chronicles - the makers made excellent Queen Seon Duk, Tree with Deep Roots and Six Flying Dragons. The cast was uniformly A grade. The result was an open-ended, boring, incoherent mess that looks like a bad sort of a drug trip and made about as much sense. 

BIGGEST GOOD SURPRISE

Extraordinary You - I had zero interest in yet another high school drama with no actors I recognized. By the end, EY was an emotional brainy twister of a marvel that became my favorite drama of all time. I’ve been watching dramas for over 13 years so that’s saying something.

2019 DRAMAS I HAVEN’T SEEN THAT I MOST WANT TO WATCH

The Crowned Clown - I love sageuks and cast and it looks so smart and emotional

Angel’s Last Mission: Love - my next contemporary - I watched a little and loved what I saw

Fates and Furies - I saw a few eps and classic melo is so up my alley.

Clean with a Passion for Now - I like the cast and it’s a year of falling for hot weird bosses apparently.

Graceful Family - I love makjang and Im Soo Jung.

The Secret Life of My Secretary - downmarket Beauty Inside and I loved BI.

Love Affairs in the Afternoon - artsy adultery FTW

Item - I don’t like crime stuff but I am here for Joo Ji Hoon.

My Strange Hero - seems a little cooky but I am fond of Yoo Seung Ho.

MOST ANTICIPATED IN 2020

King: the Eternal Monarch - Lee Min Ho and Woo Do Hwan and parallel worlds and written by Kim Eun Suk. Yes Please.

I should probably make one for cdramas too though that one would be rather shorter.

[arecomicsevengood]

I’ve been trying to slow down the pace of my anxious brain, to move it away from the obsessive unsatisfying masturbatory procrastinating of clicking refresh. I want the presence of mind that comes from focused reading, I want to heal the destroyed reward mechanism of my brain. Absent the structure to days that comes with leaving the house, quarantine conditions have exacerbated these problems. I sought out older newspaper strips, because they have a leisurely pace. While no one would actually read a book-length collection a day at a time, in recreation of how they were originally read, the guiding principle that they be taken in as a diversion while doing other things is worth keeping in mind, as it runs opposite to current directives to binge-watch TV shows. Theoretically, having these narratives exist in parallel to the procession of days would be a nice respite from quarantine’s time-warp effect. However, when reading older newspaper strips, especially if you’re paying attention to the news at all, one is frequently jarred by the presence of racial caricatures.

I really try to avoid being someone offended by work that comes from a completely different cultural context. I’m a white dude, and while I don’t want to be quick to forgive anyone’s racism, I also don’t want to be one of those people that rush to condemn things as a way to posit myself as some sort of enlightened authority. Trying to “cancel” someone who’s long dead really only makes you into someone dismissive of history, which only works to one’s detriment.

Still, when the protests against police violence turned to easily-communicated gestures of symbolic speech, and iconoclastic energy was directed against statues of historical colonialists rather than the more immediate threats presented by police cruisers, conservatives defended such statues arguing their historical importance. This argument is extremely disingenuous. We can choose the historical narrative we want to present to ourselves. While the majority of opinions enshrined in law throughout the course of American political history were those slave-owners and genocide-justifiers, there’s nonetheless a vast cultural history it would serve as well to look to and posit as who we are. Every decision made was the result of argument, the losers of the arguments unaccountably brave. Ever since reading Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke, I’ve been convinced that if any woman should be preserved on our money, it’s Jeanette Rankin, if only so her story would then be taught in schools. The work of a historian is to make an argument by collecting threads of a narrative out of the collective chaos of ongoing time before it’s all lost to entropy and rot.

Much credit is due to comics historian Bill Blackbeard, who edited the Smithsonian Collection Of Newspaper Comics, for what it is now clear is the considerable effort he must’ve made to avoid including too many depictions of racial stereotypes in his survey. He did so because he was arguing for comic strips being an art form, and avoiding the laziness of racial caricature helps that argument be made. He doesn’t bypass them completely: They’re in a Herriman strip, Baron Bean, albeit only for a few panels. They’re also on prominent display in the McKay Little Nemo strips. Maybe they’re somewhere else I didn’t look at too closely, it’s a large book.

But imagine my surprise and mortification when I bought a big collection of Polly And Her Pals Sunday strips and encountered these “mammy” caricatures in the depiction of servants. And then, when I bought a collection of Walt And Skeezix dailies, there it was again. These strips are well-regarded, considered the best of their day, and the comic strip as a whole was regarded as intellectually superior to the comic books that followed. When Gary Groth wrote his introduction to the first issue of Love And Rockets, these strips were the works he cited as the historical apex of the form.

(Apologies may be in order for my not wanting to actually include the relevant imagery of racial caricature here, and this post being all text. I would definitely need to apologize if I did include them though.)

The thing about the racial caricatures is they demonstrate the limitations of their artist’s ambition. The most charitable reading I can afford to give is that the caricatures exist within a larger context where all of the characterizations are burlesques, intended strictly for laughs, and somewhat thin. Gasoline Alley, currently being reprinted as Walt And Skeezix, is meant to evoke some sense of feeling, and while there are some melodramatic plotlines, the bulk of the work it does to accomplish that end is by being low-key and gentle. If you view the strip not as a light comedy historical piece, and admit you are meant to project your feelings onto the white main characters, you kind of have to concede that maybe Frank King didn’t really see black people as human. You know black people read these strips! It ran in a Chicago newspaper. If you lived in Chicago at this time, you would see black people living their lives, which would surely include the buying and reading of newspapers. It seems really weird to then depict black people as dumb and superstitious, even if the depiction of them as working as servants was primarily how the cartoonist would have encountered them in the middle-class milieu he lived in and depicted.

Herriman is a fascinating complicating factor. Because he’s black, and he’s arguably one of the best strip cartoonists of this era, and was respected by his peers. But he was also white-passing, in all likelihood because he knew his racial background would create problems, including with his peers. I think there’s a strong case to be made for the case Ishmael Reed basically implicitly makes with his Mumbo Jumbo dedication: That Herriman is one of the great artists of the twentieth century, and his art is informed by his blackness in the same way that blackness informs the great American art form of jazz. That his identity was denied to his peers doesn’t make his own art any less great, it simply complicates the ways that art works. But if you think of Cliff Sterrett being one of the guys who called Herriman “the Greek” and then drew this comic strip that features these horrible stereotypes, it just hurts your soul.

Sterrett is even I think someone whose work gets called “jazzy,” because there’s a certain modernist verve to it, a visual inventiveness. While the limit to King’s work is in how well-written you can really view it as being when you’re considering the racism, the limit to Sterrett’s is in how well-drawn and actually wild it is, considering that every strip  has the same gridded layout, when contrasted against the more inventive architectures of a Feininger page, or Charles Forbell’s Naughty Pete, or a Garrett Price White Boy strip. (I haven’t actually read the White Boy collection. The people who have read it and like it cite how it’s beautifully drawn, and how not-racist it is in the depiction of Native Americans, as being the things that credit it.)

Here’s something: I’m not even reading the strips drawn by conservatives! I’m not reading Chester Gould, or Harold Gray, or Al Capp. Each of these cartoonist is their own weird thing, with effectively different forms of conservatism, who I don’t wish to dismiss. I can get down with some Dick Tracy strips, whatever. To a certain extent, being an adult in dealing with history means seeing the virtues in people you probably disagree with in many ways. But it’s seeing the weird unconscious attitudes of people you would like to genuinely admire that makes you want to throw the whole project in the trash and start anew, because it displays evidence of such a deep taint.

Racism is basically America’s original sin. Comic strips are, along with jazz, the great American art form. It basically follows that you can’t talk about comics in any sort of accurate historic light without talking about racism. (There’s also racial caricature in Winsor McKay’s Little Nemo strips, obviously.) Reading the supplemental essays in these books of reprints, or critical reviews of them, you realize the desire to distance oneself from talking about the racism in the work is similar to how the conservative view of “American exceptionalism” goes hand-in-hand with a refusal to acknowledge the racist premises at the heart of its founding: People arguing for the exceptional quality of these strips are not addressing the elephant in the room, or only address it in the most cursory and hand-waving way imaginable. They are trying to paint a portrait without blemishes, without flaws, and in so doing depict a platonic ideal that does not actually exist.

These strips are not the work of Robert Crumb, where the racist imagery being employed has ostensibly an satirical end. It’s not Huckleberry Finn either, where the use of racial slurs is commonplace to set up a default mindset that then becomes undercut as a common humanity is realized. I’m actually unclear on if you could print such racial slurs in the newspaper at this time, or if it would be avoided as strenuously as any other profanity that couldn’t run in a “family newspaper.” What you see in these strips is the soft racism of paternalistic attitudes in the twentieth century American North laid bare for what it is. The volume I have of Walt And Skeezix collects the strips from 1923 and 1294, the Polly And Her Pals collection collects work from 1928 to 1930. This was an an era where black people could be reliably counted on as Republican voters, in the era before the realignment in politics that came with the Great Depression and the New Deal.

The current ahistorical posturing of Trump’s Republican party has them occasionally downplaying their overt anti-black racism to claim the “party of Lincoln” banner. So these strips are relevant, essentially, for depicting the sort of status quo the Republican party seek a return to, prior to FDR-instituted social programs, where black people exist primarily as servants and their concerns or agency, beyond how they exist in service to liberal white people, who address them from a place of charity, while conservatives would theoretically exist in all-white enclaves, are dismissed. The racism in the world depicted in these strips is inarguable, but the hope exists, in the eyes of conservatives, that liberals will see the way it flatters them, and wave it away as basically acceptable.

The alternative, as ever, would be in Herriman’s Krazy Kat, “the future liberals want,” where race and gender are forever up for debate in an shifting desert landscape. The issue there, of course, is the basically true argument that the strip doesn’t make any sense, and the more-up-for-debate point that the unique language of the strip is the result of repression of identity and internalized self-loathing. It’s also notable that the strip lacked popular appeal but was allowed to continue existing because it won the support of a wealthy benefactor. Maybe one day we’ll all learn to vibe with it, but I don’t really see that happening.

[absynthe--minded]

That’s nice to know - I infodump a lot when I learn things, and my concern was that I’d be creating an environment where I’d be prone to doing that. (Though Victor Hugo does that and people call him a genius, so I guess I’m in good company?) I’m also trying to figure out what elements of my plot that I know are pretty ahistorical need to stick around and if I’d be better off writing a truly secondary world fantasy novel instead of something set in the Florida Keys, you know?

also I’m gonna have to become an almost expert in 18th-century sailing techniques and that is daunting in and of itself and yet exciting (the story, currently titled Taming the Hawk because when I go Full Trash Pastiche I don’t hold back, is somewhere between The Curse of the Black Pearl and Kinley Macgregor’s A Pirate of Her Own)

thanks for your help!

How much research is too much, when you’re planning to write popular fiction? I’m finally writing my historical fantasy lesbian romance novel, but mid-1700s isn’t my specialty outside of fashion history; I’m aware that most people won’t give a damn but I’d like to be more accurate than Pirates of the Caribbean. I’d happily become well versed just for the sake of a book, and my gut says that’s the right approach? but I’d like a second opinion bc I’m eagerly writing trashy junk not Literature.

I’m biased, but I’d say your gut is right. Even if it’s junk, better to have junk firmly rooted in historical fact. That way you can start setting right some of the wild inaccuracies people may have gotten from the kind of listicle-sourced dreck that too often passes for historical romance. It’s better to know the rules even if you intend to break them, so you know what impact that rule-breaking will have on the rest of the world you’re writing.

How much is too much, though? I’d say when you get to the point where you can no longer see these people as people just like you or I, you need to step back a bit. You may never get to that point; I haven’t yet in my research.  But if you do, that’s your “too much” marker.

Happy writing!

[originaldetectivesheep]

Year In Review - Books I Read in 2018

Last year, I thought I was at the limits by reading 300ish books, mostly old Gutenberg stuff.  This year...kind of left that for dead, with 689 books or book-like things scratched off.  This is not merely 'way', but 'way, way' too many, and may have contributed to stagnation as an author in the middle of the year: what we read inevitably ends up setting the context for what we write, and the amount of Edgar Wallace and E. P. Oppenheim I read this year can't have been good.

To try and make sense out of these way too many books, I'm not going to post review snippets for each of them, or even the 50ish (less than 15%) that I unreservedly liked; instead, I'm going to go through and find something to say about every author I read at least three books from this year.  This is still going to be huge, but hopefully, it'll be more coherent huge, and less bad-huge.

A. Hyatt Verrill was an immense chore to read, astonishingly racist almost everywhere and completely up his own ass about branches of science he knew literally nothing about, but fighting through it, I managed to get a lot of close description of the Caribbean as it was in the early 20th century.  This isn't a recommendation of, really, any of his work, but more of a warning about how to be sure you know what you know -- that, and maybe establishing a full-privilege-people shoveling bureau to help recover any diamonds from similar shitpiles of the past for general use.  :\

Alfred J. Church never, as far as I read this year, put out a good book -- he was fatally tripped up by, to some degree, the expectations of his time and markets, and in another way, by not really understanding what fiction is and how it works.  I didn't have to read his crap to find this out, but it was faster than doing another lit class and I could do it while waiting for airplanes, so again :\

I read the first 30 of Arthur Leo Zagat's Doc Turner stories this year; in addition to being critical two-fisted pulps, they're also an object lesson in self-examination: Turner's whole deal is being the protector of the downtrodden new-Americans of Morris Street, but at such an angle that you can't help but notice who gets to be human and worthy under their hokey dialect and who doesn't.  This series was trying to be woke and progressive in its day, and where and how it fails at that should be a critical pointer for people trying, also, to lead the moment and hopefully not look grimy and problematic in another fifteen years.

I'd obviously read some Arthur Machen before, but doing a deep dive over his whole corpus this year was still a revelation.  A lot of his stuff is kind of far-corner weird, and it was really interesting to come back later in life and see the threads of just how it ended up that weird.

Arthur Morrison put up a real mixed bag: a lot of good humor and some solid detective bits, but with real problems with dialect; this is something you kind of get with nineteenth-century humor, but that doesn't make it not suck.  There's always going to be a use, as a writer, to faithfully representing  non-classroom-standard pronunciation and usage, but reading stuff with major dialect should be a bucket of cold water to rethink about how you actually put that on paper.

C. Dudley Lampen's shit-bad books, exactly enough to qualify, show how a sufficiently-motivated author, regardless of ability above a certain and very low minimum standard, can always find a publisher.  Lampen got there with Christianity; there are other paths for other bads, but taking them rather than taking your rejections will not get you where you actually want to be.

I had a bunch of D. W. O'Brien short stories this year that added up to about a qualifying extent; he's one of those writers who for the most part does make it up in volume, but there was a lot of breadth there this year, and more good material than before.  I can't understand why he isn't better known among general audiences, in the context of pulp writers before the end of the Second World War.

I notched 126 books or book-equivalents from E. Phillips Oppenheim this year, and nearly all of them were a dreadful waste of time.  Craft-wise, I liked seeing how he put together serial collections as dismembered novels, unlike Wallace's barely-attached piles of independent stories, and the way he, in mid-life, read one of his early books, threw it into the sea because it was so bad, and then got somewhat better is heartening, but that is a lot of material for very little result.  Oppenheim always wants to be literary and do well, but he never got any good at it, and "churn out a lot of barely-qualifying crap" is no longer a valid market strategy with so many other entertainment options.

I read all of E. W. Hornung, including all of the Raffles stuff, this year, mostly sitting in one place in London waiting for a plane to Jo'burg.  The cricket interplay was pretty good, and there was a lot more to think about, in a social-history dimension, than I thought there would be, but there also was a lot less material than I thought this guy had put up.

Earl Derr Biggers (including all the original Charlie Chan books) was a lot less racist than I was dreading going in, and a lot better at all kinds of stuff about place and human relationships than you really expect a detective writer to be.  Biggers is another one where you really see the contrasts between 'trying' and 'succeeding' at including marginalized people as truly human, and how you take that lesson forward is important.

This year accounted for 111 Edgar Wallace things, which were less of a waste of time than the Oppenheim if immensely more aggravating.  Wallace is a better and snappier technical writer, but he has dialect problems, he's intensely racist, he ran out so many failed experiments and slabbed together so many reprint collections, and his organization of anything novel-length is frequently a disaster.  It's more informative, maybe, to read Wallace writing about writing than it is to read his own stuff; he's thoroughly, professionally artless, but he has a distinct vision for what can sell where, and a grounded approach to writing as craft.  But for general audiences, god, no, stoppit.

Edward Lucas White had a minimum-qualifying extent this year, all read in Zambia, which was good in places and eh in others.  I liked his shorter stories better than his full-length novels, but they really go to show how a racist and orientalist fear of the unknown underlies a lot of that great early-20th-century boom in weird fiction -- as someone who likes reading and writing that sort of weird, it's another spur to re-examine what I'm doing and how I do it.

I covered all of Elizabeth McKintosh this year as well, and as much as I liked the Inspector Grant material, her non-Grant mysteries were maybe better.  It was also cool to get her full spread, and see her doing things other than mysteries; too often you see authors only through a lens of what stays in print, what the library buys, etc, and you miss these parts of their development or personality.

I finished up most of the Ernest Bramah I'd missed five years ago in Russia while I was in Zambia, and enjoyed the more Max Carrados stuff I hadn't found before.  I did not enjoy another volume of Kai Lung shittiness, but will keep it as a memento mori for doing characters so significantly outside oneself.  :\

This year also saw all of Ethel Lina White's thrillers, and while I was reading them, it was ceaselessly awesome.  If there's anything in this year that's going to qualify for re-reads in some distant future, these are going to be it.

I ground through all of Felix Dahn while I was in France, and hated about every single page of it.  The transition from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages is interesting, but maybe don't send a moustache-twirling kleindeutsch racist to tell the tales of Germans taking over from Rome.  :\

Intensely stupid and so significantly, broad-spectrum racist that I frequently wondered whether I was unexpectedly drunk rather than the book being just that bad, I somehow made it through most of Francis H. Atkins' material this year, and the most significant thing I gained out of it was never having to read those atrocious crap piles ever again.  There are a very few interesting or novel points in this guy's fiction, and none of them are worth putting up with the writing to dig out.

If you need a sleeping pill, you could do worse than Frederic W. Farrar -- unless you break out into uncontrollable laughter when confronted with mid-Victorian pietisms.  His school stories are picture-primer trash; his Romanica is ahistorical sermonizing trash.  Again, do not.

Georg Ebers can't draw characters, compose a plot, or hold reader interest, but he does a hell of a job re-writing research on Roman-era Alexandria over into thick piles of sequential words.  Dude sucks, but if you can skip around, he's done all of the work on this little corner of Egyptian history and it just remains for moderns to take that work and re-cast it.

George A. Henty made the minimum qualification, and I wish he hadn't -- his three bad to very bad novels made the worst of the flight out to Hong Kong, and should not be given the chance to spoil anyone else's time, ever again.

George Griffith had a fuck of an arc -- some of his early material was just blindingly awful, both stupid and poorly composed, but he recovered and improved in later books to put up some stuff that's borderline worth seeking out.  That this kind of metamorphosis is possible is a great encouragement to keep going: no matter how bad you are, you will not necessarily *stay that bad forever.

I've still got a couple left before I finish George J. Whyte-Melville, but from what I did read of him this year, it's pretty clear that sometimes authors have fields they're good at and fields they suck at.  His Victorian stuff is not that bad -- and his riding manual is an unintentional treasure -- but his sword-and-sandal stuff sucks major balls.  If you need to stay in your lane, that's something to learn as soon as possible.

H. Bedford-Jones is a weird one; not real good, but he takes on these gigantic imaginative ideas and does them almost correctly, almost completely.  I obviously want to avoid that sort of missed-it-by-that-much outcome, but to a certain degree you need to take on big challenges to even have a chance at that.

I read most of J. U. Giesy's work (with Junius Smith on Semi Dual) last year, and the minimum-qualifying stuff that slopped over into this year was mostly very bad, but there was a WWI novella in the bunch that was so good I wondered if it had been misattributed.  Again, what's good, what you like, and what will sell are all completely disconnected propositions.

James Hilton provided the requisite Mid-Century Popular Intentional Literature ration this year, some of which was good, some of which was confusingly-accumulated, and some of which ended up lapped by Richard Rhodes.  Hilton is another re-read candidate, but not all of his stuff; in bulk, this is a lesson about the advantages and disadvantages of throwing yourself so wholly into your works.

The John Buchan I had left for this year, after reading him in the main, much younger, was a picked-over bunch to be sure, and as usual to be grappled with rather than just taken up entire.  It's not something I'd go and recommend to others, but A Lodge In the Wilderness was maybe the most important and impactful book I read, personally, this whole year.

The one good thing I, or anyone else, can take from John W. Duffield's shitty corpus, is the expression "what is this Bomba-the-Jungle-Boy horseshit?", which means exactly what it looks like it means.  Duffield has some imaginative ideas, but has zero capacity to actually execute on them, ever, and put up some of the most virulently stupid racism I had to grind through this year.  Bad even among his contemporaries, the likes of Duffield are why informed people are reluctant to make major hay out of Lovecraft's racism -- not because he isn't still problematic, but because a lot of stuff in the contemporary popular press was that much even worse.

I technically had a qualifying amount of Ladbroke Black this year, but you blink at this dude -- who ghosted a lot of the high-speed, instantly-disposable Sexton Blake as well -- and his entire corpus is gone.  As much as I can remember, the stuff I read this year was similarly functional but not noteworthy, and fortunately not real influential.

I probably read enough Leroy Yerxa to qualify, between various short repacks; he's a middling pulp author, but going through, all of his stuff is still publishable, which is important.  He turned in acceptable work in the right trip lengths, over diverse subjects, to place out; there's a place for this kind of workmanship, even if it doesn't ever get to great heights.

I didn't expect I'd like the Lloyd C. Douglas stuff that I liked as much as I ended up liking it: there's bits of clunk through his whole corpus, but he almost never gets preachy, and where his stuff works, it hits just absolutely ceaselessly, and is very cool.  (But yes, some of it does suck, very important to note.)

M. P. Shiel was responsible for the book that I got maybe the maddest at this year, and definitely the one I wrote the longest negative review blurb for.  He had a couple good parts, but there was too much that was just over-ornamented where it didn't straight up suck.  Honestly, all of this material was back last January and a pain to think about even then.

For Golden-Age space-opera, it doesn't get much better than Malcolm Jameson, who I mostly cleaned up this year and who barely got over the qualifying line.  This took in a little more of his range than I had before, which was really good: he always comes up with neat outer angles on stuff, and almost always with correct science, at least of his time.

Max Brand is my current 'major' campaign, and reading the next hundred-ish things from him in the pile will take most of 2019.  I've already chewed a decently big chunk, though, and it's interesting to see more of his warts and weak points as a writer, where what I'd seen from him before lacked a lot of that.  I'm also seeing, for the first time, some of his non-cowboy fiction, and for the most part that's another 'stay in your lane' incentive; we'll see what of this changes next year.

I finally got around to reading most of Otis A. Kline's corpus, and it...was not really worth the wait.  Kline is another idea factory, and while he's generally more able to execute on them than Duffield and less racist in doing so, neither comes out perfect and he's substantially in the shadow of Abraham Merritt on Earth and E. Rice Burroughs when he's off on a planetary romance.  Functional and imaginative, yes, but you really really want that extra push to make it through to 'good'.

The one thing you really want to take out of S. S. Van Dine is his 20 rules for detective fiction; I got that this year, in amid the Philo Vance stuff, which takes a bit of an effort.  Van Dine's career arc is a hell of weird one, and it must have hurt, from the cleaned-up later books, to look at the over-artifacted mess of the first couple and regret not doing them better.  This sort of view is why I want to read less of these in the future -- I can't keep having my mental context dictated by works that are a hundred years and more out of date.

Sabine Baring-Gould is approached a lot better as an antiquarian and a writer of sourcebooks than of fiction.  His fictional works are okay, if you excuse some major structural problems, but for all of their unstoppable thickness, his collections of legends and historical tales are just mighty.  Maybe not an author to read, but definitely one to keep around.

I'm also kind of in the middle on Sapper, who's showing some okay range, but in many parts really exemplifying how perspective and market demands can put blinders on you.  His wartime stuff recalls Tim O'Brien or Joseph Heller in places -- mechanized warfare tends to have similar effects at whatever distance -- but there as in his thriller serials he's also the staunchest guy since Wallace, and he does a really poor job of not Drudge-siren hyperventilating about threats to the class system.  Again, we'll see next year how the rest of this goes.

I read all of Tacitus' Annals and Histories this year, and damned if I can remember a whole lot about them that deterministically wasn't in Suetonius or Julius Caesar last year.  Roman writers are definitely more primary-source than pleasure-reading at this point, but it does help to have that text as a reference for reading bads out of the Bibliotheca Romanica.

The Talbot Mundy I had on the stack this year was very much for cleanup, and doesn't change last year's impressions: a still-problematic dude who is less racist, less colonialist, and less bad than a lot of people are willing to extend him credit.  If a book has Chullunder Ghose in it, it's probably worth reading, even if I still would like to see a South Asian writer pick up and grapple with the character.

Thomas C. Bridges did probably the best boys'-own adventures I read this year, which is kind of like "least stinky garbage dump" or "best-tasting light beer".  He does good stuff and some absolute horseshit, but his pacing and action flow is just magic, even when his characters are being intolerable racist fucks; another one to scrape the gunk off maybe.

I got to see Valentine Williams turn, over the course of a lot of books this year, from a John Buchan disciple so close to almost be clone into an independent if not always original thrillerist; in 2018, we'd read the Clubfoot series out for ableism -- von Grundt is kind of defined in his villainy and power by his grotesque body -- but Clubfoot himself is one of the classic spy villains and an absolute monster of a character.  There are ways to get to that level without punching down, but this is the mark, right here.

Wilkie Collins was mostly accounted for in 2017, but the three books finished this year -- The Moonstone, The Queen of Hearts, and The Woman In White -- would be a sufficient reading for a whole year for a lot of people.  Every single one of these is plain and pure magic, and if you haven't read them, there's your '19 project.

Somehow, I made it through all of William H. Ainsworth's wild and degenerate gothicisms; I'm just not always sure how, or completely why.  Ainsworth is another author to be handled with the fireplace tongs, not because he's bad or problematic, but because he's just so weird and relentlessly extra, and I'm not really sure you want to get that on you.

* * * What stands out in the above, or what should, is how unbalanced it is: I read a couple other women authors this year who fell below the threshold, and McKintosh and White put up some of the best total results of anyone I read this year, but the volume problem is exactly as bad as it looks.  This is something I really need to make a point of fixing, but it's something that ought to also come naturally in making the other change I'm targeting for 2019.

That other change, of course, is to read more contemporary material.  There's stuff to be gleaned from the past, sure, but what I got from chewing through that much Oppenheim is of seriously debatable value.  To some extent, pulping Gutenbooks is what I do because I can do it easily at work or on the road, but I really need to set aside time to read newer, better, smarter, more diverse material if I actually want to improve as an author -- and it'll probably be less teeth-grinding, too.

[esprit-de-corps-magazine]

CRISIS IN UKRAINE: Realities Intrude

(Volume 24-11)

By Chris Westdal

Our world is in turmoil. Crises come thick and fast. Everyone’s list is different, but all include Ukraine. The crisis there has lit the fuse of new cold war.

There is constant talk of who’s to blame.

The West accuses Russia of aggression in Georgia, in Ukraine, in the Baltics, in Syria. Its president is a demon, a bully, a spoiler, a thief, a war criminal, a fixer of U.S. elections — choose your epithet; they’re all in regular use. He’s out to restore the Soviet Union, to conquer the Balts again, to make life miserable for Ukraine and generally to thwart the West at every turn.

I think that narrative is faulty. Vladimir Putin is no choirboy; no great power leader dare be. He is tough, ruthless if need be serving Russia’s security interests, but not at all the demon he’s made out to be. And though nothing is as offensive as Russia on the defensive, I don’t think Moscow is an aggressive marauder. I don’t think it wants war and a broken Ukraine on its western flank. I do think it won’t abide a security threat there, though, and that it will pay and impose very high costs, as it’s doing, to avoid one.

More generally, I think that Russia demands more respect than it’s been getting; that Putin is prepared to be our partner, but never our puppet; and that he’s damned if the United States is going to go on running as much of the world as it’s been doing — and running it so badly. Just think of the U.S. foreign policy fiascos Putin has seen in his 17 years of power, above all in the Middle East — and imagine how the charge that he’s the one who’s “aggressive” strikes him.

We hear much less about others to blame for this mess we’re in.

We wrote Russia off when the Soviet Union collapsed. We decided we could ignore its interests. For a decade, Yeltsin played along. Putin won’t. For one thing, he will contain NATO. He made that clear in Georgia in 2008 and he’s making it clear now in Ukraine.

NATO, Russians know, is not a knitting club. I think driving our well-armed military alliance up Russia’s nose was a colossal, counterproductively provocative mistake. That deed’s been done, though, and we have to live with it. Expanding NATO further, however, to include Georgia and Ukraine — as Canada has advocated — would invite catastrophe.

Independent Ukraine’s performance hasn’t helped much either.

Politically, Kyiv lost a fateful measure of the loyalty of its large ethnic Russian minority. It also failed to wrest political control from oligarchs.

Economically, Ukraine has fallen far behind its neighbours, east and west.

In foreign policy, Kyiv’s mistakes have been devastating.

It failed to keep the peace with its giant neighbour. Three years ago, with hard-line nationalists in charge, who’d trashed a European Union-brokered settlement we’d all welcomed, the Maidan picked a fight Kyiv can’t win with the Kremlin. 

Kyiv can’t make the West care more — and can’t make the Kremlin care less. Like them or not, theory aside, major powers’ spheres of influence are real. We Canadians know that; we live in one. In the real world, Kyiv has about as much freedom to undermine Moscow’s security as Ottawa has to undermine Washington’s. (And, of course, its effective sovereignty is compromised. Welcome to the club.)

Kyiv was mistaken too in taking European promises of integration, of EU membership even, far too seriously. The prospect of EU membership was always a dream; now, with the EU beset, it’s pure fantasy.

Kyiv was mistaken as well in letting Westerners mind so much of its business. We’ve seen the U.S. choose a prime minister. We’ve seen American-proxy finance ministers. We’ve seen foreigners as ministers of reform and anti-corruption. And now we’re seeing the spectacle of Mikhail Saakashvili, fresh from picking his own fight with Russia and losing a good chunk of his country, show up in Ukraine as a regional governor and would-be president.

Through the quarter century of Ukraine’s independence, Canada has been determined to play a prominent role, driven above all by passionate diaspora sentiment. Quite out of character, and far from keeping with our modest military means, we became the West’s leading hawk. This aggressive posture, with its evident disdain for Russia, is struck to this day.

What I find striking in this record is that we’ve stood our values on their heads in Ukraine. We go out of our way, for one thing, to get along with our giant neighbour. With Ukrainians, though, who also live beside a giant, we cooperate in confrontation. The Russian bear should be poked in the eye at every opportunity.

Consider as well that while at home we practice pluralism, we pander in Ukraine to lethally exclusive ethnic nationalism. The latest example bound to exacerbate interethnic animosity is a new education policy banning Russian language instruction after Grade 4. Ethnic Russian Ukrainians, however patriotic — and Russians — cannot help but take offence. Wouldn’t you? 

No country in the world has a more profound interest in good bilateral and Western relations with Russia than does Ukraine. Yet no country in the world has done less than its best, loudest friend, Canada, to encourage essential reconciliation.

Consider our Magnitsky sanctions (a House of Commons bill called Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act based on the U.S. government’s Magnitsky Act), enacted unanimously. What shred of due process do they entail? Who decides how long the list, who’s guilty, who’s not? At a time of new, tense Cold War and global upheaval, and particularly in the glaring, ahistorical absence of any Canadian effort whatever to ease tension, reduce risk, Canada’s grandstanding contribution of a late, ill-timed, imitative, redundantly duplicative, and entirely due process-free set of new Russia sanctions serves no good end whatever. This is our best shot, all we have to offer? To everything there is a season, including selective moral outrage.

Whoever’s to blame, though, we are where we are, on the verge of greater disaster, and, given the stakes, we really do have to keep some peace with Russia.

To do so, to respond to this imperative, my view is that we need to foreswear further NATO growth and make room and arrangements for Ukraine to trade well with both Europe and Russia, while posing a security threat to neither — and to have the space and peace and quiet it needs to try to reunite, recover, reform and succeed. Far from “sacrificing” Ukraine, as critics will claim, neutrality and détente would permit its salvation.

In sharp contrast, our government’s view is apparently that if we give Ukraine enough help, it will defeat the rebels and Russia in the Donbas, win back the loyalty of the now bitterly alienated ethnic Russians there, retrieve Crimea, join the West and Europe and NATO and live happily ever after, hostile all the while to its vast neighbour, Russia. I find that vision incoherent, full of delusions, sure recipes for more misery, more war.

I recommend that we devote intellectual and diplomatic talent to the conception and promotion bilaterally and multilaterally of a coherent, realistic vision of Eurasian security; that we recognize, comprehend and restore rational relations with Russia; that we reconsider our advocacy of further NATO expansion; that we promote essential Ukrainian-Russian reconciliation; and that we meantime sustain our necessarily modest contribution to NATO in Europe and enhance our armed forces at home.

It’s a tall order, but along with three oceans to sail, we have promises to keep.