Omnivoracious

Leave an Idea, Take an Idea: Five Things Someone Else Should Totally Do (Guest Blogger China Mieville)

     
        (The City & The City, an Amazon featured book for June.)


It's melancholy when you realise there are more things you'd like to do, or write, than you'll have time to, in your entire life. The endless triage of decent thoughts is necessary, a bit miserable, and a strong argument for the desirability of immortality. You cling even to the ones you doubt you'll start, as long as you can bear, just in case you find the time you know you won't.

But there's another category of ideas, a bit less frustrating, slightly more confusing, and necessitating a different response. These are those that are really, in one's own humble opinion, decent, with a potentially great audience, and without question worthy of pursuing...but that you know you'd mess up. If you even had time to start.

Just because someone comes up with a project is no reason they should be the one to follow through with it. 'I love this,' they might say, as I not-infrequently do, 'but I'm not the guy.' That doesn't mean it's not a good idea. So what to do about that? If you have a friend who could do a good job of it, you can always pass it on. But if you don't? And what about all the others that occur to you?

We should inaugurate a generous-spirited gift economy of thoughts. Plenty of shops in the US have those trays full of pennies that you can leave or take, depending on need. I see no more reason to hoard my I'm-not-the-guy ideas than my pennies. Accordingly, this is a short list of four books and one project that someone should totally do. Just not me.

1) Square Pegs

A non-fiction book, a collection of essays on and interviews with people who are members of organisations that are counterintuitive by our cruder assumptions. So, for example, Jewish members of the PLO; Muslim members of the BJP; Protestant members of Sinn Fein; Sinhalese pro-Tamil activists; and so, variously, on. The point here, I'd suggest (though it's not my project, because I'm Not The Guy--INTG), would not be to freakshow, to point and imply that these individuals are weird--though certainly, in some of the less savoury cases, there should be nothing to stop the critique of particular political positions--but in part to investigate how reductive or questionable are many assumptions we are encouraged to make about 'identities'. How and why did a particular person come to ally with a group traditionally conceived as opposed to her or his interests? How is s/he received by her allies and by her 'ethnic' (or whatever) community? Are they hopeful? Are they depressed? Can we generalise about such square pegs (I'd lay good money not)? It could be an extremely interesting book, or film, or whatever. It would need someone patient, with good interviewing skills, political subtlety, and a reasonable travel budget. Someone should totally do it.

Neither a Contract Nor a Promise: Five Movements To Watch Out For (Guest Blogger China Mieville)

     
       (The City & The City, an Amazon featured book for June.)

It's been a while since we've had some red-hot literary-movement action. Part of the problem is that the declaration of such movements, schools, salons, moments, manifestoes, sets, etc, tends to be a post-facto thing. Someone--a participant or otherwise--notices a bunch of writers and artists doing some stuff through which the observer considers there to be some shared thread(s). Give it a name, and boom: performative taxonomy complete.

So, missing the tendentious genealogies, the reclamations of forgotten texts and bigging-up of some new, pining for a smidge of controversy, I thought we could save a bit of time by naming a few movements in advance, then writing books to fit. That way we could start arguing about them without having to wait through those tiresome publication schedules.

Accordingly, what follows are a few modest proposals for literary/artistic movements to fulfil the moment's cultural needs, and a few bon mots to start the arguments.

i) Zombiefail '09-ism

Named partly in honour (not mockery) of an important debate about race and politics that set fire to livejournal earlier this year, this will be the movement for those tired of the unrelenting imperialism of zombies in horror--and now other--fiction. The writers' position will be that what started as an invigoration (one hesitates to say 'revivification', in this context) of an antique trope has viralled to the point where its ubiquity makes it ambulonecrotophile kitsch. Zombies that once stalked the cultural unconscious like baleful rebukes are now cuddly toys, dead metaphors (ba-boom) at which we can't stay mad. Paradoxically, out of very respect for increasingly degraded zombies, Zombiefail '09-ist writers will either explicitly undermine their banalisation by melancholy mockery of them, or refuse to write about them at all, instead plundering various mythoi for more neglected monsters with which to end the world.

There and Back Again: Five Reasons Tolkien Rocks (Guest Blogger China Mieville)

     
      (The City & The City, an Amazon "best book" for June.)

The Author of the Century, of course, needs no help from anyone (least of all a speck like me). No force on earth could undermine either the juggernaut implacability of his sales, nor the world-historic scale of his influence, nor the truly enormous weight of his achievement. The man puts the 'epic' in 'epic win'. However--or, more accurately, because of that--every few years, certain as tides, someone will write a splenetic screed against the Professor, explaining why he's the devil/ worst things to happen to fantasy/voice of reaction/zomg most boring writer EVER /etc. The Oedipal Resentment motivating many of these attacks may be trivially obvious, especially in those from within fantastic fiction, but it doesn't follow that the substance of all the criticism is baseless. There are perfectly reasonable arguments to be had about the impact, nature, scale and success of Tolkien's work. The sheer religious zealotry with which some Tolkienistas defend the master, when it ignores those grounds for debate and refuses to countenance a flaw anywhere in the MiddleEarthian edifice, doesn't, then, help matters. Even more nuanced pro-Hobbit partisans sometimes--and acknowledging that there are always debates on this--choose what look to some of us to be questionable grounds for defence. Because there are arguments not only about what is regrettable in Tolkien, but about what is indispensible. Accordingly, what follows is a list of some Perhaps In Some Cases Somewhat Insufficiently Stressed Reasons We Should All Be Terribly Grateful To Tolkien. It may be redundant strictly qua defence, this defence of a corpus that is thriving, but perhaps it's not pointless anyway.