YouTube Obsession

Sven van der Plank is a BattleTech lore channel known for long videos and leveled and steady delivery. Perfect to put on to go to sleep.

However, he’s just started a lore-centric playthrough of vanilla MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries that I am absolutely loving.

I’ve played MechWarrior 5 before and I love it but there is so much lore written in every box and pop-up that, yeah, I ain’t reading all that on my monitor when I could be shooting mechs. Sven is reading EVERY-THING. The videos have often gone over 2.5 hours and I love it.

MM

I’m on the the internet therefore, I’ve heard of Lex Fridman. I have never seen any of his content before but cultural osmosis via various shorts led me to believe that he is a former military operator that runs a sort of Rogan-esq podcast where anyone with horrible ideas can be heard. I still don’t know if much of this is true btw, because I have only ever watched this video.

This man is mentally challenged, brain damaged or extremely drunk. Possibly even a combination of all three. How is this person someone people look to as an intellectual tastemaker for culture? I guess for the same reason I clicked on this video to begin with: It’s a topic that I find interesting and there is an expert(?) talking about that topic. But every time he speaks I feel a pang of pity. Like seeing a discarded stuffed animal by the side of the road kind of pity for a helpless object.

This may sound incredibly small of me but I cannot reverse this image in my head. Lex might have the greatest podcast in history but I’ll never know because I can’t stand how the dude talks. This isn’t just because he also has the aesthetic air of someone who worries about the deficit center-right tech bro. It also pops up when I hear Slavoj Žižek speak and he has that coke-dealer from the 80’s sniffing tick he does every 3 seconds. I’ve read Slavoj’s stuff and it’s great but I cannot listen to interviews with the guy.

Basically, what I’m saying is that I would have voted for Kennedy because he looked better than Nixon. That’s my weakness.

Also, I guess the secret sauce of podcast greatness: Have interesting guests.

Reading

I can count on one hand how many “classical fantasy” books I have enjoyed in my life. I have numerous opinions about fantasy as a genre, too numerous to re-hash here. It’s just not a genre I typically enjoy. So it’s a big deal when I actually do like a fantasy book. In fact, I would say that when I do read a good fantasy I tend to love it; The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie is an all-time great because it plays on the best parts of the genre without resorting to clichés. Or Harrow The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, is very much fantasy but set in the far far future. Or my well-documented love for the Warhammer 40k universe which is just grim-dark medieval Catholicism in space.

All these examples embody a common principle: Darkness. Fantasy as a genre has a unique ability to explore the darkness of life by bringing these deep reptilian fears to the page via monsters and metaphor. Ursula K. Le Guin¹ writes about fantasy and stories as a deeply human trait in The Language of the Night:

I generally find that I really enjoy fantasy that can tap into the campfire tale nature of good vs evil parable the genre is so suited for.

No book has tapped this well so thoroughly in my memory better than Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman. I inhaled this book. I could not find a physical copy to borrow (or even buy) so I read it on my tablet, something I usually despise doing, because I love this book so much. And funnily enough, its premise is fairly boilerplate: A grizzled, dishonored knight gets roped into escorting a young girl across a medieval and plague-plagued France. But it does so much within this premise.

It reminds me of Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’en. Each chapter recounts a different leg of the mythic journey, each with it’s own lesson and morality. You can imagine the village elder telling the stories around the fire to impart some inherent wisdom.

Between Two Fires also has great character writing. I don’t want to give too much away but as an example; The main grizzled knight has many arcs but one where he comes to accept help from his fellows travelers. It leads to an admission of guilt and even a moment of true brotherly love that I honestly don’t feel to often in any books, let alone the over exaggerated bravado featured in most fantasy. The epic and monstrous encounters also help to highlight the small and very human actions of forgiveness and bravery. Actions that stand in bright contrast to the dark world created in this book.

Even if you don’t have any interest in fantasy as a genre, please read this book. You will not regret it.

MM

Started to read Flesh by David Szalay and I had to practice STOP READING THAT™. It is shortlisted for the Booker Prize so that’s how it came on my radar but I don’t know what blurb or description I read that made me put this on my “To Read” list from the library.

I had to put it down because the opening chapters describe, at length and with great detail, child sexual abuse. At a point I just began to wonder what could possibly happen in later in this book that would make any of this worth it? Nothing. It felt very A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara where there are no characters, just vessels for trauma.

Such a stark contrast from Between Two Fires; horrible events happen to the main cast but I care about the characters because they are so well defined and fleshed² out. I had the same experience for A.K. Blakemore’s The Glutton; The main character is treated horribly early on and disgusting things continue to happen throughout the book but the emotive characters and intriguing plot within drive the story forward. Flesh just expects the reader to endure directionless child SA content without any hint of plot or sense of character. It’s just trauma voyeurism.

On the other hand, it is a reminder that you can write a book about anything.

Other Notables

** Interview with Billy Wilder in Paris Review, 1996

** Morrison bust disappears, reappears decades later.

** We should really bring back “Pray” as a sentence opener

1  Though I have never read any of Le Guin’s actual fantasy, I have read her essays. What? I like reading critique.

2  Damn right that pun was intended.