I'm not allowed to read the works of Philip K Dick too close together. This self-imposed rule dates from the time I read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Martian Time-Slip, Ubik and A Scanner Darkly in the space of about a week, and subsquently struggled to convince my brain to operate in the manner to which I had previously been accustomed. It turns out to be quite difficult, maybe even impossible, for me to read much PKD without feeling as though I've taken a rather large quantity of rather bad drugs, or perhaps become a paranoid schizophrenic. Perhaps both!

Art is dangerous.¹

"Prana Ferox" is not the kind of destabilising influence that I'm forced to ration, but it does capture a certain something—and encourage said something to take root in the listener's mind.² The notes that would have been the first draft of this post, had they been coherent or structured enough to warrant the title of "draft", tried valiantly to describe the certain something using words in all caps inside square brackets: [ALL IN] [THROW CAUTION TO THE WINDS] [READY WILLING AND ABLE TO GO COMPLETELY OFF THE RAILS].

The excerpt from a self-hypnosis tape³ that leads off the track assures us that we will "wake up in the morning feeling gloriously alive, with the firm conviction that the problems that disturbed [us] in the past will now disappear, disappear, disappear into the midnight of our consciousness".⁴ The song's narrator would certainly like to believe it. We have arrived during the aftermath of an unspecified but apparently explosive event, and things between our narrator and the "you" he has left fuming upstairs are by no means okay, but he is downstairs checking on the makings of some bootleg whiskey, thinking maybe if he fixes his attention firmly enough on the future⁵ he won't have to deal with the past and its inconvenient consequences.

He is out of luck. Everything that has happened has happened, and it's all fuel for what will happen next. The violence (emotional or otherwise) of his experiences just makes them all the more propulsive. We don't get to see the big explosion, but we know it's coming. He is turning water into whiskey and life into rocket fuel.

My initial misinterpretation of the song's title created a mental association I have never been able to undo. The crude translation of "prana ferox" as "fierce breath"⁶ recalled a conversation from several years ago, in which a friend⁷ and I discussed the effects of sleep deprivation without the bravado and one-upmanship that usually features in conversations of that nature between nerds in their early twenties. He made a passing reference to the unshakeable conviction that comes to the exhausted-but-wired: you are burning things with your eyes.

Listening to "Prana Ferox" leaves me feeling a little bit like I am breathing fire.

1. I would say more on this topic, but then I would be stealing my future self's thunder; there is a by-request post on the subject of art coming up soon, by which I mean once I have stopped dithering about the one that will precede it.
2. At least, whenever the listener is me. Which, in my experience, it invariably is.
3. I assume that's what it is.
4. Incidentally, this snippet is as likely as anything else to be running through my mind when I wake up in the mornings.
5. Because, let's face it, this is not just about future booze. There's some metaphor going on here and it is not what you would call subtle.
6. Prana does mean breath, more or less, but also connotes concepts like life-force and energy
7. We are no longer friends. Facebook recently suggested to me that we should become friends. There are things that Facebook does not understand.

It turns out, though, that it will take some significant brain-shifting for me to feel comfortable with (or even capable of) that kind of thing. I'm not even sure it's an effort I want to make. I used to write things that I couldn't talk about, but these days I'm both better at talking and head over heels in love with Real Conversations. I'd much rather converse with you specifically than plaster myself all over a public space and hope that you notice.¹

That being said, last year was a fairly extraordinary time for me, and I would be sorry to leave it entirely unremarked.

I moved cities once and moved house three times, the last time to move in with the most awesome housemate imaginable. I got a job, then got the same job in a different city, and I got good at it quickly. I ended a relationship (one of the most sorely testing experiences of my life so far²), met wonderful new people, and worked on reconnecting with wonderful old people (with varying degrees of success). I was sick for the entire year, and I stopped holding my breath and hoping to be well again soon.

I listened to the Mountain Goats excessively enough that even I feel faintly embarassed about it, while struggling to be interested in new music and seeing almost nothing live. I set myself a goal of reading 52 books in the year, reached it quite early, and then burned out spectacularly.³ I played a few excellent computer games and saw a few excellent films, which rekindled my dormant interest in both.

Most importantly, though, I did a lot of thinking. And I do mean a lot.⁴

The relationship saga taught me a whole lot.⁵ I learned that it really does take two to tango; more specifically, the effectiveness and quality of any communication is always going to be partially out of my control no matter how good a communicator I become. I learned that sometimes disengaging completely is the best (and even only) sane option, even (or especially) when it means letting what feel like hurtful untruths go unchallenged. I learned that sometimes you just have to let people do whatever they have to do, and get on with what you have to do.

Incidentally, what is with the romanticisation of terrible, passive-aggressive, co-dependent behaviour in popular culture? Oh, things are terrible, there is no reason to think they will improve (especially since we are not doing anything to change anything), I don't even like you very much a lot of the time, but ~it's love~ so we should stay together? Fuck that noise.⁶

The phenomenal thing was the depth and breadth of thinking about relationships that got triggered. I am capable of some pretty determined and sustained introspection, and my lack of spoons meant I had plenty of time to spend with myself. One of the more significant revelations was that I have always been at my happiest when single.

That says a few things to me, but they all fall under the umbrella of "Hey! I think you've been doing it wrong!" I am, after all, the common factor in all my relationship and non-relationship periods. So I gave myself some mandatory time off to think about it all: a year of being absolutely not allowed "relationship stuff", to be extended or not depending on how much I could figure out in that much time.⁷

It has been brilliant. Having that explicit rule has not only given me the mental and emotional space to re-evaluate what I want in relationships and how I should approach them, it has also made me feel much freer to interact with people in whatever way feels most natural.⁸ I am still not sure what will happen when my year is up, but I am confident that whatever it is will be good for me.

Other things that I spent lots of time thinking about last year include: post-ironic appreciation; a large set of ethics- and 'ism'-related stuff; identity; mortality; and, most of all, sincerity and the pursuit of happiness.

By the end of 2009 I felt happier and more like myself than since ... well ... ever. Certainly since long enough ago that whoever I was then doesn't really count as the same person.

2010 so far has only continued this trend. People continue to be awesome. I have rediscovered music (recorded and live) in a big way. Urges to write more and take more pictures and travel more and have more conversations and cook more new foods are gnawing pleasantly at me, and I am even okay with not having the energy to act on most of them.

It is good to be alive.

1. It's not immediately clear how my desire to keep writing this blog fits in here, but I think it has something to do with a distinction between conversations and pieces of writing. Maybe I'm trying to practice "doing writing" more. Goodness knows I could do with the practice.
2. Ambiguous, perhaps, but either reading is true enough.
3. I haven't finished reading a book for a few months now.
4. Here's where this veers into "my life and how I feel about it". Awkwardness to 11!
5. Some of it was stuff I already knew, intellectually, but was yet to really know on an emotional level.
6. I never quite know what to do when something I would never say perfectly encapsulates what I want to say. In this case, as you can see, I went with it and then siphoned off my discomfort into a footnote.
7. Of course, I have a relationship of sorts with everyone I interact with, but I think we all know what I'm talking about here.
8. The reasons for this are, I think, a little too complex and personal for this post, but I can elaborate if requested.

The most notable side effect of this condition was the amount of Mountain Goats that I listened to.

Leaving aside the year's two new Mountain Goats releases, which I'll get to in a moment, there were a handful of their albums that I really got into for the first time. In chronological order:²

Get Lonely (2006), which I may have heard described as "spending a long time at the bottom of a swamp". Not the sort of thing that has clicked with me in the past, but I discovered this year that sometimes all one can do with an overwhelming feeling that one is suffocating at the bottom of a swamp is wait it out with some music that feels the same way.

Full Force Galesburg (1997). Wow. Just wow. This is now on approximately equal footing with We Shall All Be Healed as my most dearly-beloved Mountain Goats album. It is very close to perfect.

The Coroner's Gambit (2000), which had slipped under my radar until I happened to listen through it in a year saturated with reminders to consider mortality. "Elijah", "Baboon" and "Alphonse Mambo" are high points, but the whole thing is somehow very different to its individual parts.

Finally, Zopilote Machine (1994), a late entrant propelled by my sudden discovery that it is not just a "Going to Georgia" vehicle after all, and Nothing For Juice (1996) which I was tricked into exploring by the Awesome Yet Unfinishable Mountain Goats Project and which turned out to be marvellous.

Actual New Music From 2009!

All that being said, there were four new releases this year that I can call my favourites. They are also the only four that I have paid any sustained amount of attention to, but never mind. In alphabetical order:

Eyedea & Abilities - By The Throat

Hip-hop and I have never really gotten along. I have a huge amount of respect for the skills involved, but it's pretty rare for me to find even a single song that I can connect with. Imagine my surprise when I heard the title track of this album, liked it a lot, went to listen to the whole thing, and liked that a lot as well! I lack the vocabulary to explain what I like about it, but with luck it will inspire me to learn.

The Mountain Goats & John Vanderslice - Moon Colony Bloodbath

I am not a fan of John Vanderslice. For a while I found this EP kind of alienating, and I blamed it on "the Vanderslice taint". Then I remembered that he produced the Mountain Goats' We Shall All Be Healed, which I love almost more than anything, and was forced to reconsider. Suddenly, I no longer liked only the John Darnielle-centric songs. Repeated listening really fleshed out³ the theme,⁴ and by the end of the year I had listened to those seven tracks a total of 276 times.

The Mountain Goats - The Life of the World to Come

The Life of the World to Come was my most anticipated album of the year.⁵ My first reaction was mixed: some tracks were disappointingly inconspicuous, one was eerily reminiscent of a Barenaked Ladies song, one made me cry uncontrollably the first time I listened to it and has continued to have a similar effect since, and a couple of others landed on me just as hard. I still don't have much of a sense of it as a cohesive whole (much like Heretic Pride or most of the pre-4AD albums), and I think that if I did not have such a strong sense of John Darnielle the person (rather than just John Darnielle the musician) I would be able to maintain a greater emotional distance from it; as it is I think Darnielle is a genius but listening to this album too much (or perhaps at all) constitutes very poor emotional hygiene.

Windmill - Epcot Starfields

A vocalist who sounds like a weird hybrid of Tim DeLaughter and Kimya Dawson. Piano and strings by turns sparse and lush, warm vocal harmonies and cold synthesisers. Lyrics with a tendency towards the bizarre⁶. This album did not stand out when I first heard it, but I keep coming back to it again and again. It is a very pretty, if sometimes affected, album about a very small person in a very large universe.

New-to-me Music Not Actually From 2009!

Bright Eyes - I'm Wide Awake It's Morning

I had previously written Bright Eyes off as some kind of ridiculous, bleating, self-indulgent emo nonsense.⁷ Thanks to a recommendation from How To Be So Real, I checked this album out and was blown away. Sorry, Connor Oberst, I misjudged you.

The Hold Steady - Boys and Girls in America

Another previously-written-off band! What am I, some kind of reformed music snob or something? The Hold Steady's other albums still don't do anything for me, but Boys and Girls in America perfectly captures a reckless, full-throated, self-destructive kind of youth that I can romanticise from a distance without ever wanting to live through.

Manchester Orchestra - I'm Like A Virgin Losing A Child

One of Stefan's best recommendations to me ever (so it is in very good company). Standout tracks are "Where Have You Been?", "Sleeper 1972" and "Colly Strings". It's good to let go and just be emo sometimes.

Mission of Burma - Vs.

I sought out Mission of Burma, among other bands, after reading Our Band Could Be Your Life. This was the album that stuck. It's good to listen to really loudly. I think I need to make an effort to listen to music really loudly more often.

Moscow Olympics - Cut the World

This is a strange little EP from a Filipino (I think) dream-pop/new wave/post-punk group who somehow manage to remind me of New Order, Sonic Youth and the Pet Shop Boys simultaneously. I am not sure how "good" it is, but it broke my listening-to-new music drought for me. And I do really like it.

Oops

This is only a part of the post I had intended to write today. As it has grown somewhat large, and my self-imposed deadline for writing something approaches, I will leave writing about the unmusical aspects of 2009 until another day.

For those of you who have made it this far,⁸ I am pleased to present my soundtrack to 2009 in pseudo-mix-CD format:

Driving Through Ghosts, or, Don't Mistake Proximity For Fate.

1. By which I mean the bad half of the year.
2. The order belonging to my discoveries, not their releases. Obviously. Nitpickers.
3. Pun unintentional.
4. There is a top-secret organ harvesting colony on the moon. The two guys manning the station alternate six-month tours of duty with six-month periods in isolation back on earth, because interacting with other people could lead to the discovery of their terrible secret. Cannibalism arises.
5. Surprise!
6. "Carl Sagan, are we doomed? Can we save ourselves from ourselves? Photo hemispheres as they bruise. Save ourselves from ourselves and planetary doom.
7. I didn't realise until fairly recently that "Lover I Don't Have To Love", a song I loved in High School, was actually by Bright Eyes.
8. Or maybe you just know how to use your scrollwheel or Page Down key.

[0:00] - [0:27] - Blunt, primitive acoustic guitar. No need for anything else. This is one of the things I love about the Mountain Goats of days gone by, no matter how much "better" their records may have become since. The indie music world is stuffed full of guitarists who aren't great guitarists, but John Darnielle might be the greatest of them.

[0:27] - [1:26] - The narrator berates the object of his affections¹ for her failure to behave like a normal person should behave. He is sarcastic, yet seemingly resigned; this is probably how things are going to be for a long time yet. There is an outbreak of violence, threaded through as always with affection, or attraction, or whatever these characters always have to tie them together, and it's still hard to believe that he really minds.

But I don't care about all that.² What I do care about is this next part:

[1:27] - [1:30] - "Between you and me", Darnielle sings. What Mountain Goats fan³ has never felt a Mountain Goats song speak to them on such a crucial, personal level that it can only be a direct communication from JD himself?

[1:30] - [1:31] - Next he appears to drop the performance altogether in favour of a wry, conversational aside. If previously we were glowing with the illusory sense that John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats has something to share with us and us alone, now he is right on the other side of the room and we are positively incandescent. The upper-register vocal straining vanishes, and he admits: "it was — it was really exciting."

It is worth mentioning that the saving grace of many an horrific situation in the Mountain Goats catalogue is the exhilaration, or camaraderie, or just plain good things that Darnielle's characters find despite (or thanks to) the fact that everything is terrible.

[1:32] - [2:00] - More arms-length criticism and hyperbole, but I think we all know by now that there is not going to be an ultimatum, or an apology, or indeed any consequences at all.

[2:00] - [2:11] - This is the kind of broken-record moment I can really get behind. For the first time, the song feels like its title. It conjures up the feeling of being so inescapably a part of reality that you are practically vibrating with it. Like a confused human version of a singing wine glass , or a concrete slab being broken up by a jackhammer.

[2:12] - [2:36] - I love the way the Mountain Goats never shy away from the instrumental outro, even when it's just solitary, determined guitar hammering at two chords for another thirty seconds or so.

1. Make no mistake: that is whom (grammer) he is addressing.
2. Actually, that's a lie, but this is my fifth attempt to write about this song, and if I try to write about everything in it that I care about I will never get to the important part.
3. And here I mean the bootleg-downloading, lyric-memorising, oeuvre-blog-writing kind of fan. The kind of fan whose internal jukebox rarely plays anything else. Let's face it, we're all that kind of fan sometimes.

   Well, I am.

1. If none of the clothing in your wardrobe was allowed to be black (or a dark enough shade that it is pretty much indistinguishable from black), what colour would your wardrobe predominantly be?

Grey. Wearing white stresses me out and no other colour is sufficiently neutral. I really dislike wearing blue, and while green is my favourite colour (and I like wearing it) I think it would be a bit too weird for me to wear mostly green most of the time.

2. Are you a music elitist? How do you deal with other people having vastly different music tastes to you?

I don't think I'm a music elitist at all. I used to be. I looked down my nose at music that I didn't get anything out of, especially anything I could decry as shallow and packaged. A few additional years have improved my ability to tell the difference between my subjective opinion and objective truth, as well as teaching me to appreciate a wider variety of sounds and styles.

I tend to be really happy¹ when people that I admire or get along with share my taste in music, and a little bit sad when they don't, but people whose tastes are vastly different to mine are fine by me. There are certain things we are unlikely to be able to share, that's all.

While I am given to saying things like "anybody who doesn't like The National has something wrong with them", the defect I refer to is "being insufficiently identical to me". That is really not something I can hold against anybody.

The other day at work I saw a guy trying to buy Britney Spears tickets on eBay. I knew he had seen her perform recently, and said something like "more Britney tickets, huh?" He braced for ridicule - and, indeed, someone nearby overheard and began to make fun of him - but I had just been making conversation. As I said at the time, if one of my favourite artists was playing in Melbourne you can bet I'd be after tickets.

3. If you only knew a person in passing, what do you primarily judge their personality on? (eg. How they dress, how they talk?) How do you judge if they're worth knowing or not?

That's a hard question to answer, although it's something I actually think about a fair bit.

Part of the problem is that I really don't tend to "judge" people, or categorise them as "worth knowing/not worth knowing". If I observe someone behaving in a way that I find really unpleasant I'm likely to divert my attentions elsewhere, and if it turns out that their interests and values lack any appreciable common ground with mine I will probably not pursue closer acquaintanceship, but I really appreciate the opportunities I get to interact with people who aren't necessarily "my type of person". (This is one of the reasons I like my current workplace so much.)

The thing is that I love people. I really like the way my initial sense of somebody gradually fills out and changes as I get to know them better. I'm rarely surprised by people, because I don't have a fixed idea of who they are supposed to be; I just accept that everything fits into their personal timeline, which I will never see all of. Stuff that I don't understand makes sense with context that I don't have, and every new bit of information leads to greater understanding.

I've wandered a fair way from the question, I know. It's very difficult to put my finger on what it is that attracts my interest. Part of it is an intuitive sense of commonality, I think; I've lost count of the number of times I've felt drawn to somebody, only to find out (days, weeks, months or years later) that we share a predilection or a perspective or a particular kind of formative experience. Another part of it is individuality; even complete strangers sometimes give off such a strong vibe of being themselves that I practically want to follow them home and listen to them tell their life story.

Back to the question again! I suspect that my strongest sense of someone's personality, especially if I know them only in passing, comes from non-verbal cues. Body language, facial expressions, small reactions to things going on around them. That doesn't tend to affect whether I want to know them or not, though, it just affects the ways I might interact with them.

4. Is insomnius a reference to having insomnia?

Sort of. When I was signing up for my Livejournal account a few years ago my sleeping patterns were in much worse shape than they are now. 'Insomnius' as a handle wasn't a direct reference to insomnia, but it was a collection of sounds that seemed to fit pretty well with the person I felt like at the time. I'm sure my general lack of sleep had something to do with that.

Since then I have used it for pretty much everything online, and for me it has become quite removed from any meaning other than 'me'. I get a bit surprised when people connect it with insomnia. Sometimes I wonder if I should use something else, but as a signifier it has become about as strong as my given name (which I would also struggle to change). Besides, having trouble sleeping seems likely to be a feature of my life for some time yet.

5. Do you remember that time you put the spoon in the cup?

Like it was yesterday. Oh, man. Good times.

1. Really, ridiculously happy. Sharing the music that provides so many of my life's superlative experiences is one of the best things there is.

Materialism turns out to be a really hard thing for me to write about. I don't want to write about "what people do", and how far away from it I feel. I don't want to write about "what I used to do", and what it meant, and "what I do now", and what that means.

It goes without saying¹ that I have bypassed 'materialism' the philosophical position and gone straight for 'materialism' as a near-enough synonym for 'consumerism', or Having Stuff and Thinking That Is Important.

I have Stuff. I have much more stuff than I need, and I find this state of affairs oppressive. Only inertia and exhaustion keep me from initiating a grand purge, and I am headed for the same end result by a more gradual path. I will happily do without or make do rather than Get More Stuff, and I tend to sit on the idea of new purchases for weeks or months before I go ahead with them.²

One of the things I loved about travelling was the absence of unnecessary Stuff. I effectively owned only as much as I could carry with me, and during that time I never once missed anything I didn't have. Of course, in everyday life one does not have the excitement of travel to fill the gaps left by those absent possessions³ ... but there are better solutions than using the accumulation of Stuff as a distraction from ennui or boredom.

Perhaps it's bizarre for someone who owns two computers⁴ and an array of other first-world luxuries to claim any sort of distance from materialism. I am certainly no renunciate, but the possessions I have and value are not symbols or ends in themselves; their value lies in the life they enable me to lead. I take as much pleasure in acquiring something that perfectly fills the niche I have for it as I do in ridding myself of something that is unnecessary.

In my ideal world I have very little Stuff, but every item is Exactly Right.

What I find difficult to express is the fact that I would be quite happy to continue as I am (albeit perhaps with most of that extraneous Stuff re-homed) and never upgrade any of the cheap-and-homely things that do everything I need them to do. I would be surprised, because I enjoy the process of coming across Exactly Right Things, considering them, and making them part of my life, but I would not be unhappy.

More broadly, I am indifferent to the accumulation of wealth beyond a certain point. Being able to support myself is important to me, and I would like to see more of the world and have some degree of financial security in the future, but I lack the disposition to live beyond my means and the kind of aspirations that would drive me to constantly increase said means. Sometimes I feel uncomfortable about this because it seems that a different attitude is expected of me.

Currently I work part-time (as dictated by my health) and can still quite trivially cover expenses, put away savings, and snaffle the odd Exactly Right Thing when it comes along.

I do not wish for anything more.

(Addendum: I should note that living in the Digital Age™ and in a place where I can borrow and rent things makes this work for me. I consume vast quantities of words and music, and a lesser but not insignificant quantity of pictures both static and moving, and if their delivery and storage were not so blissfully simple and efficient I would probably have a much more conflicted attitude to my Stuff. As it is, I can keep physical instances of the things that are truly special to me and still have easy access to other things I like. It is magical.)

1. But I am saying it anyway.
2. Sometimes this can cause problems, as it applies to basic necessities like shoes and clothes just as much (or more) as to recreational purchases.
3. That being said, boring old everyday existence can be discovered to be absolutely stuffed with new experiences and wonder, approached the right way.
4. Two Apple computers, even.

I suspect that I started calling to social activities "adventures" to take the edge off the stress of organising them. I am not a take-charge-and-organise person by nature; I have a strong preference for being a follower, or at most proposing amendments to plans that are mostly complete. In the last several years, however, circumstances have tended to demand that I either step up and organise things myself or accept that I will not see most of my friends.¹

At any rate, my socially-retarded self² of a few years ago quailed at the thought of asking questions like "would you like to come out for dinner?" of anyone but very close friends, but could manage suggesting a "food adventure" to just about anybody. As the trend caught on it became even easier, because "adventure" was a generally understood and accepted social shorthand. I don't need to use the term this way nowadays, but it was really useful at the time.

One of the things I liked (and like) most about adventures is the implication that anything is possible. (A few years ago I went on innumerable supermarket adventures, which were always much more fun than simply going to the supermarket.) There is also a sense that very little planning or responsibility has to be involved, and that any participants in an adventure are prepared to simply see what happens. If I "organise" an adventure these days it is usually an attempt to welcome disparate people to join me in doing something fun, without feeling like I have to be personally responsible for each person having an excellent time and everyone present getting along really well.³

In the last eighteen months or so,⁴ adventures have taken on an additional, personal meaning for me. Because my activities have been quite severely curtailed, many of the everyday things that used to be a matter of routine have become more difficult, sometimes assuming epic proportions. That could have left me feeling overwhelmed by unmanageable tasks (and sometimes, to be honest, it does), but my self-imposed conditioning means I can see just about anything I do as an adventure of sorts. And that makes life seem pretty okay, even when it isn't.

1. More recently my health has prevented me from either organising many events or accepting many invitations, so my intention is not to make pointed remarks. At least, not about the current situation.
2. I mean this quite literally. There were a lot of things that I just did not know how to do. Fortunately, I don't think my social retardation was of a kind to make me That Guy™ at parties; it just made me feel very awkward and stressed out about things.
3. This does not usually work, but I live in hope.
4. Actually, on closer inspection it's more like twenty-one months. Hrm.

I don't remember ever wanting to have children. I have always been too selfish,¹ too horrified by the potential of genetics and environment to create disaster, and not even slightly interested in making more people.

What's more, for all that I like children I find myself less and less excited about them. This may be because my friends' children tend to be smothered by swarms of adoring, as-yet-childless friends; I like making faces at very small children on public transport, and I like interacting with children that I meet, but I am not one to cluck and dote and I find that sort of behaviour unappealing in others.

The idea of bringing up a child has a certain savour, but I can't connect it to my own reality at all. I think that being an awesome parent is a hugely valuable thing to do — perhaps one of the most important things a person can do — but I couldn't feel right about doing it unless it became the primary focus of my existence. In the absence of a massive paradigm shift, that will not be happening.

And yet there is something reassuring in a song whose narrator finds himself with a brand new baby and not a clue what to do about it. Totally lost, he nevertheless does a thing and then another thing, because there is a baby that needs things done for it. It sounds to me as though they will get by just fine.

1. I am not an especially selfish person, but I am not talking about some kind of high-flown, radical enlightened selfishness here. There are things that I am just not prepared to give up.

Somewhere along the line, as I read more "literature" and grew addicted to well-wrought language and compelling ideas, I realised that an awful lot of what I was reading was neither well-written nor interesting. Never one for moderation, I concluded that fantasy was generally terrible and stopped reading it altogether. Well-meaning attempts by friends and loved ones to lure me back into the fold with Terry Pratchett or Janny Wurtz failed miserably.

In the last few years I have discovered a handful of authors who have restored my belief in Fantasy Fiction That Does Not Suck. Most of the credit belongs to George R. R. Martin, Robin Hobb, and the subject of todays post:² Steven Erikson.

There are a few things that make Erikson's "Malazan Book of the Fallen" series stand out for me:

• It is (or will be) ten books long, and he has been publishing them at a rate of about one per year. He only has one to go. (Compare and contrast: Robert Jordan, George R.R. Martin.) And these are substantial books, not something to knock out in a spare weekend.
• Erikson has created his own world/universe from scratch, and it isn't drawn from the Tolkienesque elves/dwarves/dragons/wizards memepool at all. This means that the process of discovery is ongoing — and because he has created a deep, interesting world, it is also fascinating.
• This is some of the least racist/classist/sexist/homophobic/etc fiction I have read. (More on that in a moment.)
• The reader is dropped in the middle of a time of upheaval, with all sorts of factions and interests in play, and shown how events unfold. There are almost no good guys and almost no bad guys.
• Erikson does not pull any punches. Important, beloved characters can have just about anything happen to them; a medieval-type world is not presented as a bucolic, honorable sort of place; heroes have skeletons in their closets, and not the kind that can be nobly overcome.

One of the things I love most about this series is Erikson's egalitarian approach. There are male and female characters who are violent, lethal soldiers, or charming seducers, or brilliant mages. Characters of all colours - brown, black, white, grey, pink, bronze, blue - are important political and military figures, everyday folks the reader can identify with, and everybody in between. Same-sex attraction is fairly uncommon but not stigmatised or remarkable. Characters from "barbarian" cultures are not simply savages (noble or otherwise), and all sorts of body types are represented without being stereotyped.

It is so rare that I read fantasy that makes me cringe so little.

I recently read two books in the series back to back, a not insignificant undertaking. Here is what I thought about them:

Memories of Ice

Rating: ★★★★☆ 

Erikson's treatment of his snarled mess of intrigue and his unfamiliar, foreign world is pretty great. Rather than spoon-feeding us, or resorting to having characters explain things they already know to each other, he leaves us to flounder in confusion and pick things up as we go along. The moments of revelation when something falls into place is much more rewarding as a result. He also turns the notion of dramatic irony on its head, frequently having characters bring each other up to speed offstage and then carrying on with the story. This is frustrating at times, but I can only salute its effrontery (and effectiveness).

Finally, I must mention that this book affected me emotionally in a way I never expected. I think it was largely because the character of Itkovian resonated with me more than any other fictional character I can remember;³ this is not something I expect from fantasy at all. An extended scene near the end of the book made me more or less fall apart, and I had tears pouring down my face for several pages even after I managed to read on.

Perhaps it is abnormal of me, but saying that it gives rise to uncontrollable emotional expression is just about the highest praise I can give a book.

House of Chains

Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

That being said, there were yet more revelations about the way Erikson's world is held together, and I appreciated the return of the story to a more mundane footing. There are also new sides revealed to old, supposedly-familiar characters, and some wonderfully subtle nods to events from previous books. And just when you thought Erikson must have run out of atrocities and taboos, he shoves a big handful of new ones into your face.

House of Chains is my least favourite book in the series so far, but that only dissuaded me from reading the next immediately. I am not really disappointed by it in any meaningful way, and still have high hopes for the rest of the series.

1. Including the Silmarillion, for which I have a deep and abiding love to this day.
2. I knew I'd get to the point eventually.
3. Incidentally, the gradual reveal of what Itkovian stood for was handled brilliantly.

(Anyone who wants to join in the fun can post a comment. I'll give you five words/phrases to write about.)

Nethack was my introduction to the world of roguelike games. It made me the ASCII purist I am today. It kept me in QWERTY training after I had switched to Dvorak for all of my personal keyboard use,¹ allowing me to remain generally employable. Thanks to Nethack I spent hours upon hours engrossed in terminal screens and Usenet discussions, as well as developing a persistent tendency to see the emoticon :D as a dragon standing next to a newt.

So it's a pity that I don't like it very much any more.

Nethack had (and has) a lot going for it. It's a ridiculously complex game that requires strategy, tactics and luck; it's a mélange of fantasy references, silly in-jokes and puns; it offers various different playing experiences, both built into the game and added by the playing community in the form of voluntary "conduct" challenges.

Its arbitrary lethality was one of the things I liked most about it, especially at first. While still mostly unspoiled I would blunder about happily, discovering new and strange things and (more often than not) getting killed by them. In a normal game this would have boosted me along some sort of learning curve, but a combination of my own lack of application and Nethack's deliberate, obstructive difficulty meant that I never really got anywhere until I had accumulated information from lurking on rec.games.roguelike.nethack for a while.

Unfortunately, once I was spoiled enough to progress further in the game I discovered that the rest of it was actually quite dull. It's an unfortunate and perhaps ironic fact that the really challenging, difficult part of Nethack is the part that everyone has to play, and only relative experts ever get as far as the easy part. Once I had ascended² once I could have tried again with a different character type or extra conducts … but I had no desire to play through a boring game again, even (or perhaps especially) in a more difficult mode. Even the early levels are pretty boring if one is playing through them prudently with the aim of getting further.

I still have quite a lot of affection for Nethack. I like its silly item interactions, its funny messages, and its bewildering array of ways to die. It's just that an occasional reference is more than enough to satisfy my appetite. If I want to play a roguelike that is actually fun and challenging I will play Crawl every time.³

1. Dvorak is awesome! Convert now!
2. Ascended = winning the game.
3. Crawl has the additional bonus of being under active development. Nethack's DevTeam, although it may well have "thought of everything", has been largely silent for about six years now.