A Life in Summary

Yeah, I missed a month in there, what with the Placebos and Patient Care post sitting around for more than a month in my tray while I tried to finish it by staring at it intently from across the room. I've covered part of the gap by thrusting P&PC forward four weeks into November to cover the posting gap in the sidebar history.

But I haven't talked about where I am in life for a while. A Ruairi has requested an email on how I'm doing, so I know that I need to type it all out anyway.

I've moved in with my boyfriend Ben, and I now live in Cambridge, MA. The place is beautiful, it's a third floor condo that Ben and a friend of his from high school bought. Ben's also a doctor now, which means that I'm dating a doctor. Sometimes I feel like I've fallen through the Sex in the City rabbit hole and come out on the side of respectability.

Jobs haven't been working out, ha ha. The kinds of places that I've been applying just haven't been hiring people like me. They look at my lack of experience and weak resume and simply don't call me back. It's beyond depressing and well into the numb. Failing out of New York was hard, and I'm glad that Ben was there to catch me.

I haven't been reading as much as I've wanted to be, either. I just finished "Miracle and Other Christmas Stories" by Connie Willis and it was lovely, but I think it was only the second or third book that I finished this month.

So, life it basically on a weird sort of hold. It's not that I'm not doing things. I just don't have much to show for it at the end of the day except for a few pictures and some vague memories.

As I type this, at the very end of the year, I'm in the same place that I started 2009: on Martha's Vineyard with friends of Ben. They have a big New Year's Eve celebration and we're preparing for this year. Andrea is making Chili. Ben is still asleep after drinking and trivia last night (we came in second after having a commanding lead through most of the second half but lost the tiebreaker at the win).

I've traveled a lot this year. I went down to Washington D.C. for the inauguration and I continued to make the trip from New York to Boston for the first part of the year to visit Ben. We visited Martha's Vineyard (to the same people) and also to Nantucket to visit another friend.

Ben had a conference in Hawaii as well, and then two weeks after that he had one in San Diego. So I flew to Hawaii (for the first time) and spent a week on the north side of O'ahu with Ben in a beautiful house with a pool and no wireless and basically lazed around for a few days. Then we flew to San Francisco for the night before Halloween and went out to the Castro for dinner and drinks. Lots of the guys were in their costumes already, so it was entertaining but I still know that I should have rearranged to spend the actual night of Halloween there.

Then we went home, and in this case by home I mean New Mexico. My grandmother is there now, having moved from upstate New York so that my mother can take care of her. My mother is managing a small shop in Santa Fe part time which benefits one of the local animal shelters. We only spent a couple of days there, which was rushed. Ben met my family and he was all cute and nervous about it.

And then we went directly to San Diego, which was in the sixties and so surprisingly cold. But I'd been traveling for three weeks and Ben for almost a month and so we were both a bit tired, so we basically went back and collapsed.

That last big trip that I took was to Virginia to meet all of his family for Thanksgiving. He's got a much larger "nuclear" family than I do. He's got three parent figures, two half brothers, two sisters and one half sister and they had the additional uncles and friends over as well. It was the youngest half brother's birthday as well so it was a very complicated few days but I had a lovely time and was happy to meet all the people that Ben was worried about me meeting.

It's weird. I'm usually the emotional one in this relationship. I'm depressed or excited or whatever, but Ben was much more concerned about our meetings with our respective families than I was.

So, that's where I am now and what's been happening in a general sense. There's more trivial stuff: we're not going to many movies but we did see Avatar in IMAX 3D. It was good but the more that I think about it I don't think it was great. I don't think that it'll be the Star Wars of our generation.

Ben and I got each other a half of a Playstation 3 for Christmas and so far we have only one game that was designed for the system on it: Flower, which is lovely and worth every penny of the ten dollars that it costs. All of the other games are ports from older systems. Ben is playing through Final Fantasy VIII, which is like some sort of weird dream come true for me. It's quite odd how much I'm enjoying him playing it. I'm almost done with Zelda on the Wii, which is a lovely game as well and very well done. All of us, Ben, Me and the roommate, are playing the New Super Mario Brothers. Who could have imagined that Mario sidescrollers would have made a resurgence.

I guess that's enough. Ben wants to use my computer for a while. So cheers everyone, and I hope that you all have a wonderful New Year and have had a blissful Christmas/Hanukkah season.

Noird and Sushi

On June 3 in Cambridge I got to hear China Miéville speak about his new book The City and The City, during which he let fly with the created word "noird." He was content to let it live in the wild: he refused to define it himself except for in the most general terms and refused to speculate on other authors that it may describe. (If you're interested, the first reference to it is here and Why Mice Sing delves into it here.)

During the signing, he told me that I should spread #noird, so I guess I'll have to go sign up for Twitter. China Miéville told me too.

I asked Ben to talk about his thoughts about noird, because he's substantially brighter than I am and more apt to clearly express interesting ideas. He said:

I went to see China Mieville give a reading and question and answer session last week, in which he declared that his most recent book 'The City and the City' is a member of the noir and new weird portmanteau: noird subgenre. Upon declaring this new subgenre, Mieville started the question and answer session. I fired off the first question: 'Who else would you put in the subgenre of Noird? For me, Richard K Morgan immediately springs to mind, but what do you think?' Mieville demurred and suggesting that we need to identify the authors for ourselves. To wit, I start with a modest proposal for what Mieville is defining.

Noird is a fusion of Noir and New Weird - Noir is fairly straightforward: hard-boiled detective/crime/police procedural story - I always thing of Raymond Chandler and Chinatown. New Weird is a bit more amorphous - presumably, this encompasses the new science fiction approaches, the speculative fiction which Neal Stephenson defines so cleanly here. There is certainly a current/modern component to this, so Golden and Silver Age of sci-fi/fantasy should probably be excluded.

On the author/book list (as Mieville implied that not all his work is Noird, but 'The City and the City' most certainly is) I suggest the following:

• Takeshi Kovacs (Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, Woken Furies) series by Richard K. Morgan
• The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon
• Something by Neil Gaiman [not sure what, but he's certainly New Weird, and there's got to be detective elements to some of what he's done]
• Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde
• Halting State by Charles Stross [possible others like Glasshouse have references along those lines]
• The da Vinci Code/Angels and Demons by Dan Brown [possibly too mainstream to be new weird, but there's certainly elements that map onto this construct - stylistically, the noir component falls short here--there's not a lot of that hard-boiled feeling]
• Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami [though others from Murakami fits into this as well]

In many ways, I feel like Philip K Dick was a major founding influence in this Noird genre - looking at works such as Do Androids Dream, A Scanner Darkly, which wiki calls "a bleak mixture of science fiction and police procedural novels;" possibly may be the founding work. That being said, Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man is a worthy contender as well, with the heavy influence of the classic Noir style.

Obviously, there are other and further choices, but this is certainly a reasonable sub-genre which captures many works which sort of defy classification.

Personally, I'm not convinced that when Ben wrote this, his definition of New Weird was correct. I asked if he'd looked New Weird up on Wikipedia and found that he hadn't. Some of the works that Ben takes for granted as New Weird aren't necessarily part of that movement and some of them predate it by decades.

So, New Weird "subverts the romanticized ideas about place found in traditional fantasy" and invents complex and believable worlds in which the plots are set in a more realistic and not particularly utopian setting. Basically it's fantasy set in a world that extends beyond the boundaries of the story that exhibits the traits of the real world.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is on the Library Thing list above and both Ben and I agree that it deserves it's place on that list. Ben, having just finished the Chalion series by Bujold, thinks that those books belong to that movement as well and I can't necessarily disagree. I would add George R. R. Martin's ASOIAF to the movement as well. His books are subversions of a romanticized fantasy setting.

Possibly Harry Potter by J. Rowling belongs to this movement as well. It's certainly an expansive world that belongs to a world with a past and future that exists regardless of the actions of Harry. It does push the limit on the "realistic" front though, although I would argue that the later books show that the world in which Harry lives is not the typical utopian fantasy setting. The Minister of Magic is voted out, isn't he? Characters related to the main characters die. Not everyone lives happily ever after and if we're defining this movement by expansive worlds and a step away from utopianism, then I would argue that it does fit.

Ben would point out somewhere in here that J. Rowling would never describe herself as "New Weird." Considering her separation from the mainline fantasy movement I would question though whether she'd even accept the term "fantasy," so why does it matter?

It matters because China is spreading New Weird himself, as sort of a self-promotional/sales technique. That doesn't mean that it isn't a valid sub-sub-genre but it does make me question how correct the pushed definition is to the way that people use it. And since Noird is a sub-category of New Weird, how specific are we willing to get?

There are only a few examples of Noird, but Ben feels (and I would agree) that the are categorical, there are ways to parse out the differences between New Weird and Noird. Figuring out what those were led me to at least one more subset that Noird must be distinct from: Victorianeird (pronouced with a hard e at the end).

Victorianeird is that part of the New Weird that adapts the literary conventions, styles and sometimes setting and characters of Victorian England. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is the obvious genre defining work, but there are others. Brust's Viscount of Adrilankha series is probably another. Although I haven't read them I would guess that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Graham-Smith (and Jane Austen, of course), the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik probably fit into that category as well.

So yeah, Noird and Victorianeird. If I have any more thoughts, I'll have to do a follow-up post.

Moving on to the sushi part of this post: Cafe Sushi on Mass Ave in Cambridge is excellent. Really, really good. I guess they've changed management recently but they're much better now than they used to be. So, if you happen to be looking for excellent sushi in the Cambridge area, I heartily recommend them.

Happy St. Patrick's Day from Boston

Yes, it's true, I've moved again.