Pride and Prejudice and being taken in

Since I discussed it last week, I finished Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. I enjoyed the experience tremendously, but following the afterglow, I started having second thoughts about my reactions to it.

Pride and Prejudice and an historical novel as mystery

During the last couple of years, I've played many sessions of Regency Cthulhu, a Call of Cthulhu supplement focusing on running scenarios set in the Regency era. More specifically, the supplement calls out Jane Austen's novels. After playing, and during a break, writing a few Lovecraftian pastiches set in that era using a very different version of the character I created for the campaign, I came to realize that I really was missing out by not having read any of Austen's work. I read Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe as a kid, and some Dickens, and possibly Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, but all of these were obviously not very sharp in my mind. So, in a timely fashion, I decided to start with her classic Pride and Prejudice.

The writing was very good from the start, and the characters fascinating, but the first of three volumes had me terribly confused and unsettled. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to take as sensible, what was supposed to be ridiculous as opposed to being read as ridiculous form my modern point of view, and so on. With time I obviously realized that some of the characters are not particularly reliable, but I wasn't sure what kind of acme I could have for making sense of them.

And then, the second volume had a large, clear exposition that made me reassess my entire experience. The exposition added facts that were known neither to me nor to the character to whom it was aimed - and then the character made note of some facts that were familiar to us both, but which we had missed the significance of at the time, but now were shown in a new light with the new evidence.

The facts and what they suggested were not really culturally-dependent - they pointed to an explicit contradiction between someone's behavior and statements and their actions. If I hadn't been so busy second-guessing myself as to my interpretation of the many events and discussions surrounding this contradiction, perhaps I would have noticed it. I felt like in a detective novel, where there's a revelation of what really happened, or who did the crime, and the reader feels like they should have been able to figure it out themselves.

With this in mind, I no longer feel as I did during the first volume, that I wish that I were reading an annotated version of the novel. Instead, I would like, going forward, to try and appreciate novels like this, historical novels that do not begin with an exposition or clarifications to the reader as to the cultural and social significance of what is happening before them, as a challenge, to see if, despite not being familiar with the setting because of its distance in time, space, and/or social and cultural situation, I can nevertheless figure out when something is being hidden in plain sight like this.

I am looking forward to finishing the third volume, and then moving on to other works of this nature. Not just historical novels - fantasy and science fiction often suffer from too much exposition, but some works do gamble that throwing the reader at the deep end will not dissuade them from continuing on, and getting more and more invested in the world, perhaps exactly because they have to work so much themselves to make sense of it.

Console cowboys and arcade aces

On several occasions, William Gibson has noted that his inspiration for console cowboys in Neuromancer wasn't necessarily contemporary hacker culture, but instead the kids he saw in video arcades who became experts at the games, so immersed they mastered these new pieces of technology.

Before video games became a home phenomenon, their greatest popularization was through arcade machines. I, myself, remember spending far too much time and my parents` money on these machines in the 90s, but at least overseas the first wave started in the late 70s, and author Martin Amis wrote a very illuminating contemporary account published in 1982, Invasion of the Space Invaders. It is interesting to see how much closer to the grimy entertainment culture of dive bars, drug dens, and porn theaters. He describes his relationship to them as addictive, and interprets their design in the context of getting as many quarters from players as possible. He then also describes the people who have mastered some of these games, the aces, how they exchanged tips with each other, and in fact spends a third of the book describing tips and strategies for the most popular games. Another third is dedicated to home and hand-held consoles, comparing them with the arcade experience.

Sol Yurick's 1965 novel The Warriors obviously predates the video game arcade phenomenon, but one of the Warriors encounters an arcade full of mechanical games in the same Times Square station in which he earlier has an experience at a brothel, and feels quite at home in that milieu.

This kind of social, ubiquitous but subcultural view of gaming seems very distant now that "Gamer" has been so heavily molded by ads and marketing. Ironic that the "barcade" is in fact a lot closer to the origin of video games as a cultural phenomenon, although it's obviously quite gentrified.

Modern design is not comfortable to live with

During my visit to Chicago, I again spent time in a museum, this time the Art Institute of Chicago. Most of what I looked at was not modern art or design, but there was some of that. And it reminded me of a second issue I wanted to discuss after my visit at MoMA: how uncomfortable it is to actually live in a world designed in a modern fashion. I experienced that less when exploring the museum exhibits, and more when I made use of their bathrooms, or those of the mostly modern hotels I've stayed in. Basic elements such as sinks and doors look nice and simple, but basic aspects of them just don't seem to take into account that people would be using them, or how they will do so.

Lets start with sinks. The fact of the matter is that people will be using sinks to wash their hands. For that you need to be able to comfortably get your hands under the sink, have room to wash and rub those hands together, ideally without touching the sink while doing so, and be capable of draining the water, suds, and so forth. It is surprising how many bathroom sinks I've seen recently fail to do any or all of these effectively. One hotel bathroom had a sink that was just a shallow rectangular basin, with the faucet too low over it. As for the draining, since it was rectangular, it only halfheartedly drained, meaning any suds or detritus of shaving had to be actively cleaned off. I've also seen several recent bathrooms where the water, soap, and air drying implements are part of one contraption. Aside from the fact that this does not allow for proper pipelining, as someone washing their hands will presumably be taking up the sink until they are done drying their hands, everything is so close together that it is easy to touch a bunch of surfaces where it would be better to avoid doing so.

As for doors, I can enjoy the aesthetics of a sliding glass door, but when one is used for a shower, it needs to be set up to block off the water from spraying outside - often, that was not the case. And I was in more than one hotel room where a sliding door was used to close off the bathroom itself, sometimes set up so that it would bounce back if simply pushed closed, never really good at keeping sound in, which is recommended if sharing the lodging with anyone.

Many "organic" modern buildings essentially create a lot of dead space at corners while making for a nice-looking façade. There seem to be many of those on the Chicago riverfront, although I have not looked inside to see if my experience with others of the genre repeated here.

I feel like a lot of these problems would go away if designers and architects were forced to live with the products of their designs for at least a week.

Exploring and living in new cities

I just spent almost a week in a city I've never been to before: Chicago. It's the first time in many years that I've had a chance to explore a new city. It's something I've enjoyed tremendously in the past: just walking around and seeing what interests me, occasionally setting myself goals, such as meeting a friend or acquaintance, or visiting a museum or a landmark. I did some of that in New York City a few months ago, and now I got to do much more of it somewhere entirely new.

Sometimes I've had a similar experience when moving to a new city, although that usually only lasts for the first few weeks, as I get a lay of the environment around me, how to get to the nearest grocery store, or the post office, some basic orientation. After that it's more rare that I'll actually explore beyond that. Which is a shame - when I get around to it, I do enjoy discovering more about where I live.

Moving was on my mind throughout, because I was supposed to move to Chicago. I worked remotely for a company there, and eventually they planned on asking people to come live near the office, and get back to in-person work. Due to how COVID progressed, and eventually, layoffs that swept me with them, this never materialized. But I am starting to wonder whether staying where I live, Troy, is something I really am doing because I like the area, or just due to complacency.

Now that I know that I'm a capable remote worker, I could live anywhere with a solid internet connection, if I wanted to. Just in the US there are so many places left for me to explore, and potentially live in.

And on the other hand, I should make more of where I already live. There are whole neighborhoods of my city that I have not visited, and many cities and towns around I've never even reached.

In any event, I will definitely be visiting Chicago again.

Films I watched in 2023 - Part 4

Concluding the series of short reviews of films from 2023 (see Part 3).

In the Mouth of Madness (1994)

Very good. Cosmic horror on a mass scale, navigated using one character desperately clinging to a sense of normalcy in the face of much evidence to the contrary.

Devil's Rain (1975)

A dull attempt at horror. The title credits with backgrounds taken from Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights accompanied with dissonant music was the highlight.

Promising Young Woman (2020)

I was really hyped up for this film based on the trailers, and then COVID happened and the release kept getting delayed, and I never ended up watching it. I was afraid that it would disappoint me, but instead it absolutely lived up to and surpassed my expectations. Brilliant throughout. Least supernatural and most thrilling and unsettling film I've watched in years.

Renfield (2023)

Fun action-horror with nice callbacks to past Draculas, and plenty of opportunities for Nicolas Cage to chew the scenery.

And that's that for 2023!

The Two Cases of the Sun Bather's Diary

As a follow-up to my general discussion of the various forms of Perry Mason and his colleagues and foes in various forms of media, I've recently finished Erle Stanley Gardner's the 1955 novel The Case of the Sun Bather's Diary, which got me to rewatching Season 1, Episode 17 of the 1957 Perry Mason series, which adapts this same novel, and a direct comparison could be illuminating. Obviously this post will have spoilers for both.