Freedom Comes With Trade Offs

This week the options to write about came down to two: either a review of Bio-Dome, our latest entry in the ongoing Pauly Shore movie season I'm watching with my girlfriend, or a dissection of Boris Johnson's comment that the UK is suffering more of a Covid-19 resurgence than Italy or Germany because British people love freedom more.

At 4% on Rotten Tomatoes, Bio-Dome is possibly the worst-reviewed movie I've ever seen, but it's still better than Mission Impossible 2. It also features a young Kylie Minogue, post-Neighbours but pre-music career, and I'm presuming her casting there led to a wholesale firing of her representation team, so it's an intriguing artifact from that point of view too. But I don't know if there's much more of a blog post to it, so on, with a heavy heart, to BoJo's comments.

I'm always aware of this fact when I'm watching, say, John Oliver, but taking on these sorts of statements is always a fool's errand. Doubly so for me, since at least John Oliver is on TV, whereas I'm just some jerk with a blog that few people read (Hi sweetie! Hi Dan!).

But the whole "freedom" thing is an interesting topic, since I don't think Anglo-Saxon people ever really think about the implications of it - though it's relevant in the context of Brexit, since Brexit is just a project where fat white people bellow "freedom" at each other without considering that not all freedom is created equal.

Or to be really cynical, we can take the talking point that conservatives in this country usually say about minorities (they only talk about their rights and not their responsibilities), and turn it back on them.

The main thing is that the Brits have done a terrible job of masking up, and they're now heading for a second lockdown, or rather a bunch of individual lockdowns, because they can't really do a national one again. The implications are that university lecturers, like my sister, are being forced to teach in person, with no real guidance as to how to do so safely (fuck you, London School of Economics).

So Boris claims that Brits are bad at surviving Covid, and at wearing masks, because they love freedom more than (benighted) countries like Germany and Italy, which had fascism during the War of course. It's a cynical comment, because of course he doesn't actually believe it himself, he just knows that it plays well in rags like the Daily Mail.

Of course, the Mail and other right-wing people seem to forget that society is a series of trade-offs that limit the freedom of individuals and groups, by design. In a society of perfect freedom, for example the Purge movies, you can go around killing and stealing and doing whatever you want, as long as you can hold onto what you have. Societies are an attempt to maximize the level of freedom for everyone by limiting the killing and stealing, but strangely even libertarians aren't complaining about the infringement of their right to murder people in the street (yet).

It follows, therefore, that other curbs on freedom have benefits for society more widely. We don't, or shouldn't, have the freedom to pollute, slander people or misrepresent ourselves to employers or others with whom we enter in contracts. Some of us still do, of course. We also don't have perfect freedom of speech, in which certain utterances are deemed not protected by free speech laws in various countries. The US remains more permissive than others, but even here, the celebrated "shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater" is expressly forbidden in the opinions of several Supreme Court cases on the limits of speech.

Masks are another curb on personal freedom that's beneficial to the society at large. I have the freedom to walk around outside without a mask, but I don't have the freedom to enter a shop without it (at least here in California). People agreeing with Johnson's verbal excrescences would argue that their own freedom is more important than that of some shop assistant or burger-slinger, such people being poor and/or immigrants, but a sane society judges that the freedom of the majority of people is more important than the temporary inconvenience of one person who claims they can't breathe in a mask made of <checks notes> old t-shirts.

Put another way, if you don't respect anybody but yourself, you have a lot of freedom. You can lie, cheat, steal and generally be Donald Trump or Boris Johnson as much as you want. But if you respect people, you willingly give up some freedoms - the freedom to cough on lower-paid people of color, for instance, or the freedom to help the shop assistant infect their elderly relatives with a disease that feasts on co-morbidities.

On the other hand, if you have respect for people, they'll have respect for you, and for your rights. So we come together as a society and willingly curtail our own rights, so that we can all get on with whatever we're doing that doesn't hurt others. So maybe it's not that Germans or Italians love freedom less than Brits - it might just be that we love our neighbors more.

Those who don't like that, are welcome to follow the lead of Pauly Shore in Bio-Dome and lock themselves in a hermetically sealed biosphere for a given period of time. We'll be interested to see how you get on infecting each other.

Openings: The King of Staten Island

One of the nice things about sheltering here with my girlfriend for the past month or so has been our movie nights on weekends. Between streaming services, her DVR and things we're generally interested in, we've managed to find some good stuff - for example, we're alternating between the films of Chadwick Boseman (RIP) and those of Pauly Shore. But one of the first we watched was Pete Davidson and Judd Apatow's King of Staten Island.

I think we were both intrigued by the trailer, and the movie itself is pretty good - it takes most of the good stuff about Pete Davidson and very little of the stuff that annoys me, and places it in a believable context of showing his character coming to terms with his firefighter father's death ten years earlier, and his growth from fuck-up wannabe tattoo artist to a (potential) adult. There are probably spoilers for the movie after the jump, so be forewarned.

Key Years

I've mentioned how I'm frequently rereading books and comics, or rewatching shows, that I've liked in the past, but I've been thinking lately about which media I'm consuming and what times these things are from. I've narrowed it down to three main periods that I keep revisiting, in some way or other. They are, plus or minus a couple of years, 1995 and 2002 and 2013.

The stuff from 1995 seems to be mostly music, comics and TV shows. From 2002 it's mainly books, and extending to around 2004-05 it's music. And finally, 2013 is associated mostly with books.

When I noticed this pattern I started thinking about why I kept coming back to these years, and the best I can come up with is that they were particularly key years, though usually for very different reasons.

1995 is associated with the best time in Britpop, which isn't just when I was experiencing exciting new music but also forming my self-image as a "European". I was getting more interested in European history (especially World War II) and languages, and starting to imagine what my life would be like when I could live on my own.

That interest in Europe and Britain in particular took in Premier League football, and the British comics I was discovering at the time. Of course, by 1995 Neil Gaiman's run on the Sandman was ending and Garth Ennis had finished his run on Hellblazer, but because I discovered those books around that time (actually even a tiny bit earlier) I associate them with the period. By the same token, I didn't read Grant Morrison's Invisibles until a few years later, but rereading the collections now I see how much that book was a product of its time: 1995.

The other thing I was into at around that time was Star Trek, so I can't help but associate that year with Deep Space Nine, in particular. In fact, I've already noted how my most recent rewatch had me remembering the first time I saw those episodes, i.e. 1995-97, rather than the second time in 2006 or so. About which more anon.

2002 is another key year because I'd just started my first job and was reveling in the actual circumstances of being a young adult on my own for the first time. I'd also gotten into travel, which meant I was fixated on travel writing in a big way. In a way every time I reread my beloved Bill Bryson or Paul Theroux books, I'm revisiting that period, when the world was opening itself up to me in a way that hadn't been possible when I was a kid and when I didn't have a monthly paycheck to finance such gallivantings.

In terms of music, 2002 itself was a little barren but by the end of that year I'd discovered the resurgence of guitar bands that had begun with the Strokes and the White Stripes. I was discovering new bands, both from the UK (like British Sea Power) and, in a first for me, from the US (like Interpol). At the same time, I was also discovering a lot of the older music that was influencing what I was discovering then, so I picked up Morrissey's post-Smiths back catalog, for instance, or Joy Division and New Order.

The next one is 2013, which isn't so much a year of a big transition as it was of a new feeling: actually being good at shit. In 2011 and to a greater extent in 2012 I'd found my feet at work much more than I ever had previously, and this trend carried on in 2013. I don't remember the football so much, and I'd kind of lost the thread of newer music by then, but what sticks with me most from that time is travel and history books. I've already written about it, but there was a whole sub-genre of books mostly by white male British writers extolling the wonders of one specific Northern European country, be it Germany, Switzerland or Denmark, and I was having it all.

The ones about Germany all seem to have hit around the same time, though I didn't read them all when they came out. However, I reread Germania by Simon Winder last year (preparatory to reading Lotharingia, his latest, this year), and I've reread Keeping Up with the Germans, by Philip Oltermann, several times since I bought it in 2014. Honestly, I'm kind of twitching with the junkie-like need to read it right now, although that might also be related to my Europe withdrawal, a result of not being able to get on a plane and go to London and Italy because of this stupid pandemic.

My 2013 nostalgia, by the way, is also manifesting in a desire to finish series I began or was in the middle of during that year. Last year I caught up with Ian Tregillis's alternate WWII trilogy, The Coldest War, and with Jasper Kent's Danilov Quintet, for example, and I'm still working on James SA Corey's The Expanse, though there wasn't a gap with those books as big as with the Tregillis or Kent books.

Now, it's also interesting to think about why certain years don't loom as large. 1997-98 is one, given that I'd just started college and was getting into a bunch of new music (namely all the gloomy Manchester bands from the 80s). 2006 is the other, since I'd just graduated from graduate school and returned to London to start Phase 2 of my working life.

For the former, the music just became part of my mental furniture and I've rarely been away from the Cure, the Smiths and whatever else I was listening to then. For the latter, all the bands that had become exciting in 2002-04 suddenly started releasing boring second albums. I watched a bunch of TV that was perhaps more admirable than lovable (e.g. Battlestar Galactica); or I started the big Star Trek rewatch that essentially continues now. And in terms of books, I have vague memories of a bunch of disappointing British SF novels and waiting for the next George RR Martin book to come out (which didn't happen until 2010).

Memory is a funny thing, of course. We all remember where we were when we heard about momentous events, but we also reconstruct otherwise meaningful times in our lives. By focusing in on those three periods, I can draw some conclusions about what was going on that perhaps resonates now, though it's best not to read too much into it - I could easily point to nostalgia for other books and series I was reading at the time, for instance.

Though I wonder if other people are so fixated on books, music and other media from similar significant periods in their lives, or if it's just because as an SFF writer I'm always chasing the high I got from reading favorite classics of the genre?

Writing Characters in the Chronicles of Prydain

I mentioned in my post about rereading Lord of the Rings a few weeks ago that I was eyeing up my old copies of Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, and at this point I'm about a third of the way into book 5, the High King. I hadn't read these books since I was about ten, so apart from the odd scene from bits here and there I remembered nothing about them.

A couple of things jumped out at me from the start. One is that the books move fast - the longest of them, the High King, comes in at 286 pages, so there's not a lot of time lost charting the intricate political alliances of Prydain before Taran, in book 1, goes chasing after the oracular pig Hen Wen. Think of it this way: these five novels altogether are probably shorter than George RR Martin's first Song of Ice and Fire novel, A Game of Thrones, likely because younger readers are a lot less interested in the buildup to people hacking each other to bits with swords.

The other thing that I noticed straight away is the verbal tics of most of the supporting characters. The bard, Fflewddur Fflam, is constantly aggrandizing himself ("a Fflam is valiant!"), correcting ("if you take my meaning") and telling lies that make his harp strings snap. The Princess Eilonwy likens things to other things all the time, and Gurgi speaks in the third person about himself and others, and worries about his "poor tender head".

There are others, both for these characters and for others, but it strikes me as a quick way of letting the reader know who's talking - there are a lot of characters to keep track of so it becomes important that Fflewddur have a different voice than Eilonwy or the others. It also reminds me of a point the critic James Woods made in his book, How Fiction Works, where he described such motifs as a way of making a one-dimensional character work - by insisting repeatedly that she'll never desert Mr Micawber, Mrs Micawber in David Copperfield is giving a glimpse into her thoughts, which have probably involved deserting Mr Micawber.

The thing she - and the supporting characters in the Prydain books - repeats, becomes the defining feature, and while it's a single one that doesn't show her or them as fully realized human beings, it also allows them to come alive in a way that wouldn't be possible if the author were trying to give them that rich inner life.

Thinking about my own stories, the ones where I've differentiated the characters from one another more successfully are the ones where I've located an accent or a voice for them. That comes about from reading their dialogue out loud, so I suspect that my shorter stories are more successful in this regard than my longer novellas.

It's also worth noting that this is another example of YA literature doing something more economically (and perhaps effectively) than "serious" or "grownup" literature. Making a supporting character say the same things, or the same types of things, over and over isn't necessarily the best option for a character who'll be, for example, the point-of-view character for entire chapters, but without talking down or pandering to kids, it helps them get a quick sense of the character.

To take Fflewddur Fflam again: when he's introduced he's described as spiky-haired and spindly, a king who's so bored with ruling his kingdom that he went and learned to be a wandering bard. The lies he tells, which make his magic harp's strings break, reflect both his inclinations as a bard to make things more interesting, and hint at the idea that he's not so proficient either at music or at ruling.

Coming back to George RR Martin, he does something similar with the internal monologues of many of his characters, such as Ned Stark remembering the words "Promise me, Ned," which his sister Lyanna said on her deathbed. I've read some reviews that compared that to a musical motif, like in opera, though in contrast to Lloyd Alexander's characters it's hinting much more obliquely at the character qualities than having them repeat certain phrases or tics.

Beyond the characterizations, the stories are complex and sometimes quite dark, and discuss themes that fantasy authors these days are quite proud of themselves for addressing. In Book 4, Taran Wanderer, the reader is confronted with the human cost of all the wars and battles that populate fantasy fiction, and is also shown the pride and self-respect that non-nobles and non-combatants have for their trades, like smithing, weaving and pottery.

Apart from the lack of things for female characters like Eilonwy to do (and apart from the overall lack of female characters), such themes wouldn't be out of place in fantasy literature now, so imagine my surprise to learn (or re-learn) that the Prydain books came out in the mid-1960s. It also has very little echo of Lord of the Rings in it, which is another nice thing to notice, although surely Lloyd Alexander must have been familiar with JRR Tolkien's work when he was writing his own.

The books are simple, but they breeze along quite well and aren't (to me) embarrassingly childish. It's also nice to re-read one of the first series I was really into as a kid, talking about it with friends and my dad (who also spoiled the ending of Taran Wanderer for me). One of the nicest things as a reader of any age is getting stuck into a new series where all the books are readily available, so it's enjoyable to experience those feelings again.