Time for a ramp-up at last: a movie set at Halloween!
Well, a week before Halloween, to be precise and faithful to its novel origin, but near enough.
I was absolutely fizzing to read that Disney's adaptation of Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes was finally coming to ratty old Disney+. A decent version of it online has been very hard to find legitimately, and it was that way for many years until sanity prevailed, and this movie joined its twisted early 80s brethren. So I watched it!
Something Wicked This Way Comes (Jack Clayton, 1983)
Disney is a fascinating company, and we'll surely return to them, but for now I'm thinking of that point in the studio's past before the big IP acquisitions, before the superheroes, the star warses, the pixars and even before the new animated classics like The Lion King. I'm talking about Disney's Dark Period(tm). I'm talking The Black Hole, Watcher in the Woods, Return to Oz, The Black Cauldron, and this spooky little moonflower. I'm talking Jason Robards, Jonathan Pryce, PAM GRIER, and a curious decision to make a story previously set in a sometimes 50s a more period piece set presumably pre-Great War . It doesn't ruin anything, and maybe helps sell the film's old world visual aesthetic - although I've always found Bradbury to be a highly visual storyteller, so maybe it's just a point of difference.
So what to say? It's not the book. The book is sacrosanct. As full of life and mystery as it was when I first read it back in my teens. The cast is great. The cinematography is good, the score is... very James Horner. The production was troubled. It's a blessing we have this at all, so given the odd imperfection, I give it a fair bit of slack. The book is still there, as are my memories of losing myself in that first reading.
On the Halloweenometer we're getting very close to a great pick. It has the time, the location, and enough retro charm to locate it in a familiar-unfamiliar location. It is utterly American, dark, threatening, but not too dark for family viewing.
Recommended!
Companion Piece
We're going local with The Chills (perhaps appropriately named for the spooky season). The late, lamented Martin Phillipps had a few supernatural themed songs in his repertoire, being a fan of the paranormal. 'Ghosts' and the aptly-named 'Dark Carnival' from debut album Brave Words could both be contenders, but for me it's a little more recent, and a deeper cut - a B-Side to 'Male Monster From the Id', complete with Peter Holsapple's REM-ish guitar, and a knowing Bradbury reference in the second line. Marty was a fan of his, too.
Dungeons and Dragons changed their Gnome several times over until we got the version we have today, leagues from where the creature began, as Paracelsus' embodiment of the element of Earth. It's notable that it wasn't just the adventure profession that changed or 'evolved' over its history - they also changed appearance and motivation.
"Gnomes are excellent metalsmiths and miners. They love gold and gems and have been known to make bad decisions just to obtain them [...] Gnomes like most dwarves, but war with goblins and kobolds who steal their precious gold." Dungeons & Dragons Mentzer edition, Dungeon Master's Guide.
The traditional Gnome has stuck to the same template for over a hundred years. Everyone can describe a Gnome, probably without too much effort: short, hat, beard, nose, maybe a belly, maybe stone, maybe the woods, maybe the mines. The Dwarf association in Gnomes is strong and must be acknowledged, because their evolutions are shared. The rare appearance of the Gnome in its own right takes some time to assert the figure beyond a blending of the stock little person type (Paracelsus borrows from the 'pygmies' of the Iliad, which is transferred into English literature through Pope's The Rape of the Lock, which sets them up in a war with the more elfin Sylphs.) Thus Gnomes become earth-tied through the alchemical version by Paracelsus, then become embittered in Pope's parody.
Gnomes appear as a treasure hoarder and equally capricious in the collected tales of the Brothers Grimm (The Gnome) by which time their function as an antagonist is wrapped up with the equally greedy and subterranean Dwarf and Goblin. The Grimms of course also collected Snow White, whose absorption into popular culture through Disney and later (but unconnectedly) Tolkien not only redeemed the Dwarf, but made them accessible as humourous and sympathetic characters. The Gnome of course found some salvation as a garden totem - and perhaps it's the link with the green, growing world of nature which preserved the Gnome for more recent writers.
Further reading:
Folklore Thursday: 'On Gnomes: From Alchemical Theory to a Fairy Tale Staple [https://folklorethursday.com/folktales/on-gnomes-from-alchemical-theory-to-a-fairy-tale-staple/]
THE SEMIOSPHERES OF
PREJUDICE IN THE FANTASTIC
ARTS
THE INHERITED RACISM OF IRREALIA
AND THEIR TRANSLATION
MIKA LOPONEN (2019, University of Helsinki. Dissertation, Department of Modern languages [https://tuhat.helsinki.fi/ws/portalfiles/portal/124871175/PhD_Dissertation_Mika_Loponen_e_text_version_1.65.pdf]
The early D&D Gnome stuck doggedly to form, thanks in part to the roster of artists who drew them, and in part with the insistence of of the then contemporary 'look' of the Gnome, most frequently seen in the Huygen books. That said, Huygen's book doesn't really go to town with big noses, and certainly not with LONG noses. Their ears are human-like and round, not pointed. Their beards are full and their hats are large, pointed and usually red - just like a garden gnome statute, of course.
The garden gnome has no less a complicated history, going back at least as far as Anatolia (now modern Turkey) and travelling through Europe to Germany and of course the United Kingdom by the Nineteenth Century. The cap is Phrygian in shape and likely origin, the beard perhaps as old. The nose and ears? A rounded button and large Enid-Blytonesque ears with no points. Curious.
Fairy creatures have long been drawn or portrayed with exaggerated features, and Gnomes and Dwarfs haven't been immune. Pixie or Elfin ears are usually pointed, Dwarfs often have large noses - but not necessarily long ones, or hooked ones. Only when we look past the Disney 'Snow White' Dwarfs with their friendly bulbous hooters does the profile change.
So where did Gygax, Sutherland and others get their Gnome characteristics - pointedly the pointed ones, from?
If I had trouble establishing for myself the 'perfect' Gnome, then at least it was my own battle and it only lasted around fifteen years. TSR (and I suppose Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro after them) took something closer to a generation. In fairness, it wasn't a well-defined race to begin with, and it wasn't a playable race until AD&D; a lot of things were in play, and in the ensuing years and later editions of the game a good many things would be revised. The Gnome would be one of them.
It seems likely that Gary Gygax's original model for the fighter Gnome of D&D/AD&D is Hugi the Gnome in Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions. Hugi is woods-homed, a doughty fighter and something of a braggart, but otherwise not much different from a fantasy Dwarf. In AD&D some magic is added in the form of Illusionist spells, and this class preference persists in succeeding editions, past the introduction of the 'Deep Gnome' or Svirfneblin in the 1e Unearthed Arcana and its assumption as a playable class for 2e. The Dragonlance novels and AD&D setting then incorporated that world's Tinker Gnome as a character type, and subsequent editions married the fey magic element with an artificer's skill (though often with hazardous results). Meanwhile, in Basic D&D Gnomes have burst with reinvention as an NPC race in exclamation-mark-bearing madcap flying city adventure supplements (Top Ballista!) and mecha modules (Earthshaker!). The woodland Gnome of old has by now disappeared, as has its appearance, replaced in the wider game by a slimmer, more fey figure with wild hair, less facial hair and elfin eyes. It's a divisive reinvention, to say the least, but the whimsical Steampunk Gnome type endures in World of Warcraft. By D&D's 5e the favoured class of the Gnome has become Bard.
So much for the in-game Gnome, in the history of the Gnome in popular culture, the character has also undergone an evolution...
It may seem counterintuitive to think of a Gnome worshipping a deity - at least as much as those other early demi-humans. Back in D&D's early days it was assumed clerics - that practical way to restore hit points and get rid of undead, were particular to all races, but only the human (or half-orc in AD&D) peoples would allow their clergy to also kit up and go a-dungeon-crawling.
In the case of Gnomes in early D&D the lines were drawn even thicker. Gnomes, it could be inferred, were not spiritual, they were magical; creatures adept in illusion and sleight of hand, it jibed with the theory, aligning with other diminutive tricksters of the fairy world. Who cares if the ability to cast great illusions seemed strange in a dark old mine? Their sworn enemies, the kobolds, were also underground dwellers and tricksy. Otherwise, it went some way to justifying the Illusionist class spell list if it could be used in more than one player character type. Woodland Gnomes weren't much different, and unless you are prepared to go back to the Brothers Grimm (it's complicated) , they're not especially magical.
Unless...
Unless the woodland Gnome were taken to specialise in woodland magic, and employ natural components in their spells, supplicating to gods personifying wild nature. This is what B.B offers in The Little Grey Men, with the older Dodder praying and ultimately summoning Pan, whose presence is felt throughout the rest of their story. I like the aspect of Pan: in line with the gods, actually a god, but not entirely godly, being very earthly, somewhat feral and (maybe) a bit horny as well. Of the Roman gods he's the most animalistic, and that works, too. I'm not saying Gnomes should worship Pan, but other gods are available: Silvanus, Gaia, Abnoba, Cernunnos, Phaunus, Leshy - and so on.
Woodland magic, the worship of nature deities satisfies the Druid role in AD&D, and so my ideal race-as-class Gnome PC is just that: a Druid.
Having covered Gnomes from a floral aspect for a couple of episodes now, it's time to turn to fauna - the beasts of the Gnomes' world.
I'm going to assume an archetypal D&D fantasy woodland and its animals - that is to say, Northern Hemisphere, European, and temperate, with defined seasons. The variety of animals (excluding invertebrates) run the range of fish, reptiles and amphibians, birds (waterfowl, passerine and non-passerine, raptors) and mammals. In the works of B.B and Wil Huygen the largest animals are generally badgers, foxes, domesticated dogs and polecats, but a fantasy woodland might also incorporate bears, boars, wildcats and wolves. Below that size are the other common woodland creatures: otters, squirrels, moles, bats, mice, rats, voles, rabbits, hedgehogs, weasels and stoats. The Cook Expert D&D Set of course includes giant ferrets as guard animals for a sample Gnome lair - but the aforementioned works, strictly sticking to their favoured Gnome dimensions (roughly a handspan), has no need of them.
Size notwithstanding, it's the relationship which counts. Gnomes are the guardians of the woodland, friend to most animals, and sometimes fellow residents (B.B's little grey men share a tree with a couple of owls, Hugyen's foster infant mammals). Reptiles are at best tolerated - in Down the Bright Stream an adder is as capricious and sinister as the serpent of Eden, and fish are equally food and predator, depending on their size (minnow and a pike, respectively.) The underlying philosophy is that the Gnomes share their woodland home with animals. They rarely eat flesh, save for fish (it's okay, they don't have any feelings), and steal bird eggs, but don't seem to hunt fowl or rabbits. This extends to their craft - of which more in another post.
Above: Gnome with Squirrel, after B.B
Gnomes share a language with the animals, being able to converse with (seemingly) all mammals, most birds, and the aforementioned adder, and they rely on the strength, skills (burrowing by moles, hunting by otters, flight by the owls) and knowledge of these creatures. In exchange they ply their crafts, invention and dexterity to help their animal friends. In short, Gnomes are a woodland creature among others - notably in the Tales from the Wood RPG inspired by Watership Down and the books of BB, Gnomes are simply another player type alongside the rabbits, badgers, squirrels and other creatures.
To the adventuring Gnome such relationships and skills are significant. The ability to naturally Speak With Animals (certain kinds) and rely on them for intelligence and local lore could be very handy. the ability to summon those creatures at a time of peril could be a life saver.
Best left there for now. Suffice it to say the animal/Gnome relationship is essential to the character class and not to be sniffed at. There's more to add, but there we drift into the mystical. And that's best for another post...
There is a lot of codification in the names of fantasy characters. George Martin employed consonant shifts and an almost phonetic approach in adapting common names for his characters in his Song of Ice and Fire novels ('Eddard', 'Podrick', 'Sersei'). Tolkien took hi from Old Norse and Anglo Saxon histories, depending on the culture of his people - and when it came to Hobbits, he mixed the old with the contemporary, adding evocative descriptors and alliteration to give them their own distinctive sounds: Bilbo, Frodo, Samwise, Odo, Bungo, Meriadoc, Gerontius, Belladonna.
The last name - that of Bilbo's ill-fated mother, is of course a botanical name, and it's the names of wild flowers that B.B. uses for his little grey men: Dodder is a vine-like weed, Baldmoney an aromatic mountain plant, Cloudberry a raspberry-like fruit, and Sneezewort a hardy wildflower. Some of these are edible, some have medicinal properties, others known for their toughness or resilience, and yet others for their beauty.
I like the convention of botanical names for Gnomes. They divorce themselves from the human and cleave instead to the natural world. There are dozens of names for some plants, and hundreds of varieties; some names are almost lost , or so regional as to be obscure, and if Gnomes are not numerous, in a fantasy setting they needn't have linear surnames to distinguish themselves - in fact, I'd recommend against the convention. But to make it slightly codified, I've taken to using tree or weed names for males, and floral or herbal names for females. It'll do for now.
Above: Houndstongue and Primula.
Recommended sourcebook: Culpeper's Complete Herbal (1653), via Project Gutenberg
“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.” - Bilbo Baggins
So far I've described a Gnome at home in the woods; tied to nature, attuned to the rhythm of the living world, breathing to the wind in the treetops. A Gnome in his or her element is exactly where they should be - but it's no epic story in the making. If a Gnome is so ideally posited as a loner, or part of a small community of fosters, what on earth would inspire one to go adventuring?
Fortunately we have a literary precedent, in the form of Cloudberry, a Gnome at the heart of B.B's The Little Grey Men. Unlike his brothers Dodder, Sneezewort and Baldmoney, Cloudberry is, as his name suggests, something of a spiritual wanderer and is gripped with wanderlust. Of his own volition, and against the counsel of his brothers, he leaves Folly Brook and goes off 'up river', adventuring with a flock of high flying geese ('heaven Hounds') to distant lands. Like Bilbo and Frodo in the quote above, he returns to his brothers, never the same again.
Despite this cautionary example (Cloudberry is at the last a dangerous dreamer, and at worst... much worse), we can at least say we have one - and it's useful in noting the 'change' that occurs in Cloudberry afterwards. he is ever restless, unable to think or talk of anything else but his travels, and schemes to find a way to rejoin them. A player character Gnome needn't be so pathologically obsessed, but the curiosity is a handy hook. Everything else is detail, although my preference, if it hasn't been obvious already, is to start out keeping things simple. A beginner Gnome adventurer ought to have their own hand-crafted tools and weapons, and little armour, perhaps collecting the more usual trappings along the way. The life of a wandering Gnome among fellow drifters of other races need have little more, but change is inevitable. If you seek to play a Gnome adventurer, expect change.
This week my good chum Alistair Hughes' book comes out. In fact, it launches today/tomorrow - Halloween in the UK (oops - Sex Pistols earworm!). It is, of course, this very book:
And of course it's a thing of beauty. And wit. And stake-through-the-heart fandom, because Al's book, an infographics coffee table guide to the oeuvre of Hammer Films, is truly a labour of love.
Researched, written and illustrated by Alistair here's everything you might want to know about the van Helsing and Frankenstein family trees, the body count of Carmilla Kanstein, the many creatures of Hammer's prehistoric epics, the lunar rovers of latter-day space western Moon Zero-Seven. Elsewhere are maps - Hammer's middle-Europe, Southern England in locations and settings, a history of the world in Hammer movies - it's all pretty much there.
Beyond that, there are ample diversions - and puns surely ripped up from a grave somewhere: The Rides of Dracula details the various carriages and conveyances of the Count and his pursuers; Stalk Like an Egyptian does the same for the various mummified fiends of Hammer Studios, and The Phantom Dennis covers the various adaptations of the great Mr Wheatley. Where relevant, the works of Hammer are placed alongside other works by Universal and similar studios, placing the Undead Count, the Promethean Man, the Cursed Pharaoh and the Wolf Man alongside their alternative kin. There's no mistaking that Infogothic's focus is on hammer's works, but occasionally the lens pulls back, and there's a context involved as these creatures change and evolve before and after the rise and fall of the House of Hammer.
I'm biased, of course. Having interviewed Al for Beyond the Sofa last week, our longstanding friendship is readily acknowledged, but I think that even without our mutual interests and history, there'd be enough in these pages to feed my various interests - spaceship plans, magic circles, family crests, imaginary continents and prehistoric languages - there's fodder here for any interested modeller, gamer, fanfic writer or trivia buff - it's highly versatile
It's also splendidly illustrated. Not using official photos has brought the publication price down, but you simply don't miss them, because the line illustrations within are consistent, recognisable, and slavish in their detail. Al's work is simply among some of the best in recent NZ media, and it's wonderful to see it presented here in full colour.
My regret in viewing Infogothic is its necessary limitations - which became the limitations of my own Hammer knowledge. Wisely, Al has contained his scope to the genre-output of Hammer Studios - the horrors, fantasy and sci-fi movies. Man About the House movie fans look elsewhere - but as I mentioned in our podcast chat, reading Infogothic also revealed to me how much I have confused the works of Hammer over the years with other less-celebrated studios, such as the worthy Amicus, as well as Tigon and Tyburn. As it is, Amicus could possibly sustain a volume of its own, maybe also the Roger Corman and Vincent Price adaptations of the works of Edgar Allen Poe; but neither have the breadth nor the variety of Hammer's output (yes, On the Buses included), which becomes a strength of this book as well. Also unrealised to date, a look into the unmade Hammer films - as much as we can know about them. But other guidebooks will do for those, and maybe the fates will conspire to provide Al and us with an opportunity for a revision or a return - I know the author has plenty of ideas still, and hopefully we'll see more of them very soon.
Infogothic : An Unauthorised Graphic Guide to Hammer Horror is available from its publisher, Telos, as well as Amazon US. For a rather fine peek into some of its pages, check out Al's blog Fasmatodea, and the following video created by Monster Kid Radio:
This week I got kicked out of a shop. Well, not quite kicked out,. Escorted as I left in mortification, really.
Waiting for a few minutes after a wee walk while I was having some family prescriptions filled (not a euphemism), I stopped in at one of Wellington's few remaining shops with a healthy number and array of magazines in. I do this from time to time, not regularly, and try not to overstay my welcome. Ocasionally - but really not often, to be honest - I might buy one.
This week I picked the wrong time to flick through a magazine and two comics (fan-style - never cover-to-cover) in under five minutes. From behind me came an approaching voice and a familiar complaint:
"Hey, mate - you can't do that here. This isn't a library"
I was so surprised and taken aback I nrealy blurted out "but I'm a librarian!', which would have been a very daft thing to say. Instead, I mumbled an awkward assent, carefully replaced the magazine back in its shelf (no chance of buying that now), and walked out with the owner behind me. I guess I was the only customer in the shop, but I don't remember checking either in or out.
This picture: United States National Archives
I won't return. I think the message was clear enough, and I'll check my behaviour next time I'm in a newsagent's. I've lived in this city for twenty years now and, as said, have been an occasional customer to this particular shop, buying papers, gum, chocolate bars, stamps and, yes, magazines. But if I could be called a 'regular', then probably not the best kind - certainly in the eyes of the owner.
Walking back to the chemist shamefaced and a little rattled, two thoughts came quickly - some sympathy for the owner, and an acknowledgement that I am part of the problem. I didn't go into the shop to buy a magazine (but I might have - occasional impulse purchases are not outside my habits)
and who knows if I was the first, the fifth, or the tenth visitor to abuse his floorspace there that day, that week, that month. Maybe I am that kind of 'regular.'
It must be a hard time for a newsagent in this age of dwindling print sales, electronic subscriptions and the added impact of high turnaround titles like the weekly Prog. Nobody walked out of that shop happy this time, but next time I'm in a magazine shop will be different.
'Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks' by Ethan Gilsdorf (2012)
On a recommendation from the Save or Die podcast I recently read through Ethan Gilsdorf's Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks, an autobiographical journey by the author, a journalist, who revisits an Eighties childhood of roleplaying games through literally revisiting and immersing himself in many of the elements past and present of a fantasy geek lifestyle. Along the way he meets other gamers, lifestylers and geeks, some of whom also tell their story through Gilsdorf.
Gilsdorf is around my age, but got into gaming earlier, and seemed to stick with it larger, and yet his experiences of leaving the game seem pretty familiar to anyone who has left home, entered adult institutions and fumbled their way through the sought treasures and pitfalls of adult relationships. In fact, the author's late childhood of nursing a severely disabled mother while entering his teens weighs heavily on the narrative, as does his confessed difficulty with committing to his longtime girlfriend. In a way, the premise of the book as quest oriented helps tell his story - the work of the journalist being one of discovery, detective, conflict and intuition, much like that of an RPG character; however, it's a piecemeal journey, with interruptions, revisions and deviations. There's also an returning element in Gildorf's writing that admits to a form of arrested maturity in the writer - something he explains in part to his unenviably difficult teens, but nevertheless it intrudes into the narrative. In short, there are times when the quest seems to be aimed at more than just awakening and examining the geek in Gilsdorf's head, but also pursuing a warrior queen of his very own, and to me it sat uncomfortably.
Nevertheless, there's plenty here to absorb if, like Gilsdorf, you've been somewhat divorced from the world of roleplaying games and are interested in how its various worlds - tabletop gaming, LARPing, historical reenactment, online MORPGs and fan culture, have evolved. As anyone who has followed the fortunes of games like Dungeons and Dragons can attest, the fortunes of the game and its community have waned and waxed over the years and fought their share of demons - from Eighties Satanic Panic to the collapse of many of its gaming studios, to the emergence of new media and the digital age. I found a lot of interest in Gilsdorf's visit to the spiritual antecedents of RPGs, in particular Guedelon in France, where a castle is being constructed strictly according to mediaeval methods including manpower, and the modern re-enactors, whose lives I do not envy, but dedication and philosophy intrigues me.
Perhaps the book rather extends its stay, though. The coda, a visit to New Zealand, seemed tacked on to complete Gilsdorf's mission of visiting a fantasy world up close and offer the best chance to immerse himself in one post-Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. But anyone who has tried to accomplish this will probably tell a similar story of the variable fortunes of attempting to meet screen with reality. It's a rather flat ending, and somewhat unsatisfying. I recommend Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks with some hesitation, but will say that its coverage for the time is pretty generous, and while told from a US perspective, doesn't seem to be especially parochial. Gilsdorf himself comes across as a pretty intense individual - sometimes apologetically so, and as noted above, this personality drives a lot of his book: your mileage may vary. Fr my pafrt I finished the book a little less patient with its writer, but happy to have been on some of his journey at least.
Here, recently posted on YouTube is Gilsdorf's original films of his teenage gaming group in jittery, blurry Super 8, with the soundtrack 'Kids' from Stranger Things. As an artefact of its time it's damned near perfect.
This book I have enjoyed since I first found it in a bookshop in Roslyn, Dunedin some time in 1984.
It's not the actual book, actually. Who knows where that went? Loaned to a RPG-curious nephew, lost to the ages. Probably sent to a school fair or assisting in filling land. It happens, and because it happens, I looked for a replacement nearly ten years ago, and in that time (mainly sitting in my bedside cabinet), the secondhand copy I bought in a Newtown shop turned into this:
Now, the thing about having been a librarian for nearly 25 years is, I've never ever mended a book. At all. So when faced with detatched covers, dangling spines, and dried up glue like this:
...I had to resort to the librarian's friend, Google!
Long story short, during a week at home after Wellington's last office-closing earthquake, I discovered the book lying in pieces at the bottom of a box and decided then was the time to take action.
Covers were trimmed, glue was scraped off, and while the inner pages were separated into two or three 'blocks', luckily the interior was in pretty good shape despite some slight foxing. Hey, it's a paperback book - it's hardly top quality material from the get-go.
But hey, it worked! Mod Podge was the glue, a nondescript laminate (Coverseal, basically) stiffened up and waterproofed the cover, and I was even fussy enough to paint out the white creases and tears which couldn't be glued back together.
I fluffed the front cover, it turning out skew and the patched card replacement won't fool anyone; but my beloved old book is back in one piece and readable again. Hooray!
So proud I was in showing it off to Mrs Simian. Of course, it was only then that I realised I'd re-glued the insides upside down.
For a number of years I carried the memory of a show I watched as a
young Simian after school. One was about three boys who went bush in
the English countryside and had a distinctive piping theme tune. The
other was a words and pictures tale of some little folk who went
looking for one of their number called Cloudberry. Both eluded me
for ages until I recently did the sensible thing and turned to Google. As
it turned out, both series - respectively Brendan Chase and Baldmoney, Sneezewort, Dodder and Cloudberry were connected through their author/illustrator Denys Watkins-Pitchford, who wrote under the nom de plume 'B.B' (after the air rifle pellet and not an abbreviation of Bilbo Baggins.) No wonder I'd had difficult searching them out.
B.B. seems to have belonged to a specific generation of British writers
who, affected by the changing landscape of post Industrial Revolution
England turned their concern for the disappearing landscape into
children's writing. If it's possible to draw a line from Tolkien to
Richard Adams then that same line must pass through BB, whose stories
are imbued with woodlands nostalgia.
In The Little Grey Men (1942) and its sequel Down the Bright Stream (1948) B.B. uses his
gnome protagonists as vessels of concern as in both stories they
traverse the waterways and woodlands of a changing countryside in search
of their brother and, later, a new home (the second tale has some
kinship with Adams' Watership Down) these gnomes - Dodder, Baldmoney, Sneezewort and Cloudberry are the last of their kind, dwellers in a world
of talking animals and where man is at best a blundering fool, at worst a
monster. It's written well in a naive style akin to Tolkien's Hobbit,
but with some of the attendant sexism and xenophobia of the age.
Nevertheless, for the most part the gnomes are well characterised, with Dodder in particular developing between the books in an arc worthy of a
Baggins.
I found the books affecting - not quite as epic in scope or dour as Watership Down, but very charming and highly readable.
Watkins-Pitchford effectively captures a world in macrocosm, with a
population and sense of community, but devoid of politics or human
concerns. Don't be fooled though - there's a darkness in these books
including treachery, cruelty and murder. Cast members die in natural and
unnatural ways, and though the face of God isn't present in B.B.'s
woodland, the great god Pan is, in a striking and surreal chapter which precipitates
some remarkable character turns among the gnomes. Similarly in Bright Stream
the growing sinister truth about one of their number leads to a genuinely tense
chapter of skullduggery and truly natural justice. All the while Watkins-Pitchford's distinctive writing elegises the loss of the gnomes world, a
quiet voice in the wilderness. And his illustrations are gorgeous.
The takeaway for me, as mentioned in my earlier post, is in the nature of the gnomes themselves. Here B.B imbues them as spokemen of a vanishing natural world, dodging beasts and men, habitat destruction, and even after the fires and noises of the Blitz are heard but not entirely fathomed by them on their last great journey, ultimately abandoning England for a home of older myth and safer refuge. There's much in keeping with the Seventies version of Huygen's text - and in fact, given that B.B's works concern themselves chiefly with the last gnomes of England, they needn't be mutually exclusive. I believe there's a place for this version of the Gnome in a modern RPG - and in fact, there already is, in the independent RPG Tales from the Wood, and it's in my next post that I'll turn to this.
In the mean-time, I made some notes based on the gnomes and their world for anyone interested below:
Recently I've been thinking about Gnomes. I confess, I've been feeling a little guilty about them.
For a number of years I've thought on and off about the place of these little guys in the various editions of Dungeons and Dragons, and why in its Basic form they never distiguished themselves enough to be Player Characters. Sure, they're there among the Monsters in Mentzer's red box, and in the Moldvay Expert Set a floorplan of a Gnome lair appears, but by and large I suspect that early players just treated them as I and my friends did when we played - easy Experience Points. Kill them all!!! After I stopped playing of course the Companion module Earthshaker! came out, and then the supplement Top Ballista!, but these were, to my mind, mid-edition AD&D Gnomes retro-fitted in.
In D&D's Basic rules, Gnomes are NPC characters at best. They have an entry among the other 'Monsters' in the red box DM's Guide - and that's pretty much it. Cross over to the various versions of AD&D however, and it's a different story. For whatever reason the Gnome was abandoned in the Moldvaying and Mentzerising of the core game (fellow casualty races of course include the Half-Orc and Half-Elf), the race gets something of an on-going revision within the various iterations of the 'Advanced' game. First edition casts them as Halfling-sized Dwarf variants with similar attributes and an enmity with Kobolds (this is the version translated over to Moldvay/Mentzer); and as the game gets older the Gnome derives its own variants - Rock, Deep, Forest, and so forth. Originally given the option of an Illusionist specialty, Gnomes are later cast as Bards (another unloved and un-developed character class) and by 4th and 5th edition Gnomes really come into their own as tinkerers and tricksters - crazy inventors with a love of mischief.
I can't say I'm mad about the idea of Gnomes being cast so much along personality, particularly a personality almost purpose-built to irritate the hell out of fellow players or unbalance your campaign world with quasi high-tech. Indeed, I've heard of some groups who mutually have decided to just not include Gnomes for that reason.
Back in Basic-land I guess for purists the temptation in bringing the Gnome in as a Player Character is to adopt the D&D version - but even that has its critics. The popular argument goes: why use a Gnome when you could use a Dwarf? They generally live in the same areas, have similar cultures and a weakness of underground treasures. Or why not just use a Halfling, if you're after a diminutive Thief? There is of course the Illusionist class type to be imported - but a combination of magic and fighting ability in Basic is the domain of Elves; and a potentially weak fighter with a less-offensive array of spells may not have much going for it for players. So what then?
I believe the problem with the shifting niche of Gnomes is that they apparently lack a clear literary or mythological archetype. Gnomes in culture go only as far back as Paracelsus and the 16th century, and have no mythological or folklore precedent, which may be why they are often switched for Dwarfs (or dwarfs) in stories. The original Gnome is a theoretical earth elemental, but with more description becomes... a Dwarf with the registration number filed off. But what about in literature?
Ask anyone who lived through the Seventies about books with Gnomes in them and they may well recall Will Huygen's Gnomes(1974), the twentieth-century imprimatur that put the Gnome - pointed hat, jolly face, fulsome beard, well and truly in the public consciousness. If your common or garden Gnome wasn't already, well, a garden gnome, then this book would do little to change that.
But there is another literary precedent to the Gnome, and one that pre-dates Huygen's field guide by nearly three decades. 'B.B.''s The Little Grey Men and its sequel Down the Bright Stream* posits the adventures of the last four Gnomes in Britain, and places the race firmly in the woods as one of Pan's people (don't laugh). For all of that, however, 'B.B.' and Huygen seem to have seized on the Gnome in a smiliar fashion - they are guardians of the earth, forest-dwellers, and immensely practical, without recourse to tinkering with large-scale machinery (there are exceptions, but they are clearly not the rule).
The up-shot of this is that I think I've found a decent niche for the Gnome in a Basic D&D setting, and one which is rigid enough to avoid the overlap with the game's two other dimunitive PC races. Having read both Huygen's book and B.B.'s two novels, I considered the woodland guardian element of these texts and thought that with a brace of Druid spells one could effectively accommodate the race without too much hard work. That did do for my other idea of swapping Magic User spell sets for Elves with Druid spells, though. And in the end, I didn't want to do that. So my Gnomes are not especially magical - just like the literary ones, but they retain their woodland expertise, loyalties and preternatural identity. Rather than making them Druids I seem to be casting the Gnome as a Race-As-Class Ranger. And I think I'm pretty happy with that!
[Insert obligatory video. NO, no that one**]
[* Blogger's note: 'B.B' was the nom de plume of D. J
Watkins-Pitchford, who also provided the wonderful illustrations -
painting, etchings and line art, in both volumes. The name was
apparently taken from the ball-bearing gun pellet and wasn't, as my
thirteen-year-old self assumed, a cash-in on the name Bilbo Baggins]
[**
This song's nomination is more apposite than you may think, as Syd
Barrett was a huge fan of the books and the writer, a quote from the
first book was read at Barrett's funeral]
Over the Summer break I've been reading The Dungeon Master
William Dear's recount of the James Dallas Egbert case. In fact, I read
the book in two days around other activities, as it was so engrossing. I previously covered the book and its effect here, and Shaun Hatley provides a summary and commentary on
the book and the story behind it, including a fascinating contemporary snippet from Dragon magazine here. Consider yourself informed! Now, I found the book at a local
refuse recyclers shop - Trash Palace, of all places. Seemingly a
fantasy/SF reader was having a tip-out, but this is the only title that
really got my attention, amid the Silverbergs, Asimovs
and, er, Brookses ( they’re going to be filming Shannarah in NZ! Eek!) I
read it
quickly, thanks to a plane trip and a few hours to kill travelling; it helps too that it’s quite readable.
Dear is an informal and engaging writer, somewhat prone to self-promotion but sympathetic to the object of his investigation,
and well he might be. Dallas Egbert, as hindsight reveals, was not only
a troubled soul but caught in
a time when the best care was not available, and his tragic
disappearance – as sensational as it seemed (and reads in Dear’s
version) should be viewed as a remarkable episode in a short and unhappy
life.
The author make repeated points in retrospect about the lack of
care Dallas received as both a very young student and a gifted
individual with issues around his identity, the people around him and
his well-being. Dear’s claim that Dallas simply wasn’t
being protected by his university seems to go straight to the heart of
the boy’s disappearance, and at least some way towards his ultimate
fate, but the book concerns itself less with Dallas as a known
individual, and relies more on the young man as a mystery
in himself, which, given its retrospective nature, doesn’t help things.
Dear is the writer and the protagonist of his own memoirs, and we never
escape the fact that this is being written with the breathless energy
of a missing persons case file first and foremost.
There is, nevertheless a concerted paternalism in his attitude towards Dallas, which book-ends the investigation itself during which Dear goes
‘method’
– living close to campus (although a more youthful colleague goes one
better, it’s insinuated), experimenting with some of the troubled
Dallas’ extracurricular pursuits, including
‘tresselling’ (an eye-opening chapter in which the detective lies in front of an oncoming train aping the boy’s occasional habit), and of course
roleplaying in a session that, with its close parallels to features and the geography of the case seems questionable in its authenticity, if not unintentionally amusing in places.
And then there are the steam tunnels – oh, those steam tunnels.
Dear skips the homosexual liaisons and drug taking, however,
virtually sub-contracting these areas to a couple of individuals
outside his firm – surprisingly, this bears more fruit than Dear's meanderings, alongside an odd
game of cat-and-mouse which ultimately
leads to the ‘discovery’ of the boy.
It’s a strange case – no wonder the more sensational parts contributed
to the Satanic Panic of the early Eighties, and proved so ripe for adaptation by the schlockier end of writing at the time. Dear’s
version of events cuts to the case for the most part, but the author’s
attempts to mingle Dallas’ motivations with the then still-recent
phenomenon of D&D paint him as not only a fish out of water, but an
over-thinker. And something of a self-promoter: you
may well roll your eyes at reading about his stellar career, his
expansive mansion, his impressive case history and uncanny human touch;
you may also wish to avert your eyes at Dear’s more recent forays into revisiting old and sensational crimes.
Still,
despite itself, it is a human story, and an affecting one for its being
based on real events. Ruefully, I admit that even without the hokey RPG
session and larger-than-life
Texan detective protagonist, played straight the book would make for a
diverting documentary or film . Apparently, the options were recently
purchased, so who knows? Recommended, with slight reservations!
Between Friday posts, here's a quick read-through of a medium-sized anthology.
I picked this up on a whim at the Wellington Public Library, unsure of the content aside from a suspicion that I'd find nothing within that might nowadays be called 'fantasy' (i.e. no swrods and sorcery), and probably no or little actual Irish folklore. I was right on both counts, but it also proved that I know little of the genre - of the Irish writers I was aware of Stoker and LeFanu, but looked for Wilde and Yeats in vain – Peter Tremayne’s collection is instead a pretty sensible picking of a broad range of writers among whom largely two elements are common – forays in the fantastical, gothic or phantasmagorical, and at least a passing stint in the Emerald Isles. And so without further ado...
'Melmoth the Wanderer'(excerpt) -Charles R Maturin
A man is stalked for years by a demonic figure. Both meandering and possibly the most action-packed chapter at that, of a long and turgid work. I was reminded of Varney the Vampire in its episodic, drifting style. Once the action heats up in a London asylum (described pretty starkly) the pace quickens, but it’s all pretty hysterical and ultimately, I was glad to reach the end of it. yes, that's not very charitable to a work regarded as one of the great progenitors of Gothic literature, but to me many of the hoarier aspects of the genre seemingly begin here, too - leaden and sonorous descriptive passages being one.
'The Familiar' – Sheridan Le Fanu
A man is stalked for years for- hang on... Actually, this is a nicely paced work, just the right length. I’ve had a few brushes with Le Fanu’s Carmilla including as edited prose (a children’s version, if memory serves – good grief!), film adaptation (Hammer’s very loose Karstein trilogy) and audio adaptation (a rather fine reading by Miriam Margolis), but this was the first proper read I’ve had of his work. The Familiar is pretty good, with quite a neat ending - I was listening to a reading of Guy de Maupassant's The Horla at the time of reading and couldn't avoid comparisons.
'The Wondersmith' - Fitzjames O'Brien
Begins with a splendid descriptive opener reminiscent of Dicken’s Bleak House scene-setter (though this is set in a fictional New York), but soon mutates into an alternately ghoulish and sentimental story of gypsies, hunchbacks and outright villainy – and it gets rather silly towards the end. The story’s classed by some as the progenitor to the robot story with its murderous miniatures, but to me that’s a little too generous - like saying Pinocchio prefigures I, Robot. Sort of satisfying in the end, but a tad melodramatic. And the gypsy stereotypes are a worry.
'The Burial of the Rats' – Bram Stoker
Englishman runs for his life in a labyrinth of rubbish, pursued by desperate vagrants in post-Revolutionary Paris. Really really good. Skin-crawling and effectively tense. I loved it – it stayed with me for a few days afterwards.
'Xelucha'- M.P. Shiel
Man mistakes shady lady for ancient enchantress (or doesn't?) Hysterical. Complete bonkers from a decidedly shady writer and possible loon. Impenetrable text, verging on the wrong side of what we might nowadays call magical realism (maybe), but apart from the punchline ending, just stream of consciousness bobbins.
'The Ghost of the Valley' / 'Autumn Cricket' - Lord Dunsany
I shan't spoil these - both short, intimate and rather lovely pieces of supernatural pastoral fantasy. Alongside Stoker and Le Fanu's works both were enough to make me want to seek out more of Dunsany’s work.
...three to four out of six is pretty good, and I've a new writer to seek out. Not too bad!
It's Waitangi Day today, a day which observes not only the creation of modern New Zealand via the medium of contentious documentation, but also the coming together of two cultures, Victoria Regina's British Europeans and the various Maori iwi of Aotearoa. Just as the debate continues today (literally) over what Te Tiriti means and what nationhood represents to us 174 years on, so too does the meeting of cultures continue in every sense.
I'm not a deeply spiritual person, and I'm pretty sure I don't believe in ghosts, although Mrs Simian and I, like some of our student friends, lived in a flat in Dunedin that seemed to have its own set of occasional unexplained footfalls in its hallway. I'm sure most people could relate something similar, or knows of someone who can. I do like ghosts stories though, and I think they're culturally more important than the superficial spookiness we easily rate them by.
Grant Shanks and Tahu Potiki's series of New Zealand supernatural anecdotes are collected in two books, Where No Birds Sing and When the Wind Calls Your Name, a series of true stories which concern not just ghosts and restless spirits but many tales peculiar to a local sense of the supernatural. Echoes of abandoned sites of burial, slaughter and suicide, the persistence of tapu and reverence of pounamu and taonga like patu and hei-tiki, totem animals like dogs, birds and eels, and the enduring image of deceased ancestors among the living and in the landscape.
Belief in the spiritual and supernatural brings landscapes alive and adds meaning to places and names. It's worth observing that a lot of the book's stories, formulaic as they seem, concern actual encounters between the physical European world and some spiritual manifestation from the world of Maori. In many cases the story's protagonist is pakeha or perhaps sits on the fringes of traditional belief, and the encounter provides them with an explanation not only of the uncanny, but of the place where they met it. In a way the question of whether the phenomenon was real or imagined is beside the point; the story is given colour by it, but the kernel of each tale is the discovery of a history that offers some context; a story within a story connecting a spiritual sensation with an actual event. So ghost stories endure.
Stories unite people and shape their own histories in their telling. These collected stories are best described as 'eerie' - there aren't many which could be said to be actually frightening, though there are some which are deeply creepy: 'The Walkers', with its spectral drowned fishermen making their journey home across a beach and through giant driftwood stumps; not to mention Shanks' account of the titular story, an area of dead bush in a Fiordland valley featuring an encounter with an eighteen-point stag that recalls (to me at least) some key imagery of Grendel's Mere in Beowulf. The tales have a local and a universal element; Shanks' approach is as a confessed European among Maori. He compares his encounter and some of those mentioned in the book to a personal impression at a site from his own ancestry, the battlefield of Culloden, equating the same sense of awe and unease, what he describes as "the point before understanding". These are modest, personal stories, and believe them or not, they each carry a similar sense of questioning one's place in a world which is both physical and spiritual. Sometimes they are profound experiences; although at least one ('A Hand of Poker') is a wonderful shaggy dog story and a fitting end to an entertaining, thought-provoking and sometimes chilling collection.
I'm currently reading Shanks and Potiki's follow-up, loaned to me by Al who is blogging it right now. Yes, we've synchronised blogs! Head on over to Phasmatodea to read his account of When the Wind Calls Your Name.
By 1969 (Century's second volume) the events of interim adventure The Black Dossier have already played out, Mina and Allan are fugitives from the Government and working for Prospero, Shakespeare’s exiled Duke of Milan now ruling over The Blazing World. Pointedly here is now no ‘League’ as such, all Imperial obligations having been tossed aside with the surviving members near-fugitives themselves and only the Dossier’s eternal wastrel Orlando hanging on, dropping names and changing genders with deliberately tedious regularity. In fact, tedium and the tedium of immortality appear to be a running theme in this trilogy, the three League survivors now being themselves, effectively, immortal and in pursuit of an immortal enemy, Alan Moore’s adopted Aleister Crowley analogue Oliver Haddo, who collects new identities and earthly vessels almost as regularly as Orlando replaces his. The two crucial 'new' allies of the League, Orlando (an immortal and ultimately impotent wreck, deliberately drawn, I'd say) and ‘prisoner of London’ Andrew Norton, (another immortal and cryptic Greek chorus - pointedly also not able to directly intervene in the story) lend another disturbing themes to the Century storyline – impotence. The League are, it would appear, designed to never win, or never achieve a victory that isn't itself Pyrrhic.
And so to Moore’s alternative pulp literature London the league drift, transported by Nemo’s daughter Janni aboard the Nautilus; however as much as stepping off the submarine Mina, Allan and Orlando are also stepping away from the series’ past and the kernel of Moore’s conceit. We’ve already had one out-of-sequence story in The Black Dossier (itself a format-challenging collection of multimedia in-jokes – a 45 rpm record, a Tijuana Bible, Orlando’s randy and bloodthirsty story told as a series of Look and Learn picture stories), now it seems the added conceit (admittedly Moore’s strongest suit in this series) – recreating the world of the past through fictional analogues, has beaten Century’s plotline to near impotence itself. It’s very clever, of course, and Kevin O’Neill’s witty artwork does wonders to mollify the loss of intrigue, but I came away from Century 1969 feeling like I’d read less and merely traipsed along with Mina, Allan and Orlando through a literary Where’s Wally? Which was much of the fun of the original series of course, but by 1969 popular culture is everywhere, more recognisable (I can – only just – say it’s outside my own lifetime) and with its familiarity less exotic. Where in the past there was an intrigue to the inclusion and rubbing of shoulders between Conan Doyle’s Moriarty, Fu Man Chu, Verne’s Nemo and Wells’ Professor Cavor, there’s less surprise and novelty in seeing Thunderbirds’ Parker filling up on a motorway lay-by while Michael Caine’s Jack Carter provides voiceover. Even more, the cameo of Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor passed me by, and I can’t decide whether it’s because he’s already too familiar a face to me as a Doctor Who fan, or because on reflection the brief appearance of a Sixties time traveler in a story about literal time travelers is just not that interesting.
That said, 1969 does at least push the major story line forward in a way, teasing out the series finale by way of another thinly-veiled franchise-bothering character (“My first name’s Tom, my middle name’s a marvel and my last name’s a conundrum.”) Once you’ve reached that point you’ve perused appearances from all James Bonds (a lovely scene, really), Nicholas Roeg’s Performance (every Rutles needs a Stones analogue, naturally), and crucially, a denouement borrowing heavily from the Hyde Park memorial concert for Brian Jones, deftly tying three plot strands together, but stranding the hapless League all the more. It’s a downbeat ending to an important chapter, but I cared less this time around. Where to from here?
Naturally, the
Company of Oakenshield isn’t complete without a Wizard and a Thief…
My Gandalf and
Bilbo figures are, as you might expect, not official Hobbit figures, although
they are from Games Workshop’s Tolkien license line. Gandalf is one of five or
six metal variants on the character (including two mounted and one on a cart),
and is simply the easiest and most appropriate to use. This being a LotR
version, there’s no silver scarf as mentioned in the book, but short of making
one from green stuff, this will do – the important elements, his hat, staff and
sword Glamdring, are present, and you can’t ask better than that.
Bilbo, on the
other hand, is not Bilbo at all, but Frodo repainted and chosen for his pose and
for having his sword/letter-opener Sting in hand. In his other hand ought to be
the One Ring on a chain, as supplied by Bilbo himself, but as this was not
present in The Hobbit I’ve remodelled things slightly and used the opportunity
to include the scarf Bilbo wears in An Unexpected Journey. The green cloak
loaned by Dwalin is, of course, not present in the movie (for shame!), but I’m
happy to include it here, and the backpack is a nice touch and a happy accident,
as the movie most definitely features one. No walking stick as seen on the big
screen, however, but I’m not worried.
Bilbo, it has
to be said, is not really just Frodo with different coloured hair. That said, I’ve not made
any attempts to bulk up this hobbit or change his physique too much, hoping
instead that a judicious paint job on his face will soften the more sculpted
cheekbones and jawline of Elijah Woods circa 1999 and nod towards something
closer to Martin Freeman circa 2011.
My base for
Bilbo here incorporates some Mirkwood leaves – using the old modeller’s trick of
dried birch seeds. I’ve not mentioned this before, but my original intention
with these figure conversions some five years ago was to portray the company as
they were making their way through Mirkwood – hence Fili’s grappling hooks, and
giving me a reason to keep weapons like bows on the models (bows and knives
being the weapons Beorn gives the non-sword-bearing party members in the book.)
My birch leaves date from then, so they’re getting pretty withered now, and I’d
based the figures originally with medium-grain local beach sand and herbal tea
leaves – all of which needed to be scraped off after moth larvae took a shine to
the Raspberry Zinger (or whatever it was I’d used.) Gandalf, of course, doesn’t
accompany Thorin’s team through Mirkwood, so that idea is now laid to rest.
And so, with
the Company complete, here’s the whole gang gathered at last:
Three weeks now without an iPod. It changes a man, especially one who is accustomed to listening to stuff on the bus.
As threatened, I’ve been reading books instead, waiting for the day when an iPod will once again be mine (date undisclosed), and I’ve actually been enjoying it! Chiefest of my accomplishments is the tackling and sometimes finishing off of books I’d started ages ago and never finished or, in some cases, been gifted but never started. For shame. Here’s the tally so far:
Popcorn by Ben Elton
[A birthday present in 1997 from my future sister-in-law. Never started - sorry]
Well this I didn’t like. Really didn’t like. Preachy (it’s Ben and his big righteous hammer so where are all those them nails then?) and unlikeable characters - and those are the two main issue I had with what is otherwise a pretty tense and interesting story. Mind you, they are big issues to me. Oh it’s a spoof? Yeah, I still hated it. The violent excesses of Tarantinos movies are beyond parody, really, and to shoehorn an argument about violent cultures inspiring violent people through the medium of another obvious Tarantino pastiche? Spare me. Moving right along...
The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
[A birthday present in 2000 from an old Uni friend. Started but stalled ¾ through]
Brilliant. A devastating and penetrating account of one's loss of faith and the consequential moral torpor that follows as a Catholic police officer of impeccable and otherwise unremarkable scruples slowly loses everything on the Ivory Coast for so very little. Greene gets under the skin of his fallen protagonist more than any author I’ve read (although Maurice Gee’s Plumb comes close, I think), and I was quite affected by this. Not one I’ll return to in a hurry, but a rewarding read.
54 by Wu Ming
[Loaned to me by a workmate in 2011. Stalled after three pages]
Long and over-stocked to distraction with extraneous characters and historical detail (the writing committee that are Wu Ming clearly had a lot of political history to get off their chests], but once it gets going hugely entertaining and in places quite hilarious. It's also something of a shaggy dog tale, and if its focal point takes a while to find itself, then at least here's some interesting modern history along the way. Cary Grant, Italian communists, American cultural invasion, the birth of the global heroin trade, and the mad adventures of a sentient TV called McGuffin. What’s not to like?
Howling at the Moon by Walter Yetnikoff
[Given to me by a friend in 2012. Kept for a rainy day (Monday past)]
The autobiography of CBS’s wild man president of the 70s and 80s is a hell of a story from a self-confessed prick, really, charting his childhood in Brooklyn through to his mogul status, inevitable fall from glory and beyond. There’s a seam of self-effacing Jewish humour that undercuts a lot of pretty bullish and sometimes downright nasty corporate skulduggery in a rapidly changing entertainment landscape; Yetnikoff’s voice also makes him an appealing character despite his appalling behaviour and he’s smart enough not to paint his story as one of total redemption. And yet, it's an American story, and at the end there's the sense of a classic character arc being played out - albeit one crafted in the telling by its protagonist. The rock star anecdotes are cool, too – Springsteen, James Taylor, Streisand, Billy Joel, Jackson (Michael), Simon (Paul), Jagger, McCartney, Geffen, Motolla – what a cast!
There's more in the list to come: the possibility of some actual Gee, Julius Vogel's Sci-Fi novel, a Charlie Higson outing and some collected Washington Irving. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure I might know where our old iRiver is. Hmm, I wonder...?
