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⬅️ Previous capture (2022-01-08)
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I'm in a funk. Yup. Not the good musical kind, either. Whenever I want to read some Charles de Lint, I know I'm in a solid funk. Because his books always make me melancholy, or maybe they reflect melancholy.
So for whatever reason I hadn't caught American Gods, either the tv show or the book. So on the weekend when spouse was home, we started the tv series to fill some time. We're watching Expanse and Book of Boba Fett right now. Wheel of Time has wrapped up (it's kinda bland - I dunno what I was expecting but the only character that seemed interesting was the troll (ogre?), and everyone else is just a shocked-face-pikachu cardboard cutout in nice costumes), Hawkeye is over (and oh my god do I dislike that Kate Bishop character - this is the crappiest thing marvel has put out in a long time and I was very very very disappoint, esp since I was looking forward to the Black Widow tie in and all we get is fucking spoiled dummy Kate Bishop hogging the storyline - why the fuck would you waste screentime on that yowling bint when Black Widow's hilarious acerbic sister exists? - it's watching Hawkeye self insert fanfic scripted by a middle school girl who goes to an expensive private school and fancies herself a nerd - I really dislike that worthless Kate Bishop character and feel sorry for Jeremy Renner). I like it when amazon runs those 99 cent streaming channel promos. As long as you remember to cancel the channel before they charge full price, it's a good deal. Anyway we have Starz for the next month or two, so we can watch American Gods.
So we're a couple episodes into American Gods, and now I'm locked into watching it with spouse so I can't just binge on ahead. I must be patient. I start wondering how it compares to the book. Like, I don't have interest in reading Wheel of Time and I am happy to just watch the series, even though I am sure it is a very cut down version. Just like I haven't read all the Harry Potter books, but I've seen the movies and I know I'd want to be a Hufflepuff (the most underrated house) and that's good enough for me. (Frankly I think Diane Duane's So You Want to be a Wizard series was much better, but that's just me.) I vaguely remember spouse buying a copy of American Gods years ago and hey look, it is on our bookshelf.
So I mainline American Gods over the course of two nights and fuck up my sleep schedule reading until 4am. I ordered a Charles de Lint book (The Ivory and the Horn). I'm in an urban fantasy groove I guess. They always make me sad, because eventually you have to surface back into grey reality, and especially this pandemic reality. American Gods was written in the early aughts and there are references to things that aren't standard anymore (newspapers), or things that have gotten worse, and it's kind of painful realizing how much has been lost even just in the past decade. I can only read so much Charles de Lint at a time because his characters tend to be artists or writers and they are poor but they're able to have success in his world. They would have no time or resources for the adventures he writes about in the real world now - they'd be too busy hustling side gig work or fishing for likes on social media. The story I read last night - "Waifs and Strays" - the main character goes to classes five days a week and works four nights a week as a bike messenger, has multiple pet dogs and cares for a developmentally disabled person/pays for a caretaker, and the whole arc of the story is about how she's unhappy putting too much energy into school and work and at the end of the story she cuts her classes back to three days a week and works only two days. Like you can just do that, like the systems would let you. Maybe twenty years ago you could. These days, she'd have to surrender her dogs, put her friend in a home, live with crap roommates and just white knuckle it through school dreaming one day she could find a job that would let her pay rent and student loans without needing a second part time gig. Maybe get on prozac if she can swing it. Forget anything else.
It makes me sad and envious, how the characters live, the way they interact and go to quirky independent shops. I wish I were a Charles de Lint character, in a Charles de Lint setting. Even if nothing magical happened to me.
For a while I didn't get what people meant when they say that something is "soul-killing". There's a whole bunch of sayings that revolve around the idea of losing a piece of soul. What does it mean to lose a soul. I've used the phrases myself as sort of conversational flourish to make things sound dramatic, but they have no real meaning. "That job ate my soul" sounds more artistic than "there's no more new things to learn and my manager makes me feel bad every day." Is soul like a cake, where you lose a piece and it's gone forever? Is it like a plant, where it regrows and is meant to be harvested? What even is it? Sell your soul to the devil - what function does the soul enable? (If it truly were real, there would be a market for it on amazon.) Maybe it's just an idiom but what is the action of a soul? Is it just generating emotion? Is it the capacity for compassion? Is it the whole emotional state? Is it positive desire? Is it one's capacity for trust, belief and faith? Is it just a religious invention to scare people into compliance? If you believe in your soul, you must believe you can lose it or damage it. But what purpose does that serve, anyway. What good is a soul in the first place, that everyone is worried about losing or damaging it.
So I put "soul" in the same category as "spiritual" or "healthy" - words that are vaguely positive but are just generic placeholder syllables that don't really mean anything in conversation. Nobody is thinking very hard when they use those words, imo. Everyone would probably agree that being "spiritual" or "healthy" is a good thing but I bet most people would get absolutely poleaxed if you asked them to define why, specifically. (I never broach these conversations in real life because I'd just come off as an argumentative dick, but seriously, most of the great artists of the world, most of the people we put on "hero" pedestals and admire, are unhealthy in mind and/or body. Why do some people who have had breast cancer make a big deal about branding themselves survivors. Illness makes you larger than life, why else would there be so many different awareness ribbons to draw attention to them. But somehow everyone is obsessed with aspiring to health and appearing healthy. Okay, illness is painful, inconvenient and expensive, yes - nobody wants it for those reasons - but one could also make an argument for the positives. Why do we highlight the sob stories of olympic athletes, for instance. Woe to the athlete with no memorable sob story, they will never get a coke commercial. Why are we drawn to the bad-luck circumstances. Picture someone with perfect mental health, perfect physical health, never struggled with addiction or depression or physically suffered from an unfortunate ailment - you wanna be friends with them? No you don't, you liar - you just want to be around them in the good times, because you know they won't need much support from you.)
But I read American Gods and so much of it seems to illustrate a loss of soul. The sense that things have slipped away that were once sources of joy (and sorrow). The replacement of one thing with a sad fake. A fading fertility, like watching a lake dry up and the fish flopping in the mud, except you don't know if the wet season is even coming to fill it back up. A slow, grim decline that nobody can stop even when they understand what is happening. It's change, but not for the better, lacking hope. Helplessness. A sense that all the best days have been lived, and only struggle is coming.
It's a terrible time we're living through.
What is my culture, honestly. I say this as a white american who speaks no second language and doesn't claim any particular ancestral heritage. I have tried to be aware of the first world habit of borrowing (purchasing, copying) coveted bits from others. It's so easy to have culture, just buy it, right? Buy the book that describes the practice or buy the sage bundle or the healing crystal kit or sign up for the classes or buy the costume. Oh you like the colors or the design or the authentic third world feel? Buy it, put it in your house, hang it on your wall. Buy your religion. Buy your education. Buy your identity. Buy your dreams. Buy your friends (followers). Buy your health. Like we're all a bunch of idiot magpies dazzled by shiny things that others worked to make. Oh, it's pretty? Mine now. I have money, therefore I have culture.
If you think about it, there's a class of privileged people who wait for the poors to invent some interesting thing from dirt and garbage, and then they swoop down, claim it, package it, market it, sell the sterilized version to everyone else. They get richer, and they just wait for the poors to come up with the next fresh thing to harvest and exploit. Sugar skulls for instance. Everybody likes sugar skulls. I've seen all kinds of sugar skull print this or that, sugar skull crafts, sugar skull tattoos. Anyone can do their version and sell it. But what percentage of sugar skull merch is owned by people who understand/practice the tradition, and what percentage is owned by people who just think the decorated skull is neat looking and fun (and what percentage of those get butthurt from hearing spanish in the grocery store). It's just this cherrypicked thing that has become generic. It got stripped of meaning and it's for everyone now, yay. Look, it's pretty, buy it, idiot magpie.
What is my real culture? Is it star wars or marvel (god help me if yes)? Is it mcdonalds and starbucks and strip mall meccas? Do I have real beliefs or just things I conveniently cobbled together? Did a cultural apocalypse happen and I'm a cultural refugee, scavenging in the wreckage?
How do you make culture? Real culture, not packaged in plastic wrap. There used to be real culture.
I guess that's ultimately what I took away from American Gods. How do you make new traditions for yourself, new rich culture, not cherrypicked or copied or sold to you. Are we all little ambulatory gardens full of potential - how do we water ourselves and grow our own harvest, instead of begging for scraps at the factory.
I love urban fantasy but these days it takes a toll to read. All the things we've lost.