Canon

Trying very hard to at least get one of these out every week, even though obviously the schedule has gone to hell. Not because I think it does anything, in particular, but because I don’t want to entirely lose the habit. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me. Anyway. Here’s what we’ve got.

The other day on Twitter a baseball writer I enjoy was giving someone the gears for declaring that a young relative of his not knowing who David Bowie was represented an enormous failure of some kind. Culture moves on, the baseball writer argued, and expecting Kids Today to be into David Bowie is like our parents expecting us to be into musicians from the 1950s or something. Or in my case, The Beatles, who I have never had more than an ‘eh’ reaction to, which my uncle never really got past.

I distinctly remember thinking it was strange and vaguely annoying when people would try to get me to watch ‘old movies’ – why, when there were awesome new movies? Movies which I still enjoy to this day! Movies which are now 25, 30, 35 years old. Wait a minute…

Beyond the existential blow of (once again) recognizing that I am officially Quite Old, it does also make me think of a particularly annoying kind of behaviour that shows up from time to time in SFF (and I suspect other fandoms). The idea that you can’t be a real fan unless you’ve read ‘the canon’ – usually writers from a long time ago. Or that you can’t be a writer unless you’ve first read Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury, etc.

I have always thought this is rubbish and does nothing other than alienate people. Yes, there are a great many writers of the past who wrote amazing stuff. Then again, about eleventy amazing things have been published this year that you could also read, and it doesn’t make any difference if you like one rather than the other. Given the (gradually) increasing diversity among both artists and characters, it’s not at all hard to understand why lots of people are always going to prefer the new over the old. And, if we’re very honest, the craft has moved on and developed a good deal, and in a lot of cases, the new stuff is just better. Must read the canon? Absolute rot.

But then, I caught myself doing very nearly the same thing recently. After a Batman-related discussion with a couple of Exceedingly Young friends of mine, I suggested (I forget exactly why) that they should read the Batman R.I.P. arc, which they did and I think liked. But then for some reason I got to thinking that I should suggest something else, and suggested Kingdom Come.

Kingdom Come is a story that I enjoyed very much, have gone back to many times, and (to the extent of my knowledge about the comics industry) I believe it was reasonably influential. It was also published in 1996. It’s a good story, but there have also been a heck of a lot of good comics published since, and no particular reason to go quite that far into the past without some specific aim in mind. Somewhat in my defense, I did not say ‘You must!’, or even ‘You should!’, but … man, that impulse is there, isn’t it?

I suspect a lot of it is fairly innocuous. We liked a thing, so we want someone else to enjoy it also. We want the stories and artists who were important to us to continue to be important to other people. The trouble comes when we – consciously or unconsciously – (try to) make it an imperative.

I do think it’s important for older people to recognize that culture moves on without us, and that there’s really no good reason for The Youths to be into the same things we were, no matter how good we thought those things were/are.

At least as important, too, is not trying to gatekeep entry into the fields we’re interested in behind ‘you’re not a real fan until’. There’s lots of great SFF out there, it basically doesn’t matter what you read. There’s all kinds of music out there, none of it compulsory. And there’s really no good reason at all why either of my friends should actually read Kingdom Come.

Thanks for reading.

Limits

Hey so you may have noticed the lack of an entry for last week, which was (this time) not caused by laziness or lack of inspiration. Rather, I had a bit of a medical incident that, while really quite minor, still ended up with me being taken to hospital. (With, indeed, all the special extra worry sauce that comes with that, these days) Again, there’s no reason to suspect that it reflected anything serious, but the doctor was clear that it was caused by stress.

So.

I have spent the past week taking it as easy as I possibly can, allowing for the fact that a new semester is just getting underway and there are certain things that just Will Not Wait. A friend remarked that I should see this as a warning shot across the bow, and behave accordingly, and so I am attempting to do. I am going to have to throttle back on the amount of stuff I’m trying to give mental energy to, at least for a while.

Obviously there are negotiables and non-negotiables, and sometimes the negotiables are the kind of fun things, but such is life. Part of staying relatively non-stressed is also making sure that I have some meaningful downtime, so it is all about finding the right balance, for the next while.

None of this should have come as a great surprise to me. Again this week, there was a mental health professional on the news reminding us that right now, under these circumstances, no-one is ‘okay’, and it’s just a question of exactly how well we’re able to cope. I guess last week, I hit a patch where I didn’t cope so well.

I don’t think any of this necessarily contradicts any of the things I have said in earlier entries about how the year ahead can be a good one and that Things can Be Achieved. I earnestly believe both those things can be true, but probably only if we also remember to respect that we have limits. In fact, keeping that in mind is probably how we achieve the Things, in the end.

This the balance that I’m going to try to achieve.

Thanks for reading.

2020

I have been (perhaps obviously, given no entry last week) been putting off doing this one because, if I’m going to write about 2020, there seems no way to not write about the pandemic, and I have been generally avoiding the pandemic as a topic here because it is already so pervasive in our worlds right now and it would be very easy for this to become a Pandemic Blog, which we do not need another one of. Moreover, I am not an epidemiologist or virologist or similar person who might have actual insights upon said pandemic beyond: euuuuuuch.

Intentions aside, I think it will forever be impossible to talk about 2020 without COVID-19 being at least part, and probably a major part, of the discussion, no matter the intended topic. For most of us, it became the overriding concern sometime in March and has stayed that way more or less ever since. Every other activity has, perforce, been at least somewhat refracted through that prism.

Again, I don’t feel like I’m the right person to write about all the various ways that has played out, and we may not entirely understand it yet anyway. I expect future historians to be busy indeed evaluating the way these past twelve (and continuing) months have affected us.

Of course as a current historian, people expect me to know things about the past, but as I am not a specialist in medical history or the history of epidemic diseases, I can really only add another log to the pile of people observing that when societies experience a pandemic, they come out different on the other side. There’s a lot of variance as to ‘different how’.

According to some classicists, the civilization of the ancient Romans never really recovered from the Antonine Plague that started in 165 CE (probably smallpox), although the seeds of decline it planted took a while to grow. It may have accelerated the Christianization of the Roman world. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius encouraged immigration to help repopulate areas ravaged by the disease, and reputedly died with orders to see that the poor (most affected by the pandemic) were looked after on his lips.

In another example, many medievalists also argue that the Black Death led to the end of serfdom in Western Europe and tipped the balance of wealth in favour of workers and merchants. According to some interpretations, it created the conditions for the Protestant Reformation to succeed. Conversely, the agricultural productivity, and therefore prosperity, and therefore influence, of Egypt may have been permanently damaged.

So, different differences, and many that would have been unimaginable to the people living through it, with connections that aren’t necessarily obvious. ‘Buckle up’ might be the advice to take from all this, for the years ahead.

What sort of change will result from the COVID pandemic? Certainly in North America (and Europe) it has highlighted some of the divisions that already existed in our society; whether we choose to do anything about them or not is a part of the story that we’ve yet to write. I’m no good at predictions, so I can’t say what changes are likely. I do think that changes are likely.

So, 2020 was the year of the pandemic, inescapably. 2021 and onward is the ‘after COVID’ time that we don’t understand yet, possibly in as profound a way as the ‘before/after the Plague’ division medieval historians make of their (our?) chosen period.

I honestly cannot say what I expect the consequences to be, but I would very much like to think it is an opportunity we can seize to address the shortcomings and inequities and failures in our societies that have the disease has given clarity to. Perhaps I’ll fall back on two figures from history I’ve mentioned in the blog before.

After the first day of the Battle of Shiloh (which did not go well for the Union), General William Sherman said to his friend and commander, Ulysses Grant: ‘Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?’

‘Yes,’ Grant replied. ‘Lick ‘em tomorrow, though.’

We’ve had the devil’s own year.

Lick ‘em in 2021.

Thanks for reading.