Trismegistus

Challenge #6

In your own space, share a favourite piece of original canon (a show, a specific TV episode, a storyline, a book or series, a scene from a movie, etc) and explain why you love it so much. . Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

It's no secret that I've had Good Omens on the brain since I finished watching S2. This is a gratifying surprise, because I'd initially been quite skeptical of the idea that an S2 was even necessary, let alone that I would like it. Additionally, I've always suspected that the things I like most about the novel originated with Pratchett, and that without that essential Pratchett-ness, the Gaiman-ness I do like would be outweighed by the Gaiman-ness I don't.

Here's how the first episode convinced me otherwise:

(N.B.: Spoilers for Good Omens Season 2, episode 1 "The Arrival" and The Sandman issue 6 "24 Hours".)

Gaiman doesn't so much imagine new stories as recycle elements from existing ones in interesting ways (which I like about his stuff) and he has a definite thing for body horror, frequently body horror happening to female bodies (which I very much don't like about his stuff).

The former is in evidence throughout S2, and is probably one of the reason I like it so much, and why I feel it fits so well with the OG novel. But S2 episode 1 introduces some new characters, namely the female owner of a vinyl store who has an unrequited crush on the female owner of a coffee shop. Partway through the episode, they end up getting magically trapped in the coffee shop, whose owner begins freaking out because they have no way to contact the outside world and her abusive girlfriend is not going to be happy that shes out of touch. It's at this point I started thinking Oh god, no, because lesbians, abuse, forced confinement in a food establishment? I'd seen this before.

Specifically, in "24 Hours", the sixth issue of Gaiman's Sandman, in which a sociopath uses a magical amulet to trap a group of people in a diner and toy with them until they lose their minds. One of those patrons is a lesbian who's come there after having struck her girlfriend during an argument. While trapped inside, she's sexually menaced by one of the straight patrons and it's implied that she's dubconned into having sex with one or more them. Gaiman has her stab her eyes out with a pair of skewers in the issue's climax. Hers is the most graphic death, and the only graphic nudity, in the issue.

Even back in the late '90s, when it was generally cool to use casual homophobia for shocks or "humor" in mainstream media, and when pretty much every non-straight couple's plot arc seemingly had to end in tragedy, I remember being pissed off at how Gaiman treated this character.

So I was viscerally uncomfortable when our two new Good Omens S2 characters got locked into that coffee shop, because Gaiman recycles elements from existing stories. This was Good Omens and 2024, so I knew whatever happened to them was unlikely to be as bad as what happened in "24 Hours", but whatever "it" was going to be, I didn't think it would be good.

Imagine, then, my surprise when the two characters have an awkward, but civil conversation, and work together to get out. Maybe these two scenes are completely unrelated. Maybe Gaiman wasn't even thinking about "24 Hours" when he wrote "The Arrival". But given how recycling bits of older stories is his thing, and given how much he recycles bits from older stories throughout S2, I like to think Gaiman was thinking about that scene—and consciously undoing his mistakes from 30 years ago. Either way, that's how I'm choosing to think of it unless/until I have evidence to the contrary.

And while it's by far not the only thing in that first episode that convinced me to keep watching, it was an important one.

これで以上です。

...but this morning ( I woke up to this little doozy and, just. No. )

I could go on, but, gah.

これで以上です。

Specifically, about James Daunt, the man behind the revival of Britain's Waterstones chain of bookstores and who is gearing up to attempt the same phenomenon with Barnes & Noble. Per the article,

[Daunt's] changes have filled Waterstones’ 289 shops, mostly in Britain, with books that customers actually want to buy, as opposed to the ones that publishers are eager to sell. And store managers have been given plenty of leeway to transform their shops into places that feel personally curated and decidedly uncorporate.

This is my experience of Waterstones. It's why most of the souvenirs I bring back from the UK (aside from bona fide real chocolate) are books. The first time I walked into a Waterstones, I could not believe how many books, that I hadn't already known about, in dozens of niche categories, that fit my interests, they stocked. On the shelves. For anyone to browse and buy! As though they were no different from your garden variety Stephen King or Oprah Book Club pap.

This is an experience I haven't had in decades in this country. Now, I'm pretty lucky in that there are a number of excellent independent bookstores where I live that I visit regularly. They are very good for scratching many of my reading itches (international relations, queer lit, gaming, cuisine) but much less good for others (Song- and Yuan-dynasty painting, Manx grammar, 8th century Buddhist choral music, medieval herbal medicine). Collectively, the Waterstones I frequent have all these angles covered.

But, Amazon! I can already hear Bezos's Foresight Strategists cry.

The thing is, if Daunt is able to pull off the same transformation he did in Britain, I don't think Amazon, as it's currently oriented, could mount much of a defense. Because Amazon, as it's currently oriented, is about trapping consumers in the Amazon ecosystem. In my experience, that means that for every search I conduct, Amazon's Amazon-oriented algorithm returns two to five volumes on related topics buried in four pages of "kindle unlimited" fecal dreck...and that's if I already know the title of the book I want. Good luck trying to find a likely-seeming book if all one has is a general topic of interest. I haven't found that worth trying on Amazon in years.

Back in the day, it used to be worth going into a book barn-type store in a new city or neighborhood, because chances were, I'd discover a title I hadn't know of before. That changed as Amazon built up its online empire; it gave access to more books than neighborhood book barns stocked, often at a discounts. Once it put those book barns out of business, however, the discounts disappeared (aside from bestsellers) and Amazon moved toward pushing its poorly edited, vanity published junk onto customers. I think this and concurrent trends (e.g., publishers offering DRM-free ebooks) have created an opening for some business to come along to challenge Amazon's dominance, or at least force it to change its current operating procedure.

In the end, I suppose it will depend upon whether, under Daunt, B&N's stores can reorient toward their individual neighborhood's tastes (an iterative process) before money or investor patience runs out. I think, though, that they have a fighting chance.

これで以上です。

...and so they are here. I wrote a big tl:dr post outlining the decade of WWE storylines that culimated in Tuesday's squee, but realising that that was a little much to inflict on the unsuspecting, ( here are the Cliff's Notes. )

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...on ( Why I found the last book so anticlimactic, featuring discussions on the Nature of Good and Evil, unapologetically Snape-centric Examples, and several Special Bonus Tangents. )

So I guess that, in a nutshell, is why I feel so let down by HP. They're the longest books I've read about "the battle between good and evil" that never actually bother to deal with questions of good and evil, or especially how both can coexist in the same person.

( Special bonus tangents )

これで以上です。