Tomorrow morning I hit the road for Gencon. I hope to make daily Gencon dispatches, in order to appease those who have been complaining about a distinct lack of gaming commentary on Polytropos so far. I’m looking forward to being there, but not the 9-1/2 drive there and back. Fortunately I’ll have my trusty 6-gig Nomad Jukebox to keep me company. Here’s what I’ll be listening to:

Carry On, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse. A collection of Jeeves ‘n’ Wooster short stories. Finding Wodehouse you haven’t read yet is like finding $20 bills under your couch cushions.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. It’s been at least ten years. Why not?

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, all seventeen discs, borrowed from my friend Steve. If I can get into this one, it’ll last me practically the whole trip.

The White Stripes, Elephant. I didn’t get what all the fuss was about over White Blood Cells. Now I get it.

The New Pornographers, Mass Romantic and Electric Version.

Coldplay, A Rush of Blood to the Head.

Naturally, I’ll save Tom Waits for the tail end of the trip home, when it’s dark and (hopefully) raining. And if I absolutely run out of things to listen to, there’s always the unabridged Silmarillion, perfectly narrated by Martin Shaw.

. . . and over here we have links to stuff I wrote as opposed to stuff I read.

Writing

Thailand Travelogue is a long account of a recent visit to Thailand, flavored with a couple dashes of Thai history and cultural commentary. Unlike a dinner guest trapped in front of a bunch of vacation slides, you only have to read it if you really want to.

Backgammon recounts my recent fascination with the game, as well as my first visit to the Virginia Backgammon Club. Treat it as background reading, since I plan to blog on backgammon in the future. Yeah, that’ll be the way to get the hits rolling in — tapping into the vast network of backgammon bloggers . . .

Geek Cred

Currently all that’s here is a couple of modifications I’ve made to existing games; pretty self-explanatory once you check it out. Expect this section to grow.

This concludes the tour. I’ll be sure to comment on anything new I put in the sidebar as it appears.

While some readers will recognize some of the links to your left, most of you won’t recognize most of them. Since the blog is still only three days old, I don’t feel too bad in engaging in a wee bit of self-reference. So step right up, and I’ll tell you who these people and what these places are . . .

The Blogroll

Unqualified Offerings is the blog of the aforementioned Jim Henley. In the roleplaying game of life, Jim has a very high Intelligence Attribute and excellent Skills in Writing and Wit. He also has the Flaw: Libertarian, but that doesn’t mean he’s not worth a daily read. Bookmark him.

(pronounced lock-lin) and edBlog belong to college friends — Jonathan Laughlin and Ed Heil, respectively. Jonathan is in a cool band. Ed is working on Topos, an email-based storytelling game. He is a polymath and all-around nice guy.

Neil Gaiman needs no introduction. Oh, OK, he’s the author of the subperb comic Sandman, and more recently of some novels (American Gods stands out) and even a couple children’s books. At some point he linked to Bookslut, who talks about books a lot, so I read her faithfully as well.

Electrolite and Making Light are the husband and wife blogging team of Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden. They’re editors at Tor Books who I don’t know at all save by being a fan of their blogs. I first bookmarked Electrolite because his “Commonplaces” section was cool. He quotes his wife a lot in there, which implies a power structure in their marriage that I find comfortingly familiar.

Where is Raed? is the now-famous Iraq blog written by Salam Pax. It remains an indispensable inside view of what’s going on there these days.

Got Game? and Greg Costikyan are both computer gaming blogs, written by a professor and a designer, respectively. Both excellent and not updated nearly often enough.

Ed Hand is a friend I had lost track of until recently. Many cool recipes on his blog.

The Agitator is cool for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that he organizes his blogroll according to Bob Dylan albums. Like Jim, I read him in spite of the fact that he’s a libertarian.

Crooked Timber, Lawrence Lessig, and Talking Points Memo are all worthwhile reads as well.

Regular Reading

Ars Technica is good computer-geek reading all around, and required reading if you build your own computers.

Boardgamegeek is the “it” place for German-style boardgaming.

Spinsanity does a great job of pointing out inaccuracies and falsehoods across the spectrum of political discourse.

The Onion, Slashdot, and Slate need no introduction.

The tour will continue in the next entry. Step this way . . .

This weekend, Thursday to Sunday, I’ll be at Gencon in Indianapolis, IN. If you live in the Baltimore/DC area and won’t be at Gencon, then you have no excuse not to go see Voice in Head at the Baltimore Theatre Project. It’s a subliminal cryptoimprovisational sort of performance-thingee, written and engineered by the indivisible Matt Sahr. Very trippy and entirely worthwhile.

Take one new blogger eager to put some decent content on his site before he announces it to the world. Add a hefty dose of caffeine and some additional energy from the sheer joy of toodling with Movable Type (yes, I’m that kind of geek).

Result: way too many words. I promise shorter, snappier pieces in the near future. In the meantime, though, scroll down, read all three, comment, bookmark, and tell your friends. And welcome, welcome, welcome.

If you haven’t yet finished Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and are the sort of person who cares about spoilers, stop reading this entry.

OK. Let me get the bad stuff out of the way first.

Book Five was overwritten. Strangely, I didn’t think Book Four was, even though it was every bit as long, and I wonder if that has to do with the books themselves or my mindset when reading them. Whatever the case, I thought this one bogged down in the middle. The important things that had to be established — Harry’s adolescent angst, the horror that is Umbridge and the danger she represents to Hogwarts — were well established by then, and we didn’t need to hit those same notes again and again. It was still a book chock-full of good ol’ nutritious plot, but shearing off a couple hundred pages would have been a good thing.

The descending action was also too long, and the revelation of the prophecy was thoroughly underwhelming. I’m not sure I’m happy with Sirius’ death, either — he didn’t get to do enough in this book to give his demise any sort of dramatic weight, and it felt a wee bit gimmicky, even down to the way that Rowling teased us with other possible Main Character Deaths before springing the “real” one on us.

Book Five does a lot more for the characters, psychologically, than it does for the secondary world Rowling has created. We’ve already had hints before now of the Ministry of Magic as big, messy bureaucracy, but nothing in the depiction of (early on, I’m talking about) made me shiver with delight or interest. Harry’s internal rage, though, rang true, even when he was being thoroughly stupid. The scenes with Cho were priceless. The characters are growing, and as they grow we’re getting deeper glimpses into the adult world that they’re going to have to join.

But none of that really matters. What matters is Chapters 23 to 25, from when Harry & Co. get the better of Umbridge to when Dumbledore goes toe-to-toe with You-Know-Who (maybe Hermione can say it now, but I still can’t). The whole phantasmagoric journey through the Department of Mysteries is Rowling at her very best; as I read it I couldn’t believe my good fortune that the book had become this good. Seeing the Death Eaters appear in the Hall of Prophecy was every bit as terrifying as Harry showing up in the graveyard in Book Four. If Rowling can keep that sort of spark just a little longer, she’ll be able to pull off the last two books in fine form. Let’s just hope she takes her sweet time with them, and doesn’t watch the movies any more than she has to.

UPDATE: Loyal reader David Groen points out that it’s a Golden Snitch, not a Quaffle. I apologize, and plead two-in-the-morning-itis.

The world is full of thoroughly ignorable attacks on the Harry Potter Phenomenon. I’ve skimmed over the words of plenty of self-satisfied critics and columnists who fail to grasp why adults would want to read children’s literature, or, more commonly, simply don’t get fantasy literature at all. In a world with more time I might try to address them; nowadays I don’t even bother to read them.

A.S. Byatt is another creature entirely, though. I deeply admire her novel Possession. She knows from fantasy. And on July 7, she laid into the Harry Potter books and (obliquely) the people who read them. It pains me that a writer so brilliant could be such a poor reader in this case. I know, I’m coming very late to the party, but I’ve got to go after her NYT editorial, “Harry Potter and the Childish Adult.” (You won’t be able to view the full text at the Times, so a better place to look would be here.)

Byatt invokes Freud to peg the Potter books as a “family romance,” where a child fantasizes about a noble origin far away from his or her mundane life. So far, so good, though it’s all downhill from there. Of all people, she should know that you can’t open the Sigmund Box in lit crit for very long without making a fool of yourself:

In psychoanalytic terms, having projected his childish rage onto the caricature Dursleys, and retained his innocent goodness, Harry now experiences that rage as capable of spilling outward, imperiling his friends. But does this mean Harry is growing up? Not really. The perspective is still child’s-eye. There are no insights that reflect someone on the verge of adulthood. Harry’s first date with a female wizard is unbelievably limp, filled with an 8-year-old’s conversational maneuvers.

Rowling pegged age-15 adolescent angst pretty darn well, as far as I’m concerned. Harry’s encounters with Cho are deftly written and incredibly funny, though I can see how you might miss that if you were busy psychoanalyzing at the time.

Next sentence: “Auden and Tolkien wrote about the skills of inventing ‘secondary worlds.'” Well, Tolkien did, anyway, and Auden only wrote about Tolkien writing about it, but that’s a quibble — the main point is that by invoking the term, Byatt has upped her fantasy street cred. It lasts for all of one sentence. Then:

Ms. Rowling’s world is a secondary secondary world, made up of intelligently patchworked derivative motifs from all sorts of children’s literature – from the jolly hockey-sticks school story to Roald Dahl, from “Star Wars” to Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper.

What, exactly, is the difference between Rowling’s “intelligently patchworked motifs” and, say Cooper’s? Or Tolkien’s? Or Lewis’s? Cooper: a potpourri of Celtic mythology, ransacked in order to work in a bunch of modern-day kids. Tolkien: wholesale assimilation of Anglo-Saxon history, and a loving pastiche of rural English life. Lewis: goodness, where to begin? Even Tolkien criticized his grab-bag approach to putting Narnia together, a place where Greek gods and Nordic giants out of mythology shared space with talking beavers.

I love Cooper and Tolkien and Lewis, of course — and I fail to see what makes Rowling’s secondary world such a pale one in comparison to the others. Byatt recognizes a big difference: “The important thing about this particular secondary world is that it is symbiotic with the real modern world.” For her, this is damning. Having owls deliver your messages instead of email is “derivative,” whereas hobbits, presumably, are not. “Ms. Rowling’s magic world has no place for the numinous.”

Ho boy. First of all, creating a fantasy world that parallels and mirrors our own is one of the things that make the Harry Potter books unique — that keep them from being merely derivative of the excellent children’s fantasy that has gone before. I’m sorry that upon first reading of Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, or Diagon Alley, or the Sorting Hat, or of Potions class, or of wands and their threads, that Byatt didn’t feel that twinge, or hear that inner voice that said “yes! Here’s someone who cares as much about her world as she does her characters and her plot — someone who can actually write fantasy!”

But I will give her Quidditch. Never liked it much myself, mainly because, compared to the many other magical analogues to things in the Muggle world, this one seemed sloppy. And 150 freakin’ points for catching the Quaffle — come on! With that much at stake, a smart team would forget about scoring goals and devote all their energy to supporting their Seeker. But I digress.

Not quite having made her case, Byatt devolves into insulting fans of Harry Potter. And not just their bad taste, too — she manages to get in a sidelong dig at their sex lives!

Childhood reading remains potent for most of us. In a recent BBC survey of the top 100 “best reads,” more than a quarter were children’s books. We like to regress. I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I’m ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.

There’s more. “Ms. Rowling, I think, speaks to an adult generation that hasn’t known, and doesn’t care about, mystery.” She praises LeGuin and Pratchett; by comparison Rowling’s world is “dangerous only because she says it is.” Stop before it’s too late, Ms. Byatt! People may start to think you didn’t actually read chapters 23-25 of Book Five, which are full to the brim with mystery and terror and sharp, sharp writing. Whatever you do, don’t conclude your essay by trying to somehow blame all of this on “the leveling effect of cultural studies.” Oops, too late. OK, well in that case, if you really want to avoid becoming the caricature of a stuffy English critic, whatever you do, don’t end your essay by quoting Keats . . .

Oops, too late.

I’ve barely mentioned in all of this what I actually thought of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix — that’s coming next.

Liberia is a big mess right now. That’s nothing new; what’s new is that for once it’s making the front page.

Liberia was a mess in 1985, when I was there. I had a friend who lived half a mile down Old Road Congotown from me; I’ve long-since forgotten his name. His American mother lived with him in a well-guarded compound, and his Liberian father, a friend of Charles Taylor, lived in Lesotho because it wasn’t safe for him at home. Charles Taylor was in the States, but would be coming back to make trouble for President Doe someday soon — that was what my friend said, anyway, and we spent plenty of time wondering just how it would all go down. There was no question that Doe was thoroughly and dangerously corrupt, and that whoever did him in would be a hero.

In November, Thomas Quiwonkpa, Doe’s second-in-command, beat Taylor to the punch and attempted a coup, though many assumed that Taylor was actually behind it. I remember several days of staying at home away from the windows, occasionally hearing gunfire in the distance. The coup was put down, and stories circulated about the very grisly deaths that the rebels had met. Days later, walking down the street to my piano lesson with Trudi Ippel, I heard a truck lumbering up being me, and my nose crunched up at the terrible, pungent, and wholly unfamiliar smell that wafted from it. As it passed me I thought I saw bodies piled up in the back.

My family was back in the States by the time Taylor staged the rebellion that eventually brought an end to Doe and plunged Liberia into seven years of civil war. Somebody sent us a picture of the ruin our old house — it had been hit by an air-to-ground missile. Some people we knew got out; others we never heard from again. Liberia was fresher in my mind in those days, and I remember being baffled at how little media coverage events were getting. But goodness, seven years — even I stopped keeping track after a while.

Taylor has proved himself just another power-hungry warlord, of course. I wonder if it’s what he always was, or if the scales tipped after one too many perks of power tasted or atrocities committed. Whatever the case, his ghosts have come knocking, and Monrovia is getting dragged back into hell.

What makes this time different? Why is it News this time, and not before? I think it has little to do with the nature of the crisis, and lots to do with American media. Optimistic spin: Post 9-11, the media is a lot more sensitive to international events, including this one. Pessimistic spin: The real story here is the question of intervention and its implications for Bush’s foreign policy.

Call me a pessimist. Will Bush Commit Troops? Will he continue to nation-build, just like he campaigned against doing, even though he’s neck-deep in it now? I could care less about his overall philosophy here — if intervention isn’t something that needs to be handled on a case-by-case basis, I don’t know what is. I know what I would think if I was living there right now, though. In 1985, even during an attemped coup that didn’t upset things for much more than a week, everybody was talking about what the U.S. would do, and whether they would send in troops. I have a powerful memory of seeing a couple U.S. Marines in front of the embassy, and feeling tremendously, deeply comforted by the knowledge that if things got really, truly bad, we could go there behind the big walls and be safe — that those big guys with the guns would point them at anyone who wanted to hurt us.

Half of Liberia’s revenues consist of foreign aid, and most of that is from the U.S. That it functions at all as a country is due to American money, American businesses, and American government projects (like the huge Voice of America compound, and the vast fields of sky-kissing antennae on the road from the airport that everybody assumed belonged to the CIA). Liberians have always seen the U.S. as a big brother, and I can’t adequately express how totally and utterly baffling it is to them that, when their streets run with blood, it barely registers with anyone there at all.

I imagine that after civil war through most of the 90’s, most Liberians have had to face the fact that they barely qualify as a blip on their big brother’s radar. They haven’t given up hope (or anger), though, otherwise they wouldn’t be piling up bodies in front of the American embassy. And why not? If the U.S. is willing to piss off its allies and bust its budget in order to unseat a teapot dictator half a world away, why wouldn’t they spare the miniscule effort it would take to safeguard what is, for all intents and purposes, one of its very own colonies, a place whose entire population could fit snugly into just half of Baghdad?

Memory and history are playing a role here, to be sure, but I can’t shake the notion that while we had no business going into Iraq, we have every business going into Liberia. And it’s not that I see them as qualitatively different when it comes to humanitarian need — it’s that Liberia is unambiguously America’s problem, and that it would take so little, so very little, in the scheme of things, to help heal what is now the barest husk of a nation.

Polytropos is the very first adjective Homer applies to Odysseus in the Odyssey. Literally it means “much-traveled” or “much-wandering,” but it can be used metaphorically as “turning many ways” — wily or crafty. Homer, of course, intended both senses of the word. In the very best translation of the Odyssey, Robert Fagles renders it as “the man of twists and turns” — hence the blog’s subtitle.
Blogwise, I don’t think I’m going to manage to be as clever as Odysseus; I also can’t claim to be as well-traveled. But I do plan on writing about a little bit of this, a little bit of that, in a wandering sort of way. Mostly, I thought it’d make a cool name for a blog — and the url was available.

I wish that I could take credit for coming up with it, but that honor belongs to Jim Henley: poet, blogger extraordinaire, and longtime gaming buddy. He already has a cool name for his blog, and was nice enough to let me borrow this one indefinitely.

UPDATE: See also “How Do You Say ‘Polytropos’?”

OK. Let the blogging officially begin. Polytropos is now live, though I’m not going to announce its existence until I have buttressed it with some Actual Content. So by the time you read this, it’ll be a day or two old.

Polytropos is running on Movable Type, which installed like a dream and has been very groovy to me so far. Someday I will tinker with the look of the site instead of using a default style template; in the meantime, I apologize for being such a newbie.

Bookmark www.polytropos.org! Come back often! Make comments! And feel free to email me: nate at polytropos dot org.