Introductory postscript

Hi!

If you're reading this, welcome to the now-concluded Magpie Moth blog (2010-2019). I'm leaving it online as an archive of nine years of writing, journaling, art and photos.

Going forward, future writing can be found at www.magpiemoth.com.  

Why the change? Partly the chance to upgrade my online presence, partly the chance to create a more focussed home for my writing rather than the 'anything goes' fanzine approach here.

While I decided in the end not to compile a 'best of the blog' I'll be moving the odd piece over to the new site from time to time if it fits. 

So, do have a look around, see if anything takes your fancy. :)

Reading recommendations round-up

Now updated to cover the end of the year

William S Burroughs - Junky
Becky Chambers - Record Of A Spaceborn Few
Martin Fitzgerald - Ruth And Martin's Album Club 
Viktor Frankl - Man's Search For Meaning
Stuart Jefferies - Grand Hotel Abyss 
T Kingfisher - Swordheart 
T Kingfisher - Minor Mage
Mary Robinette Kowal - The Calculating Stars 
Ann Leckie - Provenance
Yoon Ha Lee - Revenant Gun
Taylor Jenkins Reid - Daisy Jones And The Six
Seanan McGuire - One Salt Sea 
Seanan McGuire - A Red Rose Chain
Sylvia Patterson - I'm Not With The Band
John Scalzi - Head On

As ever, bold font of greatness indicates a five-star rating - only awarded once this year (possibly a sign of too much comfort reading?).

Genre-wise, we've got

SF - 5
Fantasy - 4
Autobiography - 3
Biography - 1
Music - 1
Contemporary fiction - 1

Update

Yes, I'm still here.

While I'm still going to add things as and when I have a sense that this blog may have run its course in its present incarnation.

At the moment, my main priority rather than writing any new material is to compile a 'best of' as suggested last year and cap off eight years of the blog.

Longer term it's a choice between either 

- going back through and sorting some HTML formatting issues in older posts to make the blog fit for purpose and then continuing to use it for whatever purposes I see fit. 

- or making a new start on a new platform because the thought of wrestling with HMTL makes my teeth hurt. Maybe doing something different or a little more focussed.

I suspect the act of compiling the A-Z of Magpie Moth or whatever it ends up being will perhaps make my mind up for me.

Anyhow, for now, I'm still here.

Reading recommendations round-up

Coming off hiatus to record another 8 months of reading recommendations. Once and future classics in bold

Ben Aaronovitch - The Furthest Station
Edgar Cantero - Meddling Kids
Ruthanna Emrys - Deep Roots
E M Forster - Two Cheers For Democracy 
Neil Gaiman - Norse Mythology
Mike Gayle - The To-Do List
Matt Haig - Reasons To Stay Alive
Dave Hutchinson - Europe At Dawn
Gail Honeyman - Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
Lindsey Kelk - One In A Million 
Victor Lavalle - The Ballad Of Black Tom
Michael Lewis - The Big Short: Inside The Doomsday Machine
Mhairi McFarlane - Don't You Forget About Me
Seanan McGuire - An Artificial Night
Simon Sebag Montefiore - The Romanovs
Robert M Pirsig - Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Elizabeth Sandifer - Neoreaction: A Basilisk
Tara Westover - Educated 
Catherynne M Valente - Space Opera
Roger Zelazny - Isle Of The Dead

plus an honourable re-read mention for Edward Said's Orientalism - still an excellent book.

By sub-category:

SFF - 8 
Romantic fiction - 2
Autobiography - 3
Mainstream fiction - 1
Experimental fiction - 1 
Economics - 1
Essays - 1 
History - 1
Mythology - 1
Politics - 1

Greatest hits, or indulging my archival tendencies

By Moumou82 [CC BY-SA 3.0  (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

Somewhat to my surprise - this blog has been going for eight years and over 600 posts. 

Despite occasional protestations to the contrary, it's has remained as it started - a personal space for me to write about whatever felt like a good idea at the time. It's always been a zone of freedom rather than something I had to do for this, that or the other reason. 

Ultimately, that accounts for both its persistence and its lack of (a single) focus.

For a while now, I've toyed with the idea of going back through the blog, picking out a representative set of posts and editing them into a small compendium for an probably imaginary audience.

This seems like as good a moment as any to look back and see what stands out.

Reviews (mainly books and music with a side order of cinema) have tended to dominate, in as far as anything has. Its a form I feel at ease with going right back to my dabblings in student journalism and lends itself well to short updates. But they can - and for me often are - a way of approaching the personal from a flanking position too.

Alongside these reviews you'd find over the years a whole kitchen sink of thoughts on the above plus politics, activism, organising and even the odd (in both senses) attempt at poetry.                

Taken together - who knows - they might even amount to a coherent position?

2010

This is where it all started and it's a bit tentative. There's really only three contenders for inclusion in any compilation and they'd all need a bit of work.

- A rather nice, if short on full sentences, exploration of how magic might work in an eighteenth century fantasy.

- A rough transcript of a talk I gave at Lewisham Unitarians about the need to go beyond 'mere tolerance' of others' beliefs and work towards a positive appreciation of difference. 

- An overly florid review of Inception, which either needs half the adjectives and adverbs removing or extending to twice its current length. Either way, it needs to be much less dense.  

2011

Ah! Now it starts to get more interesting.

The book reviews start to pick up, with takes on China Mieville's Kraken, Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light and Stephen Donaldson's Covenant Chronicles (the last an expansive take in four parts over a particular quiet December)

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

I really, really, really didn't like fantasy parody Your Highness (but then it only scores 28% on Rotten Tomatoes, so this may be shooting fish in a barrel). I preferred Thor, or at least my alternative mumblecore reading of Dave Thunder's adventures.

It's short, but I remain taken with a piece of Hercules And Love Affair and the politics of dancing.

Also - the blog exhbits first signs of a recurring annoyance with nostalgia (heavily indebted to Simon Reynolds Retromania) in a review of Plush's album Fed. 

2012

We're now getting up to 60-odd posts a year. Granted, a lot of these are photos, quotes and Christmas doggerel, but still - 60 posts!

2012 was when my interest in metal really flared up (I blame living in Birmingham) and I wrote a series of posts trying to justify account for this of which these are the best. 

How I learned to stop worrying and love metal. Sort of.
On volume
On sincerity

Token anti-nostalgia post - being grumpy about the Heartbeat tourist industry in the North Yorkshire Moors

Of course in no way contradicted by posts on teenage favourites David Eddings, Julian May
and Sheri Tepper. 

A review of early Tanith Lee is also interesting for being a first crack at praising the strangeness inherent in much of the best fantasy, despite how much Eddings and his imitators try so squeeze it out. It's also a reminder of how often I misspell 'weird'.

I'm still rather pleased with my idea of 'thresholds' - curated augmented reality spaces - even though I've yet to do much anything with it.

2013

The first of two prolific years.

As an outsider exploring the margins of metal I continued to turn up gems - it's this year that the love affairs with Alcest (AKA the black metal Nick Drake) and Ulver started. 

In a more polemical mode though I suggested that Terrorizer magazine might want to take a stronger stand on racism (which in turn prompted further thought on how far an artist's politics could be separated from their art)

Lovecraft and his buddy Clark Ashton Smith, as well as Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius, all get a look in on the weird fiction front. 

Other genre fiction reviews of note included Spider Robinson's Callaghan's Crosstime Saloon, Robert Silverberg's Lord Valentine's Castle and Patrick Rothfuss' The Wise Man's Fear.

I didn't often write about non-fiction but this piece on Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's The Spirit Level is pretty good.

I also managed to review both The Hobbit and the first of the Jacksonian cinema trilogy, as well as getting a surprising amount of material out of the morality of force while reviewing Olympus Has Fallen, Iron Man 3 and Prisoners. 

Still true: too much Twitter outrage makes me want to look at cat pictures on the internet (there was a follow-up post in 2014 about tweeting in a trolling paradise)

Token anti-nostalgia post: dismay at the NME's top 10 albums of all time (and postscript)

This year's ideas I didn't do anything much with: mapping a cartography of hope and festivals as neartopian spaces.

In the future, all bananas will be scannable

More everyday science-fiction here courtesy of multinational banana corporations.

I don't Shazam, but one of my colleagues does (it works on the photo as well as the banana itself) and brought up a 3D rendering of a rainforest.

Everyday science-fiction

Gangs of obsolete technologies huddle on street corners, radiating greyscale menace.