#NEVER TRUST CAPITALIST ART KATE

[hamliet]

On Alicent and Rhaenyra

Yes, just when I think I'm out, they pull me back in. I'm mad about the fact that I like this stupid dragon show and am cautiously optimistic about it. WILL I NEVER LEARN?

Most of my analytical thoughts will be written up on like, a place where I actually get paid to write it (which I'll crosspost here when it goes up!) but for now, have thoughts on fandom discourse, because no place gonna pay me to talk about that but I still have thoughts, so blog, blargh, here we go.

My thoughts on the Alicent vs Rhaenyra diskhorse are that ppl are misunderstanding the genre. Like, House of the Dragon is a tragedy from the outset. Rhaenyra is our heroine; people aren't wrong for seeing that. But she is a *tragic* heroine. She rightly stands in opposition to a bad (patriarchal) society but also benefits from it, and therefore isn't willing to question certain things. She has hubris in this, in assuming she can get away with things other women can't, and it's going to get her killed because she reached too high.

Alicent is tragic as well, similar to Rhaenyra in that she's a victim of this society and also similar in that she's unwilling to really look critically at her role in it and thereby perpetuates it.

But it's also not wrong for ppl to notice that Alicent is the antagonist.

She's tragic, absolutely, but "antagonist" isn't a moral judgement itself. In fact, if you want to look into the tropes she's playing into (wicked stepmother, etc) and deconstruct the fairness of these labels--which honestly the show should do and ASOIAF does w Alicent's parallel characters (like Catelyn Stark)--please do, I encourage it. I call her the antagonist because Alicent makes the first move, regardless of her reasoning, and an antagonist is just an opponent of our protagonist regardless of the protagonist's morality.

Secondly, SPOILERS, but the story... does end with Alicent's line dying out and Rhaenyra's line going on to produce three heroes in our main saga: Jon Snow, Daenerys Targaryen, and even f!Aegon. Two of these save the world, whatever comes before/after. While I'd argue it's prudent to critically consider whether just having a line continue is evidence of anything redeeming or whether it's more evidence of injustice or both, that still exists as a fact for fans to ponder.

Anyways, it's not so simple as viral reddit threads assert. There is indeed grayness and misogyny in fandom, but there are also ways to critically think about the story's message and purpose that acknowledge why ppl have certain interpretations that don't involve chalking it up to bad faith on behalf of people on either "side." My personal stance is that I love Alicent as a character but I do not like the "uwu did nothing wrong" fan version of her, because it negates exactly what's most compelling about her character: that she's both victim and perpetrator, and as George RR Martin once said, the most intriguing thing to write about is the human heart at war with itself.

[xhxhxhx]

I removed some books today.

I think of myself as a minimalist, but that doesn’t happen to be true. I have acquired more books than I will ever read. They still sit, stacked and unreachable, in piles by the walls, two dozen books tall and sometimes two books deep.

I don’t think I know where they all came from. I think more came from online than from any physical store. I bought them from Abebooks, the sales search platform that Amazon owns now. Abebooks tell you the names of the sellers, but they seem unconnected to any real place.

From Better World Books. From Thrift Books and Bookbarn. From Silver Arch Books, Motor City Books, Free State Books, Sierra Nevada Books, Yankee Clipper Books, and the Atlanta Book Company. From Green Earth Books and Housing Works Books. From Goldstone Books and Powell’s Books and Kennys Bookshop and Art Galleries. From Satellite Books and the Orchard Bookshop. From Blue Cloud Books and Hippo Books and Wonder Book.

They’re from all over, from places you’ve never been, places you’ll never be. They’re names on a box. But then there are the books from more intimate places, intimately connected

From library’s old bookstore, which sold paperbacks for fifty cents, hardcovers for a dollar. From the basement of the old independent bookstore down on Front Street, where they sold remaindered and overstocked books marked down with red-orange tape. From the thrift store across the street, which charged too much.

From the Chapters at the mall in your hometown, or the Chapters and Indigo in the places you’ve been to, from the shelves of marked-down items where you looked for bargains, for the books you knew you should read, and all the books you never would. Places where you could drink sweet cream and coffee and pretend to read.

From the Borders in Syracuse, where you idled while the family went to the fair, where they always said they were going to build the largest mall in America, but never did. There was another Borders in South Florida, where they were stripping fixtures from the walls because the books had not sold, and so the Borders had to be. They still have bookstores. I’m not sure what they sell now. Postcards, I think.

The books still in my room had postcards from people I will never know, dedications to people I will never see, business cards from people who have moved on to other work. But their spines are unbroken, their pages unmarked. I guess I wanted them that way. I bought them like that.

I sometimes worried they would break through the floor. I would wake up to the collapse of everything I have ever owned as I plummeted a few short feet to my death. I guess it would probably take longer than that. I would have to wait for them to crush me. That mass of books would fall on me, blotting out the light. Crushed beneath nearly everything I have ever owned.

That’s what happened to the clerk Toshiko Sasaki in John Hershey’s Hiroshima, who was seated at her desk on August 6, 1945, in front of a couple of bookcases from the factor library:

Everything fell, and Miss Sasaki lost consciousness. The ceiling dropped suddenly and the wooden floor above collapsed in splinters and the people up there came down and the roof above them gave way; but principally and first of all, the bookcases right behind her swooped forward and the contents threw her down, with her left leg horribly twisted and breaking underneath her. There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.

Miss Sasaki made out alright, although not so well as to not ask the question “If your God is so good and kind, how can he let people suffer like this?” But then, I have more books than she did.

I removed some books today. I still have more I want to remove. I just don’t have the boxes for them. I took the boxes I did have in the back of my car to a mass-market thrift store, where they will end up on the shelves by the leather jackets. 

Perhaps they will end on some other shelf, like a postcard from somewhere unknown, in someone else’s memory. But I don’t think they will. I don’t think they’ll sell. There aren’t enough people here who spend money pretending to read.

I don’t know what will happen to them. I suppose they will pulp them. Or perhaps they will end in a landfill, crushed beneath their own weight, suffocating beneath the earth we have made for them until life reclaims them.

I wrote out a partial list of the books I threw out. I don’t know what it says about me. There’s a double significance here: These are books I bought, for some amount of money, but these are also books I am throwing away, because I asked the question the woman told me to ask, which was whether they sparked joy, and I answered no.

Those books in the photo are the books that have not yet been thrown away. Here, below the fold, are the books that have:

Judith Fitzgerald’s Sarah McLachlan: Building a Mystery

Mordecai Richler’s Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!

Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club

Misha Glenny’s McMafia

Joinville and Villehardouin’s Chronicles of the Crusades

Michael Ignatieff’s The Lesser Evil

Russell Dalton’s Citizen Politics in Western Democracies: Public Opinion and Political Parties in the United States, Great Britain, West Germany, and France

Richard Finn’s Winners in Peace: MacArthur, Yoshida, and Postwar Japan

Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi

Fox Butterfield’s China: Alive in the Bitter Sea

Anthony Sampson’s The Changing Anatomy of Britain

Masanori Hashimoto’s The Japanese Labor Market in a Comparative Perspective with the United States

Donald Keene’s Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era: Poetry, Drama, Criticism

Andrei Shleifer’s Without a Map: Political Tactics and Economic Reform in Russia

Peter Newman’s The Secret Mulroney Tapes

Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital

Lesley Downer’s The Brothers: The Hidden World of Japan’s Richest Family

Harold Vogel’s Entertainment Industry Economics

Stephen Goldsmith and William D. Eggers’s Governing by Network: The New Shape of the Public Sector

Donald Harman Akenson, Saint Saul: A Skeleton Key to the Historical Jesus

Philip Ziegler’s King Edward VIII

David Wessel’s In FED We Trust

Robert Dallek’s Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961--1973

David Halberstam’s The Reckoning

David Bell’s The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It

Kevin Phillips’s The Cousins’ Wars

Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Adventures of Immanence

Michael Oren’s Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East

Lawrence McDonald’s A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers

Richard Posner’s The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy

William Chester Jordan’s Europe in the High Middle Ages

William Cohan’s House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street

Bryan Burrough and John Helyar’s Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco

Linda Lear’s Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature

Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals

Allan Brandt’s The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America

Garry Wills’s Head and Heart: American Christianities

Sarah Bradford’s Elizabeth: A Biography of Britain’s Queen

Andrew Gordon’s The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan: Heavy Industry, 1853--1955

John Ardagh’s France in the New Century: Portrait of a Changing Society

Bob Woodward’s The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House

John Julius Norwich’s Byzantium: The Early Centuries

Taylor Branch’s Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963--65

Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker

Tim Blanning’s The Pursuit of Glory: Europe, 1648--1815

Robert Fagles’s translation of Virgil’s The Aeneid

Karl Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism

P. D. Smith’s Doomsday Men: The Real Dr. Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon

Richard Rhodes’s Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race

Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street Years

Alistair Horne’s Harold Macmillan, 1957--1986

Taylor Branch’s The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President

Ian Kershaw’s Hitler, 1936--1945: Nemesis

David Grossman’s To the End of the Land

Sean Wilentz’s The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln

Philipp Blom’s The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900--1914

Jacob M. Schlesinger’s Shadow Shoguns: The Rise and Fall of Japan’s Postwar Political Machine

Peter Jenkins’s Mrs. Thatcher’s Revolution: The Ending of the Socialist Era

Martin Lawrence’s Iron Man: The Defiant Reign of Jean Chrétien

Marin Lawrence’s Chrétien: The Will to Win

Alastair Campbell’s The Blair Years

Tony Blair’s A Journey

David Kennedy’s Don’t Shoot: One Man, a Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America

Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End

Kate McCafferty’s Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl

Martin Wolf’s Why Globalization Works

Charles Fishman’s The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World’s Most Powerful Company Really Works -- and How It’s Transforming the American Economy

William Easterly’s The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good

Karel van Wolferen’s The Enigma of Japanese Power: People and Politics in a Stateless Nation

Jeffrey Sachs’s The End of Poverty: How We Can Make It Happen in Our Lifetime