In Which We Show Them How It Feels To Lose What They Love

Guys That's My Wife

by DICK CHENEY

Thrones. If Bran can take the form of any human being, why not embody his enemies? The answer is that to think like those who wish us harm is an ugly business. It's bad enough to just be Bran, I mean he sent his brother into the wilderness under the watchful eye of some crazy ex-wilding. I got the exact same feeling watching Rickon walk away as when my best friend in college married a Jehovah's Witness. Every time I open the door, I think it's going to be him.

"guys settle down. I'm trying to possess melisandre's vibrator. especially you hodor, shut your mouth."

But onto the good news. Not spoiling the Red Wedding for my wife Lynne was tremendously hard; I kept giving her weird clues like if we were in the grocery store or at the dry cleaner, I'd slyly pull up my sleeve and I'd be wearing mail underneath. The satisfaction when she finally got this joke after tonight's episode was worth the chafing feeling on my thighs. There is no armor that does not weigh you down.

who wears mail to a slaughter anyway?

Enough circling. Watching Bran's mother get put down was crazy great. I mean, I could go on for hours listing all the things Catelyn Stark has done wrong. In fact:

1) She was kind of a dick to her husband, children, and Jon Snow.

b) That hairstyle dated back to the time of the old gods. Melisandre could have given her a perm; perhaps that would have been for the best.

14) She led Littlefinger on for like two decades

22) She made Stannis Baratheon's wife look like Barbie.

god the show will be so much better now, thank you George

31a) Instead of going to King's Landing to support her husband, she was all, "Oh, he'll be fiiiiiiine"

31b) Instead of going to King's Landing to support her Sansa, she was all, "Joffrey's a sweet boy"

31c) Instead of going to King's Landing to support her Arya, she was all, "New Hot Pie will protect her."

37) No eyeshadow

45) I once heard her make a dismissive remark about Barbra Streisand's nose that struck me as borderline anti-Semitic.

this is what you get for refusing to show when your daughter marries a little person

But really, Catelyn's worst crime was not her hair or her lack of military expertise or general uncleanliness. It was that she was always by her son's side, when she had children who needed her a lot more. Parents always play favorites, especially when some of their children are totally useless, like Bran. A daughter is always a lot less welcome than a son; GRRM's trenchant commentary on contemporary China is preferable to another speech by Tyrion about prostitutes, don't you think?

every direwolf dies. not every direwolf really lives, especially if you belong to bran. god i hate you bran.

As for Robb's direwolf, that was pretty sad guys. I sort of felt like Arya could have done something... I mean, she could have done a lot of things. She could have ensured Tywin Lannister never lived to deliver that order; in effect, she caused the death of her mother and her brother, and I respect her all the more for that.

Making a lot less sense was the overall behavior of Jon Snow. This was heartbreakingly weaselly stuff. One of the toughest men ever on the night's watch died so you could be where you were, guy. And instead of slaughtering some old dude who were mere moments away from being eaten whole by a white walker, you gave up the Ghost and started running ppl through with your sword? Ugh times one million.

chin up, as least you weren't on the receiving end of a womb-stabbing

I have an equal crit for Ygritte. Your plan was this, unkempt woman: commit the murder your boyfriend had promised to do, and thereby...save him? Do you even have the slightest idea of how easily infections are transmitted through a human bite? My wife is still convinced that is how Michael Douglas got cancer, since no woman in her right mind would allow him near her pelvis.

You've got to circle the Red Wedding. You can't come too close to it.

can't unsee

It's complete insanity to break up the dragon queen's story like this. She should have dedicated episodes, maybe just an ABC Family movie where Daario Naharis gets a paunch belly and won't do anything but watch Storage Wars and chew on beef jerky. The real problem with the dragon queen right now is that the beginning of her story is a lot more interesting than her rise to power and every time they actually use those CGI dragons it probably costs a fortune, so they don't. It's kinda strange when the show's production values suddenly drop from this:

to Jason and the Argonauts-type bad with Grey Worm, Daario and Sir Jorah Mormont on the most transparently ugly studio in the world. Poor Grey Worm; his queen is sounding more like Dr. Laura every day:

Signing off from the Red Wedding in total silence reminded me of something. I used to work with a certain person who always felt that less is more, that most meaningless of phrases. When you consider this pathetic expression more closely, anyone can think of nothing. We desire instead a rich world, and that is what Game of Thrones provides. Even a small pause of remembrance undermines its point — these deaths, while shocking and incredibly graphic to those of us who do not spend our time writing Jon Snow-Daenerys Targaryen fanfiction ("I'm fascinated by your white privilege, Jon Snow" "My medium sized dragon ate your wolf Jon" etc) lack any real meaning. They are just something that happened to this one:

while she is on her way to get where she is going.

It is selfish but honest for those surrounding death to speak of its effect on them. They are only the victims. Robb Stark planned to assault Tywin Lannister's home, slaying his servants and his army. Knowing this, Tywin made sure he struck first. There was nothing more to it than that, no menace beyond those carried out by the Frey men who stood to benefit from this betrayal. Robb and his ferociously bad looking mother made a military mistake and nothing more.

What Game of Thrones does best, and why it is finer when it does not take itself seriously at all, is show us the irony of any celebration. Things are just not going to work out for any of these people in the way they hope. (The Hound knows this best — eventually someone is just going to burn his face again.) It does drive us mad to be close to something wonderful, whether it be a particularly musical woman or a parent who we have not seen since a time in our childhood that appears impossibly distant in retrospect. It is equally as comic that we can never achieve our heart's desire as it is sad.

Next week on the Thrones season finale: Ned Stark returns as a white walker, Tyrion Lannister has a wet dream and impregnates his leather jerkin, Joffrey starts ignoring his bethrothed and focuses on playing Black Ops II full time, Melisandre gives birth to a spectral Mary Tyler Moore, Theon Greyjoy is tortured for a solid twenty minutes, Cersei goes on a tragic late night QVC ordering binge, Sansa Stark gets implants and Samwell Tarly finally shows off the depth of his wizardry by proving he is the only man in the seven kingdoms able to make it through A Dance with Dragons without falling asleep more than once.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in an undisclosed location. He would like to send his condolences to all living members of the Stark family, including Ted Stark, Red Stark, Don Stark, Mike Stark, Tiffany Stark and Bed Stark. Your cousin Ned should probably not have married that ginger woman. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

by conor campbell

"Passerby" - Allie Moss (mp3)

"Corner" - Allie Moss (mp3)

protected by a senior citizen and a supermodel, what could go wrong?

In Which We Look To The Future Of Our Race

Fear of the Unknown

by ALEX CARNEVALE

It is difficult to find the good parts of Edward Said's Orientalism. This is a book so in love with itself that it cites Henry Kissinger as being a man of considerable naivete. Said called himself a "humanist," which was a way of putting aside the perspective you were writing from, a neat rhetorial trick. Orientalism is actually at base a book about why renaming things is a powerful political tool, and if the book influenced any of the political actions in the Arab world that used this transcendent tactic, that might even be a point in the tome's favor.

Then again, it's somewhat charming that Said had the temerity to approach the topic at all. Most of Orientalism, in fact, is about all the slightly more dishonest things that have been written about the non-European world, which in its totality constituted the focus of the Jerusalem-born politician's writing. Said was above all a politician-martyr, and when he died in 2003 he left behind a legacy of us versus them political effluvium that has haunted political science departments across the eastern seaboard. Said wasn't so much a thinker as an advocate for his cause, and in fact Orientalism today would actually be more appropriate as a pamphlet.

For one of the book's epigraphs, Said quoted Disraeli's saying that the Orient was a career. I have always found this to be among the funniest lines in the book, since Said goes to extraordinary trouble to refute Disraeli's contention, while every part of his life embodied it. Said believes that our knowledge of the Orient is "ignorant, but complex" — the kind of observation that wouldn't stand up to the scrutiny of a dinner party if you didn't already want to believe it. The very fact that Westerners were able to make careers of it suggests they understood it far better than Said believed. Said retroactively applied the current political attitude towards the Arab world to its history, with varying results.

Much to Said's probable disgust, we are being assaulted with Western literature and art about the non-European world. Every single newsmagazine did a special issue focused on China, currently the most economically powerful nation in the world. Although our American engagement with the Arab world hasn't been all negative in the wake of attacks by Muslim extremists, it has naturally been the focus of many films and novels. China has begun to receive the same treatment.

with mahmoud darwishPaolo Bacigalupi's novel The Wind-up Girl shared the 2010 Hugo, science fiction's most prestigious award with its more readable, more serious China Mieville counterpart The City & the City. It won the Nebula by itself. The fact that Bacigalupi's book won an award of any kind (it placed 9th on Time's best books of the year for no discernible reason) should be a surprise to enthusiasts of any kind of literature. The City & the City blew The Wind-up Girl away. As Michael Moorcock put it about Mieville's book in The Guardian:

As in no previous novel, the author celebrates and enhances the genre he loves and has never rejected. On many levels this novel is a testament to his admirable integrity. Keeping his grip firmly on an idea which would quickly slip from the hands of a less skilled writer, Miéville again proves himself as intelligent as he is original.

In contrast, The Wind-up Girl is a borderline offensive Vernor Vinge imitation that approaches the genius of its model at no real point. To talk about China, Bacigalupi sets his story in a futuristic Bangkok. He then does us the disservice of filling this city with every science fiction cliche imaginable. Many major cities, including New York, are buried underwater, in a conceit as transparent as Law & Order cases ripped from similar headlines. Levees keep Bangkok dry and tight, and it's probably no coincidence Bacigalupi dedicates his novel to Spike Lee. Well, he should have.

Paolo Bacigalupi

The Wind-up Girl of the book's title is a so-called New Person, which is incidentally where they got the name New Meadowlands from. Emiko spends most of her time being raped onstage for the fun of visiting tourists and businessmen (get it?!?). Emiko is so "creative" that if she gets too wound up — if her systems overheat, and she tries to flee her enslavement — she could die within minutes. In other words, the inventor of an artificial intelligence decided that it was worth the trouble to create this being but not worth the trouble to have simple safeguards to prevent it from being completely destroyed if it ran too far or too fast. Bacigalupi is about as imaginative as the worst science fiction and fantasy we've seen on television, the absurd scenarios of Surrogates or The Event, or the Battlestar Galatica reduxes that posit humans under the control of technology.

All science fiction looks towards the future of our race, but that is a broad brush. But some of science fiction — the part of it that I despise — is really just the simple reiteration of Luddite fears. In Bacigalupi's world, generot has taken hold and famine rocks the world. This is only one of his incredibly boring reversals of what applying technology to the creation of food has actually been able to accomplish in the world. Bacigalupi simplifies things even worse than Said does, and he does it for the same political reason.

In reality, the history of the non-European and European worlds are not so strange to each other. Men like Bacigalupi and Said imagine a great gap between us and them. Bacigalupi's non-European protagonist is a so-called "yellow card"; as if throwing one more Nazi cliche on the rest of his claptrap wouldn't hurt. Hock Seng is former Chinese man who wants to steal Western technology in order to make a better life for himself. In order to not make this toadying, desperate character offensive, Bacigalupi turns him into a hero. His counterpart in the sweatshop business is the American representative of a Michael Moore corporation that's trying to do what Disraeli said was possible. Reducing the world economy to a simplistic black and white for the purposes of fiction is bad for both the world economy and fiction.

Anyway, there was a lot more exciting science fiction and fantasy published in 2010 that didn't necessarily win gaudy honors. Here were a few of my favorites:

Songs of the Dying Earth (eds Gardner Dozois and George R.R. Martin). This voluminous celebration of Jack Vance is all the more extraordinary because it comes while the now-blind and no longer writing legend is still alive. Most of what isn't some Tolkien-cliche in modern fantasy comes from Vance's Dying Earth series, and he's the ideal vehicle for other writers to inhabit. Stories from the late Kage Baker, Jeff VanderMeer, and Martin himself stand out. One of the best tribute collections in the short history of them.

Dragon Haven (Robin Hobb). The Alaskan-raised Margaret Lindholm had most of her success under the Hobb pen name. Her latest series has been her most engaging, set the in world of her Tawny Man and Liveship Traders trilogies. As sad as it is to say, it's still relatively unique to find exciting female characters in the male-driven world of fantasy, and Hobb's have interesting dilemmas that do more the rehash tired debates. She takes two of fantasy's most dull cliches - dragons, and homosexual love - and makes them seem fresh. This second book in the Rain Wilds chronicles doesn't necessarily imply a third, but the prolific Hobb is working on one anyway.

The Sorcerer's House (Gene Wolfe). The year's most entertaining novel is a midwestern America puzzle that reimagines the world of Faerie in the setting of a modern mystery. Unlike its spiritual twin Pandora by Holly Hollander, Wolfe uses the epistolatory style to create an inventive mystery that requires several re-readings to digest fully. And once you're done with that, the finest American writer today's new novel, Home Fires, hits shelves in January.

Black Hills (Dan Simmons). Simmons' efforts once tended more towards epic space opera and horror. Now his love of historical fiction has allowed him to define a new genre. If you're interested in early America and Orson Scott Card hasn't already ruined it completely for you, Dan's latest is up to his usual par. It's not for everyone in the way that his Hyperion quadrilogy captivated so many readers, but it's still a lot of fun on its own.

2011 promises a much better slate, including Wolfe's Home Fires, Michael Swanwick's Dancing With Bears, Richard K. Morgan's The Cold Commands, Patrick Rothfuss' The Wise Man's Fear, ideally George R.R. Martin's long awaited A Dance with Dragons, Jo Walton's Among Others and Joe Abercrombie's The Heroes.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He last wrote in these pages about Sofia Coppola's Somewhere. He tumbls here and twitters here.

"Black and Blue" - Miike Snow (mp3)

"Burial" - Miike Snow (mp3)

"Faker" - Miike Snow (mp3)