As much as I found myself frustrated by Perdido Street Station, I did very much enjoy reading it around the same time that I got to watch Sherlock. In conjunction, and as I’ve been reading Drood, they were a reminder of one of the things I like best about both real and fictional London, its capacity for mystery, its resistance to complete mapping, discovery, and explanation. London may be a mess in fiction and in truth (though very much less so in truth these days), but the trash contains wonder, if not treasure.

It’s a quality very much particular to the mythos of that city, and I was struck by it reading this review of two new major Bob Dylan surveys. Giles Harvey writes:

Dylan’s songs (there are now more than five hundred of them) seem to unearth a strange, alternate, subterranean America, an antic shadow country of dirt roads and frontier towns, abandoned mines and teeming plantations, a land inhabited by outlaws, vagabonds, crapshooters, confidence men, vigilantes, and religious fanatics, to name only its most conspicuous citizens….al happenings of the day. They no longer partitioned the country into moral factions, with arms dealers, corrupt politicians, Southern racists, and conventional bourgeois society on one side and the young, the poor, the downtrodden, and the guitar-and- harmonica-wielding troubadours on the other. They no longer asked—as Florence Reece’s pro-union protest song of the 1930s had done—”Which Side Are You On?” Instead, Dylan began writing a kind of visionary nonsense verse, in which the rough, ribald, lawless America of the country’s traditional folk music collided with a surreal ensemble of characters from history, literature, legend, the Bible, and many other places besides.

I sometimes wonder if Dylan owes his popularity to a wildness we wish was still is ours, to a more raffish origin story that is solidly cloistered in the American past and that is no longer part of our essential nature. 


Maybe it’s that a city is the largest structure we can build on a foundation of catacombs and labyrinths, and countries require more stable foundations. London is counterbalanced by the more (theoretically) wholesome English countryside. America has its sinkholes and its mystery cities, and its (theoretically) wide-open, sound heartland. Enigmas pale in the sweep of larger countries.

Movies that purport to be about people defying sexual and relational norms but are really about how sexual compatibility+friendship=soulmates with as much certainty and inevitability as a mathematical equation:

You know what’s even more boring? Two of them:

When even Mindy Kaling doesn’t change things, you know there’s trouble. Would it kill someone to make a movie with a messy ending about a couple that doesn’t end up choosing romance?

Annalee Newitz has a fascinating, but I think ultimately incomplete, essay on the strengths and weaknesses of portal fantasies up at io9. I agree that heading into a perfect fantasy world doesn’t make for terribly interesting fiction. But what makes portals interesting is the transition. You’ve got to choose to step across a portal and into another world, uncertain of what you might eventually find. Or you find your way across a threshold by accident, and no matter what you find at the end of your journey over it, the terror and anticipation of the journey through it are interesting in themselves.

As with most science fiction, the particulars of what you find at one end of a portal or what you leave behind at the other aren’t particularly the point. What matters is what the traveler knows of him or herself, his satisfactions or dissatisfactions, his courage or lack thereof, when he takes that first step, and what he finds in, or lacking in himself, on the other side. It’s easy for the vehicles for those revelations to be simplistic—unhappy modern lives or a kingdom falling under Christianity’s sway—and for the means of revelation to be simplistic as well, be it a Christ-like lion or a matriarchy. Better inventions tend to lead to better revelations. But it’s the desire for discovery that’s often the most salient thing about the heroes and heroines of portal fantasy.