Representation of Human: "The Odyssey" by Homer (translated by Robert Fitzgerald; read by Dan Stevens)

I humbly declare this book to be the greatest literary work of mankind. If you don't learn Greek (worth it just to read this Meisterwerk, never mind the rest of the immortal trove of Greek literature) you can read it in so many translations that have become classics in their own use of the English language, Fagles and Murray, just to mention two. Oh, what the Hades, let's throw in a third, not just for its brilliant translation, but also owing to the exotic character behind it: no less than Lawrence of Arabia.

The Homeric poems were sung in a less-enlightened time, in comparison with the later Greek tragedies, and with the later epics too. Apollonius' Argonautica was composed, post Greek Tragedy, and his audience would have been, no doubt, familiar with Euripides' Medea. Questions such as how justice and revenge affect societies were addressed by Aeschylus in the Oresteia; likewise, the reception of the anthropomorphic gods, and their pettiness, was raised by Euripides in Hippolytus and the Bacchae. Furthermore, the real nature and brutality of warfare was also raised in the Trojan Women. Throw in how one state views another state, and questions of racial identity, and you have The Persians by Aeschylus, and Medea by Euripides. Additionally, if you include Philoctetes by Sophocles, and the issue of how youth should conduct themselves is also raised. If you consider, too, Ajax by Sophocles, and you find that the bloodthirsty myths of an earlier age are filtered through questions that C5 Athenian society faced. What is better, the brute force of an unsophisticated Ajax, or the sophistry and rhetorical arguments of Odysseus in Ajax? By the time we arrive at Virgil, and The Aenied, brutal events such as the death of Priam by Neoptolemus in Aeneid Book II, are tempered with a more enlightened approach. Neoptolemus is condemned for killing Priam, and rightly so, as mercy is important, and exemplifies the Romanitas of 'Sparing the humble, and conquering the proud'. However, Aeneas doesn't show mercy in his killing of Turnus at the end of Book XII.

I have always thought of “The Odyssey” as the story of a man tainted, infected, by the corrupting virus of war who has to undergo a sort of purging 10 year quarantine as he struggles to get home. And yet, in spite of everything, he returns home still as deadly and full of murderous intent as the day he set out from Troy. Indeed, as the day he first set sail from Ithaca. He is a carrier of the virus of war, rather than a victim.

Odysseus is one of the most deadly and dangerous characters in the whole of literature, as much for his friends as his enemies, and this intensely human quality withstands everything the Gods can and do throw at him, as his wife's suitors learn to their cost. Not vile, just deadly, in a very individual, human way that the others who appear in the Iliad, who are more symbolic of particular qualities than real, rounded characters, are not. He is deadly in the way that a fisherman is, dreaming of his Summer holiday afloat while he watches Christmas TV in Croyden, and a Great White, going about its blinkered business in the deep, unaware of what fate has in store for it, is not.

Odysseus is perhaps the first well defined representation of a human, individual character, as opposed to a hapless plaything of the gods or embodiment of some strength or weakness, in the whole of literature. His imagination, his cunning and his indomitable will, his determination that if anyone is going to die, its, first of all, his enemy, and failing that, the guy standing next to him, makes him more dangerous than the most horrible monster, the strongest giant and the most seductive witch the gods can chuck at him. What chance does a bunch of soft, complacent suitors, unused to the possibility, the probability, even, of sudden death that Odysseus has not only seen but dealt out, have against him on his return to Ithaca, carrying the plague of war and violence in him?

I see “The Iliad” as a rhetorical piece of writing. It is no accident that Odysseus is the most beloved of Athena, goddess essentially of being clever and Achilles is notably not (unlike Heracles, Perseus, Jason et al). Achilles time is passing, the sheer logistics of the Trojan campaign which Homer bangs on about in depth are evidence of that. The stylised combat is in tension with the use of tactics, the honourable but suicidal tough guy has no place. It might be personally satisfying but you're going to lose wars that way. But how to convince proud people of this? Odysseus starts off wanting peace and hating war, this is the seed of his cruelty. This is, I think, actually our modern view of warfare as well, the less we revel in it, the more we demand overwhelming victory.

For a number of years in my youth, I didn’t want to read translations – I just felt that the presence of a third party between me and the author’s words seemed more opaque than transparent. Getting a bit older, I started to worry less about the issue (as well as a lot of other things) and generally just read what I feel like reading, though I still remain vaguely conscious of the translator at work when reading a translation. "The Odyssey" was one of those cases that made me read the translation, because I don’t read Greek.

I think that reading Tolkien must have helped me in dealing with the patronymics, since I didn’t have much difficulty with them. Are both Agamemnon and Menelaos referred to as Atreides? I seem to remember this happening in my reading, though it was usually clear which one the passage referred to.

Long before reading “The Iliad”, I picked up a lot of the story from operas: Berlioz, Gluck, Tippett, and, yes, Offenbach, not to mention the musical “The Golden Apple” by Jerome Moross and John Latouche. That last one sets “The Iliad” and “Odyssey” in late 19th / early 20th century America, very enjoyable, especially if you recognize the parallels. Right after finishing “The Iliad”, I listened to Sir Arthur Bliss’ "Morning Heroes", his tribute to his fallen comrades from the Great War. Its settings include two passages from “The Iliad: Andromache’s” farewell, which I linked to in Alexander’s version, and the passage in book 19 where Achilles arms himself for battle. I wanted to get a sense of how Homer’s poem spoke across the millennia to others caught up in war.

We see the same evolution in various forms of warfare since, consider how the longbow had a rather unsporting effect on chivalry or how air combat tactics changed between World War 1 and World War 2. I think this is most obvious when Homer, trying too hard, goes on about Odysseus's macho credentials as if he's saying, you can study for your exams and still play on the school football team. It seems like those bits are added under some pressure to avoid Odysseus seeming effeminate or weak and keep his argument on track.

It’s quite a carefully balanced piece of "writing" Odysseus is; Achilles isn't so much criticised as, well, literally laid to rest. No one would call Odysseus a pacifist, least of all me, and nor have I suggested that, but he certainly doesn't show any psychopathic lust for war. He goes out of his way to avoid war and conflict, but once he finds himself in that situation, he uses his brain, rather than any kind of blood-lust or crazed all-out assault to achieve his objective, which is to end it as quickly as possible and get home to his wife in one piece.

It is not his responsibility, in all of this, to look out for the Trojans.

As for the Trojan Horse, it woks out as the least costly solution, in terms of human life, at least for the Greeks, to their Trojan problem, which has been dragging on, at great cost in life and suffering to both the Greeks and the Trojans, for many years. As for what happened to Troy after the Greeks got in, that was a forgone conclusion from the beginning, and not the fault of Odysseus. I'm sure he would have been totally satisfied with a civilised arrangement at the beginning that allowed everyone to save face and go home happy and alive. The Trojans resisted and paid the price of all cities that resisted a siege, right up until relatively recently. They knew what would happen to them and would have done the same themselves, in similar circumstances. It was the rules of war, at the time. It made sense to torch the place, kill and enslave the inhabitants, because it made them an example to other cities in the future that might think resistance was an option.

Surrender was usually by far the wisest, if not a wholly palatable course of action, faced with a foregone conclusion. The opposite of a pacifist is not a psychopath. I think if you showed a little more empathy (a quality alien to psychopaths, of course) for the situation and the times in which Odysseus found himself, you might see things slightly differently.

As a tale, the Odyssey is a far better tale then “The Illiad” - the latter I find is more like a bloated Viking saga "he was son of X who gloriously killed son Y who was also a glourious son of a noble called C" - more personal/psychological in its themes and hence more identifiable as a figure, throughout the story Odysseus is contrasted with other figures like his friend Achilles/Agamemnon, and in his travels he never trusts a person without testing them first a far-fetched tale and only then does he either destroy them or uses them to help him. It is one of those stories I love returning to again and again. A tip to other potential readers of “The Odyssey”: trying listening to the story on audio - as it was originally intended for - it's an even more enjoyable experience.

The Linux Server Encyclopaedia: "Anonymous" by Roland Emmerich

Sigh. 

Sorry to interrupt, but what is it about the nature of our species that is so attracted to conspiracy theories? We can trace this as far back as Homer and plenty of modern examples as well.

If I had a crystal ball I think it may well show a 2416 Ox/Cam luminary frothing at the bung as he expounded on the impossibility of an illiterate uneducated Lennon seen as the co-author and author of his celebrated works. I took an interest in the claims of the Earl Of Oxford after the film Anonymous made its preposterous contribution in 2011. I was particularly interested in the fact that the denialists draw so much confidence from their claims to have discovered hidden ciphers in epitaphs and ancillary texts. The Oxfordian method of unwinding these hidden messages (they are never ciphers) involves little more than separating all the letters and making words out of them as if they were a Scrabble bag with two dozen blank tiles. Oxfordians tend to stop as soon as they have found what they want. I was able to go a bit further, whilst sticking rigidly to their 'method'. As a result, I can offer a few new ideas about Shakespeare's favourite books which not even Professor Jonathan Bate may not have considered.

1. The Autobiography of Howard Kendall

By far the most distressing revelation for a lifelong Kopite is that Shakespeare was an Everton supporter. As a native of the Midlands, he would have been forced to look north for a credible team to support. How he came to to choose The Toffees is a source of amazement but a 6x48 grill made from the epitaph reveals the legend "Evrtn is grat".

2. The Linux Server Encyclopaedia

It's fairly safe to assume most playwrights of the period, like creatives today, were Mac users but Will obviously needed industrial strength servers for his prolific output and showed a strong preference for Japanese hardware. On a desert island, with no online access to help, a cautiously competent techie would surely have taken a manual. A 4x96 grill reveals "Sony btr thn HP".

3. The Brilliant Bumper Joke Book

Much has been written about Will's comic knowledge and his instinctive grasp of the science of timing. His tavern jokes and gag lines like "William the Conqueror was there first" are legendary. No one has explored the possibility that Will may have been an early comic stand-up artist, yet in his epitaph (12 x 9 grid this time), he clearly left us one of his most treasured punchlines "Jesus saves, Moses paies owt". I think he'd have liked this book to remind him of his audience.

So remember, whilst almost all of what Oxfordians have to say might look completely ridiculous to anyone with a knowledge of the work, there will still be a legacy after the few who are left have gone.

Of course, Oxfordians don't really seem to like the fact that plays are in fact plays, and they will tend

to ignore everything that is known about how plays were produced in the period. Paul Crowley believes that the "canonical plays" were "rarely if ever performed" while William talks of plays being "held back". The fact is, that prior to 1616, the year of Shakespeare's death and Jonson' First Folio, the idea of English drama as an authorial publishing venture was unknown. The quartos were published by printers as and when they could get hold of prompt copies, and playwrights did not enjoy the benefits of copyright legislation. Plays were written to be staged. For no other reason - certainly not just to send coded messages within an aristocratic coterie.

Clear internal evidence shows typecasting, and typecasting determined a deal of choices for Shakespeare. Hamlet, which is explained by Oxfordians as a kind of autobiographical fable, tells us much about the context of drama at the time. Hamlet and Polonius (or the actors playing them) joke about the one stabbing the other in Julius Caesar the previous season. Hamlet demands that clowns stick to the script, shortly after a popular ad-libbing clown has been replaced with a more sober actorly clown.

The fact that plays were a successful commercial form of entertainment is very bothersome to Oxfordians, which is why they try to refute or tone down the idea wherever possible.

Last night I watched the movie again. After having read all of the Shakespeare work since 2011, I said to myself: "Maybe the the movie will have some merit after all"...Nope. It's was belly-button fluff in 2011, it's still belly-button fluff in 2017.A word to the wise for any brilliant writers out there - you'd better make sure that when you die, you leave behind you a trail of debris in your personal life to rival that of any of your characters.

If you write great romances, leave ample proof of all those sordid affairs you had, all those hearts you broke! Swoon for all you're worth in front of the cameras, baby, and don't leave the house without your lipstick on. Keep a detailed record of all the illegitimate children you had, and who adopted them, so that DNA testing on your descendants in the 25th century will prove you to be the author of your bodice-ripping yarns. Do not, under any circumstances, die unmarried, undivorced, or worse yet a virgin - the people of the future will mock the very idea of you understanding romance, and will put you in the fraudsters hall of shame alongside Jane Austen (whose books, as we all know, were really written by her male editor).

If you write spy thrillers, you'd better put a copy of your MI5 file in the safe for future generations to find. Better still if you can leave a copy of your old Stasi file alongside it. Shhh! Don't keep anything more than this or it will make you seem careless... careless like a bad spy who could never have come up with that twist in the ending of that triple-agent novel you wrote, you know the one, only you don't, do you? Because you didn't write it, you liar, you were just the front, the patsy for that CIA operative who couldn't use their own name because they had to do the job of a real man, a job you can't begin understand. You disgust me.

If you write fantasy fiction and care about the integrity of your legacy you really need to leave proof of your pagan/wiccan/voodoo/Satanic/other* predelictions. This is quite difficult, as a few scrawls in the margins of a tattered copy of the Book of Shadows might not be enough to convince people in the 25th century. Try getting arrested for the ritual murder of a virgin, or at the very least, indecent exposure when dancing around Stonehenge at midnight. Laminate the subsequent newspaper reports to ensure they don't degrade over the centuries as future generations will consider electronic files too easily faked, and besides, most of them were lost forever in the great EMP war of 2323, which was all a bit convenient for you, wasn't it? Someone still covering up for you after all that time, hmm?

If you write science fiction, for goodness sake don't be an actual scientist! People in the 25th century will understand physics in a way we cannot hope to comprehend and will therefore find your faster-than-light drive hilarious, and refuse to believe that a scientist wrote such a thing, attributing it instead to your alcoholic second cousin who still lived with his mother, as that's what science fiction writers are supposed to do. Please don't tell me you've moved with your girlfriend. We really are beyond hope now, aren't we?

Follow these basic rules, and you too can die happy in the knowledge that centuries from now, your body of work will not be used as an anti-establishment sledgehammer by an irate cultish group seeking to "bring down the man" by reading fiction in strictly autobiographical terms and calling everyone "sheeple".

*delete as appropriate

To paraphrase Bill Bryson:

"Oxford would certainly have had ample leisure to write the plays after 1604, assuming he was not too dead to work."

Shakespeare wrote some of his finest plays after the death of Oxford. That's how stupid these people are. Shakespeare belongs to us, not the inbred, narrow aristocracy and thick actors. To the tower with them.

NB: It always amazes me what some people get obsessed by. Engaging with most "Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare" advocates is a bit like being button-holed by someone who thinks they can prove the Ark of the Covenant is really buried under Birmingham New Street Station, and prove it mathematically based only on the Book of Revelation and the paintings of Rembrandt.

Intertextual SF: "The Grace of Kings" by Ken Liu

“Lord Garu, you compare yourself to a weed?” Cogo Yelu frowned.

“Not just any weed, Cogzy. A dandelion is a strong but misunderstood flower.” Remembering his courtship with Jia, Kuni felt his eyes grow warm. “It cannot be defeated: Just when a gardener thinks he has won and eradicated it from his lawn, a rain would bring the yellow florets right back. Yet it’s never arrogant: Its color and fragrance never overwhelm those of another. Immensely practical, its leaves are delicious and medicinal, while its roots loosen hard soils, so that it acts as a pioneer for other more delicate flowers. But best of all, it’s a flower that lives in the soil but dreams of the skies. When its seeds take to the wind, it will go farther and see more than any pampered rose, tulip, or marigold.”

“An exceedingly good comparison,” Cogo said, and drained his cup. “My vision was too limited to not have understood it.”

Mata nodded in agreement and drained his cup as well, suffering silently as the burning liquor numbed his throat.

“Your turn, General Zyndu,” Than prompted.

Mata hesitated. He was not witty or quick on his feet, and he was never good at games like this. But he glanced down and saw the Zyndu coat of arms on his boots, and suddenly he knew what he should say.

He stood up. Though he had been drinking all night, he was steady as an oak. He began to clap his hands steadily to generate a beat, and sang to the tune of an old song of Tunoa:

The ninth day in the ninth month of the year:

By the time I bloom, all others have died.

Cold winds rise in Pan’s streets, wide and austere:

A tempest of gold, an aureal tide.

My glorious fragrance punctures the sky.

Bright-yellow armor surrounds every eye.

With disdainful pride, ten thousand swords spin

To secure the grace of kings, to cleanse sin.

A noble brotherhood, loyal and true.

Who would fear winter when wearing this hue?

“The King of Flowers,” Cogo Yelu said.

Mata nodded.

Kuni had been tapping his finger on the table to follow the beat. He stopped now, reluctantly, as if still savoring the music. “By the time I bloom, all others have died.’ Though lonely and spare, this is a grand and heroic sentiment, befitting the heir of the Marshal of Cocru. The song praises the chrysanthemum without ever mentioning the flower by name. It’s beautiful.”

“The Zyndus have always compared themselves to the chrysanthemum,” Mata said.

Kuni bowed to Mata and drained his cup. The others followed suit.

“But, Kuni,” said Mata, “you have not understood the song completely.”

Kuni looked at him, confused.

“Who says it praises only the chrysanthemum? Does the dandelion not bloom in the same hue, my brother?”

Kuni laughed and clasped arms with Mata. “Brother! Together, who knows how far we will go?”

The eyes of both men glistened in the dim light of the Splendid Urn.

Mata thanked everyone and drank himself. For the first time in his life, he didn’t feel alone in a crowd. He belonged—an unfamiliar but welcome sensation. It surprised him that he found it here, in this dark and sleazy bar, drinking cheap wine and eating bad food, among a group of people he would have considered peasants playing at being lords—like Krima and Shigin—just a few weeks ago.”

In “The Grace of Kings” by Ken Liu.

Goodkind is responsible for the worst thing ever written by a human being; the now legendary evil chicken scene. I still have his books at home. Mea Culpa. That reminds me. I must give them away the next chance I’ve got… the following passage is underlined in my book. To wit:

"Hissing, hackles lifting, the chicken's head rose. Kahlan pulled back. Its claws digging into stiff dead flesh, the chicken slowly turned to face her. It cocked its head, making its comb flop, its wattles sway. "Shoo," Kahlan heard herself whisper. There wasn't enough light, and besides, the side of its beak was covered with gore, so she couldn't tell if it had the dark spot, but she didn't need to see it. "Dear spirits, help me," she prayed under her breath. The bird let out a slow chicken cackle. It sounded like a chicken, but in her heart, she knew it wasn't. In that instant, she completely understood the concept of a chicken that was not a chicken. This looked like a chicken, like most of the Mud People's chickens. But this was no chicken. This was evil manifest."

In “Soul of the Fire” by Terry Goodkind.

He really wrote this. Seriously. Yep, I'm afraid that's a direct quote. Terry Goodkind literally wrote those words. They spewed forth from his brain and onto the page. I still remember throwing book against the wall. For a long time, I stopped reading Fantasy altogether. Recently I’ve been trying to get back to the genre, but I still shudder at the thought I might find stuff akin to Goodkind’s writing. It was with some trepidation I tackled Liu’s epic fantasy starting with the first volume of his Dandelion Saga. I’m a huge fan of Liu’s short fiction. That’s why I dipped my toes in the fantasy genre once again.

Terry Pratchett's withering response to J K Rowling's assertion that she wasn't writing fantasy is worth mentioning as well. The problem with Rowling is that she's so leaden: the children's response to the discovery of a dragon is not “wow! A dragon!”, but “dragons are against school rules”. Magic as coursework. They are fantasy in that they're as thick as doorstops and chock full of chosen ones and dark lords, but compared to “A Wizard of Earthsea”, they never take flight. Philip Pullman was lucky, marketing-wise, to get what is clearly a “fantasy” series listed as a children's book and thus allowed into the hallowed ground of serious proper books at the front of the bookshop. That reminds me. What Philip Pullman writes is also crap.

I'm not that keen on pure fantasy (all that dragonrider crap), but China Mieville's excellent, when he remembers to give characters a character, M. John Harrison's Viriconium series (some call it anti-fantasy) extraordinary, Mervyn Peake's one of my favourite writers in any genre, and Terry Pratchett's 'Going Postal' was the most enjoyable thing I read last year (when I also finally read 'War and Peace', which was agony).

Has no-one mentioned comics? I used to like Cerebus the Aardaark, until I realised it wasn't taking the piss out of the fantasy genre's macho right-wing misogyny, it was macho, right-wing and misogynistic.

Yes, there are different ways of reading. Some people are clearly only interested in the surface narrative of a novel. Others read more deeply into a text, seeking its poetics. The person who taught me to read beneath the surface began by saying it would be like learning to drive a car - at first we would wonder how anyone could be on the lookout for so many linguistic possibilities at once, but that it would soon become a natural process - and she was right. I'll admit that it was one of the more important discoveries of my life, but it doesn't bother me that some people find it boring.

Those unwilling to let others be themselves are, I suspect, insecure in their own opinions. Do I really have to pose the rhetorical question, "What would life be like if we all had identical tastes?" I read a lot of SF in my teens, for the ideas, not the poetics, of which I then knew nothing. The potential weakness in the genre (which it shares with all fantasy, including "magic realism") is that without any given constraints a writer can be extremely lazy. Not all fantasy authors are lazy writers, but it takes a greater skill to write creatively when there are no boundaries.

At the bottom of all this is the need some people have to label and categorise everything, without which many of these arts blogs would not exist. It's the labeling and ranking I find boring.

As I said, Goodkind is highly irritating, like Donaldson. Both cannot write. I shudder to remember I read them, knowing time is so precious. There is something wrong with the linked series format. It hooks into the collector dysfunction in us. We cannot pick up book six and understand a thing, apart from the language and the action. We must get them all. It is consumerism. We are not supposed to consume books. We read books because we love them, or because we must, but we should not read books because we must love them. It is slavery of a strange kind. In Imperial Rome, a man could sell himself into slavery. With these books, we pay to be enslaved. That is the source, for me, of the discontent that may ground the question raised by the Fantasy genre nowadays. Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series like the above-mentioned Malloreon saga drove me away from fantasy. I just disliked being played for a fool, really.

This long preamble is just to say I’m glad I tackled Liu’s “The Grace of Kings”. Is it a perfect epic fantasy example? Nope. Is it better than most of the fodder out there? Undoubtedly yes. Does it have problems narrative-wise? Sure. But it’s still one hell of a romp, and I didn’t feel I was wasting my precious time reading dross. What did I bring home after having finished this 1^st volume? Intertextual SF.  The Odyssey. It might be because I started on this novel after doing a quick skim of Homer’s duology, but I kept seeing shades of both “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” in the novel. Sometimes it was in the language. Other times it was the characters: Mata’s Achilles vs. Kuni’s Odysseus, for example. Plus, the fact that they influenced the mortals the same way the gods did in Homer’s work. I know that if this novel might be said to have any antecedents in the classics it’s in these two examples. I can’t help see Homer in it. Of course, I could be over-reading it too, but I tend to do stuff like this all the time.

Minor beef: “I know a mother from Xana who was willing to bear a corvée administrator’s lash to save her son. I know a wife from Cocru who hiked miles through mountains filled with bandits even while she was pregnant and managed to save the man who was sent to save her.” This impassioned speech Kuni Garu gave about women, while standing atop the walls of Zudi, in the middle of a siege seemed forced, out of place and unnecessary. There were plenty of times that character could have lectured his comrades about the role of women in society (including all the times they had visited local bars where women acted as hostesses), but the author chose the middle of a battle, when tensions are high, to have Kuni give that speech. It took me out of the story for a few heartbeats…I shrugged and moved on.

NB: To push my personal agenda a little bit more SF-wise, I''d recommend Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series. Plausible, (well, kind of; Reynolds was an astrophysicist), well-written and hugely entertaining. Beats watching television. The problem with SF was that it is about the impossible, space travel and such. Doubtless, the same criticisms were leveled at Jules Verne with all his crazy talk about 'flying machines'.

SF = Speculative Fiction.

Overwritten Fiction: "IT" by Stephen King

(Original Review, 2010-12-16)

For the most part I am not too concerned with genre writing as with Literature, unless said writing IS Literature (e.g., P.K. Dick or Hammett). I admit I did read Brown's Da Vinci Code, with no pleasure at all, because I am a bit of a fan of deep dark secrets encoded in the arts, although I tend now to think of it like Foucault's Pendulum, SPOILER HERE; that the secret is that there is no secret. Still I wonder if I dislike what seems to me as overwritten and precious prose so much because it just doesn't sing in my tin ear. If you feel like going to the trouble, what are some examples of prose that sings to you, from the domain of literature, and some of the stuff you find unreadable that the rest of the world loves?

As to the last question, I have to be general, since I have a lousy memory and I am far away from my bookcases. As I have said elsewhere, Rushdie doesn't sing to me. Neither does Tolstoy. I find all the Beat writers insufferable and I don't get the reverence for Marquez at all. What I love... So many more things. Chekhov is one of my all-time heroes. Shakespeare, of course. Robertson Davies, Jonathon Carroll, Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin. All of these writers sing. You understand that this is just a tiny fistful of them.

On the whole I don't care much about the distinction between genre and literature, apart from the fact that we live in a reading world where people can get obsessed about these things. My own stance: there are only stories. Good ones and bad ones, well or badly told. Genre (as in: all the cupboards you can devise) is just a distraction.

What is the difference between Homer and Game of Thrones? I don't mean this as a glib question. Seriously, was the campfire Homer trying to do anything different from what the writer (or broadcaster) of GoT is doing: to capture and hold an audience by telling a tale of heroes and Gods and monsters? Isn't much of what we talk about when we talk about literature and genre simply the respectability of time passed?

I once seriously pissed off a professor when I was attending Universidade de Letras in Lisbon (I didn't like him and the feeling was mutual) by handing in a paper comparing Shakespeare and Stephen King, arguing they were really doing the same type of thing. Both writing for money and trying to reach the widest of audiences, both relaying heavily on grandiose set pieces, the supernatural and both heavily influenced by the idea behind the old Greek tragedy: that, contrary to what most people think, it is not hubris that really determines our fate but some more basic flaw.

So, to me, yes, there is only story - and the music of prose. Updike gives great story. Neil Gaiman has a better voice. All of that, of course, is personal. Up to a point.

To be fair, Stephen King is a pretty divisive writer. When he's good, he's good. When he's bad he gets published anyway and that does a lot of harm to his reputation with some people, just like Martin. He recycles a lot, he writes some very two-dimensional characters and he resorts to generic horror movie tropes all too frequently, but with a harsher, less greedy publisher he could be great. Half the books, half the waffle, half the good starts with bad endings and bad starts with good endings. A more consistent body of work would have prevented a lot of the criticisms of his work, and that's the publisher's job, not his. But they all probably made a lot more money this way. “IT” is a good case in point. It could have been much better than it is. “IT” and “The Stand” are probably the only two works from King I actually considered great writing. The rest of his stuff? Good, at best, to just downright mediocre most of the time. It's hit and miss with King; mostly miss. “IT”, though, is undoubtedly one of my favourite. Heck, the book would have been great even if the supernatural aspect of the story was excluded. Kind of a like a Great American Novel, but not quite.