An Apology and a Recommendation

 In retrospect it was an act of supreme hubris to commit to updating this blog more regularly the week before I managed to acquire a copy of Sniper Elite: Resistance. Regular readers will be familiar with my love for this games franchise due to subtle clues like the fact I've written about it for this blog twice now. I dare say there will probably be some similar thoughts incoming on its latest iteration, once I work out how to connect it to some theme like the reaction to The Zone of Interest or the increasing lack of public street furniture. In the meantime, after rereading the draft of my essay on Tàr I'm not sure if I have anything to add to it beyond the current final paragraph, so I may (emphasis very much on may) finally get around to uploading that this week. 

At any rate, my apologies to anyone who may have been tuning in regularly expecting more frequent updates after my First Reformed piece. I do still intend to update more frequently, but the planned semi-daily schedule is not going to be tenable for at least the next week or so, while your girl is wandering around a virtual recreation of 1940s France doming Nazis. 

As a trans woman who named herself after a character in Gaiman's collaboration with Pratchett, I was relieved to learn that character is probably one of those for which the latter was responsible.

If you are looking for some online reading to tide you over, however, I wholeheartedly recommend Elizabeth Sandifer's piece The Cuddled Little Vice over at Eruditorum Press. This epic essay began life as a series of entries on The Sandman and its author, Neil Gaiman, which Sandifer had written as part of The Last War in Albion, her psychochronographical survey of the magickal feud betweeen Alan Moore and Grant Morrison and its ripple effects on popular culture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The career of Neil Gaiman having been one of those ripple effects, it was always going to have to be covered in some way: recent revelations about Gaiman himself, however, meant that most of what Sandifer had already written had to be jettisoned in favour of writing something new which addressed the American Gods author's decades-spanning career as a serial rapist. 

The Cuddled Little Vice is, I think, both the definitive work on Gaiman and one of the finest examples I've seen of a writer stepping up to the plate when the situation demands it. Sandifer provides a full and fair aesthetic assessment of Gaiman's oeuvre and investigates what elements of his own upbringing may have made him what he is, while never treating either as an excuse not to address the full horror of the crimes he perpetrated, and the effect of those crimes, and their revelations, on both the victims themselves and the many women Gaiman used to enable his ascent to literary stardom, women like Roz Kaveney, Tori Amos, Jill Thompson and Karen Berger. There is something kind of sickening, actually, about how crucial women have been to Gaiman's success - famously, Sandman was a comic known for having a substantial female readership - but then, that's the thing about predators. They excel at camouflage, at seeming plausible. 

And when I say Sandifer makes a full and fair aesthetic assessment, I mean that she is just as willing to blame as she is to praise. Sandman and much of the work Gaiman did at around the same time are rightly valued, but she doesn't hold back from assessing Gaiman's post-Sandman, post-American Gods work as cynical hackery - describing The Graveyard Book as being like something you would get if you asked a generative AI to create a Neil Gaiman story, and calling Norse Mythology 'a book of plot summaries'. I remember the latter work, in particular, receiving high praise from the Guardian review and similar midcult literary staples. I wonder if those critics praised it because it reflected their own lack of intellectual ambition, or because they recognised Gaiman as one of their own in matters of ethics? 

But I digress. The Cuddled Little Vice should give you more than enough to be going on with while I decide what to put up here for the weekend. And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to shoot some fascists.