The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2022, pt. 2: Eleanor Arnason

 

The Pleasures of 2022

by Eleanor Arnason

This is the third year of the epidemic, and I continue to be careful, avoiding crowds. I do go to the Minnesota Opera, always wearing a mask. The first opera this season was Edward Tulane, based on a children’s book by Kate DiCamillo. It works for adults as well as children. I enjoyed it. The second opera was Handel’s Rinaldo. I had seen a spectacular production of this by the Metropolitan Opera decades ago. 

 

The Minnesota Opera’s production was a lot less good, done in a new auditorium that reminded me of a concrete bunker. The stage was small. The sets were mingy. The singers and musicians did the best they could. The production was made worse by an attempt to avoid the anti-Moslem material in the original, which was based on Jerusalem Delivered by the Italian Renaissance poet Tasso. So the two contending forces – Crusaders and Moslems – were turned into two capitalist families contending for something. Control of a company?  In the end of the opera, the two families are reconciled and join together to oppress the working class. I am pretty sure I heard that. This fits in with the fact that the opera company has laid off 40% of their musicians, since they don’t need them – or have room for them – in their new, awful auditorium. 

If you get the chance to see Edward Tulane, it is probably worth seeing. Rinaldo is also worth seeing, just not this production. 

I finally lost interest in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The last three Avengers movies were not good. They could have stopped at Age of Ultron, when Thor flies off to Asgard to deal with problems there, and Tony Stark decides to retire as Ironman and buy a farm. The movies after that were simply not as interesting: more than anything else a way to get rid of old characters and bring in a new generation of superheroes. I am not going to get involved in this new generation. I have already spent enough time on Marvel. 

Most of my fiction reading has been manuscripts submitted to my two writing groups. Good work, but not yet out. My nonfiction reading has been a lot of science, especially paleontology. Reading about mass extinctions has been reassuring. It is not likely that humanity can equal the end-of-the-Permian mass extinction, caused (many paleontologists think) by enormous volcanic eruptions in what is now Siberia. The planet will recover from whatever we do to it, given ten million years or so. 

I guess my favorite book at the moment is The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte. A good description of how paleontology is done, plus a lot of info about dinosaurs. I like dinosaurs, which are not extinct. They fly and sing all around us.  Brusatte wrote another book, which I like less well: The Rise and Reign of the Mammals. But he gives us the long, long history of mammals and their ancestral line, which began with Synapsids in the Permian, 250 million years ago. 

Science fiction writers can often see what’s wrong with a society and what kinds of changes are needed. But we don’t have a good sense of how long the changes will take. I remember sitting with a couple of friends, both SF writers, in 1992 or -93, as the Soviet Union was collapsing. “It will happen here,” I said. They agreed. One of them said, “I give us maybe three more years.” Now, 30 years later, the US finally seems to be crumbling. Everything takes longer than SF people expect. 

 

 Eleanor Arnason has written several novels and many short stories. Her fourth novel, A Woman of the Iron People (2001), won the James Tiptree Jr. award for gender-bending science fiction and the Mythopoeic Society Award for adult fantasy. Her fifth novel, Ring of Swords (1995), won a Minnesota Book Award. Aqueduct Press published her collection Big Mama Stories in 2013, her Lydia Duluth adventure, Tomb of the Fathers, in 2010, and her collection, Ordinary People, in 2005. In 2016 Aqueduct released  e-book editions of The Sword Smith, To the Resurrection Station, and Daughter of the Bear King. In 2017, Aqueduct published a collection of her Hwarhath stories, Hwarhath Stories, which was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award and was named to the James Tiptree Award's Honor List. Next year, Aqueduct will bring out a new edition of Eleanor's Ring of Swords, with an introduction by Ursula K. Le Guin, as the fifth volume in its Heirloom Books series.