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Whoof, that was a whole lot of Malazan Empire. Yep, you betcha. I liked Deadhouse Gates?? a lot, and I am pleased to report that it continued to progress along lines quite different than ??Gardens of the Moon??. The differences in setting and characters are most obvious, but around halfway through the former I realized that whereas ??Gardens?? is a novel about places, ??Deadhouse Gates?? is all about journeys. The centerpiece of ??Deadhouse Gates?? is the deeply harrowing march known as the Chain of Dogs, while ??Gardens revolves around the struggle for Darujhistan.

I can’t say I agree with Erikson when he talks about how his novels confound expectations about who’s good and who’s evil; I guess compared to the banality of Robert Jordan they’re pretty revolutionary, but Erikson’s far from ground-breaking. Indeed, at a certain point, the desire to subvert the reader’s expectations regarding such matters becomes fairly pedestrian itself. The Malazan Empire books aren’t there, but I do hope Erikson continues to focus on interesting plots and characterizations and doesn’t get too deep into making sure everyone has a dark and a light side, yatta yatta.

I’m going to take a break before the next book. One could overdose.

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Another useful resource this week: the BBC’s reporter diaries. The Agonist is also good — Sean-Paul is doing a good job of keeping up with the news. His head will explode within days, no doubt.

Turkey has OKed US overflight, finally. There was a lot of back and forth about this, mostly related to whether or not the US was going to let Turkish troops into Northern Iraq. Turkey wants to make sure the Kurds don’t form their own state, and will do so by force as necessary. No word as to what the final deal was, but Turkey reasserted that it would send troops in after they announced they’d open airspace. That’s not good.

Coalition troops… a side note. I’m going to say coalition, because there is a coalition, which consists for practical purposes of the US, the UK, and Australia. I don’t want to use the word “Allies” for this purpose, because I think it has the wrong connotations. So if you want to mentally add “small” every time I say “coalition,” go right ahead.

Anyhow, coalition troops are more or less moving freely through Southern and Western Iraq. This isn’t a surprise. The serious resistance, if there is any, will come nearer Baghdad. The advance did get bogged down at Nassiriya, where there was strong enough resistance to, well, bog down the advance. Unsurprisingly, Iraqi soldiers turn out to be more interested in fighting back on their home soil — this has not been the kind of wholescale rout we saw in Gulf War I.

We’re not seeing mass surrenders yet; this doesn’t mean we won’t see them in the future. Time will tell. Which, really, says it all for the entire mess. Nothing really unexpected has happened either way, and it’s too soon to tell whether or not anything will.

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Two things.

First, Amiri Baraka is an idiot and a pig and quite possibly a racist. (Although, you know, do some research. “It is a narrow nationalism that says the white man is the enemy… Nationalism, so-called, when it says ‘all non-blacks are our enemies,’ is sickness or criminality, in fact, a form of fascism.” You’ll never guess who wrote that. Still, set that aside: once you start with calling people a whore during your lectures, you get slotted into the idiot and pig categories. At the very least.)

Second, I take it all back. If we’re going to have to hear the words “Trent Lott moment” every time someone says something stupid that should be condemned, I want to go back and undo the entire Trent Lott furor. Leave him as Senate Majority Leader. It’s not like he suffered that much; he still has a prestigious post. And I am already getting really, really tired of the analogies. If you can’t make the case against someone without comparing them to Trent Lott, you don’t have a case.