Baltimore, Angry Notes

Alright. here are parts of my original Angry Notes that I wrote in response to the ending to Baltimore.
There was a bit more ire than I was comfortable with sharing at first and it goes of on a tangent, before recovering, barely and with bad grace, but I guess that since this is my blog I'll just do it anyway. I'm tired of the whole thing anyway and I kinda just want to dump it here without thinking about what to do with it or revising it or whatever.

Obviously. Don't read it if you didn't read Baltimore, or do if you haven't and have no intention of doing so.

SPOILERS for the end to Baltimore.




Give me a mediocre beginning and a brilliant ending any time, but never the reverse.

Once you've stood on the lofty peaks, better that it be the end than to trudge down through foothills and marsh before you reach journey's end.

And such is life too I guess.

Somewhere at one point in your life, you will reach that high and lofty peak, and the luckiest of us die there, with promise and honour yet lying ahead before old age and decrepitude and failure and ignominy come calling. We revere the brilliance of the minds too soon snuffed out, because they have not shown their mediocrity, their declining years and all that brilliance and promise wasted and squandered. Better the hero's selfless self-sacrifice than his dotage, smiling in the sun though he might be. Because even though a toothless self-deprecating grin in the sun is where the book might close, it's not the end. Every story that doesn't end in death, ends in medias res and hides the truth that we all shit the bed when we go. Life is grubby and all-round crap. It's lonely and painful and the dark is always terrifying.

So.

 Baltimore ends in death.

 Fine. Must be exactly what you wanted then, you say.

But no. Because in my view of it at least, death was always coming. Entity to entity, Baltimore to the Red King, this story would always end with mutual annihilation at the very least. Death for both.

The foregone conclusion was always there, if it had wanted to be a truly great story it would have pulled something out of its sleeve and given us something truly unexpected.

Instead it gave us the lowest common denominator and the ending everyone expected.

Golden, in his little afterword, preemptively admonishes us with "Were you expecting a happy ending?" seemingly unaware that there likely wasn't a single soul, attentively watching, who didn't call this particular ending since the original novel's ending.

Occasionally one has days like this.

Where you realize it's better to have an open mind and zero critical capacity. Where you find that it's better to switch off reason and coherent thought and where you wish you could just unthinkingly swallow it all, with abandon, to the reward of easy enjoyment or even ecstatic joy. With no extra thought, the story rules and guides the emotions exactly to where it wants them to go.
And Baltimore's story as given would be perfect for some. But I've read and seen too much already to be mollified by this one's ending. What once was expected has now become trite.

Some might even love Bergting's part of Baltimore, and loathe the cartoony quality of Stenbeck.

To that I can only say that you have no taste, dear sir or madam.

Art and fiction in general's problem is that there are too many people, the audience is too massive and too easily content and because of this, mediocrity thrives.

Mediocre writers and artists with even an ounce of self-knowledge disguise their mediocrity by appealing to the lowest common denominator, by giving the audience what it wants. By coddling them, by swaddling them in the comforting trappings of familiarity and easy expectation.

The ones with genius go against the grain, against the norm and cut out their own story. They clothe it as they wish, against every popular sentiment, however they wish.

Their brilliance is misunderstood or brushed off because it takes too much effort, or takes away too much of the fickle public's precious time.

Everyone shares a rudimentary hive mind nowadays. The internet connects us all, and where one sees brilliance he shares and the selective few snap it up until it the moment where it becomes fashionable food for the masses. and then the backlash grows until the opposite bursts forth. And then sides are formed, and everyone's fighting, having lost sight of the original track, until the next thing comes along.

The problem is of course, that I also am part of this. I, just like the audience at large, have things I want or things I expect, I give my time to what might satisfy my cravings and leave by the wayside what I think I might dislike, however brilliant it might actually be executed.

It's why I've given Baltimore my time, an excessive amount of it, during my reads and re-reads over the years and even here, in these very blog posts. It dominates my thinking and has done for a long time now because it deserves it, even if only through the sheer let-down it has delivered unto me.

It has taken my time, it has made me love it and then proceeded to dash my expectation and all my hopes with sub-par delivery.

Now, if it had started out mediocre and ended up brilliant. Well, wouldn't that be a fine thing?