The Beauty of Equations

Did you know I used to be a mathematics teacher? Well, a middle school maths teacher anyway so not exactly the most advanced stuff in the world...But still maths is one of my secret loves (On my shelves I've got four books on the calculus alone and two on prime numbers) and I really enjoyed this little documentary from BBC4 in which someone who hates maths is shown the beauty of equations...

In The Morning I'll Be Gone - The First Newspaper Review

The first newspaper review of In The Morning I'll Be Gone came out this week in Dublin's  Hot Press. The review is by Anne Sexton and is wonderfully spoiler free. For me this book was more of a traditional mystery than a thriller (most of it is taken up with an old school locked room problem) but Anne seems to have enjoyed the noir elements too. Anyway here's what she says in Hot Press: 
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In The Morning I'll Be Gone
by Adrian McKinty
Serpents Tail
Hot Press December 5 

Oh, a new Adrian McKinty book? Excellent! Featuring Sean Duffy? Even better! As a reviewer you should approach an album, film or book objectively, so the fact that I think McKinty is one of Ireland’s most interesting crime novelists might have been an issue. Luckily reviewers across the globe are equally enamoured. In The Morning I’ll Be Gone is the third Detective Sean Duffy novel and as with the previous two (The Cold Cold Ground & I Hear The Sirens In The Street) mixes fact and fiction. 

The actions begins in 1983 with a mass breakout of IRA prisoners from the Maze Prison. One of the escapees is Dermot McCann, a former schoolmate of Duffy’s. He’s sure that that “with the iron logic of a fairy story” their paths will cross again and this being fiction, they do. The grey, rain-soaked streets; the paramilitary tensions; the cultural and economic poverty of 1980’s Northern Ireland are all almost tangible and McKinty delivers a rollercoaster of a thriller that will keep you turning the pages until the very end. 

Anne Sexton
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The picture to the right is the latest cover art complete with Ian Rankin blurb. After I tweeted the cover I got a nice response from Mr Rankin himself:

Ian Rankin ‏@Beathhigh4 Dec

@adrianmckinty I read it while on tour in Canada. Really terrific, Adrian. Congrats - as is becoming usual!

Hopefully that sentiment will be shared by some part of the reading public. In The Morning I'll Be Gone will be available in the UK, Ireland, Australia & NZ on January 30 and in the US and Canada in March.

The Philosophy Of Mind And Breaking Bad

In a throwaway scene from an episode of the final season of Breaking Bad, Badger and Skinny Peter (Jesse's two drug-dealing pals) are talking about the transporter on Star Trek; you know what the transporter is even if you've never seen Star Trek, the "beam me up Mr Scott" machine: a teleportation device for transporting people instantly from one place to another. It supposedly works like this: the ship's computer breaks down the person being transported into a digital scan of their atoms and sends this digital information to the surface of another planet or another ship where the computer then reforms the person, intact, atom by atom. Ah, what about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle I hear you ask? When they reassemble the atoms won't the humans all be messed up at the other end? There are 10^30 atoms in the human body and every single atom is subject to quantum uncertainty...Well, apparently everything will be fine; according to Wikipedia:  

Heisenberg compensators remove uncertainty from the subatomic measurements, making transporter travel feasible. Further technology involved in transportation include a computer pattern buffer to enable a degree of leeway in the process. When asked "How does the Heisenberg compensator work?" by Time magazine, Star Trek technical adviser Michael Okuda responded: "It works very well, thank you."^[3]

Anyway lets for the sake of argument assume that the transporter does work. What Skinny Pete was saying to Badger in Breaking Bad was not an argument about the physics but an argument from the philosophy of mind. Pete's contention was that every time Kirk gets transported somewhere it's not the original Captain Kirk but a recreation, a copy, a copy who has the same mind state and the same memories as the about-to-be transported individual but it's not the same man. The original Captain Kirk, Pete argues, is destroyed in the transporter room and a copy reassembled at the transport site. Consciousness, Pete is implying, cannot be transported because consciousness is a property that cannot be subject to measurement. The copy of Captain Kirk now on the alien planet only thinks he's the same man because he shares Kirk's memories and mindstate at the moment of transportation but unfortunately the real Captain Kirk was killed by the transporter. The copy goes on to live Kirk's life, Pete says, until he too must enter the transporter and he too dies. Throughout the course of the show, Pete argues, there are hundreds of Kirk copies that get created, while the real Kirk dies the very first time he gets transported. Pete just throws this idea out there and then Badger pitches his Star Trek pie eating contest script idea but its worth thinking about. If you want to know more about the concept there's a Star Trek wiki discussion on what happens when you transport, here. And there's a really nice philosophical analysis of the transporter concept by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, in their 1982 book The Mind’s I where they call the transporter a "murdering twinmaker." Hofstadter further explores consciousness in his fascinating book I Am A Strange Loop and Daniel Dennett examines in some depth the idea of materialism in his - rather misleadingly - titled book Consciousness Explained. Whether you believe in strict materialism or a Cartesian dualism I'm not sure I can see how the transporter could work without killing you and replacing you with a copy. 
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But what exactly is consciousness and how does it evolve from matter? It's a huge problem in philosophy, psychology and neurology. Antonio Damasio attempts to explain some of the elements of the problem here: 

A Theory About Horror Movies

a blogpost from March of this year that got a lot of comments...
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My older daughter was at a sleep over party last week where they watched a horror movie. It was a whole bunch of girls together and none of them seemed to be particularly affected by the film, except for my daughter who was pretty disturbed by the experience. We don't watch horror movies in our house and I think this was the first one she had ever seen. She's had bad dreams for a week now and has vowed never to watch another horror film. I'm not surprised that the movie affected her like this. I've only ever seen two horror films in my life and both of them really disturbed me, and I think I have a theory why it is that I (and possibly my daughter too) get so upset by these kinds of movies. 
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Sociopaths (bear with me here, I know what I'm doing) have no capacity for empathy for other human beings. They can't put themselves into the shoes of other people and therefore have no problem using those people as means to their own ends. There are degrees of sociopathy, of course, and not at all sociopaths are violent, but some are, serial killers for example. Just as 1-2% of the population have sociopathic tendencies, it's my theory that on your standard bell curve there must be 1-2% of the population who have too much empathy for other humans. If I'm correct and one of those people is me we are simply not capable of watching a slasher or horror film because we have excessive empathy for the victims in the picture. The first horror film I saw was Friday The Thirteenth which involves teenagers getting serially murdered by a maniac. I did not enjoy the experience of watching that movie at all. All around me people were laughing, hiding behind their hands etc. but I was utterly aghast  at the poor kids who were being slaughtered. I thought about them for weeks afterwards, wondering how they could have escaped their fate and the emotional damage their murder must have inflicted on their siblings and parents. This, I gather, is not what is supposed to happen in a horror film...what I think is meant to happen is that you get a quick thrill from the murder and then you move on to the next shocking development carried along by the narrative. You are not supposed to be so traumatised that you want to stop the movie. But I reckon if you are one of the 1-2% of us on this theoretical empathy scale you have trouble separating fiction and reality - for people like us suspending our disbelief isn't the problem, for us the problem is remembering that all these individuals in the movie are only pretending to get hurt, the blood isn't real, the knives aren't real and no one actually died here at all. 
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I think this may also be why I have so much trouble liking supposedly frothy middle of the road murder mystery shows like Elementary, Monk, Sherlock, CSI etc. - in a lot of these dramas the show begins with a violent murder (on Elementary it's often incredibly violent) and after that I don't really care how the mystery gets solved or what's going on in the personal lives of the detectives because I'm still reeling from the emotional trauma of the pre title murder sequence. (I also find it very bizarre that on American TV you can show someone getting their throat cut but you are still not allowed to say the word shit, a word which is in Chaucer.) In fact now that I think about it, maybe I dont have the problem at all. Maybe the problem is you. I actually wonder how anybody can enjoy programmes or films which begin with an act of shocking, lurid violence (often against young women). Why do you read torture porn novels and watch tv programmes like this? Why don't you care about the victims? How can you compartmentalize? What the hell is the matter with all of you?

Philosophy and Dr Who

In the 50th anniversary special of Dr Who, The Day of the Doctor, there was a very intriguing philosophical moment that I thought might be interesting to unpack here. It occurred during a negotiation between shape shifting aliens and humans: the aliens had assumed human form and the negotiations between the two parties were going nowhere. The Doctor arrived and wiped their memories with his magic wand (er, sonic screwdriver) so neither party knew whether they were human or alien and they had to negotiate with one another from a position of ignorance. Thus the treaty that would be hammered out between humans and aliens would have to be scrupulously fair, because when your memory came back you wouldn't know which side you'd be on. 

Rawls

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Anyone who has studied political philosophy over the last 35 years will immediately recognize this scenario. It is the so called Original Position from John Rawls's book A Theory of Justice. Much of contemporary political philosophy has been a critique of Rawls from either a communitarian, liberal or libertarian standpoint. What Rawls says is this: imagine you had a bunch of people who were a designing a brand new society - now what if these people didn't know if they were going to be rich or poor, man or woman, black or white, disabled or abled, gay or straight, etc. - what would that society actually look like? Rawls's thought experiment allows a "veil of ignorance" to descend over the negotiators (rather like the Doctor's memory wipe) so that they would end up designing the most "just" society that they could possibly come up with. Rawls's Just Society that comes out of this Original Position has universal healthcare, laws against discrimination, equality for women, enhanced social mobility, protections for minorities etc. - To me it looks a lot like Canada or Denmark. And although what Rawls produced was only a thought experiment he says its a useful one. (Other political and ethical philosophers dispute both the idea of the veil of ignorance and what the laws of the just society would look like.) Rawls claims that we can use this conception of the Just Society to criticize cultures that are very far from his model - societies where there are great disparities of wealth, where minorities and women are not treated well etc. 

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You can get A Theory Of Justice at all good university bookshops or online. My favourite critiques of Rawls are by the philosophers Michael Sandel, Alasdair MacIntyre, Robert Nozick and Ronald Dworkin. 

Alaska Schmalaska

with the Coen brothers' new film Inside Llewyn Davies finally being released next week I'd thought I'd reblog this post about what possibly could be their next film...(or possibly the one after that)
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The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon In Michael Chabon’s universe Alaska isn’t a frontier bastion for singsongy dimwitted governors and moose-killing survivalists but rather is the transplanted home for two million cosmopolitan Jewish refugees crammed into the sprawling city of Sitka just south of Juneau in the Alaskan panhandle. This is the central conceit of Chabon’s THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION, a murder mystery and alternative history noir, that follows Detective Mayer Landsman’s quest to find the person or persons who killed the quiet chess master who lived in his overcrowded flop house. In what used to be called ‘the Jonbar Hinge’ among us sci-fi geeks, the moment Chabon’s Earth diverged from ours was sometime in the late 1930s, when the US government allowed unlimited Jewish migration from a Hitler dominated Europe to refugee camps in Alaska. The book is a kind of a ghost story, imaging the unlived lives of hundreds of thousands of people who, in the real world, were murdered by the Nazis. Chabon’s fantasy is that instead of this vibrant, rich, literary Yiddish culture becoming extinct in 1945, it crossed the Atlantic and survived in America. That’s the premise but what of the book? In many ways it’s a standard police procedural of the Ed McBain / Mickey Spillane school that Chabon has composed in an affectionate pulp 1940’s style. He writes in the urgent present tense with a great deal of panache and economy. Chabon’s metaphors aren’t quite as rich as Raymond Chandler’s (whose are?) and his steeliness isn’t up there with Hammett, but his jokes are as good and sometimes better. His humour is Yiddish humour. Dry, slightly surreal, dark. There’s a gag or Chandlerism every few pages: ‘She took a compliment the way some people take a can of soda that they suspect you’ve shaken first.’ The plot takes a while to get going but that’s ok, as you want to get to grips with Chabon’s Alaska, the alternate time-line and the offbeat characters. When the murder mystery does start to unfold, Chabon spins the yarn with intelligence, style and tight plotting. Alternative History novels are en vogue and a different outcome for World War II is by far the most popular scenario. Philip Roth’s THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA covered similar terrain only three years ago and we’ve also had FATHERLAND, SS GB among many recent others. Chabon himself is a fan of Philip K Dick’s AH novel THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, which towers above all contenders in the ‘Nazis win the war’ field. So although Chabon isn’t quite off in terra nova, what really stuck with me was the idea that every single person in Sitka – the former capital of Russian America (now there’s an idea for an AH novel) – was speaking Yiddish. There’s Yiddish TV, newspapers, radio, songs. Even the Irish newspaper hack talks a kind of low German. I liked this notion because although now virtually extinct as a literary tongue, Yiddish produced an extraordinary corpus of poems, plays and novels in its brief flowering, and today its influence can be felt in everything from Woody Allen films to Mel Brooks and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Irony is the default stance of Yiddish prose. Irony, embedded with black witticisms and a kind of grim fatalism. I have read a critique that Chabon’s style is ‘not Yiddish enough’ and certainly compared with Nobel Prize winner’s IB Singer’s it seems mannered and even a little forced. But actually Chabon does have a precursor in the lesser known Yiddish master Lamed Shapiro, whose American stories were influenced by the US hard-boiled school and seem strikingly similar to Chabon’s mix of paranoia, violence and defiant logic-inverting humour.

TYPU is a thoughtful, introspective, novel - my only real existential criticism is that I don’t think the AH scenario really adds that much to the narrative and I wonder if the novel might not have worked just as well in our universe. Chabon said that the AH was necessary because ‘the Yiddish world is dead’, and while it is true that the Nazis destroyed Yiddish Europe (and the survivors mostly migrated to Israel where they had to speak Hebrew), Yiddish did not die out completely. My own wedding ceremony was in Yiddish at a Yiddish-Bundist commune in Putnam Valley, New York, and anyone who’s been to Kiryas Joel, NY, will find an entire town of 20,000 Haredi Jews with Yiddish newspapers, Yiddish street signs, Yiddish coffee shops, Yiddish schools, self published Yiddish spy novels. And yes, Kiryas Joel even has Yiddish speaking policemen.

In The Morning I'll Be Gone - The First Review

The first review of In The Morning I'll Be Gone came in last week. It's from Jon Page of Bite The Book and here it is (below). Remember Jon only reviewed the galley so the actual book is bound to be funnier, crisper and all together even more brilliant. The heart of In The Morning is pretty much an old school locked room mystery, a subgenre of mystery writing that I've always loved and always wanted to try. Anyway here's what Mr Page had to say:
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Every great trilogy knocks you out with the first one, takes it up a notch with the second one and then blows you away with the final chapter. There a few great trilogies. Many fail at the second hurdle let alone the final one. But not Adrian McKinty. The Sean Duffy books are a truly great trilogy and destined to become a classic of the crime genre and the third and the final volume is the best yet.

Things were not looking good for our hero at the end of I Hear The Sirens In The Street. Sean Duffy had been demoted out of CID and dispatched to the border lands. His career in the police force appeared to be over. That is until a mass breakout occurs from the infamous Maze Prison in September, 1983. One of the IRA’s most dangerous men, Dermot McCann, is on the loose and planning a campaign of terror against Britain. MI5 are prepared to do anything to bring him in, including giving Sean his old job back.

Sean has a connection to Dermot but no one is giving anybody up in Northern Ireland. Sean’s digging instead leads him to an unsolved murder. A locked room mystery that has got everybody stumped. But the key to unearthing Dermot’s whereabouts maybe be found in figuring out this seemingly unsolvable mystery.

As with the previous two books McKinty skillfully blends humour and the grim realities of living in war torn Belfast in 1984 with a gripping, realistic mystery. Sean Duffy is perfectly flawed and damaged but determined to do the right thing, even if that means doing a couple of wrong things. It is a tragedy that this series must come to an end because what McKinty has been able to produce has been very special and he has taken his writing to a new level. There’s a fine line between social commentary and compelling mystery and not many writers, crime or literary, can do both. McKinty has not only been able to pull it off brilliantly but he has done so over three amazing books.


I’m going to miss Sean Duffy but I also can’t wait to see where Adrian McKinty goes next.

Literary Geography

If you are a literature groupie you might enjoy this list. It's my top places - obviously highly subjective - where you can soak up the atmosphere of a particular writer or a certain milieu. It was going to be a top 10 list but there was too much I wanted to cram in. I'm giving you my list in reverse order but really its not in any order if that makes any sense...


14. The Eagle and Child Pub, Oxford, England. The bar where JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis used to go to read aloud their works in progress and get criticism and advice from their peers. Large chunks of The Lord of the Rings and the Narnia books were composed here. They serve real ale and Philip Pullman and even Alan Moore have been known to pop in. Consequently it's a kind of a nerd paradise and it's where I met that lucky(?) lass...the future mother of my children.


13. Dostoyevsky's House, Saint Petersburg, Russia
Ok the whole thing's fake, the furniture isn't period and no one knows exactly what his apartment really looked like, but it is as close as we're going to get to the real McCoyski. When I was there they had a free walking tour map where you could follow Raskolnikov and other characters' routes through the city and that's a great thing to do as long as you don't kill an old lady at the end of it.


12. The Site of Pushkin's Duel in the Woods, The St Petersburg Suburbs, Russia
Since we're in Petersburg we might as well stay here. Pushkin wrote a poem about a young man who threw his life away on a pointless duel in the forest. Rather tragically he then, er, threw his life away on a pointless duel in the forest. There's a statue marking the spot which was hard to find but worth it: when I went to see it there was a beautiful blonde girl in a white dress leaving flowers for Pushkin and weeping for him as if she'd just heard the news. No, unfortunately, she wasn't the good kind of crazy.


11. The Colburn Hotel, Denver, Colorado
Kerouac, Ginsberg, Cassady and William Burroughs used to go to Ginsberg's room in the Colburn to take acid, mescaline and other pharmaceuticals and watch the sun set setting behind the Front Range Mountains. I've never enhanced my experience in such a way but the sun sets are nice.


10. Les Deux Magots, St. Germain, Paris
This place is on all lists like these. The cafe that was the centre of the literary universe for periods in the twenties and again in the fifties. Who mooched cafe au laits and wrote here? Who didn't? Its patrons included: Scott Fitzgerald, Joyce, Dos Passos, Djuna Barnes, Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, Beckett and many others. I mean ok so it's an expensive tourist trap these days but you still have to go here once in your life if only to experience the rudest wait staff in the Western World.


9. The British Museum Round Reading Room, Bloomsbury, London
This is where Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital and where anybody who was anybody in British letters did their research and writing. Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, Auden, Orwell, Waugh, Maugham, Amis etc. all used the RRR at some point. Now that the British library has moved to St Pancras anyone is allowed in to visit the RRR and if you go there early before the hordes of screaming children it can be quite pleasant.


8. The Piano Bar of the Ambos Mundos Hotel, Havana, Cuba
This atmospheric joint is where Hemingway wrote For Whom The Bell Tolls. Be warned the current pianist has an inexplicable fondness for Celine Dion.


7. The Bar of the Ritz Hotel, Paris
The Ritz Hotel was "liberated" by Ernest Hemingway and a few American infantrymen in August 1944. A massive drinking session ensued. Sergeant JD Salinger showed up and Hemingway bought him a few cocktails having been impressed by his early short stories. Oh if those old whisky bottles could talk...


6. Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts
Final resting place for Hawthorne, Emerson, Alcott and Thoreau and a short hike from Walden Pond State Park where you can visit a reconstruction of Thoreau's cabin. There are many great literary cemeteries in the world (Westminster Abbey and Highgate in London; Montmartre, Montparnasse and Pere Lachaise in Paris; the lovely Novodevichy Convent & Cemetery in Moscow) but this is a very special place. For me it's the epitomy of tranquil, quiet, autumnal loveliness and I wouldn't mind spending all eternity here myself (but not for a while yet).

5 Garcia Lorca's House, Granada, Spain
After the somewhat dull symmetries and broken fountains of the Alhambra why not walk down the hill to the home of Spain's greatest twentieth century poet. You won't be disappointed.


4 Dashiell Hammett's Apartment, Post Street, San Francisco
When I visited there was someone actually living here but he was kind enough to let me in anyway. Since this is also technically Sam Spade's apartment too it can be a big thrill for fans of The Maltese Falcon.

3 Robert Louis Stevenson's House, Apia, Samoa
I haven't actually been here but it's very high on my to do list. Mark Twain visited and was impressed and if I remember correctly Paul Theroux dropped by too. Anyway it looks charming and I'd like to go.

2 Trotksy's House & Frida Kahlo's House

Ok neither of them are really writers (though Trot had a nice turn of phrase) but these houses are definitely worth a visit. They're very close to one another in the pretty Coyacan section of Mexico City which was actually a port in the time of stout Cortez. (A mind boggling fact when you see what it looks like now). Trotsky's house was and is a mini fortress and he's buried in the front garden. Frida Kahlo's home is one of the most beautiful interior spaces I've ever been in. She turned the house into a full blown extension of her personality and her art blossoms in every corner.


1 Ernest Hemingway's House, Havana, Cuba
It's quite the scene. Michael Palin wrote an entire book about how no one is allowed to sit in Hemingway's chair. But as you can see...

Hope you liked my little trawl through the literary geography. Let's do this again sometime, I've got a great story about how I tried to beat Dylan Thomas's record in The White Horse Tavern...

Why Dr Who Matters

Looking forward to the big Dr Who event next weekend - the 50th Anniversary Special - so I thought I'd repost this little essay on why Dr Who matters from back in August...
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When Matt Smith announced that he was quitting the role of Dr. Who after this year’s Christmas Special the papers and social media in the UK and Australia and the geeky parts of America went into their now habitual frenzy about who would or should be the next doctor. Dismissed by some as too young for the role (by, er, me actually) Smith in fact has been of the more successful inhabitants of the Tardis. Helped by lively scripts and great companions Smith’s version of the character has been more sprightly, mischievous and elfen than David Tennant's interpretation and his energy will be hard to replace. But Peter Capaldi the new Dr Who is an absolutely inspired choice. I have loved Peter Capaldi's work since Local Hero and when I saw his turn as Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It I was just blown away by the menacing sweary Glasgow genius of his performance. 

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But why should you non geeks out there care about an often cheesy cult British sci-fi show for kids? Well I think you should care because Dr Who represents what is best about the British character and as an icon of Britishness he has no equal. Dr Who is intelligent, witty, wise, eccentric, curious; he keeps cool under pressure and he out-thinks his opponents much more often that he out fights them. Although 12 different actors have inhabited the role of Dr Who I think the defining characteristic of all their takes has been the quintessential stiff upper lip. Sang froid in the face of danger is surely one of the greatest qualities of a gentleman: its what we liked about Michael Caine and Stanley Baker in Zulu, it was the lesson we took from the Titanic disaster (whether it was true or not) and its what we loved to see satirized in Monty Python and, of course, in this fantasic scene from Carry On Up The Khyber. 
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Who can compare to Who among recent British icons? Nobody in my opinion. James Bond is a dreary thug who loves a good punch up, who hates women and who has a very tired line in repartee. Steed from the Avengers (did I say recent?) is a little too fey. Sherlock Holmes is a gloomy misanthrope casting a jaundiced eye on humanity from his upstairs room on Baker Street. Robin Hood? Nah, Robin Hood is way too campy. Flashman? I like Flashman but he's even more of a thug than Bond and a complete coward (which is part of his charm, admittedly). I do love Hilary Mantel's version of Thomas Cromwell but we haven't seen how he responds to the prospect of death yet...No, Dr Who, at least in his current incarnation (since 2005), is the icon of Britishness for our times, indeed the icon of maleness that we all should aspire to be: nimble, quick witted, funny, ironic, compassionate, gallant and brave. He's a little too chaste perhaps but in these troubled times for men it's probably better to err on the side of caution in that department. 

Autobiography - Morrissey

Morrissey trying to conquer the world of literature and attempting to bring back the cream
denim jacket look; only one of these goals is hubristic...

I was half way through writing my review of Morrissey's Autobiography (which as you can see from a couple of posts ago (below) is already one of my favourite books of the year) when I read Terry Eagleton's review, here, in the Guardian and decided not to finish mine because his was so much better. Eagleton noticed many of things that struck me: the devastatingly brilliant evocation of 1960's Manchester, Moz's curious devotion to AE Housman (its hard to take Housman seriously after reading the classic essay Inside The Whale by George Orwell) the odd ad hominem attack on Julie Burchill, the 50 pages devoted to the contract dispute with The Smiths (about 40 pages too long)  etc. etc. Unlike all other Englishmen who were born in the 1950s and have written memoirs Morrissey - wonderfully - never mentions England's 1966 World Cup victory but he does recall fainting at the sight of George Best and watching every single Miss World contest with his mother. And he savages the sadistic dollards who seemed to be in charge of the British educational system from its beginnings right up until the 1980's. Anyway in lieu of a full review I'm giving you the first half of Eagleton's review instead. I've always liked Terry Eagleton, he was one of my philosophy tutors, and his course on literary theory at Oxford was the best series of lectures I've ever attended.
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Terry on Moz: 

Not content with being voted the greatest northern male ever, the second greatest living British icon (he lost out to David Attenborough) and granted the freedom of the city of Tel Aviv, Morrissey is now out to demonstrate that he can write the kind of burnished prose no other singer on the planet could aspire to. There are, to be sure, a few painfully florid patches in this superb autobiography ("Headmaster Mr Coleman rumbles with grumpiness in a rambling stew of hate"), but it would be hard to imagine Ronnie Wood or Eric Clapton portraying the "Duchess of nothing" Sarah Ferguson as "a little bundle of orange crawling out of a frothy dress, the drone of Sloane, blessed with two daughters of Queen Victoria pot-dog pudginess". Morrissey despises most of the people he meets, often with excellent reason. 

He is scurrilous, withdrawn and disdainful, an odd mixture of shyness and vitriol. The dreamy, heart-throbbish photo on the cover of the book, the nose rakishly tilted above the Cupid's-bow lips, belies what a mean old bastard he is. He finds an image of himself in (of all people) the minor Georgian poet AE Housman, who preferred art to humanity and whose ascetic, spiritually tortured life seems to echo Morrissey's own. He admires wayward, bloody-minded types much like himself, and takes a sadistic delight in discomforting interviewers. "Why did you mention Battersea in that song?" a journalist asks him. "Because it rhymes with fatty," he replies. Taken by his father at the age of eight to watch George Best play at Old Trafford, he swoons at the sight of such artistry combined with such rebelliousness. Years later, others will swoon at his own mixing of the two.

Some of his bloody-mindedness springs from a damaged childhood. Born into a working-class Irish-Mancunian family, Steven Patrick Morrissey sang his way out of what struck him as a soulless environment, as other working-class Irish Mancunians have written or acted their way out. The vitriol started to flow early: his bleak mausoleum of a Catholic primary school was ruled by Mother Peter, "a bearded nun who beat children from dawn to dusk", and by the time he was 17 he was already emotionally exhausted. Manchester, still in its pre-cool days, was a "barbaric place where only savages can survive … There are no sexual guidelines, and I see myself naked only by appointment." His eloquent contempt for his fellow citizens is terrifying: "non-human sewer-rats with missing eyes; the loudly insane with indecipherable speech patterns; the mad poor of Manchester's armpit." The final indignity is to be turned down for a job as a postman at the local sorting office. At the hour of the birth of the Smiths, which gave him the exit from Manchester he craved, he felt himself dying of boredom, loneliness and disgust. "I would talk myself through each day," he writes, "as one would nurse a dying friend."

Not long afterwards, hordes of young people throughout the world are wearing his face on their chests. He returns to the streets where he grew up, now with a police escort, to sing to 17,000 fans from a stage overlooking an odious Inland Revenue office where he once worked. Having failed to find love from one man or woman, he can now find it from thousands. Mick Jagger and Elton John are eager to shake his hand. He enjoys his celebrity, but the sardonic self-irony of the book seeks to persuade us otherwise. There is a relish and energy about its prose that undercuts his misanthropy. Its lyrical quality suggests that beneath the hard-bitten scoffer there lurks a romantic softie, while beneath that again lies a hard-bitten scoffer. Implausibly, he claims to be "chilled" by road signs reading "Morrissey Concert, Next Left". It's true, however, that having spent years yearning to be seen, he now spends years longing to be invisible. Living in Hollywood is hardly the best place for that. He deals with his own egocentricity by being wryly amusing about it: his birth almost killed his mother, he comments, because even then his head was too big.

Even so, he remains for the most part icily unillusioned, like a monk passing through a whorehouse. His contempt for the music industry is visceral, and he prefers to spend his time reading Auden and James Baldwin. (Spotting Baldwin in a Barcelona hotel, he decides not to approach him, since even the mildest rejection would apparently mean he would have to go and hang himself.) The solution to all problems, he tells us, "is the goodness of privacy in a warm room with books". David Bowie tells him that he's had so much sex and drugs that he's surprised he is still alive, to which Morrissey replies that he's had so little of both that he feels much the same. Tom Hanks comes backstage to say hello, but Morrissey doesn't know who he is. The press lie that he is a racist, that he opened the door to a journalist wearing a tutu, that he hung around public toilets as a youth and that he would welcome the assassination of Margaret Thatcher. The Guardian runs a disapproving piece on him adorned with a photo of somebody else. When he discovers that a Smiths record released in Japan includes a track by Sandie Shaw, he begs the people around him to kill him. "Many rush forward," he adds.

You can read the rest of the excellent review, in the Guardian, here. I'd say that I was a little bit more criticial of the book than Terry who practically gushes towards the end of his piece. I mean there are flaws in Autobiography. Because of Morrissey's somewhat baroque style for example I'm still not clear what his dad for his living and whether his parents are still alive. Is he gay? Bisexual? Celibate? Moz thinks that's none of our business and maybe he's right but why not just tell us that instead of being so coy about it. I wonder too if the last 100 pages of the book couldn't have been a little more tightly edited. Yeah it can't be easy to edit Morrissey but that's why they pay you the big bucks at Penguin isn't it? And finally a book like this is crying out for an index, indexers don't charge that much so why Penguin Classics didn't pay for one is beyond me. Still, these are quibbles, I rated this an A in my books journal and it goes next to David Peace's Red or Dead as one of my favourites of the year. 

Borgen Is Back

Ok, so it also helps that the Prime Minister, er, appeals to men of a certain age...

Season 2 of Borgen started on Wednesday night here in Australia on the "minority needs" channel SBS. I was really worried that Borgen wasn't ever going to be shown again here in Oz because last season Borgen only got about 40,000 viewers each week in Melbourne which represented less than 1% of the population of the Greater Melbourne Area. Borgen got even lower viewing figures in Australia's other capital cities. (For some reason all the quality shows get their highest ratings in Melbourne, while the lowest common denominator shows get their highest ratings in Sydney - make of that what you will...) But low ratings are a double edged sword aren't they? You want them to be low enough so that the show you're into doesn't become a pop culture phenomenon, but you don't want them to be so low that the network takes the show off the air, right?
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Borgen is about the Danish parliament and machinations of Denmark's first female Prime Minister, her permanently unshaven annoying ex husband, her sprightly spin doctor, her dour cabinet colleagues and a spunky - slightly irritating - tabloid news reporter and her colleagues. More realistic than either House of Cards or The West Wing it's a political drama that usually gets by without much drama. (The Season 2 debut however was about the Danes in Afghanistan and had an entirely predictable oh I wonder if that young guy shaking the Prime Minister's hand is going to get hurt story arc. I hope the rest of Season 2 is more humdrum.) The whole thing is in Danish, of course, subtitled into English. I read on a TV blog that subtitled programmes do very badly in Oz because the Australian TV viewer is a multi-tasker who likes to surf the net with the TV on in the background, but Borgen is worth an hour of someone's undivided attention even if they're not a political theory geek like me. 
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Denmark is one of the world's happiest countries, it's also one of the world's most socially mobile countries (i.e. poor Danes are given the opportunity to live what used to to be called the American dream) and its the place where women have the highest representation in politics and business. I guess that in one of our potential futures the whole of the West is going to look like this in about 30 years; if you're worried that Utopia is going to be a boring place to live watch Borgen and you'll that see that you're wrong. 

PD James's Tips For Writing

The great PD James was interviewed by the BBC last weekend and had some

very good writing advice that I've cut and paste below. I disagree with her very first point (I reckon anyone who has competent communication skills can be taught how to write) but I'm with her on the others. Writing is a craft that requires discipline, and writing well should be the writer's goal, not success (certainly not financial success because financial success is contingent on any number of factors that are frustratingly beyond your control: luck, the Zeitgeist, the competence of the PR people, actually getting reviewed, etc. etc.) Whenever I teach writing I stress the importance of reading widely and having the discipline to practice your craft as often as you can, every day if possible. I also really like rules 8 and 9... Anyway here's what the feisty, 92 year old, Baroness James had to say to the BBC: 

1. You must be born to write

You can't teach someone to know how to use words effectively and beautifully. You can help people who can write to write more effectively and you can probably teach people a lot of little tips for writing a novel, but I don't think somebody who cannot write and does not care for words can ever be made into a writer. It just is not possible.

Nobody could make me into a musician. Somebody might be able to teach me how to play the piano reasonably well after a lot of effort, but they can't make a musician out of me and you cannot make a writer, I do feel that very profoundly.

2. Write about what you know

You absolutely should write about what you know. There are all sorts of small things that you should store up and use, nothing is lost to a writer. You have to learn to stand outside of yourself. All experience, whether it is painful or whether it is happy is somehow stored up and sooner or later it's used.

I love situations where people are thrown together in unwelcome proximity. where all kinds of reprehensible emotions can bubble up. I think you must write what you feel you want to write because then the book is genuine and that comes through.

I believe that someone who can write, who has a feeling for words and knows how to use them will find a publisher. Because after all, publishers do still need to find new writers. We all get old and we die and that's that and there have to be successors.

3. Find your own routine

I think all we writers are different. It's interesting, isn't it, how different we are?

Some people have to have the room, the pen and others do everything on a computer. I write by hand and I can write more or less anywhere as long as I've got a comfortable chair, a table, an unlimited amount of biros to write with and lined paper to write on. And then the next day when my PA comes, which she does at 10 o'clock, then I've got quite a lot to dictate to her and she puts it on to the computer, prints it out and I do the first revision.

In a sense, therefore, I revise as I go. It's important to get up early - before London really wakes and the telephone calls begin and the emails pile up. This is the best time for me, the time of quiet in the morning,

4. Be aware that the business is changing

Goodness gracious, how the world of publishing has changed! It is much easier now to produce a manuscript with all the modern technology. It is probably a greater advantage now, more than ever before, to have an agent between you and the publisher.

Everything has changed and it's really quite astonishing, because people can self-publish now. I would once have thought that that was rather a self-defeating way of doing it but actually publishers do look at what is self-published and there are examples of people picking up very lucrative deals.

5. Read, write and don't daydream!

To write well, I advise people to read widely. See how people who are successful and good get their results, but don't copy them. And then you've got to write! We learn to write by writing, not by just facing an empty page and dreaming of the wonderful success we are going to have. I don't think it matters much what you use as practice, it might be a short story, it might be the beginning of a novel, or it might just be something for the local magazine, but you must write and try and improve your writing all the time. Don't think about it or talk about it, get the words down.

6. Enjoy your own company

It is undoubtedly a lonely career, but I suspect that people who find it terribly lonely are not writers. I think if you are a writer you realise how valuable the time is when you are absolutely alone with your characters in complete peace. I think it is a necessary loneliness for most writers - they wouldn't want to be always in the middle of everything having a wonderful life. I've never felt lonely as a writer, not really, but I know people do.

7. Choose a good setting

Something always sparks off a novel, of course. With me, it's always the setting. I think I have a strong response to what I think of as the 'spirit of a place'. I remember I was looking for an idea in East Anglia and standing on a very lonely stretch of beach. I shut my eyes and listened to the sound of the waves breaking over the pebble shore. Then I opened them and turned from looking at the dangerous and cold North Sea to look up and there, overshadowing this lonely stretch of beach was the great, empty, huge white outline of Sizewell nuclear power station. In that moment I knew I had a novel. It was called Devices and Desires.

8. Never go anywhere without a notebook

Never go anywhere without a notebook because you can see a face that will be exactly the right face for one of your characters, you can see place and think of the perfect words to describe it. I do that when I'm writing, I think it's a sensible thing for writers to do.

I've written little bits of my next novel, things that have occurred to me. I've got the setting already. I've got the title, I've got most of the plot and I shall start some serious writing of it next month, I think.

9. Never talk about a book before it is finished

I never talk about a book before it is finished and I never show it to anybody until it is finished and I don't show it to anybody even then, except for my publisher and my agent. Then there is this awful time until they phone.

I'm usually pretty confident by the time I've sent it in but I have those moments when I think, 'well I sent it to them on Friday, by Saturday night they should be ringing up to say how wonderful it is!'

I'm always aware that people might have preferences and think that one book is better than another.

10. Know when to stop

I am lucky to have written as many books as I have, really, and it has been a joy. With old age, it becomes very difficult. It takes longer for the inspiration to come, but the thing about being a writer is that you need to write.

What I am working on now will be another detective story, it does seem important to write one more. I think it is very important to know when to stop.

Some writers, particularly of detective fiction, have published books that they should not have published. I don't think my publisher would let me do that and I don't think my children would like me to. I hope I would know myself whether a book was worth publishing. I think while I am alive, I shall write. There will be a time to stop writing but that will probably be when I come to a stop, too.  

The Fix Is In

Ever suspected that the fix is in? It is. The rich get richer. The private school boys look out for themselves. While you and me have to run really hard just to stay in the same place.

Books Of The Year - November Update

Occasionally in emails or tweets or blog comments I get asked what I'm reading at the moment or have enjoyed recently. It's an easy question for me to answer as I've been keeping a meticulous, nerdy, indexed (!) reading log that dates back to 1993. 
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I have no reading plan or set books; I don't read for self improvement (I'm with Dr Johnson on this one); I read exactly what I want to read when I want to (except occasionally when I have to read stuff for the newspaper). This then (below) is what my 2013 log looks like so far without the cross referencing, notes and index. The list is in chronological order. The grades are highly subjective, provisional and change frequently as time passes (and as you can see I'm a pretty easy grader).

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1. Plainwater - Anne Carson B

2. The Professor - Terry Castle A 

3. Just My Type - Simon Garfield B

4. The Generals - (audiobook) Thomas E Ricks A+

5. The Antidote - Oliver Burkeman B+

6. Why Does The World Exist - Jim Holt (began in 2012) B+

7. The Yellow Birds - Kevin Powers (began in 2012) C+

8. Thinking The Twentieth Century - Tony Judt A

9. Our Times - AN Wilson B

10. The Killer Angels - Michael Shaara A

11. The Swerve - Stephen Greenblatt D

12. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again - David Foster Wallace A

13. The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton - Anne Sexton A

14. Desolation Island - Patrick O'Brian (audiobook) B+ * 

15. The Fortune of War - Patrick O'Brian (audiobook) B+ *

16. Daniel Deronda - George Eliot B+

17. A Town Like Alice - Nevile Shute D

18. TransAtlantic - Colum McCann A

19. The Old Ways: a Journey On Foot - Robert Macfarlane (audiobook) A
20. Hope: A Tragedy - Sholem Auslander B
21. The Crimson Petal And The White - Michel Faber A
22. The Far Side Of The World - Patrick O'Brian (audiobook) A*
23. Socrates and a Platypus Go Into A Bar - Daniel Klein E
23. The Reverse of The Medal - Patrick O'Brian (audiobook) A*
24. Inferno - Dan Brown (audiobook) C

25. The Thirteen Gun Salute - Patrick O'Brian (audiobook) B+*
26. How To Live: A Life Of Montaigne In 21 Questions And An Answer - Sarah Bakewell B
27. Miami Blues - Charles Willeford A
28. Into The Silence - Wade Davis A
29. The Truelove - Patrick O'Brian (audiobook) C*
30. The Finish - Mark Bowden B
31. The Wild Places - Robert Macfarlane C
32. Armchair Nation - Joe Moran A
33. The Wine Dark Sea - Patrick O'Brian (audiobook) A*
34. Harry Potter And The Chamber of Secrets - JK Rowling E
35. Wool 1-5 - Hugh Howey B
36. Sinead Morrissey - Parallax A
37. The Luminaries - Elanor Catton A
38. Red or Dead - David Peace A+
39. Edgelands - Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley A+
40. Longbourn - Jo Baker A
41. The Broken Road - Patrick Leigh Fermor A
42. Autobiography - Morrissey A

The books that have really stuck out for me in 2013 so far have been The Generals, Red or Dead, Edgelands and Morrissey's Autobiography, and the Luminaries was pretty good too. As you can see I've had a pretty amazing run of books in the last 2 months beginning with Sinead Morrissey's Parallax and ending (so far) with the Moz himself. In case this gets taken as a kind of my-books-of-the-year blog (which I'll probably be too lazy to actually write) I should also mention the new crime novels by Declan Burke (Slaughter's Hound) and John McFetridge (Black Rock) both of which I read last year in galley and both of which I rank A+. Additionally, I just got the new Ian Rankin yesterday and although I've only looked at the cover, that smells like an A too. 
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* I'm working my way through the Patrick O'Brian audiobooks for the 4th time.

Why I Loathe Downton Abbey

A post from last October when I was living in Seattle and I saw Downton Abbey for the first time on PBS and was somewhat hooked and somewhat aghast...(I'm a lot mellower now, I promise.)
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I hadn't seen Downton Abbey until this weekend but I knew it sounded dodgy because The Daily Mail has been boosting it for the last two years and anything The Daily Mail loves is prima facie revolting. The paper who drooled over Hitler until September 1 1939 (and secretly until May 1940) has long been a champion of reactionary rhetoric and causes. But I've been puzzled by Downton Abbey because it keeps winning awards and Hollywood is far to the left of The Daily Mail. What gives? I decided that I should probably watch this show and decide for myself, which is what I did on Sunday.  
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The first thing to say is that Downton Abbey is right wing patrician propaganda of the silliest kind. The benevolent view of the upper classes and the condescending treatment of the lower orders is so sniveling and ridiculous that I wonder that the cast doesn't blush with shame every time they go on set. All the cruelest, wickedest characters live below stairs and although the upstairs ladies and gents sometimes are a bit bitchy basically they are the benevolent overloads of the Empire. Johnny Foreigner is not to be trusted in Downton Abbey be he greasy Turk or gauche American and in one embarrassing scene even the Irish Republican chauffeur breaks down and admits that he secretly worships the English ruling class. So I can see why The Daily Mail loves this show. They would like nothing less than to turn back the clock to 1913 when the lower orders and women knew their place and puffy faced men ruled one quarter of the globe from London clubs. But why do the Emmy voters love Downton Abbey too? Well just because it's reactionary nonsense doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad show. Some of my favourite writers have been right wing nuts: Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin spring to mind. And what Downton has going for it is the fact that its pretty funny. Maggie Smith is a gem and wisely they have a policy of giving her all the best lines. Dame Maggie Smith could read the phone book (is there still a phone book?) and make it entertaining and here she has sensibly decided to ignore her actual character and just play Oscar Wilde's Lady Bracknell for all she's worth. However like Tom Reagan being led into the woods of Miller's Crossing the snappy dialogue does tend to dry up as time marches on. Series 2 doesn't have too many gags and when Dame Maggie isn't on screen the charisma drops by a million candle power. Without good dialogue you start to notice the actual plot and the plot, good Lord, is the cheesiest of cheesy soap opera. It's a prettily shot and wonderfully lit soap opera though, with ravishing costumes, nice frocks and an attractive cast (well attractive for England anyway). So I think the Emmy voters like Downton Abbey because most of them are actors and actors dig soap opera and American actors in particular tend to think anything from the BBC and England is classy (even though Downton Abbey is actually a production of ITV). 
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If Downton Abbey were a better show its values might stir the blood and hasten the revolution but it's so vulgar and cliched and laughable that no one is going to get too worked up about it. It gets its facts wrong all the time (in one episode set in 1918 two characters were talking about the "rising that happened in Dublin last Easter") and it gets cheesier and lazier as Julian Fellowes (his actual name is, get this, Julian Alexander Kitchener-Fellowes, Baron Fellowes of West Stafford) runs of material. But like I say none of this matters that much. Downton Abbey can be enjoyed by many walks of American life: ladies with cats, ladies without cats who like old frocks, Anglophile gay men, conservatives longing for the good old days, and Brits abroad (for ironic mocking reasons). The intersection of all these types and thus the ideal American viewer of Downton Abbey would have to be Quentin Crisp but he, alas, has passed. 

Morrissey On Lost In Space

One of the delights of Morrissey's Autobiography is his TV criticism. Precious novelists from the Iowa Writer's Workshop can write memoirs with titles like "When I Was Young I Read Books" but working class British kids either played in the street when it wasn't raining or watched TV when it was. All British kids watched the same shows because there were only 3 channels and the BBC and ITV repeated their programmes endlessly; no American I've ever met has heard of, say, Champion The Wonder Horse, but every Brit over a certain age, including Morrissey, has memories of rainy Saturday mornings watching dreary 50's fare like that. One of Morrissey's more entertaining spiels is about the much more familiar show, Lost in Space. I wasn't a huge fan of Lost in Space and when I watched it it was mostly because of Penny Robinson but for Morrissey the gratingly sane Robinsons
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
                                                 















Pretty good, eh? And don't get him started on Captain Pugwash...  

Morrissey and The 10 Greatest Rock Memoirs

I've been reading Morrissey's memoir, Autobiography, published by Penguin Classics (!) and I have to say that so far it's been pretty great. I'll do a full review when I'm done but what I like about the opening chapters is Morrissey's voice and his beautiful evocation of the Irish diaspora community in 1960's Manchester. There have been several negative reviews of the book, one by Stuart Maconie in The Guardian which I respect and a silly and typically unfocused one by The New Yorker's pop music critic, Sasha Frere Jones that I completely discount. Frere Jones has annoyed me for years because he's an aristocrat who - I reckon - only got his job through influential connections, in hundreds of articles he's evinced no understanding of pop music at all, and by a long way he's the New Yorker's dullest writer. Of course maybe I'm biased, I've always liked Morrissey, and I've done a few oblique shout outs to his music and his prose skills over the years in my books (you may have noticed several mentions of The Cramps' Fanzine Legion of the Cramped in at least two of my novels: Legion of course was edited by Morrissey and was his first prose work.) 
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If it continues to be this good Autobiography could get into the unofficial top 10 list of rock memoirs, which is the kind of thing Morrissey would hold in utter contempt. What are the greatest rock memoirs? Well, there's a list on Rolling Stone Magazine, here, but its a bit of a dodgy effort as you'll see if you go over there. (It really took a ghost writer of genius to make Steven Tyler's life incredibly boring and to include his memoir on their list proves that a) they haven't read the book or b) they have no literary compass at all.) I reckon that you need 3 elements to produce a really great rock and roll memoir: 1) Solid music credentials. 2) Good anecdotes. 3) Good writing. You can be missing or weak in one of these elements but if you're missing in 2 its fatal. Morrissey has all three working for him so far in my read (but the Guardian says the book declines after the midway point).  
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So what are the best rock memoirs? I'm not going to pretend to be some big well read music guy. I'm not. I haven't read a lot memoirs period and I certainly haven't read everything on the Rolling Stone list (or would want to) but for what it's worth here's my little list of the 10 best rock autobiographies which I have actually read. I'm putting Morrissey in at number 7 for now...My number 1 memoir is John Lydon's Rotten: No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs and coincidentally if you look at my list it turns out that being black, Irish or Jewish is a big plus when it comes to rock memoir writing...

10. Touching From A Distance: Deborah Curtis
9. Twisting My Melon: Shaun Ryder
8. The Hacienda - How Not To Run A Club: Peter Hook
7. Autobiography: Morrissey
6. The Tao of Wu: The RZA
5. Take It Like A Man: Boy George 
4. Chronicles: Bob Dylan
3. Rat Girl: Kristin Hersh
2. Just Kids: Patti Smith
1. Rotten - No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs: John Lydon