Court philosopher to The Huffington Post Bernard-Henri Levy was exposed as a fraud on French television yesterday after quoting a fictional philosopher in defense of his book on Immanuel Kant. According to The Times Levy had not checked his sources before writing the book and was unaware that Jean-Baptiste Botul (founder of the, heh, botulism school of criticism) was a fictional character and an elaborate literary joke, something he would have discovered if he'd spent two seconds looking him up on wikipedia. The Times has the whole story here.Wednesday, February 10, 2010
You, me and Bernie? Where would we go, Verna? Niagara Falls?
Court philosopher to The Huffington Post Bernard-Henri Levy was exposed as a fraud on French television yesterday after quoting a fictional philosopher in defense of his book on Immanuel Kant. According to The Times Levy had not checked his sources before writing the book and was unaware that Jean-Baptiste Botul (founder of the, heh, botulism school of criticism) was a fictional character and an elaborate literary joke, something he would have discovered if he'd spent two seconds looking him up on wikipedia. The Times has the whole story here.Sunday, February 7, 2010
Pick Me Out A Winner Bobby - The Best Sports Movies Ever
I went to see Invictus yesterday. It wasn't bad. Matt Damon was about a foot too small but I dug his accent and his ball greediness, so typical of a flanker desperate to get all the glory while prop forwards do all the work. Anyhoo, it wasn't a classic. If I remember rightly the South Africans were the favourites to win that world cup and really how can you make a sports movie about the favourites? Still it gave me an excuse to have a think about my top sports flicks of all time and here for your edification is my list:
#14 Slap Shot - one of the few sports movies written by a woman (Nancy Dowd). The Hanson (Carlson) brothers are the standout.
#13 Rudy - My recollections of this film are hazy but I seem to remember this dialogue: "Oh Mr Frodo, sir, let me carry it for you. Please (sobbing) please Mr Frodo, please."
#12 Dodge Ball - that Rip Torn cracks me up. Here he is again hitting Norman Mailer with a hammer.
#11 Pride of the Yankees - Lou Gehrig gives his "luckiest man" speech at Yankee stadium, grown men weep.
#10 Gladiator - Boy was I surprised, I thought Commodus was going to win in the arena only to be strangled later in his bath by the wrestler Narcissus.
#9 Rocky - I'm not a big fan of boxing movies, hence no Raging Bull, but in Rocky I really like the stuff in the pet shop, the unorthodox training, the yelling of the word "Adrian" and the fact that (spoiler alert) he loses.
#8 Escape to Victory - I'm only including this because Pele is in it.
#7 Hoosiers - the movie that somehow makes basketball seem interesting.
#6 Bang the Drum Slowly - De Niro, baseball, death. And jokes. (Nah only kidding, no jokes).
#5 Field of Dreams - That penultimate scene - grown men weep again.
#4 Chariots of Fire - duh duh duh duh duhh duhhhh, duh duh duh duh duhhhh etc.
#3 The Natural - Someone read the book and decided to remove all the cynicism and cast uber WASP Robert Redford in the scrappy Roy Hobbs role. Still, "knock the cover off the ball, Roy" and "pick me out a winner, Bobby" get me every single time.
#2 Breaking Away - bicycling in a big circle 500 times. No really. Oh and yeah its one of the best films of all time.
#1 Bull Durham - Maybe now Costner and Sarandon will get together just like in the movies.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
On The Road Again
You always know how a Cormac McCarthy novel is going to end. The strong man will vanquish the weak man. The man more versed in knife fighting will best the novice. The man with the shotgun bandoleer will save the child of the man armed only with an empty pistol. The bald headed immortal will kill the illiterate wastrel who is the witness to his crimes. And it's always men doing the killing. Women seldom appear and when they do they're usually doing the dying or being fought over like heroines of the silent screen....
I've been reading Cormac McCarthy since the 1980's when I discovered Child of God in high school. I tore through his Tennessee novels and his Texas novels and his crime novel and at the weekend I finished his science fiction novel The Road. I've had misgivings about McCarthy's plots before (I've never liked the scene where they make gunpowder in Blood Meridian) but never about his prose. McCarthy writes as though its the 1640's and he's a pamphleteer warning a nervous populace that the apocalypse is imminent. His words are careful, atavistic, beautiful. His sentences are as crisp as haiku, his chapters as epic as Miltonian books.
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The Road begins seven or eight years after a comet has struck the Earth. Society everywhere has collapsed. Chaos reigns. And by chaos I mean cannibalism, slavery, murder, rape; the only organisation that seems to exist in this entropic, Hobbesian war of all against all is from isolated bands of anarchists who may or may not be benign. Into a wasted landscape (where photosynthesis has ceased and most animal phyla are extinct) a man and a boy are heading south before the brutal winter comes. The man can barely keep going, but he has to as the boy's mother has cut her throat in despair not too long before the book begins. The weak mother has failed her child but the resourceful father will not give up. In wonderful scenes he finds hidden springs, apples from an orchard, an old can of Coke and fuel for a fire. He gives everything to the boy and they dodge marauders and enslavers and those terrifying cannibals.
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The story is as harrowing as any Cormac McCarthy novel since Outer Dark but the prose is just as carefully wrought as his previous works. McCarthy thinks long and hard about how a word will sound in a sentence and if the word doesn't quite work he'll find a better one. I listened to The Road as an audiobook and there were times when it was like being privy to some secret ceremony in which magic spells were being chanted for my ears alone. Often the book would get too much and I'd have to unplug my iPod and listen to the silence for a while.
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Having said that though, I knew how the story was going to finish - though it (spoiler alert) turned out to be the Far From the Madding Crowd in McCarthy's rather Hardyesque universe. And of course all of my problems with McCarthy the artist are still there. The urban is disdained, the rural worshipped, women in The Road are the strange, enfeebled creatures beloved of patriarchal religion, while the male lead is the strong, silent type who - of course - is good with his hands. Mussolini would have enjoyed this book and doubtless The Road is a best seller among survivalists. No, Mussolini isn't quite the person I'm looking for. Nietzsche is closer to the mark - the great German prose stylist par excellence who also dismissed women, townies, the weak and people who talked too much; McCarthy - in a different branch of Germanic - treads through similar terrain. Although he's probably America's greatest living novelist with more poetic depth, lyricism and psychological insight than his contemporaries, his adulation of strength does get a bit wearisome after a while and I can't even imagine what the poor love thinks of a film like Brokeback Mountain. I do recommend The Road (and the other McCarthy novels) but I was quite relieved when it was over and as an antidote I watched Annie Hall - there the guy doesn't quite win either, but he doesn't have to hit anyone to show that he's a man; and he's funny.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Au Bout de la Terre in Vancouver
A couple of years ago I went to Vancouver to do a little thing on William Gibson. The William Gibson thing didnt come to pass but I hung out for three days had a very nice time. I got a deal on Orbitz and stayed at the Pan Pacific for 1 dollar a night and the view I had from my room was spectacular, looking down on flying boats landing in the bay. I had great breakfasts and fantastic fish meals in the evenings and I went to a donut factory for lunch. I took a kayak tour of the city and went running in the gorgeous Stanley Park. On my third and last today I took the bus out to UBC to see the campus and some locations for Battlestar Galactica (yes I know you dont even need to say it). I walked around UBC for a few hours and then I discovered a trail down to the sea. It was quite stormy and I found myself on this windswept place called Wreck Beach. The visibility was extraordinary. You could see all the way up to the mountains in the north, in the far west Vancouver Island and in the south almost down to Puget Sound. The sky was blue and it was cold and the beach was littered with big trees from the forests further up the Inland Passage. I stayed there alone watching the sun set over VI and the Pacific. It was extraordinary and peaceful and as close as I've ever gotten to any feeling of transcendence on this Earth.Tuesday, February 2, 2010
We're Not Saying You Had To Be An Idiot To Have Liked Avatar, But...
Sunday, January 31, 2010
The Books In Salinger's Safe
I did a little piece for The Times yesterday about JD Salinger that you can read here or in a slightly different form below:...
JD Salinger's death could be the beginning of a mini gold rush for the beleaguered American publishing industry. Although Salinger published nothing after 1961, in her memoir Dream Catcher, his daughter Margaret says that her father was extremely disciplined, writing every single morning, sometimes remaining in his study all day typing and editing. When she asked what he was doing he told her that he “was working on my books.” Occasionally he would even show her completed manuscripts, although he wouldn’t let her read them. What were these mysterious books about? It’s impossible to say but my guess is that they mostly concerned the Glass family, the heroes of his story collections: Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey and Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour and Introduction. Margaret Salinger says that there were dozens of notebooks all over the house about the fictional Glasses that traced their connections, noted their likes and dislikes, and detailed their habits. Salinger was always referring to the notebooks and may have been using them to plot full length novels about the Glass kids.
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The Glasses were a large, self obsessed group of children who grew up in New York in the 1930's and who, in Salinger’s universe, appeared on a radio quiz show called It’s A Wise Child which made them famous. Like Salinger they had a Jewish father, a Christian mother and were smart beyond their years. They’re an interesting bunch certainly but to me at least the Glass family short stories which appeared in the New Yorker are not as warm or as interesting as Salinger’s great novel The Catcher in the Rye about another precocious youth, Holden Caulfield. Still there are some beautiful Glass family tales and A Perfect Day for Bananafish about World War Two veteran Seymour Glass’s breakdown and suicide is a classic. Full length novels about Seymour or Zooey or Buddy or any of the Glasses would certainly be fascinating.
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The “manuscripts in a safe” story was given credence by The New York Times who claim in their Salinger obituary that there are at least two manuscripts sitting in a bank vault in Cornish, New Hampshire; but my guess is that there are many more. Salinger wrote relatively quickly and surely in fifty years he produced more than two books. And yes, Salinger became increasingly eccentric as the decades went on and there is a possibility that these manuscripts are stuffed with mad ramblings or like Jack Torrance in The Shining filled with the same line repeated over and over. I don’t think so. In Ian Hamilton’s biography In Search of JD Salinger, Salinger is lucid, canny and clever well into the 1980's and only last year his lawyers stopped the publication of a Swedish “sequel” to Catcher in the Rye on the instructions of their client.
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Salinger himself several times referred to his unpublished books and gave directions that they should be published unedited after his death. This will be exciting few weeks, for although the aloof Glasses are not everyone’s cup of tea there could be other stuff in there too. Before his half century long hermitage in New Hampshire Salinger had an intriguing life. A platoon sergeant who landed at Utah beach he fought with his troops throughout the Normandy theatre and took part in the capture of Paris, where he had a drink with Ernest Hemingway in the freshly liberated bar of the Ritz Hotel. Sergeant Salinger was at the rough end of the dreadful battle of Huertgen forest and he apparently was also present at the liberation of at least one concentration camp.
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After the war Salinger met all of New York's literary elite and was widely celebrated and well travelled. It was only following the publication of Catcher in the Rye that he began to be pestered by adoring fans and decided to withdraw from the world to the relative obscurity of a house in Cornish, New Hampshire. (I say ‘relative’ obscurity because everyone in Cornish knows where Salinger lived and it is very easy to find his house.) Salinger embraced Eastern religions, meditation, vegetarianism, and apart from writing did not appear thereafter to do much of anything. He had no comment when Mark David Chapman said that Catcher in the Rye inspired him to shoot John Lennon in 1980. He refused every plea to turn Catcher into a film, turning down Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and others.
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My guess is that the film will now happen and we are certainly going to see many authorised and unauthorised biographies too. I suppose in a few months information will start to leak out about the manuscripts in the safe, but since all of Salinger’s books have sold in the millions, one thing is clear: whether they are good or bad, about the Glasses or about Holden, or even the War, they are all going to be best sellers and the publishing house who prints them is going to make a fortune.
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My agent Bob saw the piece above in The Times and emailed me this little postscript: "Adrian, years ago I had a two-too-many drink lunch with his agent Phyllis Westberg and she said that they had had discussions with him about the rules of what he was leaving behnd--and that he'd told them there would be plenty for them to deal with."
Friday, January 29, 2010
These Micksploitation Flicks Must End
Several years ago, I wrote an article called "Blarney Stoned" for Movieline in which I attempted to determine which was the most absurdly stereotypical Hibernian film in the history of cinema. Basically, there were two kinds of motion pictures in this genre: those centring on the Irish Republican Army, and those focusing on the wee, canny, loveable Irish people who always have a bounce in their step and a song in their hearts. The first group included everything from The Informer to Odd Man Out to Cal to Michael Collins. The second group included The Field, The Legend of Roan Inish, The Quiet Man, Far and Away, and even The Commitments. By and large, the IRA films tend to be engrossing if predictable, while the second group tend to be sappy and even more predictable films in which the pipes, the pipes never stop calling from glen to glen, making anyone of Irish or Irish-American ancestry desperate to get the next plane out of Carrickfergus for Santa Monica.
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Gotta love the Carrickfergus reference. And nobody, nobody ever seems to be able to get an Irish accent right except Miranda Richardson in The Crying Game. The worst Irish accent on film? Come on thats like shooting fish in a barrel. How about the worst Irish accent on film by a Scotsman who really should know better: My four finalists are Sean Connery, Billy Connolly, Ewan McGregor and Gerard Butler. I have to give the prize to Gerry Butler because at least he apologized.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
I Have Seen The Future of Rock and Roll
Monday, January 25, 2010
Roger Ebert
Removed from the grind of television and in recovery from cancer surgery Roger Ebert has become a deep, introspective blogger and writer. Apart from somehow loving Avatar, I think he's become a better film reviewer too. Here's how he begins his review of The Lovely Bones:"The Lovely Bones is a deplorable film with this message: If you're a 14-year-old girl who has been brutally raped and murdered by a serial killer, you have a lot to look forward to. You can get together in heaven with the other teenage victims of the same killer, and gaze down in benevolence upon your family members as they mourn you and realize what a wonderful person you were. Sure, you miss your friends, but your fellow fatalities come dancing to greet you in a meadow of wildflowers, and how cool is that?
The makers of this film seem to have given slight thought to the psychology of teenage girls, less to the possibility that there is no heaven, and none at all to the likelihood that if there is one, it will not resemble a happy gathering of new Facebook friends. In its version of the events, the serial killer can almost be seen as a hero for liberating these girls from the tiresome ordeal of growing up and dispatching them directly to the Elysian Fields. The film's primary effect was to make me squirmy. It's based on the best-seller by Alice Sebold that everybody seemed to be reading a couple of years ago. I hope it's not faithful to the book; if it is, millions of Americans are scary. The murder of a young person is a tragedy, the murderer is a monster, and making the victim a sweet, poetic narrator is creepy. This movie sells the philosophy that even evil things are God's will, and their victims are happier now. Isn't it nice to think so. I think it's best if they don't happen at all. But if they do, why pretend they don't hurt? Those girls are dead."
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Brilliant, eh? Ebert's post on no longer being able to eat food or drink has rightly become a recent blogging classic. The fact that he mentions one of Cormac McCarthy's lesser known (and one of my favourite) novels Suttree in it is all to the good, although Roger and I are very different people - the scene that sticks in my mind from that book is the, er, incident in the melon patch.
Saturday, January 23, 2010
James Ellroy On Desert Island Discs
Thursday, January 21, 2010
The Sock That Sank The Presidency
I married a girl from Newton, Massachusetts and I have family in Newburyport and Cape Anne. I've spent the last eighteen summers and most Christmases on Plum Island, Mass. My driving license is from Beverly and I took my test in Salem with a big State Trooper called O'Rourke. (I drove through a stop sign and could not parallel park and he passed me with flying colours.) So I think I know the Bay State a little bit. It was with incredulity then that I heard Democratic Senatorial Candidate for Ted Kennedy's seat, Martha Coakley, say live on radio that Curt Schilling was a Yankees fan. Curt Schilling. Curt frickin Schilling. Now, I am a Yankees fan and have spent far more energy than I should hating Curt Schilling. Curt Schilling was the Yankees killer in the 2004 ALCS (an event we shall never speak of again on this blog) pitching his games hurt and like Robert Redford in The Natural with 'blood' leaking out onto his uniform (in Schilling's case, his sock). Schilling won two World Series for the Red Sox which is two more than the revered Ted Williams ever did and the sock went into the baseball Hall of Fame. Curt Schilling is a god to Red Sox Nation; (he's also a right wing nut who wants to bring back the Witch Trials and thinks that The Flintstones was some kind of documentary) but for Martha Coakley to say that Schilling was a Yankees fan and then backtrack and then express befuddlement as to who Schilling actually is, played wonderfully into the GOP strategy of positioning her as an out of touch elitist. As soon as I heard her say that I knew the election was over. You don't diss Curt Schilling in Beantown. You might as well have got Ted Williams's frozen skull and played basketball with it. Oh wait someone's already done that. ...
Now that Coakley's lost the election the Democratic majority in the senate has sunk to a filibuster vulnerable 59 seats and Obama will not be able to pass many of the planks of his reform agenda. What a massive cockup. Couldn't the Democrats have found a candidate in Boston whose last name was Kennedy and who, oh, I don't know, likes the brews and an occasional visit to Fenway Park?
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Because of the sock the game was lost, because of the game the ALCS was lost, because of the ALCS the World Series was lost, because of the World Series, the Presidency was screwed. (That and listening to the advice of Paul Krugman.) The Democrats of course have massive majorities in both houses but they are such lightweights they cant apparently do anything. I think its because they have no sock related icons of their own. Where have you gone Shari Lewis a nation lifts its lonely eyes to you.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Bright Star
I so wanted to like Jane Campion's Bright Star. Campion is an auteur and an artist, she has a rich colour palette and she directs women very well. She points the camera with the deliberation of a Katsushika Hokusai and she is careful about every frame she shoots. Bright Star is full of dazzling imagery: the woods in summer, winter and autumn, a silent walk through tall reeds, an extreme close up of a needle and thread, and there's a beautiful scene of a lace curtain blowing into a room which could have gone on for an hour and I would not have complained. Yet the film doesn't really work. It's heavy on dialogue (much of it wooden) when Campion's trademark visuals would have told the story of John Keats's doomed romance with Fanny Brawne better and more delicately. Yes, its a film about a poet and the poet's words matter but film is a medium of the eye and Campion's gift is for turning a series of striking pictures into a narrative. Sunday, January 17, 2010
Why I Hate Budweiser
On the AB-InBev corporate website I clicked on a link to find out what beers they brew (they control so many brands now its nuts) and this piece of company speak came up front and centre of the page. Go ahead, read it...Ok, what does that say to you? Nothing about making good beer or a delicious product or following ancient traditions or even a word about the goddamn Rheinheitsgebot but instead: "We build fresh appeal and competitive advantage through innovative products and services." Clearly that's Martian speak for "you must be a real bog-born eejit to drink our beer." We build fresh appeal. If you ever want a punch in the face just say "we build fresh appeal" to me. If you don't believe me about how much AnheuserBusch-InBev hate their customers just click the link above and take a dander through their website. Its all about building "brand loyality" among consumers and being a "portfolio player" in a high stakes James Bond corporate f**k fantasy. Leave a comment below if you find anything that evinces any kind of love for beer - the drink that took us out of the Stone Age, built the bloody pyramids and put a man on the moon.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Dr Who - A Dissent
The Russell T Davies era of Dr Who ended on New Year's Day with the "death" of David Tennant's incarnation of the Doctor and Davies's retirement from the show. What Davies has done with the franchise has been universally praised by fanboys and critics alike and the ratings for the new Who have been huge. Late Review critic Mark Lawson compared Dr Who to Hamlet and even fearless monkey killer and TV reviewing bad boy AA Gill dared not lift a pen against the last Dr. Who. But I haven't loved the new series, in fact for much of the time I haven't even liked it. I've been ransacking my brain to figure out why I'm out of step with the rest of humanity. Here are some possible reasons: Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Is Avatar an Unattributed Remake of FernGully?
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Mrs Robinson You're Trying to Seduce Me - Aren't You?
In 2008 Iris Robinson, wife of Northern Ireland's First Minister Peter Robinson said that homosexuals were an "abomination" and "worse even than child molesters." She explained that as an MP and member of Northern Ireland's Assembly that it was her duty and the duty of all public servants to uphold God's law as exemplified by the 10 Commandments. (Not a big reader of Edmund Burke is Mrs R).
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Well we all knew what was going to happen next didn't we? Every single time one of those holier than thou uber-Pentecostal freaks starts blathering about gays and sodomy and God's law you just know that they are going to be found out as complete and utter twists trying desperately to weave a smokescreen. BBC Northern Ireland's excellent Spotlight programme discovered yesterday that Mrs Robinson had seduced a 19 year old graduate (well, a high school graduate) and had given him a wad of cash so he could open (only in Northern Ireland folks) a chip shop.
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Of course now under God's law poor Mrs Robinson will actually have to be stoned to death. Her husband and all the members of the Stalinist-Gothic Metropolitan Faith Cathedral in north Belfast will have to dig a hole and bung her in it and chuck rocks at her Iran-style. This hardly seems fair. She's an attractive woman and Northern Ireland could always do with another chip shop or two. And if Peter Robinson resigns and the Northern Ireland Assembly falls apart and Ulster tumbles into civil war because of this I for one am going to blame the BBC. . . for not showing Mike Nichols's edifying masterpiece The Graduate often enough.
And speaking of edifying...here's that creepy/foxy chick from Pomplamoose Music with a nice version of Simon and Garfunkel's Mrs Robinson. The lyrics were never more appropriate.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
The Pacific
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
The Greatest Beers in the World
Over the holidays I had quite a few interesting brews, so here's a list of the greatest beers in the world in the humble opinion of your own correspondent:1. Pliny the Elder - IPA, USA
2. Westvleteren 12 - Trappist Quad, Belgium
3. Theakston Old Peculier - Trad. Ale, England
4. Dark Lord - Imperial Stout, USA
5. Fuller's London Porter - Porter, England
6. Rochefort Trappistes 10 - Trappist Quad, Belgium
7. Ayinger Celebrator - Dobblebock, Germany
8. Samuel Smith's Oatmeal Stout - Stout, England
9. Guinness Draft - Dry Stout, Ireland
10. Russian River Supplication - Sour Ale, USA
#1 and #10 on my list come from the great Russian River Brewing Company
Sunday, January 3, 2010
The Not So Simple Art of Murder
I'm reposting this from June of last year. According to the New York Times in 2009 New York had fewer recorded homicides than at any time in its history. The number of white murder victims in Manhattan last year seems to be fewer than ten. White Manhattanites are thus living in the safest large Metropolitan area in the world, although you wouldnt know that from the TV:...
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The New York Times has published an interactive murder map of New York City which incorporates comprehensive NYPD data for the last five years. The map is interactive because you can filter it by race/age/location etc. It makes for some interesting reading. I always thought it was amusing when I lived in Oxford that Inspector Morse stumbled across a murder every week when there hadn't been an actual murder in the city of dreaming spires in eight years. New York's plummeting murder rate has generated a similar dissonance. If you add up all the deaths on Law & Order, L&O SVU, CSI-NY etc. etc. there are easily 100+ murders in Manhattan every season and because most of the writers are white - and that's the demographic they skew to - most of the TV victims are also white. And this is where the dissonance comes in. If you look at the actual data around 90 percent of all murder victims in New York City are black or Latino. So far in Manhattan this year 4 white people have been killed. Four. Yes this is four people too many people and of course it still represents four tragedies but that's not my point. By several orders of magnitude there are going to be more white Manhattanite crime victims on network TV, movies and in crime novels this year than actually died in real life. I reckon three or four times as many white people will be killed on the Law & Order franchises alone than in the real world. Why is this? Well murder sells of course and I don't want to put a stop to that but why can't the networks tell us the real story that emerges from the NYT interactive map? The real victims of crime in New York are black and Latino and they live in places like Harlem, Washington Heights, the South Bronx, Bed Sty. Places where the actors, execs and writers never go. Maybe the studios are worried that those stories wouldn't play in Iowa. Well the success of The Wire proves that realistic crime dramas can work, but it's not easy, you can't just give people formula, you've got to write intelligent believable characters; in short the writers would have to exercise that big muscle between their ears and the networks would have to stop playing it safe. Would Inspector Morse have been as successful a show if he had gone after bicycle thieves and cocaine dealers? Maybe. Maybe not. But I think a little dose of reality might have been fun once in a while. Similarly with TV, films and crime fiction. Perhaps they could at least make an occasional attempt to show the reality of murder in New York. It's a reality that mostly exists across 110th Street way beyond the comfort zone of most of the creative types, who if truth be told probably all live in Santa Monica anyway.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
The Most Significant Event of the Decade - China's Rise
On December 29th in Urumqi, China, a mentally ill British national was executed (probably by lethal injection although the Chinese won't tell us) for smuggling heroin in a suitcase from Tajikistan. Akmal Shaikh, 53, and a father of three was convicted in a 2008 trial which lasted half an hour. During the proceedings the judges laughed at Mr. Shaikh's rambling attempt to explain the suitcase found in his possession and declared him guilty. A British national has not been executed in China since the Second World War, but despite pleas for clemency from British PM Gordon Brown and Foreign Secretary David Miliband the killing took place on time and in secret. According to the BBC "Mr Shaikh's family made continued calls for leniency right up until the execution deadline, citing his mental state, saying that he suffered from bipolar disorder. His daughter Leilla Horsnell said: "I am shocked and disappointed that the execution went ahead with no regards to my dad's mental health problems.""...
China knows that nowadays it can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants to whomever it wants. In a process that began in 2003 President Bush began borrowing huge sums of money from China (through US Treasuries) to fund his wars; FDR raised taxes to beat the Nazis, Bush borrowed from the Chinese. The process continued throughout the decade as the United States non military budget also soared. In the last year Obama's Keynesian recovery plan was financed not by raising taxes but by selling even more Treasury Bonds to China. China is now our bank and the one person you can never afford to piss off is the bank manager. China's GDP growth in this recession year was a measly 7.5 percent and this year she expanded her conventional and nuclear arsenal - China is a bank manager toting an AK-47 in one hand and a TOW anti-tank launcher in the other.
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Everything is now made in China: shoes, clothes, toys, kitchen equipment, tools, soon Volvo cars, not long after that, all other cars. The Chinese make everything, they work harder than everyone else, and there are 1.3 billion of them. This decade saw the Chinese began finally to flex their muscles protecting their heinous friends in such places as Iran, Zimbabwe, North Korea and Burma. If I were a third world dictator with, say, a big bauxite mine on my territory I'd cozy up to the Chinese too. This hegemonization process, is, I think, largely irreversible. America will not face up to the situation it is in: the Democrats won't cut entitlements or raise retirement ages, the Republicans won't raise taxes - the days of balanced budgets and paying down the debt are over. Europe and Japan are even more screwed as they age, become less productive, and increasingly irrelevant.
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I've been to China and I found it to be a rough and scary place. People who care about human rights or weep about the West's treatment of animals should certainly avoid going there; but the Chinese way is the way of the future - their recent accumulation of capital is almost unparalleled in history and shows no sign (thanks to Paul Krugman and the Afghan War) of slowing. The Sixteenth Century belonged to the Spanish. The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries to the French. The 1800's was the era of the British Empire and the Twentieth Century was dominated by America. Hopefully India will rise too as it is more my sort of place but for the moment I think we are all living in the Chinese Century and we just haven't realised it yet.
Monday, December 28, 2009
Book of the Year
I read a lot of quality fiction this year from the likes of Garbhan Downey, Ken Bruen, Colum McCann, Hilary Mantel, AS Byatt, John McFetridge, Cormac McCarthy, Orhan Pamuk, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, Colin Bateman, Zadie Smith, Alan Glynn, Dec Burke, Gita Hariharan, Stu Neville et. al. but for me the novel I enjoyed most was Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice. At a party in July I had a bit of a friendly row about Inherent Vice with the crime reviewer of The Times; he felt that the book was disjointed and overly silly and not a proper crime novel but those were three of the reasons that I liked it. It is silly and its more of a riff on detective fiction than an attempt to fully engage the genre. Mainly though I liked the book because of its Big Lebowski vibe and the fact that its very funny. Chronologically it lies between The Crying of Lot 49 and Vineland and it sort of inhabits the same paranoid, druggy, conspiratorial, trippy, ascerbic universe. Here's a paragraph explaining why there are no blacks in Gordita Beach: "When a black family had actually tried to move into town [after the War] the citizens, with helpful advice from the Ku Klux Klan had burned their place to the ground and then as if some ancient curse had come into effect refused to allow another house ever to be built on the site. The lot stood empty until the town finally confiscated it and turned it into a park, where the youth of Gordita Beach by the laws of karmic adjustment were soon gathering at night to drink, dope, and f**k, depressing their parents though not property values particularly."...
I've already posted about Inherent Vice twice, here and here so that's probably enough for now.
Friday, December 25, 2009
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Avatar is The Abyss, not Aliens
Monday, December 21, 2009
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Albums of the Year
Some of these are from 2008 cos [start doing a Wallace & Gromit Yorkshire accent now] eee, I'm a bit slow on the uptake, like.1. The Bird and Bee - Ray Guns Are Not Just The Future
2. The Ting Tings - We Started Nothing
3. Monsters of Folk - Monsters of Folk
4. Jay Z - The Blueprint #3
5. Beyonce - I Am Sasha Fierce
6. Them Crooked Vultures - Them Crooked Vultures
7. The Honey Brothers - Demonstration EP
8. Lily Allen - It's Not Me, It's You
9. Arctic Monkeys - Humbug
10. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - It's Blitz!
Friday, December 18, 2009
Most Overrated of the Decade
The defining art form of the twenty first century is marketing. We all know of people who are effectively content free but who have relentlessly marketed themselves into our consciousness. This trend has become more pronounced over the last 1o years and unfortunately we don't have Bill Hicks or Neil Postman around any more to mock the powerful engines of consumerism and their agents. But at least we can blog about it. Below is my list of people or things that I think were overrated in the world of arts and literature in the last decade. Unlike some bloggers I aint going for minor novelists, models and other soft targets. In reverse order of crapness then:10. The New Yorker: Remember when they had James Thurber and E B White? Now they have Sasha Frere-Jones and "comedy" from Woody Allen.
9. The BBC: The high point came with the first series of The Office in 2001. Its all game shows, dancing and second rate Britcoms today. Sadly the BBC is now run by boarding school boys who think that that's what the plebian public wants.
8. Saturday Night Live: It was never funny but in the noughties it got even not funnier.
7. The Simpsons: Like the fall of The Byzantine Empire The Simpsons diminishes in size and totters towards irrelevance with every passing season. Where is Mehmed II when you need him?
6. The New Atheists: Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett. It's real simple: 100 billion suns in our galaxy, 100 billion galaxies: trillions of Earth like worlds: if you don't think some powerful god-like being has evolved and is out there watching us you're just not using your imagination.
5. Martin Scorsese & Stephen Spielberg: A parade of dreary, piss poor films lacking any kind of spark, intelligence or invention. They seemed to have forgotten everything they knew about directing this decade. Please stop now gentlemen.
4. Quentin Tarantino & Wes Anderson: Tarantino made three of the best films of the 90's and in the noughties 3 of the worst of all time. Wes Anderson really needs to go get some life experience far far away from his hipster pals.
3. The Huffington Post: The Fox News of journalism.
2. Harry Potter: The Harry Potter novels were obviously some kind of mass delusion or hypnosis. They read now like campy 1950's children's books, filled with silly names, condescending plots and the prose of a wet Edinburgh phone book.
1. Bono: The most obnoxious man walking the planet Earth.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Steam Punk Chic
The first Steam Punk novel I read was The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. It was an early classic of the genre and envisaged a world in which Charles Babbage had got his Difference Engine beyond the theoretical stage: Victorian London sees the world's first steam powered mechanical computer and there's lots of fun and games with Lady Lovelace, Byron's daughter, Mary Shelley etc. Steam Punk is basically cyberpunk but set in an imagined technological past. Neal Stephenson writes a lot of these books and one of my favourites is Alan Moore's comic The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol I and II (especially II). What I didn't know until today was the fact that you can buy Steam Punk clothing for men and women from The Steampunk Emporium , but of course it makes sense. If they sell Star Trek uniforms why not techno Victoriana? (I particularly liked the Emporium's gear for "Dewey Oldfield, the autoist" and "Barnaby Clifton the intrepid motorist.")...
When I was at Oxford I remember there was a lecturer who rode around on an old fashioned bicycle and dressed in Edwardian clothing. He was an amiable nut, but as we saw with the costumes of Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman in the film version of The Golden Compass, Steam Punk kit is much, much cooler for tootling around the city of dreaming spires, tootling around anywhere in fact. BTW, I have no idea who the people are in the above pic but it's nice to see the sheilas getting into the spirit of the thing too.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Books For Christmas
The Guardian newspaper has picked my novel Fifty Grand as one of its books of the year and as a recommended book for Christmas (thank you Justine Jordan). Fifty Grand also got a nod as one of the books of the year by John O'Connell in the The New Statesman and I got a hat tip from Chris Mullin in The Observer. So far so good in Britain! but this is a novel which has struggled a bit in the US. The reasons for this are many: the bad economy didn't help; it also wasnt good that my editor left Holt two months before publication and that my replacement editor left two weeks before the pub day. Editors are crucially important in getting blurbs for books and getting them into the hands of reviewers. With 50G review copies were only sporadically sent out, were not followed up on, and there was no budget for publicity. I also think the subject matter may have been too controversial for some American reviewers. Still the success of Stuart Neville's Ghosts of Belfast shows you what a dedicated publishing house can do (it also helps that the book is f**king brilliant) and in the UK the success of Fifty Grand is all down to the hard work of Rebecca Gray, Anna-Marie Fitzgerald, Pete Ayrton et alia at Serpents Tail; and in Oz, Kate Hyde at Allen and Unwin. Word of mouth of course also helps and if you were one of the people who reviewed Fifty Grand on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk or Good Reads or Audible.com rest assured that I not only read your review but showed it around the family and probably sent it to my agent to prove that "some people like me". Thank you very much, I really appreciate it.Saturday, December 12, 2009
An Open Letter To Peter Jackson
Dear Mr Jackson, I'll come straight to the point, The Hobbit starts filming in six months and I want to be in it. I know that you've said that only New Zealanders will be considered as extras because of government restrictions and ok I'm a Mick but please hear me out. First of all I read The Hobbit in 1977 when I was about nine so I am no Johnnie come lately to this franchise and I've read the book at least three times since so I am familiar with the material. Second of all I played The Hobbit module in MERP many times (about six people on Earth will understand what this means). Third of all I played The Hobbit video game on the Sinclair Spectrum which was the slowest loading video game in the history of the world and required great patience and strength of character. Fourth of all although I own a copy of Karen Fonstad's Atlas of Middle Earth I promise I am not a nutter.Friday, December 11, 2009
My Best Fiend
Monday, December 7, 2009
What I Think About When I Think About Running
What I think about is: when is this run going to be over, or, did that pregnant lady pushing the twin stroller really just go past me, or, how many times can I listen to John Fogerty singing "I wanna know, have you ever seen the rain?" without going completely insane. What Haruki Murakami thinks about is very different. He thinks about what running means as an endeavour, he thinks about the mechanics of movement, he thinks about how good looking the girls are in Cambridge, Mass. His book is called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, but actually he hasn't talked about it much before this, which is odd because when you read WITAWITAR you see how important running is to him. Murakami is a Japanese novelist who routinely gets mentioned as a potential nobelist, but dont let that put you off. WITAWITAR is an arresting memoir about how Murakami's interest in jogging became an obsession with running marathons and ultra marathons. He says that he took as a model (as well as his title) Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, but the book to me is actually squarely in the Japanese tradition of poetic memoir and travelogue which goes back at least to Matsuo Basho whose Narrow Road to the Deep North is the all time classic of this trope. Both men are travellers, seekers of the way, searchers after truth....
One of the best scenes in Murakami's book is a 60K ultamarathon in northern Japan where he bonks and entirely goes to pieces before getting passed by an octogenarian lady who cheerfully tells him not to give up. Turning misery into something funny or transcendent - into spiritual truth - is the artist's job. One of the best haiku in all of Basho is when he's ill and staying at a miserable inn in the arse end of nowhere:
bitten by fleas and lice
I slept in a bed
a horse pissing all the time
close to the window
All you can do is laugh, because it really isn't funny at all.
Friday, December 4, 2009
FIlms of the Decade
Following on from my books post last week, below I've listed my favourite films of the decade. I don't think it was a particularly good era for the movies. The Coens were off the boil, we no longer had Stanley Kubrick, some idiot reinvented torture porn and mindless blockbusters continued to dominate. Outside of Hollywood I think English and French art house films generally got overpraised out of sheer desperation (the Times puts the feeble Cache as their #1 film of the decade) and the explosion of Korean horror films didn't do much for me. Still, for what it's worth, these are my favourite films (not necessarily the best) of the noughties.1. Mulholland Drive (2001) David Lynch
2. The Barbarian Invasions (2003) Denys Arcand
3. Grizzly Man (2005) Werner Herzog
4. In The Mood For Love (2000) Wong Kar Wai
5. Lost in Translation (2003) Sofia Coppola
6. Shaun of the Dead (2004) Edgar Wright
7. Bloody Sunday (2002) Paul Greengrass.
8. Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) Guillermo del Toro
9. Juno (2007) Jason Reitman
10. Children of Men (2006) Alfonso Cuaron
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Wrong Desert, Good Analogy, Dubai is a Massive Pyramid Scheme
Last week Dubai World Corp attempted to reschedule some of its debt. Stock markets across the planet fell but initially many of the commentators I watched on the business channels told people not to panic, because "the economics of Dubai were fundamentally sound." I'm not sure that I agree with that. When you walk around the empty malls, empty bookshops, empty cinemas and empty restaurants in Dubai you wonder if this Emirate without any oil or other natural resources really represents the future of urban planning, architecture and civilization as we know it (which its leaders proclaim). Parts of Dubai are like a movie set or ghost town and just as many cranes are standing idle as working. By Monday it seemed that people were finally waking up to the reality in Dubai. I read an interesting summary of opinion about the Emirate's potential problems in the New York Times here and a rather more ballsy piece by Rod Liddle in The Times of London here. And I found this little article tucked away on CNN which wonders if the Dubai real estate market is and always was a gigantic pyramid scheme: The CNN piece also mentions the $12 billion Palm Jumeirah where David Beckham has a home and "You can't even see the sea and all the fronds which house the communities are gated." And they conclude with the ridiculous sounding Palazzo Versace hotel in Dubai which is going to have a beach "featuring refrigerated sand."
Monday, November 30, 2009
The Melbourne Gangland Murders
Like no other city in Australia, Melbourne has been blessed by a fascinating gangland culture, which has helped inspire TV shows, books and feature films - you can get the gist of the whole story on Wikipedia here. I reviewed a couple of memoirs by two of the major players in Saturday's Melbourne Age: ex boxer Mick Gatto and mob wife Roberta Williams (right). I liked both books as you can see below: ...
My Life by Roberta Williams; I, Mick Gatto by Mick Gatto and Tom Noble
Apart from a dispiriting lack of basic competence, what distinguishes Melbourne’s criminal underclass from their counterparts in say, the New York mafia, is their enthusiasm for publicity. Where La Cosa Nostra embraces omertà - the code of silence - Melbourne’s underworld clans act rather more like the village chiacchierone: the local gossip who airs everyone’s dirty laundry in public. Recently Mick Gatto and Roberta Williams have been attacking each other in the tabloids with such ferocity that if this were a 1930's film, the third act would finish with one of them saying “kiss me you fool,” accompanied by a soaring musical score.
...
Mick Gatto’s account of his life in gambling, boxing and crime I, Mick Gatto is published by an imprint of Melbourne University Press and was co-written by former Age journalist Tom Noble. It is fast paced, lively and unpretentious, and the story of Gatto’s South Melbourne childhood is particularly affecting. Gatto offers no angst ridden self justification for his later actions but says that he was a happy kid surrounded by friends and family. Born in 1955, Gatto’s parents were first generation immigrants from Calabria who, really, must have known all about omertà.
...
After a run in with local hoods Gatto decides to learn boxing as a method of self defence and quickly finds that he has talent and, he says, with a little more discipline and some luck he could have been, like Terry Molloy, “a contender”. Instead he became a bouncer and petty crook and ended up in Melbourne’s Pentridge Prison for burglary. Post prison life took Gatto into illegal gambling clubs, but his biggest win was surely marrying his formidable wife Cheryle who has ridden the Gatto rollercoaster for more than thirty years. The meat of I, Mick Gatto, of course, is his sensational 2005 murder trial, when he was accused of assassinating underworld hitman Andrew Veniamin. Gatto’s story is gripping: he and Veniamin (a former friend who had attended his birthday party) got into an argument in the back room of La Porcella restaurant in Carlton over the recent killing of a gangland associate. Veniamin apparently pulled out a .38 calibre revolver and with his boxer’s reflexes, Gatto says that he managed to turn Veniamin’s gun on himself. The jury bought the defence argument that because the .38 misfired it must have meant that the two men were struggling over the weapon, and Gatto was acquitted. Gatto is fortunate that this incident happened in Melbourne where the average jury panelist would not have experienced the fairly common instance of a misfiring .38 at the local gun range, and he’s also lucky the jury never got to hear about the fact that he had a body bag waiting in the boot of his car.
...
Gatto’s book is charming and engaging, probably like the man himself, and near the end there is an interesting scene where he meets Roberta Williams after Underbelly has begun showing on Channel 9. He describes her affectionately as having a “lot of dash, more than her husband Carl ever had,” which is nice when both claim the other tried to have them killed.
...
You can see this dash and flintiness throughout Williams’s own book My Life - The Untold Story of an Underworld Survivor. Her childhood in Seaford and Frankston was grim: her father died when she was still a baby and her mother could not cope in the slightest. She got pregnant at seventeen, moved to the city and later was horrifically beaten up by her partner Dean Stephens, a friend of rising criminal stars, the Moran brothers.
...
In 1994 her life changed when she met chubby, baby faced gangster Carl Williams. They fell in love, married and Carl raised her kids like they were his own. The war with the Morans began when they tried to kill Carl over a money feud and as Williams cold bloodedly points out “luckily for us the Morans were stupid because they let Carl live and he knew he would never make the same mistake they did. Underbelly made Carl out to be the dumb one. . .but think of this, they are dead and he is alive. Who is the dumb one?”
...
Roberta denies that Carl ordered the killing of Mark Moran, but she agrees that Carl was behind Jason Moran’s murder on June 21 2003. Indeed she relishes the fact and admits her joy upon hearing of Moran’s death (although she denies foreknowledge of the hit). This part of the book is rather chilly. Williams sees herself as a victim persecuted by the media and the criminal justice system and she portrays Carl as a gun toting loveable rogue. She shows no sign of remorse that Jason Moran and Pasquale Barbaro were shot in their car in front of five young children, including Moran’s twins. Indeed, she mocks the family members who appeared shocked and grief stricken that night on the TV news.
...
There’s no denying Williams’s charisma or her toughness or her love for her own children but a kinder editor might have made her temper such sociopathic statements. I also think Harper Collins could have spent a few dollars compiling an index that would assist the general reader in keeping track of all the diverse characters in Williams’s absorbing story.
...
Reading these memoirs together is a little like viewing Rashomon: people and actions are either good or evil depending on whom you believe; however truth isn’t necessarily why people are going to buy these books. If you enjoyed Underbelly by John Silvester and Andrew Rule or the first TV series then these volumes should be right up your alley.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Getting Your Geek On
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Novels of the Decade
Let me jump on the listmania bandwagon and give you my favourite novels of the decade. Maybe these aren't the best books of the noughties but they're the ones I liked most.1. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
2. The Cold Six Thousand - James Ellroy
3. L'Amour est très surestimé - Brigitte Giraud
4. Grotesque - Natsuo Kirino
5. Let the Right One In - John Lindqvist
6. The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
7. Her Last Call To Louis MacNeice - Ken Bruen
8. White Teeth - Zadie Smith
9. The Red Riding Quartet - David Peace
10. Fingersmith - Sarah Waters
Sunday, November 22, 2009
The Prosecution Rests in the Knox Case
The prosecution case against Amanda Knox rested today. If you don't know who Amanda Knox is then your life is probably a good bit richer and more interesting than mine. Here's a useful CNN summary:...
Friday, November 20, 2009
The Lost Symbol
Ok, so I've taken the piss out of Dan Brown on this blog before, but I've got to admit that there's a good novel buried within The Lost Symbol. The story is fast paced, unusual and exciting. There are two excellent plot twists that I didn't see coming and the book's characters could possibly exist in the real world (allbeit a real world where an assembly full of high school students cheer wildly when they discover that their guest speaker is the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution). I listened to the audiobook version of The Lost Symbol and the narration was crisp and fluid and the characters were well differentiated. For at least three quarters of the book I was gripped by the premise and Brown's clever nesting of the plot within objects and arcana. I admired Brown's dispassionate prose which is the way to go with sensational material and I dug his device of leaving each chapter on a hook. The book takes place in Washington DC and there's murky goings on with masons - two elements that I also really enjoyed.Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Thank You Yoko
A few months ago the BBC had a piece about those apparently few eccentrics in the world who dislike the music of John, Paul, George and Ringo. After some exhaustive research it was concluded that to say that you liked pop music but disliked the pop music of the Beatles was an incoherent and untenable position. It was ok to dislike pop music in general, preferring classical, but, according to the Beeb, it didn't make any sense to doubt the genius of the Beatles if you were a fan of the pop music genre. Monday, November 16, 2009
Back From The Wars
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Everything We Know Is Wrong
Chocolate Milk May Reduce Inflammation
RONI CARYN RABIN
November 9, 2009
Move over, red wine. Make room for chocolate milk. A new study suggests that regular consumption of skim milk with flavonoid-rich cocoa may reduce inflammation, potentially slowing or preventing development of atherosclerosis. Researchers noted, however, that the effect was not as pronounced as that seen with red wine. Volunteers ages 55 and older who were at risk for heart disease. Half were given 20-gram sachets of soluble cocoa powder to drink with skim milk twice a day, while the rest drank plain skim milk. After one month, the groups were switched. Blood tests found that after participants drank chocolate milk twice a day for four weeks, they had significantly lower levels of several inflammatory biomarkers, though some markers of cellular inflammation remained unchanged.
...
Participants also had significantly higher levels of good HDL cholesterol after completing the chocolate milk regimen, according to the study, which appears in the November issue of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and is already online.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
A Good End To A Weak Season
In the John Cheever story "The 5.48" a philandering Madison Avenue ad-man from Westchester County gets his comeuppance from a crazy woman he slept with and then completely forgot about. The TV series Mad Men takes place in the same time period and milieu as "The 5.48," and I've been dreading the appearance of a crazy lady with a gun since about episode 2. When Don Draper, the philandering ad exec who lives in Ossining, started seeing a nutty school teacher, I felt sure that this was how season 3 was going to end.Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Jacques Barzun Is Alive and Well and Living in Texas
In a couple of weeks its going to be Jacques Barzun's 102nd birthday. I hope Jacques hangs in there because in this degraded epoch of ours where ill educated oafs like Glenn Beck and Patrick J Buchanan are lauded as sages Barzun is a rare link to an age when a person would be ashamed to pontificate on any subject without having a thorough knowledge of history, the classics and several European languages....
Born in France, educated in America, Barzun was for many decades the doyen of the Great Books programme at Columbia University. I have read three books by Monsieur B: Simple & Direct - a sensible and practical guide to writing; The Use and Abuse of Art - an essay which does exactly what it says on the tin describing the uses and abuses of art; From Dawn to Decadence - probably the best history of western civilization from 1500 - 2000 that has ever been written. Let me talk a little more about Dawn to Dec. It's basically a long but fast paced cultural history for the general reader. Barzun's prose is effortless, his learning eclectic, his wit playful, clever and acerbic. It's a book that manages to be both deep and wide ranging and most important of all it, is never dull. If you haven't read From Dawn to Decadence I both pity and envy you. I pity because you're undoubtedly lost in a sea of unknowning, but I envy because you've got a real treat to look forward to. (Hmm, doesn't Mr. T. famously say the previous sentence in a more concise way?)
...
Anyway, Joyeux Anniversaire, Jacques.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Yoani Sanchez Beaten By The Cuban Secret Police
Aside from my little brother Gareth, Yoani Sanchez is one of the bravest people I know. She is a young Cuban blogger who writes about the perversities of life in the Castro brothers personal island fiefdom. I've emailed with Yoani a couple of times and I make sure to read her blog every few days. On Friday Raul Castro's secret police, the DGI, grabbed her on the street, pulling her hair and beating her until she got into their car. She was taken to a police station and there, according to CNN, the agents "warned her that her writings had gone too far" and threatened her. Yoani has been intimidated several times in the past but this is the first time she has been beaten by Castro's bullies. She is out of police custody now but badly shaken....
Saturday, November 7, 2009
The Neville Has All The Best Tunes
Ok, so I stole the pun in the title from Declan Burke, but if you can't lift from The Master who can you lift from? I just finished Stuart Neville's The Twelve yesterday and I was blown away by it. It's a dark, exciting, lyrical, uncompromising thriller set in Northern Ireland. James Ellroy has described Neville as a brilliant new voice in Irish fiction and after reading The Twelve I whole heartedly agree. There's a great non spoiler review on Ger Brennan's Crime Scene Northern Ireland here. And if you haven't yet jumped on board the runaway train that is the Celtic New Wave in Irish crime writing, Neville's The Twelve is an excellent place to start. And then after Neville make sure you check out: Declan Burke, Brian McGilloway, Ken Bruen, Eoin MacNamee, Declan Hughes, Colin Bateman, Garbhan Downey, Ger Brennan, David Park, Sam Millar et al. I mean really folks, wouldn't it be nice to be ahead of the trend for once?
Thursday, November 5, 2009
How To Win The War Against Al Qaeda
As some of you may know my little brother Gareth is currently an intelligence officer serving in Afghanistan. He's got a lot on his plate but among his tasks is helping in the hunt for Al Qaeda operatives and Mr Bin Laden himself. OBL is in one of three places: The Afghani side of the Af-Pak border, the Waziri side of the Af-Pak border or Pakistan administered Kashmir. As confident as I am in my little brother's abilities, conventional methods of finding OBL don't seem to be working which is why I think the time has come to bring in 70's TV favourite Grizzly Adams. Why do I say this? Well, I think the following story from the BBC explains it better than I can:Bear kills militants in Kashmir
By Altaf Hussain
BBC News, Srinagar
A bear killed two militants after discovering them in its den in Indian-administered Kashmir, police say. Two other militants escaped, one of them badly wounded, after the attack in Kulgam district, south of Srinagar. The militants had assault rifles but were taken by surprise - police found the remains of pudding they had made to eat when the bear attacked.
It is thought to be the first such incident since Muslim separatists took up arms against Indian rule in 1989. The militants had made their hideout in a cave which was actually the bear's den, said police officer Farooq Ahmed. The dead have been identified as Mohammad Amin alias Qaiser, and Bashir Ahmed alias Saifullah.
News of the attack emerged when their injured comrade went to a nearby village for treatment. "Word spread in the village that Qaiser had been killed by the bear," another police officer said. A joint party of the police and army personnel went into the forest and collected the bodies of the two militants. Police say they also recovered two Kalashnikov assault rifles and some ammunition from the hideout.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Oh Those Ghastly Americans and Their Dreadful Halloween (Again!)
Every year the British press publishes an article by some Little Englander nutcase attacking Halloween as a gauche American invention that's all about requiring you to spend, spend, spend. This year it was AN Wilson's turn in The Daily Mail. What's interesting about Wilson's lazy article is how similar it was to Andrew Martin's piece in the Guardian last year. It's almost as if Wilson had Martin's article in front of him while he was typing. Hmmm.Monday, November 2, 2009
The Cove
...
The Cove is a wonderful film but you should probably skip it if you don't want your blood pressure to go through the roof. Also, don't take the kids. Here's Roger Ebert's four star review, and here's what Evan Williams said in The Australian.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
The Beer and the Book
I've been reading Greenmantle by John Buchan. It's a hundred year old spy novel set in Germany and the Mid East during World War I and it is a sort of sequel to the 39 Steps. If, like me, you read the 39 Steps and didn't think it was as good as the Hitchcock film Greenmantle will come as a pleasant surprise: it's exciting, fast paced and apart from some unironic jingoism (and an over reliance on coincidence) a very good read. There's an interesting scene early on where Hannay meets the Kaiser at a railway station and the sympathetic treatment of the German Emperor must have shocked many Brits at the time (it was published in 1916). Thursday, October 29, 2009
Aren't You A Little Short For A Stormtrooper?
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
The Next King of Scotland?
Without question the Conservative Party is going to win the 2010 General Election in Britain, once again launching the idea of Scottish independence into the spotlight. The Scots have been relatively quiet since 1997 because Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were Scots from the Labour Party (which is strong north of the Border). David Cameron, the Conservative leader, however, is both English and Tory, which bodes ill for the union. The Scottish National Party rules the devolved Scottish Assembly and although opinion polls have fluctuated, probably a majority of Scots now favour independence. If independence happens I wonder if the Scottish would be willing to turn back the clock and take on current Jacobite Pretender to the Scottish crown, this gentleman to the right, Prince Franz of Bavaria.Tuesday, October 27, 2009
The Lost Squirrel...
The Lost Squirrel
Robert Langdon woke from a dreamless sleep in his Cambridge apartment near Harvard University, America’s oldest and finest college of higher learning. Sleep, he knew, was a habit shared by all mammals and most invertebrates. No one understood why sleep was so necessary for these life forms but Robert Langdon knew that dolphins only slept with half their brain at any one time, otherwise they would drown. Dreams were another of the many domains of Robert Langdon's expertise. Freud, of course, was not the first to interpret dreams; famously Joseph of the Israelites, exiled in the land of Egypt, had become an expert dream reader for the pharaohs.
Robert Langdon got out of bed and walked across the carpet. Carpets had been covering the homes of human beings since weaving was discovered by the Sumerians in the second millennium BC. His carpet had not however come from Sumeria, but rather from the Ikea on I-95. It was 5.55 in the morning the same time philosopher Immanuel Kant woke each day for his constitutional walk around the city of Konigsberg. Kant was so regular that shopkeepers could set their watches by him. Now of course Konigsberg had been renamed Kaliningrad and was no longer in East Prussia but rather in the odd Russian exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast. Chuckling Robert Langdon wondered if the Knights of the Teutonic order would have been happy with that state of affairs.
“Oh tempora, oh mores,” he said in Latin, once the universal language spoken by all cultured peoples but now a mere tool for academics and the esoteric tongue of the Vatican.
In the kitchen the Harvard University wall calendar told him that it was Tuesday. Tuesday, he thought, remembering that it was named for the Norse god Tiu, the equivalent of the Roman god Mars. Tuesday was the second day of the week, coming between Monday and Wednesday. Tuesday and Thursday were the only days of the week that began with a T, although Thursday's T was a soft one, not a hard one.
Robert Langdon opened his Northland 3000 refrigerator, the most expensive fridge in the world, a gift from his mentor the brilliant Professor of quantum mechanics John Elton who was also an international singing star and who used a cunningly inverted stage name and red wig to hide himself. Robert Langdon took out a pint of milk. Milk he knew came from the lactation glands of cows. All female mammals lactated. He wondered if duck billed platypuses did so. Hmm, he thought, if only there was some device that could give him that information easily. Some kind of encyclopedia - perhaps stored electronically. If such a device existed you wouldn’t need everything explained all the time, because you could assume that people weren’t idiots and they could just look stuff up they didn't know.
He poured the milk into his bowl of cornflakes. Cornflakes of course had been developed by William Keith Kellogg as a health food, but now were consumed across the world by all cultures. He ate quickly. The Harvard University pool where he swam each morning opened at 6:30 and that only gave him fifteen minutes to get dressed in his trousers and polo neck. Trousers of course had been popularized by Beau Brummel following the sans culottes revolution in F-
The phone rang. “Is this Bob Langdon?” a guttural voice asked. A voice that seemed to be speaking from another dimension entirely, maybe even another universe. Modern physics had proven that many universes existed - the multiverse it was called - but telephone conversations between the universes had never been thought possible. Perhaps until today!
“This is Semiotics Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University, America’s oldest and finest institution of higher learning.”
“I’m a Boise State man myself, listen Bob, we live just across the street and your car alarm has been going off for the last fifteen minutes, can you come out and turn it off, please.”
Robert Langdon knew that alarms had existed since Roman times when the sacred geese on the Capitol hill had alerted the sleeping citizens that an attack by the Celts was imminent.
"Can you go outside, please, pal. We want to get back to sleep.”
"Did you know that dolphins only sleep with half their br..." Robert Langdon began but the phone was dead. It reminded him that the first phone call had been made in this very city by Alexander Graham Bell who had unfortunately not taught at Harvard but rather at the inferior Boston University.
Professor Robert Langdon dressed and went outside. The alarm on his Porsche Boxster S was indeed sounding. Porsche was a German company founded in 1931 by Ferdinand Porsche, but that was not important right now, what was important was the alarm.
He turned it off with a push on his infrared key button. Robert Langdon was worried. What could possibly have set off this alarm in the first place? He examined the car’s roof. It was covered with squirrel poop. Squirrels were a type of rodent common in North America and Europe. The squirrel was in the tree, naked and afraid. Could it have jumped on the roof and started the alarm, shat itself and jumped off. No. That didn't seem likely at all. What struck Robert Langdon about the poop was the fact that if you cocked your head and looked at it in a funny way it seemed to be arranged in an aleph, first letter of the Hebrew alphabet and key to the ancient wisdom of the Zohar. A chill coursed through him.
“I have a terrible feeling,” he said out loud to no one in particular “that I am about to be thrust into another one of my strange adventures.”
The wind blew from the north, which in this hemisphere was where the polar regions lay. He turned up the collar on his coat and headed towards the Georgian buildings of Harvard University, America’s oldest and finest institution of higher learning.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Sometimes Even Orwell Nods
When I was a student at Oxford I made a little pilgrimage one day to visit George Orwell's grave at the nearby All Saints Cemetery in Sutton Courtenay. The grave wasn't in very good condition and you could barely read the name Eric Arthur Blair and his dates, but I was well pleased. It was important to me because I had liked Orwell's novels and essays and I still think of him as a model for the clarity of his sense and prose. I was little dismayed therefore yesterday to read this bit in an essay he wrote on Mark Twain:Saturday, October 24, 2009
Literary Trivia To Astound/Annoy Your Friends
I very much enjoyed this account of the baseball trivia world series in the New York Times. With statistics stretching over three different centuries and an ultra geeky fanbase, baseball attracts more trivia buffs than perhaps any other sport, save cricket. My favourite piece of arcana was this question: Which three players appeared in games when they were older than the sitting United States President? Answer: Dan Brouthers and Jim O’Rourke (older than Teddy Roosevelt in 1904) and Satchel Paige who was older than Lyndon Johnson in 1965 (and presumably 1964 and 1963 too?)...
Literature doesn't attract that level of devotion alas and the facts are so well known that they don't really count as trivia, however, thematically following on from my last post, I have compiled a list of 8 facts that may amuse some of you. (Why 8 and not 10? Well, I sometimes think about what life would be like if octopii had used their surprisingly large brains to become the dominant species on Earth and everything was thus in base 8, and, also, to be honest, I got a bit lazy.) And yes I know that's not the plural of octopus. Ok on with the facts:
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1. Marcel Proust and James Joyce once shared a taxi in Paris. (You won't be surprised to learn that both complained about their health and Proust paid.)
2. Samuel Beckett and Raymond Chandler were both cricket playing Irish novelists.
3. Philip Larkin worked as a librarian in Belfast.
4. William Faulkner wrote the plan of his novel A Fable on a bedroom wall in his house in Oxford, Mississippi (and its still there to this very day).
5. JD Salinger once bought Ernest Hemingway a drink in the bar of the Ritz Hotel during the liberation of Paris. The bar of course now (like many others throughout the world) is called the Hemingway Bar.
6. Jonathan Swift was a vicar in my home town of Carrickfergus for about a year, during which he time he wrote A Tale of a Tub and possibly a preliminary sketch of Gulliver's Travels.
7. The focal point of L Ron Hubbard's "novel" Battlefield Earth is the Denver Public Library which is the same place where Jack Kerouac wrote preliminary sketches for On The Road. (And, I, er, your humble correspondent, wrote a couple of novels).
8. Alexander Pushkin's most famous poem is about a man who ruins his life in a duel. Pushkin was later killed in a duel. Mikhail Lermontov (Pushkin's most famous successor) was so incensed by this that he wrote a series of passionate poems about the stupidity of duelling and accused the Tsar of being complicit in the duel which killed Pushkin. Lermonotov, of course, was later killed in a duel.
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Incidentally when I visited the site of Pushkin's duel in a park north of Saint Petersburg a young girl had brought flowers for Pushkin and was weeping for him uncontrollably - proving once again that poets and rock stars should die young and a little bit stupidly if they want immortal fame.
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Ok that's it, we're out, if you can think of any lit triv, I'd love to hear to it.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Some Tidbits From The Paris Review Interviews
I recently got The Paris Review Interviews III to go with I and II. I think this one might be my favourite of them all. Instead of reviewing the books however I thought I would just give you 10 interesting tidbits from the interviews: Saturday, October 17, 2009
One Football Team For Ireland
Northern Ireland’s sorry and predictable elimination from yet another World Cup at least didn’t culminate with the players getting in a punch up with one another as they did after their Euro 2008 qualifying debacle. Still, things have come to a pretty pass, Northern Ireland has not played in a World Cup since Mexico in 1986 when they were eliminated in the first round and I doubt they will ever qualify again. In the 1980's the Iron Curtain was still intact, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union only fielded one team each and Northern Ireland could usually secure a second or third seed in the group competition. The standard of play and the number of countries has increased in Eastern Europe since and typically Northern Ireland now gets a third or fourth seed with virtually no hope of making it to the World Cup finals against superior opposition....
Northern Irish fans have coasted on memories of the 1982 World Cup when we came within a whisker of making it to the semis, but those glory days were more than a generation ago and the current squad has more in common with a team like Iceland or Latvia or - God save us - Wales, perennial also rans. The situation in the Republic of Ireland is almost exactly the opposite. Since their nadir in the 1980's the Republic has been to three World Cups: 1990, 1994 and 2002 and this week they made it into the knock out playoffs for 2010. In 1990 and 1994 the Republic acquitted themselves with distinction and 2002 was only spoiled because of the spat between Roy Keane and Mick McCarthy.
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It wasn’t Northern Ireland’s fault that football - unlike rugby - became split in Ireland. Dublin was the centre for Gaelic Games on the island and Belfast was traditionally the centre for football. The IFA was (and still is) based in Belfast but after partition in 1923, a rival federation, the FAI, was established in Dublin. Confusion reigned for the next thirty years with dozens of players getting called up by both Ireland federations until, in the 1950's, Con Martin, Davy Walsh, Tommy Ahern and Reg Ryan had the odd distinction of playing for the IFA and FAI teams in World Cup qualifiers. FIFA put a stop to this by ordering a renaming of the Irish teams and a strict division of players: footballers born in Eire would play for the Republic of Ireland, those born in the north, Northern Ireland.
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Northern Ireland still managed to punch above its weight, qualifying for the 1958 World Cup and then producing such stars as George Best, Pat Jennings, Sammy McIroy and Danny Blanchflower, before the heroics of the Espana ‘82 campaign. Northern Ireland fans are a small but dedicated bunch and I have been to many memorable home games at Windsor Park. The defeats of England and Germany come to mind and truly anything can happen there in that tiny, intimidating ground in the heart of west Belfast. But now that the team has been eliminated for the sixth World Cup in a row it is time to face facts, an all Ireland team is our best hope of ever getting to the Cup again and over the long term an all Ireland team might do quite well, especially if it began to draw players from all of Ireland’s football codes.
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The all Ireland rugby team is currently ranked fifth in the world and an all Ireland football team would surely rise in the FIFA rankings. There are of course many problems with this scheme. Firstly, the IFA would be furious at the loss of money and prestige if home games moved to the Aviva stadium in Dublin. Secondly, football is not rugby, rugby in Ireland is a middle class game that no one, deep down, really gets too serious about whereas football is important and comes with a heavy sectarian baggage that rugby does not possess. I concede these points, but one way to win over hearts and minds in Belfast would be to play half the home games there, perhaps in the new multi sport stadium being planned for the Ulster rugby and GAA teams. Loyalist and Republican paraphernalia and flags could be banned completely as they are for Belfast Giants games and then you might even see some Catholic supporters or families with children, rarities both in Windsor Park. Sectarianism is not the universal acid it once was in Belfast and it shouldn’t be forgot that Glasgow is a city divided between Rangers and Celtic supporters who come together to boo England at Hampden Park.
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Another difficulty is that many Northern Ireland players would fight to qualify for an all Ireland team; perhaps none of the current team would be good enough. But competition is ultimately a good thing, you want footballers playing their hearts out to get selected for the national team, not just assuming they’ve made it because they’re on a big club in the EPL. The Irish rugby team grants no favors to players because they are from Ulster or any of the other provinces and that has made the team stronger. Of course the diehard sectarian nutcase ‘supporters’ will never buy into this plan, but the whole point of the peace process in Northern Ireland is to build cross community bridges and displace sectarianism whenever possible. Money, patience and trust, but especially money from FIFA, UEFA and the British and Irish governments could grease a lot of wheels and make it happen. It’s already too late to get the ball rolling for Brazil 2014, but the 2018 World Cup is most likely going to go to England and FIFA, who helped create this mess in the first place, could throw Ireland several group stage games as a way of further sweetening the financial pot.
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I know some people will say, hold on a minute, it's not just about winning it's about playing the game, old chap. Yeah, pal, that may apply to some sports but not football.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Meades Meets The Future on the Isle of Lewis
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
We Have A Winner
Thanks to everyone who entered the Dead Trilogy competition. The actual time it took me to walk the length of Manhattan was a lackadaisical nine hours and forty minutes. I thought I gave a good clue when I said it took me longer than I was expecting but most people under-estimated the time which means, I suppose, that I'm a good bit slower and lazier than y'all think. If you didn't win thank you for participating.Monday, October 12, 2009
The Dead Trilogy Competition
Thanks to the largesse of those kind people at Allen and Unwin and Serpents Tail, I recently received a couple of copies of the trilogy edition of Dead I Well May Be, The Dead Yard and The Bloomsday Dead. The books look fantastic in this edition and the covers and artwork are consistent throughout. I'm keeping one set for myself but I thought I might as well give the other set away. It isn't available in the US (Dead I Well May Be isn't even in print in the US) so this might be a nice get for someone. They are all first editions and of course I'll sign them. It might be worth a few bob one day especially if I go onto fame or infamy....
Ok it's fairly simple competition. I lived in New York for seven years and Dead I Well May Be mostly takes place there. To get to know the city, one day I decided to walk the whole length of Broadway from the top of Manhattan to the bottom. I stopped off to eat a couple of times and there were a couple of bathroom breaks but mostly it was just me walking. My question is this: how long did it take? I noted my start time way up on 220th street and
my finish time when I met the missus at South Ferry. The person closest to my time in hours and minutes gets the books. Just leave your guess and name and an email address in the comments below, or if you have a blogger account just your name, answer and tick the email follow on button....
Unless someone gets the exact time in hours and minutes the competition will close forty eight hours after this post goes up and I'm only going to allow one guess per person. Finally, here's a wee hint: I did the walk all on one day but it took much longer than I was expecting. Good luck!
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Richard Dawkins Is Not Really An Atheist
Richard Dawkins was on BBC 5 Live recently talking about his latest book and he said something that struck me as rather odd. Paraphrasing (because the BBC's podcasts disappear after a week) he mused that there may be super beings out there in the universe indistinguishable from gods, who are the end products of a long period of evolution on their home worlds. He said something similar on Fresh Air two years ago. And although he thinks it unlikely Dawkins speculates that life here on Earth may have begun because one of these superbeings got the ball rolling with an initial seeding.Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Kids Say The Creepiest Things
Unfortunately I grew up in the era when film directors realised the full potential of having creepy children in their movies. I think it may have begun with the blonde geniuses in Children of the Damned but by the seventies Damien in the Omen really took the prize for terrifying toddlers. Damien freaked me out and then at a very vulnerable age I happened to see Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and that was the icing on the nightmares.