Avatar is The Abyss, not Aliens

Don't believe the film critics who tell you that Avatar is a great film: these guys are paid shills, corporate hacks, sell-outs and professional boosters for the film industry. Do believe me because I have no axe to grind, except maybe against James Cameron's beardy face. Avatar is a headache inducing bore of colossal proportions. The first four hours are like a really bad National Geographic special on New Guinea. We are supposed to be awe struck by 3 D digital plants and pseudo Native American blue aliens. The grumbling in my cinema started an hour in and then the grumbling became groans, a couple of walk outs, and then quite a few people in my row started taking their 3 D glasses off to give their eyeballs a break. The hours crawled by and it just went on and on with lines like: "I fell in love with the forest and then I fell in love with you." Ugh. Remember that cool bit in Titanic where the falling dude hits the propeller? - there isn't even a bit like that. To quote Michael Palin in the lion tamer sketch: its just dull, dull, deadly dull. The last act of the film is better but by this time my brain had forced me into a protective coma so I couldn't really appreciate it. I'll admit I was nervous about Avatar because of the extended trailer, but I liked T1, T2 and Aliens and expected a lot more of Cameron than a cheesy Thomas Covenant rip off. Yeah that's right I said Thomas Covenant rip off, namely Vol 2 The Ill Earth War. I have read everything! BTW whoever calls this film science fiction does not understand the concept of science fiction. This is a mid 80's era fantasy film, nothing more nothing less. The one consolation in the whole brain damaging mess is Sam Worthington who is clearly going to be the new Russell Crowe. If you havent seen Avatar, if I were you, I'd stick on Nickelodeon and watch Avatar: The Last Airbender instead - a kids cartoon with better dialogue, mythology and effects that wont give you a headache.

Solstice Sunset

St Kilda, 9.03 pm

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!

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.

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.")
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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.

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.

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Blurbs are important too and I'd like to thank Ken Bruen for being an early champion of Fifty Grand. Finally a word about the blogosphere. Because I didn't get reviews in the likes of The New York Times, The Washington Post etc. I was more dependent than ever this year on bloggers for their support, so a big thank you to Declan Burke, Gerard Brennan, Peter Rozovsky, Dana King, Brian Lindemuth, Seana Graham, Sandra Ruttan, Brian O'Rourke, Liam Hoyle, Dan Wagner, Jolie Jordan, John McFetridge and many others - without you I'd be up the bloody creek. Thank you guys and gals. If there are going to be Adrian McKinty crime novels in the future (something I'm thinking quite hard about right now) it will largely be down to your support. Go raibh maith agaibh.

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.

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Fifthly (and this is my most important argument) the mission to The Lonely Mountain was a joint enterprise which brought in Dwarves from all over Middle Earth. Dwarves came from The Iron Hills, The Blue Mountains etc. etc. and it would be a mistake if you gave them all the same Englishy actor accent which we saw a lot of in The Lord of the Rings. There should be important regional variations in the Dwarvish accents in the new films. Thorin of course could speak BBC English, but you should also have regional accents and dialects to show that these are Dwarves from all over the world. Now here's my point, although I've never actually acted in anything I think you should have a Belfast accent in there and I can do one. Here's an audio file of me on Radio New Zealand ! I can also do Gorbals Glasgow and a serviceable Brummie so please Mr Jackson (and of course Mr del Torro) think of the integrity of the story and give me a call. It doesn't have to be Balin or one of the glamour roles, Oin would be fine or even poor doomed Fili (er, spoiler alert). Also I can grow my own beard too which is more than you can say for Orlando Bloom.

My Best Fiend

With the permission of Werner Herzog, the entire documentary My Best Fiend has been posted on YouTube. Its a good introduction to Herzog and especially to his extraordinary work with the mercurial Klaus Kinski. Dont be put off by the first two minutes, the documentary is in English.

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.
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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.

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

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:

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London, England (CNN) -- For the past decade, Dubai has been home to the greatest concentration of cranes anywhere in the world as billions of tonnes of concrete, steel and glass have refashioned the city skyline. But the rapid growth of the past six years has slowed recently due to the global slump in property prices. Hopes of a recovery have now been further imperiled by the news that the state-owned Dubai World has requested to delay paying its massive debts by six months. Dubai has become a playground for architects as well as millionaires commissioning a string of audacious building projects aimed at helping reposition the city as the financial and cultural hub of the Middle East. Billions of dollars have been spent transforming the landscape, erecting buildings which continue to break records of all dimensions. The Burj Dubai -- at 818 meter the world's tallest skyscraper, the vast Palm Jumeirah -- built on land reclaimed from the sea, the Dubai Mall -- the largest shopping center in the world and the Mall of the Emirates; home to the world's biggest indoor ski slope form part of a very long list of completed construction projects. "The whole place is kind of like a time-lapse film. You wake up in the morning and it's just a little bit different," Jim Krane, author of "City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism" told CNN. But, according to Krane, some of these projects, like the Burj Dubai, suffer from a severe lack of practicality. "Dubai doesn't really need to have to build tall asides from prestige purposes. If you look at it, it's a really bad idea. It uses as much electricity as an entire city. And every time the toilet is flushed they've got to pump water half a mile into the sky," he said. The telescopic shape is also presents problems of a more practical nature Krane thinks. "The upper 30 or 40 floors are so tiny that they're useless, so they can't use them for anything else apart from storage. They've built a small, not so useful storage warehouse half a mile in the sky," he said.

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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."

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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?”
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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.
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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.
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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.

Getting Your Geek On

There's still a month to go until James Cameron's Avatar hits the screens and despite hating the trailer I find myself checking AICN every few days for updates. Once a geek always a geek I guess. In the meantime I found this mashup of the Spike Jonze/Beastie Boys Sabotage vid and The Empire Strikes Back. Men of a, uhm, certain age will love this, everyone else should give it a miss... I uploaded the High Def version so you might to want to pause it until the whole thing loads before you play.

This Is The Kind of Stuff I Have to Deal With

Ok you people out there in the UK and US and elsewhere have double digit unemployment, economic meltdown, chavs, hoodies and gangbangers rampaging through the streets, but at least you dont have to deal with this (from Yahoo news):

MELBOURNE, Australia – A kangaroo startled by a man walking his dog attacked the pair, pinning the pet underwater and slashing the owner in the abdomen with its hind legs. Chris Rickard, was in stable condition Monday after the attack, which ended when the 49-year-old elbowed the kangaroo in the throat. Rickard said he was walking his blue heeler, Rocky, on Sunday morning when they surprised a sleeping kangaroo in Arthur's Creek northeast of Melbourne. The dog chased the animal into a pond, when the kangaroo turned and pinned the pet underwater. When Rickard tried to pull his dog free, the kangaroo turned on him, attacking with its hind legs and tearing a deep gash into his abdomen and across his face. "I thought I might take a hit or two dragging the dog out from under his grip, but I didn't expect him to actually attack me," Rickard, 49, told The Herald Sun newspaper. "It was a shock at the start because it was a kangaroo, about 5 feet high, they don't go around killing people."

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Not yet Chris, but this is how countless low budget horror movies have begun.

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

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:
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Perugia, Italy (CNN) -- [According to the Prosecution] The November 2, 2007, death of British student Meredith Kercher occurred during a twisted sex game in which Amanda Knox taunted Kercher, and two men -- boyfriend Rafael Sollecito and acquaintance Rudy Guede -- sexually assaulted her. Prosecutor Guilano Mignini said during his seven-hour closing that Knox hated and resented Kercher and had decided the time had come to exact revenge. Knox, 22, and Sollecito, 26, are on trial for sexual assault and murder. Police found Kercher's bloody body under a duvet on the floor of the apartment she shared with Knox. Both deny the charges. Mignini said Kercher died about 11:30 p.m. after she and Knox had quarreled -- either over money or Guede's presence at the house. The prosecutor said the men pinned Kercher down by her arms while Knox played with the knife, prodding at her throat and saying, "Ah, you were pretending to be such a little saint. ... Now we are going to show you."

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The defense argument is that Knox spent the night sleeping at her boyfriend's house smoking marijuana and thus has no clear recollection of the evening's events. The drugs apparently also explained her bizarre 'confession' to the local cops and her odd behaviour in the days following the murder. For good measure the defense also says that Knox's DNA appeared on the murder weapon because of evidence mishandling by the Italian forensics unit.

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Despite the fact that this has become a cause celebre and, ridiculously, an early candidate for Trial of the Century, to me this is a fairly simple case, complicated only by the fact that Amanda Knox is American and very good looking. Patricia Highsmith wrote about uncannily similar events to the Knox affair in her novel The Talented Mr Ripley over three decades ago. Ms Knox is not as talented as Tom Ripley, not by a long chalk I'm happy to say.

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.

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However, (and you knew there was a however coming didn't you?) the problems I had with The Lost Symbol were many. First of all, I didn't like the fact that the book ended and then we still had two full hours to go. Two hours of exposition, back tracking and explanation that added nothing to the story whatsoever; and it annoyed the hell of me that the people doing this exposition had just seen their loved ones tortured and killed, but somehow, avoiding a mental breakdown, they decided to lecture us on their own personal exegesis of the Old Testament. End the book already! I kept yelling at the iPod.

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Secondly I didn't like Brown playing fast and loose with science: no Mr Brown ESP doesn't work, positive thoughts cannot reverse the growth of cancer cells, there is no such thing as a Jungian collective unconscious etc. etc. Those studies you mentioned about people praying for heart patients? - the results were the opposite of what you put in the book.

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My third problem was Brown's use of the word "chuckle". Everybody was always chuckling. Nobody laughed, tittered, hooted, snorted, guffawed, broke up, convulsed, snickered, whooped etc. They just chuckled. And boy did they chuckle. They chuckled in extremis. They chuckled when recalling memories. They especially chuckled when revealing odd bits of masonic lore. Dan Brown's got fifty million dollars and a library of ten thousand volumes but he doesn't own a Thesaurus?

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Ok, but that's enough of the hating. It's probably just jealousy. Dan Brown has written a page turner that's quite a bit slicker than the Da Vinci Code with less obvious howlers and better twists; so if you're looking for a good audiobook for your commute, I'd happily recommend it. (He said with a chuckle).

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.

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Well maybe I'm philosophically unsound but I hate the bloody Beatles. I hate their sound, their harmonies, their lyrics, everything about them. I find their music insipid, dull, bland, so bad in fact that it's almost torture to listen to. I hate the McCartney songs most of all, but the entire oeuvre pains my ears. And it's not as if I'm prejudiced against that era. Quite the reverse in fact. Among my favourite bands are Led Zep, Pink Floyd, The Who, The Stones, The Kinks, The Animals, Cream, but not the frickin Beatles. I hate the early mop top Beatles, I'm a little more tolerant of the middle period stuff in Revolver and Rubber Soul, but then it really gets bad with the late psychedelic albums. Everything about those records makes me irritated and I defy the most ardent Beatles fan to watch the whole of Magical Mystery Tour without wincing in pain and agony. Apart from the two Harrison tracks on Abbey Road I'd be happy never to hear any of those songs ever again as long as I live. (Harrison is my favourite Beatle not just because of his music, but also because he mortgaged his house so that Monty Python could make Life of Brian.)*

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I know most people won't understand me when I confess to these feelings, but there they are, the cat's out of the bag and I feel better.The BBC may disagree with me but some influential people are also jumping on the Beatles hating bandwagon. Anyway I'll stop now before someone gets me started on The Beach Boys or The Eagles or the abomination that was known as Wings.

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*Here's a fact for trivia fans: George Harrison and Elvis both shared a favourite film: Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Back From The Wars

My little brother got back safely from Afghanistan at the weekend. I've talked to him on the phone but he was too exhausted to really give me a lot of details, though I get the impression that this was a harder tour than his time in Iraq last year. Physically it seemed much more difficult: he was based in the desert in Helmand, was sleeping in a tent and although he's an intelligence officer, he was much closer to the front lines this time too.

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Still Gareth is back and everyone in the McKinty family is relieved. Because this was his second combat mission in two years he wont have to go on a combat tour again for a long time. And I'm just glad I'm off the hook. My grandad fought in the trenches of World War 1 for an incredible four years, my dad was in the Royal Navy for twenty years and now Gareth has done his bit for our generation. Hopefully the next generation will not have to deal with any of this craziness.

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Incidentally, Gareth sent me a video of his last dinner in the officer's mess that sensitive souls should not watch.

Everything We Know Is Wrong

From The New York Times

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.
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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.

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.

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It didn't. Betty Draper, the enemy within, was the one who plunged the metaphorical knife, ostensibly because of Don's serial affairs with a bevy of brunettes, although it seemed to me that Mrs Draper decided to end their marriage more because she discovered he was poor white trash from West Virginia or thereabouts. She, of course, is a Main Line Bryn Mawr girl cut from the same cloth as Grace Kelly's character in High Society. And now that I think about it, I suspect that rather than following John Cheever as a model for future shows the writers of Mad Men will take us on a dance a bit like High Society (or the better original The Philadelphia Story) where Betty will have to choose between one of several suitors including her ex husband.

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Most of the reviews I've read of Mad Men have raved about another brilliant season, but actually I think this series was weak and unfocused with a lot of non sequitur storylines and tangential plots. The secondary characters grew duller and were absent for much of the time. Did Kurt and Smitty have any lines at all this year? And I really missed Joan giving it the old boom shaka boom shaka boom round the office. At least we did get our weekly dose of Martian Pete Campbell trying desperately not to blow his human cover. Still, much of it was thin gruel. I wasn't impressed by the appearance of Conrad Hilton and I thought the manufactured fight between Roger and Don was pretty lame - Don really could do with a Moriarity but Roger isn't it. What saved season 3 for me was the strength of its final two episodes - last week's mournful riff on the Kennedy assassination and this week's exciting industrial espionage romp. Matthew Weiner has distilled Mad Men back to its essence and we're now literally in a small hotel room with all the main characters as they try to start a new company. Roger, Coop, Pete, Peggy and Joan allied with Don will make for good TV next go round.

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.
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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?)
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Anyway, Joyeux Anniversaire, Jacques.

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.
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Late last year Yoani was named one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time magazine and last month the Cuban government banned her from traveling to New York to receive an international journalism award. (Only high ranking Communist officials are allowed to travel outside of Cuba). The DGI frequently attempts to block Yoani's blog, but most of the time you can read it here: Generacion Y.

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I'm really upset about what happened to Yoani but there's a wider problem too. Cuba, I feel, gets far too easy a ride in media circles. Pro Cuban stories frequently appear on the BBC and CNN talking about the wonderful music scene in Havana, Cuban beach holidays, and how "Cubans are more ready to meet the challenges of recession because of their policy of recycling junk." These are puff pieces without a hint of serious reporting. I've been to Cuba many times and take it from me Cuba is not a tropical paradise with a benign dictatorship, happy go lucky cops and great gleaming hospitals. Cuba is a clumsy, thuggish, police state and Havana is a town filled with teen prostitutes, pimps and "sex tourists". There is no freedom of travel or speech in Cuba and the Communist Party and the Secret Police run the island with unsubtle brutality. I think it's very hard to get this truth across because most journalists are broadly sympathetic to Cuba regarding it as a plucky little island holding up a defiant middle finger to big bad Uncle Sam on the other side of the Florida Strait. A particular offender in my eyes is The Huffington Post who published a fawning interview between Sean Penn and Raul Castro late last year and just a couple of weeks ago ran an impassioned "editorial" from Alec Baldwin demanding an end to the ban on US citizens travelling to Cuba. (US citizens, of course, are not banned from travelling to Cuba, they just aren't allowed to spend money there, but try telling that to Mr Baldwin or Huffington Post readers and you'll get disbelieving howls.)

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The embargo is a whole other issue and I'd like to see an end to it too because the Castro brothers use it as an excuse for their disastrous economic incompetence and gross mismanagement. Even if the brothers were geniuses (which they are not) no two people should run any country for fifty years. If you really hated living under George Bush for 8 years, imagine how Cubans feel living under Raul and Fidel for 50.

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I've emailed Yoani to see if she's ok, but the best thing we can all do is email our local Cuban embassy or consulate to let them know that the whole world will be watching how they treat her and other dissidents. This is the email address of the Cuban Embassy in London: embacuba@cubaldn.com and they can be called here: 0207 240-2488

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?

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.

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.

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These columns are so tedious to me. They ignore the fact that Halloween is a Celtic invention, not an American one and thrives in the parts of the British Isles where toffs like AN Wilson obviously never travel to. Still for a man so well educated you think he at least would have dipped into The Golden Bough now and again where the multifarious British manifestations of Halloween are well documented. I'd love to rehash all my arguments from November 2008, but the articles are so suspiciously similar, perhaps you should just read my post from last year instead.

The Cove

A few weeks ago I went to see a film called The Cove about the secret slaughter of dolphins in Japan and the shipping of the survivors to water parks (like Sea World) across the globe. I knew that if I wrote about the film then I would say something stupid and intemperate; unfortunately in the ensuing weeks I have not calmed down. If you get a chance to go see The Cove you should. Its a very well made documentary, both beautifully shot, oddly exciting and very moving. (There's a whole Soylent Green subtext too which is perversely funny). If self aggrandizing bully Michael Moore represents everything that is wrong with modern documentary film making, The Cove represents everything that is good. The hero of the film is Richard O'Barry who was the original trainer for Flipper and who after years of working in Hollywood had a Road to Damascus moment when one of his dolphins died in his arms.
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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.

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).

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But I didn't really want to talk about the book that much, I actually wanted to chat about a unique experience in my life: reading the book while drinking the beer that's been named after it. I know of no other beer which has been named after a book, and didn't know about Greenmantle Ale until I found it in my local beer shop in St Kilda. Greenmantle Ale is a light session ale - malty, hoppy, smooth and very drinkable. To my mind there were caramel and chocolate notes and a pleasant slightly tannic aftertaste. The alcohol content is not high and you could knock back three or four and still concentrate on your novel.

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There are of course Thomas Hardy ales but I haven't heard of another beer/book combination like this. There's plenty of scope for others: War and Peace could inspire a Russian Imperial Stout and surely the Brooklyn Brewing Company could do something with Last Exit to Brooklyn. The lack of a Ulysses Porter seems like an enormous gap in the market, but of course sometimes its the evil of the giant brewing companies that's to blame.

Aren't You A Little Short For A Stormtrooper?

A few months ago Casey Pugh had the idea of remaking Star Wars Sweded style as a collaborative fan based video project. He divided Star Wars into 473 15 second clips and asked for contributions. When its done the movie will be spliced together and called Star Wars Uncut. There are about 50 15 second segments left so if you want to be part of what will be the funniest and best Stars Wars Fan Vid ever jump on over to StarWarsUncut.com. They've released a trailer on YouTube of what they've got so far and I think its got classic written all over it.

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.

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As you may know the Jacobites were denied the Kingship of England and Scotland (and Ireland) because they were Catholics and after the defeat of James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 they fled to France. In 1715 (the "fifteen") and again under Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745 (the "forty-five") they tried to raise the clans in Scotland. It didn't work and the English put down the rebellion and Charlie fled back to France. The Jacobites married into European Royalty and they haven't gone away although they gave up their actual claim to the British throne in 1810.

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Prince Franz seems like a decent chap. He's a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and he collects modern art. He spent part of his childhood in Dachau concentration camp where he was sent because his family opposed the Nazis. The Scots really could do a lot worse. (King Mel the First anyone?) Franz (who the Jacobites title King Francis II of Scotland) doesn't however have any kids so the succession would pass to Prince Max of Bavaria and then to the charmingly named Sophie, Hereditary Princess of Liechtenstein.

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Of course a few pro independent Scots are republicans and some favour the current Queen (who is half Scottish after all) but I think there are still some who hanker for "the King over the water." So Prince Franz, here's a question for you, do you take Lowenbrau with your haggis or maybe a nice Schneider Weisse?

The Lost Squirrel...

I've been listening to The Lost Symbol as an audiobook and in the library CD package I found this unknown Dan Brown work that I thought I should share with everyone...

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.

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:

In Life on the Mississippi there is a queer little illustration of the central weakness of Mark Twain’s character. In the earlier part of this mainly autobiographical book the dates have been altered. Mark Twain describes his adventures as a Mississippi pilot as though he had been a boy of about seventeen at the time, whereas in fact he was a young man of nearly thirty. There is a reason for this. The same part of the book describes his exploits in the Civil War, which were distinctly inglorious. Moreover, Mark Twain started by fighting, if he can be said to have fought, on the Southern side, and then changed his allegiance before the war was over. This kind of behaviour is more excusable in a boy than in a man, whence the adjustment of the dates. It is also clear enough, however, that he changed sides because he saw that the North was going to win; and this tendency to side with the stronger whenever possible, to believe that might must be right, is apparent throughout his career.

Orwell is quite wrong about this. Mark Twain was 22 when he began studying to be a pilot on the Mississippi and 24 when he got his license. By the age of 25 he had already abandoned the Confederate Army had headed west to Nevada. 25 strikes me as still being pretty young. Its also very odd for Orwell to claim that Twain was jumping onto the winning team. It looked like the Confederacy was going to win the war or at least force a negotiated peace well in to 1864, a good three years after the young Sam Clemens had headed west.

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Childhood heroes let you down as you get older, but that's sort of their job and Orwell is no different. Unfortunately he couldn't resist fitting his facts around his theories, a flaw that shines through some of his work. However when he was good he was very, very good. Take a look at England Your England or Such Such Were The Joys as nice examples of his high art.

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?)
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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.

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:

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1. Salman Rushdie is a Lord of the Rings geek and speaks fluent Elvish. That, my friends, is clearly how to impress the ladies.

2. Norman Mailer believed in reincarnation.

3. Jean Rhys lived in terror of obeah - West Indian black magic.

4. Simenon wrote a new Maigret novel every 11 days.

5. Ernest Hemingway wrote standing up.

6. James Thurber had a photographic memory and could transcribe entire conversations, perfectly, decades later.

7. Until 100 Years of Solitude came out none of Garcia Marquez's books had ever sold more than 700 copies. (There's hope for all of us!)

8. Martin Amis appeared as a child actor in the film A High Wind in Jamaica.

9. Stephen King was drunk during the writing of Cujo.

10. Isaac Bashevis Singer felt that we were surrounded by ghosts and spirits.

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My favourite interviews were with Singer, Faulkner, Denison and Hemingway who all seem pretty likeable. My least favourite were with Graham Greene and William Gaddis who, frankly, seem like jerks.

The Nietzschean Art of Cormac McCarthy

With the release this week of the new Cormac McCarthy film The Road, I thought I would repost my review of the book from January of this year....

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.
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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.

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.
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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.

Meades Meets The Future on the Isle of Lewis

One of my favourite people, Jonathan Meades, is back on BBC 4 with a new series, this time called Off Kilter which is all about the architecture and symbolism of Scotland. Thanks to the Meades Shrine you can watch this and every series on YouTube and you should (just don't tell too many people or the BBC that you're doing it). In the clip to the right Meades has gone to the Isle of Lewis & Harris and found a Ballardian futurescape of rust and beauty. Because the clip has been uploaded in glorious hi-def you'll need to pause it for about a minute after the circle thing stops loading, so that it will play without interruption. (It's worth the hassle.) And check out more Meades on YouTube.

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.

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Enough about those losers, now for the winner...the closest guess was 9 hours 37 minutes from Ryan. Just three minutes out! Freaky. Anyway the trilogy edition of the Dead series goes to him. Well done mate, now do us a favour and give me your email or your address and I'll have those books off to you in tomorrow's post. I hope you don't live in England, I just heard that the Royal Mail is going on strike...

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.
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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.
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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!

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.

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Now Dawkins says that he doesn't believe in God because he thinks that God has to be infinite, and has to exist prior to the Big Bang, but he is, apparently, willing to believe in a finite god who is the end product of evolution. This doesn't seem an enormous distinction to me. Let's say a god-like being did kick off evolution on this planet and he or she has been watching us closely for the last 4 billion years (those first three billion must have dragged). Wouldn't it make sense then to worship and pray to this entity in the hope that we could benefit from the entity's largess? If sufficiently advanced couldn't this entity do just about anything including preserving our mind states and transmuting these mind states into another form after our deaths? Dawkins consistently mocks the efficacy of prayer and the belief in resurrection, but these are the logical outcomes of what he's saying here. Furthermore in a universe of 10 000 billion suns with billions of Earth like worlds that's been knocking around now for at least 13 billion years doesn't it seem more likely than not that these god-like beings have evolved somewhere and indeed are out there right now? Wouldn't prayer and worship seem like sensible, precautionary steps in dealing with these potentially terrifying entities? And what exactly does Dawkins's atheism mean if he is prepared to believe in gods, but not an infinite God? In the strict sense of the word Dawkins is not an atheist, he's an agnostic. Theism is the belief in at least one god, atheism is the certain belief that there are no gods.

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Hold on a minute, you may be saying to yourself, can the world's most famous atheist really not be an atheist at all? Uhm, yeah, I think so. I also think that if you believe in evolution by natural selection (and the evidence is overwhelming folks) and if you believe that the universe is 13.5 billion years old (again lots of evidence) then strict atheism (belief in no gods or god-like entities) is not very logical. Somewhere, somewhen they must have evolved.

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And don't even get me started on Dawkins's colleague, Professor Nick Bostrom and his theory that none of this is real to begin with and that we are all very probably living in a computer simulation controlled by god-like beings from the future.

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.

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Of course since then we've had The Sixth Sense and The Ring so that now the scary supernatural child is almost the default position in horror films and the trope is so pervasive you begin to suspect it even in your own life. Tonight my daughter and I were out for an evening walk in a tumbledown part of St Kilda when we passed a house covered in ivy with a decrepit roof, old fashioned shutters and windows that had a vague, oddly sinister fairy-tale appearance. The garden however was full of wild flowers, so I said "Oh what a lovely house." My daughter replied, "Yes, but the gate is talking to me and wants me to go in." I'm pretty sure that if I hadn't been conditioned by The Ring, The Omen etc. I would have just ignored this remark; as it was, a chill went down my spine. "What do you mean the gate was talking to you?" I asked. "Oh you know, the way everything talks to you," she explained.

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I was scared and did not press the matter further. I decided that I didn't want to know. Finding out accelerates you to Act 2 and for the present I want to stay in Act 1. Of course it's nothing more than the innocent ramblings of an imaginative seven year old, but then again...

Blood's A Rover

I reviewed James Ellroy's Blood's A Rover for today's Australian newspaper. The first few paragraphs are below and you can read the full review here. Spoiler Alert: I liked the book. Also in today's Australian there's an interview with the Napoleon of Irish fiction, John Banville, talking about genre writing.

The Heavyweight in the Red Corner

Boxing aficionado, James Ellroy, is a little like the Joe Frazier of American letters. While Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy get spoken of as contenders for the title of America’s Greatest Novelist, Ellroy often gets dismissed as a mere crime writer. His amour propre, his past as a teenage neo-Nazi, and the fact that he writes about that most gauche of places, Los Angeles, has never endeared him to the literary establishment.
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Blood’s A Rover, however, may just well change their opinion. It is the completion of Ellroy’s near two thousand page American Underworld trilogy that began with the evocative American Tabloid and continued with the extraordinary The Cold Six Thousand. American Tabloid is a technically impressive and often brilliant novel structured around the Cuban Revolution and the Kennedy assassination, written in a clipped ultra telegraphic prose style that reinvents American crime fiction in a way no writer has attempted to do since the 1920's. Harsh, single word, verb-less sentences pile on top of one another like the dripping tap of a water torturer, producing a hypnotic, trance-like effect which repels as many readers as it seduces. But where American Tabloid is a book teetering on the edge of a cliff, The Cold Six Thousand jumps completely into the abyss with an even sparer haiku-like prose style and a complex narrative of conspiracies, invasions and cover-ups starting with JFK’s murder and ending with the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
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Blood’s A Rover breathlessly continues the story in the days following King’s death in Memphis. The central characters in the book are the ones we got to know (and in most cases dislike) in The Cold Six Thousand - the conspirators who planned the hits on both Kennedy brothers and MLK. If this sounds a bit crazy, well, it is. In Ellroy’s America (and one assumes he does not actually believe this) Dr. King was shot by Hoover’s FBI working with the mafia, Cuban exiles and the CIA. King’s murder incites rioting in America’s black ghettoes and Richard Nixon rides the conservative backlash to get elected with a little help from the mob, Dominican drug dealers, an ex FBI macher called Dwight Holly and a murderous ex Las Vegas cop, Wayne Tedrow Jr. who ended book two of the trilogy by helping beat his father to death with a golf club.
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To complete the Freudian trio of central protagonists in Blood’s A Rover we are introduced to the new character of Donald Crutchfield, a neophyte private investigator, voyeur and pervert. Ellroy has described himself as the ‘Tolstoy of crime fiction’ and Crutch is transparently Ellroy’s Pierre Bezukhov - a mostly sympathetic avatar of the novelist himself, who gets his kicks (as Ellroy once did) by breaking into women’s homes to sniff their underwear.
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We follow these diverse sociopaths on a wild ride through the politics, controversy and insanity of America in the seventies with Ellroy gleefully libelling the conveniently deceased Nixon, Hoover, LBJ and Howard Hughes who were all in on the whole Kennedy thing. And yes I know this is a novel and not actual history but I still find it a little disturbing that Ellroy absolves such real life individuals as Sirhan Sirhan, Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray, all of whom are mere patsies in the wider conspiracy. Then again, though, maybe that is the point, as in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, Ellroy’s world is not quite our world: this is an alternative 1970's, a slightly darker America where intelligence agencies, the military industrial complex and very rich men are the sinister puppet masters. (One shudders to think what Ellroy could do with 9/11 as subject matter.) ...
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(You can read the rest of this review over at The Australian)

Woody Allen Used To Be Good, Honest

I was quite excited by the idea of the new Woody Allen film Whatever Works. It's about a misanthropic scientist played by Larry David - of Seinfeld and Curb fame - but when I finally saw the flick over the weekend I was disappointed. It's not so funny or interesting and as I talked to a few people about it I realized that there was an entire generation out there who only know Woody Allen from his scandalous personal life and his weak later period works. He's also in the news this week for being the first signature on a creepy list of people who want the immediate release of Roman Polanski. Anyway it sometimes helps to divorce the artist from his work and as a very small corrective, here's my list of the Top 10 best Woody Allen films:

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1. Annie Hall (1977): Woody at the height of his powers. A bittersweet geek-meets-girl romance containing such classics as: Marshall McLuhan, the JFK conspiracy sex excuse, the Grammy Hall dinner, the party at Paul Simon's house etc. Genius. A+

2. Hannah and Her Sisters (1985). The story of Hannah and, er, her sisters. Funny, twisted, dark, very sad, and then funny again with a kick ass happy ending. Brilliant. A+

3. Love and Death (1975). Woody's take on classic Russian literature.
Sonja: You were my one great love.
Boris: Oh, thank you very much. I appreciate that. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm dead.
Sonja: What's it like?
Boris: What's it like? You know the chicken at Tresky's Restaurant? It's worse.
Sonja: There are many different kinds of love, Boris. There's love between a man and a woman; between a mother and son...
Boris: Two women. Let's not forget my favorite.
Sonja: And I want three children.
Boris: Yes. Yes. One of each.
Anton Inbedkov: Shall we say pistols at dawn?
Boris Grushenko: Well, we can say it. I don't know what it means, but we can say it.
A

4. Sleeper (1973). A health food store owner from the 70's wakes up in the twenty third century. The giant pudding scene may the funniest thing ever put on celluloid. A

5. Crimes and Misdemeanors (1991). Martin Landau hires Lenny from Law & Order to murder Angelica Huston and that's when his troubles really begin. Nice subplot involving Woody and Alan Alda. A

6. Radio Days (1986). A sentimental favourite of mine. Woody captures the universe of pre war radio stars. The War of the Worlds bit is LOL hilarious as the kids would say if they could stop tweeting for five minutes and watch a good film for a change. B+

7. Manhattan (1979). Beautifully shot, bittersweet somewhat troubling romance between a young girl and an older dude. (No prizes for guessing who plays the older dude) B+

8. Take the Money and Run (1969). Early anarchic comedy about an incompetent criminal. The scene with the cello and the marching band just about kills me. B+

9. Play It Again Sam (1972). All the old Woody cast in a kind of prequel to Annie Hall. Its mostly shot in San Francisco and its a bit wackier than the mature Woodman, but there's some great stuff in there. B+

10. Match Point (2003). Much derided in England because Woody dared show the Swiss Re Building and had a lot fun with a London setting. Great central performances and Scarlett Johansson appears in a wet T shirt. Whats not to like? B+

Two Plot Flaws In Inglourious Basterds?

I thought Inglourious Basterds was a bit feeble. For me it had the vibe of a well meaning Valentine card from Quentin Tarantino to his surrogate father Harvey Weinstein - a goyish anti-Nazi revenge fantasy light years from the ironic, subtle revenge fantasies of, say, Mel Brooks or Lubitsch's To Be or Not To Be. Unless you've drunk the Kool Aid in Tarantino Land (like most of the critics on Rotten Tomatoes) you've probably had your emperor/no clothes moment; but let's say you're one of those who liked IG, well then, I need your help understanding a couple of things:

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#1. I get the fact that IG is an alternative history, I see that, I've read a lot of counterfactuals and alternative histories, but one thing I know about that genre is that they all still have to obey their own internal logic. You need self consistency in an alternative history for the story to make sense - unless you're in a universe where the rules of formal logic are actually different and if so you need to explain that. So help me understand this then, please. Recruiting the Basterds Brad Pitt explains that he fought the Germans throughout Sicily and Italy as the Allies did in fact do in the real World War 2. In Josef Goebbels' propaganda film we actually see some of this campaign fictionalised. Germans fighting American troops as they push up the spine of the Apennines. So why is it when Hitler is interviewing the Wehrmacht Private about the Basterds campaign of terror in France that the enormous map behind Hitler's head shows the Reich as it was in roughly November 1942 before Rommel was driven out of the Africa and before the allies invaded either Sicily or Italy? The disposition of forces is at least two years out of date, which is a bit of a serious flaw in a battlefield map. This looks a lot to me like a plain old fashioned cock up rather like the moment in the film Atonement when they flash forward to 1939 and we're at the Dunkirk evacuation (which of course happened in 1940). Tarantino prides himself on his attention to detail and care with every element of a scene so perhaps someone could explain why this map is so wrong.

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#2. This problem is more to do with narrative structure. If you removed the Basterds completely from IG I think nothing in the story would actually have changed. The entire Nazi leadership (SPOILER ALERT) would all still die at the end and in a much more grisly fashion, burned to death by Shoshana (above) and her assistant. Do the Basterds turn any narrative wheels at all in this screenplay, or are they just one enormous sub-plot that doesn't actually go anywhere? Again QT prides himself on the tightness of his scripts, but this seems poorly thought through.

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I'm not trying to pick on Quentin Tarantino. The first 15 minutes of IG and Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, KBpt1 and Jackie Brown prove that he is a big talent, but I do wish someone would stage an intervention at this point. Everyone needs to listen to older and wiser counsel from time to time and Harvey isn't doing his boy any favours by letting him play off the leash film after film.

The Celtic History of England Suppressed Again

As everyone now knows a huge Anglo Saxon horde of gold was found in a field near Walsall in July by an unemployed chap out with his metal detector. I wish nothing but good luck to Terry Herbert who found the gold and stands to make a couple of million quid, but I do want to cast a skeptical eye on the experts the British government has put on this treasure trove. At the press conference on Thursday with tears in his eyes Dr Kevin Leahy started quoting from Beowulf as he described the dozens of gold and silver objects recovered from the field. What Beowulf has to do with anything is beyond me. Beowulf dates from the 10th century and these items come from the 6th or 7th. It would be like quoting from Cheers to explain something that happened at the Salem Witch Trials. I'm also suspicious that these objects have been definitively called Anglo-Saxon. Do they look Anglo Saxon to you? To me the artifacts are unmistakably Celtic in origin and design. And here's a few reasons why they might not be Anglo Saxon: Firstly, they were discovered in an area which was a boundary zone between the native Britons and the invading Germanic peoples. Secondly the Germans were pagan, the West Britons Christian and yet three crosses and a verse from the Bible in Latin were found in the horde. Let's unpack that a little. Who do you think is more likely to have a Latin Bible verse written on gold on them, an illiterate pagan Anglo Saxon warrior or a Celtic Romano-Christian Briton? Well, according to the experts the illiterate pagan of course. Thirdly the tentative attachment of this horde with Penda, King of Mercia is also odd because Penda claimed to be a direct descendant of Wotan and was certainly not a convert to Christianity (although some of his children may have converted if you believe Bede).
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So what's going on? This is what I think: The entire "Anglo Saxon" history of England is largely bogus. The Germanic peoples from Denmark and Saxony did certainly migrate to England in the fifth and sixth centuries but the native Celts were not slaughtered or driven from their land. Thanks to DNA research by Bryan Sykes (et al.) we now know that a relatively small number of Germanic invaders became an elite upper caste in the central and eastern parts of England some time in the fifth and sixth centuries. The great mass of the English people remained Celtic in language, culture and origin. These Germanic invaders did not penetrate Wales or Scotland or Ireland, but the idea that the English are different from the peoples of the "Celtic fringe" has been hard to shift. It was a largely Victorian notion and comes coupled with the idea that the English are Germanic, democratic, logical while the Celts are romantic, dreamy, talkative, illogical. This entire idea is - excuse my Anglo Saxon - total bollocks. A lot of English archaeologists haven't caught up with the DNA evidence yet because it shatters the paradigm of the history/propaganda they were taught in school and university.
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They need to get with the new science. England like Ireland, Scotland and Wales was a Celtic country (with Germanic overlords) until much much later than anyone realised. To me this treasure is a startling example of Celtic art and to my mind has nothing whatsoever to do with Anglo Saxons (a dodgy term in itself), King Penda, or, God save us, Beowulf.

St Kilda...FTW!

I may have some sort of magical power rather like the Rain God in Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker books. Why do I say this? Well, unless you're a St Kilda footie team fan and you believe strongly in the Jinx, read on:

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Item#1 In 1986 after moving to England to attend Warwick University I started going to Coventry City games. Coventry were the local football team and you could always get tickets because Cov had never won anything in its 104 year history. Eight months after I started supporting Coventry they won the FA Cup, the most important trophy in English football and the only one they have ever taken.

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Item#2 In 1993 I moved to New York City and because I was living in Harlem and working in Washington Heights, naturally I became a Yankees fan for baseball and a Rangers fan for hockey. (I don't like basketball or American football). In 1994 the Rangers won their first Stanley Cup in 54 years and in 1996 the New York Yankees won their first World Series in 19 years.

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Item #3 In 2001 we moved to Denver, Colorado and started going to Colorado Rockies games. In 2007 the Rockies got to the World Series for the first time in their history and although they lost, it was still quite an achievement for them to take the NL Pennant.

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Item #4 Last year we moved to St Kilda, Melbourne, Australia. I quickly discovered to my dismay that no one really cares about soccer or rugby in this town, but footie - Aussie Rules - is everything. I started watching Aussie Rules on telly and found that I liked the game. But which team to support? Well there was really no choice: we live in St Kilda, my daughter goes to St Kilda Primary School and every Monday the St Kilda FC boys come to the Sea Baths to ruin my swimming session (but we'll forgive them that) so it had to be The Saints. What has happened? What do you think? St Kilda are in the Grand Final with a chance of taking the whole thing for the first time since 1966. Are they actually going to win? I don't know, but I wouldn't bet against them.

Gadaffi, JFK, Ellroy and North By Northwest

For the last couple of days I've been eagerly awaiting Colonel Gadaffi's speech at the UN. Yesterday I stayed up late to watch it on Cspan and I wasn't disappointed. Gadaffi really brought the crazy, but he also brought together a number of themes that this blog has been rattling on about in recent months: Accusing the UN delegates of being nothing more than murderers he nicely summarised my posts about the Hitchcock classic North By Northwest. He then complained about how impossible it was to get a good night's sleep because of noisy neighbours, which I can empathise with. Seemingly losing his marbles completely at one point Gadaffi turned to the assembled ambassadors and heads of state and demanded to know if any of them "had information about who killed JFK" which dovetailed nicely into my posts about James Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand. The Libyan leader's speech was only the second longest in UN history; he was of course outlasted by Fidel Castro whose little brother Raul makes a cameo appearance in my novel Fifty Grand, which I've posted about here. (Nice plug, eh?) It was the speech of a true nutter and the only thing he forgot to talk about which I've covered was UFO's.

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Anyway, you can read an excellent piece of reportage on Gadaffi's UN speech in The Guardian here and if you're a fan of the whole Chavez-Castro school of rhetoric you can watch the whole barmy thing on Cspan.

Postcards From The Edge

My little brother Gareth emailed me back some pics from Afghanistan. He's the balding chap in the second one and that fuzzy one at the end is his charming accomodation. Every guest bed should come with an SA-80 assault rifle on the pillow, don't you think?

Top 20 Travel Books

The Times newspaper has published a list of the 20 best travel books of the last century. These lists are only a bit of fun and I've been guilty of a couple of them myself, but even so, this particular one is - shall we say - a wee bit parochial. Of the twenty travel writers on the their list, 17 are English (17!). There's one Irish woman on there and the two Americans are Paul Theroux who of course has a couple of English children and who lived in London for twenty years and Bill Bryson who has dual British/American citizenship and who lives in Yorkshire. There are no French, German, Spanish, Polish, or Italian travel writers on the Times list. No one from Latin America, Africa or Asia. The great VS Naipaul doesn't get a look in or Carlo Levi or Peter Mathiessen or William Least Heat Moon or Pico Iyer etc. etc.
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Still if you're looking for a list of the top 20 English travel books of the last century this is a good place to start, although why A Time of Gifts isn't #1 is a bit of a puzzle.

It's an LA Thing: Pynchon, Ellroy & Philip K Dick

In the early 1970's James Ellroy, Thomas Pynchon and Philip K Dick were all living within a few miles of each other in Greater Los Angeles. Ellroy was a 23 year old kid beginning his first experiments with writing, Pynchon was 34 and editing the book which would become Gravity's Rainbow and Dick at 42 was reaching his peak as a novelist, having the experiences and working on the book which would become A Scanner Darkly. There must have been something about that time and place because - joining Scanner - we've now gotten Pynchon's version of events in Inherent Vice and Ellroy's take in Blood's A Rover and they all seem to share certain thematic unities: pandemic drug use, paranoia, corrupt LAPD officers, belief in government conspiracies, supreme disillusionment with politics, and, in the case of Ellroy and Pynchon, an odd obsession with Las Vegas and Howard Hughes. The overriding impression you get from these novels is that America as an ideal has reached a dead end here at the edge of the continent among the wastrels, drug dealers, dreamers and movie stars. And it might even go deeper than that - not only has America failed, but the whole enlightenment project has failed. The modern world is fundamentally broken and cannot be fixed; democracy has no future - you either have total license or total tyranny and the proponents of these extremes are shrill and crazy.

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But that just may be Los Angeles. Don't get me wrong, I like LA. Fat Burger and Santa Monica and Malibu Creek are worth the drive, but I don't think you could have written Rover, Scanner or Vice in New England where people are not known for their demonstrative or hyperbolic nature. William Faulkner tells a story about how he was driving in Maine once and asked for directions. "Can you get to X, from here?" Faulkner wondered. "Yes." a local farmer responded. "Thanks," Faulkner said and off he drove before finding that the road he was on ended in the middle of nowhere. He drove back and encountered the farmer again. "I thought you said I could get to X from here," he wondered. "Not on this road," the farmer told him. Faulkner claims that he was impressed by the Mainer's precise answer to his question. In Mississippi they would have gone out of their way to show you the right road, but that was unnecessarily verbose in Maine.

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I have to say, although Faulkner was subtly dissing the north east, I really like it up there: people keep to themselves, they're suspicious of authority and innovation and they don't fall easily for the latest trends. Perhaps in the Los Angeles of 1971 America's future seemed bleak - as it does today - but drive up to New Hampshire or Vermont or Maine (and many other places in the heartland I'll bet) and you'll see a landscape and culture unchanged in nearly four centuries and a hardy, skeptical people who are not afraid of the future and who can handle just about anything.

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(Except maybe the terrible circumstances of another novel I read recently - Cormac McCarthy's The Road. )

Surfing Bells With Swayze

Last December I was lucky enough to go surfing in several places along the coast west of Melbourne including Apollo Bay and Bells Beach. I'm an out of shape 40 year old Irish guy from Belfast so it wasn't anything spectacular: small wave surfing on a long board. But I was thinking about it today. At the end of Point Break, Patrick Swayze ends up in Australia and goes out to Bells Beach to die on the wave of a 100 year storm. Of course the scene at Bells was really filmed somewhere on the Oregon coast but that's not the issue. What I'm trying to say is that I really liked that goofy movie Point Break and I'm sorry that Patrick Swayze is no longer with us. One of journalism's rare voices of sanity Joe Queenan had a nice piece about Swayze in the Guardian today. You can read a couple of paragraphs he wrote about Point Break below and you can read the rest of the article here.
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"The 1991 Kathryn Bigelow film, in which Keanu Reeves plays a fabulously good-looking though not especially cerebral undercover cop, revolves around a gang of surfing bank robbers led by the disarmingly philosophical Swayze. The very idea of making a movie about surfing, philosophical gangsters led by Swayze, who Reeves vows to bring to justice, reaffirms why America is such a great country. Anyone can make movies about good love gone bad. Anyone can make movies about the lives of others. But we make movies about surfing bank robbers who spout Buddhist wisdom to undercover cops named Johnny Utah. And we have the good sense to cast Swayze in them.

Our favourite movies are never the ones that are shown out of competition at Cannes. They're the ones you can't wait until your kids are old enough to see. They're the ones you always recommend when a friend calls up and asks what film she should watch to cheer her up and you cannot, cannot believe that she has never crossed paths with Johnny Utah and Bodhi. They're the ones that if someone told you they didn't understand their appeal, you would terminate the friendship on the spot. They're the ones that make you feel that the stars on the screen will always be young ."

Stone The Bloody Crows, or, Rather, Don't

Call me an odd bod but I've always been fascinated by crows of the genus corvus and in particular ravens, who are the most sinister but also the cleverest of the wild birds we get in the British Isles (their brains are even bigger than those of parrots). Crows can recognise human faces, perhaps even letters of the alphabet and young crows have been known to indulge in play activities such sliding down snowbanks and jumping in and out of sprinklers. Crows are clever, curious and downright weird. When I used to cycle to school the same crow would follow me along the same bit of road every day for a year. It knew me and I knew it and we seemed to get along. This may be an Irish thing.

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But maybe not. Crows crop up everywhere in sociology, literature, music and folkways. In the GPO on O'Connell Street in Dublin you'll find the famous statue of the dying Cuchulain, but many people miss the fact that he's not alone. He's got a crow perched on his shoulder. This is supposedly Badb, the goddess of war, who takes the form of a crow, but I think it could be any old crow who just likes hanging out with humans.

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These reflections have been stirred up by a wonderful book I've just read called Crow Planet by Lyanda Lynn Haupt which looks at the biology, behaviour and intelligence of crows. There's a nice review of the book in the NY Times here and if you click the above link it will take you to the Amazon listing. I enjoyed it thoroughly and although I'm not expert enough to comment on the science of her observations Ms Haupt makes a pretty convincing case for the smartness and ingenuity of our corvus pals.

How Derren Brown Did It

On Wednesday night much of Britain was enthralled by "mentalist" Derren Brown predicting the winning numbers in the National Lottery. If he had really done that it would have been amazing. I am a bit of an amateur magician and its been driving me crazy that this "prediction" seems to have baffled so many people in the UK. Derren Brown is not a member of the British magic circle and this trick was a cheat anyway so I don't mind revealing how he did it. However, if you don't want to know please don't read any more of this blog post.
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Still with me? Ok. What Derren Brown actually did on Wednesday night was tell us what the winning lottery numbers were 12 seconds after the numbers had been drawn. We all could have done that. Ah but what about the balls to the left of the screen which we saw while the live feed was coming through the TV, weren't they there the whole time? No, they weren't. What we were actually looking at was a split screen, running down the left hand third of the screen. While the draw was taking place one of Brown's assistants was placing the correct balls on the real stand while we watched the split screen. At 2:01 on the YouTube video you can see Brown look across to his assistant to check that the final ball has been placed, a camera wobble then occurs at 2:04 which covers the transition from the split image to the live image. Brown then walks over and uncovers the balls that his assistant placed on the stand.
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I'm sorry if this wrecks your belief in number theory, or mass hypnosis, the predictive power of crowds or a conspiracy with the lottery company; this wasn't any of those things. This illusion required almost no skill at all from Brown, it was patter mixed with a David Copperfield style camera trick, the kind of magic that I loathe. This was beneath DB who is very good at proper magic and doesn't need to cheat. Brown's explanation on Friday night that he used "deep maths" is what we amateur magicians call "misdirection" and what everyone else calls "total bollocks."

My Oh My - Vice!

Ok let me warn you straight away that I am a Thomas Pynchon fanboy. I've read all the novels, short stories, essays, and some books that most people haven't even heard of - Mortality and Mercy in Vienna for example, which I read and re-read happily in the Butler Stacks at Columbia University until someone stole it. I even struggled through Against the Day which is probably Pynchon's least accessible book but which had some memorable scenes set in my, then, manor - Denver, Colorado.
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Thomas Pynchon was born in Glen Cove, Long Island in 1937, went to Cornell University, joined the navy, became pals with Richard Farina and published his debut novel V in 1963 to great acclaim. He followed up with the brilliant Crying of Lot 49 and cemented his reputation with the WW2 masterpiece Gravity's Rainbow in 1973.
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After a long period of silence he produced Vineland in 1990 which divided critics, Salman Rushdie raved about it but Harold Bloom thought it was so bad that it "had to be the work of an impostor." I was of the former school of thought - Vineland for me was dark and funny and uniformly terrific. In some ways Inherent Vice is a prequel to Vineland or possibly a sequel to Lot 49. It's Pynchon's surreal, intelligent, re-interpretation of detective fiction. Set in LA at the tail end of the 60's it reminded me a little of Robert Altman's version of The Long Goodbye with Elliot Gould playing Marlowe. The plot follows the adventures of private eye Doc Sportello, his girlfriend and what happened or didn't happen to the whole counter culture movement in America. The book does what it says on the tin - channeling all the tropes of crime fiction through TP's warped, encyclopedic and densely clever imagination. I'm not cool with spoiler reviews however I will say that the narrative is maybe a little too familiar to those of us who are The Big Lebowski obsessives, though Lebowski itself was an homage to Chandler and Hammett. Like TBL, Inherent Vice is hilarious, laugh out loud funny, but also a sort of antidote to Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem and the California that gave Nixon and Reagan their shove into the big time.
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As much as I admired Against The Day life's too short to re-read it and I really enjoyed this looser, more relaxed Pynchon; I hope there are many more books like Inherent Vice festering in his big brain.
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Sunday update: I found this YouTube Video apparently made and voiced by Thomas Pynchon himself inhabiting his main character who is revisiting his Manhattan (Gordita in the book) Beach manor of 1970.

The Screenplay Just Writes Itself - The True Story of a Chubby, Bald, Blind, Housebound, Teenage, Evil Genius

I was reading the Air-Freight current issue of Rolling Stone this morning in Borders when I came across a fantastic article by David Kushner about a blind, overweight Boston kid who used his extraordinary mimicking skills to get access to the phone numbers and credit card information of celebrities, politicians and even FBI agents. Matthew Weigman's power grew to such an extent that he attracted a devoted band of acolytes who would do his bidding and anyone considered to be an enemy would either have their phone cut off or would find a SWAT team at their door come to arrest them for imaginary crimes. You can read the entire article here and you should, it's fascinating. A little snippet:

By 14, Weigman was conning his way through AT&T and Verizon, tricking them into divulging insider information — like supervisor identification numbers and passwords — that gave him full run of the system. If he heard a supervisor's voice once, he could imitate it with eerie precision when calling one of the man's underlings. If he heard someone dialing a number, he could memorize the digits purely by tone. Once he called a phone company posing as a girl, saying he needed to verify the identity of a technician who was at "her" door. Convinced, the operator coughed up the technician's company ID number, direct phone line and supervisor — key information that Weigman could later put to nefarious use, like cutting off a rival's phone line.

There seemed to be no limit to what he could do: shut off your phone service, dig up your unlisted cellphone number, even listen in on your home phone — something only a handful of veteran phreaks can pull off. Celebrities were a favorite target. Weigman heard a YouTube video of Mitt Romney's son Matt dialing his dad. Weigman listened closely to the touch tones, deciphered the candidate's cellphone number — and then made a call of his own. "Mitt Romney!" he said. "What's going on, dude? Running for president?" Weigman says Romney told him to shove the phone up his ass, and hung up.

Nobody's Going to Venus Mrs Hatoyama

Japan's new First Lady, Miyuki Hatoyama is a remarkable woman in many respects: she travels, she writes, she's an experimental cook. I like the cut of her jib but she said something a bit odd when she talked about her UFO experience. According to a slightly sensational account in The Huffington Post she claimed in a book last year that the aliens abducted her while she was asleep and then:

While my body was still in bed, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus. It was a very beautiful place and it was really green.

Now, a few years ago I had my own, er, close encounter, with a triangular shaped UFO over Colorado so that part of the story I might buy. But no one's going to Venus. This from Wikipedia:

The pressure at the planet's surface is about 92 times that at Earth's surface—a pressure equivalent to that at a depth of nearly 1 kilometer under Earth's oceans. The density at the surface is 65 kg/m³ (6.5% that of water). The CO2-rich atmosphere, along with thick clouds of sulfur dioxide, generates the strongest greenhouse effect in the Solar System, creating surface temperatures of over 460 °C (860 °F). This makes Venus's surface hotter than Mercury's.

In the olden days before Russia began sending probes to Venus many people assumed that because the planet was covered with clouds naturally it was tropical, lush and green. There were many many science fiction novels about visits to this Venus and encounters with Venusians. But now we know better, there are no Venusians and never will be. So please, when the aliens come again Mrs Hatoyama, get them to take you to Europa, or Titan, or Mars or somewhere where life, at least, has a fighting chance. And bring a camera.
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BTW with remarkable prescience David Byrne wrote the theme music for this incident and this blog post twenty five years ago. (Sorry if its copyright restricted in your country, now you know how I feel everytime someone links to Hulu).

Shatner & Nimoy at Dragoncon

Two old, funny Jewish guys having a laugh with each other in Atlanta. Trust me, this is pretty good. (Look for Nimoy going for Shatner's wig near the start.) You can watch the whole hour on WhatJaneSays's channel on YouTube.

Kiwi Is Not The Only Fruit

I did a couple of radio interviews yesterday. One was for Radio New Zealand and the other was for Sydney ABC. Dont ask me what I talked about as these things are always a bit of a blur for me and I dont like listening to myself talk. But if you want to hear the silky tones of North Belfast filtered through Oxford, New York, Jersualem, Denver and Melbourne and possibly hear me waffle on about Fifty Grand, crime fiction, Cuba, rugby, sandwiches (?), JRR Tolkien and other stuff then you can listen to the Radio New Zealand Podcast here on the programme Nights With Bryan Crump. (Nice chap, Bryan). I dont think the ABC interview with the equally charming and fragrant Jon Casimir is up yet but this is the web site for when it does become available.

Crime Fiction and the N Word

I recently read a crime novel by a white American novelist that made frequent use of the N word for black people. The effect was disastrous and made me embarrassed for this well known writer. No one had told him in a while that white people probably should not use this word in crime fiction even if they think they're hip and they know all the lyrics to Jay Z's Black Album.

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There is however one notable exception to this rule. James Ellroy's novel The Cold 6000 (2002) begins with the line: "They sent him to Dallas to kill a Ni**** pimp called Wendell Durfee." The N word gets used another four or five hundred times throughout the course of the book. I consider The Cold 6000 to be the best American crime novel of the last decade so is it a problem that this modern classic uses racist language with such impunity? In the case of 6000, I think not, although Ellroy is writing in 3rd person, it's the persona of a 3rd person bigot, racist, fantasist and nutcase. 6000 is an over-the-top examination of the American nightmare which began with the Cuban revolution and ended with the assassination of Martin Luther King. James Ellroy is an ironist not a racist and I feel that his use of the N word is not offensive (at least to me).

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Much more troubling is the line in Farewell My Lovely (1941) when the civilized, pipe smoking Philip Marlowe says to Detective Nulty "When is the inquest on the ni**** coming up?" It's the casualness of Marlowe's remark that's so disturbing. Clearly he uses this language with his friends and confederates. He's not showing off. He doesn't need to. This is how Marlowe thinks of black people. It diminishes him immeasurably in my eyes. The line of course is not used in the 1970's film version (above).

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The corrosive effect of the N word was well known by the 1940's. In 1941 the N word had already been effectively banned in Hollywood movies and most northern newspapers. Indeed the N word's unpleasantness was apparent way back in 1885 when H Rider Haggard said in King Solomon's Mines that to call someone a ni**** was vulgar and rude.

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Very occasionally I get asked for advice by neophyte writers. I generally stick to the tried and true formula: write what you know. But I'll throw in a piece of advice here, gratis: if you're not African American you should be very careful with the N word even if you're, say, Elvis Costello; chances are that you are not the supreme ironist that James Ellroy is and your use of this word in your fiction or your songs or any other art is going to be a disaster.

Bringing Sexy Back To Sydney

Yours truly, the second sexiest Irish crime writer, will be reading in Sydney tomorrow Tuesday September 1 at 7pm at the Mosman Art Gallery on Myahgah Rd. phone (02) 9978 4178‎. Contact: Jon Page. I'll be appearing with the far more sensible and crowd pully: Barry Maitland, Kathryn Fox and Robert Wilson. And to be honest I'm not feeling that sexy at the moment (an admission you will never hear from Justin Timberlake). I've just got back from Queensland and the humidity has done amazing things to my hair. I now look like Sideshow Bob on a very off day, but if you want to hear me read Fifty Grand or talk about Cuba or just gape in wonder at a 70's fro, I'll see ya there.