Perth

Hopefully I made it to Perth and I'm now at the writers festival. Either that or my plane crashed in the outback and I'm now in some sort of Mad Max 2 type scenario battling for my life against a bunch of petrol heads in goggles. Or I could be in a Mad Max 3 scenario battling for my life against Tina Turner's hair extensions.
...
Just a quick reminder that if you want to come see me then I'll be at three events over the next two days. (Details on the post three below this one).
...
Slainte.

Our Youth-Worshipping Culture Is Killing Us (Literally)

Paging Mr Dawkins...Er, How Do You Explain This?

From The New York Times science section:

Researchers from the University of South Carolina Upstate and Indiana State University placed pregnant crickets in an enclosure where they were stalked, but not eaten, by a wolf spider, whose fangs had been coated with wax to protect the crickets. The young of the spider-exposed mothers turned out to be more predator-savvy than those with mothers who were not exposed to the wolf spider; they stayed hidden longer, and were more likely to freeze when they encountered spider feces or spider silk. In a second experiment, the researchers placed the juvenile crickets in an arena with a starving wolf spider with fully functioning fangs. Eventually, the spider got all the crickets, but the young born from spider-exposed mothers lasted longer in the arena of death. The research was published last month in The American Naturalist. What remains unclear is exactly how the crickets are warning their unborn. “We don’t know a specific mechanism,” said Jonathan Storm, a professor at the University of South Carolina Upstate in Spartanburg and one of the authors of the paper. Although it is conjecture at this point, he said, “It’s possible that there could be some sort of hormone transmitted.”

...

Maybe that Lamarck bloke wasn't as wrong as everyone thinks? Er, no, he probably was. Anyway, for my issues with Richard Dawkins click here. And for a really interesting look at where those little Hobbit people on Flora came from check out this fascinating theory in last Sunday's Observer.

Perth Writers Festival

If you're in Perth this weekend why don't you come see me at the Perth Writers Festival. Fortunately I'll be surrounded by big name talents so I won't be under too much pressure to be funny or interesting. This is the programme listing for my stuff:

Pulp Fiction

The new novels of KA Bedford, Lenny Bartulin and Adrian McKinty have a Chandleresque air to them. They look at the legacy of noir fiction and its effect on their writing with Grant Stone.

Chair: Grant Stone

Undercroft Sat 27 Feb, 2 – 3pm

Crime Does Pay

Crime writers Colin McLaren and Adrian McKinty consider the interplay between real life and the imagination in the world of crime fiction.

Chair: Deborah Kennedy

Uni Club Theatre Sat 27 Feb, 5 – 6pm


Complex Characters

Though crime fiction is sometimes accused of being formulaic, it often features complex characters who grow over a series of books. Michael Koryta, Adrian McKinty and Irvine Welsh talk about the complexity of character.

Chair: John Harman

Uni Club Theatre Sun 28 Feb, 12.30 – 1.30pm
...
I'll also be doing an event on March 2nd when I'm back in Melbourne at the North Fitzroy Star hotel at 6 PM with Michael Koryta, Marianne Delacourt & Rebecca James.

Smile or Die

My book of the year so far is Barbara Ehrenreich's Smile or Die about the positive thinking/self help industry that began in North America and has now spread its obnoxious creed across the world. As Sinclair McKay explains in his review in The Daily Telegraph:

Ehrenreich encountered this phenomenon in some force when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. From the mammogram on, she found that she had entered a world of pink ribbons, Ralph Lauren pink ponies and balloons, of “fun runs’’, of books featuring personal testimonies with statements like “cancer is your ticket to your real life’’ and “cancer will lead you to the divine’’. Ehrenreich found that any expression of dissent – any suggestion that one found the illness frightening, and the treatment and insurance arrangements disgraceful – led to her being howled down online by fellow sufferers for having a “bad attitude’’ and “anger and bitterness’’.
...
Ehrenreich goes on to investigate the positive thinking phenomenon in various aspects of American life. Her dissection is neat and although it isn't quite Jessica Mitford or Neil Postman it is a long overdue and useful corrective to the smarmy Dr Phil, the creepy Oprah and the dangerous James Ray et. al who tell us that "we can do anything if we only try hard enough." This, of course, is not true. In fact we're all utterly screwed, we're going to die very soon, the game is rigged against us and blaming our alleged failures on our own lack of will is a recipe for despair. I think its far better to think negatively, have the odd misanthropic laugh now and again at the follies of mankind and try to finish each day with a really good beer.

...

I had one quibble with the book. Among the statistics Ehrenreich trots out is a debunking study of cancer patients: the ones who "think positively" have exactly the same recovery rates as those who don't. This may be true, but in my experience being pleasant and friendly to the nurses really does help you a lot in hospital.

...

In lieu of the book which is published by the sometimes difficult to find Granta you can read the rest of the review by Sinclair McKay here in The Daily Telegraph.

A Serious Schmuck

Guest Blogger Review by Leah Garrett

David Denby of the New Yorker, in one of the few really negative reviews of the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man said it well: the great Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer “would have been disgusted” by the behavior of the main character, Lawrence Gopnik, the whining schmuck who acquiesces in all situations, never stands up for himself, is tricked, beaten, refuses the come ons from his next door neighbor (very un-Singer) and is the eternal victim. Gopnik is the caricature of the quietly suffering Jewish loser who becomes a human punching bag. Rather than imbuing Gopnik with the traits standard in Yiddish and Jewish American writing from Sholem Aleichem to the brothers Singer - ironic humor, sarcasm, the ability to laugh at oneself and others - Gopnik is a sad sack with no redeeming qualities. He doesn’t crack wise, he doesn’t speak truth to power, he doesn’t go down zinging. He just goes down.
...
In a way A Serious Man telegraphs its intent in the first segment of the film set in the shtetl. This scene is entirely in Yiddish and the English subtitles miss half of what is actually being said. Likewise A Serious Man spectacularly misses the whole point of Yiddish literature (and Yiddish cinema) which is that, yeah, life is going to get you in the end but the way to cheat Death is to make a gag about his scythe and viciously mock his choice of cloak.
...
The film is set in suburban Minnesota in the late 60’s when the Coen brothers were growing up there. True this isn’t New York or Chicago but Jewish Minneapolis isn’t that different from the North American hubs of Jewish culture; the Coens’ representation of Jewish American suburbia, however, is the polar opposite of Woody Allen's or Mel Brooks’ world where the machers who annoy the hell out of you get eviscerated by superior wit. The Coens' universe is a morose, dreary, and paranoid landscape, without intellectualism or wit. We know the Coens have read Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler but have they dipped into, say, Philip Roth? The textured, dark hilarity of Roth’s Jewish suburbs is nowhere to be seen in their oddly bland film.
...
In a way Gopnik is actually more akin to "The Wandering Jew" a Christian trope whose task it is to eternally suffer until redemption or death arrives to lift him from this vale of tears. Gopnik is very different from the standard schlemiels of Jewish culture, from Tevye the Dairyman to Larry David, who are afflicted by small and large hardships, but who survive and in fact thrive by mocking themselves and their predicament. Gopnik just sulks around, moaning tediously, reel after reel as his job implodes, his wife leaves him, his children rebel and his health declines. No wonder he, and the movie, have appealed so strongly to a broad range of primarily non Jewish critics: Gopnik is a perfect Wandering Jew or Job or Jesus figure who takes on all the sins of mankind, suffering without question and who, through this misery, supposedly purges and purifies others.
...
Reworking the Job story in a modern context has been done several times before but nowhere better than in I. L. Peretz’s 1894 iconic Yiddish masterpiece “Bontshe Shvayg” [Bontshe the Silent]. Bontshe is a shtetl version of Lawrence Gopnik who responds with silence to the torrents of abuse he faces thoughout his life. Of course, because this is a Yiddish story, it ends with Bontshe going to heaven and being mocked mercilessly for his passivity by a prosecuting angel who cracks wise at Bontshe’s expense. When Bontshe is asked what he would like in recompense for all his suffering he blows it yet again by humbly asking for a “bagel with some butter” which is met with by howls of laughter. Peretz’s hugely popular and important short story was clearly challenging the misuse of the Job trope in Jewish life and showing that there is nothing worthy to be found in passivity and that all it really does is make the sufferer into a pathetic schmuck. It is both troubling and tedious to see the Coen brothers turn the clock back to a hackneyed Jewish caricature that went out of date more than a century ago. IB Singer might indeed have been disgusted by this film but more likely he would have fallen asleep first.

Sinead Morrissey

Sinead Morrissey was shortlisted for this year's TS Eliot prize (for the best poetry collection published in the British Isles). I was hoping that she would win but unfortunately she did not. (The award went to Philip Gross.) I had to do a search through this blog to see if I had posted about Sinead Morrissey before and found to my surprise that I hadn't. Let me rectify that.
...
It is apparent now that the generation of poets who were at Queens University Belfast roughly around the same time as Seamus Heaney exhibited the kind of genius that you find very rarely in history: Periclean Athens, Elizabethan London, Fin de Siecle Vienna, 20's Paris. Poets in the Queens circle included Heaney himself, Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, Derek Mahon, Tom Paulin, Michael Longley et al who, between them, have won just about every poetry prize going. Ireland of course has never been short of pugilists or poets and a new generation of greats is now coming to the fore among whom Sinead Morrissey is one of my favourites. Born in 1972 in Portadown, educated at Trinity, she brings your bog standard Irish gift for brilliant lyrical intensity to a disciplined and close observation of her own feelings and the world around her. Is she the real deal? I think so. She's intelligent, learned and is only getting better. The BBC has a nice clip of Sinead reading and a list of the other poets up for the TS Eliot prize here.

The Third Policeman

70 years ago today Flann O'Brien wrote to his friend William Saroyan that he had completed a new book, a metaphysical detective novel called The Third Policeman. Alas, when the novel was sent out to publishers, just before the Nazi blitzkrieg on Western Europe there was scant interest and O'Brien (nom de plume of Brian O'Nolan) decided to shelve the book. He later became a little embarrassed by its weirdness and told friends that the manuscript had been stolen from the boot of his car while he had left it parked by the side of the road. The manuscript was finally found after his death by his widow and published in 1967. Of course it is Flann O'Brien's masterpiece and one of the great Irish novels of the century. Certainly the strangest Irish crime fiction story ever written. If you really want a plot summary read it here on Wikipedia but be warned there are many spoilers. If you haven't read The Third Policeman you should add it to your TBR pile. It's work, but what good thing isn't?

You, me and Bernie? Where would we go, Verna? Niagara Falls?

Court philosopher to The Huffington Post Bernard-Henri Levy was exposed as a fraud on French television yesterday after quoting a fictional philosopher in defense of his book on Immanuel Kant. According to The Times Levy had not checked his sources before writing the book and was unaware that Jean-Baptiste Botul (founder of the, heh, botulism school of criticism) was a fictional character and an elaborate literary joke, something he would have discovered if he'd spent two seconds looking him up on wikipedia. The Times has the whole story here.

...

I've been annoyed with Bernard-Henri Levy for quite a few years now. I studied philosophy in the Anglo-American tradition which is short on rhetorical flourishes and heavy on sourcing, formal logic and analysis. The French "philosophical" schools of the 1960's onwards with their incomprehensible Marxist/Hegelian/Habermasian dialectic are to my mind largely worthless verbiage. Bernard-Henri Levy is not the most ridiculous of the philosophes but he is the most famous. Charlie Rose has a man crush on him and he regularly pontificates on The Huffington Post about things he knows very little about. The only book of his I've managed to read all the way through was American Vertigo, a sociological examination of US life and manners. I hated it and was quite pleased when Garrison Keillor did a controlled demolition job in The New York Times. I don't like to see a man, any man, kicked when he's down but Bernard-Henri Levy's weasel worded defence of Roman Polanski in various media was something of a last straw for me. No Bernard, Polanski wasn't guilty of "sexual misconduct" or the victim of a "Puritan witch-hunt" he raped a 13 year old and it probably wasnt the first or the last time either.

...

If you want to read a real philosopher, try a different Bernard, the late Bernard Williams whose short essay Which Slopes Are Slippery? is more interesting than anything Bernard-Henri Levy has ever written. And if you're looking for some good, solid philosophy try this hippy dude at Yale who also talks a little about my boy Bernie Williams near the end.

...

On a slightly related subject here's a nice recent article by the BBC's Paris reporter wondering why Parisians are so bloody rude.

Pick Me Out A Winner Bobby - The Best Sports Movies Ever

I went to see Invictus yesterday. It wasn't bad. Matt Damon was about a foot too small but I dug his accent and his ball greediness, so typical of a flanker desperate to get all the glory while prop forwards do all the work. Anyhoo, it wasn't a classic. If I remember rightly the South Africans were the favourites to win that world cup and really how can you make a sports movie about the favourites? Still it gave me an excuse to have a think about my top sports flicks of all time and here for your edification is my list:
#14 Slap Shot - one of the few sports movies written by a woman (Nancy Dowd). The Hanson (Carlson) brothers are the standout.
#13 Rudy - My recollections of this film are hazy but I seem to remember this dialogue: "Oh Mr Frodo, sir, let me carry it for you. Please (sobbing) please Mr Frodo, please."
#12 Dodge Ball - that Rip Torn cracks me up. Here he is again hitting Norman Mailer with a hammer.
#11 Pride of the Yankees - Lou Gehrig gives his "luckiest man" speech at Yankee stadium, grown men weep.
#10 Gladiator - Boy was I surprised, I thought Commodus was going to win in the arena only to be strangled later in his bath by the wrestler Narcissus.
#9 Rocky - I'm not a big fan of boxing movies, hence no Raging Bull, but in Rocky I really like the stuff in the pet shop, the unorthodox training, the yelling of the word "Adrian" and the fact that (spoiler alert) he loses.
#8 Escape to Victory - I'm only including this because Pele is in it.
#7 Hoosiers - the movie that somehow makes basketball seem interesting.
#6 Bang the Drum Slowly - De Niro, baseball, death. And jokes. (Nah only kidding, no jokes).
#5 Field of Dreams - That penultimate scene - grown men weep again.
#4 Chariots of Fire - duh duh duh duh duhh duhhhh, duh duh duh duh duhhhh etc.
#3 The Natural - Someone read the book and decided to remove all the cynicism and cast uber WASP Robert Redford in the scrappy Roy Hobbs role. Still, "knock the cover off the ball, Roy" and "pick me out a winner, Bobby" get me every single time.
#2 Breaking Away - bicycling in a big circle 500 times. No really. Oh and yeah its one of the best films of all time.
#1 Bull Durham - Maybe now Costner and Sarandon will get together just like in the movies.

On The Road Again

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

Au Bout de la Terre in Vancouver

A couple of years ago I went to Vancouver to do a little thing on William Gibson. The William Gibson thing didnt come to pass but I hung out for three days had a very nice time. I got a deal on Orbitz and stayed at the Pan Pacific for 1 dollar a night and the view I had from my room was spectacular, looking down on flying boats landing in the bay. I had great breakfasts and fantastic fish meals in the evenings and I went to a donut factory for lunch. I took a kayak tour of the city and went running in the gorgeous Stanley Park. On my third and last day I took the bus out to UBC to see the campus and some locations for Battlestar Galactica (yes I know you dont even need to say it). I walked around UBC for a few hours and then I discovered a trail down to the sea. It was quite stormy and I found myself on this windswept place called Wreck Beach. The visibility was extraordinary. You could see all the way up to the mountains in the north, in the far west Vancouver Island and in the south almost down to Puget Sound. The sky was blue and it was cold and the beach was littered with big trees from the forests further up the Inland Passage. I stayed there alone watching the sun set over VI and the Pacific. It was extraordinary and peaceful and as close as I've ever gotten to any feeling of transcendence on this Earth.

...

I flew back to Denver and told the wife and said she had go to Vancouver and especially to Wreck Beach. She went in June, stayed at the Pan Pacific ate at the fish restaurants, ran in Stanley Park, took the kayak tour. I begged her to go out to UBC and down to Wreck Beach and as soon as she got there to call me and talk to me about it. I was so excited waiting for her call, because I wanted her to experience the same feeling of transcendence that I had had and to get a bit of it back myself. She went to UBC, then to Wreck Beach and then she called me. "Well, how was it?" I asked. "Fine," Leah said. "Fine? Fine?! What do you mean fine," I said. She hesitated. "What is it?" I asked. "It would have been great but for all the penises," Leah said.

...

You see Wreck Beach is a nude beach and on that particular June day it was full of creepy swinger dudes with chest chair and medallions who had all walked over to Leah to say "hey baby" and stuff like that. Yikes. But it demonstrates what Thomas Wolfe rightly pointed out a long time ago "you can't go home again, asshole, you can't go home again."

...

...

(I think the title of this blog post is a double entendre in French Canadian but if it doesnt work somebody please let me know.)

...

And for those of you looking for my review of Garry Disher's latest you can finally read it here. (I'm chuffed about the Blade Runner ref that I snuck by the sub editors).

We're Not Saying You Had To Be An Idiot To Have Liked Avatar, But...

I like to think that I began the Avatar backlash back in August four months before the film actually came out. So its nice to see that while the movie has become the most successful motion picture of all time the group of people who are least won over by its alleged charms are the science fiction geek community who expect more from their films than our non geeky brethren walking the streets. Geeks were the first ones to spot the Dances With Wolves connection, the FernGully connection, the Thomas Covenant connection and the general lameness of the film. I've come to the conclusion that the people who really loved Avatar were the same type of people who were amazed and terrified by trains coming directly towards them in the days of silent cinema. Several times over the last month I've been told that Avatar is all about enjoying the ride. Well, as RedLetterMedia point out in part two of this YouTube if you want to enjoy a ride go to bloody Disneyland. If you care about cinema stop supporting films like frickin Avatar, cos if you dont ten years from now all movies will be like this.