The Hermeneutics of Suspicion - The Adam Curtis Edition

Adam Curtis is spoken of in hushed tones as some kind of prophet or seer dispensing truth to a few wise acolytes from a windswept, er, studio in the BBC . He makes documentaries and this one in particular, The Trap, has been recommended to me by several people. The uploader on YouTube feels that its contents are so dangerous that it is bound to be taken down soon by Google, the CIA, the US Government and possibly David Icke's lizard beings who run the universe. It is an "analysis" of Isaiah Berlin's essay "Two Concepts of Liberty" and explains how Berlin's idea of "negative freedom" now shapes the modern world.
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Its certainly a visually arresting TV show but my God it is shallow undergraduate stuff and it is quite amazing to me that anyone can regard this as somehow "news". You study Isaiah Berlin's Two Concepts of Liberty in your very first week in a contemporary political philosophy course and then you spend the next year or so reading all the detailed criticisms of Berlin's view. Berlin was wrong Curtis says in the dramatic big reveal at the end of his show. Oh yeah, which way wrong? The way Ronald Dworkin says he was wrong or the way Robert Nozick says he was wrong or the way Alasdair MacIntyre says he was wrong or the way Charles Taylor says he was wrong? Berlin is merely a starting point for the whole communitarian/liberal debate that has been raging in philosophy since the late 60's. It's staggering that Curtis seems to be unaware of all of this. It gets him into embarrassing trouble: for Curtis to say that the idea of "positive liberty" has been "hidden and forgotten" (or perhaps, duh, duh, duh, suppressed) is absolute rubbish. Has he had read any philosophy book or paper written in the last 40 years? Now that Marxism is toast this is all that political philosophy departments ever argue about. Entire conferences, books, etc. etc. have raged on the idea of positive versus negative liberty. The very first philosophy tutorial I ever had was on Michael Sandel's criticisms of John Rawls's book length treatment of Berlin.
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Ironically Curtis is part of the problem that he claims to be worried about in his other documentaries - i.e. the dumbing down of TV. He's clearly spent a lot of time in the BBC archives finding footage and music for his programmes, but that time might more profitably have been spent in a library. The Trap is very thin gruel indeed, containing big exaggerated theses, no counter examples and no nuance; it proves what Neil Postman said two decades ago: TV is a medium for communicating images not ideas.
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If you are interested in the whole concept of positive and negative liberty and the role of freedom in a democracy (from the left and right and from all places in between) check out these books as a starting point:

Friedrich Hayek - The Road To Serfdom
Karl Popper - The Open Society and its Enemies
Two Concepts of Liberty - Isaiah Berlin
A Theory of Justice - John Rawls
Taking Rights Seriously - Ronald Dworkin
Anarchy, State and Utopia - Robert Nozick
Sources of the Self - Charles Taylor
After Virtue - Alasdair MacIntyre

Incidentally I'm going to pitch an idea to the BBC for a TV show called Charles Darwin The Hidden Prophet which will be an analysis of this unknown nineteenth century biologist and the conspiracy of silence about him and his controversial ideas.

Ssshhhh, its The Whisperers by John Connolly

My review of JC's The Whisperers from last Saturday's Melbourne Age:

One of the unforeseen consequences of the Irish economic boom of the 2000’s was the emergence from nowhere of a “Celtic New Wave” in Irish crime fiction. Just as Ian Rankin in Scotland and David Peace in Yorkshire reinvigorated the stodgy vicar-infested world of British crime writing so Ken Bruen, Declan Hughes and John Connolly gave Irish letters an urgent adrenalin shot to heart. Where Irish fiction had been focussed on a nostalgic past that never actually happened and a sentimental present that played well in the big book buying market across the Atlantic suddenly Messrs Bruen, Hughes and Connolly began churning out novels that were fast, exciting and funny and which owed more to the legacy of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler than James Joyce or WB Yeats.
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John Connolly was an immediate best seller in Ireland and his shrewd, intricately woven novels eventually began to get noticed outside of the British Isles too. In 2000 he won the US Shamus Award and various Hollywood movie versions of Connolly’s books are now in the works. The latest novel in Connolly’s taut Charlie Parker series is The Whisperers. It begins with the looting of the National Museum of Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein. An artefact is stolen, shady deals are done. The action then shifts to the Maine-Canada border where a group of ex US servicemen is involved in smuggling drugs, contraband and people. The likable P.I. Charlie Parker begins investigating an apparent suicide and is inevitably drawn into this wider milieu of corruption and deceit.
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The Whisperers has all the Connolly trademarks: a lyrical opening, meticulous research and a highly-developed grasp of character. Parker’s technique is competence itself and I enjoyed his careful, methodical and often humorous deduction. I also liked the appearance of the Parker adversary, the intriguing Collector, whose scenes are filled with a nice blend of mystery and nervous energy. The measure of a book like The Whisperers is usually how good the villains are and I can report that the villain “Herod” is interesting, clever and suitably villainous.

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If there is a downside to the novel it’s the plot of The Whisperers which is somewhat transparent for anyone who has seen Cary Grant’s Charade or the episode of The Simpsons where Grandpa Abe and his war buddies decide to grab some Nazi loot and ship it home. I also was not particularly convinced by the action scenes set in Iraq; Connolly is a little too highbrow to really get the idiom of the working class infantry grunts that did the heavy lifting in the invasion. His knowledge of the military hardware is all technically correct but his quotations from Homer and Euripides are a clue that the closest Connolly’s ever gotten to a bullet fired in anger is the section of the library where the Dewey Decimal numbers creep into the 950’s.
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Finally a word about the denouement of The Whisperers. John Connolly is a very talented writer but now so successful that maybe, like Stephen King, he can no longer be edited, for surely any editor worth his salt would have prevented him from ending his novel exactly the same way as one of the most popular films of the 1980’s that also featured a mysterious artefact stolen from the Middle East. Perhaps it was meant as an homage, but to me it felt like a bit of a rip off.

Robots: Two Views

Hitch 22

So just how bad was infant terrible Christopher Hitchens when he actually was an infant? The answer is...not very. Naughty perhaps, but Hitchens has always been that quaintly English type of rebel who knows on which side his crumpet is buttered. Stop me if you've heard this one before: a middle class privately educated school boy goes to Oxford and becomes (gasp) a Trotskyite before having a (gasp) mid life crisis and returns to the Macmillanesque high Toryism of his youth. Along the way Hitch gets in a few verbal scraps, Mrs Thatcher calls him cheeky and he moves to DC (or was it Marvel?) Like his Oxford chums Martin Amis, Julian Barnes et. al. he becomes a prose master; Hitchens however never experiences real poverty, self doubt or soul searching . . .the kind of stuff that makes good writers into great ones. Gore Vidal used to call Hitch the Dauphin to his Roi Soleil and the two men are undoubtedly brilliant, clever and witty but with both there's a kind of emotional hollowness which keeps them from the pantheon. Toffs, even well read ones, find it difficult to create high art, which I feel is the same problem that Hitch's buddies Barnes and Amis share too.
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I am an admirer of Christopher Hitchens though and better than that I respect him. He takes literature seriously, he's no fan of the John Le Carre school of apologia and unlike almost every other member of his political cadre he never mocks the American underclass or NATO's servicemen and women - which as the brother of a veteran of both Afghanistan and Iraq I appreciate. Hitch 22 however was ultimately a disappointment. Hitchens doesn't go deep enough or wield the knife with enough forensic vigour to really give himself a thorough going over. It's a shame. He had the stones to go after Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger etc. but then he bottled it when the oracles at his publishing house asked him to know himself.
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For a different take on Hitchens's book, check out Peter Temple's excellent review in the Melbourne Age here. Temple however makes one small error when he mentions Hitchens's lapel flag - he implies that Hitch wears the Stars and Stripes on his jacket but it is in fact the banner of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

Coincidence? Er...yeah.

Coincidence has no place in twenty first century writing. It's actually a worse device for solving plot problems than the supernatural and I hate the supernatural in fiction. Magic explains and excuses everything but coincidence is still a higher category of crime because it only works if the audience or reader is not deeply engaged: coincidence assumes that you, the paying punter, are really really stupid.

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Ridley Scott and his screenwriter Brian Helgeland used coincidence not once, not twice but three times to get out of difficulties they had painted themselves into with their re-imagined version of Robin Hood. Each coincidence acted like a magic feather to solve a plot problem which could have been solved in a better way if the writing had been crisper and less indolent. These are the three occasions:

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1. When Robin and his men are making their way cross country through the forest (i.e. not using a trail) in France they - by coincidence - come across the ambushed Robert of Loxley and his men who are taking the news of the King's death back to England. The forest was frickin enormous, they set off hours before Loxley, yet the two parties (three if you include the French) all bumped into each other in the woods.

2. Robin agrees to take Robert Loxley's sword back to his father for reasons I'm still not clear about. When he arrives at Loxley's series of man sheds (definitely not a castle) outside Nottingham William Loxley (Max Von Sydow) realises that Robin is in fact the son of the man who wrote the Magna Carta and who he (William) had executed years before. Can you imagine what an extraordinary coincidence this is? In a bloody wood in the middle of France Robin promises to return the sword of a dying man to his da and by an amazing goddamn stroke of luck the returnee is the only person in the world who can tell Robin about his mysterious origins. The sword incidentally has a cryptic motto carved on it about sheep which is also part of the same ridiculous coincidence.

3. The barons rebel against King John and King John decides to meet them in battle. Where? Why at Barnstaple of course which by coincidence is the very place where Robin's father was killed at some kind of pseudo Celtic cross. When Robin gets there he has a flashback, digs into the cross and finds his father's motto about the sheep - the same one that's on the sword. All the plot problems about Robin's origins are sorted out in an utterly shameless and truly insultingly stupid manner.

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Yes, Ridley Scott did a decent good job directing this film but good directing doesnt excuse lousy story. If we allow them to get away with this kind of shite we deserve nothing but Avatars and Robin Hoods from now on which for some of you (I'm looking at thee Empire Magazine) would, I suppose, be just fine.

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Friday morning update: John McFetridge pointed me in the direction of this interesting blog post by William Martell about what went wrong with the original script: How Nottingham became Robin Hood.

Things Can Only Get Better

Pessimism is cool, optimism isn't. Try telling someone the interesting fact that if all the ice at the north pole melts sea levels will actually fall and look at the disbelieving, unhappy expression on their face and you'll see what I mean. (Sea levels will fall of course because icebergs displace more water than the equivalent amount of water alone.) And what about the glaciers? Even with runaway global warming under the most severe models it would take 1000 years to melt the Greenland icesheets which would give us a bit of time to figure out the physics of CO2 scrubbers etc. What about species going extinct? Well, 99.99% of all animal species that have ever lived have gone extinct and the planet seems to be doing fine. No, really, unless a comet is heading our way we are not doomed.
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This was brought home to me today by a book review I read in The New York Times by John Tierney. The book is called The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley. Here's some of the review:

The first [doomsaying] school [of history] despairs because it foresees inevitable ruin. The second school is hopeful — but only because these intellectuals foresee ruin, too, and can hardly wait for the decadent modern world to be replaced by one more to their liking. Every now and then, someone comes along to note that society has failed to collapse and might go on prospering, but the notion is promptly dismissed in academia as happy talk from a simpleton. Predicting that the world will not end is also pretty good insurance against a prolonged stay on the best-seller list. Have you read Julian Simon’s “The State of Humanity”? Indur Goklany’s “The Improving State of the World”? Gregg Easterbrook’s “Sonic Boom”? Good books all, and so is the newest addition to this slender canon, “The Rational Optimist,” by Matt Ridley. It does much more than debunk the doomsaying. Dr. Ridley provides a grand unified theory of history from the Stone Age to the better age awaiting us in 2100.

Progress this century could be impeded by politics, wars, plagues or climate change, but Dr. Ridley argues that, as usual, the “apocaholics” are overstating the risks and underestimating innovative responses. “The modern world is a history of ideas meeting, mixing, mating and mutating,” Dr. Ridley writes. “And the reason that economic growth has accelerated so in the past two centuries is down to the fact that ideas have been mixing more than ever before.” With new hubs of innovation emerging elsewhere, and with ideas spreading faster than ever on the Internet, Dr. Ridley expects bottom-up innovators to prevail. His prediction for the rest of the century: “Prosperity spreads, technology progresses, poverty declines, disease retreats, fecundity falls, happiness increases, violence atrophies, freedom grows, knowledge flourishes, the environment improves and wilderness expands.”
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I think a lot of people prefer the idea that everything is going to the dogs and that in the "good old days" things were better, kids knew their place, etc. Of course this is an absolute crock of shite. It may be a tediously trendy position but its a fallacious one. Professor Steven Pinker in the video above puts things in perspective.

Rating The Robins

It must be list season in the McKinty household because here's another one, also inspired by the new Robin Hood. Strange film BTW. Russell Crowe was pretty decent (apart from the usual accent trouble) but I found the normally great Cate Blanchett to be something of a charisma black hole. There were a few interesting ideas but also a lot of speechifying and the action scenes were that rare Ridley Scott thing - boring. But that's not what I wanted to talk about here. If you want to read a sensible and pitch perfect review of Robin Hood, ignore the fawning Brits and check out Roger Ebert. In my own cheap and cheerful manner all I want to do ici is give you my Top 10 Robin Hoods. I should stress that I've used two criteria: the job the actor does in the role and the quality of the film. Drum roll please, Andre...
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10. Cary Elwes: Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993). Ok, I like Cary Elwes, he was terrific in The Princess Bride and that episode of Seinfeld but this movie is weak. Sometime in 1982 Mel Brooks just stopped being funny.
9. Richard Greene: The Adventures of Robin Hood (1950's). Even after 50 years this prime SoCal cheese isn't any tastier.
8. Patrick Bergin: Robin Hood (1991). Bergin actually isn't bad, certainly nowhere near as awful as Uma Thurman, I don't care what anyone says, that lady is not cut out for the acting game.
7. Russell Crowe: Robin Hood (2010). Ok the film wasn't brilliant, but it's got the grunty Mr Crowe in it and it was directed by Ridley frickin Scott.
6. Brian Bedford: Robin Hood (1973). The Disney version. I liked this film very much when I was a kid. I don't remember a whole lot about it except that Robin was a fox and Peter Ustinov was in it.
5. Douglas Fairbanks: Robin Hood (1922). Fairbanks is terrific in this picture and it would have been higher on my list if I wasn't such a Phillistine about silent movies. But my God the guy can buckle a swash. He's awesome.
4. Sean Connery: Robin and Marion (1975). I think this is Connery's best performance in anything. The film is a bit slow in places but that doesn't matter when you're watching two masters (the other is Audrey Hepburn) at work.
3. Kevin Costner: Robin Hood - Prince of Thieves (1991). Kevin's phoning in his performance from Iowa, but the film is pretty decent on the whole. Morgan Freeman plays Morgan Freeman excellently and Alan Rickman, famously, is the real thief here, stealing every scene he's in. (Just like he does in Die Hard and Galaxy Quest.)
2. Michael Praed: Robin of Sherwood (1980's). Does anyone remember this TV series from the early 80's? It was all very ethereal and mystical. The music was by Clannad and the stories were strange and mostly low key explorations of identity and loss. I know this doesn't sound promising, but believe me it was great.
1. Errol Flynn: The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). The Tasmanian Devil himself in a delightful romp with his old sparring partners Olivia de Havilland, Basil Rathbone and Claude Rains. He's a saucy devil is Errol and he fights and loves and swings from things. The score is brilliant and the whole thing moves along at a rare old clip. It really doesn't get any better than this kids.

Geek Love

I've got a little article up in The Times about nerd heroes, inspired in part by the new muscular version of Robin Hood. It's my attempt at a list of the top 20 geek icons, you know, for those of us who aren't testosterone overdosing grunting biped killers. I was thinking about my choices this morning and of course there are many people who I could have added and skimming the complaints of commenters I've had a few more ideas. Data from Next Gen? Perhaps. Flight of the Conchords? Maybe, but those dudes are way too cool to be real geeks. Harold and Kumar, from the Harold and Kumar films? Yes, they might have made my list had Harold not become a well respected serious actor and Kumar joined the Obama administration. No, really, he did. Anyway you can check out my selections in The Times, here. You should do it before this and every other article in the paper disappears behind their incoming pay wall.

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Oh, the picture? That comes from Poorlydressed.com which is a companion site to Fail Blog one of my favourite places on the interwebs for killing time. Why they included this stylish family in a blog called Poorlydressed.com is beyond me. And I'll bet you that they're all MIT professors or internet billionaires by now.

Plus Ca Change...

Nothing really changes. Obama's appointee to the Supreme Court Elena Kagan went to Harvard. The new SC will have 9 judges all of whom either went to Harvard or Yale. David Cameron, the new British Prime Minister went to Oxford. His Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg went to Cambridge. Barack Obama also went to Harvard. Elena Kagan also went to Oxford. It's virtually a closed shop as you'll see from this partial list of Oxford's Prime Ministers:

David Cameron
(1966-) May 2010- Conservative
Tony Blair
(1953-) May 1997 - Jun 2007 Labour
Margaret Thatcher
(1925-) May 1979 - Nov 1990 Conservative
Harold Wilson
(1916-1995) Oct 1964 - Jun 1970 Labour
Mar 1974 - Apr 1976
Edward Heath
(1916-2005) Jun 1970 - Mar 1974 Conservative
Sir Alec Douglas-Home (1903-1995) Oct 1963 - Oct 1964 Unionist/Conservative
Harold Macmillan
(1894-1986) Jan 1957 - Oct 1963 Conservative
Anthony Eden
(1897-1977) Apr 1955 - Jan 1957 Conservative
Clement Attlee
(1883-1967) Jul 1945 - Oct 1951 Labour
H H Asquith
(1852-1928) Apr 1908 - May 1915 Liberal Coalition
May 1915 - Dec 1916
Marquess of Salisbury (1839-1903) Jun 1885 - Jan 1886 Conservative
Jul 1886 - Aug 1892
Jun 1895 - Jul 1902
Earl of Rosebery
(1847-1929) Mar 1894 - Jun 1895 Liberal
William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898) Dec 1868 - Feb 1874 Liberal
Apr 1880 - Jun 1885
Feb 1886 - Jul 1886
Aug 1892 - Mar 1894
Earl of Derby
(1799-1869) Feb 1852 - Feb 1852 Conservative
Feb 1858 - Jun 1859
June 1866 - Feb 1868
Sir Robert Peel
(1788-1850) Dec 1834 - Apr 1835 Tory
Aug 1841 - Jun 1846
George Canning
(1770-1827) Apr 1827 - Aug 1827 Tory/Whig coalition
Earl of Liverpool
(1770-1828) Jun 1812 - Apr 1827 Tory

There's actually another 9 of them but you get the picture. Some other interesting facts about David Cameron: he is a descendant of King George III and a cousin to the Queen, he's part Scottish (like all recent PM's), he was a member of the secretive and really quite loathsome Bullingdon Dining Club and his tutor at Brasenose College, Vernon Bogdanor, gushingly called him his most brilliant student ever. Vernon Bogdanor was also my tutor at Oxford and the only thing he ever called me was "adequate, McKinty, quite adequate."

Bring Back Pascarelli And, Er, Other Thoughts

As Joni Mitchell pointed out a few years ago: "Don't it always seem to go, you don't know what you've lost till its gone." I used to listen to the Baseball Today podcast every morning in the car or on my bike, but since ESPN disappeared Peter Pascarelli (for daring to suggest that Commissar Bug Selig maybe doesn't deserve a statue in Milwaukee) the podcast has been just awful. Pascarelli was great because he used to tell the truth which almost never happens anywhere anymore. Now the show is basically Eric Karabell (who sounds like he's about 14) and his monosyllabic producer vamping desperately for 30 minutes before exhaustion kicks in and the show comes to a merciful end. Sometimes they have a guest on who is, say, an expert on the Texas Rangers and Karabell will spend fifteen minutes explaining how great it is to have on the beat writer for the Waco Sentinel and how wonderful it is to talk about the Rangers bullpen problems and you know that all the time he's wondering what it would be like to put a .38 in his mouth and go click. Now I know what you're thinking, you're thinking who the hell is Joni Mitchell? God Almighty. You want me to do all the work around here? Why don't you look her up on Wikipedia you bloody eejit. Or stick in big yellow taxi in YouTube or something. And no, my friend, not the Counting Crows version; I mean are you kidding me? A 46 year old white dude who's still sporting dreadlocks? Come on...Although somehow he seems to have pulled the wool over Emmy Rossum's eyes, which I just don't get because she seems very intelligent. According to her Wikipedia entry she sang Happy Birthday in twelve different keys to get into the Metropolitan Opera Children's Chorus. Can you imagine that audition? Happy Birthday is not a nice song to hear under any circumstances when it isn't actually your birthday, but to hear it 12 times in a row...She's very lucky she's good looking that's all I have to say. Also according to Wikipedia she has Celiac disease which means that she can't tolerate gluten but she does tolerate chubby white dudes with dreads who were famous for five minutes in the early nineties for being the anti Nirvana. Go figure, huh? Doc Brown was right in Back to the Future Part III, women are the real mystery.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

A tight script. Steady, sensible direction with a few interesting flourishes from Werner Herzog. A bravura performance from Nicholas Cage that makes you see what a terrific actor he used to be and is still capable of being. Movie humor that is actually funny. An editor who has the genius to cut many scenes to the bone but leave in two iguanas singing to Engelbert Humperdinck's Please Release Me Let Me Go. These are a few of the reasons that Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is a thriller that you probably never heard of and certainly didn't go see in the movie theatre. Well the Russians liked it as you can see from this poster. And it has Val Kilmer and Eve Mendes in it. Still not convinced? Ok it's your loss. I don't know why I bother. Just forget it and go rent Avatar for your Blu Ray instead.

Two Minute Star Wars

In my house there are three people who have never seen Star Wars (and who, apparently, have no interest in seeing it) and one person who has seen it maybe 16 or 17 times. If you're someone who has successfully avoided the Star Wars trilogy for the last 33 years, but are a little curious as to what it's all about then watch this YouTube. . .Now if only someone would make one for Lost.

Tonight I'll probably watch Star Wars or The Big Lebowski rather than the UK general election stuff. I think I know what's going to happen. Cameron gets 312 seats which means that with DUP support he's the new Prime Minister. I'm basing this on Nate Silver's forecast over at 538.com. Nate was very accurate when calling the 2008 Presidential race, but this is his first forray into UK politics so we'll see.

A Bono Elvis Tribute

In honour of Bono's poetic tribute to Elvis, here's my own tribute to Bono. Childish? Yes. Heartfelt? Well, not really, but it passed a couple of minutes.

U2
rat poo,
a pestilential crew,
one of them’s only five foot two,
not the bald one,
or the ‘blonde’ one,
or the other one,
no, the one who owns private islands like Scaramanga in The Man With The Golden Gun,
Elvis follower,
God botherer
tax dodgerer,
eye linerer,
won’t even pay a library finerer,
got more dough than a Saudi oil refinerer,
lectures us not to over strive,
but to be like him, spiritualized,
swears when the feed’s being carried live,
quotes Bible verses but not Mark 10:25,
Elvis,
you liked Cole Porter’s ‘Begin the Beguine’,
lucky, cos I swam once in the guitar shaped pool of the Graceland Days Inn,
and that makes a good rhyme.

Oh No, Now Nick's Gone and Made Me Like Him

I've been pissed off at the Liberal Democrats for the last couple of weeks ever since I read their manifesto and found that it contained no Northern Ireland section. This made me suspicious that - unlike the Tories and Labour - they saw Ulster as a colony not even worth thinking about, and that they were going to run the place like the goddamn Raj. But now I've gone and read the Guardian this weekend and I noticed this little piece by Clegg on Samuel Beckett. Beckett spent his formative years in Ulster, was a genuine hero of the French Resistance and is with Flann O'Brien one of the few Irish writers to have successfully captured the Mick genius for dead-pan black comedy. I'm still not sure I'd want a Prime Minister who answers every question with "What's the bloody point, mate, we're all gonna die soon anyway," but even so I'm impressed. David Cameron's favourite novelist is Graham Greene which is also a good thing and Brown's choice of James Mitchell is dour and Presbyterian, which I've got admit, I quite like too. Anyway, with permission, I quote the whole of Clegg's article below:

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My Hero

Nick Clegg

I've always read a lot, mainly fiction. These days, with three young sons, often the most I can manage is a quick chapter here, a few pages there; but there are still very few nights when I'll get to sleep without dipping in to whatever book I have on the go. So I am grateful to those writers who have made it easy to go back to them, night after night, year after year. They are the greats, and Samuel Beckett is one of them. My first encounter with Beckett was when I was studying in Minnesota and I acted in a student production of Krapp's Last Tape. Back then I remember images of Beckett making as great an impression on me as his work. He always looked so impressive – that beak-like nose, eyes staring dead into the camera – and he had an austerity to him, even when he was young, that makes it very easy to connect the man to the words.
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Since then I must have read Waiting for Godot – of course – a hundred times. Every time I go back to Beckett he seems more subversive, not less; his works make me feel more uncomfortable than they did before. The unsettling idea, most explicit in Godot, that life is habit – that it is all just a series of motions devoid of meaning – never gets any easier.
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It's that willingness to question the things the rest of us take for granted that I admire most about Beckett; the courage to ask questions that are dangerous because, if the traditions and meanings we hold so dear turn out to be false, what do we do then? But amid the bleakness, there is also humour, and it's no surprise that there are so many comedians among Beckett's fans. His appeal lies in his directness – the sparse, unembellished prose that can make his meticulous stage directions unexpected. He leaves you with a sense that you knew what he meant, even if explaining it back would leave you lost for words. Direct and disturbing – it is impossible to grow tired of Beckett.

Who Is Markie Macdonald Private Eye?

She's Scottish, she's an IT manager and she's the best virtual gumshoe in the biz. Oh and she may not be a she. Last week I followed the case of British couple Amy Taylor and Dave Pollard who got divorced because Dave was having a virtual affair in Second Life. The story got a lot of yuks in the national press and became the butt of late night jokes. I didn't get too excited about it until I read this piece in The Guardian which mentions how the suspicious wife finally got proof of her husband's philandering activities. She hired virtual detective Markie Macdonald to uncover the truth. Who is this flame haired Jessica Rabbit-esque spook? The Times explains in a 2005 article:

By day “she” is an IT manager of unknown gender somewhere in Scotland. By night she manages and pays an international staff of 12 private eyes who keep her Second Life offices open 24 hours a day. Markie has earned about £50 in real money in the past few months. “It started as word of mouth,” she said. “We have people in love and getting married in SL and getting married is a commitment not to be unfaithful. I could see people who were married in SL paying for dances, sex, etc, and thought ‘I wonder if their partner knows’.” . . .“Honey traps” are the agency’s preferred method: an attractive male or female character flirts with the target and then a sleuth photographs the couple in flagrante or, because this is a very different world, teleports the suspicious spouse right to the scene.

With a little further digging I found out via New World Notes that Markie had come across Dave and Amy before. In fact Amy hired Markie in 2005 to vet Dave and see if he was the sort of person who would flirt with someone else's avatar. He barely passed that honey trap test but Amy was so pleased that she invited Markie to the virtual wedding (alas, she couldn't go). Wagner James Au of NWN has an interview with Markie and pictures (virtual ones) as well as a recounting of the 2005 investigation here. I'm not dissing Markie's detecting skills in the slightest but Dave does not seem to be sharpest pixel on the screen having apparently fallen for the same honey trap on THREE separate occasions. Still, I'll bet Markie has quite a few other interesting stories to tell and if no one's said it to her before, let me be the first: you should write a book.
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(I recycled this post from two years ago and, alas, as yet, Markie hasnt taken my advice)

Spinetingler

My novel Fifty Grand won the 2010 Spinetingler Award for best novel of the year in their Rising Star category. A big thank you to everyone who voted for me and a big thank you to Spinetingler Magazine for short listing me in the first place. There were a lot of good books out this year and I really appreciate it guys and gals.

The Exact Point At Which I Stopped Reading Stieg Larsson

I'm not sure how I ended up in the book publishing business. I clearly have no understanding of the market or what the public wants and I am always amazed by the books which end up as best sellers. For example I dont get why adults read (and apparently enjoy) the Harry Potter series, Twilight baffles me, James Patterson's recent fictions (his first few books are good) read like they were written for and by eejits and the breakthrough success of Stieg Larsson is peculiar. I found the first Millennium novel to be a decent overly didactic novel in need of a brutal editor. If he had lost maybe thirty percent of the financial shenanigans, cut some of the explicit torture and all of the last fifty pages Dragon Tattoo could have been great. Stieg Larsson's novel The Girl Who Played With Fire has many of the same problems but the author's tics are worse. I stopped reading the novel at the point in the text where Larsson mentioned "ignorant American tourists." The book had been getting on my nerves for some time before this but finally I could take the patronising tone no longer. Americans in Larsson's world are always fat and stupid, Australians live on sheep stations, businessman are all secret Nazis, people of color are all simple but good hearted folk. The "stupid American tourist" line was almost the final straw. I did read one more paragraph but unfortunately that paragraph contained a line about an innocent man who was thrown off a British Airways flight for "looking vaguely Arabic." Sigh.
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Larsson's humorless political correctness reminds me of a special meeting of the students union circa 1988 when an argument breaks out over what to name the new disability access room, either Nelson Mandela Hall or The Rosa Luxemburg Centre. Who likes this kind of stuff? All those ladies reading Larsson on their holidays can't all be contributing editors to The Daily Kos, can they? If a book is really well written I can forgive and ignore a writer's prejudices: Evelyn Waugh was a squalid individual who wrote like a dream. Philip Larkin was even creepier and even better. But if a writer isn't quite so good then his or her prejudices rapidly become tiresome. And prejudice from the left is just as boring as prejudice from the right. Call me a cock eyed optimist but I feel that the public isn't stupid and they will eventually see this. I mean you just have to look at what's happened to Stieg Larsson's recent sales . . . oh, er, wait.