Dying Is Easy, Comedy Is Hard

Happy St Andrews Day

I know I posted this last year but I love this clip, especially the opening sentence.

What Happened Before The Big Bang - Breaking News

A couple of weeks ago I linked to a BBC Horizon programme that asked the question what happened before the Big Bang. In new research published this weekend Roger Penrose and Vahe Gurzadyan claim to have discovered evidence for a universe that existed before our own universe. The BBC explains it poorly here. Penrose and his collaborator explain it better here (the drawing is theirs). The idea is very simple. If indeed there was a universe that existed before our own the most dramatic event in that universe would be the impact of two galaxies crashing into one another. At the heart of every galaxy is a black hole and big galaxies have "supermassive" black holes at their centre. When huge two galaxies are drawn together by gravity the supermassive black holes eventually will also smash into one another. This event is so powerful, Penrose argues, that it will create enormous energy pulses that will reverberate throughout both that universe and into a new universe which is formed in the wake of a new Big Bang. Penrose and Gurzadyan say that they have found structural evidence for these events in the cosmic microwave background. If this paper is correct then the cyclical model of the universe is probably also correct and the entire history of the universe from birth to entropic death has happened countless times, almost certainly an infinite number of times in the past. And of course if the universe (or perhaps multiverse would be a better word) is infinitely old then logically, a previous Adrian McKinty typed this exact blog entry and a previous you read it and scratched your head, exactly the way you are doing now, a long, long, long time ago.

The (Not Very Bright) American

The American wasn't a terrible film. I know this because I didn't walk out of the cinema. But even so the film makers really don't think we in the audience are very clever. There's an old saw that goes "nobody ever lost any money underestimating the intelligence of the public" but I have never bought into that, which maybe explains a lot about my writing career. Anyway here are some of the reasons why I suspect the director of The American takes us to be eejits:

(Spoiler Alert, don't read this if you are going to see the movie.)

1. Clooney has a butterfly tattoo on his back, but in case we didn't get the point he's also reading a book (the only book he reads in the  movie) on butterflies. His girlfriend calls him Mr Butterfly, a butterfly lands on the arm of a woman at a picnic and he mentions that its an endangered type and then at the end the camera lingers on a butterfly taking off. Hollywood just loves to underline the motif because they think we're too dumb to see it on a first pass.
2. The movie playing in the cafe is Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time in the West. In case we missed that the cafe owner says to Clooney "Sergio Leone, a great Italian director."
3. The priest. Everything about the priest reminded me of the Simpsons's pizza chef who says "you a must excuse a me I'm a just an old Italian stereotype."
4. The female lead was a prostitute. Again. But, ahhh, she has a heart of gold and she falls in love with the male lead. Where have we heard this before? Oh I dont know in about a couple of million Hollywood movies?

5. The song playing in the cafe was "Pas Americano" you know just in case we hadnt gotten the message before.

6. His life is in great danger which is why he picks a different small town where no one will know where or who he is. So why doesn't he leave town immediately after the anonymous note?

7. Why doesn't he leave town after the first assassination attempt?
8. And why doesn't he leave town after the second assassination attempt? Because the film wouldnt be quite long enough?
9. He gets paid how much for basically building a silencer/suppressor?
10. And while we're on the subject he builds a highly sophisticated silencer/suppressor out of an old Fiat crank shaft.
11. How does his mistress get to that place 20 miles out of town on foot and still get there before him when he had a five second gun battle and then drove?

Tulips At Thanksgiving

Of course its Thanksgiving Weekend in America. I nearly forgot. Its high spring here in Australia. We had three days of ninety degree temperatures this week and then a humid rain yesterday and today. On my walk this morning I saw four cockatoos, several green parrots and a garden filled with tulips. It doesn't feel like Thanksgiving at all.
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Maybe you're already dreading the winter? I know how that feels after 8 years in Denver. But fear not, the Earth will spin on its ellipse and your spring will come.
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Meantime here's a lovely poem from an old flatmate of mine, Alicia Stallings, originally published in Poetry Magazine.

Tulips
by A.E. Stallings

The tulips make me want to paint,
Something about the way they drop
Their petals on the tabletop
And do not wilt so much as faint,


Something about their burnt-out hearts,
Something about their pallid stems
Wearing decay like diadems,
Parading finishes like starts,


Something about the way they twist
As if to catch the last applause,
And drink the moment through long straws,
And how, tomorrow, they’ll be missed.


The way they’re somehow getting clearer,
The tulips make me want to see—
The tulips make the other me
(The backwards one who’s in the mirror,


The one who can’t tell left from right),
Glance now over the wrong shoulder
To watch them get a little older
And give themselves up to the light.

Sado Island

After a day spent at the famous Nikko shrines among frightening amounts of tourists I used my Japan Railways Pass (an absolute must for any foreigner) to get as far from the madding crowd as possible. I ended up on Sado Island which used to be a penal colony in the Sea of Japan. Not only were there no tourists, there didn't seem to be any other people either.
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For lunch I had a packet of crispy dried fish and a couple of cans of Sapporo from a lonely vending machine. I have to say I quite liked the isolation and the rusty, run down stark beauty of the island. If the Japanese ever get bored of teeny bob pop they'll invent grunge in a place like Sado.

Wind, Sand and Stars

Antoine Saint Exupery's Wind, Sand and Stars is a book I've been saving up to read for years. I kept thinking that I'd wait to tackle it until my French was good enough to really appreciate it. But there comes a time in a man's life when he realises that his French is never going to improve. So I took WSS in English and a couple of other books (not for me the mighty Kindle) on my Tokyo trip.

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The book is as beautiful as I thought it would be. It's filled with Saint Exupery's poetic reflections on life most of which he composed while flying early mail routes in South American and N Africa. I don't expect this to be everyone's cup of tea, but I'm afraid that I'm going to have to insist that everyone does attempt the story of Bark The Slave from pages 60 - 69 (in the Penguin edition) which is one of the most fantastic short passages of prose I have ever read.

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Saint Exupery's amazing story of crashing in the Libyan desert and somehow suriving is on pages 71 - 103. It's this account that led Outside Magazine to pick WSS as the #1 adventure travel book. Sadly of course Saint Exupery, was shot down over the Mediterranean in 1944 just a few years after composing Le Petit Prince and Wind, Sand and Stars.

The 47 Ronin

Thanks to the JetStar sale I went to Tokyo last week. I hadn't been to Japan before and I quickly found that I loved the place. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to get the hang of the Tokyo Subway System but nothing could be simpler to navigate and don't get me started on the amazing Shinkansen bullet trains...
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The first thing I did in Tokyo was get up early and take a trip to the tombs of the 47 Ronin. I became aware of the 47 Ronin initially through the Borges story "The Uncivil Teacher of Etiquette, Kotsuke no Suke," and then through the ukiyo-e - a remarkable series of woodblock prints. The shrine to the 47 Ronin is a surprisingly peaceful haven in the middle of Tokyo.
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Like a total idiot I forgot to bring my camera to Japan but I did manage to take a couple of videos with the pinhole camera on my iPod nano.

The Finkler Question

I have a question: can you still call this a comic novel if there are no laughs? Actually I rarely even smiled. Admittedly I read this book in poor circumstances: on the red eye from Tokyo to Melbourne, but even so this felt less like a novel and more like a parade of lame, rather old fashioned observations about Americans, British Jews, lefties, the BBC etc. that might have been edgy in say 1983 but which I found toe curlingly embarrassing in 2010. It doesn't work as a comic novel because Howard Jacobson does not deliver on the funny. Neither his puns nor his comedic situations nor his dialogue made me laugh. But if its not a comedy what is it? The caricatures in this book carry no moral force or seriousness, they do not entertain or instruct or make us think. The book is basically about a circle of Jewish and wannabe Jewish friends in North London who discuss life, love and philosophy but I really should emphasise that this is an overly generous description. The paper thin characters talk and act like silly, not too bright students after their first hit of Moroccan black. They babble and moan and babble some more. This quickly becomes tiresome. Eventually most of us grow out of our pointless verbosity and narcissism. Children (not necessarily our own) make us grow up; but a certain strata of the English middle and upper classes farm their children out to various grim agoge and thus remain in a retarded state of adolescence for their entire life. Why would anyone care what these kind of people say or do? I wasn't interested when Iris Murdoch was telling us about them and Howard Jacobson aint no Iris Murdoch.
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He aint no Philip Roth or Saul Bellow either. In fact I can only imagine that this book won the Booker Prize because the jury hadn't read any Roth, Bellow or even Michael Chabon. Jacobson lacks their depth and acerbity and yeah he lacks their jokes too.
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Which brings me to my wider point - what the hell has happened to British fiction? The Finkler Question is the best they can do? Hampstead table talk and gossip slow cooked for 315 pages? Really? The Finkler Question, Wolf Hall, that's where you want to go? Vay iz meer, bubelah, vay iz meer.

Kyoto

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The Draughtsman's Contract

The Draughtsman's Contract was the first really good murder/mystery that I saw on TV, thanks to Channel Four Films. You can watch the whole thing here on YouTube or better yet get it from Netflicks. Here's what Roger Ebert had to say back in 1983

Nicolas Bouvier - The Japanese Chronicles

The best book I've read this year is Nicolas Bouvier's travel book The Way of the World which tells the story of his journey from Paris to Afghanistan just after the Second World War. Bouvier's later book The Japanese Chronicles isn't quite as good as that because it's more disjointed, written as a series of impressionistic postcards sent from Japan over a period of several decades. But it is a superior book of travel essays and on every page there is a keen observation or a philosophical side track. Here's a random bit from a Kyoto chapter that gives a pretty good flavour of his style:

Later today in the lobby of my Kyoto Hotel I meet some other foreigners...these are French. After two weeks of cultural circuits they suspect their guides of "not having delivered the soul of Japan." There are some things you don't even say to the woman you love, or to a beloved brother. And these women, who are not stupid, who in Paris would hesitate to change their butcher, demand that before they leave someone should wrap up the 'soul of Japan' for them. What do they want? That through a simple mental process their ignorance can be transformed into knowledge so that they can discuss it when they get home. I judge them, but I too sometimes would like to find my meal set in front of me and fast. We come to this thin and frugal country with our greedy metabolisms. The whole West is that way. The golden dishes, the Maharajas, the rubies as big as duck eggs, that is what the first explorers wanted to see, not the simplicity which is the hallmark of Japan. Here anyone who does not serve an apprenticeship to frugality is definitely wasting his time.

What Happened Before The Big Bang

I always found Stephen Hawking's explanation in A Brief History of Time (there was nothing before the Big Bang) unsatisfying. Turns out so do a lot of other people. Another great documentary from BBC's Horizon:

Questions, questions

Is there anyone interested in what I have to say? I know I'm not, but perhaps you might be. If so, here's an interview I did with Len Wanner over at The Crime Of It All. It's mostly about crime fiction, but we do touch on a few other subjects. In an attempt to stir up some controversy let me highlight the vicious attack I make on Ian Rankin near the end. Len has dug up a picture of me from April 2008 sitting on my porch in Denver. I'm sitting in my incredibly comfy Adirondack chair which I got in a thrift store for twenty bucks and which I really miss. I don't miss the fact that although it's the middle of Spring there's still a healthy layer of snow on the ground.

Can You Hear Me Now?

My audio book read at the moment is The 1000 Autumns of Jacob De Sloot by David Mitchell, which I've been listening to on my iPod on the bike or riding public transport. After a nauseating opening I'm really enjoying the book which is set in Nagasaki around 1800 and may be about to involve the Nagasaki Harbour Incident and HMS Phaeton. Or maybe not. I got the book from the St Kilda Public Library as an audio e book download which makes me feel a lot less guilty than getting it as a torrent. The audio e book process works very well and I've "checked it out" for a renewable three week period. Very cool.

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In other audio news I've learned that the great Blackstone Audio will be bringing out my new crime novel Falling Glass in an audio edition next year and also the first two books in my Lighthouse Trilogy: The Lighthouse Land and The Lighthouse Wars. You'll be able to get those books from iTunes or Audible.com or directly from Blackstone. Falling Glass and the Lighthouse books are going to be read by Gerard Doyle who has done most of my stuff. Ger and I had a skype conversation about how to pronounce certain words etc. in the kids series and I'm confident that he is going to do an excellent job as usual. He also told me a story about when he and his kid met Steven Spielberg that had me laughing my arse off.

Out of Town

I'm heading out of town for a week. I've scheduled a full series of - no doubt - fascinating blog posts but I won't be able to respond to your comments. I will, of course, read them all and I'll try to respond as best I can when I get back.

Hans Rosling

I was listening to the BBC's Start The Week podcast with Jonathan Franzen and during a lively and interesting discussion of Franzen's new novel, Freedom, Andrew Marr asked Franzen about over population. Franzen and everyone on the panel agreed that this was one of those issues that "no one ever talks about" because basically its insoluble. This idea goes back a long way. "Let's help these two beggars," one of Jesus's disciples said. "Nah, forget it," Jesus told them, "the poor are always with us," - which is one of the most famous category mistakes in the history of philosophy. The Start The Week guests agreed that third world poverty and overpopulation was an issue politicians ignored because "nothing could be done".

The conversation amazed me because no one on the panel mentioned Hans Rosling. I thought everyone knew about Hans Rosling by now. Over the last three years at a series of TED conferences Rosling has been busting myths about overpopulation and third world poverty using the hard science of statistical analysis. Doom and gloom might sell books, but this is not the true story at all.

Decimating Decimation

In a strangely aggressive New Yorker review of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executioners, Clive James went after Goldhagen for his misuse of the word decimation. Indeed Goldhagen's apparent ignorance of the correct usage of decimate was the final evidence James needed to prove that Goldhagen was a hack and that his book was worthless. Decimate of course means reduce by a tenth. If you remember Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus, Larry Olivier decimated his own legions after they had performed poorly in battle, killing every tenth man, so that they'd do better next time. At least I think that happened in the movie, it's been a while...Anyhoo, decimate means reduce by one tenth. But lately of course it's taken on a different meaning and nowadays it only gets used in its technical sense when specifically discussing the history of Ancient Rome. Now it's a synonym for slaughter or destroy or waste. This has been common usage for quite some time in the US and I'd venture to suggest that few people under 40 even know about the older definition. Clive James has always been one of those charming Canute like figures trying to stop the tide of language change but I'm afraid it just isn't possible. I know this because last week I saw this headline in the sniffy and really quite particular New York Times:

Killing For The Mob Then Decimating It In Court

At first I thought this was a story about a mob informant who had gone on a rampage in the courthouse, but it wasn't, it was just about a common snitch and was proof that the new definition is now current everywhere. I imagine that if Daniel Goldhagen used decimate in his new book the New Yorker editors would not let Clive James spend a couple of paragraphs, er, decimating the book because of it.

District 9

I finally saw District 9 yesterday. It's a 2009 film directed by Neill Blomkamp set in a future Johannesburg. It's about aliens who have come to Earth and who quickly become an oppressed underclass (sort of like the 1980's film Alien Nation). There's been good word of mouth on D9 and it got nominated for a best picture Oscar. I've been looking forward to it, but I have to say that I was ever so slightly disappointed. It's ideas are a bit stale and the last third of the flick lacks ambition and imagination. Wikipedia informs me that "the story, adapted from Alive in Joburg, a 2005 short film directed by Blomkamp and produced by Copley, pivots on the themes of xenophobia and social segregation. The title and premise of District 9 were inspired by events that took place in District Six, Cape Town during the apartheid era," which is fair enough but the metaphor is handled pretty heavily. For me D9 is the paradigm case of overly high expectations: if I had discovered this film on a Friday night at one in the morning I'd probably think it was a minor masterpiece, but unfortunately because of that sloppy final act and the overpraise I don't. It is however extremely well acted and surprisingly funny (the comic timing of the lead actor is terrific). I don't know, I hate to diss this film when the studios are turning out Transformers 3 and Indiana Jones IV, I guess I just expected more from producer Peter Jackson who really should have pushed Blomkamp that little bit harder on the script. Alien for example had a dozen drafts of the screenplay until they got everything just right. District 9 could have done with two or three more.

Happy Halloween

I like Halloween. Always have. It was an important holiday for me growing up in Carrickfergus in the 1970's. We bobbed for apples and for money, we ate chocolate and nuts and apple tarts, we wore masks and we went "Halloween Rhyming" - the Irish equivalent of trick or treat. There was always a lot of weird stuff going on up country that used to scare the bejesus out of us. October 31 is the last day of the Celtic year and the traditional fire ceremonies celebrating this event go back thousands of years. It always makes me laugh when I read some pompous idiot complaining in The Daily Telegraph about the growth of this "ghastly American holiday" in fair Albion. These people just don't know their history. They should read Frazer's Golden Bough. In fact everybody should read Frazer's Golden Bough.
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We had trick or treat in St Kilda this year and the kids loved it. Nobody got a rock.