I Claudius

I read in The Guardian last week that HBO is planning to remake the 1970s BBC series I Claudius. Reaction on the right hand side of the sheugh seems initially to be hostile. I Claudius is regarded as a classic and one of the high points of the BBC in the 1970s along with Kenneth Clark's Civilization, David Attenborough's Life On Earth and Jacob Bronowski's Ascent of Man. In college I read the Robert Graves novel I Claudius and liked it very much. It's Graves's second best book after his brilliant memoir Goodbye To All That which is a must read for anyone interested in World War 1 and its aftermath (it's also a must read for anyone who has struggled through the ghastly E E Cummings novel/memoir The Enormous Room). After college I read Graves's sequel to I Claudius, Claudius The God which isn't quite as good, but I had never seen the TV series until a couple of years ago when I rented it from Netflix. I was pretty surprised to discover that this "classic" was actually very cheesy. Hammy, badly lit, filmed on cheap, wobbly sets, the BBC's I Claudius reminded me more of Blake's 7 or Dr. Who than the high art I had been expecting. The acting was poor and over the top and the art direction valiant but ultimately doomed by the BBC's limited budget. The scriptwriters cut out much of the novel's nuance and almost all of the humour and the whole thing is actually quite embarrassing today. If I were HBO I wouldn't worry about the critics from the UK who say that they are going to spoil a classic, those critics are either demented old luvvies or they haven't actually seen I Claudius for a long time. 

Following The Detectives

In 1995 I went to Russia for the first time. It was a bit chaotic and slightly dangerous but I really enjoyed myself. Before I'd gone I'd made a map of St Petersburg and I spent a couple of days visiting all the locations in Crime and Punishment. I also went out to the site of Pushkin's duel in the woods and I visited Dostoyevsky's grave. When I moved to New York the first thing I did was visit all the haunts of the beats and when I was at Oxford I decided that my local was going to be The Eagle and Child because that was the local of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien (and I made a little map of all the places those two guys had lived in in North Oxford). I can't help it, I'm a book geek and I like maps which is why Following The Detectives is definitely my kind of volume. Twenty literary detectives and their tales are unpacked cartographically by several well known crime writers and critics. It is not meant to be a comprehensive guide, it's edited by Maxim Jakubowski and thus reflects what Maxim likes and is into...the good (Dashiell Hammett's San Francisco, James Lee Burke's New Orleans, Raymond Chandler's LA), the bad (Peter James's Brighton) and the ugly (Peter James again, sorry).
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I particularly enjoyed Peter Rozovsky's brilliant look at Icelandic crime fiction (one of the things I liked about Jar City was the map at the start) and Dec Burke's intelligent take on Dec Hughes's Dublin. In fact all the contributions are excellent and Maxim has done a fine job editing this book. Following The Detectives is definitely crying out for a volume 2 (an iPhone Ap would be fantastic!) and hopefully next time Maxim will broaden his range a little and not leave as much of the heavy lifting to the commendable Barry Forshaw. (Yeah that's right, that was a hint). You can get Following The Detectives at the old rogue's Murder One bookshop in London or at Torrans's No Alibis in Belfast or at Otto's Mysterious Bookshop in NYC or, of course, on Amazon.

Just One More Thing...

Crime writer Mark Billingham's Columbo Documentary for BBC Radio 4

Celebrating The Titanic

I have never understood why the city fathers in Belfast have been so eager to celebrate the Titanic in recent years. The fact that the Titanic was built in Belfast can't be something to boast about can it? Yet it seems to be. They've put up giant murals all over East Belfast and they're actively renaming that part of town as the Titanic Quarter. I'm not knocking the workers - my dad and my sister both worked in Harland and Wolff shipyard, but the fact that the Titanic sank on its maiden voyage with tremendous loss of life is surely not something to be bragging about.
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The photograph is from Wednesday night's riots in the Short Strand (the so called Titanic quarter). Maybe the guy chucking the petrol bomb will get a mural of his own one day.

Magnus Carlsen

I was waiting for the number 16 tram outside the St Kilda Public Library on Tuesday when I noticed this face plastered all over the side of it (right): I recognised who it was, but I wonder if many other people in Melbourne do. I imagine most punters think its a bad photograph of Justin Bieber. It isnt of course. It is in fact Magnus Carlsen, the chess grandmaster, currently ranked #1 (or #2 in some ratings) in the world. He was advertising - I think - a clothing company. I was somewhat taken aback seeing young Magnus on the side of my local tram but it can only be a good thing when a chess prodigy is a fashion icon rather than the cast of Top Gear, Project Runway Australia or Masterchef  who are on the other trams on my route.
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You can read more about Magnus Carlsen's amazing career, here. 

Meet The New Boss...Same As The Old Boss

In a new, wide ranging, somewhat scattershot, not entirely convincing, but always compelling documentary Adam Curtis argues that the idea of the ecosystem is bogus. Along the way we get a glimpse into why the hippie communes failed and a look into the future of the Arab Spring (which is probably going to be an Arab winter). Watch it soon before the BBC deletes this YouTube account.

Existential Crises, Engines and Man Sheds

(Blogger ate the two new posts I've been working on, so out of laziness and pique today I'm recycling an older post, originally posted July 2010)
In last week's Herald Sun I read that our new Prime Minister's partner Tim Mathieson is a patron of some kind of men's health initiative that involves giving each Australian male access to a "man shed" where he can potter around, read Top Gear Magazine and fix things. I wondered if the Herald was being satirical about this but apparently not. The man shed initiative is a desperate move and it's far too late. Men in the west are in big trouble. We weren't meant to sit at desks for 8 hours a day or live in little boxes or visit garden centres at the weekend. All of that is cripplingly bad both physically and spiritually. Basically I think that things have been going down hill for us since we gave up persistence hunting. For 50,000 generations we lived outside on the savannah in Tanzania and Kenya dodging lions and chasing gazelles until they couldn't run anymore. For the last 100 generations we've been living in squalid cities next to a bunch of friggin strangers with all their hang ups and bad music. Men don't hunt, don't hang out, don't really do anything anymore. We don't even fix cars - a traditional twentieth century standby when things got bad. And it's been getting worse. Camille Paglia in a slightly crazed, buckshot op/ed in the NYT last week came up with a few excellent points on this topic:

In the discreet white-collar realm, men and women are interchangeable, doing the same, mind-based work. Physicality is suppressed; voices are lowered and gestures curtailed in sanitized office space. Men must neuter themselves, while ambitious women postpone procreation. Androgyny is bewitching in art, but in real life it can lead to stagnation and boredom, which no pill can cure. Meanwhile, family life has put middle-class men in a bind; they are simply cogs in a domestic machine commanded by women. Contemporary moms have become virtuoso super-managers of a complex operation focused on the care and transport of children. But it’s not so easy to snap over from Apollonian control to Dionysian delirium.

Nor are husbands offering much stimulation in the male display department: visually, American men remain perpetual boys, as shown by the bulky T-shirts, loose shorts and sneakers they wear from preschool through midlife. The sexes, which used to occupy intriguingly separate worlds, are suffering from over-familiarity...

Back to the cars. I walked by a broken down Range Rover this week. I looked under the hood with the owner but the engine was covered up by bits of plastic as if the mere thought of all those mechanical bits whirring around was somehow offensive. Sheds arent the answer. I dont know what is the answer (or even really what is the question) but I do know that we've gone beyond the shed solution.

Win A Book!

Declan Burke, one of Ireland most respected crime novelists, has edited what I think is the definitive collection of essays on Irish crime writing. It's out this week and it's called Down These Green Streets.

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I've written a piece for the collection about crime fiction in Northern Ireland in the period 1945 - 1990, which, if truth be told was rather a thin time for lovers of noir and mysteries. But fear not there are a few gems scattered among the decades. . .

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My piece talks about one of my favourite novels of this period Odd Man Out which was subsequently filmed by Carol Reed. To win a copy of Down These Green Streets, I'd like you to answer this three part question:


1) In Odd Man Out which real Belfast pub does James Mason seek sanctuary in; 2) which actor who later played Dr Who is serving behind the bar; 3) in which Michael Forsythe novel does Michael also have a violent encounter in this very bar?

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Ok, that's it. First person with all three correct answers gets the book. Please answer in the comments below and provide some kind of contact address. I'll contact you and Liberties Press will send you out a book.

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bon chance mes amis! (as they say in Larne)

Killadelphia

This is a great little documentary Louis Theroux has done for the BBC about policing North Philly. The "no snitching" code, the complete lack of cooperation with the cops and the level of violence remind me of north Belfast  in the 70s and 80s. In Belfast extortion and protection rackets greased the wheels, in Philly its all about crack, meth and heroin.

Patrick Leigh Fermor

I read the sad news this morning that my favourite writer Patrick Leigh Fermor has died. Fermor was a war hero, a bon vivant, a wit, a polyglot, an impeccable prose stylist and, possibly, the last of the great English travel writers. In 1933 at the age of 19 after failing to get into university Leigh Fermor decided to travel on foot from London to Constantinople. He caught the ferry to Holland and began an epic journey, the first part of which he chronicled in the wonderful book A Time of Gifts. After making it to Constantinople he fell in love with Greece and travelled there until war broke out. He joined the SOE and worked behind enemy lines in Crete. His exploits as a commando were later made into the Michael Powell film Ill Met By Moonlight.
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Patrick Leigh Fermor is the man as far as I'm concerned. He loved languages, travel, scholarship, cultural differences and most of all people. He never accepted the surface judgement on anything or anyone and preferred to investigate things for himself. A Time Of Gifts is simply the best travel book I've ever read. You can read the excellent Daily Telegraph obituary, here. 

Shaken: Stories For Japan

Edgar nominated crime novelist Tim Hallinan has put together a collection of short stories to help the tsunami relief fund in Japan. Its an e book exclusive available on Kindle or as a direct computer download. Everyone worked for free and all the money raised will go directly to tsunami relief. You can get it on Amazon, here. I read it yesterday and its an excellent Japanese themed collection of mostly crime fiction. I've written a non fiction piece for the book about my trip last November to the village of Matsushima. 

AC Grayling's Dodgy New University

AC Grayling

In 2010 I heard AC Grayling give a talk about philosophy at the Perth Writer's Festival. Actual A.C. would have been nice because although it was at night it was 40 degrees centigrade inside the hall. In anticipation of disaster I had taken the precaution of getting a seat in the back row. AC Grayling began his talk thus "I was in my bath the other night reading Moliere..." He continued in a similar vein for an hour, at least I assume he did, 10 minutes was all I could handle of it and there were free drinks waiting round the corner. I met Grayling later and had a brief chat with him. A nice enough bloke but I quickly deduced that he's a sort of poor man's John Gray. He's a generalist, not in the first rank of world philosophers, and has made no great contribution to any of philosophy's major disciplines.
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It was a bit of a surprise to read in The Guardian yesterday that he's gone off and founded a New College of the Humanities in Bloomsbury, London which will be charging 18,000 pounds a year for a B.A. What will you be getting for your 18 grand? Well Grayling has assembled a small but heavy weight team of international professors for his institute. It is not an eclectic bunch. There is only one women on the faculty and only one minority. The rest are all Anglo-American white guys of a certain age. Among the big names are Richard Dawkins, Ronald Dworkin, Niall Ferguson, Stephen Pinker, Steve Jones, Peter Singer, Grayling himself. By good fortune I've either had seminars with or heard lectures from most of Grayling's faculty, so I'm in a position to save you some cash which you can then use to go to a proper Uni with a diversity of voices and viewpoints (and where you might see the occasional lecturer under 40 or a woman or someone who didn't grow up in the Anglo-American academic tradition).
1. AC Grayling: I've heard him lecture and I've read one of his books. Not a deep thinker, more of a media personality.
2. Simon Blackburn: I've heard him lecture and heard him frequently on the radio. Blackburn, like Grayling is a historian of philosophy and a bit of a lightweight.
3. Sir David Cannadine: Cannadine is a fairly minor historian of royalty in Britain (hence the knighthood). No real original ideas. Read half of one of his books.
4. Linda Colley: This will make you laugh, Linda Colley, the only woman on the faculty, is David Cannadine's wife. She's also a minor historian.
5. Sir Richard Dawkins: I've heard him lecture many times at Oxford and I've read five of his books. His thesis? Nothing Earth shattering: every species on the planet got here through natural selection and there is no evidence for the existence of God. Er, that's about it, really.
7. Ronald Dworkin: Another philosopher. I've had tutorials with him and I've read 4 of his books. He believes in natural rights and says that these rights permeate the common law of England and America. He's good is Dworkin, maybe not 18 grand good, but he's good. Jeremy Bentham called natural rights nonsense on stilts and neither Dworkin nor any other believer in them has ever really explained where these rights actually come from.
8. Peter Singer: Yet another philosopher. I've heard him lecture a couple of times. Singer is a very smart guy. He's an animal rights activist and an ethicist. Again don't know if he's worth 18 big ones.
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So that's about two thirds of his faculty covered and they all look pretty similar dont they? No real radicals who will challenge each other's world views and make the students think. The Guardian has also broken a story that Grayling has ripped off the curriculum of the University of London for many of his courses. Dear oh dear when the professor's a plagiarist what hope do the students have? To me this "university" seems less about providing students with a rich and interesting education and more about providing a retirement fund for Mr Grayling and his aging chums.

This Is The Scandalous NY Congressman We SHOULD Be Talking About

Soon to be ex-Congressman Anthony Weiner is a creep and a perv but the NY Representative who really scares me is Congressman Peter King of Long Island. It's one of life's ironies that the current Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee has long been a champion of international terrorism. When the Provisional IRA massacred civilians at war memorials and at fish and chip shops and burned alive diners at restaurants, Peter King would gleefully put himself forward to endorse their goals and their methods. The problem wasn't the men who planted the bombs, King would opinine glibly, it was the British, who had divided Ireland in the first place. King was no preaching Paddy from across the sheugh. He actually got his feet wet and was a frequent visitor to Northern Ireland in the 1980's and got to know (and stayed with) many of the Dundalk based IRA and INLA hardliners. It was during this time incidentally that the IRA were receiving aid, Czech high explosives and training from Colonel Gadaffi. American money raised by the likes of Peter King going straight to Libya to buy arms. Interesting eh? Wonder what will happen when Tripoli falls and all those embarrassing files come out...

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Chairman King may or may not be a racist but he is certainly a sectarian shit stirrer having frequently referred to American Muslims as the fifth column and "the enemy within". He's made quite a show of his Muslim bashing on Fox News but I wonder if all this is mere smoke to cover his own terrorist activities? Intriguingly the Real IRA and Continuity IRA, the Dundalk and South Armagh based IRA splinter groups (the ones who brought us the horrific slaughter of the Omagh bombing) have become much bolder and better organised in the last eighteen months; significantly this is since Peter King has become a ranking member and now Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee and thus privy to not only CIA intel but also information from British intelligence; Chairman King now gets, weekly, every CIA, Mossad & MI6 briefing about world terrorism. Unlike the entire leadership of Sinn Fein in Ireland, King has had no Damascene conversion that I'm aware of, so to me this seems a bit like hiring a pyromaniac to guard a lumber yard. Is Chairman King passing on intelligence to his old friends in the IRA splinter groups? I honestly don't know...maybe one of the brave journalists on Fox could suggest an FBI investigation?
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The New York Times is reporting that Anthony Weiner is going to resign in the next 24 hours and we all probably should just ignore him now. But if we ignore Chairman King his power will grow like Sauron in Mordor or Khan Noonien Singh on Ceti Alpha V or, you know, some less nerdy thing. But, of course, you can guess which of these two gentlemen the media is still going to go after, can't you?

Deviant

Here's the cover of my new YA novel Deviant which will be out in October from Abrams. Pretty creepy image, eh? And here's a link to artist Vincent Chong's blog where he talks about the process that went into designing this cover. The book incidentally is not grounded in anything supernatural but is a young adult noir (if such a genre exists) that takes place in present day Colorado Springs. I should be getting galleys of the book in a few weeks and when I do I'll give a couple away on the blog.

VS Naipaul, Hack

Interesting story in the Guardian today with echoes of Christopher Hitchens's famous "women aren't funny piece" for Vanity Fair. VS Naipaul says that women can't write for toffee and no female writer is a match for him. None. Not even Jane Austen. 
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The Nobel Prize for literature has for many decades been regarded as something of a joke. Geography, ethnicity and longevity are the prerequisites for obtaining the Nobel these days, not talent. But some people do take it seriously. Before VS Naipaul won the 2001 Nobel he had been a bit of a bore but emboldened by his Swedish coronation Naipaul's arrogance has grown to Chomskian levels. I've read VS Naipaul and he is no genius. He's a middling middle class novelist with a very laboured style, a tin ear for dialogue and a deadening, bland philosophy that he presents as some great truth he has uncovered from his rather limited experience of the world. Naipaul is well known for cutting people who annoy him out of his life (this includes long time friends and family members) and I imagine that nowadays he is surrounded largely by sycophants and yes men. Once a month he probably gets a fawning letter from his publisher. Perhaps this explains his delusion. Naipaul isn't in the same league as Jane Austen or George Eliot or Emily Bronte or even Charlotte Bronte. In a 100 years everyone will still be reading Jane Austen for pleasure while Naipaul will be reduced to a footnote. 

The Hobbit

I was a bit depressed when I learned that Guillermo Del Toro was leaving The Hobbit movie and I was even more depressed when - before filming began - Peter Jackson demanded that New Zealand change its labour laws so that the unions would be weakened; but I guess I'm a nerdy fanboy at heart because I'm really looking forward to this:

Irish Poem of the Month - June

This month its WB Yeats's classic The Second Coming. (Are you still looking for a title for your magnum opus? This is a good place to start, here or perhaps in Yeats's Sailing To Byzantium.)

The Second Coming
WB Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.




Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.




The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?