Allah's Artistry is the name of a Friday night feature on the Islam Channel. Tonight they showed some leaf-cutter ants doing their thing in the rainforest whilst the narrator asked "how come one thousand ants can behave as if they had the same purpose?" The answer broadcast to the devout was of course that this provides "clear evidence" of Allah's micro-management of the natural world. Yet of course the answer is the same as that to the quite similar question of how come all the cells in our body behave as if they have the same purpose. Because they all have the same genes.
Only religion seems to retain this freedom to misrepresent fact on our TV screens; there really ought to be a way to safeguard our citizens from this kind of nonsense. What is intolerable on traditional terrestrial TV should be equally so on niche digital channels.
Friday, February 09, 2007
Gorkana
Earlier this week I had a demonstration of a web-based media relations application called Gorkana, which sounds a bit like the name of somewhere (or someone) connected with Borat's loss of innocence.
Anyway, the general idea is that it allows PRs to keep tabs on all the key journalists whose views hold sway with their clients' customers and other stakeholders. The users can output lists of names and email addresses for easier one-to-many communications, and within their own organisations they can view, add and amend information about individual media contacts. There's also a search application, which would be vastly improved by a connection with a proper electronic media database (like Factiva) where the body as well as the title of articles can be queried, and perhaps certain other data sources that would permit influence and impact to be assessed in greater depth.
Overall the system has the look of something that was developed without a great deal of hands-on involvement from end-users or the journalists themselves, though there is a survey built in that allows the latter to express an interest in opera or tennis in the hope that Glyndebourne or Wimbledon tickets might form an integral part of the awareness-generation process. (And anyone can tell you how hard it is to get people in the comms industry to think of themselves as users. )
When pressed, the Gorkana reps forecast the imminent inclusion of bloggers in their system. I'd love to know how much serious thought is being given to that particular challenge. The underlying peer-to-peer dynamics of the medium would make it that much harder.
I know that some of my colleagues have given some thought to what a social / collaborative version of such a contacts system might look like. But if it had to be a good old-fashioned piece of centralised data, then at the very least it will have to demonstrate some recognition that categories like "relationship" are going to be harder to define at the global level. And even more so than MSM listings, blogger contact entries will only really work if they are integrated into tools that can monitor (and critique) conversations in the blogosphere.
Anyway, the general idea is that it allows PRs to keep tabs on all the key journalists whose views hold sway with their clients' customers and other stakeholders. The users can output lists of names and email addresses for easier one-to-many communications, and within their own organisations they can view, add and amend information about individual media contacts. There's also a search application, which would be vastly improved by a connection with a proper electronic media database (like Factiva) where the body as well as the title of articles can be queried, and perhaps certain other data sources that would permit influence and impact to be assessed in greater depth.
Overall the system has the look of something that was developed without a great deal of hands-on involvement from end-users or the journalists themselves, though there is a survey built in that allows the latter to express an interest in opera or tennis in the hope that Glyndebourne or Wimbledon tickets might form an integral part of the awareness-generation process. (And anyone can tell you how hard it is to get people in the comms industry to think of themselves as users. )
When pressed, the Gorkana reps forecast the imminent inclusion of bloggers in their system. I'd love to know how much serious thought is being given to that particular challenge. The underlying peer-to-peer dynamics of the medium would make it that much harder.
I know that some of my colleagues have given some thought to what a social / collaborative version of such a contacts system might look like. But if it had to be a good old-fashioned piece of centralised data, then at the very least it will have to demonstrate some recognition that categories like "relationship" are going to be harder to define at the global level. And even more so than MSM listings, blogger contact entries will only really work if they are integrated into tools that can monitor (and critique) conversations in the blogosphere.
McCarthyisms #4
McCarthy's novels were amongst those dissed by Brian Myers in his Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose.
Summing up why he felt that a resurgence of good-old American scorn for pretention was long overdue, Myers griped that:
From the scene at the very start where a Sherrif's deputy is strangled with a pair of handcuffs, the body count starts to mount almost exponentially, a phenomenon I hadn't previously encountered in serious literature. In some ways it might be the most "trite" of McCarthy's novels, but that is really a side-effect of the way McCarthy has worked his elaborate, allusive way with a plot outline straight out of the Hollywood thriller genre: man finds suitcase full of cash surrounded by dead narcos. Man decides to pick it up and leave. Dead narcos' associates decide to follow him and so on.
Summing up why he felt that a resurgence of good-old American scorn for pretention was long overdue, Myers griped that:
"Any accessible fast-moving story written in unaffected prose is deemed toIn truth, these aren't criticisms that will easily stick to McCarthy's writing. No Country for Old Men for instance may be stylistically lighter than some of the earlier books, but it remains recognisably a McCarthy novel and it has action aplenty.
be 'genre fiction' - at best an excellent 'read' or 'page turner' but never
literature with a capital L...Even the most obvious triteness is acceptable
provided it comes with a postmodern wink...What is not tolerated is a strong
element of action - unless, of course, the idiom is obtrusive enough to keep
suspense to a minimum."
From the scene at the very start where a Sherrif's deputy is strangled with a pair of handcuffs, the body count starts to mount almost exponentially, a phenomenon I hadn't previously encountered in serious literature. In some ways it might be the most "trite" of McCarthy's novels, but that is really a side-effect of the way McCarthy has worked his elaborate, allusive way with a plot outline straight out of the Hollywood thriller genre: man finds suitcase full of cash surrounded by dead narcos. Man decides to pick it up and leave. Dead narcos' associates decide to follow him and so on.
Chapinismo: Chilero
Cool.
Hence re-chilero: well cool, rad, awesome, book, killer, off the 'ook, the cat's pijamas etc.
Hence re-chilero: well cool, rad, awesome, book, killer, off the 'ook, the cat's pijamas etc.
Boom time
Guatemala's professional assassins normally have to content themselves with picking off journalists and corrupt local alcaldes, but next month sees an almost unprecedented gaggle of opportunities opening up for them.
First up the main draw himself, George Dubya Bush, who will be passing through on a tour of the region (Taking in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and Uruguay as well as Guate.)
Then there's the annual conference of the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB), to be held March 16 thru 20, which will be attended by 11 different Latin American presidents, including Michelle Bachelet (Chile), Felipe Calderon (Mexico), Alvaro Uribe (Colombia) and Evo Morales (Bolivia).
Finally on March 29, their majesties King Juan Carlos of Spain and his wife Queen Sofia are scheduled to drop by.
First up the main draw himself, George Dubya Bush, who will be passing through on a tour of the region (Taking in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and Uruguay as well as Guate.)
Then there's the annual conference of the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB), to be held March 16 thru 20, which will be attended by 11 different Latin American presidents, including Michelle Bachelet (Chile), Felipe Calderon (Mexico), Alvaro Uribe (Colombia) and Evo Morales (Bolivia).
Finally on March 29, their majesties King Juan Carlos of Spain and his wife Queen Sofia are scheduled to drop by.
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Everything's on the beach
LOST returned last night after its 13 week winter hiatus. Another roughly hour-shaped chunk out of my spare time each week.
The city of Miami featured (mysteriousy) as it does of course in CSI:Miami, the show I became hooked on whilst flying across the Atlantic. If there's a more involvingly ludicrous character on TV than Lieutenant Horatio Cain I've yet to find him. Caruso's performance wouldn't be worth spoofing because he seems to be already playing it as a piss-take...rather like some of the great TV detectives of the 1970s.
Looks like I will never be crossing the pond on BA again. I'd rather pay Continental $5 for a miniature bottle of Merlot than BA 240 quid for my second bag. (I don't think I have ever made the journey carrying less than 30 kgs.)
The city of Miami featured (mysteriousy) as it does of course in CSI:Miami, the show I became hooked on whilst flying across the Atlantic. If there's a more involvingly ludicrous character on TV than Lieutenant Horatio Cain I've yet to find him. Caruso's performance wouldn't be worth spoofing because he seems to be already playing it as a piss-take...rather like some of the great TV detectives of the 1970s.
Looks like I will never be crossing the pond on BA again. I'd rather pay Continental $5 for a miniature bottle of Merlot than BA 240 quid for my second bag. (I don't think I have ever made the journey carrying less than 30 kgs.)
Chapinismo: Pistear
To grease someone's palm; literally to dosh them up. From pisto, chapin slang for dosh.
The most recent accounts I have heard about the death of our friend in Guatemala last weekend are taking the regretably rather everyday story of the accidental death of a motorcyclist and turning it into a proper chapin folk-tale.
The woman that got down from the car to kick him (having just run him over) turns out to have been a judge. There were other people in the car and they promptly joined in. The judge has no doubt since had to pistear the local cops, as our friend was one of many hundreds of bikers on the road that morning in Chiquimula, and several of his comrades on the Caravana del Zorro took photos of the incident.
The most recent accounts I have heard about the death of our friend in Guatemala last weekend are taking the regretably rather everyday story of the accidental death of a motorcyclist and turning it into a proper chapin folk-tale.
The woman that got down from the car to kick him (having just run him over) turns out to have been a judge. There were other people in the car and they promptly joined in. The judge has no doubt since had to pistear the local cops, as our friend was one of many hundreds of bikers on the road that morning in Chiquimula, and several of his comrades on the Caravana del Zorro took photos of the incident.
Severe Weather
This cute little snowman on Masthouse pier this morning betokens a modest overnight snowfall, that still somehow managed to shut several airports around the capital.In spite of the advance warning we had of this "severe weather" the ramps leading down to the piers along the Thames will only have been gritted in time for the evening rush-hour.
Soho Square was looking slippery around 11 o'clock this morning.
McCarthyisms #3
These all occurred within the space of three pages.
"Hack away you mean red nigger, he said, and the old man raised the axe and
split the head of John Joel Glanton to the thrapple."
A thrapple, according to Dictionary.com, is another word for the thropple or windpipe.
"The judge was standing on the rise in silhouette against the evening sun like some great balden archimandrite."
An archimandrite, according to Dictionary.com, is a senior abbot with multi-monastery responsibilities.
"He stamped his feet on the boards and flared his arms like some wild
thaumaturge out of an atavistic drama."
A thau....oh, can't be bothered.
I guess this is what Hyperwords was invented for!
"Hack away you mean red nigger, he said, and the old man raised the axe and
split the head of John Joel Glanton to the thrapple."
A thrapple, according to Dictionary.com, is another word for the thropple or windpipe.
"The judge was standing on the rise in silhouette against the evening sun like some great balden archimandrite."
An archimandrite, according to Dictionary.com, is a senior abbot with multi-monastery responsibilities.
"He stamped his feet on the boards and flared his arms like some wild
thaumaturge out of an atavistic drama."
A thau....oh, can't be bothered.
I guess this is what Hyperwords was invented for!
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
McCarthyisms #2
Scott alluded to Cormac McCarthy's "King James cadence" in his comment on my last post. It's an intriguingly un-situated narrative voice that brings us these blood-red borderland shenanigans from the 1850s. It's not quite dialect, yet McCarthy does permit himself the anachronistic liberty of referring to African Americans (and his characters to Native Americans and Mexicans) as "niggers" and the mentally handicapped as "idiots" or "it".
Recently Michael Chabon spoke of McCarthy's "densely-foliated" prose in a New York Review of Books article, suggesting that in Blood Meridian "lushness of prose counterbalances aridity of setting." Well, for me at least, this lush prose tends at times to get itself a tiny bit blotto.
Indeed, in trying to invest his narrative with all the poetic trappings of a kind of apocalyptic anti-mythology, McCarthy himself repeatedly crosses back and forth across the frontier of well-judged metaphor. And sometimes I experienced the contrast between the opulence of the language and the comparatively prosaic nature of the thing being described as a sudden suspension of involvement. Some more examples:
"Those riders seemed journeyed from a legendary world and they left behind a strange tainture like an after image on the eye and the air they disturbed was altered an electric. "
"They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote. For although each man among them was discreet unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whose whited regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds."
This next double-whammy simile is also fairly typical. The first one in the pairing just about stimulates a visceral 'visual' impression, but the second one requires more imagination, and struck me as a little superfluous. (I've heard these described as analogical similes, where the typical linking phrase − like some − sets about conjuring up an abstract/hypothetical likeness, rather than a more familiar visual one.)
"All about her the dead lay with their peeled skulls like polyps bluely wet or luminescent melons cooling on some mesa of the moon."
And yet, the cadence of the sentence as a whole just seems to work, regardless of its mixed success with regard to the direct conveyance of meaning.
These are of course ultimately matters of taste and experience. One man's lushness is another's pretentiousness. My own pet-favourite composer is Prokofiev, and I'm sure there are plenty of people that would declare his works for solo piano overblown...while I get that special buzz everytime I put them on.
Apparently Cormac McCarthy is a big fan of Melville, whose Moby Dick I am yet to take on. Though according to one leading American cultural commentator "the Bing Bang wrote Moby Dick".
Sometimes McCarthy's fiction reads like the result of a Big Bang originating in the offices of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Recently Michael Chabon spoke of McCarthy's "densely-foliated" prose in a New York Review of Books article, suggesting that in Blood Meridian "lushness of prose counterbalances aridity of setting." Well, for me at least, this lush prose tends at times to get itself a tiny bit blotto.
Indeed, in trying to invest his narrative with all the poetic trappings of a kind of apocalyptic anti-mythology, McCarthy himself repeatedly crosses back and forth across the frontier of well-judged metaphor. And sometimes I experienced the contrast between the opulence of the language and the comparatively prosaic nature of the thing being described as a sudden suspension of involvement. Some more examples:
"Those riders seemed journeyed from a legendary world and they left behind a strange tainture like an after image on the eye and the air they disturbed was altered an electric. "
"They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote. For although each man among them was discreet unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whose whited regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds."
This next double-whammy simile is also fairly typical. The first one in the pairing just about stimulates a visceral 'visual' impression, but the second one requires more imagination, and struck me as a little superfluous. (I've heard these described as analogical similes, where the typical linking phrase − like some − sets about conjuring up an abstract/hypothetical likeness, rather than a more familiar visual one.)
"All about her the dead lay with their peeled skulls like polyps bluely wet or luminescent melons cooling on some mesa of the moon."
And yet, the cadence of the sentence as a whole just seems to work, regardless of its mixed success with regard to the direct conveyance of meaning.
These are of course ultimately matters of taste and experience. One man's lushness is another's pretentiousness. My own pet-favourite composer is Prokofiev, and I'm sure there are plenty of people that would declare his works for solo piano overblown...while I get that special buzz everytime I put them on.
Apparently Cormac McCarthy is a big fan of Melville, whose Moby Dick I am yet to take on. Though according to one leading American cultural commentator "the Bing Bang wrote Moby Dick".
Sometimes McCarthy's fiction reads like the result of a Big Bang originating in the offices of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
McCarthyisms #1
When not completely purple, the prose in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian has a certain evening redness of its own.This is not, I hasten to add, a blanket criticism of an author whose talents as a scribbler are quite possibly greater than any other working in the world's favourite language. Yet as I near the end of this book, and a more serious commentary starts to take shape in my head, I have been wondering what to do about all those deliciously over-baked passages I have been marking out along the way; far more than I could realistically find a place for in my critique.
So, here they are, in daily-ish blog digest form. And the first is one I recited to my father over the weekend, extracting from him the kind of scowl he usually reserves for AA Gill's columns in the Sunday Times. ("Why use one word when you can use ten..." etc.)
"Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all."
Stick your oven thermometer in that one! If I could be bothered, I would be counting the number of times McCarthy starts a simile in Blood Meridian with "like beings...".
Extension du domaine de la lutte (Whatevaaarr)
'L'Etranger for the info generation', according to Tibor Fisher. "The tale of an unhappy Frenchman, decently though darkly done," according to the Complete Review.I was looking for my copy of Camus' much-brandished novel the other day, but when V started quoting bits back at me on the phone, I realised that I must have left it in the downstairs loo in Antigua!
A compare and contrast exercise does seem to recommend itself.
Both Mersault and Houllebecq's narrator − an information technology professional whose belief that he is nicely adapted to a life of vacuity proves to be wildly optimistic (for the sake of brevity in this post let's call him Loïc) − are young men mired in indifference. And it is the ebb and flow of their of moral indifference that gives these stories their particular edge.
An act of violence on an otherwise deserted beach becomes the key moment in both novels. Mersault's just happens because the weather had taken shape that day in a particular way. Loïc's is pre-conceived, and fails to happen because his chosen proxy lacks the necessary psychotic buzz about him.
Whereas Mersault maintains a stance of genuine indifference even to the full consequences of his own indifference (in spite of the determination of the state to make him suffer for it) Loïc's rather more obvious existential discomfort involves a good deal of sobbing and vomiting as the gradient of his decline steepens.
Compared to the novels that followed it Whatever goes easier on the caustic humour and has not a single pornographic sex scene to speak of. (Which may explain why the story doesn't quite achieve climax itself.)
There's nothing in there that made me chuckle quite as much as Nicholas Lezard's review in the Guardian: "The book slips down easily like a bad oyster...it's a sly drawing pin placed under your bottom in the Spirit Zone of the Millennium Dome". (Though I did like the episode when Loïc tells a psychologist that it's not so much that he is feeling down, it's just that "the world about me appears high".)
Like later Houellebecq mouthpieces, Loïc appears to harbour nostalgic yearnings for an old-fashioned kind of Love, which has been undermined at the societal level by sexual liberalisation (which "leads to the phenomenon of absolute pauperization", rather like its economic equivalent), and on the more personal level by his having generally missed the boat.
"Desire itself disappears, only jealousy and fear remain...one becomes lessAt odds with both enterprise and consumer culture, his lifestyle is one of prolonged tedium leading "to feelings that are acutely more painful..in general I see nobody at the weekends. I stay at home, do a bit of tidying. I get gently depressed." (Hmm. This sounds a bit too familiar right now...)
seductive and on that account bitter."
At first he seems to have some amusing coping mechanisms, like reporting his lost car as stolen, because "saying that you've lost your car is tantamount to being struck off the social register." Yet a ill-fated training exercise in the provinces soon has him convinced that the time for trying to hold it all together has definitively passed:
"For years I have been walking alongside a phantom who looks like me and who lives in a theoretical paradise strictly related to the world. I've long believed that it was up to me to become one with this phantom. This is done with."Pyschoanalysts and dentists are singled out for tour-de-force tirades. Of the former he observes that "a ruthless school of egoism, psychoanalysis cynically lays into decent, slightly fucked-up young women and transforms them into scumbags of such delirious egocentrism as to warrant nothing but well-earned contempt...a woman fallen into the hands of the pyschoanalysts becomes absolutely unfit for use."And that the latter are "exceedingly venal creatures whose only goal in life is to wrench out the most teeth possible and buy themselves a Mercedes with a sun-roof."
He also sneers at the people in his own industry that believe in the inherent value of extending the volume and flow of information, and "that freedom is nothing other than the possibility of establishing various interconnections between individuals, projects, organisations, services." This makes him a rather intriguing sort of modern heretic.
For the first fifty pages or so it struck me that this novel was revealing to me a younger, more compassionate author, still just about keeping pace with his own shadow. He even has some kindish words for the opposite sex: ("A prick can always be cut off but how do you forget the emptiness of a vagina.?") Darkness − and to some extent dullness − then descends on the punchline-free final act, the promising office satire having petered out around the halfway mark.
It's as if Houllebecq needed to novelistically examine the mess in his own mind, before he could embark on his life's mission of messing with everyone else's. The Complete Review haven't yet critiqued any of the later novels , yet I doubt whether the adjective "decently" would feature so prominently if they did.
La Caravana del Zorro
Uno de los mejores amigos de V murió atropellado este fin de semana mientras participaba en este evento. Formaba parte de una flota de 20 mil motociclistas, y era uno de los 3 quienes fallecieron en diferentes accidentes de tránsito.
En el velorio V escuchó que la mujer que le habia atropellado bajó enrabiada de su vehículo para patearle mientras que agonizaba en la calle. Sólo en Guatemala...
Despues de que la vieja aquella se habia marchado, el aún logró pedirle a un amigo que llamara a su mamá para contarle que estuvo en un accidente...pero que estaba bien. La ambulancia tardó como 45 minutos en llegar, y el ya habia muerto al alcanzar al hospital en Esquipulas.
Nos hemos quedado re-chocados. Era una de las mejores personas en Antigua. Un joven abogado con un buen corazón y con ganas de buscar un papel positivo en la política de su pais. Tenia una hija de 10 meses. Un desperdicio total.
Tenia tambien dos hermanas, gemelas idénticas, bastante atractivas pero caqueras y por lo general, pesadas. Dice V que se portaron en el velorio como se fuera una fiesta cualquiera. Pero la gente de Guatemala se acostumbran a la muerte repentina. Pero yo aún no me he adaptado.
V se habia encontrado con el en la calle la semana pesada. Se aproximó a ella en su moto y le dijo "si no te saludo ahora, ya nunca lo haré." Cuando el chisme del accidente llegó a nuestra casa este domingo, V inmediatamente intentó llamarle en su celular, sin poder creer en lo que le habian contado.
La Caravana del Zorro se lleva realizando en Guatemala por 45 años consecutivos. Tiene como propósito el agradecer al Cristo Negro por las bendiciones derramadas sobre los mensajeros y cobradores de Guatemala.
En el velorio V escuchó que la mujer que le habia atropellado bajó enrabiada de su vehículo para patearle mientras que agonizaba en la calle. Sólo en Guatemala...
Despues de que la vieja aquella se habia marchado, el aún logró pedirle a un amigo que llamara a su mamá para contarle que estuvo en un accidente...pero que estaba bien. La ambulancia tardó como 45 minutos en llegar, y el ya habia muerto al alcanzar al hospital en Esquipulas.
Nos hemos quedado re-chocados. Era una de las mejores personas en Antigua. Un joven abogado con un buen corazón y con ganas de buscar un papel positivo en la política de su pais. Tenia una hija de 10 meses. Un desperdicio total.
Tenia tambien dos hermanas, gemelas idénticas, bastante atractivas pero caqueras y por lo general, pesadas. Dice V que se portaron en el velorio como se fuera una fiesta cualquiera. Pero la gente de Guatemala se acostumbran a la muerte repentina. Pero yo aún no me he adaptado.
V se habia encontrado con el en la calle la semana pesada. Se aproximó a ella en su moto y le dijo "si no te saludo ahora, ya nunca lo haré." Cuando el chisme del accidente llegó a nuestra casa este domingo, V inmediatamente intentó llamarle en su celular, sin poder creer en lo que le habian contado.
La Caravana del Zorro se lleva realizando en Guatemala por 45 años consecutivos. Tiene como propósito el agradecer al Cristo Negro por las bendiciones derramadas sobre los mensajeros y cobradores de Guatemala.
Sunday, February 04, 2007
Near perfect blandness
AA Gill was laying into Theo Randall at the Intercontinental in today's Sunday Times, scoffing that "it's so perfectly bland and devoid of personality, it could be a late-night DJ on Classic FM."Very drole...especially as my niece has just taken over the 4am weekend presenting slot on that channel!
Meanwhile the staff of the Times online, bloggers excluded it seems, are having a bit of a beer break.
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
800 pages too long?
I have enjoyed the minor furore in the lit-blogosphere created by the refusal of (paid) Newsweek reviewer Malcolm Jones to push through to the end of Vikram Chandra's new 900-page novel Sacred Games.
Frankly, I'm with Jones on this one. The first, and less spurious of his self-justifications, is based on the opportunity cost that a "good but not great" (and clinically obese) novel presents to mid-life consciousness:
"My time is precious. Your time is, too. Who has enough time in the day to do all that we want? When I go home after work, it’s triage every night. I can listen to music. Or I can play music. Or I can answer letters or write. Or I can read a book. Or watch TV. Or watch a DVD on TV. Or go out to a concert or a movie. And those would be the nights that I don’t have to clean up the kitchen, do the laundry or help with homework...If you’re going to write 900-plus-page novels, you’d better be as good as Dickens, or I … or I’m going to read Dickens."
Though of course he's supposed to be reading fiction as his day job, which is the part that most irks the lit-bloggers.
I'm less sympathetic to the line his second excuse takes: If the conscientious sort of literary reviewer dedicates the kind of time to reading a mighty, mediocre tome that might otherwise be spent picking his children up from school, he ends up compromised, unable to assume a position of mild indifference to its quality:
"Most reviewers get invested in the books they review, one way or the other. So the books are either panned outright or praised. The praise isn’t necessarily over the top, but it is praise. The reviewer has an investment now. He or she has spent a lot of time reading this book. Can’t just say, oh, it was OK. So you wind up with positive reviews that lack something—heart, maybe?"
V has very set views on the appropriate BMI for fiction. She still hasn't forgiven me for reading War and Peace (in Spanish) and is currently singing the praises of The Outsider, mainly because of its brevity. I have just embarked on a book that certainly looks dauntingly podgy to me, Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots: Why we tell stories, but when I flicked through to the final page last night to check out its payload in pages, I discovered that it has but a paltry 705. The qualities of the first chapter nevertheless suggest I may yet make it all the way through. The plants only need watering once a week anyway.
Frankly, I'm with Jones on this one. The first, and less spurious of his self-justifications, is based on the opportunity cost that a "good but not great" (and clinically obese) novel presents to mid-life consciousness:
"My time is precious. Your time is, too. Who has enough time in the day to do all that we want? When I go home after work, it’s triage every night. I can listen to music. Or I can play music. Or I can answer letters or write. Or I can read a book. Or watch TV. Or watch a DVD on TV. Or go out to a concert or a movie. And those would be the nights that I don’t have to clean up the kitchen, do the laundry or help with homework...If you’re going to write 900-plus-page novels, you’d better be as good as Dickens, or I … or I’m going to read Dickens."
Though of course he's supposed to be reading fiction as his day job, which is the part that most irks the lit-bloggers.
I'm less sympathetic to the line his second excuse takes: If the conscientious sort of literary reviewer dedicates the kind of time to reading a mighty, mediocre tome that might otherwise be spent picking his children up from school, he ends up compromised, unable to assume a position of mild indifference to its quality:
"Most reviewers get invested in the books they review, one way or the other. So the books are either panned outright or praised. The praise isn’t necessarily over the top, but it is praise. The reviewer has an investment now. He or she has spent a lot of time reading this book. Can’t just say, oh, it was OK. So you wind up with positive reviews that lack something—heart, maybe?"
V has very set views on the appropriate BMI for fiction. She still hasn't forgiven me for reading War and Peace (in Spanish) and is currently singing the praises of The Outsider, mainly because of its brevity. I have just embarked on a book that certainly looks dauntingly podgy to me, Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots: Why we tell stories, but when I flicked through to the final page last night to check out its payload in pages, I discovered that it has but a paltry 705. The qualities of the first chapter nevertheless suggest I may yet make it all the way through. The plants only need watering once a week anyway.
Photoblog excerpts
A nice pic of Tikal at dawn here, and a few clicks back this one of two girls beside the lake at Santa Catarina Palopo.
Rome
The second series whereof is proving to be very entertaining, especially now that the main characters have filled out and seemingly settled into their correct dramatic groove within the historical narrative. This week's episode had the delightfully menacing Mark Anthony pissing into Cicero's pot plants and Octavia and her Sloane Ranger girlfriend "inhaling hemp". It also featured more of the kind of zesty dialogue that we've come to expect:
I'm glued.
"Nobody in my family sucks cock without I say so."Meanwhile Titus Pullo continues to explete his way through the story, a "cack!" here and a "Juno's cunt!" there, with the occasional more obviously anacronistic "oh bollocks!"
I'm glued.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Ideologically suspect
Back in my post-student days I applied for a job at Waterstones in Notting Hill and was asked in the interview to name a writer I particularly admired. I suppose this was my opportunity to align myself with the rather scruffy bunch sitting expectantly across the table from me. James Joyce or D.H. Lawrence would have done the trick, but the name that formed on my lips immediately drew out grimaces of disapproval: Plato.
There's no denying that my sympathy for this particular philosopher, and perhaps by implication his elitist masterplan for solving the general problem of politics, might be said to place me on the same bench as all those whose commitment to egalitarian democratic principles is at best lukewarm.
Yet Plato's principal mouthpiece is close to being a Jesus-like figure of love and self-renunciation for all non-believing rationalists. And underlying the parable of the cave is surely one of the best metaphoric ideas anyone has ever had, anwhere, anytime.
Anyway, wouldn't it be worth at least trying to let a selected panel of intellectuals run at least one small country somewhere as a kind of test?! Surely they can't make a worse hash of it than the fuckwits that currently control most of the world's polities?
Strangely enough the people I know who are most vociferous about democracy and freedom (especially information technologists turned amateur social engineers) tend to get by by ignoring the potential the masses have for spoiling their cosy peer-to-peer utopia. Computers inherently filter out a given percentage of dummies and the rest can largely be delimited by virtual barriers that are at present not legislated against. Nevertheless this smart, participatory Athens is without doubt surrounded by the babbling barbarians of trivia. And they want in.
For the last few years this horrible horde has spread their ideology of inverted snobbery to almost every corner of the mass media. Jade Goody, herself something of an iconic figure within this movement, surely had every reason to suppose that her treatment of hoity-toity Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetti would win further burps of approval from the habitual Big Brother constituency. Indeed, previous voting patterns suggested that foreigners and/or anyone native with a basic education and standards was likely to be villified.
Yet many of the Asian community in the UK remain as straightforwardly bourgeois in their aspirations as television (or at least the BBC) itself used to be before the mid-80s, and the dissing of their idol by this cackling pack of oiks not only had them rushing to exercise their television suffrage but stimulated, through their many complaints, the rest of Britain's slumbering middle classes to stir themselves into a decisive confrontation in which the offending vulgarians have seen their future earnings startlingly diminished and their dreams of celebrity perhaps trashed forever. Instead three vaguely eloquent, vaguely already successful foreigners came through. Unheard of.
Democracy is a system not a state of mind. But strangely enough a society permeated by snobbery and prejudice, such as Guatemala, can in some ways function better as a democracy than one permeated by the kind of inverted snobbery that has seemingly taken hold of our popular culture in the UK. A snob society does at least benefit from elite (and middle-class) participation. An inverted snob society tends to suffer from mass apathy, because to have what in the ancient world was the basis of status in civic society, is nowadays a sure way to single yourself out as a "tosser", and our current crop of politicians are only vaguely cool when they invite slobs like the Gallagher brothers round for a spot of vino.
A gang of teenagers behind the Phoenix theatre threw a rock at me tonight as I made my way home. I think they had just been to see Blood Brothers.
There's no denying that my sympathy for this particular philosopher, and perhaps by implication his elitist masterplan for solving the general problem of politics, might be said to place me on the same bench as all those whose commitment to egalitarian democratic principles is at best lukewarm.
Yet Plato's principal mouthpiece is close to being a Jesus-like figure of love and self-renunciation for all non-believing rationalists. And underlying the parable of the cave is surely one of the best metaphoric ideas anyone has ever had, anwhere, anytime.
Anyway, wouldn't it be worth at least trying to let a selected panel of intellectuals run at least one small country somewhere as a kind of test?! Surely they can't make a worse hash of it than the fuckwits that currently control most of the world's polities?
Strangely enough the people I know who are most vociferous about democracy and freedom (especially information technologists turned amateur social engineers) tend to get by by ignoring the potential the masses have for spoiling their cosy peer-to-peer utopia. Computers inherently filter out a given percentage of dummies and the rest can largely be delimited by virtual barriers that are at present not legislated against. Nevertheless this smart, participatory Athens is without doubt surrounded by the babbling barbarians of trivia. And they want in.
For the last few years this horrible horde has spread their ideology of inverted snobbery to almost every corner of the mass media. Jade Goody, herself something of an iconic figure within this movement, surely had every reason to suppose that her treatment of hoity-toity Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetti would win further burps of approval from the habitual Big Brother constituency. Indeed, previous voting patterns suggested that foreigners and/or anyone native with a basic education and standards was likely to be villified.
Yet many of the Asian community in the UK remain as straightforwardly bourgeois in their aspirations as television (or at least the BBC) itself used to be before the mid-80s, and the dissing of their idol by this cackling pack of oiks not only had them rushing to exercise their television suffrage but stimulated, through their many complaints, the rest of Britain's slumbering middle classes to stir themselves into a decisive confrontation in which the offending vulgarians have seen their future earnings startlingly diminished and their dreams of celebrity perhaps trashed forever. Instead three vaguely eloquent, vaguely already successful foreigners came through. Unheard of.
Democracy is a system not a state of mind. But strangely enough a society permeated by snobbery and prejudice, such as Guatemala, can in some ways function better as a democracy than one permeated by the kind of inverted snobbery that has seemingly taken hold of our popular culture in the UK. A snob society does at least benefit from elite (and middle-class) participation. An inverted snob society tends to suffer from mass apathy, because to have what in the ancient world was the basis of status in civic society, is nowadays a sure way to single yourself out as a "tosser", and our current crop of politicians are only vaguely cool when they invite slobs like the Gallagher brothers round for a spot of vino.
A gang of teenagers behind the Phoenix theatre threw a rock at me tonight as I made my way home. I think they had just been to see Blood Brothers.
Teide petition
Teide on Tenerife, the world's third largest volcano, is using the Web to petition for inclusion on UNESCO's list of World Heritage sites.
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