Dead metaphors stretching their legs

Professor Harold Bloom's rant about J K Rowling and her lucrative 'literary' creation is worth quoting in full:

"I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs." I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.

But when I wrote that in a newspaper, I was denounced. I was told that children would now read only J.K. Rowling, and I was asked whether that wasn't, after all, better than reading nothing at all? If Rowling was what it took to make them pick up a book, wasn't that a good thing?

It is not. "Harry Potter" will not lead our children on to Kipling's "Just So Stories" or his "Jungle Book." It will not lead them to Thurber's "Thirteen Clocks" or Kenneth Grahame's "Wind in the Willows" or Lewis Carroll's "Alice."

Later I read a lavish, loving review of Harry Potter by the same Stephen King. He wrote something to the effect of, "If these kids are reading Harry Potter at 11 or 12, then when they get older they will go on to read Stephen King." And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you read "Harry Potter" you are, in fact, trained to read Stephen King."

Rico Suave

Back in '91 V and I went along (with about half a dozen other people) to the UK launch of that single at the HMV store in Oxford Street. In the months before it had dominated the Billboard Chart and Gerardo's minders mistakenly believed that he should seize the opportunity to cross-over to the British market. There must have been fewer Ecuadorians in London back then than there are now. He looked like a pez out of agua in our capital and seemed relieved to chat to V and sign her copy of his single.

VH1 voted Rico Suave one of the 'Top 50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs, Ever' and Weird Al' Yankovic parodied it as Taco Grande.

Gerardo la Pelota Mejía carried on recording throughout the 90s and then transformed himself into one of the people that he seemed so under the thumb of that afternoon in London: a record company exec. It was he who brought the work of Enrique Iglesias to the anglophone market and discovered rapper Bubba Sparxxx. He would also feature in a dozen movies, including such straight-to-video classics as Pauly Shore is Dead and Sundown: The vampire in retreat.

His most recent comeback album is called 180°, a title which reflected the existential flip the artist claims to have experienced.

"I'm turning my back to a world that has given me everything; wealth and women. I've done just about everything but I slipped in a major way. Now I realize one thing: what matters most are the simple things in life, love, the invisible things, faith, truth and all that comes from the heart".

And in spite of those admirable sentiments, the album really very good, especially the reggeton version of Sueña.

Incidentally, I noticed last year in Guatemala that merengue has lost its monopoly as the music of the street to reggeton. I'm not sure this is entirely a good thing, as there is something a bit more brutal (and less inclusive) about the insistent new beats coming out of the Hispanic Caribbean. If merengue is at heart "saucy", the lyrics of grammy-winning reggeton bands like Calle 13 are pushing the envelope of machista innuendo.

McCarthyisms #7

When Blood Meridian was published Caryn James wrote in the NYT that "While it is hard to get through it, it is hard to ignore it."

For the first eighty pages or so I was inclined to agree with fellow Harry Potter-hater Harold Bloom's opinion that McCarthy's novel stands as one of the greatest literary achievements of our age, but then I started to get a bit bogged down. Up until then I had been enthusiastically telling people that here at last was an author writing in English that I could unequivocally admire, but at around the half-way stage I started to empathise with the critics that had ruled this book more pretentious than portentous. McCarthy does however heave up the drama of his epic in the final third...only to deliver an ending that is on the half-empty side of ambiguous.

More on that in a later post. Meanwhile, it is worth saying outright that, faults and all, Blood Meridian is still a whole lot better than the best novels written on this side of the world in the past 25 years (such as Coetzee's Disgrace.) "Hit and miss verbiage" it may be, but the hits outnumber the misses significantly.

These then are the things that McCarthy is VERY good at representing:

1) Animals, especially canines

"By evening they had acquired a retinue of half a dozen wolves of varying size and color that trotted behind them singlefile and watched over their own shoulders to see that each should follow in his own place."

"Now wolves had come to follow them, great pale lobos with yellow eyes that trotted neat of foot or squatted in the shimmering heat to watch them where they made their noon halt."

2) Lunge /parry/riposte-style dialogue, always without quotation marks

"Kindly fell on hard times aint ye son? he said.
I Just aint fell on no good ones."

3) Dialect

"Aint that the drizzlin shits, he said."

4) All manner of unpleasantnesses

"The idiot was small and misshapen and his face was smeared with faeces and he sat peering at them with dull hostility silently chewing a turd."

"Later when the lamps were lit the heads in the soft glare of the uplight assumed the look of tragic masks and within a few days they would become mottled white and altogether leprous with the droppings of the birds that roosted upon them."

"They were skewered through the cords of their heels with sharpened shuttles of green wood and they hung grey and naked above the dead ashes of the coals where they'd been roasted until their heads had charred and the brains bubbled in the skulls and steam sang from their noseholes."

5) Distant electrical storms and other atmospheric effects

"All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear."

"Tandem storms were blowing down-country from the north and the thunder trundled away in the distance and the air was cold and smelled of wet stone."

"About him lay only the strange coral shapes of fulgurite in their scorched furrows fused out of the sand where ball lightning had run upon the ground in the night hissing and stinking of sulphur."

"That night they could see the fire of the Mexicans reflected in the sky to the east beyond the curve of the earth."

6) Serendipitous first impressions of new townships

"Already it is twilight down in the Laredito. Bats fly forth from their roostings in courthouse and tower and circle the quarter. The air is full of the smell of burning charcoal. Children and dogs squat by the mud stoops and gamecocks flap and settle in the branches of the fruit trees. They go afoot, these comrades, down along the bare adobe wall. Band music carries dimly from the square. They pass a watercart in the street and they pass a hole in the wall where by the light of a small forgefire an old man beats out shapes of metal. They pass in a doorway a young girl whose beauty becomes the flowers about."

"They passed old alms-seekers by the church door with their seamy palms outheld and maimed beggars sad-eyed in rags and children asleep in the shadows with flies walking thei dreamless faces. Dark coppers in a clackdish, the shrivelled eyes of the blind. Scribes crouched by the steps with their quills and inkpots and bowls of sand and lepers moaning through the streets and naked dogs that seemed composed of bone entirely and vendors of tamales and old women with faces dark and harrowed as the land squatting in the gutters over charcoal fires where blackened strips of anonymous meat sizzled and spat. Small orphans were abroad like irate dwarfs and fools and sots drooling and flailing about in the small markets of the metropolis and the prisoners road past the carnage in the meatstalls and the waxy smell where racks of guts hung black with flies and flayings of meat in great red sheets now darkened with the advancing day and the flensed and naked skulls of cows and sheep with their dull blue eyes glaring wildly and the stiff bodies of deer and javelina and ducks and quail and parrots, all wild things from the country round hanging head downward from hooks."

7) Rural parishes

"He woke in the nave of a ruinous church, blinking up at the vaulted ceiling and the tall swagged walls with their faded frescoes. The floor of the church was deep in dried guano and the droppings of cattle and sheep. Pigeons flapped through the piers of dusty light and three buzzards hobbled about on the picked bone carcass of some animal dead in the chancel."

8) Characterful local drinking places

"The cantina was a single room and there was a hole in the ceiling where a trunk of sunlight fell through onto the the mud floor and figures crossing the room steered with care past the edge of this column of light as if it might be hot to the touch."

9) Evil

The subject perhaps, of a future post...

Humble Pie

Andrew Flintoff will be arriving at Sydney's Kingsford Smith international airport with a seriously unlovely piece of Antipodean silverware. If our cricketers are coming back on BA it will cost them an extra two hundred and forty pounds to check it in.

Humble pie is back on the menu down under.

"Scattered Shias, Sunni spells"

It worries me that tonight's lead story surrounding the US revelation that "a growing body of evidence" points to Iran supplying weapons to insurgents in Iraq, fails to acknowlege the obvious fact that the Shia militias that Iran is most likely to support, have proven far less deadly to the invaders than the Sunni ones. 170 coalition deaths are cited. This is really a small percentage of the total. Where are the Sunnis getting their roadside bombs from then? (Answers on a postcard)

BAFTAs: "I donnaspeaka english, gracias"

Strangely the BAFTAs are all going where they deserve to. The production design and cinematography of Children of Men were recognised, Eva Green took the Rising Star gong, and Pan's Labyrinth, in truth the best movie of 2006, was chosen for best foreign-language film.

Great acceptance speech from Guillermo del Toro: "I'm far too fat for this excitement..I always love England because I can get very drunk and be very repressed."

The Mexicans are doing well so far. Let's see if they carry this success through to the Kodak Theatre next month.

I can see why it annoys Mark Kermode that they all refer to Babel as "bab-EL". At least Jonathan Woss says it wight.

I hadn't realised that The Departed was a remake of Infernal Affairs!

Isn't Forest Whitaker such a nice bloke? (He almost forgot to thank his wife!)

Well Limey...

When my father was just 15 he was evacuated to the United States, making an unusually northerly convoy crossing of the Atlantic which took a full ten days. On arrival at the docks in New York he found himself a taxi to take him to the hotel where he would be met. As soon as he had settlled in the rear seat the driver turned around and addressed him cheerily:

"Well limey, how's it feel to be a refugee?"

The Feeling

Live at Cirque last Wednesday night.

Blaine on stage, kind of

Blaine at the LG Shine Launch

I had a great night out on Wednesday with my colleagues at Cirque, the nightclub formerly known as the London Hippodrome back in its 80s prime (which I once attended back in my own 80s prime: one of Eddie Davenport's Gatecrasher Balls.)

The occasion this time was the launch of LG's Shine, the second mobile phone in their Black Label Series.

David Blaine appeared in person during his public walkabout, and more sharp-edgedly as a projected holgram on stage.

Music-wise Indie group The Feeling were top of the bill.

Aside from the laid-back American man of magic and a few of our indigenous attention-seekers, Mohammed Al Fayed was there with his son Omar. I will post some short video clips I took over the next couple of days. (Meanwhile there are already some pics up on the LG Shine blog and the MoBlog.)

We were looking after a few bloggers that we had invited along. SMS Text News kept us informed and amused throughout the day (and in the aftermath) with his blow-by-blow coverage, including an exclusive interview with Cirque's backroom staff.

Everyone I spoke to seemed to be having a good time, but one of the invited guests in particular bad-mouthed the party the next day in the press. I know that the whole idea of these events is 'coverage' but I still think that if you have accepted someone's hospitality it remains very impolite to rubbish it in public afterwards. It would be a bit like me going to dinner at someone's home and then blogging about how crap their cooking is the next day! Personally I only slag off food and drink I have paid for! Media people are just a bit too spoiled these days.

Anyway, the main selling point of the Shine is it's mirror-like LCD display. I wonder whether we will soon see flat screen TVs using this technology on a larger scale. (Perhaps too reflective...)

McCarthyisms #6

It's been said that McCarthy has a set of crutch words: preterite, anchorite etc. and that he picks words for their cadence rather than their contribution to the overall sense of a sentence. Myers groused that "like Proulx and so many others today, McCarthy relies more on barrages of hit and miss verbiage than on careful use of just the right words."

I wonder what McCarthy sounds like translated into Spanish. Certainly when García Márquez is translated into English some of his recurring pet words are translated in different ways each time they occur on the page, and even though Gabo graciously suggested that Gregory Rabassa's translation of El Otoño del Patriarca represented an improvement on his original text, you get a far clearer sense of the aesthetic effect the author was trying to achieve with sound and rhythm from the version en castellano. (A load of critics have had a good gripe about McCarthy's use of untranslated Spanish!)

Unlike lefties like Gabo and Saramago, McCarthy appears to be a radical conservative, and this means that however private and reclusive he may wish to remain, polite, educated society as a whole is probably less interested in what he has to say; in public at least. Though one would glean very little evidence from the published works of those other supposedly progressive-minded writers that they are any less pessimistic about the human condition than he is.

Duel with the Devil

Is the name of a fairly sensationalist Canadian documentary about CSI in Guatemala City.

The film-makers' headline statistic is the 15 or so homicides that occur in the chapin capital every 24 hours. On a particularly bad night this can rise to as many as 30, the total for a whole year in Vancouver. (There are approximately 150 murders annually here in London, around a third of which can be tied to organised criminal groups.)

Whilst watching CSI: Miami the other evening I did a little research and found some surprising information. Florida's most famous city was little more than an isolated village on the banks of the Miami river from its foundation in the 1840s until the arrival of the railroad on April 7, 1896. At the turn of the century there were still only 1,167 people living there. This number had increased to 110,637 in 1930 and now stands at 362,470 − still pretty tiny compared to the 2m+ inhabitants of Guatemala City.

McCarthyisms #5

The criticisms Myers has levelled at McCarthy remind me of derogatory remarks once made by Timothy Mo about the "verbosity" of Gabriel García Márquez.

Yet in spite of his at times very dense style it would be difficult to position the Colombian Nobel-winning author within a snooty intellectual elite. Perhaps he's helped himself by penning two genuine crowd-pleasers: Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude. Snooty intellectuals on the other hand, are more likely to cherish The Autumn of the Patriarch, whilst Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a bit of a writer's book. (I'm sure Myers would agree that it is one piece of fiction where a complex narrative style and dramatic tension can be seen to be complementing each other rather nicely.)

Anyway, there are parts of McCarthy's Blood Meridian where the debt to magical realism seemed particularly apparent. One of these is the comma-lite Comanche attack on Captain White's party, for me the most memorable passage in the novel:

"A legion of horribles; hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armour of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many width their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in Regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools."

Frogged??

David Allahnborough

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.

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.

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:

"Any accessible fast-moving story written in unaffected prose is deemed to
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."

In 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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.