The Ex-Communicator

Lavinia

2009-12-22T16:59:14Z

I am reading Lavina by Ursula Le Guin. It is a retelling of the last book of the Aeneid, from the point of view of the young Latin princess that Aeneas marries prior to the founding of Rome. It is set in Bronze Age Italy, in a country of competing tribal groups: the Latins, the Etruscans, some Greek settlements. Lavinia has visions of the dying Virgil - a man of her far technological future - and she feels, truly or not, that she and Aeneas have life as characters within his poem, a vision she can't share with her companions.

The biggest interest for me is the portrayal of her early Indo-European culture, the rustic and earthy precursors to the sophisticated religious and civic institutions of Rome. We hear a few words of pre-Latin for example. The beliefs and rituals emerge from the business of everyday life, which we can extrapolate onto urban Roman culture, and onwards to European culture in general. Le Guin does not minimise the martial and patriarchal nature of the precursor society. It reminds me of the Ancient Greek stories of Mary Renault.

Here is part of a discussion Lavinia has with the spirit of Virgil, when he explains that Juno opposed Aeneas because he was the protegee of Venus.

I pondered this. A woman has her Juno, just as a man has his Genius: they are the names for the sacred power, the divine spark we each of us have in us. My Juno can't 'get into' me, it is already my deepest self. The poet was speaking of Juno as if it were a person, a woman, with likes and dislikes: a jealous woman.

The commentary is on the development of naturalistic religion into a formalised narrative mythology. I think the pairing of 'Juno' with 'Genius' is very interesting. Compare 'Hera' and 'Hero' - in both cases as mythology develops into formal religion, the female active principle is externalised as a goddess, and finally discarded altogether, while the male equivalent is embodied in living men, and continues to be real. Heroes and Geniuses exist right now.

And here's a longer etymological digression - I have long thought that 'Janus' and 'Jana' (ie 'Diana') are male and female forms of the same pre-Indo-European term - the basque word for 'god' is Jainko. You could argue that 'Genius' and 'Juno' represent a further development of the same term.

Anyway, that's my purely speculative train of thought which has strayed quite a way from the novel. I think the interest of the novel rests most strongly in the way it constantly suggests the forms of Roman society, and hence of modern ideas, in a world which is not unlike the Valley of the Na. I think that Le Guin is demonstrating (or at least arguing) the continuity between her vision and modern western culture - I see a lot of criticism of Le Guin which says she paints a dream world which has nothing to do with what people are 'really like' (hard headed, mercantile, avaricious, expansive: ie, modern western people). I think she is making a case here for the relevance of her vision.

Security personnel to main tracking gallery

2009-12-21T18:06:32Z

'Tis the year's mindnight - yes it's Gauda Prime Day.

'Sooner or later we're going to drop into one of these holes in the ground and never come out.'
'Sooner or later everyone does that Vila.'

Here is the last five minutes of the final episode of Blakes Seven

Total Perspective Vortex

2009-12-19T15:07:33Z

Here is an animation which takes you from the Himalayas, out into space, and to the limits of the observable Universe and back in six minutes. It's quite mind-expanding.

I was thinking that the scrappy bit of fossil I got from the limestone bank in Dudley is 400 million years old, and 400 million light years is about as far out as it gets when you see the message 'the empty areas where we have yet to map'. When I touch an old fossil like that, I want to feel that time.

Last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off

2009-12-18T11:16:44Z

RIP Dan O'Bannon, screenwriter of my favourite film Alien. Also the immortal Dark Star:
Doolittle, I'm going into them. I'm beginning to glow. They are taking me with them. With the Phoenix. Gonna circle the universe. Forever.

I can be helpful in rounding up the others

2009-12-18T10:51:13Z

I want the next election to result in a hung Parliament for two very shallow reasons. Firstly, I bet my son a tenner last summer, and I'll be quids in. Secondly, to surprise the people who are going all Kent Brockman: 'I for one welcome our new giant insect overlords'. I'm not talking about people who are actually Tory supporters, happy that their team will win, but all the opportunists I am bumping into these days who are scrabbling to jettison their principles:

'It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves."

Then we find David Cameron is actually very small in size, but crawling on the eyepiece of the telescope! Doh!

The angry men

2009-12-15T14:51:29Z

Jared Diamond may have gone a bit silly, sucking up to Walmart and Coca-Cola, but his book Collapse is probably my book of the decade, because it brought into focus where the world is going. This article by George Monbiot today expresses it very well.

humankind decides what it is and what it will become. It chooses whether to continue living as it has done, until it must make a wasteland of its home, or to stop and redefine itself...No longer may we live without restraint. No longer may we swing our fists regardless of whose nose might be in the way. In everything we do we must now be mindful of the lives of others, cautious, constrained, meticulous

That is what I got from Collapse. Not that societies can not survive the closing down of their resources, but that they survive by changing into something more formal, constrained and orderly. This happened for instance in China about the time of the Roman Empire. It's not what I want to happen - far from it - but I think it may be the only way to survive.

The angry men who seek to derail this agreement, and all such limits on their self-fulfilment, have understood this better than we have. A new movement, most visible in North America and Australia, but now apparent everywhere, demands to trample on the lives of others as if this were a human right. It will not be constrained by taxes, gun laws, regulations, health and safety, especially by environmental restraints....The angry men know that this golden age has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate.

I think this is true. The people who are angry bullies, making stupid arguments and wars, are wrong and reprehensible, but they Get It emotionally. Their anger is proof that deep down they understand that their style of life is passing away. The very comments on Monbiot's article include hundreds of exemplars.

William Blake said in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: 'Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained'. I think we have to face that. The angry men are at least people with strong feelings, and accurate instincts, even if they are also ignorant bulles.

For myself, I would like an orderly dismantling of capitalism. I would like to retain things like anaesthetics and books, and for that I am prepared to give up foreign travel and bottled water - ha ha as if you can make a bargain with fate.

Blind Lake

2009-12-14T15:11:17Z

I'm listening to a mainstream SF novel from 2003 called Blind Lake by a Canadian writer called Robert Charles Wilson. I haven't read anything else by him, but on the evidence of this, he is a decent writer. This book seems like the good old standard SF - a good story, plausible people, clear writing style. Nothing too flashy. I will look out for his other books; I think Darwinia is the most famous. Does anyone have any opinions on his work?

Blind Lake is set 50 years in the future. A bank of evolved quantum processors has been set up to enhance images from a huge telescope array, scanning distant planets. It has begun to deliver images more detailed than seems physically possible, including evidence of extraterrestrial life, eventually close ups of aliens going about their business. Is the Blind Lake array providing accurate imagery using physical processes yet undiscovered by people, or is it faking 'what humans want to see'? It seems to me that the latter is the most likely explanation but I haven't got to the end yet, and so far only the nastiest character in the story agrees with me.

At the start of the story three reporters visit the scientific station at Blind Lake, where the images are being observed, and that afternoon it goes into lock-down. The lock-down stretches, without explanation, to months of isolation. Rations are dropped in, but there is otherwise no contact with the outside world. Unlike the new Stephen King book Dome, they do not descend into psychotic anarchy, but sort of rub along in a slightly depressed and irritable way. It seems fairly realistic to me.

There are four strong and distinctive women characters: a nerdy scientist, a cynical reporter, a strong minded secretary and an 11 year old girl with weird powers. It has taxed the audio reader - a guy with a rich deep voice - to produce four distinctive high pitched voices.

The story is not entirely WYSIWYG. There are issues raised about how we model or mirror the existence of other minds, with images of reflection, mirrors, projection, isolation. It's also very cold and snowy in the story, which fits in nicely with the weather here now.

Any special requests?

2009-12-13T10:33:29Z

Yes, I am going to post every Sherlock Holmes preview clip that I see until the film appears on boxing day. This one has Downey loosening Law's trousers while saying 'Don't get excited' and has a young lady sandwiched in between the two of them. I KNOW WHEN I AM BEING TOYED WITH.

A Serious Man

2009-12-12T19:38:35Z

A Serious Man is a film by the Coen brothers, just released in the UK. The Coens are clearly massively talented, but a bit variable. This one is very much like The Man Who Wasn't There from almost ten years ago. Like that film it is very low-key, but I suspect it will stick with me, like that film did.

It's the story of a middle aged Jewish physics professor in Minnesota in 1967. He faces various crises and challenges that are very important to him, but not earth-shaking in the scheme of things, such as his wife deciding to leave him for a ghastly overbearing git, and a student trying to bribe him. The pace of the story is quite gentle, the scenes are slow, there's a lot of space for thinking. It was incredibly vivid, like a vivid dream. It was almost disorienting when the film finished and I was not actually in 1967.

The film is about uncertainty. Every time we see him in a lecture, he's delivering the same topic - Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, Schroedinger's cat. The events of his life strike him, as they strike us watching the film, as rather bizarre and coincidental. It's as if they have a meaning, but he can't figure out what it is. In one scene that made me laugh out loud, he draws a series of equations and we pull out to see an infeasibly massive board, covered in numbers and symbols, and he concludes the lecture - 'and thus proving that we don't know anything'.

The only reasonably good advice anyone gives him in this film in the context of uncertainty is 'be nice to other people - it can't hurt'. Jefferson Airplane's 'You need somebody to love' features heavily. Having said that, there is a marked absence of love or even niceness. Almost everyone in it is pretty horrible, and uncaring, though perhaps towards the end they start to try to be a bit nicer to each other. The aesthetic is also very oppressive.

I thought that Anton Chigurh in the Coen's No Country for Old Men was like a black hole in space-time. That is, anyone who perceived him, was killed before they could pass on any information about him. The exception was the old woman who said to him 'We do not give out information' - when she said that he spared her. This film I think has a similar theme, but this time we are inside the black box. We are like the cat, and we don't find out what happened to it.

Where the wild things are

2009-12-12T12:10:36Z

I was writing a couple of weeks ago about the Peter Ackroyd book Albion, about common threads of English writing. I'm still reading it actually, it continues to be very good. The common thread he identifies is hard to define, but something to do with seductive danger coming into the home farm, as talking animals and ghosts and mutations of the body, about dissolution of the normal into something no longer normal. I was then thinking about the recent American TV shows that I have loved so much this decade. I asked myself - do they confirm to that model? If so, does that mean it is a universal model of good art?

I think there is another model underlying these American TV shows (they were The Wire, Mad Men, Firefly, Deadwood and Breaking Bad). That model is that you must go out - out away from the home farm - you will lose touch with the unthinking behaviours of your home - and then you will find a true ground of authenticity. In the darker versions, you are then cut off for ever from what you were. I guess, being glib, this is a model of the frontier of the mind or soul.

So - having sort of framed this idea - I was wondering can I project it backwards from the noughties onto a tradition within American TV, and art more generally? At first I was thinking - well, the X Files and Star Trek, for example, have a very different feel from Deadwood. But then I thought: 'The Truth is Out There' - that sums up the model I was thinking of, in five words: out there, you find the ground of being. 'Where no man has gone before'? Northern Exposure? Fits the model exactly. Wizard of Oz, yes - though unusually she manages to come home. Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn...

There are other threads in US TV, even the very best TV, which do not fit this model. Cop shows in general do not fit it, apart from The Wire, perhaps the Shield. The West Wing I think does not - but correct me if I am wrong. Twin Peaks - is that an exception? There are great American literary writers who do not write to this model. And of course, as in Britain, there is a powerful philistinism which resists the model. In England - you shall not let the wild thing into the home. In America - you shall not loosen even one rule of conformity. Because, what is out there.

PS it is complicated because of the strong mutual sharing of ideas and people around the world. Ravenous for example fits the English model not the American - but it was directed by an English woman, shot in Hungary, stars an Australian and a Scottish man.

top songs and albums

2009-12-11T13:52:17Z

Rolling Stone selects top 100 albums of the decade and top 100 songs of the decade. Obviously a bit US-centric on the whole. I'm surprised they liked Kid A so much better than In Rainbows.

I have said before, though there was a lot of disagreement, that I think albums are becoming less important as easy download fragments purchasing into individual tracks, and fragments audiences into specialist genres. At the same time mass-audiences are hooked up to TV tie-ins, like the X-Factor, which are about a complete package of person-process-product rather than the music in itself. I'm not saying that's 'wrong' - but it weakens the product as a standalone I think. I find that stuff very unmemorable.

Anyway, given all that, these are my choices.

Top 10 songs (this is actually 11)

Rehab by Amy Winehouse
Stan by eminem
When the sun goes down by Arctic Monkeys
Club Foot by Kasabian
Take Me Out by Franz Ferdinand
Can't Stop by Red Hot Chilli Peppers
Seven Nation Army by the White Stripes
Gay Bar by Electric Six
Crazy by Gnarls Barkley
Push the Button by Sugarbabes
Beggin by Franki Valli/Palooski

(I was going to include Walk Like a Panther - but that was 1999 - incredible)

10 albums is hard because I don't generally buy albums:

In Rainbows
Kid A
Franz Ferdinand
By the Way by the Red Hot Chili Peppers
Time the Revelator by Gillian Welch
Scissor Sisters
Gorillaz
Exit Music by various
Version by Mark Ronson

(and this is actually 9 - never mind)

I know I am quite ignorant about music so feel free to tell me I am way off.

Three Dollar Tag

2009-12-10T22:27:50Z

Do you like my Santa-Master icon? Can't wait for my Christmas viewing pleasure.

H has set up a blue-grass band called Three Dollar Tag. I went to see them the other day. H is the front man. They have a guy who plays dobro and banjo, H and his friend Pete playing guitar, and a really good fiddler who has stood up with Fairport. I am obviously biased but I think they are good. H knows how to put together a good set, with crowd-pleasing songs, and it is very lively.

As well as guitar H plays a zydeco necktie from Hobgoblin in Birmingham.

The Washboard tie is almost certainly the greatest and most versatile of all percussion clothing, Just clip the tie to your shirt and put on the provided playing thimbles to astound your friends with fantastic rhythm! With the Wasboard tie in your wardrobe you are prepared for any situation in which rhythmic accompaniment is required!

He carries it in a big case, and he brings the case on stage and elaborately opens it, and everyone is wondering what he is going to play, and then he puts this tie on, and two silver thimbles, and plays it during an instrumental. Everyone was laughing.

Breaking Bad

2009-12-09T20:42:48Z

I was so, so tired yesterday. H left to do his music down the pub, and I was just lying all ennervated like a Romantic poet wasting away: 'I won't be awake when you get back...' But then I watched the season finale double episode of Breaking Bad. By gum, it woke me up a treat. When H got in about midnight I was sitting up watching it, and the first thing I shouted 'Come and see this, Walt is fucking bad ass!' And he really was.

The whole of season 1 is really Walt getting more and more bad ass. It's impressive because of the continuity from a person who has surrendered completely to obligation and guilt, to someone scary and assertive and altogether exciting. His sidekick Jesse meanwhile is a tragic figure, betrayed by his family. That episode literally gave me nightmares in which I let my children down as badly as Jesse's parents hurt him, and I was so pleased when I woke up and it wasn't true.

Here are two music videos which convey their two characters quite well - with some spoilers for seasons 1 and 2 if you care about that:

Scar Tissue - a Jesse vid
Bad to the Bone - a Walt vid

Here are two clips from the show

Jesse and Walt cook meth (season 1)
Walt is bad ass (season 2)

I guess this post is to try and sell the show to those who haven't watched it yet.

1979: an age of sexual decorum

2009-12-08T11:55:31Z

Someone called Jonathan Zimmerman berates young people nowadays for their promiscuous ways:

I’ve heard plenty of my 40- and 50-something male peers complain that they were born several decades too early. But I have never, ever heard a woman say she’d prefer today’s hooking-up system to the dating rituals we grew up with.

It's a complex area, and there are obviously good and bad things about various sexual arrangements, for men and women. I know these are valid things to discuss, but that isn't why I link to this.

No. It's something else that I've noticed lately, which is that people now talk about my generation as if we grew up in the good old days. I'm 48 and I didn't grow up in a world of formal dating and restraint. Men in their 40s and 50s were young in the 1970s and we went at it like nobody's business. We aren't bloody Victorians. We used to sniff glue and stick pins through our faces. Well, to be fair I didn't do that, but you know what I mean.

So I guess what I am posting about is that my generation - the punk generation - are now being held up as the good old days when men were men and women didn't have casual sex. How old is Zimmerman. I could tell him stories that would make him blench.

Top TV

2009-12-08T10:18:33Z

Article in the NY Magazine (thanks for the correction Abigail) arguing that in the noughties, TV became Art. The argument - and I think it's a good one - is that there is a business model to create high class drama, which repays investment in DVD box sets. While the noughties were arguably an excellent decade for film, they have been inarguably an excellent decade for TV.

My top five American TV shows were/are

Deadwood
Mad Men
The Wire
Firefly
Breaking Bad

Each one bloody outstanding - outstanding. I feel privileged to have seen any one of them, let alone all. Furthermore there were others, such as the Sopranos and Battlestar Galaactica, which were surely very good but I just never got around to watching.

My top five British TV shows were, it's more difficult, but I think:

Life on Mars
The Office
Spooks
Doctor Who
Spaced

I've left something obvious off there haven't I? I've got a nagging feeling. These are different from the high investment US shows: less grounded, more absurd. They rely more on winging it. That's not a very clear way of expressing what I mean.

I think that TV has been art before now, but it's more consistent, and there's more money invested in it, now that the philistines have figured out they can generate income from quality. Of course there is another business model, which is churn out any tatty old crap which is supposedly 'real', while being nothing like reality. However, you don't have to watch it do you? (By 'you' here I am addressing myself)

I would like to put in a word for British short drama series, which come and go, perhaps never make as much individual impression as these great shows, but cumulatively add up to something worthwhile. That includes BBC classical adaptations like Crime and Punishment, and ITV's bleak crime dramas like Wire in the Blood and Rebus.

Ong Bak fighting video

2009-12-06T11:26:58Z

Ong Bak is a Thai martial arts film. The fighting in it is a lot more rough and violent than most martial arts films. The goody is very good (I think his original motive is to retrieve a sacred statue of the Buddha for his humble village) but his fighting is completely unscrupulous - bashing people on the head with bits of metal and so on. I personally think it's great.

Nicky - obsessive24 - has created a very fast and violent video using Ong Bak fight scenes to Breathe by the Prodigy. The video is very exciting, balletic and brutal. Bang bang smash. You can view or download it here.

ETA - I think the action, particularly because bodies do impact hard in these fight scenes, makes you imagine the weight, no the mass, the mass and the momentum of the bodies. You can only make sense of the fights if you mentally model the heaviness and strength of the body in motion, so it is quite sexy.

Speaking in Tongues

2009-12-06T08:32:35Z

Yesterday I went to see Speaking in Tongues at the theatre in London, starring John Simm. I went with matildabj, happytune emmzzi and valderys. The play reminded me very much of the brilliant Australian film Lantana (2002 - another one for the top 50 of this decade - highly recommended, an underrated film). I just checked imdb and it is written by the same person, with more or less the same plot.

It's a play and film about the tangled stories of a series of couples, each story leading on to the next. In the play these stories unfolded by having two different scenes performed on stage at the same time. So for example, two different couples would be arguing, in two different rooms - but all four actors are on stage at the same time, on the same set of a room, talking together or across each other. The two men might both say 'I'm sorry' at the same time, but in different voices, then the women reply one after the other, in different ways, and one couple reconciles as the other split up. Not every scene is like that, but the whole play develops in that way, the stories echoing each other. The only scenes that did not quite work for me were when the two women were talking together, I don't think he had quite captured the female voice.

The other actors were Ian Hart (non-brits may know him best as Quirinus Quirrell in the first Harry Potter film) Lucy Cohu (who was apparently Alice Carter in Torchwood?) and Kerry Fox (Shallow Grave among many other films). These are middle aged people, and I was pleased that the women were attractive but real-looking.

Here is the Guardian review which I see says that the film Lantana is based on this play not the other way round. Here is how Billington describes the theme of the play.

What Bovell is saying gradually becomes clear: Trust, whether between husband and wife, supposed lovers or therapist and patient, is dismayingly rare; and although we live in a world of hidden connections, we are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins... I admire Bovell's use of narrative suspense and his ability to suggest that coincidental encounters mask a deep unease.

Unease is good. In the second half of the play the story becomes more anxious and gloomy, and also dreamy and mystical. While the first half was about familiar intertangled events, in the second half people seem to be drifting away from each other, into separate worlds.

John Simm, of course, I thought was beautiful. He had more opportunity to move about in the first half of the play, which is always lovely to see. In the second half he plays a working class man suspected of murder, sitting at a police table telling his story to nobody, and a lonely policeman interviewing the dead woman's husband. He is mostly static and inward turning in these scenes.

Selfishly, I liked his more comedic, lively, dancing action in the first half - though I think the play itself got better and deeper as it progressed.

World Cup

2009-12-05T08:36:22Z

hoyland54 posts about the World Cup Draw, which happened yesterday evening (previously on communicator: The World Cup occurs every four years and I get over-excited). The World Cup in 2010 is to be held in South Africa.

The qualifying teams are put into eight groups, which all play each other in a league style. The two top teams in each league go onto to the 16-team play-off round, which then operates as a knock out tournament to the final.

Here are the groups. I have bolded the teams I think are likely to head their groups, and italicised the ones that I think will come second. In some groups I think there is no clear second.

Group A: South Africa, Mexico, Uruguay, France
Group B: Argentina, Nigeria, Korea Republic, Greece
Group C: England, USA, Algeria, Slovenia
Group D: Germany, Australia, Serbia, Ghana,
Group E: Netherlands, Denmark, Japan, Cameroon
Group F: Italy, Paraguay, New Zealand, Slovakia
Group G: Brazil, Korea DPR, Côte d'Ivoire, Portugal
Group H: Spain, Switzerland, Honduras, Chile

I think England are lucky in this draw (for a change). We should be able to beat all three teams in our group, but that doesn't mean we will, because England always fuck up. England will play the USA on the 12th June. I have a horrible feeling that we might lose, just because that would be so galling, and England do that to me every time. I think we might lose that symbolic match but win the group.

More films of the decade

2009-12-04T14:18:39Z

Looking at The AV Club top fifty films of the decade reminds me to add two more 'best films' to that list, both of which I loved.

Adaptation (2002)
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… And Spring (2003)

There are a few more that I thought were very good, but I'm not sure if I'd put them into my very top list

A History of Violence
AI
The Man who Wasn't There
United 93
Children of Men
Dark Knight
There Will be Blood

There are a bunch more, like Oldboy or City of God, that were surely brilliant but I haven't seen all the way through. The more I think about it, the more I feel this has been a pretty good film decade.

Best films of the naughties?

2009-12-02T13:44:15Z

andrewducker has compiled a list of top films 2000-2009 via an 'IMDB search for movies scoring over 7 on the IMDB with more than 10,000 votes during 2000-2009 and then listing the ones that I thoroughly enjoyed.'

Here is my short list which I have compiled by looking down andy's list to see which ones still give me a tingly feeling, plus adding any others I can think of off the top of my head.

No Country for Old Men
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Downfall
Equilibrium
Harry Potter (Azkaban)
Spirited Away
Serenity
In Bruges
Kung Fu Hustle
Memento
Sexy Beast
Shaun of the Dead
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The Bourne Identity
The Lord Of The Rings (Fellowship)
The Prestige
Unbreakable
Watchmen
Y Tu Mama Tambien
Casino Royale
Gladiator
28 days later
Pan's Labyrinth
Persepolis
Wall-E
The Incredibles
I heart huckabees
A scanner darkly
Brokeback mountain
Donnie Darko
The Others

No shampoo

2009-12-01T17:32:06Z

I read one of those articles the other day 'Things I wish I had known at 16', you know the kind of thing. Matthew Parris said he would tell his 16 year old self to abandon shampoo and just wash his hair in plain water.

I've often felt that shampooing every day wasn't doing my hair much good, and I need to condition it heavily with every shampoo, but the alternative people usually give is 'Don't wash your hair at all, just brush thoroughly' and I never felt I could go that far.

However, I have now gone a week and a half, washing my hair daily with water only, and I think it's working out pretty well. I think the water is enough to clean it. My hair doesn't feel greasy. I am still blow-drying it, which probably is something else I ought to drop, but I need it dry before I walk to work.

Anyone else tried this, or might like to try it? I'm not sure whether it would work with long hair. Also, when I lived in London my hair and face got a lot dirtier every day, and I'm not sure water would have been enough. But at present, it seems to be working out better than I expected.

I might shampoo once a fortnight or something. Or I might abandon this project if my hair suddenly goes horrible.

Albion

2009-12-01T11:04:00Z

I am reading 'Albion: The origins of the English imagination' by Peter Ackroyd. You may be worried that a book like this is either reactionary or xenophobic. This review by Blake Morrison in the Guardian mainly focuses on explaining that it completely is not. I'll leave the subject as I can't improve on Morrison's argument. However, Morrison's first paragraph is I think bizarrely wrongheaded:

At first glance, Peter Ackroyd writing on the middle ages is about as plausible as Will Self publishing a biography of Chaucer or Irvine Welsh issuing a scholarly monograph on The Dream of the Rood. He seems too modern, too urban, too camp and cosy to want to wander the whale-roads with Beowulf or rough it with the pilgrims to Canterbury. How could the devotee of that strenuously postmodernist poet JH Prynne and the author of Dressing Up: Transvestism and Drag come to feel a spiritual kinship with the Anglo-Saxons?

All I can say is that he views Ackroyd (and the Anglo-Saxons) in a very different light than I do. And Self and Welsh. Ackroyd has always been totally immersed in the ancient context.

I love reading this book. Peter Ackroyd is very well read, and he likes the same type of writing that I do, so it's a great ride through the subject. His chapters are long leaping chains of allusive thoughts, going from Old English poetry up to the modern day, tracing similarities of theme and style. Whether he is finding real commonality over 1500 years of writing, music and painting (and embroidery and architecture) or imposing it on literature like a Rorschach blot, it would be hard to prove. I think it's real.

One pleasure as I read is to extend his chains of allusion, which sort of peter out mid-twentieth century, on to popular English culture: Nigel Kneale, The Beatles, Bowie, Alan Moore, Edge of Darkness, Red Dwarf, Radiohead. 'Alien' for example I think harks back to Beowulf and Hamlet: Nostromo-> Elsinore-> Heorot. In fact I'd like to write a 'modern companion to Albion'.

What are the characteristics of the English Imagination according to Ackroyd? And what is their origin? Despite that being the whole point of the book, it would be hard to pin him down, in fact that is also part of the point. I think he argues for a link between the physical features of landscape and weather, of the confluence of different enthnicities, and perhaps some non-physical haunting of the landscape, and the effect this has on people who live here. And what are the effects and features? Mistiness, indeterminacy, lack of certainty, inconsistency, mingling of forms and feelings, hauntedness, shyness, vulgarity, embarrassment, sympathy with the devil, gloom, liminality, despair, failure, the demotic voice, sarcasm, riddles, ecstasy. Think of Gawain, Gulliver, Scrooge, Alice, Frankenstein, Holmes. Think of Blakes 7!

You are forced to ask to what extent these are widespread human characteristics, not English ones? There are certainly non-British writers, for instance Poe and Borges, who would fit very well into this model. And there are some British writers such as Enid Blyton and Barbara Cartland who I think don't map very well into it at all. You are also forced to ask to what extent these are characteristics of Ackroyd himself, which he is projecting onto our culture. On the other hand I think there is a strand of dream-haunted imagination which is real, and does endure within British culture, among other places on Earth.

The other issue which came to mind a lot as I read this book (I am still reading it) is that there is another strand of British culture - this is outside the scope of the book of course - which is actively hostile to the British imagination. Let us say, for the sake of argument, that there is something about living in Britain which blurrs boundaries, that fantasy and eccentricity are always seeping under the doorframe. There will be people who feel called to resist this dissolution. To fight fancy and to ridicule those who give in to it. I am thinking the Daily Mail, Melanie Phillips, Richard Littlejohn, Mary Whitehouse, Jeremy Clarkeson. Thatcher. Opposed to the British imagination there is always aggressive British philistinism. Often they seem to be the ones with all the power. I think it's because the philistines often try to present themseves as the real British, and often they have all the money and the police on their side, that a book like this is so inspiring.

Paranormal Activity

2009-11-29T17:50:55Z

Paranormal Activity is an ultra-low budget horror film. Everyone said it was very frightening. It is indeed very frightening. Like The Blair Witch Project, it is ostensibly re-edited 'found footage', so its low production values are part of an aesthetic of authenticity (also like The Fourth Kind).

The premise is that we are looking at the home movies of a rather dull young couple living in San Diego. She thinks things are going bump in the night so he rigs up cameras with night vision and sound to prove there's nothing really happening. When they pick up some ambiguous signs that she might be having visitations from a demon, he panics, determines to 'protect his woman' and starts trying to out-macho the demon. Despite being warned not to by a psychic. Duh.

There's a good contrast in the film between the full-colour day time shots, where he is sceptical and relatively up-beat, and the night vision footage, where he is just as spooked as his girlfriend by the odd goings-on. The audience too pick up the day/night contrast in tone, and in the second half of the film, every time the night vision footage started up, people were shifting about, audibly groaning or sucking in breath. The noisy audience made the film more scary.

Not a lot 'happens' compared to many supernatural horror films nowadays. Less is definitely more, to my mind. Possibly for preference I would have pared it down even more, so that it was feasible that all the happenings were in her mind, and she was gradually infecting him with her own insanity. Like The Little Stranger.

The paranormal activity is a little more explicit than that, but the constraints of very low budget mean that a little has to go a long way. The most frightening scenes in the film, apart from perhaps the very end, are when we see her getting up in the night, as if sleepwalking, to stand - staring expressionlessly down at his sleeping form - as the film goes into fast forward and we see the hours ticking by, and she is just standing there, jiggling slightly.

Patrick Stewart, patron of Refuge

2009-11-28T13:35:59Z

Read this account by Patrick Stewart of growing up with domestic violence. I think it's very powerful. Some on my f-list have already linked to it, but I think it is worth passing along.

Do I dare disturb the universe?

2009-11-28T10:15:34Z

Here is an interesting Doctor Who video. It doesn't use music. It uses TS Eliot reading The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock. You are cringing aren't you but it works. It's astonishing.

It's almost ten minutes long. I think it takes a couple of minutes to calm your misgivings, and I would say give it at least that long before you decide if you like it or not. Eliot's voice is... well, not modern. Towards the end the whole things lifts further and becomes marvellous I thought. After the poem ends: 'Till human voices wake us, and we drown...' there are some clips which I don't think were needed; I think it stands on its own.

ETA sorry, in my haste I forgot to link to the person who created the video. Here is the post, and a chance to download it in higher quality, and of course give favourable comments. I'd be interested in your opinion here on whether you think it works as a video.

I want to recommend a second video, which is totally different: Filthy Gorgeous League of Gentlemen. This video tells you everything you need to know about what sex is like in Britain. Unless it's just me. (not of course safe for the sensitive)