The Ex-Communicator

Most honoured novels

2009-07-14T11:35:05Z

A questioner at metafilter asks 'recommend me a list of best SF novels'. There are some interesting answers. I particularly liked this link, to the works of 'Speculative Fiction' which have been awarded the greatest number of honours. I suppose this is inherently biased towards more recent works, as the number of available awards has increased over time.

The Top 10 'most honoured' speculative fiction novels are (in order):

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susannah Clarke
American Gods, Neil Gaiman
Handmaid's tale, Margaret Atwood
Prisoner of Azkaban, JK Rowling
A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge
Skellig, David Almond
The Yiddish Policeman's Union, Michael Chabon
The House of the Scorpion, Nancy Farmer
The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson
Neuromancer, William Gibson

I have read, and liked, most of those. Azkaban is I think just the 'best Harry Potter' and not an all-time great book, but I think it is a worthy inclusion because of the impact of the whole sequence. Jonathan Strange is one of my favourite books ever. I personally preferred A Fire Upon the Deep to A Deepness in the Sky but they are both good books.

There are three I haven't read. American Gods and Skellig have both, funnily enough, been recommended to me by my children as books I should read.

The only one I know nothing about is The House of the scorpion. I'm wondering whether it was even published in the UK?

2666 by Roberto Bolaño

2009-07-12T09:28:57Z

2666 is a massive novel, and it's translated from Spanish. I think it's worth the commitment of time and attention, and I haven't read any reviews from any of my friends. Hopefully, this overview will let you judge if it's the type of thing for you.

2666 is about 900 pages long. Bolaño died as he was finishing it. He left instructions for his heirs to release it as five novels over five years, to maximise income, because he wouldn't be there to provide for them. Instead they have published it according to its original conception - as one huge novel, divided into five semi-autonomous parts. One advantage of this is that you can tackle each sub-novel as a smaller commitment than taking on the whole. Though, alas for this tactic, the first novel is probably the least accessible.

The central theme of the novel is the fictional Mexican border town of Santa Teresa in Sonora, which is based on real-life Ciudad Juarez in Chihuaha. I was already interested in Juarez, because it is the centre of a real-life wave of misogynist murders, in which hundreds of women and little girls have been tortured and killed and dumped in vacant lots and in the desert. Possibly by the most prolific serial killer ever, and possibly as part of an organised operation by porn cartels, or by sex tourists.

The book is compassionate and complex. It values all people, and it is written as such with interlocking lives, in a range of different literary forms. It's is also quite surreal and mystical.

The first novel is about four European academics who have dedicated their lives to the study of a reclusive German novelist called Benno Von Archimbaldi. They come to Santa Teresa, because there are rumours he was seen there. Most of this novel is about their love affairs with each other (three are men from Spain, France and Italy, and one is an English woman). They are really a bunch of silly drips, but the novel is written in an amusingly decadent European style.

The second novel is about the professor of Philosophy at the University of Santa Teresa. He is bringing up his daughter alone because his wife has gone off. Most of the book is his reminiscence about his wife's emotional breakdown when they lived in Spain. Also he is worried that his daughter is in danger because of the constant killing of young women. This novel is very short and is written in a mournful Latin-American style.

The third novel is about a self-sufficient black American reporter who comes to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match and stays to look into the murders, and falls in love with the professor's daughter. It's written in a tough American style. I found it the most accessible section, but scary.

The fourth novel is what I am reading at the moment. It's about the killings. It includes vivid portraits of individual male policemen and reporters, who are largely trying in good faith to address the killings in the face of official indifference and corruption. But most of this novel is taken up with hundreds and hundreds of descriptions - each about half a page in length for hundreds of pages - of the discovery of individual female bodies. It's not titillating, it's not melodramatic. It makes you confront the vast number of deaths, by blunt repetition. Each dead person is a person, with their own lost life. I can't explain really: it's a way of making you acknowledge the deaths without making them into a source of cheap entertainment.

The fifth novel I haven't got to yet, but from the title it reintroduces the never-seen Von Archimbaldi.

Reviews
ETA - here are some extracts from reviews, which I stole from wikipedia

Jonathan Lethem in the New York Times Book Review: "2666 is as consummate a performance as any 900-page novel dare hope to be: Bolaño won the race to the finish line in writing what he plainly intended as a master statement. Indeed, he produced not only a supreme capstone to his own vaulting ambition, but a landmark in what's possible for the novel as a form in our increasingly, and terrifyingly, post-national world. The Savage Detectives looks positively hermetic beside it. (...) As in Arcimboldo's paintings, the individual elements of 2666 are easily catalogued, while the composite result, though unmistakable, remains ominously implicit, conveying a power unattainable by more direct strategies. (...) "

Amaia Gabantxo in the Times Literary Supplement:n"(A)n exceptionally exciting literary labyrinth. (...) What strikes one first about it is the stylistic richness: rich, elegant yet slangy language that is immediately recognizable as Bolano's own mixture of Chilean, Mexican and European Spanish. Then there is 2666's resistance to categorization. At times it is reminiscent of James Ellroy: gritty and scurrilous. At other moments it seems as though the Alexandria Quartet had been transposed to Mexico and populated by ragged versions of Durrell's characters. There's also a similarity with W. G. Sebald's work (.....) There are no defining moments in 2666. Mysteries are never resolved. Anecdotes are all there is. Freak or banal events happen simultaneously, inform each other and poignantly keep the wheel turning. There is no logical end to a Bolano book."

Ben Ehrenreich in the The Los Angeles Times:"This is no ordinary whodunit, but it is a murder mystery. Santa Teresa is not just a hell. It's a mirror also -- "the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant, useless metamorphosis." (...) He wrote 2666 in a race against death. His ambitions were appropriately outsized: to make some final reckoning, to take life's measure, to wrestle to the limits of the void. So his reach extends beyond northern Mexico in the 1990s to Weimar Berlin and Stalin's Moscow, to Dracula's castle and the bottom of the sea."

Adam Kirsch in Slate: "2666 is an epic of whispers and details, full of buried structures and intuitions that seem too evanescent, or too terrible, to put into words. It demands from the reader a kind of abject submission—to its willful strangeness, its insistent grimness, even its occasional tedium—that only the greatest books dare to ask for or deserve."

Collation of multiple reviews here: A+ 'Nearly Perfect'

What I read on my holidays

2009-07-12T08:43:27Z

I had a very good time in Brittany. It was bright and sunny and also windy so that it didn't get too hot. I had a good time with Howard, walking for miles and eating seafood. We went to a lot of places: The Silver River in Huelgoat, Quimper, Yeun Elez, Roche point, the Glenan Islands, and multiple visits to Bar Nautilus, my favourite.

I didn't miss the children too much. My daughter is on her way home today - probably just got off the trans-Siberian railway at Moscow, and I'll meet her at the airport this evening.

I slept a lot - about twelve hours every day - and that's had a big effect on me. I gave up coffee altogether, and I think that's done me good.

But because of sleeping and walking on the dunes and beaches with Howard I have read much less than I usually do on holiday. I've read one book and listened to two on audio, and I haven't finished any of them. I can't believe it. This never happens to me on holiday.

What I read:

2666 by Roberto Bolaño. This is a brilliant massive novel, which I will do a separate post on.

Gifts by Ursula Le Guin (on audio) - A children's fantasy book, about feudal mountain people with supernatural destructive powers. It's very short - six hours unabridged - and I listened to most of it on the drive back from Plymouth last night. As always, well written, humane, engaging. Packs a lot into a small compass.

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman (on audio) - This is a history of 14th century Europe which is an attempt to get inside what it felt like to be a person in those days. It's quite a well known book, written in the seventies. I'd recommend it to anyone who is interested in that sort of thing.

Holiday and Separation Anxiety

2009-06-30T11:07:30Z

I'm going to Brittany for a short holiday starting tomorrow, for 10 days. H and I are going on our own. Although we have been away for weekends together this is the first significant break we have had from our children in twenty years (I had a baby already when we moved in together). This is only just starting to sink in.

To be honest I feel a bit like I am losing a limb. They are reaching an age now when I have to let them go, but it is difficult after so many years, such a big chunk of my life, of being responsible for their welfare and safety 24/7. I didn't sleep very well last night, and that is partly due to some deep rooted anxiety at going away from them.

Actually, the reason we have picked these dates is that my daughter is going to Tatarstan for two weeks on a youth trip, mostly paid for by the Russian government. I didn't want to leave her in England, while I was in another country, but she is too old to be dragged along with us. This seemed a good opportunity for us all to get a break we would enjoy.

However, she is off tomorrow morning, flying from Birmingham airport at 3am, and I feel frightened to send my little girl to spend two weeks thousands of miles away. Of course she does not feel worried - she's excited about it, and I think I have managed not to impose my anxiety on her.

I don't know what I will be like in France - perhaps miserable the whole time. I have to be careful that I don't impose my worries on H, who deserves a good break and a rest.

More on The Little Stranger 'what is really going on'

2009-06-29T16:23:17Z

I have just read a handful of reviews of The Little Stranger (a few of them are summarised here) and it's noticeable that some of the reviewers seem to have read the story in quite a different way from me.

My belief is that the narrator, Faraday, overtly dull and rationalist, is actually the source of the evil come upon the house. He doesn't passively witness the evil happening to everyone except him - his presence is the common factor behind these events. I think he literally kills the inhabitants of the house. He is the 'little stranger'. My only question is does he know he is doing it? And is he doing it physically or psychically?

But not everyone sees it that way. For example, the Washington Post says 'Faraday calls to mind Patricia Highsmith’s clever psychopath, Tom Ripley' but the Times says 'Faraday is a decent, humane man, concerned for his patients and for the welfare of the Ayres family, but he is a dull dog, so painstaking in his narration as to raise the question of whether Waters has set herself a challenge: to mediate her story through the consciousness of a bore.'

I think the Post have got it right - Faraday is a psychopath, and an unreliable narrator. The only question is - does he know it? Is he literally and physically harming people , and reporting it (to us, the reader) as the work of ghosts, or is his subconscious producing uncanny effects (as a troubled teenager is supposed to produce poltergeists) without his being aware of it?

To my mind this extra level makes this makes the story more interesting, but it is noticeable that most reviewers have not read the story in this way. I think I would like to re-read it, with this in mind from the start.

The Little Stranger

2009-06-29T14:41:43Z

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters is a ghost story of a dry and indirect kind. I haven't read The Turn of the Screw, but I think it might be along the same lines - is there a ghost? Is there rather a self-replicating mental illness which reflects the social tensions within the house? Or a genetic taint on a family? Or is there a psychic darkness emanating from one disturbed individual, like a nightmare made real? And of course on another level the whole story is a metaphor for the changing power balance between the old 'gentry' and wider post-war society which is moving on ahead of them into the future.

I listened to this on audio, unabridged. The whole thing is about 15-16 hours long. For the first three hours - so a considerable chunk of the book - the emotional tone is very restrained, and frankly almost nothing happens. I had two or three books on the go, and I was dipping into this in breaks from the others, take it or leave it. Then at 3 hours it suddenly ramped up. I can remember, I was walking down Canley Ford, when the whole story suddenly broke open in a shocking event, and I could hardly bear the rising tension. The writing was very controlled and perfectly paced.

A voice reading a story in your ear is very intimate, particularly lying in bed in the dark, and towards the end of the novel, as things become more spooky, I had to sit up and turn the light on because it was insinuating and scary.

I can compare this to her previous 1940s-set book The Night Watch - a step change in improvement in writing quality from her earliest novels, and you feel you are in the hands of a professional who is completely in control of her craft. Having said that people might find it a slow burner, and some might be frustrated that it isn't explicitly one thing or another. Personally I'd like to see it Booker-shortlisted.

Oh, yes, and one more thing. If they put this on telly I'd like to see David Mitchell as the p.o.v. doctor character. I think comedians play horror quite well. Failing that, perhaps Mark Gatiss or one of that clutch.

Rape as reproductive strategy

2009-06-26T09:23:15Z

Many evolutionary psychologists, as I assume you know, have argued that reprehensible as it might be, rape is a positive reproductive strategy. That is, although it is morally wrong, it nevertheless increases a man's chance of passing on his genes to the next generation.

My counter-argument, based just on intuition, was that the reproductive costs of rape outweigh its advantages. In a society without formal legal systems, the families of raped women will kill rapists, and the wider society will shun sexual transgressors (and being shunned is a big deal). There are of course destitute and unprotected women, without family to shelter them, but these women are in no position to raise babies. Destitute women will use abortion and infanticide, and of course lose babies at a much higher rate to disease and famine.

(ETA and there is rape in wars and in clan feuds, but these are not 'good reproductive opportunities' for child survival as we have seen in places like Rwanda. I hate to use these terms, but these are the terms that are used.)

And to be even blunter: reproductive success in humans is not mainly about 'getting women pregnant' because women are not passive receptacles and raising human children takes years of hard work, to which women must consent.

In contrast I think concubinage - keeping young women as extra 'second wives' - is actually a good reproductive strategy, although it's not great for women. So, I'm not all happy clappy saying 'nice things are reproductively successful and nasty things aren't'. Just that one particular nasty thing - rape - is only a good reproductive strategy in male fantasy land.

Anyway, some researchers studied the reproductive success rate of rape in a society with no anti-rape laws (no legal structures of any kind) - The Ache of Paraguay. They didn't observe any rapes, but did a what-if calculation based on other measurements within the society: for instance, the odds that a woman was able to conceive on any given day.

He and two colleagues therefore calculated how rape would affect the evolutionary prospects of a 25-year-old Ache. The scientists were generous to the rape-as-adaptation claim, assuming that rapists target only women of reproductive age [of course IRL this is not always the case]. Then they calculated rape's fitness costs and benefits. Rape costs a man fitness points if the victim's husband or other relatives kill him, for instance. He loses fitness points, too, if the mother refuses to raise a child of rape, and if being a known rapist (in a small hunter-gatherer tribe, rape and rapists are public knowledge) makes others less likely to help him find food. Rape increases a man's evolutionary fitness based on the chance that a rape victim is fertile (15 percent), that she will conceive (a 7 percent chance), that she will not miscarry (90 percent) and that she will not let the baby die even though it is the child of rape (90 percent). Hill then ran the numbers on the reproductive costs and benefits of rape. It wasn't even close: the cost exceeds the benefit by a factor of 10. "That makes the likelihood that rape is an evolved adaptation extremely low," says Hill. "It just wouldn't have made sense for men in the Pleistocene to use rape as a reproductive strategy, so the argument that it's preprogrammed into us doesn't hold up."

You can read the whole article here.

Modern science is limited by the imaginative and emotional limitations of practitioners. Men tend to emphasise the statistical importance of impregnation and underemphasise the importance of successful completion of pregnancy (for example) because of their social role. And the male social perspective is seen as 'objectivity' because of power imbalances in our culture.

ETA there is a good metafilter discussion of the article here. For example this comment:

What this "discipline" (evo psych) does is give the reader some sense of control of the very messy thing that is human sexuality. By providing reductionist hypotheses regarding our deepest sexual fears, we gain some level of control over our fear. It has nothing to do with the scientific method.

Though I think it is not just sexual anxiety which is addressed, but the whole anxiety of corporeality.

Ancient music

2009-06-25T16:37:57Z

BBC story: archaeologists have found a musical instrument - a flute carved from a vulture's wing bone - that is 35,000 years old. How amazing. You can hear what the music sounds like here. Ice age music! Of course they don't know the tune, but now they know the notes.

Optical illusion

2009-06-25T15:45:30Z

An extremely powerful optical illusion

You see the blue and green spirals?

Amazingly they are the same colour: "RGB color values in both spirals are 0, 255, 150".

I copied it to Paint and cut-and-paste, and they are definitely the same colour. Wow.

From metafilter.

You kids get off my lawn

2009-06-23T12:38:38Z

You often read, on the Internet, a notion that 'property' is a natural or elemental relation between an owner and an object of ownership. This is a founding principle of libertarianism, and underpins distinctively Anglo free market neoliberal economics theory. On the contrary I think ownership is actually a secondary social relation, and has different meanings in different societies (the two main alternatives being pastoral/nomadic and agrarian/imperial I think).

The principle of conservatism is that 'the natural order is the moral order', and thus the uniquely modern state of unmediated ownership is seen as natural, as pre-governmental, as pure - and as the basis of moral order.

My feeling is that modern Anglo notions of ownership arose as a result of the outreach of English-speaking colonialism across the globe. To the colonists the new lands were unowned, as there was no existing social obligation to the savage or barbarous inhabitants. This very new conception of a-social ownership without responsibility has now been turned around to be a primal or natural state, which government and society 'interferes with' in a harmful and unnatural way.

Now there is a new frontier - the Internet - and property here is different again. It is very bound up with social role, kudos, personal reputation. Ownership may be less significant than right attribution. Reproduce my work, but attribute it to my online i-d. It's an utterly different paradigm - almost the reverse of colonialist/capitalist land-stripping.

Author Mark Helprin has written a defence of the old paradigm significantly called Digital Barbarism. Here is an excerpt which I could almost have designed as an parody of the fundamentalist 'ownership' paradigm.

His argument is that intellectual copyright, far from being weakened by the new digital world, should be strengthened and made infinite and perpetual (literally, he thinks it should endure forever). I call it fundamentalist for a reason - like religious fundamentalism it is a reaction to change by becoming more extreme and rigid.

Anyway, this has turned into a mega-post. Here is a rebuttal of Helprin by a champion of the new paradigm - Larry Lessig. Tellingly it is vital, well written, fun.

Here in contrast is a turgid defence of Helprin by Ross Douthat. Tellingly (again) although it's all about the importance of ownership of ideas it begins with a yawn-inducing appropriation of this excellent xkcd cartoon. And he doesn't give it a proper attribution. What could be a clearer demonstration that the old paradigm is tone-deaf to the new?

All links courtesy of this crooked timber thread.

ETA And there's a metafilter thread here.

Erdos xkcd

2009-06-19T13:24:41Z

Did you get today's xkcd? Look at google searches for Erdos today.

View Poll: Erdos

Cats not smart shock

2009-06-18T15:26:03Z

Did you see this report that cats aren't very intelligent? There are plenty of outraged comments on the Guardian there, sternly denying the possibility that this might be so.

Hey - I like cats, but I don't think they are super smart. They are well suited to survival in their native environment, and their body-consciousness is much better developed than humans. I mean their bodily movement is better integrated and flows more gracefully.

In humans supreme grace requires concentration and mental discipline, so perhaps we are tempted to attribute impressive mental powers to cats - but I think for them grace is innate and unconscious. The same goes for horses - daft as brooms but hardwired to move with grace. I don't think they are worse as animals just because they leave abstract cognition to their monkey friends (ie us).

The swallowed land

2009-06-16T16:02:32Z

I have been reading and listening to The Wasteland, so here is a slightly stupid pastiche which doubles as a little bit of Doctor Who fanfic set at the time when he's living as that human schoolmaster, and is visited by an old friend.

The swallowed land

Master of situations, the famous spiritualist and magician
Appeared distracted, nevertheless
Is known to be the wickedest man in Europe
Contacts the dead, as efficient as the post office.
‘Are you a Medium?’
‘I’ve never had any complaints’.
His smile engages my attention.
‘Have I seen you before?’
He did not answer, gestured towards my face.

Here, said he,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor
(He has forgotten that he is reborn).
Here is the outer rim of the world, where the water falls perpetually;
The stars, reflected in a pool of hydrogen,
Here is the man with a tin heart, and here the chariot.
And this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries in his pocket
Which you are forbidden to see.

I see the two of us
Fighting on the airless surfaces of meteors
Mon semblable,
From out of the thunderhead he spoke,
‘I invoke Shango
His sacred number is Ten, and all numbers,
His symbol is the oshe axe, which represents swift justice
He perpetuates the human seed into the Milky Way
He is owner of the double-headed drums.’

And this card shows the paired lovers
Wound white and red, like the tape at a crime scene
Like the chirurgeon’s pole:
He who heals by cutting.
Fear loss of companions.
Fear your other half
Il ferait volontiers de la terre un débris
Et dans un bâillement avalerait le monde
He willingly makes debris of the Earth
And in his mouth he swallows everything.

Red Cliff

2009-06-15T12:00:16Z

Red Cliff is a Chinese-language (Mandarin?) film from John Woo. It's a huge-scale mediaeval warfare epic. That means you know exactly what you will get: a thousand warships sailing up the Yangtze, heroes fighting off dozens of assailants, the imperial palace with massed ranks of kneeling officials, Tony Leung. And that's what you get. 90% of the film is battle, with occasional interludes of calligraphy, music and rainfall. It's completely by the book. Personally I like this kind of thing, and I expect you know whether you do or not.

I have two complaints - one is that it has no hidden depths of any kind*: it's pretty conventional. The second is that it is about half an hour too long, so it gets repetitive and tedious at the end (IMHO). It's like Hero without the sexual complexity, and hallucinatory oddity.

*OK, maybe a wee little bit of sexual subtext with the commander in chief

Ashes

2009-06-14T16:50:37Z

Thanks to altariel for the link. This is a lovely one hour program by David Mitchell's comedy partner, Robert Webb, speaking about TS Eliot, ee cummings, and Larkin. And he goes to a pub open-mike poetry night! It seems a bit stuffier than ours.

He does it very well, candid and charming. I've sat indoors for an hour to watch this, on a lovely day. I didn't want to stop watching.

Mitchell(s) and Webb

2009-06-14T07:48:44Z

While I'm obsessing on politics, here's a great article by David Mitchell in today's Observer. He writes like a dream doesn't he? Modest and yet assertive.

Sir Alan Sugar comes across on TV as exactly the sort of cock who Tory voters like. His brand of "no-nonsense" nonsense and second-hand rhetoric, and his public affirmation that wealth makes what you say more important, are perfectly judged to appeal to the sort of idiot who thinks David Cameron talks a lot of sense, even though all he does is repeatedly bleat "change" like a tramp in a doorway.

And I read in the Guardian interview this week that he still lives in a council flat with a lodger, and he hasn't had a girlfriend for seven years? Ladies of Britain, what the hell are you thinking? Knickers on standby.

Meanwhile, in a shock overthrow of literary convention writer David Mitchell is more conventionally good looking than actor David Mitchell.

BTW - I missed Robert Webb's documentary on poetry last week - I could kick myself, and it isn't on replay any more. How annoying.

More BNP stats

2009-06-12T15:49:45Z

And on the BNP, Daniel links to this polling report which indicates that the BNP is not drawn from disaffected Labour voters, but from the Tory-voting minority within the working class.

If BNP supporters (have parents that vote Labour) are , male working class voters therefore, the natural conclusion that it’s Labour they are taking support from. This falls down, however, on some other questions - asked if they’d rather have Cameron or Brown as PM, BNP voters opt for Cameron by 59% to 17%. Asked to place themselves on the political spectrum they put themselves right of centre, in roughly the same place as they do the Tories. 22% of them think the Tories care about people like themselves, only 6% say the same about Labour. In short, the people the BNP seem to appeal to are actually “working class Tories” - the sort of traditional working class voters who under other circumstances might shift over to the Conservatives.

This is a great relief to me, as I thought these people were Labour supporters gone bad, very bad. This is how it has been presented in the mainstream media.

I should note that the rest of the article indicates that Labour and Tory voters are close together on many anti-BNP-type issues, such as disbelieving in racial inferiority, with BNP supporters radically different from all the mainstream parties, so I'm not saying BNP are 'typical Tories' gone bad either.

If I can shoot rabbits then I can egg fascists

2009-06-12T15:31:55Z

Daniel D at Crooked Timber:

Based on the fact that (the BNP) got two MEPs elected, non-white British citizens might justifiably be looking with suspicion at their white neighbours today, thinking that a significant proportion of us were secretly harbouring fascist sympathies. In fact this isn’t true; the absolute number of BNP votes was slightly down on 2004, and their electoral success was purely an artefact of overall low turnout. It’s therefore an important point to be made, to our own population and to the world’s watching media, that Nick Griffin isn’t in fact a newly popular and influential political figure; he’s a widely reviled creep who not only doesn’t lead a phalanx of jackbooted supporters, but actually can’t even set up for a TV interview without being pelted with eggs. The voice of the British populace does not shout “Hail Griffin!”, it shouts, “Oi Fatty, cop this! [splat]”. And the only efficient and credible way to demonstrate to the world that Griffin is regarded as an eggworthy disgrace, is to actually and repeatedly pelt him with eggs.

I'm not looking for a quote making the opposite case - I'm sure you know what it is - we should not lower ourselves to their level, we should allow the fascists to speak so we can refute them. I take it for granted all lj-friends are anti-racists, so this is just a question of tactics.

View Poll: Egging the BNP

The Dudley Locust

2009-06-12T11:14:19Z

A poem I've been working on.

The Dudley Locust

When working men in caps
Drilled into this outcrop
They found the stone infested
With dead beetle-things
They called them Dudley Locusts,
And we now
Would call them trilobites.
They took them all away.

I gather a shell like a cockle
Peeping from ancient mud
blurring
With time, sickening time,
Four hundred million years.

I ask the humble cockle: make me feel
all your past winters.
But you are so small
Absent or disappointing fossil
The totem of the black country.

Now, when I invoke the eroding locust,
Swarms of beetles emerge from the rocks
And seethe within the scree
But only in my mind.

Standing in the rain
With my shoes admitting the damp
Is this foreboding
The perception of my own age
Gathering itself before the next fall?
Or a true prophecy?

I want to be impressed
By how humble you are
In the grey rock
How blurred and smeared
I want to know your marred persistence
To see not you, but the curtain of decay
Which is destroying you -
And, in a local breach of entropy, preserve
The temporary order of my life.

They are playing my song

2009-06-11T15:22:26Z

There's a thread on Yglesias today on 'Songs about People called Alison'. Sometimes spelled wrong. My favourite is the one from Elvis C.

BTW have you noticed that almost all 'mediums' on telly programs are called Alison. No idea why.

ETA This is what I've actually been looking at on youtube this afternoon: some Vincent D'Onofrio videos.

I like the way you move
Mad about the boy
Boy from New York City

They aren't 'really good' like 'really well made and edited videos', just collations, but he's a lovely mover.

Uphill all the way

2009-06-10T08:41:00Z

I am quite obsessed by the film Southern Comfort (1981) directed and written by Walter Hill. I think it forms the middle part of a trilogy with The Warriors (1979 - writer/director Hill) and Aliens (1986 - co-written and produced by Hill). All three films have a very specific storyline - a group of beleaguered warriors making their way through hostile territory, being picked off one by one, and the true leader emerging.

The Warriors is based explicitly on Anabasis ('Uphill') by the soldier/writer Xenophon:

Stranded deep in enemy territory, the ... Greek senior officers killed ... Xenophon, one of three remaining leaders elected by the soldiers, played an instrumental role in encouraging the Greek army of 10,000 to march north across foodless deserts and snow-filled mountain passes towards the Black Sea and the comparative security of its Greek shoreline cities. Abandoned in northern Mesopotamia, without supplies other than what they could obtain by force or diplomacy, the 10,000 had to fight their way northwards through Corduene and Armenia, making ad hoc decisions about their leadership, tactics, provender and destiny, while the King's army and hostile natives constantly barred their way and attacked their flanks. Ultimately this "marching republic" managed to reach the shores of the Black Sea at Trebizond, a destination they greeted with their famous cry of joyous exultation on the mountain of Madur in Surmene : "thalatta, thalatta", "the sea, the sea!".

The Warriors depicts a mixed-race street gang fighting their way out of New York. The film is much less subtle in its exploration of the theme than Southern Comfort or Aliens, for example using the names of characters from the Anabasis, and with explicit discussion about 'who should be the war leader?' It is very interesting to me as a missing link joining up the chain of development, but I prefer the two subsequent films which revisit the theme in a more complex way, and they are both very subtexual.

Incidentally I think Star Trek Voyager could have been a much better show if it had followed this template more closely. In fact it ended up being rubbish.

(ETA - for my classicist friends, why I have used 'thalatta' not 'thalassa': that indented text is from from wikpedia which has the note "θαλασσα... Thalatta was the Attic pronunciation")

Ashes to Ashes season finale

2009-06-08T19:21:40Z

I thought Ashes to Ashes has been pretty good lately. I thought last week's episode of Chris on his Via Dolorosa was very well performed. matildabj points out that a 3rd season has been commissioned. Bet Chris dies tonight.

But where next for our favourite Hunt? That article has some ideas

Hastings, 1066: "Stop whining, you've got another eye, haven't you? I've seen worse at a Manchester derby. It stops here; no garlic-chomping froggie pretender is taking over my country. Raymondo, to the shield wall!"

I also like this one from the comments

Side of the LA Freeway 2006: 'Raymondo, have I got heatstroke or did this drunken colonial call me sugar tits?'

Here's one from me:

Walmington on Sea, 1943: 'You tell me to put that light out one more time Hodges, and I'll shove that bike so far up your arse you'll have a handlebar moustache! And no Wilson, I don't think it's terribly wise, so get bloody used to it. Next!'

What else?

What needs to be done

2009-06-08T18:13:24Z

Good article by Sunny Hundal in the Guardian on the election of two BNP ( that's our fascist racist party) MEPs.

It may stop Labour ignoring its traditional working-class origins, now so comprehensively stomped over that they're migrating to other parties in droves. This is not an indictment of high immigration and multiculturalism, as no doubt some will call it, but of a centralised party ignoring local concerns. As Sarah Ditum points out, our media tell people every day that their crumbling infrastructure is the fault of those dastardly asylum seekers (rather than lack of investment, which might mean higher taxes). Immigration wouldn't be such a big issue if local councils presented information more quickly about population movements, so resources could be poured in or taken out in response, ensuring local public services didn't suffer. This is also a result of the lack of investment in social housing.

I agree with him that ultimately human social values will render fascism impotent:

Most people have enough contact with someone of an ethnic minority to know how stupid racism is. That personal knowledge will always override whatever the BNP says.

I also agree with Dan here that

Renewal is therefore the order of the day, and already last night the left was out in force – Nick Brown talking down the privatisation of Royal Mail, Michael Meacher talking up social housing, and, er, Polly Toynbee being Polly Toynbee... whatever the details of policy, going back to core values, back to the party’s roots in an electorate which has abandoned them (and yet who have not sided with the Tories in doing so), is what needs to happen.

And here's my instinct about yesterday. It feels to me like when your partner has made you very angry, and you eventually say something so hurtful and spiteful that you shock yourself, and you see how much it has hurt him/her, and then now that you have done the worst you can, you can begin a process of reconciliation. They needed to suffer really badly. But will that be enough now?

A more measured criticism of Drag Me To Hell

2009-06-07T09:34:17Z

nihilistic_kid picks Drag Me To Hell apart in a more comprehensive way here. He's obviously managing to see it more clearly than I can because he's not emotionally overloaded by the issues in the way I am.

He correctly says the film appears to be racist towards gypsies/Roma/travellers. I do think this is true. Generally when I am watching a film I'm expecting apparent racism to be exploded - for instance if all the black people in a film seem to be venal and stupid I expect the film to overthrow that in the end, revealing that something else entirely is the case. I was expecting that to happen in this film. It didn't.

nihilistic_kid also points out - and this is another area where I tend to emotionally overload quite rapidly - that the other social group which is 'punished' in this film are social climbers - that is the lower class girl is punished for wanting nice things, wanting a middle class job and a middle class boyfriend. Again, I thought this would revert itself. At first she does various ruthless things, and betrays her own principles, to try to escape the torment. At the end she refuses to do that. She refuses to hurt anyone, and she refuses to give up. I thought this would be redemptive. But no - she can do nothing to save herself. And yet the 'sin' she has committed is no worse than wanting to have the nice things that everyone else around her is born into.

And isn't this exactly the ground on which poor people are criticised by privileged people. For venality, greed, envy, desire for more than they are born to. A person who already has money can say 'Oh, I never think about money' while tucking in to lovely food in a lovely house. A person with lots can look down at a person with little, and call the poor person greedy.

This seems a good time to raise a common trope of horror films - that the malignant and evil power is generally associated with a group who in real life are powerless, and have had suffering imposed on them. Often children are the source of evil, but in real life they are thousands of times more likely to have evil done to them by adults than vice versa. In US films the horror often emerges from Native American graves ('Indian burial ground').

A charitable view would be that the horror is an embodiment of the suppressed but unappeasable guilt of the victors, the perpetrators of genocide. Or in the case of this film, a vague uneasy guilt of mainstream society at how the traveller community is generally treated.

A less charitable - and I think more accurate - view is that attributing hidden power and malevolence to the oppressed group is psychologically comforting to the powerful people in society.

Or as nihilistic_kid puts it:

(this film is) trafficking in the sort of stereotypes and libels that continue to inform the persecution of the Roma worldwide.. a Romany woman finds herself unable to pay the mortgage. Of course, she has the power to drag people to hell, but she can't seem to scrape a few extra bucks together?... If Roma (or Indians, or the less intimidating sort of Will Smithian black folk, or woppy old ladies or whomever they give powers to in movies these days) had magical powers, they really wouldn't have problems. You know who'd have the problems? White fucking people would have the problems.

Drag Me to Hell

2009-06-06T22:18:43Z

I went to see Drag Me to Hell. I think I was hoping it would be cathartic or releasing for me, but it left me feeling down.

I suspect this is just me, my phobic reaction making me take it too seriously. I guess many people who enjoy boisterous daft supernatural horror films would like this one. It's just I didn't like it. I thought the heroine was great, really good actress, and the scary scenes were both ridiculous and pretty scary in places. But the overall thing left me with a bad feeling. Probably this isn't a very useful review to help anyone else to judge whether they would like it.

Actually I think that's probably more unclear than it needs to be. Basically I was very frightened of going to hell when I was a little girl. I thought this film would be about a feisty young woman fighting back against damnation, as a sort of metaphor for fighting off the fears of my youth. I thought it would be scary but inspiring. Instead all her efforts are futile, her courage and kindness avail her nothing, against inexorable damnation. it made me feel pretty gloomy actually.