A number of interesting things happened over the weekend, the least enjoyable of which was being woken up at 2:30am by the fire brigade putting out the fire that somebody had set in our neighbours' car. How charming of them.
One of the most enjoyable things -- in a vengeful, wrathful, blasting-the-infidels kind of way -- was playing Risk Godstorm with R. and M. on Saturday evening. It's a deeply enjoyable game which follows the basic mechanics of Risk 2210 A.D. -- itself a significant updating of classic Risk with its "Slug it out till you're the last one left alive" ethic -- with some intriguing twists. (Enormous fun though the old-fashioned approach, in a mindlessly macho kind of way, was, Godstorm and the modern variants do seem to be a little more... nuanced[1].)
In Godstorm, five of the ancient polytheistic pantheons -- the Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Celtic and Norse gods -- do battle alongside armies of their followers, inflicting the lands of Europe and the Mediterranean with plagues and tempests and the like. Pretty much the same dynamic holds as in 2210 A.D., with the gods replacing the various specialist "commander" pieces, but with two glorious departures: firstly, one of the continents it's possible to occupy is Atlantis, which is both more profitable and easier to defend than the other territories but is susceptible, at an undetermined point in the game, to vanishing altogether from the board; and secondly, troops who die are moved onto the separate Underworld board, where they continue to fight for domination and whence they can, potentially, be resurrected. Huzzah for maurauding armies of the dead!
Add to this the fact that some of the "miracle cards" (equivalents of 2210 A.D.'s command cards) can potentially effect enormous changes on the state of play, and Godstorm certainly seems to be the most spectacular of the Risk variants to date.
Unfortunately, the length of time it took us to learn the new rules, together with the necessity of getting R. & M.'s child units into bed before we could start, meant that we only had time to play for three "epochs" (rounds of turns -- a single turn can easily take half an hour), rather than the prescribed five.
We decided that the existence of the afterlife makes things a lot more agreeable for players who are doing badly, as each unit wiped off the face of the Earth is a reinforcement in the battle for the Underworld. There are a few kinks in the gameplay (set out in this rather overcritical review), but the only aspect I found really unsatisfying was the lack of differentiation between the gods. Of course I accept that this would make the game even more complicated, but as things stand there's basically no distinction made apart from the colours of the pieces and the names of the individual gods on each side, and as a huge mythology geek I find this unsatisfying.
It would have been nice if the various gods were more powerful when on their home turf, for instance, which would have been easy enough to build in. I'd also have preferred to have had some acknowledgement of the gods' distinctive personalities, perhaps via pantheon-specific decks of cards. As it is, the game insists on reducing them into a one-size-fits-all formula of Sky God, War God, Death God and Goddess of Magic. This works well enough with the Greek pantheon from which it's evidently derived, with Zeus, Aries, Hades and Hecate fulfilling the roles (although it's odd to consider Hecate on a par with the Olympians), but it falls down badly when applied to the other pantheons.
The Norse, for instance, have Odin, Thor, Loki and Freya in these slots, none of whom fits even remotely. Not only has Loki nothing to do with death and Freya nothing obvious to do with magic, but Odin is, if anything, more of a war god than Thor, who is associated with thunder and thus with the sky. But the formula says that the head of the pantheon is the Sky God, so what can you do? (In fact assigning areas of patronage to the Aesir in the mode of the Olympians is a fundamentally misconceived endeavour, showing the hegemony of Hellenistic thinking in Western mythography, but never mind.)
Still, it would be churlish to be overcritical of any game which allows you to smite your enemies whilst bellowing "Die, heathen scum, for I am Thor!" or chanting The Ride of the Valkyries, even if you do have to do it quietly to avoid waking the children. Very much recommended.
...then on Sunday B. and I discovered that a local pub does a free cheeseboard at Sunday lunchtime. Life is good.
[1] If you are a classic Risk enthusiast, then under no circumstances should you download [link deleted due to lack of self-discipline], a freeware version with substantially speeded-up gameplay which allows you to play against multiple virtual players with distinctive strategies. It's horrifyingly addictive.
12 September 2005
09 September 2005
Abstinence (If Only)
Lord, it's been a busy week. A new academic year, and suddenly the library is swarming with students. Of course their disconcerting enthusiasm will abate before very long, but at the moment they keep pestering us for advice and information, sitting on the furniture, moving the books, and generally causing chaos and disruption to our neat and orderly library. Obviously this isn't the kind of behaviour I want to encourage... but my hands (unlike the grubby little fingers of the students) are tied.
Seriously, it's bedlam. I meant to update this blog at work on Tuesday, but I really haven't had the time all week.
I promised that I'd explain the rationale behind my frankly deranged decision to give up coffee... and, well, it's nothing terribly profound, really: I was drinking too much of it, and wanted to cut down. Unfortunately, too much and too regular caffeine generates a genuine, honest-to-goodness addiction -- with symptoms like mood swings, stress, irritability, excessive tiredness, trembling, headaches and the like -- and the only way to shake this off completely is to go into full-on withdrawal for a period of eight weeks. By the end of that time (or so my medical friend R. assures me) all the effects are expunged, and one can either swear off the noxious brew forever, or once again start taking it in moderation as a stimulant.
In the meantime, of course, one isn't allowed coffee or tea in any form (including decaff, in which enough traces remain to tide the addiction over... I just hope mint tea isn't addictive, fattening or carcinogenic, because at the moment I'm more or less drowning in it). And, of course, one has to deal with the withdrawal symptoms, which (predictably and hilariously) include stress, mood swings, irritability, excessive tiredness, headaches, trembling...
In my case, the problem is compounded by the fact that I can only write with any degree of creativity when I'm caffeinated to the gills, which means my present, temporary, sabbatical from trying to write creatively is my only realistic opportunity to detox. I'm appreciating the downtime -- with any luck I can return to writing in November, refreshed and reinvigorated and brimming over with scintillating ideas. (Mixed metaphor there, unless you envisage the ideas as comprising a fluid which also scintillates. You see the kind of thing I'm up against.)
I'm temporarily back on the diet as well, to purge the pizza and burritos and pasta and sausages and mezze and cooked breakfasts and cookies and doughnuts and beer I consumed at Greenbelt. From this point of view Saturday was somewhat non-optimal, as B. and I visited the Bristol Organic Food Festival.
It's a fantastic, huge event, sprawling along two banks of the harbourside, with stall after stall after stall offering delicious organic goodies and, in many cases, offering free samples to taste. Said samples are, of course, tiny, but wandering around accepting morsels of bread, cheese, oil, vinegar, pate, wine, beer, crisps, chocolate, cake and the like for long enough adds up to a pretty hearty lunch. (There was some gorgeous-smelling organic coffee as well, which naturally was off-limits.) We ended up spending far too much money, and came away with wine, amaretto, cheese, pâté, chocolate, lemon curd and brownies in four varieties (standard, white chocolate, coconut and, fantastically, chilli flavour), all in a big bag.
In the evening we dragged our friend M. out to The Wellington, where we ended up eating reasonably decent veggie chilli and drinking extremely decent Bath Ales. A very satisfactory day in many ways, but not terribly so for the welfare of my waistline.
The rest of the weekend continued to be remarkably relaxing, certainly relative to the hecticness of this week and the week before. I spent most of it just lounging around, and found that I had some time for things like reading, watching DVDs, stroking the cats and the like. OK, some of the DVDs were for research purposes, but still.
It means I'm really looking forward to the forthcoming weekend -- which, thank heavens, will be starting in just under half an hour. Hurrah.
Seriously, it's bedlam. I meant to update this blog at work on Tuesday, but I really haven't had the time all week.
I promised that I'd explain the rationale behind my frankly deranged decision to give up coffee... and, well, it's nothing terribly profound, really: I was drinking too much of it, and wanted to cut down. Unfortunately, too much and too regular caffeine generates a genuine, honest-to-goodness addiction -- with symptoms like mood swings, stress, irritability, excessive tiredness, trembling, headaches and the like -- and the only way to shake this off completely is to go into full-on withdrawal for a period of eight weeks. By the end of that time (or so my medical friend R. assures me) all the effects are expunged, and one can either swear off the noxious brew forever, or once again start taking it in moderation as a stimulant.
In the meantime, of course, one isn't allowed coffee or tea in any form (including decaff, in which enough traces remain to tide the addiction over... I just hope mint tea isn't addictive, fattening or carcinogenic, because at the moment I'm more or less drowning in it). And, of course, one has to deal with the withdrawal symptoms, which (predictably and hilariously) include stress, mood swings, irritability, excessive tiredness, headaches, trembling...
In my case, the problem is compounded by the fact that I can only write with any degree of creativity when I'm caffeinated to the gills, which means my present, temporary, sabbatical from trying to write creatively is my only realistic opportunity to detox. I'm appreciating the downtime -- with any luck I can return to writing in November, refreshed and reinvigorated and brimming over with scintillating ideas. (Mixed metaphor there, unless you envisage the ideas as comprising a fluid which also scintillates. You see the kind of thing I'm up against.)
I'm temporarily back on the diet as well, to purge the pizza and burritos and pasta and sausages and mezze and cooked breakfasts and cookies and doughnuts and beer I consumed at Greenbelt. From this point of view Saturday was somewhat non-optimal, as B. and I visited the Bristol Organic Food Festival.
It's a fantastic, huge event, sprawling along two banks of the harbourside, with stall after stall after stall offering delicious organic goodies and, in many cases, offering free samples to taste. Said samples are, of course, tiny, but wandering around accepting morsels of bread, cheese, oil, vinegar, pate, wine, beer, crisps, chocolate, cake and the like for long enough adds up to a pretty hearty lunch. (There was some gorgeous-smelling organic coffee as well, which naturally was off-limits.) We ended up spending far too much money, and came away with wine, amaretto, cheese, pâté, chocolate, lemon curd and brownies in four varieties (standard, white chocolate, coconut and, fantastically, chilli flavour), all in a big bag.
In the evening we dragged our friend M. out to The Wellington, where we ended up eating reasonably decent veggie chilli and drinking extremely decent Bath Ales. A very satisfactory day in many ways, but not terribly so for the welfare of my waistline.
The rest of the weekend continued to be remarkably relaxing, certainly relative to the hecticness of this week and the week before. I spent most of it just lounging around, and found that I had some time for things like reading, watching DVDs, stroking the cats and the like. OK, some of the DVDs were for research purposes, but still.
It means I'm really looking forward to the forthcoming weekend -- which, thank heavens, will be starting in just under half an hour. Hurrah.
05 September 2005
Excursions in Time
Right, then, yes.
The Time-Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. It is, quite honestly, bloody amazing.
It's certainly received it's fair share of hype -- and being nominated by Richard and Judy for their daytime-TV book club is an awful lot for any novel to live down -- but it really is remarkably good.
It's not marketed as S.F., which is one of the things publishers do these days so that S.F. books with not-too-outrageous settings can sold more widely. It is, however, deeply respectful of its basic science-fiction premise (a protagonist whose unusual genetic condition causes him to time-travel involuntarily, apparently under the partial control of his subconscious mind) and follows it through with as much rigorous and careful extrapolation as I've ever found in a work of S.F. (far more than in some). It also works as a "proper" novel, in that the characters are multi-layered, convincing, painfully familiar and shaped by their experiences and relationships even when -- as in the cases of the two protagonists, time-travelling Henry and his lifelong love Clare -- those expeiences are deeply weird and non-realistic in nature.
The book isn't flawless. It is, at times, a little precious, and the passages where Proust and Rilke are quoted in the original languages are frankly pretentious. There's also, tight though the plot-logic is, a papered-over chasm in the book's intellectualism where some philosophical examination of Henry's plight, particularly of the inescapable determinism which his explorations of the past appear to reveal, would seem really to be called for. But, though the romance is one of an unusually cerebral nature, it's clearly the central relationship which the book is truly about.
The core image of the novel comes, in fact, in the epilogue where... [NB: The following has been made invisible to avoid spoiling the book. Highlight the whitespace to read...] ...an elderly woman spends her last years waiting for the promised final visit of her long-dead time-travelling husband. This image alone would have made for a wonderful short story, but that would have lacked the emotional punch which it derives from its novelistic context. Without knowing Clare and Henry as we do by this point in the book, it would have been a clever and reasonably poignant idea, rather than an achingly potent source of longing and grief.
Basically, The Time-Traveler's Wife is the only book I've read in absolute ages which has had me in uncontrollable tears at the end. I could barely see the words to read them, in fact... which was kind of annoying, actually, but still, extremely cathartic.
Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman is an altogether different kind of book -- still cerebral, and still about time, but far from being character-focussed. Indeed, it has virtually no named characters: the framing narrative deals with the young Albert Einstein and a colleague of his at the patent office, but that's about it. Instead it's a magic-realist exploration of creatively-imagined worlds where time works differently from our own, the linking idea being that these are the rejected hypotheses, experienced in dreams, which led Einstein to his theory of relativity.
The imagination which has gone into thinking up these worlds is breathtaking in itself. There's a world where the future does not exist and cannot be conceptualised, and a world where there's no such thing as memory; worlds where time cannot be quantified and worlds where it is the ultimate and only absolute; worlds where time works like a stream or like a wheel or like an infinite hall or mirrors; even a determinist world like the one in The Time-Traveler's Wife, where everybody's future is mapped out and where nobody therefore cares about the consequences of their actions.
The really clever thing is the way all of these hypotheticals -- which are treated as springboards for creative thought rather than bases for logical extrapolation -- become metaphors for the real relationship between our human identities and our subjective perceptions of time. The novel as a whole explores disparate imaginative spaces, each with its own rules, and their reciprocal effects upon the human beings who live in them. Comparisons with Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities (as luck would have it, the only Calvino I've managed to read, and very fine it is too) are predictable, but worthwhile.
Nameless though the characters are, their internal monologues are often deeply moving -- all the more so since a number of them are clearly altered versions of Einstein's own present, past and future, and his own surroundings in 1905 Berne are generally recognisable, if profoundly changed. (Much of this aspect of the book passed me by, to be honest, as I'm not that clued-up on Einstein's life. I really should read a biography and then reread the novel, as I'm sure it would repay that kind of attention.)
Honestly, this is a fantastically good work of art, which everybody with any interest both in theoretical physics and damn good writing should definitely read.
Meanwhile... I've finished Seven Deadly Sins, which suffers by comparison with the above (but does have a couple of splendid stories by the reliable Paul Magrs and Tara Samms). I've also embarked on Simon Morden's novella Another War, having first reread "A Forgotten Corner of Hell" in the Subway collection Brilliant Things, to which it's a sequel. Where "A Forgotten Corner of Hell" (in which a 1920s country house vanishes to become contiguous with an otherdimensional netherworld) reads rather as if H.P. Lovecraft's been given a rewrite by Agatha Christie, Another War (where the house reappears in present-day Oxfordshire) gives the impression that Tom Clancy's now been allowed to have a go. I'm enjoying it very much so far.
I think I'll hold off commenting on The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction till I've finished it -- I'm a little over halfway through now. It's been a mixture, so far, of nodding along in agreement and disagreeing vociferously, to the bemusement and consternation of my wife and / or colleagues.
The Time-Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. It is, quite honestly, bloody amazing.
It's certainly received it's fair share of hype -- and being nominated by Richard and Judy for their daytime-TV book club is an awful lot for any novel to live down -- but it really is remarkably good.
It's not marketed as S.F., which is one of the things publishers do these days so that S.F. books with not-too-outrageous settings can sold more widely. It is, however, deeply respectful of its basic science-fiction premise (a protagonist whose unusual genetic condition causes him to time-travel involuntarily, apparently under the partial control of his subconscious mind) and follows it through with as much rigorous and careful extrapolation as I've ever found in a work of S.F. (far more than in some). It also works as a "proper" novel, in that the characters are multi-layered, convincing, painfully familiar and shaped by their experiences and relationships even when -- as in the cases of the two protagonists, time-travelling Henry and his lifelong love Clare -- those expeiences are deeply weird and non-realistic in nature.
The book isn't flawless. It is, at times, a little precious, and the passages where Proust and Rilke are quoted in the original languages are frankly pretentious. There's also, tight though the plot-logic is, a papered-over chasm in the book's intellectualism where some philosophical examination of Henry's plight, particularly of the inescapable determinism which his explorations of the past appear to reveal, would seem really to be called for. But, though the romance is one of an unusually cerebral nature, it's clearly the central relationship which the book is truly about.
The core image of the novel comes, in fact, in the epilogue where... [NB: The following has been made invisible to avoid spoiling the book. Highlight the whitespace to read...] ...an elderly woman spends her last years waiting for the promised final visit of her long-dead time-travelling husband. This image alone would have made for a wonderful short story, but that would have lacked the emotional punch which it derives from its novelistic context. Without knowing Clare and Henry as we do by this point in the book, it would have been a clever and reasonably poignant idea, rather than an achingly potent source of longing and grief.
Basically, The Time-Traveler's Wife is the only book I've read in absolute ages which has had me in uncontrollable tears at the end. I could barely see the words to read them, in fact... which was kind of annoying, actually, but still, extremely cathartic.
Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman is an altogether different kind of book -- still cerebral, and still about time, but far from being character-focussed. Indeed, it has virtually no named characters: the framing narrative deals with the young Albert Einstein and a colleague of his at the patent office, but that's about it. Instead it's a magic-realist exploration of creatively-imagined worlds where time works differently from our own, the linking idea being that these are the rejected hypotheses, experienced in dreams, which led Einstein to his theory of relativity.
The imagination which has gone into thinking up these worlds is breathtaking in itself. There's a world where the future does not exist and cannot be conceptualised, and a world where there's no such thing as memory; worlds where time cannot be quantified and worlds where it is the ultimate and only absolute; worlds where time works like a stream or like a wheel or like an infinite hall or mirrors; even a determinist world like the one in The Time-Traveler's Wife, where everybody's future is mapped out and where nobody therefore cares about the consequences of their actions.
The really clever thing is the way all of these hypotheticals -- which are treated as springboards for creative thought rather than bases for logical extrapolation -- become metaphors for the real relationship between our human identities and our subjective perceptions of time. The novel as a whole explores disparate imaginative spaces, each with its own rules, and their reciprocal effects upon the human beings who live in them. Comparisons with Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities (as luck would have it, the only Calvino I've managed to read, and very fine it is too) are predictable, but worthwhile.
Nameless though the characters are, their internal monologues are often deeply moving -- all the more so since a number of them are clearly altered versions of Einstein's own present, past and future, and his own surroundings in 1905 Berne are generally recognisable, if profoundly changed. (Much of this aspect of the book passed me by, to be honest, as I'm not that clued-up on Einstein's life. I really should read a biography and then reread the novel, as I'm sure it would repay that kind of attention.)
Honestly, this is a fantastically good work of art, which everybody with any interest both in theoretical physics and damn good writing should definitely read.
Meanwhile... I've finished Seven Deadly Sins, which suffers by comparison with the above (but does have a couple of splendid stories by the reliable Paul Magrs and Tara Samms). I've also embarked on Simon Morden's novella Another War, having first reread "A Forgotten Corner of Hell" in the Subway collection Brilliant Things, to which it's a sequel. Where "A Forgotten Corner of Hell" (in which a 1920s country house vanishes to become contiguous with an otherdimensional netherworld) reads rather as if H.P. Lovecraft's been given a rewrite by Agatha Christie, Another War (where the house reappears in present-day Oxfordshire) gives the impression that Tom Clancy's now been allowed to have a go. I'm enjoying it very much so far.
I think I'll hold off commenting on The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction till I've finished it -- I'm a little over halfway through now. It's been a mixture, so far, of nodding along in agreement and disagreeing vociferously, to the bemusement and consternation of my wife and / or colleagues.
Greenbelt Post-Mortem
So... just to return one more time to the subject of Greenbelt. The blog entries at surefish cover most of what I actually did, and much of what I thought: what they don't say is that I spent the whole time stressed out and knackered, having taken on way too much this year.
My talk itself wasn't too bad in terms of stress -- it was written and polished by the time I arrived, and really it only necessitating taking an hour out that morning to practise, and caffeining and sugaring myself up immediately beforehand (and really, coffee and donuts aren't a very grave hardship). Certainly the buzz which came from realising I'd delivered it well, and kept the audience entertained and interested for an hour, more than made up for the work I put in.
The panel discussion was even less hassle, although I didn't feel it was terribly successful. (No reflection on my fellow panellists, Annie and Conrad, nor indeed to host Nick: there were half a dozen blogging-related events at this year's festival, and I don't think there was a great deal of interest or energy left to spare for ours. Nick's comment that "I think we just about got away" with it pretty much sums it up.)
The journalism, however, was exhausting. It wasn't just the couple of hours each day it took away from my time at the festival (that being about how long it took me to compose 600 well-crafted words in the inevitable non-optimum conditions), it was the way I felt obliged to do stuff all the time rather than relaxing, just so that I'd have something to blog about -- and, when I was doing said stuff, to take notes about the stuff I was doing rather than just enjoying it.
Apologies to anyone reading this who enjoyed the blogs, but I don't think I'll be doing that again. Greenbelt is pretty much the only opportunity I get to relax and be calm in spiritually nourishing surroundings, and sadly I had precious little of that this year.
Another thing I didn't mention (and it it turns out I could have done, as surefish themselves have a fairly ambivalent review of the event here) were my reservations about the Sunday morning communion. While I do find the diversity (and the sheer number) of those present thoroughly inspiring, one result of it is that the service is always very awkwardly pitched, aiming to appeal to adults of a wide variety of worship backgrounds as well as children and teenagers (an important consideration, since the service generally lasts an hour and a half at least).
This year in particular, the worship group running the thing seemed to be hopelessly out of their depth, inviting the congregation to join them in responses which many present found deeply bizarre. (Much of this was sexual politics, which I'm aware Greenbelt is more keen on than most christian congregations... but still, you don't need to have a particularly dirty mind to be disturbed by someone asking all the children present to shout "Taste our fruits".)
Moreover, their centrepiece, a story written as a myth / parable around this year's festival theme of "Tree of Life", was awful. Badly-written, confusing drivel where overblown metaphors contended in a Darwinian battle for dominance, and -- quite absurdly, given the fantastical nature of the framing narrative -- a ploddingly literal version of Jesus's institution of the tradition of the Holy Communion had been bolted on as crassly as if Tolkien had decided to sample the crucifixion accounts in The Lord of the Rings. I'm no liturgist, but I've written fantasy, and I'm certain I could have come up with something considerably better.
The service also commenced with an unusually beautiful poem by Stewart Henderson, which was thoroughly ruined by being read in the style of an illiterate rap-artist. Argh. As I say, I was in a critical rather than a spiritual state of mind at the time, but even so, I do hope Greenbelt don't use Revive again.
Still, the service as a whole did what it was supposed to do, and I did enjoy the hymns. The fact that I have some negative opinions (that Paul Cornell's unique position in relation to the new series of Doctor Who was under-used in his session, for instance, much of which could have been delivered by any clued-up fan) doesn't mean that the positive stuff wasn't true as well (and Cornell's session was certainly highly entertaining). Despite not being able to relax, I did enjoy the whole experience -- except during the actual writing of the blogs, when I was just frustrated not to be elsewhere doing something else.
My highlights: Karen Armstrong, an intelligent and lucid speaker; Cole Morton and Gareth Higgins on separating faith and church by erasing the secular / spiritual divide; The Proclaimers; the visual art, oustanding, as ever; the beer and food, which really were heavenly. And, obviously, the intangible atmosphere of the whole place.
And next year I'll get time to appreciate it all properly, so hurrah.
My talk itself wasn't too bad in terms of stress -- it was written and polished by the time I arrived, and really it only necessitating taking an hour out that morning to practise, and caffeining and sugaring myself up immediately beforehand (and really, coffee and donuts aren't a very grave hardship). Certainly the buzz which came from realising I'd delivered it well, and kept the audience entertained and interested for an hour, more than made up for the work I put in.
The panel discussion was even less hassle, although I didn't feel it was terribly successful. (No reflection on my fellow panellists, Annie and Conrad, nor indeed to host Nick: there were half a dozen blogging-related events at this year's festival, and I don't think there was a great deal of interest or energy left to spare for ours. Nick's comment that "I think we just about got away" with it pretty much sums it up.)
The journalism, however, was exhausting. It wasn't just the couple of hours each day it took away from my time at the festival (that being about how long it took me to compose 600 well-crafted words in the inevitable non-optimum conditions), it was the way I felt obliged to do stuff all the time rather than relaxing, just so that I'd have something to blog about -- and, when I was doing said stuff, to take notes about the stuff I was doing rather than just enjoying it.
Apologies to anyone reading this who enjoyed the blogs, but I don't think I'll be doing that again. Greenbelt is pretty much the only opportunity I get to relax and be calm in spiritually nourishing surroundings, and sadly I had precious little of that this year.
Another thing I didn't mention (and it it turns out I could have done, as surefish themselves have a fairly ambivalent review of the event here) were my reservations about the Sunday morning communion. While I do find the diversity (and the sheer number) of those present thoroughly inspiring, one result of it is that the service is always very awkwardly pitched, aiming to appeal to adults of a wide variety of worship backgrounds as well as children and teenagers (an important consideration, since the service generally lasts an hour and a half at least).
This year in particular, the worship group running the thing seemed to be hopelessly out of their depth, inviting the congregation to join them in responses which many present found deeply bizarre. (Much of this was sexual politics, which I'm aware Greenbelt is more keen on than most christian congregations... but still, you don't need to have a particularly dirty mind to be disturbed by someone asking all the children present to shout "Taste our fruits".)
Moreover, their centrepiece, a story written as a myth / parable around this year's festival theme of "Tree of Life", was awful. Badly-written, confusing drivel where overblown metaphors contended in a Darwinian battle for dominance, and -- quite absurdly, given the fantastical nature of the framing narrative -- a ploddingly literal version of Jesus's institution of the tradition of the Holy Communion had been bolted on as crassly as if Tolkien had decided to sample the crucifixion accounts in The Lord of the Rings. I'm no liturgist, but I've written fantasy, and I'm certain I could have come up with something considerably better.
The service also commenced with an unusually beautiful poem by Stewart Henderson, which was thoroughly ruined by being read in the style of an illiterate rap-artist. Argh. As I say, I was in a critical rather than a spiritual state of mind at the time, but even so, I do hope Greenbelt don't use Revive again.
Still, the service as a whole did what it was supposed to do, and I did enjoy the hymns. The fact that I have some negative opinions (that Paul Cornell's unique position in relation to the new series of Doctor Who was under-used in his session, for instance, much of which could have been delivered by any clued-up fan) doesn't mean that the positive stuff wasn't true as well (and Cornell's session was certainly highly entertaining). Despite not being able to relax, I did enjoy the whole experience -- except during the actual writing of the blogs, when I was just frustrated not to be elsewhere doing something else.
My highlights: Karen Armstrong, an intelligent and lucid speaker; Cole Morton and Gareth Higgins on separating faith and church by erasing the secular / spiritual divide; The Proclaimers; the visual art, oustanding, as ever; the beer and food, which really were heavenly. And, obviously, the intangible atmosphere of the whole place.
And next year I'll get time to appreciate it all properly, so hurrah.
03 September 2005
Reading List (Update)
I really ought to get round to maintaining a proper online books list somewhere like All Consuming, rather than keeping on posting them here. But I still haven't. So for reference (my own, largely), here's the current list of what would be in my "To Read" pile if I had one (which, being anal about shelving all my books in the proper order at all times, I don't).
As you'll see from the following, I haven't managed to read many of the books I intended to over the summer. Getting through About Time 5 was something of a mammoth haul -- it's looking as if the entire six-volume series is going to weigh in at something like a million words. That's the length of Clute and Nicholls' Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, entirely devoted to Doctor Who. But who needs a sense of proportion when you have cultural investigators of the calibre of Messrs Miles and Wood?
I did manage to get through The Dancers at the End of Time, Warring States, The Time Traveler's Wife, Einstein's Dreams and of course Wildthyme on Top, two of which I'm still intending to post about shortly. Bizarrely, it's only now that I realise that every single one of these is about time-travellers, alternative formulations of time or both, and that most of them have "time" (or "thyme") in the title. I'm not as obsessive as this makes me sound, honestly.
Current reading consists of Short Trips: Seven Deadly Sins (largely for Paul Magrs' Iris Wildthyme story, "Suitors Inc.") and The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, which has somehow become a great deal more difficult since I decided to give up coffee. (Oh yes, I need to post about that at some point too. It's just a temporary thing, with any luck.)
So, here's the revised list (new stuff added since last time in bold):
Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God.
Brian Bates, The Real Middle Earth.
Mark Chadbourn, World's End.
Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum.
William Gibson, Pattern Recognition.
Gwynneth Jones, Bold as Love.
China Miéville, Perdido Street Station.
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas.
Simon Morden, Another War.
Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor.
Christopher Priest, The Space Machine.
Christopher Priest, A Dream of Wessex.
And, once again in the "not sure I can be arsed" category...
Jacqueline Rayner, Winner Takes All.
Gary Russell, Spiral Scratch.
The Morden and the Armstrong were bought at, or arising from, Greenbelt, although the festival bookshop wasn't particularly helpful there. They didn't stock The Battle for God, despite Armstrong's research into fundamentalism being what she was speaking (very interestingly) about; and they very quickly sold out of her more recent book on Islam. Another War they only had in stock because Simon (who spoke on "Christian fiction" and why it's all so awful) had brought along some of his own copies. Stocking Peculiar Lives and Of the City of the Saved... was pretty much out of the question. Never mind.
Some rather more substantial posts about books and stuff should follow over the course of the weekend, with any luck. This past week has all been a bit manic.
As you'll see from the following, I haven't managed to read many of the books I intended to over the summer. Getting through About Time 5 was something of a mammoth haul -- it's looking as if the entire six-volume series is going to weigh in at something like a million words. That's the length of Clute and Nicholls' Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, entirely devoted to Doctor Who. But who needs a sense of proportion when you have cultural investigators of the calibre of Messrs Miles and Wood?
I did manage to get through The Dancers at the End of Time, Warring States, The Time Traveler's Wife, Einstein's Dreams and of course Wildthyme on Top, two of which I'm still intending to post about shortly. Bizarrely, it's only now that I realise that every single one of these is about time-travellers, alternative formulations of time or both, and that most of them have "time" (or "thyme") in the title. I'm not as obsessive as this makes me sound, honestly.
Current reading consists of Short Trips: Seven Deadly Sins (largely for Paul Magrs' Iris Wildthyme story, "Suitors Inc.") and The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, which has somehow become a great deal more difficult since I decided to give up coffee. (Oh yes, I need to post about that at some point too. It's just a temporary thing, with any luck.)
So, here's the revised list (new stuff added since last time in bold):
Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God.
Brian Bates, The Real Middle Earth.
Mark Chadbourn, World's End.
Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum.
William Gibson, Pattern Recognition.
Gwynneth Jones, Bold as Love.
China Miéville, Perdido Street Station.
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas.
Simon Morden, Another War.
Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor.
Christopher Priest, The Space Machine.
Christopher Priest, A Dream of Wessex.
And, once again in the "not sure I can be arsed" category...
Jacqueline Rayner, Winner Takes All.
Gary Russell, Spiral Scratch.
The Morden and the Armstrong were bought at, or arising from, Greenbelt, although the festival bookshop wasn't particularly helpful there. They didn't stock The Battle for God, despite Armstrong's research into fundamentalism being what she was speaking (very interestingly) about; and they very quickly sold out of her more recent book on Islam. Another War they only had in stock because Simon (who spoke on "Christian fiction" and why it's all so awful) had brought along some of his own copies. Stocking Peculiar Lives and Of the City of the Saved... was pretty much out of the question. Never mind.
Some rather more substantial posts about books and stuff should follow over the course of the weekend, with any luck. This past week has all been a bit manic.
31 August 2005
Lives Again
Another pleasingly enthusiastic review of Peculiar Lives has surfaced at Science Fiction Crowsnest (NB: You may encounter popups at the site). I must start collecting these links on a webpage.
29 August 2005
Normal Service...
...certainly isn't going to be resumed tonight. But it should be later in the week, with any luck.
Apologies to all my regular readers for the relentlessly God-bothering tone of this blog as of late. As you'll have gathered, the Greenbelt christian arts festival has been rather occupying my attention: now that I'm back this shouldn't be the case for much longer, at least until August next year. If you want to know what I did and how it was, then follow the links below -- but if you do, then you probably already have.
(For those of you who can't be bothered, the talk went very well. It was crowded out, in fact, with some 260 attendees. Doctor Who is a very big draw this year. [Edit: Full transcripts should be going up on the web at some point, and with luck Greenbelt will eventually be selling recordings of the event itself.])
I will at some point be producing a post about the festival generally, saying the things I couldn't really say whilst writing on behalf of surefish.co.uk -- but otherwise Peculiar Times should shortly be returning to its regular round of political and philosophical rumination, literary and televisual criticism, random autobiographical maunderings, unhealthy speculation about Nicole Kidman and gratuitous plugs for my books. How lucky you all are.
I have (at least) one reading-related post in particular which I really must write at some point soon, covering among other things The Time Traveler's Wife, Einstein's Dreams and the first quarter of The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction.
It's going to have to wait, though, because currently I am, quite honestly, absolutely bloody knackered. And I'm enrolling students again tomorrow morning.
Apologies to all my regular readers for the relentlessly God-bothering tone of this blog as of late. As you'll have gathered, the Greenbelt christian arts festival has been rather occupying my attention: now that I'm back this shouldn't be the case for much longer, at least until August next year. If you want to know what I did and how it was, then follow the links below -- but if you do, then you probably already have.
(For those of you who can't be bothered, the talk went very well. It was crowded out, in fact, with some 260 attendees. Doctor Who is a very big draw this year. [Edit: Full transcripts should be going up on the web at some point, and with luck Greenbelt will eventually be selling recordings of the event itself.])
I will at some point be producing a post about the festival generally, saying the things I couldn't really say whilst writing on behalf of surefish.co.uk -- but otherwise Peculiar Times should shortly be returning to its regular round of political and philosophical rumination, literary and televisual criticism, random autobiographical maunderings, unhealthy speculation about Nicole Kidman and gratuitous plugs for my books. How lucky you all are.
I have (at least) one reading-related post in particular which I really must write at some point soon, covering among other things The Time Traveler's Wife, Einstein's Dreams and the first quarter of The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction.
It's going to have to wait, though, because currently I am, quite honestly, absolutely bloody knackered. And I'm enrolling students again tomorrow morning.
26 August 2005
Greetings
Just a brief pre-emptive welcome to anybody who visits this blog over the weekend of Greenbelt 2005, either as a result of my appearances at Between the Lines or via my festival blog for surefish (to which, unless anything radically unexpected happens, my next post here should link).
So. Hello. Welcome to Peculiar Times. [Shuffles awkwardly.]
Please feel free to read, to browse the archives and links (especially to my homepage, where there's lots of stuff relating to my published fiction), and to leave comments if you so wish.
While I write this I am, in no particular order:
1. Trying desperately to research blogging and blog theory as preparation for the panel discussion in Between the Lines on Sunday at 6pm. (Technorati is proving helpful in this respect.)
2. Looking forward eagerly to my arrival at Greenbelt in roughly eleven hours' time, and to the subsequent festivities.
3. Supposedly (as in "supposed by my employers to be") working as a librarian. (No, really, I've just catalogued a book. Later on I'll be enrolling new students and issuing them with library cards.)
Greenbelt is, I'm sure, going to be wonderful -- the only issue being, as ever, how to divide one's time between the hectic mix of arts, seminars, worship and social interaction that's on offer. (The last of these has to remain unlubricated by decent beer, sadly -- not that Greenbelt's "dry" these days, just that the beer at the Cheltenham Racecourse bar is legendarily indecent.)
[STOP PRESS EDIT: I am informed by a reliable correspondent that this year there is, in fact, a Real Ale Marquee! And Richard Dawkins insists there's no such thing as a miracle...]
But if you're reading this as one of the people I welcomed above, you know exactly how wonderful it is, because you've been there already -- or, if you're particularly keen and net-addicted, are there right now.
I hope you're enjoying it as much as I intend to, and I look forward to seeing you there.
So. Hello. Welcome to Peculiar Times. [Shuffles awkwardly.]
Please feel free to read, to browse the archives and links (especially to my homepage, where there's lots of stuff relating to my published fiction), and to leave comments if you so wish.
While I write this I am, in no particular order:
1. Trying desperately to research blogging and blog theory as preparation for the panel discussion in Between the Lines on Sunday at 6pm. (Technorati is proving helpful in this respect.)
2. Looking forward eagerly to my arrival at Greenbelt in roughly eleven hours' time, and to the subsequent festivities.
3. Supposedly (as in "supposed by my employers to be") working as a librarian. (No, really, I've just catalogued a book. Later on I'll be enrolling new students and issuing them with library cards.)
Greenbelt is, I'm sure, going to be wonderful -- the only issue being, as ever, how to divide one's time between the hectic mix of arts, seminars, worship and social interaction that's on offer. (The last of these has to remain unlubricated by decent beer, sadly -- not that Greenbelt's "dry" these days, just that the beer at the Cheltenham Racecourse bar is legendarily indecent.)
[STOP PRESS EDIT: I am informed by a reliable correspondent that this year there is, in fact, a Real Ale Marquee! And Richard Dawkins insists there's no such thing as a miracle...]
But if you're reading this as one of the people I welcomed above, you know exactly how wonderful it is, because you've been there already -- or, if you're particularly keen and net-addicted, are there right now.
I hope you're enjoying it as much as I intend to, and I look forward to seeing you there.
23 August 2005
Festival Flapping
My Greenbelt talk is still way too long. I think I'm going to have to cut references to the original series of Doctor Who down to a sixty-second mention, just to remind people that there was such a thing. Even then there's some decent material on the new series that I'm going to have to drop.
It's frustrating that the original plan, of doing one session on Old and one on New Who, had to be ditched. Admittedly it forces me to be ruthless, which is good -- but so far I've been struggling to get through my practice runs in 50 minutes, which (taking into account shuffling-in-and-out time for the audience) leaves no time at all for questions at the end.
It seems that the venue has shifted location this year, away from the central "Festival Village" area and into the fringes of the campsite, apparently along with several of the other seminar venues. Supposedly this is part of a general scheme to try to prevent talks being disrupted by loud music and / or D.J.ing from the other venues, which is in itself a pretty good idea, as that's often been pretty distracting for audiences and speakers alike. Whether the new configuration results in the seminars being less well-attended remains to be seen, but it's probably worth trying for the one year at least.
I'm looking forward hugely to this year's festival, although this is tempered by having to be back at work for the next three days (and therefore being unable to arrive in Cheltenham until mid-evening on Friday, grr). For some reason the upper echelons at St Brad's are of the opinion that making students come and enrol the moment their G.C.S.E. results arrive, will give the college a competitive edge... rather than, as seems rather more realistic, pissing off all their prospective registrants royally.
It certainly pisses off their staff, many of whom feel quite strongly that they should be entitled to have the time up to the August Bank Holiday off, even if they were expected back straight afterwards. And, as I've said before, this summer holiday has been hopelessly unproductive as far as writing's gone, to the extent that even getting the talk written feels like something of a triumph. So I'm actually feeling rather annoyed and unfulfilled, except when actively looking forward to Greenbelt.
Still, never mind. The weekend will, I'm sure, be fab, intensive workload and all.
I may not get the chance to update here again before I go, in which case the next things you'll see here will be the links I'll be putting up to my three-day festival blog at surefish. Enjoy.
It's frustrating that the original plan, of doing one session on Old and one on New Who, had to be ditched. Admittedly it forces me to be ruthless, which is good -- but so far I've been struggling to get through my practice runs in 50 minutes, which (taking into account shuffling-in-and-out time for the audience) leaves no time at all for questions at the end.
It seems that the venue has shifted location this year, away from the central "Festival Village" area and into the fringes of the campsite, apparently along with several of the other seminar venues. Supposedly this is part of a general scheme to try to prevent talks being disrupted by loud music and / or D.J.ing from the other venues, which is in itself a pretty good idea, as that's often been pretty distracting for audiences and speakers alike. Whether the new configuration results in the seminars being less well-attended remains to be seen, but it's probably worth trying for the one year at least.
I'm looking forward hugely to this year's festival, although this is tempered by having to be back at work for the next three days (and therefore being unable to arrive in Cheltenham until mid-evening on Friday, grr). For some reason the upper echelons at St Brad's are of the opinion that making students come and enrol the moment their G.C.S.E. results arrive, will give the college a competitive edge... rather than, as seems rather more realistic, pissing off all their prospective registrants royally.
It certainly pisses off their staff, many of whom feel quite strongly that they should be entitled to have the time up to the August Bank Holiday off, even if they were expected back straight afterwards. And, as I've said before, this summer holiday has been hopelessly unproductive as far as writing's gone, to the extent that even getting the talk written feels like something of a triumph. So I'm actually feeling rather annoyed and unfulfilled, except when actively looking forward to Greenbelt.
Still, never mind. The weekend will, I'm sure, be fab, intensive workload and all.
I may not get the chance to update here again before I go, in which case the next things you'll see here will be the links I'll be putting up to my three-day festival blog at surefish. Enjoy.
Lives in Review
Richard McGinlay at Sci-Fi Online provides the first proper review of Peculiar Lives, excluding those written for mailing lists or bulletin boards.
(If I were one to quibble I might say that there's more of an engagement with relatively trivial details, and less with the actual story, than I'd ideally be keen on... but for obvious reasons, it's not the done thing to review one's own reviews. McGinlay is complimentary about the novella, and that is very pleasing indeed.)
(If I were one to quibble I might say that there's more of an engagement with relatively trivial details, and less with the actual story, than I'd ideally be keen on... but for obvious reasons, it's not the done thing to review one's own reviews. McGinlay is complimentary about the novella, and that is very pleasing indeed.)
21 August 2005
Blog Cabin
B. and I spent most of yesterday building one of these:
...and then eating one of these as a reward. (We chose the "Sun". Mm, halloumi.)
The Greenbelt talk is coming together reasonably nicely, now. Unfortunately there's a lack of people to practise it at -- my usual test audience, R. and M., are waiting for me to lend them the videos of 2005 Doctor Who before they'll actually know what I'm talking about.
This means that a week tomorrow will be the first time I've stood up to deliver it to anybody other than B. and the cats, which is mildly terrifying. Still, never mind.
I also need to do some proper research for Sunday's panel discussion on Blogging, which is kind of intimidating as well. Does anyone have recommendations for the following, all of which I need to read some of at some point:
1. Some interesting and/or high-profile Christian and/or literary blogs?
2. Sites which go rather more into the cultural (and preferably not too much of the technical) theory of blogging -- in terms of history, current trends, ethics, politics and the like?
Any suggestions gratefully received.
...and then eating one of these as a reward. (We chose the "Sun". Mm, halloumi.)The Greenbelt talk is coming together reasonably nicely, now. Unfortunately there's a lack of people to practise it at -- my usual test audience, R. and M., are waiting for me to lend them the videos of 2005 Doctor Who before they'll actually know what I'm talking about.
This means that a week tomorrow will be the first time I've stood up to deliver it to anybody other than B. and the cats, which is mildly terrifying. Still, never mind.
I also need to do some proper research for Sunday's panel discussion on Blogging, which is kind of intimidating as well. Does anyone have recommendations for the following, all of which I need to read some of at some point:
1. Some interesting and/or high-profile Christian and/or literary blogs?
2. Sites which go rather more into the cultural (and preferably not too much of the technical) theory of blogging -- in terms of history, current trends, ethics, politics and the like?
Any suggestions gratefully received.
19 August 2005
In Other News...
...It seems as if I'll be even busier at Greenbelt than previously announced. In addition to writing a daily blog for surefish (don't worry, I'll link to it from here), they'll also be running an article to tie in with my talk about (all together now) The Spirituality of Doctor Who. Those pieces will probably be going up on this page, so keep your eyes peeled over the Bank Holiday weekend.
If you're going to be at Greenbelt, you'll be able to see me actually delivering the talk at 1pm on Monday 29 August at Between the Lines: with luck a full transcript will materialise eventually to join last years' talks here. If you'd like to hear me and a panel of other self-appoitned experts, wittering on about blogging, then you'll need to be at the same venue at 6pm on the Sunday -- coincidentally, two hours before the venue shows Greenbelt speaker Paul Cornell's Doctor Who episode Father's Day.
In other other news, my hardback copies of Peculiar Lives arrived from Telos yesterday, and are really rather nice. The cover is dark blue, with a textured leather effect (not real leather, obviously) and there's a ribbon bookmark, adding to the whole elderly-book feel. These publishers take real care over, and pride in, the physical appearances of all their books, and with these hardback editions it really shows.
If you're still considering whether or not to buy the novella, whether in hardback or paperback, then don't forget that a sample chapter of the novella is being hosted online at Outpost Gallifrey. Read it before you shell out (and then shell out, obviously).
Now that the hardbacks are out, and following the release of Wildthyme on Top, the only fiction of mine that currently remains to be released is "The Long Midwinter" in Short Trips: The History of Christmas. Whether anything further will have been announced by the time that comes out remains to be seen... but frankly, I seem to be suffering from a certain amount of creative burnout just at the moment. The past month has been the least productive time-off-work I've had for years, and I've had to put a couple of hopeful-looking projects on the back-burner from sheer lack of ability to proceed with them.
I'm thinking I might take a bit of a sabbatical after Greenbelt, and spend two or three months without trying to write creatively at all. The hope is that depriving myself of the opportunity to follow through on my ideas will immediately result in a plethora of them presenting themselves, all of which I can jot down and save for later, when I can return to work refreshed and reinvigorated. This, at least, is the theory.
If you're going to be at Greenbelt, you'll be able to see me actually delivering the talk at 1pm on Monday 29 August at Between the Lines: with luck a full transcript will materialise eventually to join last years' talks here. If you'd like to hear me and a panel of other self-appoitned experts, wittering on about blogging, then you'll need to be at the same venue at 6pm on the Sunday -- coincidentally, two hours before the venue shows Greenbelt speaker Paul Cornell's Doctor Who episode Father's Day.
In other other news, my hardback copies of Peculiar Lives arrived from Telos yesterday, and are really rather nice. The cover is dark blue, with a textured leather effect (not real leather, obviously) and there's a ribbon bookmark, adding to the whole elderly-book feel. These publishers take real care over, and pride in, the physical appearances of all their books, and with these hardback editions it really shows.
If you're still considering whether or not to buy the novella, whether in hardback or paperback, then don't forget that a sample chapter of the novella is being hosted online at Outpost Gallifrey. Read it before you shell out (and then shell out, obviously).
Now that the hardbacks are out, and following the release of Wildthyme on Top, the only fiction of mine that currently remains to be released is "The Long Midwinter" in Short Trips: The History of Christmas. Whether anything further will have been announced by the time that comes out remains to be seen... but frankly, I seem to be suffering from a certain amount of creative burnout just at the moment. The past month has been the least productive time-off-work I've had for years, and I've had to put a couple of hopeful-looking projects on the back-burner from sheer lack of ability to proceed with them.
I'm thinking I might take a bit of a sabbatical after Greenbelt, and spend two or three months without trying to write creatively at all. The hope is that depriving myself of the opportunity to follow through on my ideas will immediately result in a plethora of them presenting themselves, all of which I can jot down and save for later, when I can return to work refreshed and reinvigorated. This, at least, is the theory.
Don't Mention the Waugh
It's important I complete my epic write-up of last weekend's festivities before it all falls out of my head. As my fourth decade progresses, I find myself forgetting things remarkably easily -- I used to retain information without even trying, often without even wanting to at all, and now it's a real struggle. It's tragic really.
...Where was I?
Right. Yes. The Oxford reunion weekend -- and specifically, the DougSoc reunion weekend, which means that it wasn't terribly much like the floppy-haired cricket-whited unrequited Weltschmertzfest that the phrase "Oxford reunion weekend" suggests.
(To be honest, Oxford in the 1990s wasn't a particularly Brideshead place anyway -- except for a few unrequited-floppy-cricket types who insisted on perceiving it as such, and who for fairly obvious reasons tended to congregate around Christ Church, which as ill luck would have it was my college. I didn't tend to spend much time there.)
Anyway. Last weekend was well-attended, with some thirty or more DougSoccers, accompanied by partners and in two cases infant offspring, partaking of traditional activities ably organised by Silk and Pete, to whom enormous thanks are due.
Festivities began at Saturday lunchtime with a grimly determined picnic in the University Parks. This eventually succumbed to the inevitable downpour, and we decamped to The Lamb and Flag[1], one of the many highly decent real ale pubs in Oxford (and the only one, I believe I'm right in saying, which has its own dedicated beer, Lamb and Flag Gold, although it's not brewed on the premises).
After this we resorted to The Bear, the traditional starting-point for the now internationally-renowned DougSoc Role-Playing Pub Crawls. (Historically the reason for this has been the extensive outside seating, which is of course useless in a downpour. We crowded out the sweaty, steamy interior instead.) Enormous kudos points are due to Pete at this point for creating an all-new pub crawl (which hopefully will be getting archived at some point) -- a hugely ambitious crossover between the Hitchhiker, Prisoner, Sandman and Doctor Who universes.
The original DougSoc Doctor Who pub crawl (not archived) was called The Claws of Time and featured yours truly as the Master (bwa-ha-ha). The Doctor Who elements in this updated version were naturally based around the 2005 series, and pubgoers were given the parts of the Doctor, Rose, Captain Jack, Margaret the Slitheen (played by B.) and The Editor (played by me -- I'm evidently typecast. It's the beard, I think.) We were sent on a schedule from pub to pub, drinking and interacting in character with each other, and more surreally with characters from the other fictional universes.
All of which was enormous fun, even if it did involve wandering around in the rain (and visiting The Turl, which has gone enormously downhill and where the only remotely drinkable beer was Guinness[2]. For completeness' sake, the other pubs where I was sent were The St Aldate's Tavern -- formerly known as The Hobgoblin, and prior to that The Bulldog -- and the splendidly-named The Three Goat's Heads.)
After which we all went for a nice Italian meal, then to the Oscar Wilde Room in Magdalen College for your classic booze-up-with-comedy-sketches event. Booze consisted of beer, wine, Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters[3] and all the usual; comedy consisted of recycled Cruel and Unusual Punishment sketches, along with some other usual suspects like Fry and Laurie. A massively good time was had by pretty much all, although the children and most of their parents had vanished by this point.
Attempts to play Mao were abortive as far as most of us were concerned, since the (otherwise highly impressive and efficient) organisers had failed to take into account the need for playing-cards and the players had to trek back to someone's house. Plus it was late, and a lot of us lost our all-night-partying student stamina long ago, so went to bed instead. (B. and I slept at her old college, St Hilda's, which has a very nice S.C.R. guest room and rather less impressive cooked breakfasts.)
Sunday morning saw the most Bridesheadish activity of the whole weekend. I didn't partake of the punting, having a pathological dislike of any activity which stands a chance of resulting in any part of me being submerged in filthy river-water. Instead I wandered around the bookshops kindly provided by the entrepreneurs of Oxford for the purpose, and picked up a copy of the Hugo-Award-winning Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, which I'm looking forward to reading even as we speak.
I met up with the others for lunch at Magdalen College bar, after which we lounged around in Christ Church Meadow before in some cases progressing to the very best of Oxford's fine real ale pubs, The Turf Tavern, for a final round of beer before making our ways to our various homes.
The whole thing was generally a fantastic time, with the opportunity to catch up with some people I haven't seen for a very long time and many others who I don't see nearly often enough.
Plus beautiful surroundings, nice beer, good food, fun activities and, naturally, the universe going "foom". What more could one ask?
[1] Pub reviews courtesy of Colin, for nostalgic reasons, and therefore very likely several years out of date.
[2] A short history of Phil's drinking preferences over the years, for those of you whose curiosity was piqued by the tobacco rant:
1985 to 1990ish (aged 14 to 18) -- Pimm's and lemonade (the first thing I ever got drunk on). Dry Blackthorn or Woodpecker cider. Martini and lemonade, Bacardi and Coke. Lambrusco.
1990ish to 1999ish (aged 18 to 27 -- the Oxford years, frustratingly enough) -- Guinness and other then-mainstream stouts such as Murphy's and Beamish. Occasional mass-produced ales like Caffrey's. Tastes in wine becoming more acceptable, moving quickly from white to dogmatically red, with an exception made for retsina. Spirit consumption limited to ouzo and vodka, except at drunken parties when pretty much anything would do (see [3] below).
1999ish to the present (aged 27 to 33) -- Sudden discovery of real ale and consequent reformatting of the palate. Favourite beers now too numerous to name. Still ignorant about wine, but I know what I like and it's definitely not white. Not at all averse to a decent single malt whisky, either.
[3] The historic DougSoc recipe for a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster: take 2 parts Blue Curaçao to 2 parts vodka, 1 part tequila and 1 part rum. (In practice, just take 2 parts Curaçao to 4 of anything that pours.) Mix in a large mixing-bowl. Add orange juice in much larger quantities until the mixture is an opaque green colour. Slosh in a little of anything else that looks like it might be interesting, then ladle out to all comers. Garnish with a slice of aubergine (optional).
...Where was I?
Right. Yes. The Oxford reunion weekend -- and specifically, the DougSoc reunion weekend, which means that it wasn't terribly much like the floppy-haired cricket-whited unrequited Weltschmertzfest that the phrase "Oxford reunion weekend" suggests.
(To be honest, Oxford in the 1990s wasn't a particularly Brideshead place anyway -- except for a few unrequited-floppy-cricket types who insisted on perceiving it as such, and who for fairly obvious reasons tended to congregate around Christ Church, which as ill luck would have it was my college. I didn't tend to spend much time there.)
Anyway. Last weekend was well-attended, with some thirty or more DougSoccers, accompanied by partners and in two cases infant offspring, partaking of traditional activities ably organised by Silk and Pete, to whom enormous thanks are due.
Festivities began at Saturday lunchtime with a grimly determined picnic in the University Parks. This eventually succumbed to the inevitable downpour, and we decamped to The Lamb and Flag[1], one of the many highly decent real ale pubs in Oxford (and the only one, I believe I'm right in saying, which has its own dedicated beer, Lamb and Flag Gold, although it's not brewed on the premises).
After this we resorted to The Bear, the traditional starting-point for the now internationally-renowned DougSoc Role-Playing Pub Crawls. (Historically the reason for this has been the extensive outside seating, which is of course useless in a downpour. We crowded out the sweaty, steamy interior instead.) Enormous kudos points are due to Pete at this point for creating an all-new pub crawl (which hopefully will be getting archived at some point) -- a hugely ambitious crossover between the Hitchhiker, Prisoner, Sandman and Doctor Who universes.
The original DougSoc Doctor Who pub crawl (not archived) was called The Claws of Time and featured yours truly as the Master (bwa-ha-ha). The Doctor Who elements in this updated version were naturally based around the 2005 series, and pubgoers were given the parts of the Doctor, Rose, Captain Jack, Margaret the Slitheen (played by B.) and The Editor (played by me -- I'm evidently typecast. It's the beard, I think.) We were sent on a schedule from pub to pub, drinking and interacting in character with each other, and more surreally with characters from the other fictional universes.
All of which was enormous fun, even if it did involve wandering around in the rain (and visiting The Turl, which has gone enormously downhill and where the only remotely drinkable beer was Guinness[2]. For completeness' sake, the other pubs where I was sent were The St Aldate's Tavern -- formerly known as The Hobgoblin, and prior to that The Bulldog -- and the splendidly-named The Three Goat's Heads.)
After which we all went for a nice Italian meal, then to the Oscar Wilde Room in Magdalen College for your classic booze-up-with-comedy-sketches event. Booze consisted of beer, wine, Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters[3] and all the usual; comedy consisted of recycled Cruel and Unusual Punishment sketches, along with some other usual suspects like Fry and Laurie. A massively good time was had by pretty much all, although the children and most of their parents had vanished by this point.
Attempts to play Mao were abortive as far as most of us were concerned, since the (otherwise highly impressive and efficient) organisers had failed to take into account the need for playing-cards and the players had to trek back to someone's house. Plus it was late, and a lot of us lost our all-night-partying student stamina long ago, so went to bed instead. (B. and I slept at her old college, St Hilda's, which has a very nice S.C.R. guest room and rather less impressive cooked breakfasts.)
Sunday morning saw the most Bridesheadish activity of the whole weekend. I didn't partake of the punting, having a pathological dislike of any activity which stands a chance of resulting in any part of me being submerged in filthy river-water. Instead I wandered around the bookshops kindly provided by the entrepreneurs of Oxford for the purpose, and picked up a copy of the Hugo-Award-winning Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, which I'm looking forward to reading even as we speak.
I met up with the others for lunch at Magdalen College bar, after which we lounged around in Christ Church Meadow before in some cases progressing to the very best of Oxford's fine real ale pubs, The Turf Tavern, for a final round of beer before making our ways to our various homes.
The whole thing was generally a fantastic time, with the opportunity to catch up with some people I haven't seen for a very long time and many others who I don't see nearly often enough.
Plus beautiful surroundings, nice beer, good food, fun activities and, naturally, the universe going "foom". What more could one ask?
[1] Pub reviews courtesy of Colin, for nostalgic reasons, and therefore very likely several years out of date.
[2] A short history of Phil's drinking preferences over the years, for those of you whose curiosity was piqued by the tobacco rant:
1985 to 1990ish (aged 14 to 18) -- Pimm's and lemonade (the first thing I ever got drunk on). Dry Blackthorn or Woodpecker cider. Martini and lemonade, Bacardi and Coke. Lambrusco.
1990ish to 1999ish (aged 18 to 27 -- the Oxford years, frustratingly enough) -- Guinness and other then-mainstream stouts such as Murphy's and Beamish. Occasional mass-produced ales like Caffrey's. Tastes in wine becoming more acceptable, moving quickly from white to dogmatically red, with an exception made for retsina. Spirit consumption limited to ouzo and vodka, except at drunken parties when pretty much anything would do (see [3] below).
1999ish to the present (aged 27 to 33) -- Sudden discovery of real ale and consequent reformatting of the palate. Favourite beers now too numerous to name. Still ignorant about wine, but I know what I like and it's definitely not white. Not at all averse to a decent single malt whisky, either.
[3] The historic DougSoc recipe for a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster: take 2 parts Blue Curaçao to 2 parts vodka, 1 part tequila and 1 part rum. (In practice, just take 2 parts Curaçao to 4 of anything that pours.) Mix in a large mixing-bowl. Add orange juice in much larger quantities until the mixture is an opaque green colour. Slosh in a little of anything else that looks like it might be interesting, then ladle out to all comers. Garnish with a slice of aubergine (optional).
17 August 2005
Ad Nauseam
Every time I see or hear a mention[1] of the revolting British supermarket chain Asda (now a subsidiary of the much larger revolting U.S. supermarket chain Wal-Mart), their advertising jingle starts playing in my head. You know, the one they used to use in those incredibly cheesy T.V. adverts which would end with someone patting their back pocket in time with the jingle, to show how much spare change they had left after doing their shopping there. The one which they used to play over and over and over and over and over again on their stores' P.A. systems, before some international agreement or other on the use of psychological torture was invoked to stop them.
Is this an example of effective marketing?
Bear in mind when formulating your answer that as a direct result of the above I loathe Asda with a violent, psychotic passion, and that if a branch of it were the last grocery shop left on Earth, I would not only prefer to starve to death than to do my shopping there, but wouldn't intervene to prevent it burning down if it contained the final bar of chocolate in existence.
[1] Don't bother following that link, it's not very interesting. Just the springboard for a rant.
Is this an example of effective marketing?
Bear in mind when formulating your answer that as a direct result of the above I loathe Asda with a violent, psychotic passion, and that if a branch of it were the last grocery shop left on Earth, I would not only prefer to starve to death than to do my shopping there, but wouldn't intervene to prevent it burning down if it contained the final bar of chocolate in existence.
[1] Don't bother following that link, it's not very interesting. Just the springboard for a rant.
15 August 2005
Image Consciousness
The weekend in Oxford was very fantastic indeed, and I will be describing it at length.For the moment, though, here's an experiment on my part in using Blogger's new picture-uploading facility. The photo, of a shop named Honey's on the High Street, exists courtesy of my fellow DougSoccer Alex and illustrates what a peculiar place Oxford is. There can't be many cities in the U.K. where a newsagent would pick on this specific publication as their primary selling-point.
Give Me Nicotine or Give Me Death
I'm pretty much entirely not a smoker. As a student I flirted with cigarettes, largely out of curiosity; but having established to my satisfaction that neither the flavour nor the high was fun enough to justify the considerable expense -- and, crucially, that smoking didn't make me look cool enough that girls were more likely go to bed with me -- I gave up on it.
These days the only tobacco I taste takes the form of a cigar on special occasions: weddings, usually, or when friends are celebrating the successful functioning of their reproductive equipment.
So the direct effect on my life of what, apparently, two-thirds of M.P.s want -- a total ban on smoking in pubs -- would be negligible. But the effect on British pub culture would be devastating, and that's something I do feel I have a stake in. As a member of CAMRA I'm entitled to pontificate about such things, at extreme length if necessary, whilst resting a full-to-the brim pint on the upper surface of my belly. So...
If the Government bans smoking in pubs, as many voters seem to want them to do, then pubs will at a stroke become less inclusive, friendly and welcoming. Students, old men with dogs and a fair number of affluent professionals will suddenly find it vastly preferable to go to a private members' club, or more depressingly to consume their fags and beer at home. Drinking in streets and parks, which the Government also frowns on, will certainly increase.
Under the legislation the Government is actually proposing, whereby it's only pubs which sell food where the ban will be observed, publicans will be obliged to decide whether they'd prefer to alienate the smokers or the eaters among their clientele. Whatever happens, pubs are going to go out of business -- and you can bet it's not going to be the ones with the financial backing of mainstream breweries or big McPubCo chains.
I understand the health benefits, just as I understand that... oh Lord, just fill in your favourite statistic about traffic accidents or marijuana or whatever. But speaking for myself, I would very much prefer to be considered an adult, capable of making an informed decision as to whether or not the risk of entering a mildly nicotine-laced atmosphere is worth the benefit of the nice beer I might find therein, than a mindless work-drone who requires to have all freedom of choice removed by governmental edict so that the difficulty of making a decision won't destabilise his brain, thus compromising his value to the state.
And as for those of us who actually aren't adults... well.
I'm honestly in favour of pubs accommodating families by providing, say, non-smoking rooms, outside tables and the like. I'm very glad to be able to go to pubs and have a drink with those of my friends who have, as previously mentioned, successfully undergone the parturitive process.
But a pub is, essentially, a social space for adults: this is its core function. The fact that many such establishments will also admit children is an additional benefit -- an optional extra which, at present, a reasonable number of them choose to offer. Myself, I didn't set foot in a pub until I was old enough (in my own estimation, if not that of the Government) to have a drink there, and I certainly didn't expect everyone else there to conform to what was at the time my fanatical disapproval of tobacco, any more than I expected them to share my taste for Dry Blackthorn cider.
Now that I'm older, I'm honestly very pleased that the opportunity exists for me to go to pubs and have a pleasant pint with those of my friends who have elected to become parents. And yet I would, in an ideal world, also like not to be deprived of the opportunity to go to pubs with those of my friends who are smokers -- and, if it seems appropriate, to eat a meal there with them -- without them moaning all the bloody time.
Is that really such an indefensible position?
These days the only tobacco I taste takes the form of a cigar on special occasions: weddings, usually, or when friends are celebrating the successful functioning of their reproductive equipment.
So the direct effect on my life of what, apparently, two-thirds of M.P.s want -- a total ban on smoking in pubs -- would be negligible. But the effect on British pub culture would be devastating, and that's something I do feel I have a stake in. As a member of CAMRA I'm entitled to pontificate about such things, at extreme length if necessary, whilst resting a full-to-the brim pint on the upper surface of my belly. So...
If the Government bans smoking in pubs, as many voters seem to want them to do, then pubs will at a stroke become less inclusive, friendly and welcoming. Students, old men with dogs and a fair number of affluent professionals will suddenly find it vastly preferable to go to a private members' club, or more depressingly to consume their fags and beer at home. Drinking in streets and parks, which the Government also frowns on, will certainly increase.
Under the legislation the Government is actually proposing, whereby it's only pubs which sell food where the ban will be observed, publicans will be obliged to decide whether they'd prefer to alienate the smokers or the eaters among their clientele. Whatever happens, pubs are going to go out of business -- and you can bet it's not going to be the ones with the financial backing of mainstream breweries or big McPubCo chains.
I understand the health benefits, just as I understand that... oh Lord, just fill in your favourite statistic about traffic accidents or marijuana or whatever. But speaking for myself, I would very much prefer to be considered an adult, capable of making an informed decision as to whether or not the risk of entering a mildly nicotine-laced atmosphere is worth the benefit of the nice beer I might find therein, than a mindless work-drone who requires to have all freedom of choice removed by governmental edict so that the difficulty of making a decision won't destabilise his brain, thus compromising his value to the state.
And as for those of us who actually aren't adults... well.
I'm honestly in favour of pubs accommodating families by providing, say, non-smoking rooms, outside tables and the like. I'm very glad to be able to go to pubs and have a drink with those of my friends who have, as previously mentioned, successfully undergone the parturitive process.
But a pub is, essentially, a social space for adults: this is its core function. The fact that many such establishments will also admit children is an additional benefit -- an optional extra which, at present, a reasonable number of them choose to offer. Myself, I didn't set foot in a pub until I was old enough (in my own estimation, if not that of the Government) to have a drink there, and I certainly didn't expect everyone else there to conform to what was at the time my fanatical disapproval of tobacco, any more than I expected them to share my taste for Dry Blackthorn cider.
Now that I'm older, I'm honestly very pleased that the opportunity exists for me to go to pubs and have a pleasant pint with those of my friends who have elected to become parents. And yet I would, in an ideal world, also like not to be deprived of the opportunity to go to pubs with those of my friends who are smokers -- and, if it seems appropriate, to eat a meal there with them -- without them moaning all the bloody time.
Is that really such an indefensible position?
12 August 2005
Lost, Not In Space
I watched the double-length pilot episode of Lost last night. At present I haven't read any spoilers for the series whatosever, so the following is a reaction to it completely in isolation. I don't imagine I'll be able to keep that up for long, though, so here, for the record, are those initial thoughts...
The interpersonal drama was all a bit dull and predictable, I thought, except for the odd behaviour of Daniel Dae Kim's character and the revelation that it's the bird-who-fancies-the-doctor who was actually the prisoner on the plane. The young-blonde-in-denial was becoming particularly irritating towards the end. This was compounded by the fact that hardly anybody's name seemed to be spoken, so that one was thinking of them as "the vaguely muslim-looking guy", "the sinister old guy", "the token fat guy" and so on.
Perhaps this is meant to make them seem more archetypal, though. Perhaps.
Furthermore, the setup is enormously contrived -- the plane being so comprehensively smashed up, while so many passengers and their luggage survive; the pilot surviving for long enough to hand out vital information; the menacing sounds in the woods; even the inevitable "one of us is not to be trusted" dynamic.
Charitably, it seems to me that there's going to turn out to be a reason for this (although probably not for the clichéd behaviour of the characters themselves). Perhaps it's having read a Guardian article which compares the series's premise with that of the reality show Survivor, but I couldn't help thinking -- even before the polar bear turned up -- that this was not a "real" environment. I don't imagine that it's actually a virtual reality, but it seems pretty clear that someone is stage-managing everything. (Either that or all the above is just a symptom of poor writing.)
So far we have a wreck on an isolated island due to bad weather, and the revelation of another plane-crash sixteen years earlier. Plus, of course, an invisible monster in the undergrowth, which is probably intended to make us think of The Lost World, but put an altogether different association in my head.
So -- would I be going out on a limb if I suggested that future episodes may just possibly throw up an elderly castaway and his sixteen-year-old daughter living on the island? (It isn't clear at this point, incidentally, whether the sinister backgammon-playing old man was actually a passenger on the flight.) The only question is whether this character's mastery over the local environment -- which will naturally turn out to be responsible for both the plane-crash and the monster -- will derive from books of magic or giant banks of ancient alien machinery, and whether his sidekick will be an aery spirit or a cute robot.
So, the situation is intriguing, and possibly archetypal 'n' that, but the actual drama is, so far, bordering on the banal. Plus the English guy is rubbish. Perhaps I've been spoiled recently with watching proper quality drama like The West Wing and Firefly, but I'm not entirely sure Lost is going to keep my attention for long enough to deliver on its promise.
The interpersonal drama was all a bit dull and predictable, I thought, except for the odd behaviour of Daniel Dae Kim's character and the revelation that it's the bird-who-fancies-the-doctor who was actually the prisoner on the plane. The young-blonde-in-denial was becoming particularly irritating towards the end. This was compounded by the fact that hardly anybody's name seemed to be spoken, so that one was thinking of them as "the vaguely muslim-looking guy", "the sinister old guy", "the token fat guy" and so on.
Perhaps this is meant to make them seem more archetypal, though. Perhaps.
Furthermore, the setup is enormously contrived -- the plane being so comprehensively smashed up, while so many passengers and their luggage survive; the pilot surviving for long enough to hand out vital information; the menacing sounds in the woods; even the inevitable "one of us is not to be trusted" dynamic.
Charitably, it seems to me that there's going to turn out to be a reason for this (although probably not for the clichéd behaviour of the characters themselves). Perhaps it's having read a Guardian article which compares the series's premise with that of the reality show Survivor, but I couldn't help thinking -- even before the polar bear turned up -- that this was not a "real" environment. I don't imagine that it's actually a virtual reality, but it seems pretty clear that someone is stage-managing everything. (Either that or all the above is just a symptom of poor writing.)
So far we have a wreck on an isolated island due to bad weather, and the revelation of another plane-crash sixteen years earlier. Plus, of course, an invisible monster in the undergrowth, which is probably intended to make us think of The Lost World, but put an altogether different association in my head.
So -- would I be going out on a limb if I suggested that future episodes may just possibly throw up an elderly castaway and his sixteen-year-old daughter living on the island? (It isn't clear at this point, incidentally, whether the sinister backgammon-playing old man was actually a passenger on the flight.) The only question is whether this character's mastery over the local environment -- which will naturally turn out to be responsible for both the plane-crash and the monster -- will derive from books of magic or giant banks of ancient alien machinery, and whether his sidekick will be an aery spirit or a cute robot.
So, the situation is intriguing, and possibly archetypal 'n' that, but the actual drama is, so far, bordering on the banal. Plus the English guy is rubbish. Perhaps I've been spoiled recently with watching proper quality drama like The West Wing and Firefly, but I'm not entirely sure Lost is going to keep my attention for long enough to deliver on its promise.
09 August 2005
Inn Transit
Sorry about the reduced posting rate on this blog recently. I have been frantically trying to get work done, and to a very great extent failing, but in a manner which is taking up most of my time and creativity. Argh.
The Greenbelt talk is largely "written" now, but will need extensive practice to turn it from notes into something that's actually deliverable, and the other things I've been trying to do are in various half-formed stages. I have, however, found the time to give lots of constructive help and advice to other people about their creative projects. www.infinitarian.com, for all your displacement-activity needs.
Things I actually have done recently have included a very nice weekend in London, attending B.'s much-delayed birthday pub crawl. A spurious narrative justification based on Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next novels meant that everyone was invited to come as a character from 19th-century literature, so that the denizens of Southwark, Borough and environs were treated to the sight of -- among others -- Bill Sykes, Lorna Doone, Jane Eyre, Doctors Jekyll and Van Helsing, a slightly out-of-period Leopold Bloom and a rather impressive Bride of Dracula, all wandering around getting increasingly plastered and arguing about where to eat.
B. had arranged some particularly fiendish clues to direct us between venues, which for easily-guessed reasons became subjectively more difficult as the evening progressed. I drank lots of very pleasant beers in lots of very pleasant pubs with lots of very pleasant people, and saw more Londonian backstreets than I have in a long while. I also had time for a brief trip to the Tate Modern in the morning.
Next weekend we'll be attending the equally exciting, and even longer awaited, reunion of the Oxford University Douglas Adams Society, where we plan to revive some fine old DougSoc traditions including role playing pubcrawls, partying where Oscar Wilde used to live and playing Mao, and which therefore promises to be fun on a stick. Watch this space for a full report.
The Greenbelt talk is largely "written" now, but will need extensive practice to turn it from notes into something that's actually deliverable, and the other things I've been trying to do are in various half-formed stages. I have, however, found the time to give lots of constructive help and advice to other people about their creative projects. www.infinitarian.com, for all your displacement-activity needs.
Things I actually have done recently have included a very nice weekend in London, attending B.'s much-delayed birthday pub crawl. A spurious narrative justification based on Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next novels meant that everyone was invited to come as a character from 19th-century literature, so that the denizens of Southwark, Borough and environs were treated to the sight of -- among others -- Bill Sykes, Lorna Doone, Jane Eyre, Doctors Jekyll and Van Helsing, a slightly out-of-period Leopold Bloom and a rather impressive Bride of Dracula, all wandering around getting increasingly plastered and arguing about where to eat.
B. had arranged some particularly fiendish clues to direct us between venues, which for easily-guessed reasons became subjectively more difficult as the evening progressed. I drank lots of very pleasant beers in lots of very pleasant pubs with lots of very pleasant people, and saw more Londonian backstreets than I have in a long while. I also had time for a brief trip to the Tate Modern in the morning.
Next weekend we'll be attending the equally exciting, and even longer awaited, reunion of the Oxford University Douglas Adams Society, where we plan to revive some fine old DougSoc traditions including role playing pubcrawls, partying where Oscar Wilde used to live and playing Mao, and which therefore promises to be fun on a stick. Watch this space for a full report.
05 August 2005
Greenbelt Update
This year's Greenbelt is beginning to look rather busy. Early evidence suggests that in addition to my talk on The Spirituality of Doctor Who -- which, incidentally, I should be writing at this very moment -- I'll be participating in (but fortunately not chairing) a panel discussion on blogging. (Both of these sessions are at the Between the Lines venue -- see here for their full programme.) If you're at the festival and coming along to either session, do come and say "Hi" to me afterwards.
Greenbelt appears intent on elevating me as some kind of Christian Blog Guru, as I'll also be blogging from the site on behalf of surefish.co.uk, the web-magazine run by Christian Aid's internet-provider subsidiary. The relevant entries -- summaries of my day-by-day experiences at the festival on Saturday, Sunday and Monday -- will be going up at the surefish site, but I'll naturally be linking to them from here. Since this effectively means that I get paid for doing something I'd be hoping to get round to doing anyway, it gets a big thumbs-up from me.
It does mean, though, that Greenbelt 2005 is going to be substantially less restful than usual for me. I think I may take next year off, and spend my Bank Holiday weekend relaxing instead.
Greenbelt appears intent on elevating me as some kind of Christian Blog Guru, as I'll also be blogging from the site on behalf of surefish.co.uk, the web-magazine run by Christian Aid's internet-provider subsidiary. The relevant entries -- summaries of my day-by-day experiences at the festival on Saturday, Sunday and Monday -- will be going up at the surefish site, but I'll naturally be linking to them from here. Since this effectively means that I get paid for doing something I'd be hoping to get round to doing anyway, it gets a big thumbs-up from me.
It does mean, though, that Greenbelt 2005 is going to be substantially less restful than usual for me. I think I may take next year off, and spend my Bank Holiday weekend relaxing instead.
30 July 2005
Three Cheers for Iris
I recently finished reading Wildthyme on Top, and overall it's rather fine -- not flawless, but enormously enjoyable.
I'm not going to review all the stories, because that would be far too much effort, and would also run up rather obviously against my complete inability to be objective about a volume I appear in. But one fascinating aspect of the volume is to see how different authors' takes on the same batty, cheerfully self-centred time-traveller can be. Wisely, Paul Magrs hasn't attempted to force them into consistency together, so that the individual interpretations shine through clearly.
Two of my favourite stories in the book are extreme in their differences. Craig Hinton's "Came to Believe" is the very personal tale of Barry, an alcoholic whom Iris helps through his early days in rehab. It's emotionally the most powerful story in the book, just edging out Jon Blum's finale (which I'll come to shortly). The only metafictional element is that Barry is a writer, and in the story Iris is entirely sincere and effectual in what she does.
Lance Parkin's "The Mancunian Candidate", by contrast, is rooted in Iris's habit of barging in on other characters' fictional universes, and relies on her being far too lazy to solve even the most transparent mystery. It's probably the funniest story in the book, being a satire on children's fantasy and the Narnia books in particular, full of metafictional pyrotechnics and political irony, and with a splendidly nasty final twist.
I also particularly enjoyed Stephen Cole's "Beguine" -- a story in the style of Paul Magrs' mainstream fiction, which dances cleverly between future dystopia, horror and a rather touching love story -- and Jon Blum's "The Evil Little Mother and the Tragic Old Bat", a fascinating study of fictional archetypes and the real people who underlie them, whose ending provides the volume with its perfect finale.
It's a shame that Paul Magrs wasn't able to contribute a story himself, but I found Wildthyme on Top fascinating to read, and so should you.
And having said that, I'm going to shut up about it.
I'm not going to review all the stories, because that would be far too much effort, and would also run up rather obviously against my complete inability to be objective about a volume I appear in. But one fascinating aspect of the volume is to see how different authors' takes on the same batty, cheerfully self-centred time-traveller can be. Wisely, Paul Magrs hasn't attempted to force them into consistency together, so that the individual interpretations shine through clearly.
Two of my favourite stories in the book are extreme in their differences. Craig Hinton's "Came to Believe" is the very personal tale of Barry, an alcoholic whom Iris helps through his early days in rehab. It's emotionally the most powerful story in the book, just edging out Jon Blum's finale (which I'll come to shortly). The only metafictional element is that Barry is a writer, and in the story Iris is entirely sincere and effectual in what she does.
Lance Parkin's "The Mancunian Candidate", by contrast, is rooted in Iris's habit of barging in on other characters' fictional universes, and relies on her being far too lazy to solve even the most transparent mystery. It's probably the funniest story in the book, being a satire on children's fantasy and the Narnia books in particular, full of metafictional pyrotechnics and political irony, and with a splendidly nasty final twist.
I also particularly enjoyed Stephen Cole's "Beguine" -- a story in the style of Paul Magrs' mainstream fiction, which dances cleverly between future dystopia, horror and a rather touching love story -- and Jon Blum's "The Evil Little Mother and the Tragic Old Bat", a fascinating study of fictional archetypes and the real people who underlie them, whose ending provides the volume with its perfect finale.
It's a shame that Paul Magrs wasn't able to contribute a story himself, but I found Wildthyme on Top fascinating to read, and so should you.
And having said that, I'm going to shut up about it.
28 July 2005
Live and Let Diet
So, then. This diet I mentioned, way back in April. I'm well aware of how dull diet blogs can get, so I've been avoiding mentioning it generally, but I do feel the need for a quick self-congratulatory indulgence.
You see, it's going really well -- rather more so for me than for B., but I think it's a truth universally acknowledged that when men can be arsed to diet the weight loss comes easier for us than it does for women.
The plan, as you may recall, was to eat seven equally-spaced meals of roughly 200 calories each throughout the day, meaning that we never felt unbearably hungry, and that if we got up feeling unsatisfied from a particular meal, well, at least we were going to be getting another one in two or three hours' time.
Also to get a lot of exercise, which we haven't quite managed.
But as for the eating we've been, for the most part, remarkably disciplined -- so much so that when the weather started getting hot we cut back from seven to six snacks, allowing ourselves two a day of 250 rather than 200 calories, to make up a fairly strict weight-loss regime of 1300 calories per diem.
And, fantastically, it works. I certainly miss the satisfying feeling of having my stomach stretched by a large and heavy meal, but the marvellous thing is that -- within reason -- one can eat any food as long as it's in appropriately small quantities. A small glass of port and a thinnish slice of a really good cheese, for instance, is around 200 calories, as is a snack-sized Snickers bar, or half a pint of beer and half a packet of crisps. There are very few things that it's impractical to eat in sufficiently tiny quantities.
When I started the diet I was, frankly, fat. I weighed in at something over 14 stone -- I'm not exactly sure how much over, because I'd found it too alarming to check for quite a while. Since then, I've lost at least a seventh of my body-weight, and am now, if not exactly thin, certainly pretty trim at 12 stone.
This, I feel bound to point out, is a hell of a difference. My mother certainly thought so when I went home for my brother's wedding -- and if pleasing one's mother shouldn't really be what life is all about, it's certainly a happy bonus. All my trousers are now far too large, I've had to put extra holes in my belt, and my XL T-shirts hang like baggy shrouds about my skeletal frame.
I still have a bit of a paunch, which I want to lose. This, along with uxorial solidarity, is why I'm still sticking to the diet. It's looking, though, as if further weight loss is going to have to come through exercise, which will probably be a lot less enjoyable.
Still -- not bad going so far, eh?
You see, it's going really well -- rather more so for me than for B., but I think it's a truth universally acknowledged that when men can be arsed to diet the weight loss comes easier for us than it does for women.
The plan, as you may recall, was to eat seven equally-spaced meals of roughly 200 calories each throughout the day, meaning that we never felt unbearably hungry, and that if we got up feeling unsatisfied from a particular meal, well, at least we were going to be getting another one in two or three hours' time.
Also to get a lot of exercise, which we haven't quite managed.
But as for the eating we've been, for the most part, remarkably disciplined -- so much so that when the weather started getting hot we cut back from seven to six snacks, allowing ourselves two a day of 250 rather than 200 calories, to make up a fairly strict weight-loss regime of 1300 calories per diem.
And, fantastically, it works. I certainly miss the satisfying feeling of having my stomach stretched by a large and heavy meal, but the marvellous thing is that -- within reason -- one can eat any food as long as it's in appropriately small quantities. A small glass of port and a thinnish slice of a really good cheese, for instance, is around 200 calories, as is a snack-sized Snickers bar, or half a pint of beer and half a packet of crisps. There are very few things that it's impractical to eat in sufficiently tiny quantities.
When I started the diet I was, frankly, fat. I weighed in at something over 14 stone -- I'm not exactly sure how much over, because I'd found it too alarming to check for quite a while. Since then, I've lost at least a seventh of my body-weight, and am now, if not exactly thin, certainly pretty trim at 12 stone.
This, I feel bound to point out, is a hell of a difference. My mother certainly thought so when I went home for my brother's wedding -- and if pleasing one's mother shouldn't really be what life is all about, it's certainly a happy bonus. All my trousers are now far too large, I've had to put extra holes in my belt, and my XL T-shirts hang like baggy shrouds about my skeletal frame.
I still have a bit of a paunch, which I want to lose. This, along with uxorial solidarity, is why I'm still sticking to the diet. It's looking, though, as if further weight loss is going to have to come through exercise, which will probably be a lot less enjoyable.
Still -- not bad going so far, eh?
27 July 2005
Annoyingly,
I'm having a frustratingly unproductive week, despite the number of things I've been hoping to get done. I always seem to need a stupidly long run-up to get working properly during the college holidays, which is infuriating as I know I'll be longing for this much available time once term has started again.
So far I seem to have mostly spent the time posting to Doctor Who mailing lists, although a portion of that is arguably productive towards my Greenbelt talk. (I may update Parrinium Mines shortly with some insights from my recent all-day Christopher Eccleton marathon. [Edit: Now done.]) The only concrete thing I've achieved is to finish the synopsis for Ossian's Reach, which could be a stormingly good S.F. novel if I ever manage to get off my bottom and sell it to somebody.
I have, however, managed to replace my scooter -- and what's more, the bike in question is still outside the house six days later (I keep checking). The replacement's another Sym CityTrek, that being the scooter I'm used to driving. I have no interest in getting used to something else at this point -- I suppose sooner or later they'll stop making them and I'll have to learn to work a new model, but I'm not looking forward to it.
(It's actually very reliable, with well-designed controls. I had to drive a Piaggio Zip for a couple of months once, and the controls were terrible -- it was difficult to indicate and apply the rear brake simulataneously, for instance, which was predictably hilarious when trying to turn a corner.)
I ought to attempt a books / media update at some point soon, too -- I'm still very much enjoying Warring States and Wildthyme on Top, and B. and I recently rounded off our watching of Twin Peaks with a viewing of Fire Walk With Me (so that all makes sense to us now, obviously). I've also re-watched the disturbing but rather fine millennial dystopia Strange Days, and the amazing I ♥ Huckabees, both of which deserve comment.
I also want to bore you all about my diet. So, treats in store there.
So far I seem to have mostly spent the time posting to Doctor Who mailing lists, although a portion of that is arguably productive towards my Greenbelt talk. (I may update Parrinium Mines shortly with some insights from my recent all-day Christopher Eccleton marathon. [Edit: Now done.]) The only concrete thing I've achieved is to finish the synopsis for Ossian's Reach, which could be a stormingly good S.F. novel if I ever manage to get off my bottom and sell it to somebody.
I have, however, managed to replace my scooter -- and what's more, the bike in question is still outside the house six days later (I keep checking). The replacement's another Sym CityTrek, that being the scooter I'm used to driving. I have no interest in getting used to something else at this point -- I suppose sooner or later they'll stop making them and I'll have to learn to work a new model, but I'm not looking forward to it.
(It's actually very reliable, with well-designed controls. I had to drive a Piaggio Zip for a couple of months once, and the controls were terrible -- it was difficult to indicate and apply the rear brake simulataneously, for instance, which was predictably hilarious when trying to turn a corner.)
I ought to attempt a books / media update at some point soon, too -- I'm still very much enjoying Warring States and Wildthyme on Top, and B. and I recently rounded off our watching of Twin Peaks with a viewing of Fire Walk With Me (so that all makes sense to us now, obviously). I've also re-watched the disturbing but rather fine millennial dystopia Strange Days, and the amazing I ♥ Huckabees, both of which deserve comment.
I also want to bore you all about my diet. So, treats in store there.
21 July 2005
Chapter House
Just a quickie, because I have to go out and buy a replacement moped.
Outpost Gallifrey is now hosting a sample chapter of Peculiar Lives online, in its Features section. It's sub-chapter I.1, the first after the Foreword, where Emily encounters Violet for the first time. (The Outpost version retains the policeman's usage of the n-word, which I wasn't sure it was going to.)
So, if you've not yet decided whether Peculiar Lives is the sort of thing you might want to buy (for instance through this Amazon link), then this would seem an ideal opportunity to find out.
Outpost Gallifrey is now hosting a sample chapter of Peculiar Lives online, in its Features section. It's sub-chapter I.1, the first after the Foreword, where Emily encounters Violet for the first time. (The Outpost version retains the policeman's usage of the n-word, which I wasn't sure it was going to.)
So, if you've not yet decided whether Peculiar Lives is the sort of thing you might want to buy (for instance through this Amazon link), then this would seem an ideal opportunity to find out.
20 July 2005
It Came From Planet X-Mas
Well, I guess this counts as an official announcement. The Editor informs me that the story's also carried in this month's Doctor Who Magazine. So...
My short story, "The Long Midwinter", will be published along with 24 others in Short Trips: The History of Christmas, this December's Doctor Who anthology from Big Finish. The volume is edited by Simon Guerrier (the owner of the blog linked to above, who published me previously in A Life Worth Living), and has some marvellous authors writing for it, including Kate Orman, Jon Blum, Marc Platt and Simon Bucher-Jones.
My story has, as the overall title suggests, a Christmas theme, despite being set on another world millions of years in the future. It's the nearest I've yet come to hard S.F. (although to be honest it's not very near), and like "Minions of the Moon" it's a bit of a worldbuilding spree [Weltbauenfest]. It's also a modest milestone for me -- as a fan if not a writer -- as it's my first piece of licensed Doctor Who fiction.
Available details at present are [Edit: entirely forthcoming, actually, so I'll set up a web page of my own here. I'll try to come up with a story blurb at some point soon.]
Go on, though, order a copy. It'll make a splendid Christmas present.
My short story, "The Long Midwinter", will be published along with 24 others in Short Trips: The History of Christmas, this December's Doctor Who anthology from Big Finish. The volume is edited by Simon Guerrier (the owner of the blog linked to above, who published me previously in A Life Worth Living), and has some marvellous authors writing for it, including Kate Orman, Jon Blum, Marc Platt and Simon Bucher-Jones.
My story has, as the overall title suggests, a Christmas theme, despite being set on another world millions of years in the future. It's the nearest I've yet come to hard S.F. (although to be honest it's not very near), and like "Minions of the Moon" it's a bit of a worldbuilding spree [Weltbauenfest]. It's also a modest milestone for me -- as a fan if not a writer -- as it's my first piece of licensed Doctor Who fiction.
Available details at present are [Edit: entirely forthcoming, actually, so I'll set up a web page of my own here. I'll try to come up with a story blurb at some point soon.]
Go on, though, order a copy. It'll make a splendid Christmas present.
19 July 2005
Wildthyme On Arrival
Hurrah!
My contributor's copies of Wildthyme on Top arrived this morning, necessitating my answering the door to the postman in my pyjamas. (Fortunately, my summer pyjamas look enough like [a very weird person's idea of] summer daywear for this not to be too embarrassing, provided I check the status of the fly beforehand. You didn't need to know that, sorry.)
The book is very lovely indeed -- the cover looks even better in situ, and promises good things for the Big Finish New Worlds range as a professional-looking line of small-press S.F. books. I've not had time to read much of it yet, aside from Paul Magrs's wonderful but sadly brief Preface (which is really less a preface than a scene-setting vignette) -- but I'm really looking forward to seeing what the volume's other authors have made of one of my favourite fictional time-travellers.
To celebrate the book's arrival, I've updated my web page with an "Extra" that may also interest Faction Paradox fans: the proposal for "Iris Wildthyme in the City of the Saved", a novel I pitched to Big Finish back in 2001 when it seemed possible that the company would be bringing out a series of regular Iris Wildthyme novels to accompany their Bernice Summerfield line. It is, in retrospect, not enormously good, and the plot ended up being cannibalised for The Book of the War and to a lesser extent Of the City of the Saved... ...but it was my first attempt to develop the concept of the City at any length (as well as my first attempt to write professionally for Iris), and may therefore be of historical interest.
I'm aware that I may have rather over-hyped Wildthyme on Top here, by expressing my own enthusiasm (and, at times, impatience) for the project to you all. I hope I haven't engendered overly high expectations, in myself or anybody else... but stuff Harry Potter, I'm really, really looking forward to reading Iris.
(That said, I'm about halfway through Warring States now, and it's fab. Mags has a real knack for setting, conjuring up a vivid, detailed historical world. This must be so much more difficult to do than pulling a completely new setting out of one's own head, since at every stage there's the requirement to be accurate rather than to invent any old detail which happens to fit. I'm not at all sure I could manage it, so much kudos to Ms Halliday for carrying it off so effortlessly.)
My contributor's copies of Wildthyme on Top arrived this morning, necessitating my answering the door to the postman in my pyjamas. (Fortunately, my summer pyjamas look enough like [a very weird person's idea of] summer daywear for this not to be too embarrassing, provided I check the status of the fly beforehand. You didn't need to know that, sorry.)
The book is very lovely indeed -- the cover looks even better in situ, and promises good things for the Big Finish New Worlds range as a professional-looking line of small-press S.F. books. I've not had time to read much of it yet, aside from Paul Magrs's wonderful but sadly brief Preface (which is really less a preface than a scene-setting vignette) -- but I'm really looking forward to seeing what the volume's other authors have made of one of my favourite fictional time-travellers.
To celebrate the book's arrival, I've updated my web page with an "Extra" that may also interest Faction Paradox fans: the proposal for "Iris Wildthyme in the City of the Saved", a novel I pitched to Big Finish back in 2001 when it seemed possible that the company would be bringing out a series of regular Iris Wildthyme novels to accompany their Bernice Summerfield line. It is, in retrospect, not enormously good, and the plot ended up being cannibalised for The Book of the War and to a lesser extent Of the City of the Saved... ...but it was my first attempt to develop the concept of the City at any length (as well as my first attempt to write professionally for Iris), and may therefore be of historical interest.
I'm aware that I may have rather over-hyped Wildthyme on Top here, by expressing my own enthusiasm (and, at times, impatience) for the project to you all. I hope I haven't engendered overly high expectations, in myself or anybody else... but stuff Harry Potter, I'm really, really looking forward to reading Iris.
(That said, I'm about halfway through Warring States now, and it's fab. Mags has a real knack for setting, conjuring up a vivid, detailed historical world. This must be so much more difficult to do than pulling a completely new setting out of one's own head, since at every stage there's the requirement to be accurate rather than to invent any old detail which happens to fit. I'm not at all sure I could manage it, so much kudos to Ms Halliday for carrying it off so effortlessly.)
17 July 2005
Summer is Icumen In
Until Friday, despite having been an adolescent male in Britain post-1973, I'd never seen The Wicker Man. One of the things I did during my Day Off was to remedy this deficit.
It's bloody good, isn't it? And I don't just mean Britt Ekland's erotic dancing. There are a great many "cult" films, particularly from the 70s, which turn out on actual viewing to have been almost completely pants. But The Wicker Man is excellent, combining an intelligent and lucid script with cleverly ominous direction and mostly fine performances (particularly from Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee). Even the songs are fantastic. (Has anyone ever turned it into a West End musical? Why on earth not? If they can do it for The Witches of Eastwick, then this one seems a natural.)
I don't know anything about Anthony Shaffer's other work -- I've never seen or read Sleuth, for instance -- but I studied his twin brother Peter Shaffer's plays as an undergraduate, and I was struck by the similarity. Peter Shaffer's work is notable for its use of music and pageant (see Amadeus and The Royal Hunt of the Sun respectively), and for its awareness of drama as ritual, including its use in religious liturgy and psychotherapy (see particularly Equus). The same kind of sensibility permeates The Wicker Man.
I suspect that most modern neo-pagans find the film either hilarious or deeply offensive (depending on where on the po spectrum their faces happen to reside), but I thought the drama's analysis and use of the trappings of ancient paganisms was extremely well done, particularly in its drawing of the parallels as well as the contradictions between paganism and christianity. I was impressed, too, with the sympathetic treatment of the straitlaced Sgt Howie, who despite the repressiveness of his views is seen as a good man striving to do the right thing. I was particularly pleased to see his faith survive his martyrdom intact -- it would have been so easy, and so cheap, to show it falling apart as soon as he was certain of his death. (I don't hold out much hope for the Hollywood remake in that regard, sadly.)
I have only three reservations, and they're all fairly minor:
1. It's very short -- not even an hour and a half. If the film was running under-length, surely some additional footage of -- for instance -- Britt Ekland dancing naked whilst singing in an extremely sexy Scottish accent could have been found to pad it out a bit[1]?
2. Aubrey Morris, who's beginning to become something of a bête noir of mine. He's fine in rôles which require gurning, fruity-voiced theatricality (the Town Crier in The Prisoner, for example), but such rôles do not -- unless written by Shakespeare -- include rural gravediggers. (He was ludicrous in Babylon 5, as well.)
3. The ending -- not the wonderfully bleak martyrdom scene, but the revelation that Lord Summerisle and the islanders have been working to entrap Howie from the beginning, and thus that the whole trail which led him to Rowan Morrison and the sacrificial ritual was a false one. It's straight from the school of seventies paranoia which brought us, well, The Prisoner for a start, but it tends to cheapen the rigour of what's gone before. One presumes that the islanders' rituals as witnessed by Howie are genuine, but ultimately the only reason to believe that is that Summerisle seems like the kind of man who'd be honest about his religion even while deceiving somebody. The film would work better if we were more certain at the end of what we'd seen.
Overall though, a damn good film, and one I'm already feeling the urge to watch again. There's scope for a fantastic prequel, as well (probably scuppered by the remake, but never mind), starring the current incarnation of Christopher Lee as the first Lord Summerisle, the Victorian patriarch and freethinker, introducing his pagan religion to the island in the 1860s. The 1970s Summerisle tells Howie that the island's minister ended up leaving for the mainland, but I can't help suspecting that that may have been a euphemism for something rather more... festive.
[1] Yes, yes, I know it's not actually her singing. Or dancing either, apparently. It's her most famous scene, and she's hardly in it... but nevertheless, my point stands. If you'll forgive my mentioning the fact.
It's bloody good, isn't it? And I don't just mean Britt Ekland's erotic dancing. There are a great many "cult" films, particularly from the 70s, which turn out on actual viewing to have been almost completely pants. But The Wicker Man is excellent, combining an intelligent and lucid script with cleverly ominous direction and mostly fine performances (particularly from Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee). Even the songs are fantastic. (Has anyone ever turned it into a West End musical? Why on earth not? If they can do it for The Witches of Eastwick, then this one seems a natural.)
I don't know anything about Anthony Shaffer's other work -- I've never seen or read Sleuth, for instance -- but I studied his twin brother Peter Shaffer's plays as an undergraduate, and I was struck by the similarity. Peter Shaffer's work is notable for its use of music and pageant (see Amadeus and The Royal Hunt of the Sun respectively), and for its awareness of drama as ritual, including its use in religious liturgy and psychotherapy (see particularly Equus). The same kind of sensibility permeates The Wicker Man.
I suspect that most modern neo-pagans find the film either hilarious or deeply offensive (depending on where on the po spectrum their faces happen to reside), but I thought the drama's analysis and use of the trappings of ancient paganisms was extremely well done, particularly in its drawing of the parallels as well as the contradictions between paganism and christianity. I was impressed, too, with the sympathetic treatment of the straitlaced Sgt Howie, who despite the repressiveness of his views is seen as a good man striving to do the right thing. I was particularly pleased to see his faith survive his martyrdom intact -- it would have been so easy, and so cheap, to show it falling apart as soon as he was certain of his death. (I don't hold out much hope for the Hollywood remake in that regard, sadly.)
I have only three reservations, and they're all fairly minor:
1. It's very short -- not even an hour and a half. If the film was running under-length, surely some additional footage of -- for instance -- Britt Ekland dancing naked whilst singing in an extremely sexy Scottish accent could have been found to pad it out a bit[1]?
2. Aubrey Morris, who's beginning to become something of a bête noir of mine. He's fine in rôles which require gurning, fruity-voiced theatricality (the Town Crier in The Prisoner, for example), but such rôles do not -- unless written by Shakespeare -- include rural gravediggers. (He was ludicrous in Babylon 5, as well.)
3. The ending -- not the wonderfully bleak martyrdom scene, but the revelation that Lord Summerisle and the islanders have been working to entrap Howie from the beginning, and thus that the whole trail which led him to Rowan Morrison and the sacrificial ritual was a false one. It's straight from the school of seventies paranoia which brought us, well, The Prisoner for a start, but it tends to cheapen the rigour of what's gone before. One presumes that the islanders' rituals as witnessed by Howie are genuine, but ultimately the only reason to believe that is that Summerisle seems like the kind of man who'd be honest about his religion even while deceiving somebody. The film would work better if we were more certain at the end of what we'd seen.
Overall though, a damn good film, and one I'm already feeling the urge to watch again. There's scope for a fantastic prequel, as well (probably scuppered by the remake, but never mind), starring the current incarnation of Christopher Lee as the first Lord Summerisle, the Victorian patriarch and freethinker, introducing his pagan religion to the island in the 1860s. The 1970s Summerisle tells Howie that the island's minister ended up leaving for the mainland, but I can't help suspecting that that may have been a euphemism for something rather more... festive.
[1] Yes, yes, I know it's not actually her singing. Or dancing either, apparently. It's her most famous scene, and she's hardly in it... but nevertheless, my point stands. If you'll forgive my mentioning the fact.
14 July 2005
Ms Wildthyme and Mr Carnelian (and others)
I've now finished both Michael Moorcock's The Dancers at the End of Time and --by dint of dedication and extensive train commuting -- Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.
Dancers was exceedingly good. It pulls off the remarkably difficult trick, endemic to far-future narratives which take their futures seriously, of making the characters sympathetic and human whilst still showing them so changed by time that many aspects of their characters are alien to us. (Other books which manage it well are Brian Aldiss' Hothouse and Bruce Sterling's not-that-far-in-the-future-actually Schismatrix) There's much about the inhabitants of Moorcock's End of Time which is unfamiliar, from their easy and direct control over matter to their disturbing indifference in the face of oncoming catastrophe; and yet their naivete, their joie-de-vivre and their eclectic inventiveness makes them seem richly, warmly human -- particularly, of course, in the case of the protagonist, Jherek Carnelian.
Even more impressively, Moorcock uses this setting and protagonist as the basis for a love story which is both convincing and touching, with its own pains and setbacks and, eventually, joys -- despite the fact that one of the characters involved is a native of the End of Time and the other (the magnificently characterised Mrs Amelia Underwood) a strait-laced Victorian, two mindsets which are equally alien to his readers. (I suspect that this works in part because Jherek and Amelia represent two contrary sets of impulses, towards licentiousness and self-denial, which are implicit in various concentrations in everybody.)
My only reservation is that I rather wish I'd read the three volumes (An Alien Heat, The Hollow Lands and The End of All Songs,) separately, rather than as a collected edition: the unvarying tone and relative lack of incident (until around the middle of the third volume, when the world ends suddenly) did start to get a little wearing after a while. It is, of course, a remarkable accomplishment to portray a decadent society motivated largely by ennui without provoking just such an emotion in the reader, but I don't think the single-volume publication serves the material well in that respect.
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell I was less impressed by, overall. There were some lovely ideas in it, including interesting demonstrations of the methodology of magic, the underplayed alternative-history angle (whereby Northern England was ruled by a faerie-changeling king from the eleventh to fifteenth centuries) and (although the deployment of period language was a bit hit-and-miss) the rather well-done Regency setting.
The story itself, perhaps because of its conscious indebtedness to fairy-tale and folklore, was very simple, which makes it a slightly odd decision to have written the book at such considerable length -- it might have been better suited to the smaller size of (for instance) Neil Gaiman's Stardust than to its 782 pages. This makes the majority of the (actually very full) narrative seem like an accumulation of largely disconnected episodes, although the characters and places about which they cluster do come together rather perfunctorily towards the end.
The style, too, is simple, although with some gorgeous turns of phrase. I think I would have preferred a more consistent attempt to recreate the language of the era (Clarke largely confines herself to occasional orthographical oddities like "surprize" and "chuse"), but that's perhaps just me. It was a pretty good book, but I'm not sure it warrants the glowing praise it's been receiving.
Just after I disembarked from the train on which I'd finally finished Strange & Norrell, wondering what I should read next, I came home to find my copy of Mags L. Halliday's Warring States sitting on the floor by the letter-box. Just as excitingly, there are now reports of subscribers actually receiving Wildthyme on Top. Both of these (assuming Wildthyme gets to me soon) bump everything on this list from the next-reading spot.
So... just one chapter into Warring States so far, but the vivid description of an era and culture (1900s China) which is only nebulously familiar to me is already looking very good.
Dancers was exceedingly good. It pulls off the remarkably difficult trick, endemic to far-future narratives which take their futures seriously, of making the characters sympathetic and human whilst still showing them so changed by time that many aspects of their characters are alien to us. (Other books which manage it well are Brian Aldiss' Hothouse and Bruce Sterling's not-that-far-in-the-future-actually Schismatrix) There's much about the inhabitants of Moorcock's End of Time which is unfamiliar, from their easy and direct control over matter to their disturbing indifference in the face of oncoming catastrophe; and yet their naivete, their joie-de-vivre and their eclectic inventiveness makes them seem richly, warmly human -- particularly, of course, in the case of the protagonist, Jherek Carnelian.
Even more impressively, Moorcock uses this setting and protagonist as the basis for a love story which is both convincing and touching, with its own pains and setbacks and, eventually, joys -- despite the fact that one of the characters involved is a native of the End of Time and the other (the magnificently characterised Mrs Amelia Underwood) a strait-laced Victorian, two mindsets which are equally alien to his readers. (I suspect that this works in part because Jherek and Amelia represent two contrary sets of impulses, towards licentiousness and self-denial, which are implicit in various concentrations in everybody.)
My only reservation is that I rather wish I'd read the three volumes (An Alien Heat, The Hollow Lands and The End of All Songs,) separately, rather than as a collected edition: the unvarying tone and relative lack of incident (until around the middle of the third volume, when the world ends suddenly) did start to get a little wearing after a while. It is, of course, a remarkable accomplishment to portray a decadent society motivated largely by ennui without provoking just such an emotion in the reader, but I don't think the single-volume publication serves the material well in that respect.
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell I was less impressed by, overall. There were some lovely ideas in it, including interesting demonstrations of the methodology of magic, the underplayed alternative-history angle (whereby Northern England was ruled by a faerie-changeling king from the eleventh to fifteenth centuries) and (although the deployment of period language was a bit hit-and-miss) the rather well-done Regency setting.
The story itself, perhaps because of its conscious indebtedness to fairy-tale and folklore, was very simple, which makes it a slightly odd decision to have written the book at such considerable length -- it might have been better suited to the smaller size of (for instance) Neil Gaiman's Stardust than to its 782 pages. This makes the majority of the (actually very full) narrative seem like an accumulation of largely disconnected episodes, although the characters and places about which they cluster do come together rather perfunctorily towards the end.
The style, too, is simple, although with some gorgeous turns of phrase. I think I would have preferred a more consistent attempt to recreate the language of the era (Clarke largely confines herself to occasional orthographical oddities like "surprize" and "chuse"), but that's perhaps just me. It was a pretty good book, but I'm not sure it warrants the glowing praise it's been receiving.
Just after I disembarked from the train on which I'd finally finished Strange & Norrell, wondering what I should read next, I came home to find my copy of Mags L. Halliday's Warring States sitting on the floor by the letter-box. Just as excitingly, there are now reports of subscribers actually receiving Wildthyme on Top. Both of these (assuming Wildthyme gets to me soon) bump everything on this list from the next-reading spot.
So... just one chapter into Warring States so far, but the vivid description of an era and culture (1900s China) which is only nebulously familiar to me is already looking very good.
If You Can't Stand the Noise, Get Out of the Library
Last day of term today. There are builders inside the library, drilling things.
Yesterday we had a student charity concert going on directly outside our windows -- which, of course, we couldn't have closed unless we wanted to go down with heat stroke. Fortunately most of the students were at the concert, rather than trying to use the library. I heard it all from the enquiry desk: most of the student bands were delivering generic and rather awful rap, but one -- a girl with an amazing voice -- did a torch-song rendition of Oasis' "Wonderwall", which was very sensual and quite fantastic.
The heat seems to be bringing out the worst in the two high-traffic mailing lists I belong to -- one has been taken up with a rather nastily acrimonious discussion about the merits of pacifism as compared with those of killing Arabs, while the other has been giving undue attention to an attention-seeker, and his cretinous claim that he could "knock up" a publishable novel proposal over a weekend, despite his utter lack of experience of doing any such thing.
(The heat would appear to have put me in a bad mood as well, now I come to think about it.)
Tomorrow I will be spending mostly lounging around, unless any of my seemingly myriad editors or co-authors ask me not to. I know I have work to do, but I'm entitled to one day off, damn it.
Yesterday we had a student charity concert going on directly outside our windows -- which, of course, we couldn't have closed unless we wanted to go down with heat stroke. Fortunately most of the students were at the concert, rather than trying to use the library. I heard it all from the enquiry desk: most of the student bands were delivering generic and rather awful rap, but one -- a girl with an amazing voice -- did a torch-song rendition of Oasis' "Wonderwall", which was very sensual and quite fantastic.
The heat seems to be bringing out the worst in the two high-traffic mailing lists I belong to -- one has been taken up with a rather nastily acrimonious discussion about the merits of pacifism as compared with those of killing Arabs, while the other has been giving undue attention to an attention-seeker, and his cretinous claim that he could "knock up" a publishable novel proposal over a weekend, despite his utter lack of experience of doing any such thing.
(The heat would appear to have put me in a bad mood as well, now I come to think about it.)
Tomorrow I will be spending mostly lounging around, unless any of my seemingly myriad editors or co-authors ask me not to. I know I have work to do, but I'm entitled to one day off, damn it.
12 July 2005
God...
...I'm so bloody tired today. Very little likelihood of managing to get any work done, let alone writing an interesting or entertaining blog entry.
In response to the Government's plans to introducte a law prohibiting incitement to religious hatred, which many feel will end up banning religious-themed jokes (among other things) from the media, the christian website Ship of Fools is holding a competition to find the funniest and the most offensive such jokes. Many of these are well worth taking a look at. Here's my retelling of an old favourite which someone else has already entered:
In response to the Government's plans to introducte a law prohibiting incitement to religious hatred, which many feel will end up banning religious-themed jokes (among other things) from the media, the christian website Ship of Fools is holding a competition to find the funniest and the most offensive such jokes. Many of these are well worth taking a look at. Here's my retelling of an old favourite which someone else has already entered:
A group of people brought a woman to Jesus who they said had been caught in the act of adultery. "Shall we stone her, master, as the law commands us?" they asked.So far, most people have rated that one 4/5 for humour and 1/5 for offensiveness, which gives you some idea.
Jesus thought about this for a moment. "Whoever is without sin among you," he said, "let them cast the first stone."
At this, the crowd went very quiet, and began to shuffle away. Then suddenly, a hefty rock came sailing out of the crowd and crashed into the unfortunate woman's head.
Jesus sighed, and said, "You know, Mother, sometimes you really piss me off."
08 July 2005
Authorial, Intense
On a happier note... the Secret Mystery Project seems to be picking up momentum, although it's still in its early stages yet. My potential co-author tells me he's been having meetings.
It's going to be a while before I can say anything specific about the S.M.P. here (except that it's a co-authored project, but I just let that slip anyway). If it goes ahead, then it's potentially very exciting; if it doesn't, then it's additional writing experience if nothing else. My purported co-author is a person of enormous creative energy, which if I'm lucky means that I can get him to do most of the work, but is more likely to mean I'll have to work like a mad panicking beaver in order to keep up.
Whichever, the next couple of weeks are going to be hectic, rather than being (as from a week today) the leisurely end-of-term break which would have been really rather welcome. Updates to this blog may become somewhat sketchy during that time.
I also need to write my Greenbelt talk, of course. Plus I've promised a new proposal to one of my previous publishers. And I really to get this portfolio-for-agents sorted out.
It's beginning to feel as if the five weeks of the summer vacation are about the only time of the year in which I can "be a writer" properly. For that brief period it feels as if I'm writing as a full-time job, like it's supposed to be. Then I come back to College and have to start being patronising to students again. Hey ho.
It's going to be a while before I can say anything specific about the S.M.P. here (except that it's a co-authored project, but I just let that slip anyway). If it goes ahead, then it's potentially very exciting; if it doesn't, then it's additional writing experience if nothing else. My purported co-author is a person of enormous creative energy, which if I'm lucky means that I can get him to do most of the work, but is more likely to mean I'll have to work like a mad panicking beaver in order to keep up.
Whichever, the next couple of weeks are going to be hectic, rather than being (as from a week today) the leisurely end-of-term break which would have been really rather welcome. Updates to this blog may become somewhat sketchy during that time.
I also need to write my Greenbelt talk, of course. Plus I've promised a new proposal to one of my previous publishers. And I really to get this portfolio-for-agents sorted out.
It's beginning to feel as if the five weeks of the summer vacation are about the only time of the year in which I can "be a writer" properly. For that brief period it feels as if I'm writing as a full-time job, like it's supposed to be. Then I come back to College and have to start being patronising to students again. Hey ho.
At Half-Mast
I don't think I have anything to say about the terrorist attacks in London yesterday that a) isn't completely banal, or b) hasn't been said many times already by better writers than me.
I spent a great deal of yesterday reading online news and feeling extremely sad. Thank God none of the people we know living in London (who include B.'s sisters and numerous friends) seem to have been affected by this, but that's no comfort to the people who have been. I'm thinking of those people a lot today.
It's been a grim week.
I spent a great deal of yesterday reading online news and feeling extremely sad. Thank God none of the people we know living in London (who include B.'s sisters and numerous friends) seem to have been affected by this, but that's no comfort to the people who have been. I'm thinking of those people a lot today.
It's been a grim week.
04 July 2005
Further Peculiarity
The promised Extras to the Peculiar Lives pages at www.infinitarian.com are now extant and up. They consist of the essays previously mentioned on the novella's literary contexts, and some (entirely spurious) extracts from the notebooks of Erik Clevedon. I've been having fun today writing the latter.
It may take a short while before the mirror site at Thoughtplay registers the latest changes.
A surprising mystery project, which I can't discuss at the moment and which may not come to anything anyway, has emerged from the blue and intervened to mean I've no time to finish the annotations to 'Minions of the Moon' for the moment. There doesn't seem to be any great hurry for these, though, with Wildthyme on Top still to be released.
It may take a short while before the mirror site at Thoughtplay registers the latest changes.
A surprising mystery project, which I can't discuss at the moment and which may not come to anything anyway, has emerged from the blue and intervened to mean I've no time to finish the annotations to 'Minions of the Moon' for the moment. There doesn't seem to be any great hurry for these, though, with Wildthyme on Top still to be released.
03 July 2005
Putting on Ayres
OK, yes, I freely admit I'm no judge of poetry. I've never been able to write the stuff, and although I'm capable of enjoying reading it it's a class of writing I've never been able to critique intelligently either.
But honestly... how is this not just doggerel? Apart from a couple of turns of phrase which show the author hasn't simply gone for the most unimaginative cliché that came to mind, I can't see anything whatsoever to recommend it. I was particularly unimpressed by the quatrain rhyming "hostility" / "tea" and "lava" / "forever". It reads like it should be sharing space with Doreen Wentworth in the Milton Keynes Citizen.
...whereas it seems that in fact the poet in question has had three collections published by Chatto and Windus, and been shortlisted for a Whitbread Prize. So, er, possibly I should just shut up.
But honestly... how is this not just doggerel? Apart from a couple of turns of phrase which show the author hasn't simply gone for the most unimaginative cliché that came to mind, I can't see anything whatsoever to recommend it. I was particularly unimpressed by the quatrain rhyming "hostility" / "tea" and "lava" / "forever". It reads like it should be sharing space with Doreen Wentworth in the Milton Keynes Citizen.
...whereas it seems that in fact the poet in question has had three collections published by Chatto and Windus, and been shortlisted for a Whitbread Prize. So, er, possibly I should just shut up.
02 July 2005
Extended Family
I'm back, after having had a very pleasant time at my brother's nuptuals. My reading (which N. and L. chose themselves in the end, none of my suggestions being what they were really after) went O.K., as did my toastmastery at the reception, and I successfully acquired a sister-in-law, a nice bottle of wine and a compilation C.D.
There were old friends and family who I hadn't seen for ages, and friends and family of the happy couple who I'd never met before but were very nice anyway. There was also much champagne, wine, beer, wedding-cake, cigar-smoking, music and dancing. I discovered that my brother's father-in-law (or my sister-in-law's father, if you prefer to look at him that way) looks (but otherwise isn't) frighteningly like George Galloway M.P., and also that I dance like a girl.
Generally a very nice time indeed, and since it happened during the week (although getting the time off has been a bit of a pain) it leaves me the weekend free for writing. Hurrah.
On which note, the first of the promised Extras to Peculiar Lives are now up at the website: two essays on the literary context of the novella, complete with Amazon Associate linkings to the various books mentioned (yes, I finally worked out how to do that). One goes into more detail about the book's roots in the works of Olaf Stapledon and his scientific-romantic contemporaries, while the other goes into some detail about its placement in the Time Hunter range. There will be some extracts from the notebooks of Erik Clevedon to follow, along with some material relating to "Minions of the Moon" once Wildthyme on Top is available.
There were old friends and family who I hadn't seen for ages, and friends and family of the happy couple who I'd never met before but were very nice anyway. There was also much champagne, wine, beer, wedding-cake, cigar-smoking, music and dancing. I discovered that my brother's father-in-law (or my sister-in-law's father, if you prefer to look at him that way) looks (but otherwise isn't) frighteningly like George Galloway M.P., and also that I dance like a girl.
Generally a very nice time indeed, and since it happened during the week (although getting the time off has been a bit of a pain) it leaves me the weekend free for writing. Hurrah.
On which note, the first of the promised Extras to Peculiar Lives are now up at the website: two essays on the literary context of the novella, complete with Amazon Associate linkings to the various books mentioned (yes, I finally worked out how to do that). One goes into more detail about the book's roots in the works of Olaf Stapledon and his scientific-romantic contemporaries, while the other goes into some detail about its placement in the Time Hunter range. There will be some extracts from the notebooks of Erik Clevedon to follow, along with some material relating to "Minions of the Moon" once Wildthyme on Top is available.
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