Friday, April 9, 2010
Brotherhood of enthusiasm
It's not just us...
From a review of a couple of collections of essays by Michael Chabon:
.....one of the sweetest moments in Manhood for Amateurs occurs when he stupefies an English expatriate with his family's knowledge and deep appreciation of Doctor Who. The Englishman doesn't even know of the Russell T Davies reincarnation of the show. "'It's a pretty good show,' I said, but I knew that my tone and my posture and the wild fannish tenor of my voice were saying It's the greatest show ever in the history of television."
Busy Sunday? -- Rare event, on line!
One of the many reasons to be glad its not 1910.... Gathering small audiences together worldwide.
This weekend an (almost) never to be repeated performance of Morton Feldman's String Quartet (II), which takes six hours without a break, will be broadcast live on the new music service of WQXR, called Q2. The many readers of this blog who insist that contemporary music can only express unease will be shocked at the beauty of Feldman's music -- and people who call Tiger Woods an athlete will be astonished at four people performing a complex and demanding piece of that length.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Appearances aside....
... this man is not a poseur. He's China Mieville, the grand master of urban fantasy, whose wonderful book "The City and The City" has just won the British Science Fiction Award, and may well win the Hugo (since the convention is in England this year) and the Arthur C. Clarke award. The Guardian has the scoop.
"The City and The City" is a police procedural, set in Eastern Europe, in two cities that interpenetrate. It's a great gloomy procedural and an intricate fantasy.
Mieville, Alan Moore, Jeff Vandermeer, Iain Sinclair, Gene Wolfe, Michael Moorcock, Mark Helprin's Winters Tale, the Neil Gaiman book about the London Tube, even the Martin Scorsese of "Gangs of New York" -- they all write about labyrinthine cities of great age and wonder. I haven't found one I dislike yet, and am currently working through the first of Jeff Vandermeer's books about Ambergris, called "City of Saints and Madmen", which seems to be a collection of pamphlets, historical essays, short stories, and dictionaries.
A good place to start is Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast Trilogy, which is the primary source -- although if you haven't read Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, you should. And Mieville's Perdido Street Station, or......
UPDATE: A brief rundown of the Hugo nominees is here. I loved this quote:
A quick Google search shows that only The City & The City has received plentiful mainstream review coverage, along with a few mentions of Canadian Robert J Sawyer's book in Canada. (Significantly, none have been mentioned in the New York Times.) As usual, this lack of coverage says more about the mainstream press than the books in question. Why Jonathan Safran Foer's decision to eat no meat or Ian McEwan's discovery that global warming may not be to the universal benefit of mankind should merit so many more column inches than these intriguing books is a question I can't answer …
More for readers dismayed by the cluttered minds of their idols...
I'm afraid it's bad news.
Key quote: "Her strengths lay in her unfettered mental fertility and her lack of system."
Health and fashion notes from the mysterious Orient
A tip from uber-traditional fashion hero, Hollister Hovey: Handmade cloth shoes from China. Cheap and handsome (although the markup from the original price in China must be savage). Jet Li wears them (as shown in the many Jet Li photos on the site).
I am suspicious of the health claims, however:
Many people work with computers always have bad skin condition and easily angry, ect., that's all because of static. Furthermore, the old people's skin is drier than the youth with the aging of cardiac, cerebral and vascular, that make old man more easily to be harmed by the static and cause cardiac, cerebral and vascular disease.
Our human body have a magnetic field inside,and we lived in the magnetic field of nature,once the balance of nature were altered or changed can cause ours uncomfortable feeling,so the best way is always wear shoes without a insulation soles,let the static get out our body easily and keep the balance between us and the nature.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Sorry if you're not a fan, but I can't help myself
Some completely right on reactions from the Guardian. (Quotes have been edited for spoilers, the linked article is not) BTW, the Guardian quite property calls this "Season 31"
There looks like being little Rose Tyler-style simpering here - Amy is another Moffat mad-women. 'Fiesty' is too easy a word for a woman who happens to have a personality – Amy is at once rather disturbed, gleefully impulsive and something of a bad girl.
.......
Smith is a fan of Troughton, and he dances around the crotchety-loveable-mad axis from the off. Smith's age also turns out .... to be something of a non-issue. Moffat's line is that although the Doctor uses 900 as his stage-age, he can't have any idea how old he is: he's a Timelord, these things are wibbly-wobbly. And Smith carries off the youthful vigour of a new body and the ancient professorial wisdom with easy panache. The much-heralded 'recklessness' is there as well...
..................
.....it feels like an absolute triumph. A whole new world of regulars is seamlessly introduced, the story has both pace and complexity, and it's refreshing not be in London again. The (spoiler) has to be one of the most beautiful design creations the Doctor Who teams have ever come up with. There's also a spot of proper scariness from the (spoilers) – and Moffat once again displays a mastery of childhood paranoias.
Monday, April 5, 2010
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Friday, April 2, 2010
Moffat on Radio 4
Great interview on Front Row with Steven Moffat in advance of Saturday's premiere of the new Doctor. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and hit "Chapter 2" -- lasts about ten minutes.
Best quote:
Although our audience is not made up of eight and nine year olds, all our audience is watching as eight and nine year olds.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Without comment (although a date check might be in order)
From Locus, the science fiction trade magazine:
Today the estate of Ayn Rand announced that they had authorized science fiction writers Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow to write an official sequel to Rand's bestselling novel Atlas Shrugged.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Darker than necessary?
Fans of Spaced and Bob and Rose will enjoy this clip from a BBC comedy series that seems remarkably dark. I will try to follow up with a report, although the Guardian seems to think that the network is trying to bury it. Premiered at 11:45 on a Saturday night so there might be something to it.
Another aspect of joy
Shopping, cooking, and dinner in the balti triangle in Birmingham. The video cooking lesson is probably not as helpful as it should be, but still..
My favorite comment, among the usual arguments about who makes the best balti, whether Indian food is better than Pakistani food, and why is the south so crap at making baltis:
What ARE these two white people WAFFLING on about ?
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Montaigne and pedal pumping
I was a bit ashamed by Muffy's reaction to my post about the new fetish of pedal pumping -- and not merely because he was wittier than I. His final point was this:
I think this is great, really. Not because I enjoy pedal pumping, but because it reveals another layer of the wonderful oddity of folks.
I should have been more attuned to this, because I've been reading a wonderful new book by a BBC presenter called Sarah Bakewell (I think I've mentioned it before) called "How to Live, or, A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer." In the chapter offering the answer "Wake from the Sleep of Habit", Bakewell writes about Montaigne's love of the odd and excessive:
Habit makes everything look bland: it is sleep-inducing. Jumping to a different perspective is a way of waking oneself up again....
Reciting diversities helps to break free of (our narrow and unexamined opinions), if only for brief moments of enlightenment. "This great world," writes Montaigne, "is the mirror in which we must look at ourselves to recognize ourselves from the proper angle."
Of course she also quotes him as saying "The most beautiful lives, to my mind, are those that conform to the common human pattern, with order, but without miracle and without eccentricity."
That doesn't fit me (or anyone else here) any better than pedal pumping -- but thanks again to Muffy for giving me that zen blow on the side of my head....
Breathless
I was reading Richard Brody, film blogger for The New Yorker, and thinking about a couple of things that he mentions:
The photo above is of Godard -- the guy with the loose tie in the center of the crowd -- filming the last scene of Breathless. The bystanders are just people who wandered by. No crowd control, no crew. If you've ever fantasized about making a revolutionary masterpiece this moment is what you were dreaming about. (The corruption of this dream is why I have so much contempt for indie cinema and Sundance.)
If you need help with math, that was fifty years ago.
When Breathless was released, it was reviewed for The New Yorker by none other than Roger Angell, later to become fiction editor and baseball writer. He sure got it right:
This, of course, sounds like a routine policier, but it is immediately evident that M. Godard and his associates have something vastly more fascinating in mind, which is nothing less than to make comprehensible, and therefore touching and serious, the lives of two disorderly, disconnected, nihilistic young moderns—and to do so, moreover, by seeing and hearing their unlovely world with exactly the same nervous glances and flighty inattentiveness that they themselves must rely on. To say that the film almost entirely succeeds in this awesome undertaking may explain why, in my estimation, it achieves the heights and confirms the men of the New Wave as the makers of a powerful new tradition in the art of the film.
Friday, March 26, 2010
Not writing, typing...
"...truth, in writing, is the only important thing. That's what it's for. The whole time, every day, all these pages, all my life, means sitting there looking for something -- some line, some insight, some microsecond -- that makes me think: yes. Yes, that's true. That's real. I recognize that. I know it. That's all I'm after! It might be a truth discovered ten million times before by other people, but that doesn't matter. If you discover it for yourself, then that makes everything worthwhile. No wonder writing is such hard work! You're strip mining your own head, every day, searching for this stuff -- and then those moments of revelation are like a godsend.I remember thinking, and thinking, and thinking, about Vince, in Queer as Folk, until I arrived at that crucial conclusion about him, in Episode 8, that because his boyfriend loves him he thinks less of the boyfriend. Vince cannot love Cameron because Cameron is stupid to love Vince. That's a great insight. Frankly, that's brilliant! It's devastating. And it's not merely analysis. It decides Vince's character, which then decides the plot, which then decides the entire climax of the series. The discovery of a truth like that doesn't come along very often, though every other moment is spent working toward it.
It's so worth it, when it happens. Oh my word. Gold dust."
-- Russell T Davies, The Writer's Tale: The Final Chapter, p. 692.
UPDATE
"If you want a Doctor Who example...it's there in the moment in "Aliens in London" -- that moment when Jackie calls the police to report the Doctor. I love the truth of that moment, that she's so shell-shocked she betrays the Doctor. An incredible thing to do, and very real. It's there in the whole 45 minutes of "Midnight," in the accuracy of that group mentality. It's there in that tiny moment in "Turn Left," when Donna tells Sylvia she's tried the Army for jobs, but with no luck -- because this is after she's seen the Army take her neighbors away to a concentration camp. Donna might well rage in the street, and yet she asks the same Army for employment. I really believe that. A true moment of defeat."
END UPDATE
"...(she) then turned to hoist herself onto a bar stool, showing off a pair of haunches a man would be proud to have the tattooing of."--Andy Dalziel in Reginald Hill's The Price of Butcher's Meat, p. 51.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
There's hope for us all
Otto Penzler, seller and collector of mysteries, is selling the part of his collection devoted to British spy novels, including a first edition of Casino Royale with a guide price of $20,000 to $30,000.
"Because my bookshop was in Manhattan, most authors sooner or later found themselves visiting, where I distinguished myself as an enormous irritant by asking them to inscribe my books," he said. Initially built to hold 9,000 volumes "just in case", Penzler built his shelves two rows deep "and they rapidly filled". The collection, which also includes "an equally extensive" range of American espionage fiction, now numbers around 60,000 volumes.
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