... the person who threw seafood all over my yard last night.
I left the house this morning to be confronted by a carpet of prawns, cockles, mussles and calamari. I suppose they could have been deposited by a storm, or a tsunami, but I very much doubt either would have shelled the prawns. Or the cockles and mussels. Not to mention cutting the squid into rings.
Um, perhaps there's a story in there somewhere...
Thursday, 13 November 2008
Wednesday, 12 November 2008
Truth from teh interwebs
You can find the strangest (SFW) things out there. Some of them even approach the truth...
Ian Sales's Dewey Decimal Section:
885 Classical Greek speeches
Ian Sales = 91491259 = 914+912+59 = 1885
Class:
800 Literature
Contains:
Literature, criticism, analysis of classic writing and mythology.
What it says about you:
You're a global, worldly person who wants to make a big impact with your actions. You have a lot to tell people and you're good at making unique observations about everyday experiences. You can notice and remember details that other people think aren't important.
Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com
Ian Sales's Dewey Decimal Section:
885 Classical Greek speeches
Ian Sales = 91491259 = 914+912+59 = 1885
Class:
800 Literature
Contains:
Literature, criticism, analysis of classic writing and mythology.
What it says about you:
You're a global, worldly person who wants to make a big impact with your actions. You have a lot to tell people and you're good at making unique observations about everyday experiences. You can notice and remember details that other people think aren't important.
Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com
Friday, 7 November 2008
More Music
Saw Anathema live last night. I first saw them two years ago in Glasgow, but this time it was local. Not a big gig. Intimate, almost. But very loud. And excellent. Definitely one of the contenders for the best gig I've attended this year.
Here they are playing their "hit single", 'Fragile Dreams'. It's from their Were You There? live DVD.
I can't wait for the new album.
Here they are playing their "hit single", 'Fragile Dreams'. It's from their Were You There? live DVD.
I can't wait for the new album.
Wednesday, 5 November 2008
Walking the Same Road?
One of the things which really annoys science fiction fans is non-sf authors writing science fiction novels but refusing to admit they have done exactly that. There have been plenty of examples - PD James' The Children of Men, Maggie Gee's The Ice People (of which Jeremy Paxman said it couldn't be science fiction because it was good), and pretty much anything by Margaret Atwood which doesn't feature "squids in space"...
Of course, the reverse is also true to some extent. We fans of science fiction are happy to claim for the genre works which we feel fit the genre's remit, even though they were not written by sf writers, or even identified as sf by their authors. Such as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four or Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. Admittedly, Burgess was not unfriendly to sf - albeit not as friendly as Kingsley Amis or Michael Chabon - but he preferred to think of it as "futfic".
Which brings us to Cormac McCarthy's The Road.
Incidentally, I dislike the term "literary fiction". It's mis-used too often as a genre tag, a handy way to label fiction some people don't like. So rather than being descriptive, or perhaps even aspirational, it becomes a barrier, a shorthand for "I won't read this book because I read a book once that wasn't a simple escapist tale and I didn't like it, so all books like it must be rubbish".
I prefer to think of fiction as occupying a scale similar to food. At one end you have fast food - junk reading, intended to entertain but doesn't require much thought. At the other end, you have gourmet reading - prose to savour, books to think about after you've finished them, products of great talent and skill. And, of course, there's everything between those two extremes.
But The Road... Comparisons to sf are inevitable because of The Road's subject. It is a post-apocalypse novel. Something destroyed civilisation, and most of the life on Earth, years before. A man and his son walk from somewhere in the north of the United States towards warmer climes at the coast. En route they encounter other survivors - some have turned to cannibalism, others to violent tribalism. But there is no hardy community of back-to-nature survivors.
Few sf novels, even ones about the end of the world, are as bleak as The Road. Perhaps that's because science fiction - despite much discussion of late claiming the contrary - is an inherently optimistic genre. It takes as axiomatic that problems can be solved, that phenomena are open to explanation. It's pure optimism to assume - to operate on the assumption - that the universe is explicable. And malleable. And part of the bleakness of The Road stems from its refusal to explain the cause of the apocalypse.
In fact, there's very little in the way of explanation in The Road. The man and the boy are not even named. The man also displays knowledge from a variety of fields - medicine, engineering, woodcraft - but his background is never described.
And then there's the prose. Which is a great deal better than that you'd expect to find in a sf novel. There are indeed well-written (gourmet, so to speak) sf novels, but the genre is not known for the quality of its writing for good reason. McCarthy's prose is spare, often stark - frequently forgoing even verbs - and is as responsible for the novel's sense of bleakness as its dour premise. Some of it works really well:
The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes.
Some is less successful: the occasional odd verb, such as "... glassed the valley below them with the binoculars" or bizarre terms like "the snow lay in skifts all through the woods" and "the snow stood in razor kerfs atop the fencewires". Skifts? Kerfs?
McCarthy's punctuation is also... odd. Paragraphs are formatted as they would be on-line, with no indents and a line or two of space between them. But dialogue in a single paragraph is indented, and does not use inverted commas. This lack of quotation marks does somewhat distance the speech, which may have been the intent. McCarthy clearly doesn't want the reader to get too close to the man or the boy. Or he would have named them.
I can think of no good reason, however, why he chose not to use apostrophes for certain constructions. The apostrophe is there in "there's" and "they're"; but not in "wont" or "cant" or "wouldnt". I don't understand the logic in not using it only for the elided "o" in "not".
The Road is a very good novel indeed. But, despite its prizes, despite its acclaim, despite the film being made of it, The Road is not an important novel. It will not alter the way we think of post-apocalypse novels, it will not affect the relationship between sf and mainstream literature. At least, it will certainly not do that within the genre. Perhaps non-sf readers might think differently, but I suspect not.
Of course, the reverse is also true to some extent. We fans of science fiction are happy to claim for the genre works which we feel fit the genre's remit, even though they were not written by sf writers, or even identified as sf by their authors. Such as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four or Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. Admittedly, Burgess was not unfriendly to sf - albeit not as friendly as Kingsley Amis or Michael Chabon - but he preferred to think of it as "futfic".
or Anthony Burgess' 
Which brings us to Cormac McCarthy's The Road.
Incidentally, I dislike the term "literary fiction". It's mis-used too often as a genre tag, a handy way to label fiction some people don't like. So rather than being descriptive, or perhaps even aspirational, it becomes a barrier, a shorthand for "I won't read this book because I read a book once that wasn't a simple escapist tale and I didn't like it, so all books like it must be rubbish".
I prefer to think of fiction as occupying a scale similar to food. At one end you have fast food - junk reading, intended to entertain but doesn't require much thought. At the other end, you have gourmet reading - prose to savour, books to think about after you've finished them, products of great talent and skill. And, of course, there's everything between those two extremes.
But The Road... Comparisons to sf are inevitable because of The Road's subject. It is a post-apocalypse novel. Something destroyed civilisation, and most of the life on Earth, years before. A man and his son walk from somewhere in the north of the United States towards warmer climes at the coast. En route they encounter other survivors - some have turned to cannibalism, others to violent tribalism. But there is no hardy community of back-to-nature survivors.
Few sf novels, even ones about the end of the world, are as bleak as The Road. Perhaps that's because science fiction - despite much discussion of late claiming the contrary - is an inherently optimistic genre. It takes as axiomatic that problems can be solved, that phenomena are open to explanation. It's pure optimism to assume - to operate on the assumption - that the universe is explicable. And malleable. And part of the bleakness of The Road stems from its refusal to explain the cause of the apocalypse.
In fact, there's very little in the way of explanation in The Road. The man and the boy are not even named. The man also displays knowledge from a variety of fields - medicine, engineering, woodcraft - but his background is never described.
And then there's the prose. Which is a great deal better than that you'd expect to find in a sf novel. There are indeed well-written (gourmet, so to speak) sf novels, but the genre is not known for the quality of its writing for good reason. McCarthy's prose is spare, often stark - frequently forgoing even verbs - and is as responsible for the novel's sense of bleakness as its dour premise. Some of it works really well:
The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes.
Some is less successful: the occasional odd verb, such as "... glassed the valley below them with the binoculars" or bizarre terms like "the snow lay in skifts all through the woods" and "the snow stood in razor kerfs atop the fencewires". Skifts? Kerfs?
McCarthy's punctuation is also... odd. Paragraphs are formatted as they would be on-line, with no indents and a line or two of space between them. But dialogue in a single paragraph is indented, and does not use inverted commas. This lack of quotation marks does somewhat distance the speech, which may have been the intent. McCarthy clearly doesn't want the reader to get too close to the man or the boy. Or he would have named them.
I can think of no good reason, however, why he chose not to use apostrophes for certain constructions. The apostrophe is there in "there's" and "they're"; but not in "wont" or "cant" or "wouldnt". I don't understand the logic in not using it only for the elided "o" in "not".
The Road is a very good novel indeed. But, despite its prizes, despite its acclaim, despite the film being made of it, The Road is not an important novel. It will not alter the way we think of post-apocalypse novels, it will not affect the relationship between sf and mainstream literature. At least, it will certainly not do that within the genre. Perhaps non-sf readers might think differently, but I suspect not.
Thursday, 30 October 2008
2008 Reading Challenge: The One That Made It All Worthwhile
I'm still a bit behind with this year's reading challenge, but I'm slowly catching up. For September's book, which I didn't actually start until this month, I picked The Jewel in the Crown by Paul Scott. Like most Brits my age, I have vague memories of the ITV adaptation from 1984. Other than that, I knew little about the book, or its author. And it's unlikely that would have changed... if I hadn't found all four books of The Raj Quartet going for £1.38 for the lot in a local charity shop, and thought they might be worth a go.
I should have come to Scott sooner. My favourite non-genre writers are Lawrence Durrell, John Fowles and Anthony Burgess, all British post-modern literary writers who came to prominence in the first two decades of the latter half of last century. As did Scott. There are other similarities - all four spent time abroad and later set fiction there: Burgess in Malaysia (The Long Day Wanes); Fowles in Greece (The Magus); Durrell... well, take your pick: he was a professional expat and set novels pretty much everywhere he lived; and Scott, of course, in India. Further, all four are known chiefly by the general public for only one of their works - The Raj Quartet for Scott, A Clockwork Orange for Burgess, The French Lieutenant's Woman for Fowles, and The Alexandria Quartet for Durrell.
But on to the book itself.
Not having read anything by Scott before, I'd expected a relatively traditional narrative, something like EM Forster's A Passage to India, perhaps. But the first page proved me wrong. Rather than pull the reader into the story of The Jewel in the Crown, Scott explains it: "This is a story of a rape, of the events that led up to it and followed it and of the place in which it happened." The next forty pages then relate the life of Miss Crane, who moved to India as a governess in 1907 but stayed on when her employers were posted back to Britain. She became a teacher in the mission schools and, by the time the rape occurs in 1942, she is Superintendent of Schools in Mayapore, where The Jewel in the Crown is set. But she doesn't actually have anything to do with the rape.
But then neither does Lady Lili Chatterjee. Or Sister Ludmilla. Or Mr Srinivasan. Or Brigadier Reid. Or Duleep Kumar. Yet these are all viewpoint characters in The Jewel in the Crown, and it is through them, and their stories, that Scott builds up a picture of the events sparked off by the rape of Daphne Manners by a group of Indian men. These viewpoints are written in a variety of narrative styles. Some are third person, some are first person. Some are presented as the spoken recollections of a character - and Scott's handling of each character's voice is impressive - to an unnamed listener. There are some lovely bits of prose, such as :
With all the chicks lowered the house is dark and cool even at midday. The ceilings are very high. In such rooms human thought is in the same danger as an escaped canary would be, wheeling up and up, round and round, fluttering in areas of shadow and crevices you can imagine untouched by a human hand since the house was rebuilt by MacGregor.
The Jewel in the Crown is by no means an easy read. Scott maintains voice so rigorously that the narrative rarely sticks to the story, and often detours into areas - such as the backgrounds and characters of his cast - which do not actually advance the plot. Duleep Kumar, for example, is Hari Kumar's father, and Hari is one of the men accused of Daphne's rape. Duleep's story explains Hari - the Indian who is more English than the English - but it's peripheral to the story.
Of course, India is as much a character in the book as Hari, Daphne and the others. It is represented by the invented city of Mayapore. Scott has not stinted on the details, nor on the thoughts and feelings of each of the various characters to the town and the country. The most damning is Hari, an Indian brought up in England and educated at the best schools, who does not feel Indian, but is treated as such. He thinks of himself as invisible: too Indian for the English, too English for the Indians. He's the pivot about which the plot of The Jewel in the Crown revolves.
The Raj Quartet has been criticised for perpetuating prejudices and racial stereotypes. In a 1984 essay 'Out of the Whale', Rushdie pointed out that if Daphne Manners' rape was a metaphor for the British exploitation of India, it should have been the rape of an Indian girl by white men. Which completely misses the point. The Jewel in the Crown is not about the exploitation of India. Scott is not writing about the Indian experience, about being Indian under the Brits. He is writing about two societies crashing together, each driven by an imposed agenda. The rape is merely the trigger for the reactions of the characters in the book, and those reactions are specific to those involved.
Nor is it surprising that The Jewel in the Crown perpetuates racial stereotypes. The story is told through its characters, and it is their sensibilities which are on display. Miss Crane, Brigadier Reid, Sister Ludmila, and Daphne Manners are all white. Brigadier Reid, for example, is offensively patronising because he epitomises the attitude of his generation of India hands. A reader who doesn't understand that is missing the point. If Scott wanted to depict a balanced viewpoint, he would not have used Reid.
Now, obviously, my perspective on The Jewel in the Crown is going to differ from Rushdie's. But I'm not reading it as a Brit, I'm reading it as a British expat - or rather, an ex-expat - who grew up in the Middle East as a "privileged white". Of course, the parallels are not exact; the Gulf was not the Raj. Also, by the late 1960s / early 1970s, attitudes and sensibilities had changed a great deal. But I went to English speaking schools (I'm a founding pupil of two English speaking schools in the Gulf), I mixed with other European kids, and I rarely if ever socialised with Arabs or people from the Indian subcontinent. When I returned to the Gulf to work in the early 1990s, things were different. At one point, I was the only Brit in my employer's Systems Development department (and I was also the only male). And yet in many respects, things had not changed: when I asked an Indian colleague why she was filling in a membership form for a bar, she told me it was so she wouldn't be turned away at the door. I replied that I'd never been refused entry. "You're white," she said.
There is a particular British expat experience which The Jewel in the Crown (and Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet) both make use of. Neither mirrors precisely my own experiences growing up in the Gulf, but there's a... shape in the text, in the life and interaction of the characters which comes close to emulating it. It's not as arrogant as:
In his heart he also shares with that old ruling-class of English he affects to despise a desire to be looked-up to abroad, and shares with them also the sense of deprivation because he has not been able to inherit the Empire he always saw as a purely ruling-class institution.
... But there is certainly a shadow of Empire colouring the experience, as well as an understanding of Britain which is filtered through the perceptions of those who were once ruled by it. It's Britishness informed by the culture of its surroundings, a microcosm of Britishness - almost a siege-mentality in some respects - but one which has subsumed some aspects of its environs. It no longer maps directly onto the culture of Britain. It's an experience I suspect is slowly vanishing as the world grows "smaller". Since the alternative appears to be McDonald's, Cocoa-Cola and Hollywood, then I'm not convinced its disappearance is a good thing.
Of the books I've read so far this year for my reading challenge, The Jewel in the Crown has easily been the best. I certainly plan to read the remaining books in The Raj Quartet - The Day of the Scorpion, The Towers of Silence and A Division of the Spoils. And I shall be adding Paul Scott's other novels to my wants list. Oh, and I want to watch the television adaptation again.
I should have come to Scott sooner. My favourite non-genre writers are Lawrence Durrell, John Fowles and Anthony Burgess, all British post-modern literary writers who came to prominence in the first two decades of the latter half of last century. As did Scott. There are other similarities - all four spent time abroad and later set fiction there: Burgess in Malaysia (The Long Day Wanes); Fowles in Greece (The Magus); Durrell... well, take your pick: he was a professional expat and set novels pretty much everywhere he lived; and Scott, of course, in India. Further, all four are known chiefly by the general public for only one of their works - The Raj Quartet for Scott, A Clockwork Orange for Burgess, The French Lieutenant's Woman for Fowles, and The Alexandria Quartet for Durrell.
But on to the book itself.
Not having read anything by Scott before, I'd expected a relatively traditional narrative, something like EM Forster's A Passage to India, perhaps. But the first page proved me wrong. Rather than pull the reader into the story of The Jewel in the Crown, Scott explains it: "This is a story of a rape, of the events that led up to it and followed it and of the place in which it happened." The next forty pages then relate the life of Miss Crane, who moved to India as a governess in 1907 but stayed on when her employers were posted back to Britain. She became a teacher in the mission schools and, by the time the rape occurs in 1942, she is Superintendent of Schools in Mayapore, where The Jewel in the Crown is set. But she doesn't actually have anything to do with the rape.
But then neither does Lady Lili Chatterjee. Or Sister Ludmilla. Or Mr Srinivasan. Or Brigadier Reid. Or Duleep Kumar. Yet these are all viewpoint characters in The Jewel in the Crown, and it is through them, and their stories, that Scott builds up a picture of the events sparked off by the rape of Daphne Manners by a group of Indian men. These viewpoints are written in a variety of narrative styles. Some are third person, some are first person. Some are presented as the spoken recollections of a character - and Scott's handling of each character's voice is impressive - to an unnamed listener. There are some lovely bits of prose, such as :
With all the chicks lowered the house is dark and cool even at midday. The ceilings are very high. In such rooms human thought is in the same danger as an escaped canary would be, wheeling up and up, round and round, fluttering in areas of shadow and crevices you can imagine untouched by a human hand since the house was rebuilt by MacGregor.
The Jewel in the Crown is by no means an easy read. Scott maintains voice so rigorously that the narrative rarely sticks to the story, and often detours into areas - such as the backgrounds and characters of his cast - which do not actually advance the plot. Duleep Kumar, for example, is Hari Kumar's father, and Hari is one of the men accused of Daphne's rape. Duleep's story explains Hari - the Indian who is more English than the English - but it's peripheral to the story.
Of course, India is as much a character in the book as Hari, Daphne and the others. It is represented by the invented city of Mayapore. Scott has not stinted on the details, nor on the thoughts and feelings of each of the various characters to the town and the country. The most damning is Hari, an Indian brought up in England and educated at the best schools, who does not feel Indian, but is treated as such. He thinks of himself as invisible: too Indian for the English, too English for the Indians. He's the pivot about which the plot of The Jewel in the Crown revolves.
The Raj Quartet has been criticised for perpetuating prejudices and racial stereotypes. In a 1984 essay 'Out of the Whale', Rushdie pointed out that if Daphne Manners' rape was a metaphor for the British exploitation of India, it should have been the rape of an Indian girl by white men. Which completely misses the point. The Jewel in the Crown is not about the exploitation of India. Scott is not writing about the Indian experience, about being Indian under the Brits. He is writing about two societies crashing together, each driven by an imposed agenda. The rape is merely the trigger for the reactions of the characters in the book, and those reactions are specific to those involved.
Nor is it surprising that The Jewel in the Crown perpetuates racial stereotypes. The story is told through its characters, and it is their sensibilities which are on display. Miss Crane, Brigadier Reid, Sister Ludmila, and Daphne Manners are all white. Brigadier Reid, for example, is offensively patronising because he epitomises the attitude of his generation of India hands. A reader who doesn't understand that is missing the point. If Scott wanted to depict a balanced viewpoint, he would not have used Reid.
Now, obviously, my perspective on The Jewel in the Crown is going to differ from Rushdie's. But I'm not reading it as a Brit, I'm reading it as a British expat - or rather, an ex-expat - who grew up in the Middle East as a "privileged white". Of course, the parallels are not exact; the Gulf was not the Raj. Also, by the late 1960s / early 1970s, attitudes and sensibilities had changed a great deal. But I went to English speaking schools (I'm a founding pupil of two English speaking schools in the Gulf), I mixed with other European kids, and I rarely if ever socialised with Arabs or people from the Indian subcontinent. When I returned to the Gulf to work in the early 1990s, things were different. At one point, I was the only Brit in my employer's Systems Development department (and I was also the only male). And yet in many respects, things had not changed: when I asked an Indian colleague why she was filling in a membership form for a bar, she told me it was so she wouldn't be turned away at the door. I replied that I'd never been refused entry. "You're white," she said.
There is a particular British expat experience which The Jewel in the Crown (and Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet) both make use of. Neither mirrors precisely my own experiences growing up in the Gulf, but there's a... shape in the text, in the life and interaction of the characters which comes close to emulating it. It's not as arrogant as:
In his heart he also shares with that old ruling-class of English he affects to despise a desire to be looked-up to abroad, and shares with them also the sense of deprivation because he has not been able to inherit the Empire he always saw as a purely ruling-class institution.
... But there is certainly a shadow of Empire colouring the experience, as well as an understanding of Britain which is filtered through the perceptions of those who were once ruled by it. It's Britishness informed by the culture of its surroundings, a microcosm of Britishness - almost a siege-mentality in some respects - but one which has subsumed some aspects of its environs. It no longer maps directly onto the culture of Britain. It's an experience I suspect is slowly vanishing as the world grows "smaller". Since the alternative appears to be McDonald's, Cocoa-Cola and Hollywood, then I'm not convinced its disappearance is a good thing.
Of the books I've read so far this year for my reading challenge, The Jewel in the Crown has easily been the best. I certainly plan to read the remaining books in The Raj Quartet - The Day of the Scorpion, The Towers of Silence and A Division of the Spoils. And I shall be adding Paul Scott's other novels to my wants list. Oh, and I want to watch the television adaptation again.
Wednesday, 29 October 2008
Me & My Magic Man
I've not had a musical interlude for a while. So let's have one.
It's not all death metal round here, you know. Every now and again I like to wig out to a bit of 1970s prog rock. Check this one out. Uriah Heep, performing their classic 'The Wizard' on some television show.
Bad lipsynching! Flowery jeans! Dancers in hotpants! Mick Box giving it some axe attack! An audience that looks like it doesn't know what it's doing there! Ah, those were the days...
It's not all death metal round here, you know. Every now and again I like to wig out to a bit of 1970s prog rock. Check this one out. Uriah Heep, performing their classic 'The Wizard' on some television show.
Bad lipsynching! Flowery jeans! Dancers in hotpants! Mick Box giving it some axe attack! An audience that looks like it doesn't know what it's doing there! Ah, those were the days...
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