Last week (or in the strangely ahistorical world of the internet, about twenty five centimetres below), I criticised David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas for its failure to create a convincingly realised diary from 1850. The fact that I hadn't read the rest of the novel at the time was a bit of a risk, admittedly, and indeed later that day I read the section in which one of the characters suggests that the 1850 section may be a fraud. Perhaps, then, this was leading up to some amazing intertextual twist in the closing pages? Well... no.
Cloud Atlas struggles under the weight of its own tricksy structure, six broken-backed stories arranged symmetrically and which 'follow' each other as characters 'read' the following/preceding sections. The trouble is, the novellas themselves aren't quite interesting enough to exist outside the gimmicky structure; yet that same gimmicky structure isn't quite ingenious enough to justify the content. The idea that characters in one section have read other sections of, gosh darn, the novel that you're reading right now, is now so dated (going back to at least 1860 and Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, and probably even further back to Laurence Sterne) that it doesn't really count as structural ingenuity any more. Similarly, I was expecting a bit more narrative intertwining than the idea that one man's writing makes for another's reading. As for the novel's theme of historical recurrence and the eternal return (yep, Nietzsche is in there, peeping out from 'Letters from Zedelghem'), it's the kind of thing Peter Ackroyd made a career out of in the eighties, but with more depth and resonance. Admittedly, Ackroyd's novels are also characterised by a certain kind of social conservatism (if the past just keeps coming back, what's the point of change?), something Mitchell is at pains to avoid, but with only moderate success.
So much for the structure. Once past this, the content of the six novellas is somewhat variable. "The Pacific Diary of Adam Ewing" is hamstrung by its clumsy prose, which is at least rather less cringeworthy in the second half (incidentally, that suggestion of fakery never becomes more than a suggestion, and comes across as an insurance policy for Mitchell in case the chapter isn't wholly convincing). "Letters from Zedelghem" is a so-so account of sentimental education; "Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery" starts well, but its second part is something of a let-down (the resolution seems ludicrously hurried, and the Russian doll construction of the novel means that by the time I'd got to the second part, I'd largely forgotten who was who in this section). "The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish" also starts well as comedy, but becomes weirdly inconsequential when the focus moves to Cavendish's escape from the retirement home in which he has become trapped. "An Orison of Sonmi-491" is the most interesting section, but loses focus towards the end (there's a theme developing here). Finally, "Sloosha's Crossin' and Ev'rythin After" is another ostentatious attempt to capture a particular voice; as the only narrative in the novel not to be split in two (being at the centre), it seems to go on for a little too long.
It's not as if the novel is awful - "Luisa Rey," "Timothy Cavendish" and "Sonmi-491" are quite compulsive in style - but this kind of historical scope and structual ambition requires a better pay-off than Ewing's final meditation that the will to power will eventually undo humanity (you think so?). I'm also not sure if the novel's recurrent structure means that we're meant to find Ewing's final optimism for a better future misguided, or if the inherent reactionary politics of the idea of the 'eternal return' simply undoes the novel's critique of the desire for colonial and corporate ascendancy. Although on reflection, that ambiguity may probably be the best thing about the novel.
Sunday 9 December 2007
Sunday 2 December 2007
NeoVictorian Bandwagon in Wheel-loss Incident: or, the first chapter of David Mitchell's *Cloud Atlas*
Just a brief note this time, primarily because of an urgent need to complain about something everybody else thinks is great (cf. Kylie Minogue, J. K. Rowling, Russell T Davies). This week I finally got around to picking up my copy of David Mitchell's much touted novel Cloud Atlas, of which I have only heard good things (although these include the damned-with-praise Richard and Judy thumbs up - never forget that these two (or more accurately, their researchers) gave an actual, proper, award to Dan Brown for his cliche compendium The Da Vinci Code)). For those of you who have missed all this, Cloud Atlas is composed of texts from various historical periods (including the future) and genres, which combine to form some kind of quasi-postmodernist time-bending extravaganza. I can't explain this more clearly at the moment, because I'm only halfway through the second chapter. I write now because I found the first infuriating.
The novel opens with "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing," a diary purporting to be from 1850. As you might have guessed by now, it's dreadful; the worst kind of pseudo-Victorian prose where 'tis and 'twas are bandied around like it's 1746 and long words are dragged out because that's, like, how they spoke in olden days, innit? Some choice cuts: "No more tatterdemalion a renegado I ever beheld" (9), "circumambulating" (19), "terraqueous globe" (11). "I fancy he is a Bedlamite" (4) already sounds far too dated for the mid-nineteenth century (it might not be, but it sounds like it). The word 'and' is taboo, since the ampersand apparently lends much more historic kudos (it goes on & on & on...). Nobody actually says 'egad' or 'gadzooks,' but they're thinking about it. If this were a play, you can be sure that everyone would be rigid backed and bowing at each other continually, or punctuating conversation with waves of a handkerchief like some kind of heritage semaphore. It's 1850, but not as we know it.
There are also mistakes littered throughout. Adam is clearly from California, but his spelling is English (any decent edition of Dickens' novels clearly demonstrates the reach of American linguistic conventions) - glances at later pages of the novel reveal that other American texts have their spelling intact. Adam mentions himself as being a Yankee, which really refers specifically to one from New England or the north-east more generally (where one definitely cannot find San Francisco). But the real clincher (for me, anyway), comes on page 35: "I recalled my father-in-law's aphorism, 'To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom.'" I hope later chapters reveal Adam's father-in-law to be Charles Dickens, who invented the word 'boredom' two years later in Bleak House (1852).
Of course, anyone demented enough to thoroughly cross-reference any historical novel with the OED is going to come up with inaccuracies (to be fair, pre-1852 instances of 'boredom' are my own alarm bell, and I hope to catch out Derek Acorah some day soon). But the problem is that Mitchell fails to write something that generally sounds convincingly and specifically Victorian; his idea of the period seems to belong to the later eighteenth century, and it's difficult to read this chapter as existing in the same precise period as, say, David Copperfield. Of course, I'm also taking a risk in making these complaints without finishing the novel; later chapters may well reveal the text to be a fake (in which case, I told you so). But I had to say something, egad.
The novel opens with "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing," a diary purporting to be from 1850. As you might have guessed by now, it's dreadful; the worst kind of pseudo-Victorian prose where 'tis and 'twas are bandied around like it's 1746 and long words are dragged out because that's, like, how they spoke in olden days, innit? Some choice cuts: "No more tatterdemalion a renegado I ever beheld" (9), "circumambulating" (19), "terraqueous globe" (11). "I fancy he is a Bedlamite" (4) already sounds far too dated for the mid-nineteenth century (it might not be, but it sounds like it). The word 'and' is taboo, since the ampersand apparently lends much more historic kudos (it goes on & on & on...). Nobody actually says 'egad' or 'gadzooks,' but they're thinking about it. If this were a play, you can be sure that everyone would be rigid backed and bowing at each other continually, or punctuating conversation with waves of a handkerchief like some kind of heritage semaphore. It's 1850, but not as we know it.
There are also mistakes littered throughout. Adam is clearly from California, but his spelling is English (any decent edition of Dickens' novels clearly demonstrates the reach of American linguistic conventions) - glances at later pages of the novel reveal that other American texts have their spelling intact. Adam mentions himself as being a Yankee, which really refers specifically to one from New England or the north-east more generally (where one definitely cannot find San Francisco). But the real clincher (for me, anyway), comes on page 35: "I recalled my father-in-law's aphorism, 'To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom.'" I hope later chapters reveal Adam's father-in-law to be Charles Dickens, who invented the word 'boredom' two years later in Bleak House (1852).
Of course, anyone demented enough to thoroughly cross-reference any historical novel with the OED is going to come up with inaccuracies (to be fair, pre-1852 instances of 'boredom' are my own alarm bell, and I hope to catch out Derek Acorah some day soon). But the problem is that Mitchell fails to write something that generally sounds convincingly and specifically Victorian; his idea of the period seems to belong to the later eighteenth century, and it's difficult to read this chapter as existing in the same precise period as, say, David Copperfield. Of course, I'm also taking a risk in making these complaints without finishing the novel; later chapters may well reveal the text to be a fake (in which case, I told you so). But I had to say something, egad.
Wednesday 22 August 2007
The In-Flight On-Screen Round-Up
I've recently been on an absurd number of international flights, having temporarily relocated to the US in June, and subsequently been invited back to the UK for a frenzy of interviews for academic posts (my top tip for those negotiating the famously inpenetrable academic job market: be on the other side of the world. Or, light the touch paper of application, then retire to a safe distance of about 6,000 miles). To add to the confusion, at the end of July I moved from Woodland, California (as mentioned above) to Norman, Oklahoma, where I now remain until the end of August.
Anyway, since other commitments are taking up my resources for acute intellectual debate at the moment, this issue makes good my promise to degenerate into televisual review (or rather, film). And also to assuage the considerable anxieties of those who thought the Doughnuts were over with. So, here's my critical round-up of the various delights in-flight entertainment has to offer those travelling in the very near future:
Wild Hogs: John Travolta, William H. Macy, and two other vaguely recognisable men relieve their mid-life crisis by pretending to be bikers. It's the kind of film best summed up by the word 'amiable', but mostly in a good way (cf. Hot Fuzz, discussed below). The kind of film one watches on a Sunday, late morning, then realising that you watched the whole thing and you need to get into town before the shops close early (thanks Sunday Trading laws - why should Christians get all the inconvenient fun?). Or the kind of film watched at 36,000 thousand feet when there's no other choice and the alternative is reading more of Neil Gaiman's hideously overrated Neverwhere.
Bridge to Terabithia: The fact that I managed to follow this without sound and out of the corner of my eye suggests that it isn't Citizen Kane. Although I suspect that it would also be difficult to make sense of Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol under the same conditions, so maybe I'm being harsh.
Blades of Glory: I may regret writing this, but this was my guilty pleasure of the recent transatlantic shenanigans. Like the Hogs, this was a desperation choice, but one that turned out rather well thanks to the visible influences of This is Spinal Tap (including figure skating commentary such as "Famed for his personal hygiene, McElroy is beginning to reek. Of gold.") and the first half of Zoolander (before the plot takes over and it loses its way). The director also seems to have it in for figure skating championship mascots as well, which surely counts for something. The best bit, however, is the last thirty seconds. All films should end that way.
Premonition: I only watched the first twenty minutes, before being reminded why I'd only ever seen one other Sandra Bullock film, ten years ago.
Stranger than Fiction: Another non-starter, lasting only fifteen minutes because of the labouring of the central idea (like a bad comedy sketch), and Emma Thompson's irritating voice-over. Or just voice.
Borat: It's no wonder Kazakhstan complained. The film starts with a tour of Borat's home town, which is vaguely uncomfortable in an "Aren't foreigners funny?" way (similar to those fake guide books to Molvania and the like, which are amusing until about half past two on Boxing Day). Things get more uncomfortable once we get to the US, but for the better as often very funny faux-interview high jinks ensue. Singing the national anthem at the rodeo is one of the high points; the naked fight in the hotel is another, with a caveat of "I shouldn't be finding this that funny, surely". Other encounters are startling, such as Borat stopping street punks for fashion advice, or meeting some depressingly misogynist frat boys. There's a plot about going to meet Pamela Anderson, but it really doesn't matter. The most impressive thing, however, is how Sacha Baron Cohen makes such a potentially unlikeable character quite sympathetic and endearing.
Hot Fuzz: I don't want to inaugurate some kind of Simon Pegg/Nick Frost/Edgar Wright backlash, because I like them all, but it has to be said: Hot Fuzz is something of a disappointment. It's let down by two main problems: it's too long, and it's conceptually muddled. The idea is that a spectacularly successful London cop is transferred to a rural town, where law enforcement culture clash hijinks ensue (hijinks always ensue). It's the basically the same idea as Shaun of the Dead: relocate a filmic genre to an inappropriate setting. And indeed, the final half hour or so, which moves an LA gunfight to rural England, is amusing. But this should be the starting point, not the end. Wouldn't it have been funnier to have the central character as a violent maverick from the beginning? I suspect the outlandish nature of the murders throughout is also supposed to be funny, but it doesn't work because the events and the setting aren't incongruous enough, thanks to Midsomer Murders and the like. The comedy is also 'amiable', but this time in a bad way, because one expects much more from the people involved. It feels as if the writer, producer, and director all had slightly different ideas about what they were parodying; as if half of them thought they were making English policing look like CSI for comic effect, while the other half thought the idea was to bring Lethal Weapon to the countryside. So while the final part is funny, it takes too long to get there, like a comedy sketch was bloated into a two hour film (and it really shouldn't be more than ninety minutes). There are good parts - Timothy Dalton has fun as the amusingly obvious bad guy, there are some hints at a Wicker Man style denouement (Edward Woodward stars, after all) and I liked the subtlety of the two Bill Bailey characters reading novels by Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks - but it should be better than it is.
Anyway, since other commitments are taking up my resources for acute intellectual debate at the moment, this issue makes good my promise to degenerate into televisual review (or rather, film). And also to assuage the considerable anxieties of those who thought the Doughnuts were over with. So, here's my critical round-up of the various delights in-flight entertainment has to offer those travelling in the very near future:
Wild Hogs: John Travolta, William H. Macy, and two other vaguely recognisable men relieve their mid-life crisis by pretending to be bikers. It's the kind of film best summed up by the word 'amiable', but mostly in a good way (cf. Hot Fuzz, discussed below). The kind of film one watches on a Sunday, late morning, then realising that you watched the whole thing and you need to get into town before the shops close early (thanks Sunday Trading laws - why should Christians get all the inconvenient fun?). Or the kind of film watched at 36,000 thousand feet when there's no other choice and the alternative is reading more of Neil Gaiman's hideously overrated Neverwhere.
Bridge to Terabithia: The fact that I managed to follow this without sound and out of the corner of my eye suggests that it isn't Citizen Kane. Although I suspect that it would also be difficult to make sense of Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol under the same conditions, so maybe I'm being harsh.
Blades of Glory: I may regret writing this, but this was my guilty pleasure of the recent transatlantic shenanigans. Like the Hogs, this was a desperation choice, but one that turned out rather well thanks to the visible influences of This is Spinal Tap (including figure skating commentary such as "Famed for his personal hygiene, McElroy is beginning to reek. Of gold.") and the first half of Zoolander (before the plot takes over and it loses its way). The director also seems to have it in for figure skating championship mascots as well, which surely counts for something. The best bit, however, is the last thirty seconds. All films should end that way.
Premonition: I only watched the first twenty minutes, before being reminded why I'd only ever seen one other Sandra Bullock film, ten years ago.
Stranger than Fiction: Another non-starter, lasting only fifteen minutes because of the labouring of the central idea (like a bad comedy sketch), and Emma Thompson's irritating voice-over. Or just voice.
Borat: It's no wonder Kazakhstan complained. The film starts with a tour of Borat's home town, which is vaguely uncomfortable in an "Aren't foreigners funny?" way (similar to those fake guide books to Molvania and the like, which are amusing until about half past two on Boxing Day). Things get more uncomfortable once we get to the US, but for the better as often very funny faux-interview high jinks ensue. Singing the national anthem at the rodeo is one of the high points; the naked fight in the hotel is another, with a caveat of "I shouldn't be finding this that funny, surely". Other encounters are startling, such as Borat stopping street punks for fashion advice, or meeting some depressingly misogynist frat boys. There's a plot about going to meet Pamela Anderson, but it really doesn't matter. The most impressive thing, however, is how Sacha Baron Cohen makes such a potentially unlikeable character quite sympathetic and endearing.
Hot Fuzz: I don't want to inaugurate some kind of Simon Pegg/Nick Frost/Edgar Wright backlash, because I like them all, but it has to be said: Hot Fuzz is something of a disappointment. It's let down by two main problems: it's too long, and it's conceptually muddled. The idea is that a spectacularly successful London cop is transferred to a rural town, where law enforcement culture clash hijinks ensue (hijinks always ensue). It's the basically the same idea as Shaun of the Dead: relocate a filmic genre to an inappropriate setting. And indeed, the final half hour or so, which moves an LA gunfight to rural England, is amusing. But this should be the starting point, not the end. Wouldn't it have been funnier to have the central character as a violent maverick from the beginning? I suspect the outlandish nature of the murders throughout is also supposed to be funny, but it doesn't work because the events and the setting aren't incongruous enough, thanks to Midsomer Murders and the like. The comedy is also 'amiable', but this time in a bad way, because one expects much more from the people involved. It feels as if the writer, producer, and director all had slightly different ideas about what they were parodying; as if half of them thought they were making English policing look like CSI for comic effect, while the other half thought the idea was to bring Lethal Weapon to the countryside. So while the final part is funny, it takes too long to get there, like a comedy sketch was bloated into a two hour film (and it really shouldn't be more than ninety minutes). There are good parts - Timothy Dalton has fun as the amusingly obvious bad guy, there are some hints at a Wicker Man style denouement (Edward Woodward stars, after all) and I liked the subtlety of the two Bill Bailey characters reading novels by Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks - but it should be better than it is.
Spiderman 3: This is going to make me sound terribly grumpy, but this had my 'law of diminishing returns' sense tingling. It's still above average for the superhero genre, but since it relies so much on the previous films as a continuation of that narrative (rather nicely summed up in the credits), it also invites comparison with them, and the judgement is that it's more of the same. That is, more dizzying and hectically edited fight sequences around the skyscrapers of New York, more near death misses for Spidey... and a creeping lack of investment from the viewer. By the grand finale, Spiderman has been through so much and recovered that he seems pretty much invicible, which somewhat undermines the inevitable final confrontation (yes, at a large building). There's also too much crammed into the storyline; Peter's relationship with Mary Jane, the ongoing conflict with Harry over his father's death, a rivalry with another photographer, an escaped prisoner who turns into Sandman, some black goo from space which turns Peter bad in a Superman 3 way and turns the rival photographer into a monster... making some sense of all this requires the writers to take some questionable shortcuts. Since the "you killed my dad you bastard" plotline isn't going anywhere, Harry conveniently gets amnesia, only to recover later, only to have the butler reveal some previously concealed evidence that resolves the whole storyline (so what was the butler doing throughout the second film? Shooting hoops?). The Sandman thread is equally careless; the convict escapes from prison and is next seen literally wandering into the middle of some particle accelerator thing, where he gets turned into sand. Of course, he needs some motivation to be evil beyond the basic determinism of being a criminal anyway, so he's upset about his daughter being ill. That's about as far as motivation goes, so in a remarkable act of narrative retrofitting, it turns out that he was the guy who shot Peter's uncle after all, and not the guy in the first film. Beyond that, it's not particularly clear why Sandman should have any kind of grudge against Spiderman, except that he is Bad and Spiderman is Good. Of course. The black goo is also unexplained; this might have been satisfying in a more tightly focused plot, but given the holes on display here, it also looks careless. It's not all bad - the performances are good, and the resolution is nice. Well, at least the Venom plot ends well, resolved by what might be the best example of "I knew that information would prove useful at the end of the film" because the set-up wasn't obvious and the execution isn't tediously over-explained. The Sandman plot ends as poorly as it started, with the bad guy realising out of nowhere that he's been naughty and must change his ways. Peter's forgiveness of him would be powerful if the character had been thought through in any depth... but I'm getting back to grumpy here. It's a very watchable and enjoyable film, but don't think about the plot too much, or you'll end up like me.
Sunday 15 April 2007
Doctor Who and the Critical Backlash
I'm now back in the UK, and all too aware that I didn't write much live from the States. My excuses are that a) I'll deal with such things later, this being more of an occasional column than realtime e-gawpfest, and b) time moves much more quickly in Northern California than it does in Britain, so much so that I feel I've returned even before I departed. So in lieu of American adventures and thoughts (which will be forthcoming, have no doubt), I invite you to browse an equally informative website about what is increasingly becoming my US home, Woodland CA:
http://insidewoodland.com/
In the meantime, let's discuss British stuff, and in particular Doctor Who. I hadn't seen any of the new series until "Gridlock," the third episode. Unfortunately, it didn't make me feel particularly bereaved to have missed the first two instalments, nor did it make me excited about the 'pleasures' to come. This is not something I say (or rather, write) easily, being a Who enthusiast well before it was cool. I never went so far as to attend a convention, but I do have a fantastic range of Target novelisations in a box downstairs, most of which I bought in Mevagissey, a Cornish fishing village which in the late eighties boasted not one but two remaindered bookshops, an unnaturally high fishing-village-to-remaindered-bookshop ratio. This was back in the days when remaindered bookshops sold things one might want to buy, rather than cheap stationery and synthesizer albums. I presume this historical shift indicates an increased restraint in the publishing industry, now that editors have learnt the bitter lessons of printing half a million copies of The Twin Dilemma (incidentally, if any Who minded rare book dealers are reading, I also bought a copy of The Sontaran Experiment, the contents of which turned out to be The Armageddon Factor. Does this make me rich?). Even at the age of eleven, I was already enough of a Victorianist to realise that Ghost Light was conceptually flawed in its treatment of Darwinian theory, and also that it just wasn't a very good story. So, when I heard that Who was making a sustained return to the screen (and I don't mean the 1996 telemovie, in which the Doctor did a lot of wandering around San Francisco with an attractive woman - how could I have known that, eleven years later, I too would be a doctor doing a lot of wandering around San Francisco with an attractive woman?) I had that strange combination of excitement and "don't mess it up."
Two years on from the revival, and the gloss of excitement has worn off to reveal... not very much. Firstly, there's David Tennant. Hearing Tennant was going to take over from Christopher Eccleston was good, since I'd liked him in Blackpool in 2004, and even more so in a touring production of Comedians (where, in a before-he-was-famous style, he was lost in the billing behind Ron Moody and Martin Freeman). Ah, I thought, Tennant will do just fine, and in any case, anybody can play the Doctor. To be proved wrong on both counts, however, is not just disappointing but embarrassing. Eccleston may have seemed eccentric casting to some (and even he seemed surprised by it well into the first series), but he was convincing and could carry the weaker moments. Tennant can't - in fact, quite often he is the weaker moments. Shouting isn't an alternative to authority.
Secondly, there's Russell T. Davies, whose reputation as one of our best television writers is baffling. I can't think of any Davies script or project that hasn't included some major flaw. 1991's Dark Season was passable, but being two stories shoehorned into one series gave it the appearance of being broken-backed. Two years later, Century Falls made hardly any sense at all. I'll admit I didn't see any of Queer as Folk or Bob and Rose, although I know some people were vaguely offended by the latter's intimation that "hey, maybe gay men can like women as well! Wouldn't that be whacky??" The Second Coming in 2003 was interesting, but like so much of Davies' work, unravelled itself in yet another conclusion that made no sense and was based in the most embarrassing kind of atheism, one that refutes religion not on ontological but ethical grounds, where lack of belief in god stems not from the fact that he doesn't exist, but that he's fairly useless to humanity and so not worth bothering with. It's the kind of dogmatism that gives writers like Terry Eagleton the opportunity to make such nonsensical remarks (in his After Theory) that atheism is really just inverted religion. (While we're on the subject of religion, it's intriguing to see the extent to which the Daleks have been reshaped. In the seventies, they were Nazis; now they're religious fundamentalists, with gods, cults, and marytrs). My main problem with Davies, however, is that he can't tell a self-contained story, since much of his creative idiom is in soap opera, a genre concerned less with narrative than with providing imaginary friends for the undemanding (in a year which gave us Life on Mars and a new series of Peep Show, in a Radio Times interview Davies chose Hollyoaks as the televisual highlight). Doctor Who is the opposite of Coronation Street - in fact, that's the precise reason it was cancelled in the 1980s. It also means that this revival is oddly parochial, revisiting the same people and places in a similar attempt to create some kind of fictional community. Star Trek is science fiction about community; Who is essentially "Anchorite in Space", a weird bloke in a box.
Thirdly, and I'll leave it here for now, nu-Who is just a bit too glossy. I've always wondered why, in terms of scenery, it's acceptable to guffaw "It's just a quarry in Surrey!" but not "It's just the inside of a computer!" At least the quarry exists, and since I know they haven't actually gone to the moon, I don't see why realising that should be so unpalatable. But one of the distinguishing marks of classic Who was the challenge of creating universes and narratives on comparatively limited resources. It was the televisual equivalent of the literary group Oulipo, trying to create under severe restrictions (as in George Perec's novel La Disparition, without using the letter 'e') which would in turn create something intriguing. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't, sometimes it had startling consequences (such as Warrior's Gate, for instance). Nu-Who has no such restrictions, being able to CGI almost anything into existence and so eliminating any of the material challenges that only good writing and a theatrically imaginative approach can meet. Instead of grimy corridors, we have glossy sheen (remember the station in The Impossible Planet? For a desolate outpost in the very pit of hell, it seemed awfully shiny and well-lit). The rejigging of the theme music is a perfect example. The Who theme gained its considerable fame through sounding like nothing else, yet at the same time having been produced by two or three people and a lot of ingenuity (again, creative restriction). It sounded weird and perfectly matched the content of the show. Today, we have the National Anthem of the State of Doctor Who, something that sounds exactly like something else - an orchestra on Earth. I'm fairly sure more demented fans than me actually stand up for it now, which is not the point - it should leave us shaken, not stirred.
http://insidewoodland.com/
In the meantime, let's discuss British stuff, and in particular Doctor Who. I hadn't seen any of the new series until "Gridlock," the third episode. Unfortunately, it didn't make me feel particularly bereaved to have missed the first two instalments, nor did it make me excited about the 'pleasures' to come. This is not something I say (or rather, write) easily, being a Who enthusiast well before it was cool. I never went so far as to attend a convention, but I do have a fantastic range of Target novelisations in a box downstairs, most of which I bought in Mevagissey, a Cornish fishing village which in the late eighties boasted not one but two remaindered bookshops, an unnaturally high fishing-village-to-remaindered-bookshop ratio. This was back in the days when remaindered bookshops sold things one might want to buy, rather than cheap stationery and synthesizer albums. I presume this historical shift indicates an increased restraint in the publishing industry, now that editors have learnt the bitter lessons of printing half a million copies of The Twin Dilemma (incidentally, if any Who minded rare book dealers are reading, I also bought a copy of The Sontaran Experiment, the contents of which turned out to be The Armageddon Factor. Does this make me rich?). Even at the age of eleven, I was already enough of a Victorianist to realise that Ghost Light was conceptually flawed in its treatment of Darwinian theory, and also that it just wasn't a very good story. So, when I heard that Who was making a sustained return to the screen (and I don't mean the 1996 telemovie, in which the Doctor did a lot of wandering around San Francisco with an attractive woman - how could I have known that, eleven years later, I too would be a doctor doing a lot of wandering around San Francisco with an attractive woman?) I had that strange combination of excitement and "don't mess it up."
Two years on from the revival, and the gloss of excitement has worn off to reveal... not very much. Firstly, there's David Tennant. Hearing Tennant was going to take over from Christopher Eccleston was good, since I'd liked him in Blackpool in 2004, and even more so in a touring production of Comedians (where, in a before-he-was-famous style, he was lost in the billing behind Ron Moody and Martin Freeman). Ah, I thought, Tennant will do just fine, and in any case, anybody can play the Doctor. To be proved wrong on both counts, however, is not just disappointing but embarrassing. Eccleston may have seemed eccentric casting to some (and even he seemed surprised by it well into the first series), but he was convincing and could carry the weaker moments. Tennant can't - in fact, quite often he is the weaker moments. Shouting isn't an alternative to authority.
Secondly, there's Russell T. Davies, whose reputation as one of our best television writers is baffling. I can't think of any Davies script or project that hasn't included some major flaw. 1991's Dark Season was passable, but being two stories shoehorned into one series gave it the appearance of being broken-backed. Two years later, Century Falls made hardly any sense at all. I'll admit I didn't see any of Queer as Folk or Bob and Rose, although I know some people were vaguely offended by the latter's intimation that "hey, maybe gay men can like women as well! Wouldn't that be whacky??" The Second Coming in 2003 was interesting, but like so much of Davies' work, unravelled itself in yet another conclusion that made no sense and was based in the most embarrassing kind of atheism, one that refutes religion not on ontological but ethical grounds, where lack of belief in god stems not from the fact that he doesn't exist, but that he's fairly useless to humanity and so not worth bothering with. It's the kind of dogmatism that gives writers like Terry Eagleton the opportunity to make such nonsensical remarks (in his After Theory) that atheism is really just inverted religion. (While we're on the subject of religion, it's intriguing to see the extent to which the Daleks have been reshaped. In the seventies, they were Nazis; now they're religious fundamentalists, with gods, cults, and marytrs). My main problem with Davies, however, is that he can't tell a self-contained story, since much of his creative idiom is in soap opera, a genre concerned less with narrative than with providing imaginary friends for the undemanding (in a year which gave us Life on Mars and a new series of Peep Show, in a Radio Times interview Davies chose Hollyoaks as the televisual highlight). Doctor Who is the opposite of Coronation Street - in fact, that's the precise reason it was cancelled in the 1980s. It also means that this revival is oddly parochial, revisiting the same people and places in a similar attempt to create some kind of fictional community. Star Trek is science fiction about community; Who is essentially "Anchorite in Space", a weird bloke in a box.
Thirdly, and I'll leave it here for now, nu-Who is just a bit too glossy. I've always wondered why, in terms of scenery, it's acceptable to guffaw "It's just a quarry in Surrey!" but not "It's just the inside of a computer!" At least the quarry exists, and since I know they haven't actually gone to the moon, I don't see why realising that should be so unpalatable. But one of the distinguishing marks of classic Who was the challenge of creating universes and narratives on comparatively limited resources. It was the televisual equivalent of the literary group Oulipo, trying to create under severe restrictions (as in George Perec's novel La Disparition, without using the letter 'e') which would in turn create something intriguing. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't, sometimes it had startling consequences (such as Warrior's Gate, for instance). Nu-Who has no such restrictions, being able to CGI almost anything into existence and so eliminating any of the material challenges that only good writing and a theatrically imaginative approach can meet. Instead of grimy corridors, we have glossy sheen (remember the station in The Impossible Planet? For a desolate outpost in the very pit of hell, it seemed awfully shiny and well-lit). The rejigging of the theme music is a perfect example. The Who theme gained its considerable fame through sounding like nothing else, yet at the same time having been produced by two or three people and a lot of ingenuity (again, creative restriction). It sounded weird and perfectly matched the content of the show. Today, we have the National Anthem of the State of Doctor Who, something that sounds exactly like something else - an orchestra on Earth. I'm fairly sure more demented fans than me actually stand up for it now, which is not the point - it should leave us shaken, not stirred.
Tuesday 3 April 2007
Neo-Victorians at 36,000 feet
A week into my latest
So, The Prestige (in either format) is highly recommended. And certainly more so than Deja Vu, one of the other film choices. This is one of those conceptual thrillers Hollywood is so fond of nowadays, but unfortunately let down by the fact that its concept is a crock. An absolute crock.
Sunday 25 March 2007
Live from Heathrow
"I like a man who stays put": Roy Batty, Blade Runner
Those of you who have been paying attention will know that yesterday I was speaking at the "Science Fiction and the Canon" conference in Cambridge. More about that soon, but for now there are more immediately appropriate things to talk about.
This particular doughnut comes to you from Heathrow Terminal 3, bare hours before the US leg of the tour (as I insist on calling it) begins. The queue for the security gate is the longest I've seen here, streaming all the way out of departures and no doubt well past the most disappointing Garfunkel's in London (chocolate cake can have many flavours, but surely onion isn't one of them). The queue is so big that people with more than two hours to wait before their flight are being asked not to join it. It's strangely heartening to see, especially since certain quarters of the media are treating long-haul airline passengers with the warmth and welcome usually reserved for paedophiles. I'm not a climate change denier (seeing George Monbiot take apart David Bellamy on the news a few years ago was a delight), but at the same time I'm intrigued by some of the subtexts of environmentalism. Whereas it once seemed a heterogeneous bunch of concerns, now it seems (in the popular media at least) concerned with the monolithic threat of CO2 emissions. Yet political stances always have their own ideological emissions, and the stuff coming out of environmentalism's exhaust is a weird kind of New Parochialism. So, while no doubt the Independent would frown on my transatlantic flight today, I don't really have a choice - I can't cycle to Northern California. But then, surely I have a choice of whether to go or not? Why should I? How far did the food in my kitchen travel? Why take 'unnecessary' journeys?
In the last few years, we've been introduced to two theoretical concepts: "food miles" and the "carbon footprint," both of which explicitly or implicitly attack the idea of not staying put. "Carbon footprint" in particular is as manipulative as anything Roland Barthes analysed in his Mythologies, with its central thesis that bourgeois myth operates by making the political or cultural seem natural and given. "Carbon footprint" seems to be the perfect example of culture masquerading as nature, with the added implication that it would be best if one left as few footprints as possible, of any kind. Travel, they used to say, broadens the mind; now, it's antisocial behaviour. I also wonder if there's a connection between the still quite recent democratisation of air travel and the middle-class media now deeming it unfashionable. This might explain the intriguing links recent writers of fiction have made between anarchism and the rejection of mobility. Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club features a memorable sequence on the disorienting experience of air travel, the procession of airports which all look alike. J. G. Ballard's Millennium People is closer still; dealing with an affluent anarchist set, the novel begins with an attack on Heathrow.
Perhaps I'm being unfair. I certainly don't want anyone to think I'm Jeremy Clarkson (as my friend Gareth Edwards has pointed out, the real life Alan Partridge). I don't drive, I use public transport, and agree that inefficient transport should be made as unattractive as possible where there are viable alternatives (why, really, would you need to fly within the UK?). And maybe my theoretical posturing, my 'New Parochialism,' is only going to get me in the Neophiles column of Private Eye. After all, the New Parochialism isn't so new after all. Developments in transportation have always been viewed with suspicion. Some of the crazier religious Victorians thought that building the London Underground would awaken Satanic forces; as my forthcoming (that is, forthcoming in the academic sense) cultural history will show, the Underground network has regularly been portrayed as a pathological space of danger, fear, and monsters. The bombers of July 7th 2005 drew on exactly these tropes, consciously or otherwise, just as the World Trade Center attacks borrowed the aesthetics of the action film, and grimly punned on the American emergency services phone number. And the anti-travellers of Fight Club and Millennium People have their ancestors in Xavier de Maistre's eighteenth century work A Voyage around my Room, and the Victorian French decadent Des Esseintes in Huysman's A Rebours (setting off for England, Des Esseintes gets no further than thinking about what being in England would be like). What goes around, comes around - so perhaps you'd be better staying at home.
Those of you who have been paying attention will know that yesterday I was speaking at the "Science Fiction and the Canon" conference in Cambridge. More about that soon, but for now there are more immediately appropriate things to talk about.
This particular doughnut comes to you from Heathrow Terminal 3, bare hours before the US leg of the tour (as I insist on calling it) begins. The queue for the security gate is the longest I've seen here, streaming all the way out of departures and no doubt well past the most disappointing Garfunkel's in London (chocolate cake can have many flavours, but surely onion isn't one of them). The queue is so big that people with more than two hours to wait before their flight are being asked not to join it. It's strangely heartening to see, especially since certain quarters of the media are treating long-haul airline passengers with the warmth and welcome usually reserved for paedophiles. I'm not a climate change denier (seeing George Monbiot take apart David Bellamy on the news a few years ago was a delight), but at the same time I'm intrigued by some of the subtexts of environmentalism. Whereas it once seemed a heterogeneous bunch of concerns, now it seems (in the popular media at least) concerned with the monolithic threat of CO2 emissions. Yet political stances always have their own ideological emissions, and the stuff coming out of environmentalism's exhaust is a weird kind of New Parochialism. So, while no doubt the Independent would frown on my transatlantic flight today, I don't really have a choice - I can't cycle to Northern California. But then, surely I have a choice of whether to go or not? Why should I? How far did the food in my kitchen travel? Why take 'unnecessary' journeys?
In the last few years, we've been introduced to two theoretical concepts: "food miles" and the "carbon footprint," both of which explicitly or implicitly attack the idea of not staying put. "Carbon footprint" in particular is as manipulative as anything Roland Barthes analysed in his Mythologies, with its central thesis that bourgeois myth operates by making the political or cultural seem natural and given. "Carbon footprint" seems to be the perfect example of culture masquerading as nature, with the added implication that it would be best if one left as few footprints as possible, of any kind. Travel, they used to say, broadens the mind; now, it's antisocial behaviour. I also wonder if there's a connection between the still quite recent democratisation of air travel and the middle-class media now deeming it unfashionable. This might explain the intriguing links recent writers of fiction have made between anarchism and the rejection of mobility. Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club features a memorable sequence on the disorienting experience of air travel, the procession of airports which all look alike. J. G. Ballard's Millennium People is closer still; dealing with an affluent anarchist set, the novel begins with an attack on Heathrow.
Perhaps I'm being unfair. I certainly don't want anyone to think I'm Jeremy Clarkson (as my friend Gareth Edwards has pointed out, the real life Alan Partridge). I don't drive, I use public transport, and agree that inefficient transport should be made as unattractive as possible where there are viable alternatives (why, really, would you need to fly within the UK?). And maybe my theoretical posturing, my 'New Parochialism,' is only going to get me in the Neophiles column of Private Eye. After all, the New Parochialism isn't so new after all. Developments in transportation have always been viewed with suspicion. Some of the crazier religious Victorians thought that building the London Underground would awaken Satanic forces; as my forthcoming (that is, forthcoming in the academic sense) cultural history will show, the Underground network has regularly been portrayed as a pathological space of danger, fear, and monsters. The bombers of July 7th 2005 drew on exactly these tropes, consciously or otherwise, just as the World Trade Center attacks borrowed the aesthetics of the action film, and grimly punned on the American emergency services phone number. And the anti-travellers of Fight Club and Millennium People have their ancestors in Xavier de Maistre's eighteenth century work A Voyage around my Room, and the Victorian French decadent Des Esseintes in Huysman's A Rebours (setting off for England, Des Esseintes gets no further than thinking about what being in England would be like). What goes around, comes around - so perhaps you'd be better staying at home.
Thursday 15 March 2007
The Cast of "Casualty" doing an Abba Medley
The BBC charity telethon is here again, reminding me of Alexei Sayle’s comment that Comic Relief was established by the people of the Third World to aid the struggling comedians of the UK. While in no way disputing the fine intentions of the campaign, or denying the need for such aid, I find it difficult to become moved by Comic Relief as a charitable event. It presents too much of a queasy mix of self-conscious irony (the reflex of the comedic personalities involved) and leaden earnestness (the very serious and real necessity for such campaigns), resulting in a smugness that becomes gradually unbearable.
The problem lies in Comic Relief’s central faith in the idea of comedy as progressive force, embodied in the feeble play on words of the title. The power of comedy to effect any kind of social or cultural change is much vaunted, but rarely demonstrated. British news media seems to have never heard of Chris Morris; The Simpsons, frequently cooed over for its ‘subversive’ content, was in fact always fairly safe, even more so now that its slide into self-indulgence and retreads of itself is now fully established (as Homer might say, "Mmm… law of diminishing returns"). South Park showed what subversive content really was, although its recent lurch towards the political right has made it somewhat resistant to the progressive politics usually associated with comedy (although in a way, this is taking comedic subversion to a new level). So Comic Relief’s faith in the power of laughter to heal the world seems, ironically, somewhat po-faced. It doesn’t help that the comedy routines are often somewhat self-satisfied in their references to "what we’re all here for tonight." A good example happened a few years ago when Comic Relief night featured an ‘episode’ of Only Fools And Horses, the first to appear since the series’ conclusion in 1996 (but before the ill-advised return to the series a few years later – only fools flog dead horses). The episode ran as normal until the final few minutes, when David Jason turned to camera and said that they didn’t know how to end the sketch, but then again it didn’t really matter because the real point was the charity. But this just struck me as poor writing. Did the charitable subtext need to be pointed out so clumsily? Did it need to be pointed out at all? Did the performers need to make it so clear that they were doing this for a good cause? Other fundraisers such as Band Aid were largely free of this kind of self-satisfaction because, in terms of the event, the appeal was almost incidental. People paid to see a rock show, and that money just happened to be used for a particular charity. Somehow, Comic Relief never seems content to let itself simply be a comedy show that uses its material to raise money.
It sounds as if I’m complaining that my thoughtless enjoyment of funnies is being compromised by boring old reminders of material want and the need for change. But compare Comic Relief with the BBC’s other charity, Children in Need, an equally valid cause but without the same sense of self-satisfaction. This is partially because the appeal isn’t inherently tied to a certain sector of the entertainment industry, so it doesn’t (on the whole) seem to act as a promotional opportunity or as the Comedians’ Union Showboat Bonanza. It’s also refreshingly free of the kind of "I’m cool and funny in real life, but tonight I’m letting my aloofness drop for the common good" self-satisfaction. It’s also striking that while Children in Need doesn’t have any kind of visual prize for donation, Comic Relief depends on the Red Nose as both fundraiser and promotional device. It’s all right if you’re not a professional comedian, you can at least have the temporary semblance of one. Just leave the actual jokes to the professionals – in the right hands they can save lives.
The charity telethon as a genre, however, is facing new challenges. Whereas shows like Children in Need used to give people the chance to see celebrities in different and usually embarrassing contexts, that kind of programming appears every night. The idea behind a twenty minute section on Children in Need ten years ago now gets hosted by Ant’n’Dec and shown sixty weeks a year on ITV2. You’re never further than eight hours away from the cast of Casualty doing an Abba medley. Resultantly, the charity shows are resorting to singers promoting their new album, or trailers for the current West End shows, which in turn gives rise to a new kind of self-promotion. Whether this is better than the old kind of self-promotion, we’ll have to see. Nevertheless, I’ll no doubt be hurling coins into a bucket on Friday, and it would be nice if you’d join me (ah, it does feel quite good after all).
The problem lies in Comic Relief’s central faith in the idea of comedy as progressive force, embodied in the feeble play on words of the title. The power of comedy to effect any kind of social or cultural change is much vaunted, but rarely demonstrated. British news media seems to have never heard of Chris Morris; The Simpsons, frequently cooed over for its ‘subversive’ content, was in fact always fairly safe, even more so now that its slide into self-indulgence and retreads of itself is now fully established (as Homer might say, "Mmm… law of diminishing returns"). South Park showed what subversive content really was, although its recent lurch towards the political right has made it somewhat resistant to the progressive politics usually associated with comedy (although in a way, this is taking comedic subversion to a new level). So Comic Relief’s faith in the power of laughter to heal the world seems, ironically, somewhat po-faced. It doesn’t help that the comedy routines are often somewhat self-satisfied in their references to "what we’re all here for tonight." A good example happened a few years ago when Comic Relief night featured an ‘episode’ of Only Fools And Horses, the first to appear since the series’ conclusion in 1996 (but before the ill-advised return to the series a few years later – only fools flog dead horses). The episode ran as normal until the final few minutes, when David Jason turned to camera and said that they didn’t know how to end the sketch, but then again it didn’t really matter because the real point was the charity. But this just struck me as poor writing. Did the charitable subtext need to be pointed out so clumsily? Did it need to be pointed out at all? Did the performers need to make it so clear that they were doing this for a good cause? Other fundraisers such as Band Aid were largely free of this kind of self-satisfaction because, in terms of the event, the appeal was almost incidental. People paid to see a rock show, and that money just happened to be used for a particular charity. Somehow, Comic Relief never seems content to let itself simply be a comedy show that uses its material to raise money.
It sounds as if I’m complaining that my thoughtless enjoyment of funnies is being compromised by boring old reminders of material want and the need for change. But compare Comic Relief with the BBC’s other charity, Children in Need, an equally valid cause but without the same sense of self-satisfaction. This is partially because the appeal isn’t inherently tied to a certain sector of the entertainment industry, so it doesn’t (on the whole) seem to act as a promotional opportunity or as the Comedians’ Union Showboat Bonanza. It’s also refreshingly free of the kind of "I’m cool and funny in real life, but tonight I’m letting my aloofness drop for the common good" self-satisfaction. It’s also striking that while Children in Need doesn’t have any kind of visual prize for donation, Comic Relief depends on the Red Nose as both fundraiser and promotional device. It’s all right if you’re not a professional comedian, you can at least have the temporary semblance of one. Just leave the actual jokes to the professionals – in the right hands they can save lives.
The charity telethon as a genre, however, is facing new challenges. Whereas shows like Children in Need used to give people the chance to see celebrities in different and usually embarrassing contexts, that kind of programming appears every night. The idea behind a twenty minute section on Children in Need ten years ago now gets hosted by Ant’n’Dec and shown sixty weeks a year on ITV2. You’re never further than eight hours away from the cast of Casualty doing an Abba medley. Resultantly, the charity shows are resorting to singers promoting their new album, or trailers for the current West End shows, which in turn gives rise to a new kind of self-promotion. Whether this is better than the old kind of self-promotion, we’ll have to see. Nevertheless, I’ll no doubt be hurling coins into a bucket on Friday, and it would be nice if you’d join me (ah, it does feel quite good after all).
Sunday 4 March 2007
Tour Dates
I promised the twin worlds of Victoriana and Academia, so I’d better pay up before this e-journal degenerates into hilarious accounts of weekend shopping (although I’m going to California towards the end of the month, prime territory for Curb Your Enthusiasm style misadventure). So the first instalment – which, incidentally, grows week by week into a partwork you and your family will treasure – is a sneak preview of material to be included in my next academic appearance, speaking at the Science Fiction and the Canon conference at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, on 24th March. Why not bag yourself a seat at the conference website here?:
http://www.anglia.ac.uk/ruskin/en/home/faculties/alss/deps/english_media/conference.html
So, "Dick/ens: Bleak House and the Dystopia of Blade Runner." I was so tempted to call this paper "‘It’s too bad she won’t live: but then again, who does?’: Esther Summerson as Replicant," but that wouldn’t have quite suited what I’m actually going to be talking about. What I am arguing will have to remain a mystery save for those who stump up to attend the conference. Although a tiny clue is that another rejected title was "Like Tears in Rain." In the end, I went for Dick/ens because it’s a beautiful half pun (or hun) and has superfluous typography in the title. Incidentally, at this year’s MLA convention, Joseph Valente gave a paper on academic titles discussing such flagrant use of punctuation. That particular panel was the most notorious of this year’s event, thanks to Paul Morrison’s infamous "Is the Rectum a Text?" I happened to be sitting behind a journalist at the time, so if you read of this panel in the American press (no doubt as an example of the theoretical decadence of the MLA), I was actually there. It’s something to tell the grandchildren.
Anyway, my trailer for the Cambridge conference constitutes an illustration from Punch in 1850 (I'm momentarily at a loss for a more specific reference than that, but it's on the way). The illustration reveals the extent of advertising in mid-nineteenth-century London, something I think a lot of people are apt to see as a modern, or even postmodern development (I see Microsoft Word dislikes the word postmodern, which is surprising since ‘Help’ seems to have been constructed by Jacques Derrida). Although the sensory overload (in the fashionable phrase) of street advertising really got going towards the end of the nineteenth century, here it's clearly already on the way. Like the most intriguing images, there are so many questions. Why are all the Ns reversed on the advertising cart except for those in "Van Dieman's Land" (that is, Tasmania, indicating a mid-Victorian liking for Antipodean flavoured sensationalism)? What's going on with the surprised looking man on the left (who, I must admit, looks like he's performing some sort of levitation trick - oh yes, magic is something else that's going to crop up a lot here as well)? Are those peaches in the girl's basket, and is there any psychoanalytic mileage in her fruity bounty, as well as what seems to be at least a police caution? As for my favourite part, I'm stuck between the two men advertising mixed somethings, and the poster on the far left. There's something amusing about the sudden leap from modern visual entertainment technologies to the more enduring aesthetic of the freakshow. I wonder if it would have had a similar effect to a poster today promising IMAX... Nintendo Wii... The Bearded Lady. Nonetheless, I hope that DIORAMA PANORAMA CYCLORAMA DWARF! will soon become a popular drinking game at the MLA convention.
It does say tour dates at the top; you can see me live at Cambridge on 24th March, before I head off to California on the 25th… and my next public appearance will be at the Daphne du Maurier International Centenary Conference, Fowey, 10th-11th May. Get your seats booked at:
http://www.anglia.ac.uk/ruskin/en/home/faculties/alss/deps/english_media/conference.html
So, "Dick/ens: Bleak House and the Dystopia of Blade Runner." I was so tempted to call this paper "‘It’s too bad she won’t live: but then again, who does?’: Esther Summerson as Replicant," but that wouldn’t have quite suited what I’m actually going to be talking about. What I am arguing will have to remain a mystery save for those who stump up to attend the conference. Although a tiny clue is that another rejected title was "Like Tears in Rain." In the end, I went for Dick/ens because it’s a beautiful half pun (or hun) and has superfluous typography in the title. Incidentally, at this year’s MLA convention, Joseph Valente gave a paper on academic titles discussing such flagrant use of punctuation. That particular panel was the most notorious of this year’s event, thanks to Paul Morrison’s infamous "Is the Rectum a Text?" I happened to be sitting behind a journalist at the time, so if you read of this panel in the American press (no doubt as an example of the theoretical decadence of the MLA), I was actually there. It’s something to tell the grandchildren.
Anyway, my trailer for the Cambridge conference constitutes an illustration from Punch in 1850 (I'm momentarily at a loss for a more specific reference than that, but it's on the way). The illustration reveals the extent of advertising in mid-nineteenth-century London, something I think a lot of people are apt to see as a modern, or even postmodern development (I see Microsoft Word dislikes the word postmodern, which is surprising since ‘Help’ seems to have been constructed by Jacques Derrida). Although the sensory overload (in the fashionable phrase) of street advertising really got going towards the end of the nineteenth century, here it's clearly already on the way. Like the most intriguing images, there are so many questions. Why are all the Ns reversed on the advertising cart except for those in "Van Dieman's Land" (that is, Tasmania, indicating a mid-Victorian liking for Antipodean flavoured sensationalism)? What's going on with the surprised looking man on the left (who, I must admit, looks like he's performing some sort of levitation trick - oh yes, magic is something else that's going to crop up a lot here as well)? Are those peaches in the girl's basket, and is there any psychoanalytic mileage in her fruity bounty, as well as what seems to be at least a police caution? As for my favourite part, I'm stuck between the two men advertising mixed somethings, and the poster on the far left. There's something amusing about the sudden leap from modern visual entertainment technologies to the more enduring aesthetic of the freakshow. I wonder if it would have had a similar effect to a poster today promising IMAX... Nintendo Wii... The Bearded Lady. Nonetheless, I hope that DIORAMA PANORAMA CYCLORAMA DWARF! will soon become a popular drinking game at the MLA convention.
It does say tour dates at the top; you can see me live at Cambridge on 24th March, before I head off to California on the 25th… and my next public appearance will be at the Daphne du Maurier International Centenary Conference, Fowey, 10th-11th May. Get your seats booked at:
This is being organised in association with the annual Daphne du Maurier Festival of Arts and Literature, which means that in one sense I’m on the same bill as Jethro Tull. More of them later.
Wednesday 28 February 2007
Why Darwin's Doughnuts?
I should probably begin by explaining the title of this… actually, I’ll start by complaining about the word blog. I just don’t like it. It sounds like it belongs to the messier end of medical statistics (as something that might be measured, and not in a pretty way). It may be the reason why I’ve waited so long before having one of these things myself, until I realised there was no reason why my half-arsed news shouldn’t be publicised as well. But I still don’t like the word. So instead, if you’ll excuse the pretension… an e-journal. You like?
Right. Following that escaped footnote, we can begin again. I should probably begin by explaining the title of this e-journal, which requires a bit more personal information. I am a researcher, occasional lecturer, and fairly new PhD, in English, specifically in the field of Victorian Studies, which explains the Darwin bit. In keeping with the title, there will probably be some Victorian stuff on here. Maybe some reports on academic conferences, maybe some miniature book reviews. But usually just comments on whatever I’m reading and funny pictures. Oh, and bonus rants whenever I hear in the media that old joke about Victorian sexuality, i.e. they didn’t have any. Piano feet will be on flagrant display throughout.
Thus, one half of the title. I wish the other half constituted a fantastic expose of Charles’ dining habits, but it doesn’t. Instead, this splendidly alliterative title nicely sums up my equal interests in Victorian culture and too much sugar. I suppose on another level, it signals my investment in an evolutionary paradigm for explaining the universe. Dawkins’ Doughnuts might have been another title, but that comes a little too close to Dunkin’ Donuts (against which I have nothing; this year’s MLA convention in Philadelphia was held conveniently near to one of their shops). And it loses the Victorian context a little, as well. And the history of the doughnut as a model for scientific theory is a fascinating one… for now, however, I adopt it as having another symbolic potential. For (and stay with me here) is not the Darwinian model of the universe itself a doughnut, or depending on your perspective, a certain kind of doughnut? Some people find it delicious with a central core of jam (here standing in for reason, evidence, or ‘truth’ if you want to go that far). Others with slightly different tastes find it circular and with a hole at its centre (the sprinkles often found on these donuts are standing in for the devil’s work of misinformation, dinosaurs and the like). Now, whether I’m in an extended metaphor or not, I tend to prefer jam doughnuts. And I don’t really see cakes as theological indicators. Usually.
Finally, I’m getting in on intellectual fashion. Jay Clayton, in the marvellously titled Charles Dickens in Cyberspace (Oxford UP, 2003) points to a "Darwin Boom of the turn of the millennium" evident in titles of novels and non-fiction books which have all made Charlie the possessor of a wide range of stuff. This includes a Dangerous Idea, a Black Box, an Orchestra, a Shooter, a Spectre, a Radio, some Worms, and a Ghost (Clayton 170). And doughnuts seem as good as anything on this list. Admittedly, the turn of the millennium is itself on the turn, but at least the title sums up my general lateness in doing one of these things. And wait – isn’t it a bit parodic too? Cool.
One more disclaimer. If you’ve got this far, I really wouldn’t expect what follows to be the intellectual carnival I’ve so tiresomely suggested above. It might just turn out to be the television review column I’ve always wanted, or complaints about airports, or stuff about progressive rock (the most unfairly maligned of musical genres). But you can always search for the titillating bits. That’s what the internet is for, after all.
Right. Following that escaped footnote, we can begin again. I should probably begin by explaining the title of this e-journal, which requires a bit more personal information. I am a researcher, occasional lecturer, and fairly new PhD, in English, specifically in the field of Victorian Studies, which explains the Darwin bit. In keeping with the title, there will probably be some Victorian stuff on here. Maybe some reports on academic conferences, maybe some miniature book reviews. But usually just comments on whatever I’m reading and funny pictures. Oh, and bonus rants whenever I hear in the media that old joke about Victorian sexuality, i.e. they didn’t have any. Piano feet will be on flagrant display throughout.
Thus, one half of the title. I wish the other half constituted a fantastic expose of Charles’ dining habits, but it doesn’t. Instead, this splendidly alliterative title nicely sums up my equal interests in Victorian culture and too much sugar. I suppose on another level, it signals my investment in an evolutionary paradigm for explaining the universe. Dawkins’ Doughnuts might have been another title, but that comes a little too close to Dunkin’ Donuts (against which I have nothing; this year’s MLA convention in Philadelphia was held conveniently near to one of their shops). And it loses the Victorian context a little, as well. And the history of the doughnut as a model for scientific theory is a fascinating one… for now, however, I adopt it as having another symbolic potential. For (and stay with me here) is not the Darwinian model of the universe itself a doughnut, or depending on your perspective, a certain kind of doughnut? Some people find it delicious with a central core of jam (here standing in for reason, evidence, or ‘truth’ if you want to go that far). Others with slightly different tastes find it circular and with a hole at its centre (the sprinkles often found on these donuts are standing in for the devil’s work of misinformation, dinosaurs and the like). Now, whether I’m in an extended metaphor or not, I tend to prefer jam doughnuts. And I don’t really see cakes as theological indicators. Usually.
Finally, I’m getting in on intellectual fashion. Jay Clayton, in the marvellously titled Charles Dickens in Cyberspace (Oxford UP, 2003) points to a "Darwin Boom of the turn of the millennium" evident in titles of novels and non-fiction books which have all made Charlie the possessor of a wide range of stuff. This includes a Dangerous Idea, a Black Box, an Orchestra, a Shooter, a Spectre, a Radio, some Worms, and a Ghost (Clayton 170). And doughnuts seem as good as anything on this list. Admittedly, the turn of the millennium is itself on the turn, but at least the title sums up my general lateness in doing one of these things. And wait – isn’t it a bit parodic too? Cool.
One more disclaimer. If you’ve got this far, I really wouldn’t expect what follows to be the intellectual carnival I’ve so tiresomely suggested above. It might just turn out to be the television review column I’ve always wanted, or complaints about airports, or stuff about progressive rock (the most unfairly maligned of musical genres). But you can always search for the titillating bits. That’s what the internet is for, after all.
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