Darwin's Doughnuts

Still going...

2010-05-09T23:59:00.002+01:00

Hello all,

Another one of those huge gaps, I'm afraid; I've simply been too busy with the old lecturing to put something up of late, even with the goading of the general election to tempt me. Of which, a pick'n'mix of observations:

1) Cameron's closing statement at that first televised debate - manifesto in a nutshell, or 80s power ballad in rough draft?
2) Surely the issue with Gillian Duffy was not the subject she raised, but how she raised it; that is, the rather loaded term 'flocking.' The first casualty of electoral war, it seems, is close reading.
3) Proofreading, too, took a bit of a pounding. D J Taylor wrote a nice piece in the Independent on inept political language, mostly pointing out the errors of the Liberal Democrats (my local council candidate actually managed to sneak a superfluous apostrophe into the name of my ward); the BBC was unusually dreadful, averaging one obvious mistake a day. The best one occurred minutes before the beginning of the final debate, with a spectacularly incoherent headline featuring 'Barak Obama'.
4) Once again, 'Victorian' gets wheeled out pejoratively, this time to describe the UK's electoral system. Excuse me, but something the Victorians were very good at was organising stuff. Electoral reform, too, was something of a recurrent Victorian theme, though no doubt we'll all be told that, like sex, it was invented in the 1960s.

More to follow, no doubt. For the moment, an admin note; comments are now subject to moderation, since about 50% of the comments being left seem to be Chinese proverbs that conveniently link to sites selling bargain trainers ("Wow! These are genuine Niks!") or crushed tiger essence that offers terrifying powers of potency ("Erectile dysfunction? Hip trouble? With just one pill, you too can become a peripatetic priapic!"). Ah, to think that by calling it "Plato's Pharmacy" they could attract a whole new poststructuralist market.

The Doughnuts 2009: End of Year Literary Awards

2010-01-03T19:42:00.013Z

As always, not what's been published this year, just what I got around to reading. You think I'm made of money?

Best New Author: Don Delillo, Underworld

This was close - it was almost Salman Rushdie with The Satanic Verses. Both novels have their faults, although I suspect that with Rushdie I was at a disadvantage thanks to my frankly shaky grasp on Islamic theology. But Delillo edges it on the basis of some superb writing, not least the sixty page prologue to Underworld, describing a single baseball match. Of course, it helps that this particular baseball match is the final of the 1951 World Series, and that Delillo's cast here includes Frank Sinatra and J. Edgar Hoover.

Oddly enough, it's easier to point out Underworld's flaws than its strengths (or maybe that's just me). The most obvious is the fact that Delillo is a better literary stylist than a convincing delineator of character; the central pair of Nick Shay and Klara Sax are, well, just a little bit dull. Having now read White Noise as well, it's clear that Delillo's characters are really just mouthpieces for versions of Delillo (I'll probably have more to say on White Noise later in the year, but for now, I'll just note that he writes some of the most staggeringly perspicacious children in literary history). In terms of plot, since Delillo's somewhat expansive theme is the last 50 or so years of American history, it isn't the kind of novel that depends on the forward movement of narrative; in fact, the predominant movement of Underworld is backwards, opening (after the prologue) in the 1990s and ending (before a postmodern epilogue, of course) in the 1950s, the prose becoming increasingly fragmented as memory fades. This isn't a fault, of course, but those looking for a narrative hook to pull them through 827 pages will be disappointed. So, you're saying, if the characterisation of the main players is suspect, and the narrative diffuse, why does it scoop the big prize? Underworld is by no means perfect; it sometimes meanders and perhaps too obviously has its eye on 'greatness' (or possibly GREATNESS). But when it works - and that's most of the time - it's outstanding. Ironically, given the historical scope of the thing (and its physical presence as a book very definitely makes it a 'thing' - the physical mass of it is thematically appropriate), the best sections are those in which tiny moments of time come under extended narrative inspection. The aforementioned baseball game and immediate aftermath, about four actual hours, takes sixty pages; the thoughts of a street punk immediately after shooting a man, a second or two, take up a compelling page; and, in perhaps the best section, a couple of minutes of home video, potential evidence in a murder case and obsessively replayed on the news, is dissected with a detail that makes Barthes look like Littlejohn. Put another way, Delillo's theme is 'real time'; distorting it on the page, but also wondering about the 'real' time of history. Ultimately, Underworld is not consistent, but it can be awesome.

Best novel: John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

A crowded field this year, thanks to some excellent novels around March; Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, and Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea. Nausea is the runner-up here, a brilliant evocation of alienation (which also includes a hilarious moment about ordering cheese heroically). Objectively, it might even be better than Toole, but my instinct is to go with A Confederacy of Dunces, not least because whereas Nausea's origins are clearly in the intention to fictionalise existential philosophy, Dunces is less easily characterised. Put another way, whereas Sartre wrote a manifesto, Toole wrote a novel (I suppose I'm just suspicious of blatantly philosophical fiction, which is after all why Milan Kundera lost to Jonathan Franzen last year). Toole also has the edge inasmuch as while I don't remember Sartre's characters in any detail (although this is perhaps the point), Ignatius Reilly is still in here. I'm not as convinced as others are that the plot comes together that neatly (Burma Jones never seems that integrated into the whole, but then perhaps that's the point), but it's damn funny, not least Ignatius' sabotage of Levy Pants and his habit of shouting at the screen in cinemas. Baton Rouge will never sound the same again.

Biggest disappointment: Jonathan Franzen, The Twenty-Seventh City

A clear win for Franzen here, partially because of the ease with which The Corrections took the top prizes last year. The weak part of The Corrections was the Lithuanian sub-plot, the events of which seemed cartoonish and unconvincing; in The Twenty-Seventh City, the bad news is that it's all Lithuania. The plot is that the St. Louis of the mid-1980s appoints a female Indian chief of police, Jammu, who then gains increasing control of the city through a complex conspiracy of psychological terrorism, murder, local politics and the like. Sounds like a brilliant black comedy of city politics at the height of American conservatism, right? Sadly, no. It's scuppered by murky plotting and characters who can't bear the weight of the psychological scrutiny Franzen would perfect in The Corrections. It's never quite clear why Jammu acts in the way she does, or precisely how she manages to gain influence over city politics (I know little of how American cities are run, but I imagine that the chief of police has little to do with taxation decisions). Sequences of events are weirdly compressed; one character thinks he might apply to the police academy and a few months later, he's typing reports in the precinct. It's not quite clear if Franzen is trying to represent the actual St. Louis here, or some alternative world where things work slightly differently (not in the science fiction sense; rather, in the way that Iain Sinclair's Radon Daughters takes places in an 'alternative' London), but either way, it's unconvincing. Throw in a couple of sentences that shouldn't have escaped an MA seminar in Creative Writing, and you've got a bunch of perfectly good reasons why this went unpublished in the UK until after The Corrections.

(The closest competitor, incidentally, was Pat Barker's Regeneration. I understand that this is some kind of heresy, but I couldn't help but feel that it reduced the horror of the First World War to the status of truism (he had his head in a cow! Yuk!), while the final chapters crassly spell out the subtext for the hard of reading).

Coming up...

Last year, I predicted that 2009 would be when I finally got around to Delillo, and I was right; before I start congratulating myself for predicting my own choices, let's remember that I was wrong about Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Quantum Physics and Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, which are still both waiting patiently. At the moment, 2010 most obviously looks set to be a revisiting of much of Dickens, with a bit more Delillo thrown in (White Noise, Mao II and Cosmopolis in particular). I'll probably also get around to Christopher Priest's The Dream Archipelago in the next twelve months, although the snippet I read immediately before Christmas didn't promise great things. But hey, perhaps I'll be wrong again.

Limited Edition

2009-11-01T15:48:00.003Z

Last week in Waterstone's in Portsmouth, I saw one of the most forlorn sights the literary world has to offer - the book signing by an author of whom nobody's heard. A couple of years ago, it would seem that one only got a book signing in Waterstone's, Ottakars (remember them?), Dillons (remember them?) or W. H. Smith (remember them? They used to be a bookshop?) through a certain level of fame and wrangling by publishers. Nowadays, when the internet offers anyone a potential audience of millions and notoreity, you can turn up with a table in the middle of Waterstone's, no matter how small your readership, how large the type, or how hideously photoshopped the cover. Unfortunately, embarrassment tends to ensue. It's difficult not to feel sorry for the guy sitting alone at the table, tapping his pen absently to pass the time, but nor do you want to make eye contact. Earlier this year, in Newcastle, a similar thing happened, except that this time the author seemed to have brought his family with him, and by the time I popped in in the afternoon, he was sending his wife out into the shop to try and cajole punters into showing some interest. I doubt, somehow, that Ian McEwan does this.

My point here is not that such events should be the reserve of the super-popular: after all, J. K. Rowling sells far more than Iain Sinclair; sales alone are no indicator of literary worth. But what is of some concern is the focus on fame rather than achievement, of wanting the book signing event before putting in the work that will make it worthwhile. While living in West Jesmond in Newcastle, I had the misfortune to live above a guy who believed himself to be some sort of musician - that is to say, he was a competent guitarist, a weak vocalist, and with just enough artistic ambition that his output made James Blunt look like Marilyn Manson. He had, of course, a website, which consisted of a brief list of performances and a significantly larger merchandise section, which offered a range of t-shirts, badges, and mugs bearing his name (the funniest was the 'limited edition' lyric sheet, of which only 100 had been made, apparently. I imagine 98 of them are still in his flat, or have yet to be photocopied). It made me wonder what was more important - whether the publicity facilitated his music, or whether (more likely) the music was a means of getting his name on a t-shirt.

Finally, and on a related matter, I've found myself drawn into this year's X Factor and in particular the debate on John and Edward, who seem to be hated by the studio audience (possibly because of the startling resemblance to the double take brothers from Harry Enfield's TV series in the early 1990s). Unfortunately, the audience don't seem to understand that they created John and Edward; they may be awful, but that's what you get when any vestige of criticism is shouted down. You couldn't do better! He deserves to have his name on a t-shirt! Where's your name on a t-shirt? Every time Simon Cowell is booed for pointing out something ws rubbish, John and Edward grow larger and stronger. Ladies and gentlemen, meet your masters.

Burning Pandas for Fuel

2009-10-18T16:49:00.002+01:00

Sorry about that - another long pause, as quite a bit's happened in the interim. The main news is a move to Portsmouth (home of the country's angriest market florist, it seems) to start a full time post at the university. That's taking up quite a bit of time at the moment, so there's not been much opportunity to keep up with things here. I'll try and be a bit more productive in the future, honest.

To business. In early 2006, I saw George Galloway give a talk at the University of Exeter. I was by no means a Galloway fan, but thought that it would at the very least be interesting (at least, as interesting as the fact that Respect, who had organised the event, wanted the names of everyone who attended. Had anyone at the front desk read G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday my pseudonym wouldn't have lasted long). George actually turned up half an hour late, and when he inevitably ran out of time the meeting moved from the lecture theatre onto the lawn outside the Northcott Theatre, standing on a bench while surrounded by listeners. How radical, we thought. How kinda Pankhurst. Towards the end of the question and answer session, a friend of mine came up to me and asked "Is it still propaganda if you agree with it?"

An interesting question. While largely agreeing with the perspectives under discussion, I was slightly concerned with Galloway's tendency to respond to difficult questions (why don't the projections of the Iraq election support that thesis, George? What's with the Portugese villas, George?) by implying that the matter was irrelevant or the questioner was ignorant of some other crucial factor and manipulating the crowd against him or her (that said, no effort was required with the guy who asked if the BNP cared more about the British people than Respect did, since this drew an almost comedically exaggerated gasp from the rest of the audience; Galloway's response on the uselessness of nationalism was superfluous). I could appreciate much of Galloway's position; it was the means of getting there that was problematic. A year later, I'd encounter the same problem reading Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, but this time in starker terms. Dawkins' conclusions were easy to agree with, but not the sometimes shallow rhetorical moves; I was still an atheist, but not because of these arguments. I agreed with it - but did this absolve it of propaganda?

I ask this because I've just seen the latest "Act on CO2" advert, and despite agreeing with its broader argument, my immediate response was to want to burn a panda for fuel (incidentally, did you notice the sad panda toy beside the bed? I didn't until the second viewing). At whom is this advert aimed? Those already aware of climate change don't need convincing; those who see it as a leftist fantasy will read it as literally confirming their belief that it's all a fairy story. Most of those inbetween will be put off by how wretchedly manipulative it is, from the music to the weeping cartoon animals to the big CO2 monster to the blaming of 'the grown ups' (children, of course, have nothing to do with carbon dioxide, as they subsist entirely on the ambient radiation of cuteness until the age of 12 years and ten months). A hugely complex debate becomes reduced to "Turn on a light = drown a dog." Perhaps it needs to be like this - simplistic in order to get through. But if so, show us consequences with some actual referent - news footage of real flooding, examples of declining species - not something mediated through the subjectivity of children and unambiguously meant to induce guilt. I fear that the government have wasted their money on something so unsophisticated as to convince nobody and annoy the rest of us.

My other fear is that, in writing this, I'm shoring up a conservative scepticism of climate change - certainly, many of the criticisms I've found online have come from those who believe it's all a big conspiracy (raising tax money for the government usually seems to be the justification here - not sure how my taking the bus or not leaving lights on raises tax revenue, guys, or the implication that anything cooked up by the powers-that-be would win out over any alternative put by the energy companies). But, as I've argued elsewhere, the ends of the environmental argument are so compelling that the means - any means, like those ludicrous EDF adverts made out of 'recycled film' footage (I'd like to think they're joking here, but I suspect they take the green validity of this claim absolutely seriously) or this new advert - seem to be beyond criticism. So yes, it's still propaganda even if you agree with it. And if you don't agree with me, I'll drown five dogs.

May of the Penguins

2009-05-25T21:53:00.006+01:00

A bank holiday weekend of museums, this time. First of all, the opening day of the Great North Museum on Saturday. We had to go for two reasons: firstly, they're been working on it around the corner from my office ever since, well, ever since it was my office; and secondly, the winsome young girl on the posters all over the Metro threatens to scream and scream until she's sick if you don't. A more considered write up will have to wait until the place isn't so incredibly busy; walking into Newcastle at lunchtime, it was encouraging to see that the queue reached all the way out of the museum grounds and round into the university (the one place you're usually guaranteed to see a queue reaching out of a door in town is the Kentucky Fried Chicken on Northumberland Street; I'm not being facetious, it's actually true). The exhibitions on Hadrian's Wall and ancient Egypt aside (well, not aside, they're very good), the main focus is on natural history and taxidermy in particular; owls seem to be the favourite, which is fine by me (to anyone reading in Norman, Oklahoma - pop into The Library pub and say hello to the stuffed owl who lives there). Admittedly, the prevalence of stuffed animals makes the occasional appearance of a living reptile in a box somewhat surprising, as if they weren't sure whether to go for the full reptile house display or not, but it's all very well laid out. There's also a replica dinosaur skeleton and a planetarium, which we had no hope of getting into on Saturday, but which we'll be going back for. I haven't been in a planetarium since Jodrell Bank c. 1990, me.

Then on Sunday, to Gateshead for the "70 Years of Penguin Design" exhibition at the Shipley Gallery. Firstly, though, a comment on the interior of Gateshead Metro Station before someone decides to rip the whole thing out, because they really shouldn't. Yes, it's dated, but there's a period charm to it, rather like the Piccadilly Line at Heathrow Terminals 1,2,3, of which Gateshead is weirdly reminiscent. If you ever have a dream in which you're at the Heathrow tube station and it looks familiar yet unfamiliar, as if all the elements have been somehow shaken up into some kind of architectural anagram, then you're probably at Gateshead Metro. In fact, it's intriguing how the different parts of the Metro are shaping up as various tribute acts for sections of the London Underground. Gateshead is the Piccadilly line, with hints of the Victoria; the all new Haymarket is clearly going for the Jubilee look, albeit without the platform doors (which I never liked anyway - I like a bit of edge on my tube); Jesmond is the Circle/District, whereas West Jesmond is clearly some prosperous Metropolitan line suburb. Monument (Newcastle), ironically, bears little resemblance to Monument (London).

Well, it's intriguing to me.

Anyway, the Penguin exhibit. The title of "70 Years of Penguin Design" was somewhat baffling at first, until I realised that this exhibition has been touring for the last four years and should therefore be called "70+4 Years of Penguin Design," catchy as that isn't. Some very nice material on the development of the logo (from its dancing days to a more sedate, regal stature) and striking mounted displays of orange, blue and green Penguins (this last turning into some kind of private Panini sticker transaction for me: "Got... got... need... got... need"). A particularly nice exhibit showed the various incarnations of The Great Gatsby over the years, and made the curious point, seemingly obvious but which had never occured to me before, that whereas music (at least, popular music) is pretty much inextricably linked to a certain cover image for the rest of its cultural life, the marketing identity of the written word is much more changeable, and even where book covers become iconic (the Penguin Lady Chatterley's Lover, for instance), there's a sense that eventually a new cover has to be designed precisely in order to overthrow such visual dominance. More theoretical discussion of why this might be the case was passed over, but I'm sure I'll come back to this in the near future.

Comprehensive as the exhibition was in some areas (gratifyingly, green Penguins and the development of the Marber grid), there were some curious omissions. There was a big display of the Penguin 70 range to celebrate the 70th anniversary, but barely a mention of the Penguin 60s from 1995, which were surely much more influential in popularising the pamphlet style publishing which Penguin have capitalised on so much in recent years. Most strikingly, the Classics range wasn't even acknowledged as existing beyond the 1960s; lots of material on the roundel design of the original version from the 1950s, including the strangely humorous error on the cover of E.V. Rieu's translation of The Odyssey, which shows a boat with both oars and full sails, but not a single black spine of a later publication in sight. Since the recent redesign of the classics range in the last five or so years has been the most striking innovation to folks like me - and, let's be honest, to most of the people who go to this exhibition - this seems a little odd, not least because it's in changes like this that Penguin lead the market (or did you think Oxford's rebranding of the World's Classics series shortly afterwards was coincidence?). However, there was a nice display of some splendidly 1970s covers for J.G. Ballard, all looking like stills from a Terry Gilliam animation (and one including the image of Mickey Mouse on a television screen - I imagine that was a copyright nightmare) and an interesting survey of how far the orange/green bars look of the original paperbacks has infiltrated publishing and popular culture more widely. Oh, and we got lovely free bookmarks as well. If you're at all interested in publishing or just want to see some occasionally freaky covers from the 1970s (especially on the Pelicans), go and see it if it pops up near you. Go on, pick up a - no, I'm not going to do that.

Conference Pairs

2009-05-05T22:28:00.003+01:00

Time to roll out what I only half-jokingly refer to as the tour dates for the summer. Only two, really, so less of a tour and more of a line between two points:

May 15th sees all the fun of a conference without the bother of a hotel for the seemingly obligatory hometown paper (cf. Exeter, July 2008) for the Crime Studies Network in the North symposium, Crime Studies: Facts and Fictions. It's free, so if you want a good seat, I would e-mail Malcah Effron at Newcastle University to book your place.

Then, July 20-22 sees me in London for the University of Reading's Narrative Dominions, a conference based around the forthcoming volume four of the Oxford History of the Novel in English. I hear that the chapter on the detective story is the most awesome six thousand words ever published.

Talking of publishing, it's been a good year for reading fiction so far. I don't mean all those shiny new novels in Waterstone's, the darkly comic portraits of modern life and the like, but somehow finding time to get through the 280-odd novels that comprise the fiction waiting list on my shelves. Highlights so far have included Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man, Paul Auster's Mr Vertigo, Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea (honestly, the heroic cheese sentence made me laugh out loud. You'll have to go and read it now, won't you?), Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, Alasdair Gray's Poor Things (not quite as out there as it thinks it is, though), and in particular John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, which so far looks pretty secure as this year's best novel. The middle ground includes Patrick Suskind's Perfume (nice, but with the weirdly inescapable flavour of the middlebrow bookclub about it - mmm, the taste of condescension there), Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (an excellent and convincing discussion of socialism and often quite moving, but a little on the flabby and repetitive side as a novel), and Paul Auster's latest variation on a theme of metanarrativity, Man in the Dark. And then the badlands; Ian Rankin's The Flood is a little too obviously the frst novel he had published, and the slightly too self-congratulatory foreword to the new edition proudly notes how expensive those 1980s first editions now are; Malcolm Pryce's Last Tango in Aberystwyth is the same joke as his first novel - now with half the characterisation, but the same great fractured paragraph taste! Then there's James Wilson's The Dark Clue, a turgid attempt to write a sequel to Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, notable solely for the front cover recommendation of "Read 50 pages and you'll be gripped," surely the most backhanded literary compliment ever paid (I made it to about 90 pages, before the utter lack of forward movement and the ridiculous caricatures of historical figures such as John Ruskin put paid to any idea of actual literary fun). And, dare I say it, Pat Barker's Regeneration. You heard me. Pat Barker's Regeneration. That'd be Booker Prize winning Pat Barker, y'know, but I'm afraid I found Regeneration a bit too diffuse - expecting a closer focus on the encounter between W. H. Rivers and Siegfried Sassoon, Barker throws in a bunch of other weirdly diffuse characters (Prior, who I hear takes over in the rest of the trilogy, seemed particularly incoherent) and a habit of explaining her metaphors in case you wus too dumb to get it (the subtext of Rivers' self-examination towards the end is practically nailed to the reader's forehead). Oh, and the horrors of war. Except that we all know that war has horrors, so you've got to make your horrors really horrific to escape the kind of cliche inherent in the very idea of 'the horrors of war'... which Barker doesn't. What? You loved it? Perhaps it's just me.

And finally... did anyone else hear Christopher Caldwell on Start the Week this week? Did anyone hear his question to Monica Ali about the problems of writing a novel that addressed an atomised society, such as today's modern world apparently is? (We're so cool today, see. So atomised, modern, liberated. We done liberated us from the Victorians). Did anyone else goggle when he used Dickens as an example of an author concerned with the local? Did anyone else shout "So what the hell was Bleak House* about then?" at the radio? What? You loved it? Perhaps it's just me.

* Or Our Mutual Friend. Or Little Dorrit. Or - hell, any of them.

A Disembodied Eye

2009-04-03T19:40:00.003+01:00

Despite my stunning analysis last month, Britain continues to fear Google Maps Street View. The most astute criticism came from a poster on the Independent message board who thought it an invasion of privacy because "you can see if my car is outside or not." Indeed, we're all sitting ducks for burglars once they've set their time machines to eight months ago. The craziness continues apace:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/beds/bucks/herts/7980737.stm

I was fortunate enough to be in Broughton at the time, as it so fortunately happens, and the scene was something like this:

10.00 am. The Google Car passes through Broughton. Some villagers cower in fear of the petroleum beast, before seeing the logo on the side ("Go Ogle") and realise there is pseudosurveillance afoot. A mob forms with rapid speed.

10.15 am. Torches are distributed and the villagers circle the car, hoping to regain their souls from the black box on top. The driver tries to explain the purpose of the cameras but is mauled with copies of the Daily Mail.

10.20 am. The police arrive to mediate, but now the mob is shouting about how their rights not to be photographed are being violated, and in broad daylight, too. One woman screams "I am being raped by the gaze!" Several villagers mishear "gaze" and a homophobic faction splinters off to beat up anyone holding a copy of the Guardian or who owns a musical CD which is neither a) by Andrew Lloyd Webber or b) loosely based on the oeuvre of a classic rock band. A march appears around the corner, led by a group of six year olds being pushed forward by their mothers, bearing a banner that says "Children should be heard and not seen."

10.45 am. Village leader Paul Jacobs gives a statement "I don't have a problem with Google wanting to promote villages... I don't mind them taking pictures of the street, but that shouldn't include my house. I mean, you can clearly see that I have a dreamcatcher in my window." A journalist turns to look and is promptly shrieked at for daring to point his eyes in that direction. Then he realises that the journalist is from the BBC, which is much more respectable than a grubby internet compay, so allows them to film the house for millions to see. After all, there's images of your house and images of your house.

12.00 pm. A wicker effigy of the Google logo has been constructed and one of the drivers hauled inside. At noon exactly, the Wicker Google is set alight.

12.34 pm. Noel Edmonds descends in his helicopter, having sensed that a civic outrage is in progress. "Britain has gone bonkers!" he proclaims from his ready made orating stage "If we join our minds to defeat this intrusion and order it cosmically, so it will be! We will also bring Noel's House Party back for another series." Noel loses the sympathy of the crowd here, and his helicopter is attacked as ungodly. Edmonds escapes only thanks to the quick thinking of his batman, Keith Chegwin, who scoops up Edmonds and shoulders his way though the melee.

1.36 pm. With their torches, the villagers pursue the Google car to the edge of a Romanticist cliff, while some early afternoon low cloud gives the village a strangely German Expressionist cast. The mob eventually force the car off the cliff, unaware that the car will actually return in The Bride of Google Maps Street View.

2.17 pm. The villagers return to their homes, glad that they have beaten off the spectre of people seeing them. But for how long?

That's how it happened.

A Street View to a Kill

2009-03-21T19:18:00.007Z

Apologies for that title; last Sunday weirdly had the theme of San Francisco. In the morning, I finished reading Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (finally - it's been in the waiting pile since 2000); stumbled across a documentary on City Lights bookstore on Radio 4 in the afternoon; and then dropped by the second half of A View to a Kill in the early evening, just in time to see the oddly unengaging car chase with the fire engine, having missed the nonsensical namedropping of the movie's title in the middle. Still, that's my favourite bit, not least because at that point Christopher Walken and Grace Jones are looking across San Francisco Bay and directly at Berkeley, which is where I got married. The rest of the film is best forgotten, though.

I begin with Northern California because I've spent the last couple of weeks e-trotting around the place on Google Maps Street View. Let me avoid equivocation on this point: I love Google Street View. At the beginning of February, and feeling more than usually nostalgic for my erstwhile hangouts in Woodland and Davis, California, I thought I'd look up a few features on the map and the satellite pictures, maybe see the roof of our old apartment or Raley's, the supermarket where the apricot pie is good and the fried chicken isn't. When Google Maps instead offered me the opportunity to, goddammit, effectively walk about the place with 360 degree vision, I was so surprised and delighted that I may have sworn out loud. Addiction followed quickly; I covered pretty much all of central Davis (although I was slightly disappointed that the University isn't covered, presumably because it's state property) and Woodland, before moving on to Norman, Oklahoma, and various other familiar places. Thus, the sudden surge of interest in Street View this week, with the launch of a limited UK version, seems like old news. I be surfin' the zeitgeist like a culture, um, surfer.

Inevitably, there has been criticism from privacy groups and some sections of the press. I caught sight of an article in Metro yesterday in which the story title screamed something about GOOGLE SPYWARE, which pushes the definition of spyware somewhat (would you have guessed that it's published by the Daily Mail? Well, yes). Google have, quite rightly, pointed out that all images are taken from the perspective of public property, and that you don't see any more than you would actually walking down the street. Critics cite the case of the man spotted going into a sex shop (again, the outrage connected with this leads me to suspect that Metro and the like may have their terms confused again - you can't actually buy sex in those places, guys. It's not like pick'n'mix) or images of accident victims. But what if I'd seen those people myself, in person, as I was walking in the street? Would it be wrong of me to have seen them? Would there be hysterical press coverage of "SPYWARE IN YOUR HEAD - These so-called 'eyes' give their users the ability to 'see' up to fifty metres..."

The problem lies in our changing conception of public and private. I'm currently reading Richard Sennett's The Fall of Public Man, the central argument of which is that gradual social change since (roughly) the nineteenth century onwards has eroded our sense of acting and being in public, and of being involved with strangers in ways that aren't characterised by discourses of fear and suspicion. Put another way, we have become increasingly internalised; psychological rather than sociological, personalities rather than acts or relationships (and Sennett is particularly interesting on this with regard to sexuality; there's a connection here with Foucault's argument about the creation of the homosexual as a human type, rather than a set of acts, but I'm not going to go into that now). In terms of physical environment, public space has similarly become eroded; postmodern architecture tends to regard open space as something to be moved through, not experienced in itself. Public space is something we suffer in order to reach the goal of our private space; our homes, our office, or our cubicle. At best, there may be a few benches where you can eat a sandwich before getting back to Microsoft Excel.

I'm only near the beginning of the book, so can't say any more about how the argument develops (I'm hoping there's a car chase and a wisecracking chimp, though). But it seems to me that the Street View debate suggests that our public spaces have become privatised, or at least they have when they're up for grabs on the internet thanks to an international corporation (perhaps, then, privatised in both senses). When I'm walking in the street, I can't honestly expect to move through space entirely unregarded (indeed, if I walked through Newcastle shrieking "DON'T LOOK AT ME!", the opposite would probably happen. At least, for a second or two). Being in public means we're going to be involved in interactions with others, however brief or negligible, whether we like it or not, and no amount of MP3 earphone social-buffering is going to change that (incidentally - while in a number of malls in the US this December I noticed that absolutely nobody was audially isolated in this way; again, different uses of space). Likewise, if I appear in the background of someone's photograph of the high street, am I justified in punching them in the throat for capturing my image on their lightbox of tricks? Probably not.

Now hang on a minute, you're saying. It's all very well beating up the Daily Mail, but what you're suggesting here is justification for a CCTV nation that won't sit well with any self-respecting Independent reader. Who do you think you are - Noel Edmonds? But the crucial point is that whereas CCTV is interested in what people are doing right now, Street View isn't interested in either 'people' or 'right now'. There's no temporal dimension. You may be annoyed that you've been seen popping to Spar in your parachute pants on 27 July 2008, but it's hardly surveillance of your ongoing life, simply an enigmatic moment frozen for the world to see (and remember, they could have seen it for themselves anyway just by being there, they just couldn't afford the air fare). Maybe that's where some of the animus has come from; we're in there, but just as background. Maybe we don't like being second fiddle to a load of buildings and, you know, stuff. Most of the images I've seen seem to have been taken early in the morning, with hardly anyone else around. Maybe it's a training programme for the survivors of the apocalypse (who have, of course, already been chosen). Incidentally, looking for evidence of when the images were taken is also fun - the billboards outside cinemas provide valuable clues (Davis seems to have been mapped about a month after I left, and Woodland two months after that).

There are other implications, of course - I'm interested, for instance, in how this is going to impact on our ideas of travel, since long haul flights are now morally comparable with embezzlement of an orphanage, and if seeing a city online becomes in any way a replacement for actually seeing it in person - but that's another story for another time. I'm off (that is, staying here on my sofa) to gawp around Northern California some more.

The Doughnuts 2008: End of Year Literary Awards

2009-01-08T12:08:00.004Z

Let's head over to Bermondsey High Street KFC and see what Kirsty Wark has in store for us... if you've forgotten the rules, see last year.

Best New Author: Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

This was a close one – the runner up was Milan Kundera for The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I finally got around to reading in May. But Franzen gets the big prize this year for two reasons; firstly, he didn’t blow things with a banality fest like Kundera’s Immortality (more of that one below), and secondly, Kundera’s novels are a little too obviously narratives illustrating pop philosophical points, which for Alain de Botton readers makes them, like, the best thing ever, but only really very good to the rest of us. There’s philosophy in The Corrections, albeit jokes about literary theory, but not at the expense of the novel or the characters, who I still remember as people six months later (as opposed to say, ‘the guy who represents individualism’). And it’s also very funny, in the sense of being genuinely amusing and not just ‘darkly comic’ (is anybody else sick of that phrase?). The Lithuania plotline is the novel’s weak point (as a dozen Amazon readers have pointed out), and I found the opening chapter a little dismaying in its “I’m writing a literary novel, me,” tone, but get beyond that and it’s superb (or ‘generous,’ as nearly everyone says on the back cover. What do they even think that means?). He also does the sentient faeces plotline with more subtlety than South Park, too.

And the others? Irvine Welsh’s Marabou Stork Nightmares was impressive in making it bearable to be in the company of an utterly repulsive character, but ultimately came across as not much more than The Singing Detective rewritten by Bret Easton Ellis; Henning Mankell’s Sidetracked was so-so but never really delivered the denouement it promised, and included popular fiction’s least involving car chase (and, if I was paying attention properly, something of a plot hole towards the end).

Best novel: Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

Well, if Jonno hasn’t scooped this one as well. I’ve already talked about it above, so let’s look at some of the runners up. Paul Auster came close with The Music of Chance (and, to a lesser extent, The Book of Illusions), making up for the abysmal Travels in the Scriptorium at the end of last year. Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach was a good follow up to the excellent Saturday, although not quite the masterpiece everyone else thought it was. By contrast, Martin Amis’ Yellow Dog was nowhere near as bad as the reviewers would have you believe and was really quite funny in places (is this what happens in one’s thirties? Literary fiction starts to be actually funny? Will I now find Kingsley Amis as much a hoot as everyone else seems to?), which was also the case with Iain Sinclair's Landor's Tower. Christopher Priest’s The Glamour was very good, and much closer to The Prestige than the rather disappointing The Extremes and The Separation. However, I’m still hugely impressed by The Corrections, so there it is.

Best NeoVictorian novel: um, nothing.

Nope, I didn’t get around to reading any this year, not least because I was too busy reading the actual Victorian stuff. I may have to rethink this one as a category, partially because NeoVictorian novels are fashionable and I'm a curmudgeonly type who ditches things as soon as everyone else likes them (poker, for instance, which was so much fun until about five years ago).

Best Victorian novel: Wilkie Collins, The Two Destinies

This one is just going to get more and more obscure as the years go by, simply because rereads aren’t allowed (as I said last year, if they weren’t it’d just end up being Dickens, continually). I suppose it could have been George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil, but if I’m going to have mesmerism and the like, then I’m going to have dancing cats as well.

Biggest Disappointment: Caroline Clive, Paul Ferroll

Again, lots of competition here. Milan Kundera followed up the superb The Unbearable Lightness of Being with Immortality, and in doing so made good on his thesis that convincing fictional characters are ultimately undesirable by putting on a spread of cardboard philosopuppets dancing around a set of unconvincing ‘insights’ – the only reason it didn’t win this one was because I didn’t finish it (see my comments on Stephen L. Carter's The Emperor of Ocean Park last year). The same goes for Hanif Kureshi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, which I realize is some kind of heresy, but it simply didn’t give me enough reasons to continue beyond the first fifty pages (ironically, David Bowie’s The Buddha of Suburbia was very much in evidence on the ol’ MP3 throughout the year). Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin also falls into the disappointment category on the basis of the towering praise it’s received (one of the best novels of the twentieth century? No, it isn't). There’s nothing particularly wrong with it, but I found it uninvolving and the supposed ‘twist’ a laughable get-out to cover the fact that all of Margaret Atwood’s characters sound just like Margaret Atwood. In similar vein, there’s nothing particularly bad about Angela Carter’s Wise Children, except when you’ve already read Nights at the Circus (I see that Wise Children is now an A-level text, continuing the tradition of picking something from a first rate contemporary author’s second string, cf. Ian McEwan, The Child in Time). But the prize this year goes to Caroline Clive for Paul Ferroll, one of those ‘forgotten’ Victorian novels which – can I say this? – was probably forgotten for a very good reason, i.e. it’s a mess. Apologists (and there are a few) argue that Clive’s style represents an interesting challenge to the conventions of high Victorian realist narrative and the limitations of popular genre, but I’m just reminded of the episode of The Simpsons where Homer says there’s no moral, it was just a bunch of stuff that happened. Morality was certainly a key factor in the novel’s reception - Victorian reviewers were mostly annoyed that Clive refused to condemn her central character for being a murderer – but this is a bunch of stuff and nothing more, one where potentially interesting plotlines emerge only to be dismissed a few pages later (the crazy arsonist butler and his unprompted confession, for instance, needed some development). But ultimately, I know that if I struggle through nineteenth century crime fiction (and I’ve read a bit of it), then there’s something wrong. Hell, I even like novels with dancing cats (see above).

Coming up…

As I write, 2009 has already got off to a good start with Paul Auster’s Mr Vertigo and Man in the Dark (wow, almost up to date); the latter shows a considerable improvement from the dreadful Travels in the Scriptorium (although the brief reference to that novel was not particularly welcome), but Auster is getting slightly too comfortable in his ‘man of letters in emotional crisis tells stories – one of which is tantalizingly incomplete - to ease his pain’ armchair. I’m not making any promises here, but I suspect this may be a year for Americans – in addition to Auster, I have my eye on Don Delillo, Marisha Pessl, and Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (sitting on the waiting shelf since 2002). Come back in twelve months and see if I was right.

Bringing down the House

2008-10-28T18:46:00.007Z

At Television Centre, they've been waiting for the clocks to go back, so that as soon as British Summer Time has choked its last, they can slam a Victorian novel adaptation into the DVD player and punch 'play.' Bleak House was a hit three or so years ago, so how about... um... Little Dorrit?

Little Dorrit? What next? Dombey and Son? Barnaby bejesus Rudge? Don't say it too loudly, but Little Dorrit divides opinions, like a big opinions knife. I have a peculiarly sentimental attachment to it, because very few people can say they met their wife through a novel (unless they're, say, psychotic and have misread the fact/fiction relationship dreadfully), and Little Dorrit was that novel. In summer 2005 I was invited over to the Dickens Universe at UC Santa Cruz, a week long examination of a different Dickens novel each year, and that year it was - oh, you guessed. Anyway, I went over to talk about Victorian detective fiction; I came back with the kind of long distance relationship that made me feel I was in a Channel 4 lifestyle drama and meant that the next two years or so were largely spent in airports. I also met Miriam Margolyes out there, which just heightened the low key surrealism of the whole week, along with seeing people reading Terry Eagleton on the beach. But what was striking was the number of people at the conference/shebang who admitted that they didn't really like Little Dorrit that much. The plot is kinda murky, the imprisonment metaphors are laid on a bit much, Amy Dorrit is one of those heroines that a certain kind of reader finds utterly irritating (not me, but I know people who would readily send a spaceship crewed by Amy, Esther Summerson and Little Nell into the heart of the sun - it could be another Star Trek spin-off). As for me, Dorrit is admirable but not particularly lovable - it's more Dombey and Son than Bleak House. It may be significant that the characters I find the most compelling are Maggy, partially because of her self-reflexive love of narratives, but also for the way Hablot Browne has illustrated her, a round eyed stare that conveys her feeble mindedness (to use the Victorian phrase) but also provokes immediate sympathy; and Tattycoram, more of whom later. And is it really coincidence that Little Dorrit appears on our screens at the height of economic crisis? The Merdle financial fraud subplot seems to be the most compelling reason for adapting it, at least as far as the papers are concerned. I don't know how long it took to make, but surely someone in the drama department at the BBC knew more about the economic climate than most.

So, is it any good? My hopes were not rasied by the continuity announcer promising that "Dickens' work comes to life now on BBC1", as if literature were some corpse awaiting revivification from the golden hand of television. Saying that it's better than 97% of the rest of television doesn't really mean much any more, as the medium has become the new poetry - massive cultural potential, but virtually impossible to get right (and even House, the goggle box's best offering of recent times, has its weaknesses - the slightly repetitive plots and its obsession with the "Everybody Hurts" montage, whereby at the end we see everybody thinking about what happened here today). Much like the novel, the televisual Little Dorrit invites admiration but defuses involvement. Part of the problem is the familiarity with the BBC's 'prestige drama' format, and indeed the title sequence offers a bewildering range of famous names, all in the tiniest typeface ever used on television (it's called Victorian Drama and it's set in 0.0000000000000000000004 point) and highly derivative of the opening to Bleak House three years ago. Accordingly, most of the episode was spent identifying the faces rather than the characters. There's Bill Paterson and Janine Duvitski! Matthew MacFadyen's at the door! Sue Johnston and Alun Armstrong are downstairs! The guy from The Vicar of Dibley pops round, and the keys to the Marshalsea are held by that bloke who looks like Kenneth Connor, but it can't be Kenneth Connor because Kenneth Connor hasn't looked like that for years (primarily because of death), so it isn't Kenneth Connor, but you recognise him anyway. You know the one I mean - the one who looks like Kenneth Connor. The one thing more predictable than the stellar casting is the sop to up and coming talent in the lead -last time, Anna Maxwell Martin was probably best known for being Lyra in the National's His Dark Materials, before becoming face-changing space-dreaming Esther Summerson; this time, it's Amy who's been given to a relative unknown, Clare Foy, and consequently she seems to be more of an actual character than the rest of them.

To be fair, I'm being a little harsh. MacFadyen is shaping up well as Arthur, Tom Courtenay is showing everyone else how it's done, and Andy Serkis as Blandois shows great potential (I'm not sure how authentic that French accent is, but then again that suits the more performative side of Blandois' character, and anyway Serkis captures the magnetism of the man beautifully). My initial resistance to the appearance of Alun Armstrong again so soon after his turn as Bucket in Bleak House was overcome at the end of the episode, when I was reminded of Flintwich's doppleganger, so Bucket's regeneration (so to speak) seems appropriate. Maxine Peake (who, to her credit, I didn't recognise at first) is also an intriguing Miss Wade. Which leads us to the stunt casting - in 2005, we had Johnny Vegas as Krook, which kind of worked; this time, we have Freema Agyeman as Tattycoram, and it seems to be a train wreck from the off. I imagine the Dickens traditionalist mafia will be indignant that Tattycoram is now black, and there does seem to be an undertone here of poking the Daily Mailers, which is perfectly fine; the problem lies in the fact that making the character black brings up intriguing questions of the consequences for social interaction, which the script completely ignores. Although no reactionary, Dickens was not famed for his progressive racial politics, and the casting seems entirely at odds with the writing. It's fine to make Tattycoram black, but nobody else on screen seems to have noticed that she is. It doesn't help that the character has been terribly underwritten and that Agyeman is struggling to make the part work - the effects of psychological bullying just come across as stroppiness. Trailers for subsequent episodes suggest that the intimations of Miss Wade's lesbianism, subliminal in the original, are going to be accompanied by fireworks in the screen version and footage of trains going into tunnels... um... perhaps footage of a tunnel being built right in front of another tunnel? What is Sapphic visual shorthand nowadays, anyway?

Acting aside, the direction and set design is a little jarring. Victorian London looks less like Victorian London than Dickensworld (TM) - where the hell is everybody? Where's the visual onslaught of posters and bills? Where did all this space come from? For a story all about imprisonment, the actors are swimming in acres, and there isn't much of a sense of enclosure when it requires a panning shot for Arthur to get from one end of a room to the other. With the exception of a couple of shots of Amy, everyone appears in middle range, and the only hints at the theme of the novel are a few hackneyed shots through prison bars (Blandois in prison) or arches (Miss Wade and Tattycoram). I'm hoping the earlier episodes have set up this sense of space in order to break it down later on, but that may be too much to expect. Similarly, the direction often seems intent on making Andrew Davies' (oh, he adapted it, but you knew that already) script ridiculous, which occasionally it is; both are equally guilty in the scene where Mr. Meagles declares that they are imprisoned "in Marseilles, of all places!" and then cuts to a tricolore immediately afterwards - where do you think they are? (No, not Lyme Regis, which is what it looked like).

Ah, it's easier to pick holes in stuff. More fun, too. Ultimately, Little Dorrit is good, but not great, and I'm damning it with faint praise when I say that it's probably worth your time. It's not Bleak House, but then again, what is? Bleak House, obviously.

Xeroxy Music

2008-09-23T22:22:00.008+01:00

There I am in Blackwell's, looking around to see if the reading list for my module has magically transformed itself into a stack of actual books for actual students to come in and actually buy (answer: I don't think so, although I did see a pile of Bleak Houses; although every Blackwell's at every university is obliged to stock a pile of Bleak Houses. Or Bleaks House, I don't know), when I caught sight of the retooled Oxford Classics, and in particular their new Middlemarch. That looks familiar, I thought, for reasons I won't insult your intelligence by only hinting at right now, if only because this website's limited options for displaying pictures have given the game away from the start (i.e. the Russell T Davies effect). Yes, the same slightly plain, grey garbed, "I'm a governess and no mistake" woman was on the cover of the very same copy of Jane Eyre that I was already carrying (it's Daniel Macnee's "Lady in Grey," in case you wondered). What does this mean - that Dorothea Brooke was Jane Eyre all along? Was Sherlock Holmes really Casaubon? Did Lydgate turn into Rambo? You never saw them in the same room together.

Ah, books and their covers. Despite the turn towards a more cultural materialist perspective in criticism, the relationship hasn't really received a great deal of academic attention, probably because everybody knows that apparently you can't judge the former by the latter. Although in some cases, you can; the worst novel I've ever read also had the worst cover, best described as the personnel of a pub covers band (possibly called Xeroxy Music) badly photoshopped around a solar eclipse (which was at least partially relevant to the plot). I'm naming no names here, but it's the only novel I know of to be set at my old institution, the University of Exeter; the honour isn't so much a poisoned chalice as a McDonalds coffee spat into by Richard Littlejohn. In any case, book covers are far more interesting and culturally interesting than cliche would have you believe. When I'm in the US, a normally bland bibliopolis such as Borders becomes fascinating, because of the (often baffling) difference in cover art for the same novel on either side of the Atlantic. Paul Auster, for instance, gets treated much better over there by Penguin, as opposed to Faber's gloomy and grainy intimations of Americana for the UK market (and there's a better typeface in the US, too). The design for Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion is also much better stateside: a largely blank silver cover with the barest hint of reflection, looking directly at it and seeing the word GOD superimposed on your fuzzy mug somehow suggests Dawkins' argument more acutely than the UK version of a red explosion vaguely reminiscent of a nu-prog album. Sometimes, the differences are more subtle; the cover of Ian McEwan's Saturday in the US is really just a close-up of the back of the British cover, no doubt because many American readers won't be familiar with the British Telecom tower (the UK cover for Saturday is curious anyway, being a rather literal staging of the first chapter and therefore a bit like a Pan's People dance number). In other cases, the British versions are better; buy Haruki Murakami in the US and you're entering a whole world of crazy kitsch, rather than the more studied minimalism here, while crime fiction in America still tends to favour design that's unthreateningly populist, as opposed to the rather more cryptic Colin Dexter covers that have been around here since the mid nineties. And talking of crime fiction, I'm still hugely fond of the original Faber cover for P. D. James' Devices and Desires as a strangely haunting image, although I can't remember that much about the actual novel.

Back to the nineteenth century - there are definite trends to be considered. Buy Thomas Hardy in Penguin Classics in the nineties (where most of mine date from), and you'd almost certainly get a medium-to-long shot of landscape. Nowadays, it's medium-to-close images of a single person. Does this mean the way we read Hardy has changed, from a recognition of the importance of place to his work in character study? Dickens seems to have gone the other way - from one or two people on the covers a few years ago, to today's extremes - either moody empty spaces (Bleak House, Great Expectations) or crowded scenes from the original text (David Copperfield, Little Dorrit). As for George Eliot, designers seem to go back and forth as to whether it's the social setting or the individual character who really carries the reader's attention. Middlemarch is a place - Middlemarch is a state of mind...

The Rumble in the Lambeth Palace

2008-08-22T12:19:00.002+01:00

Iain Sinclair once said (actually, he said it right here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GZw4Ym5U28) that television simply isn't suited any more to the documentary format. There's simply not enough space for the material that needs to be included in any in-depth discussion. Before I get irate e-mails about my use of spatial metaphors to discuss television ("SIR - Is it not the case that television is a temporal phenomenon..."), consider the fact that an hour's documentary really boils down to a script of about sixty pages, double spaced, and which includes all kinds of visual and effect cues scattered among the actual intellectual content. How much can you actually cram into an hour's documentary, once you've dealt with all the slow-mo, speeded up footage of people walking across a bridge on the Thames, and zeitgeisty blasts of Coldplay?

(A brief pseudo-digression (pseudo because I haven't really got to the main subject of this week's doughnut, although you've probably already guessed that it's the final episode of Richard Dawkins' The Genius of Charles Darwin): in the clip mentioned above, Sinclair mentions how a documentary on J. G. Ballard failed to engage with the man's work in any depth, and reduced the contributions of those such as Sinclair to snippets barely totalling a fistful of minutes. And yet... Ballard's reputation has always baffled me, especially the regard in which he's held by far better writers, such as Will Self and Sinclair himself. I can see how his earlier work might have shaped the development of science fiction, but his most recent novels have been banal doodles around the themes of modern society and violence, the kind of thing Chuck Palahnuik did with Fight Club, although Palahnuik clearly didn't feel the need to keep writing the same novel. If you're a J. G. Ballard and having trouble writing your next novel, why not try this one? Make your protagonist a white professional male, who leads a relatively dull life until some kind of explosion/terrorist attack/murder/general outburst of violence at a local industrial estate/airport/shopping centre involves him/his wife/partner/ex-partner. During the investigation into the mayhem, your protagonist gets deeper into a cabal of middle class types whose lives have become so affluently boring that they only feel alive through acts of violence. End with moral ambivalence aplenty, the hero almost seduced by this argument, ooh, perhaps the spectre of violence lurks within us all and our Starbucks lattes. Das End.

There. I've said it.)

Anyway, the shortcomings of television as a documentary medium had a big parade this week, with the third instalment of Richard Dawkins' series The Genius of Charles Darwin. I criticised the last episodes for a lack of historical context, which at least wasn't as much of a problem this week, since Dawkins decided he was going to ditch the content (except for a brief interlude on Darwin's own religious crises) and go after religious types instead. As such, there wasn't a great deal to complain about, since it's always fun to see the man tussling with 'science' teachers who honestly believe the Earth is about six thousand years old, or creationists who keep repeating that all they want to do is 'open up the debate,' as if the will to argument were on a par with actual evidence or theoretical credibility (how far, I wonder, would I get if I wanted to 'open up the debate' that Shrewsbury is a myth perpetrated by Margaret Thatcher, who lives in my foot?). But, fun as it is to goad people who believe that the eye is perfect while peering through lenses an inch thick, it didn't deserve nearly an entire episode of a series purporting to be about Darwin himself. The fact that such goading went on for far too long was clear from the editing of the discussion with three school teachers about the responsibilities of teaching science and challenging religion; while Dawkins went on about kicking religion in the 'nads, the teachers began exchanging slightly worried glances of the kind they might bandy about if confronted by a drunk at a bus station, with the result that he began to lose a bit of ground with the viewers. The programme nearly lost it altogether when Dawkins faced the camera and declared resoundingly that "If you're a relativist, you're a massive dickhead" (well, not quite like that, but almost). What, any kind of relativism? Dawkins certainly has a good case to make, but not when he ditches nuance in favour of grandstanding, and there was too much of that over the course of three episodes apparently about Darwin.

Similarly, the effort to cover so many angles (that is, to fit in a smattering of nutbars as well; covering the angels, perhaps) meant that the curse of the television documentary struck again, inasmuch as everybody got two minutes. That's OK when you're talking to a man who believes god is better than scientists at explaining the origin of the universe because scientists weren't there (and, worse still, wears a 'hilarious' t-shirt proving god's existence through equations denoting science) because more than two minutes and you'd be pummelling the screen in outrage, but what is the point of driving all the way to visit Daniel Dennett for a brief conversation which really only retreads Darwin's "There is grandeur in this view of life?" (which Dawkins quoted in the first episode anyway)? And who else thought that the meeting with Rowan Williams was poorly served by being condensed into a couple of minutes betwixt adverts for hair conditioner? This surely deserved its own programme (if only because they'd managed to book Williams in the first place), ideally on Christmas Day in an attempt to liven up Channel 4's otherwise leaden anti-yule scheduling. Instead, we got Dawkins being annoyed by a metaphor, further conversation on which would have been fascinating, if we hadn't been obliged to leap into the car and drive to Dan's house afterwards.

Ultimately, then, The Genius of Charles Darwin was a disappointment, primarily because Dawkins couldn't keep his mind on Darwin and kept wandering off to poke at religious types. Of course, the critique of religion is right there in evolution, but Dawkins seems content to live up to his reputation as megaatheist (somehow I think hyphenating that term would dilute it). Ironically, in doing so he's rapidly leaving behind his work in science, by getting fixated on telling us what isn't there, instead of what is and thus letting the absences speak for themselves. As speech theorist ("say what you see") Roy Walker once said, it's good but it's not right.

Dawkins' Doughnuts

2008-08-14T17:55:00.002+01:00

So, part two of The Genius of Charles Darwin. Last week I bemoaned the lack of historical depth to Richard Dawkins' account of evolutionary theory. Did things get better this week? Well... not really.

Let's focus on the good parts, for the moment, because there were many. The Dawk is at his best when explaining concepts, not trying to contextualise them, and so there was a nice part on why applying Darwinian principles to business is simply stretching a metaphor too far. It's clear, too, that Dawkins feels uneasy that The Selfish Gene is often associated ideologically and historically with Thatcherism (much of the programme was Dawkins saying "honestly, I'm a liberal"), and the case he made for the fallacy of the comparison was a good one. Some interesting material on the Darwinian uses of altruism, although the section in which he confronted another researcher who had criticised his work as promoting veneer theory (i.e., that morality is really just the misleading icing on a cake of survival-driven viciousness) was a bit disappointing; encouraged by the fact that Dawkins had let a voice of informed dissent onto the stage, it really turned into Dawkins saying "But of course, he's wrong." As for other voices of dissent; this week's hilarious scene was the interview with the Kenyan priest, who after Dawkins had patiently explained the theory of evolution (including the crucial nugget that humans didn't pass through a stage of being apes, they simply have a common evolutionary ancestor), replied with "So what's evolution's aim? Will we all have, like, really big heads?" You can take the teleology out of the priest, but you... actually, no you can't.

And so to the not so good; that is, Rick's grasp of scientific history. I threatened to kick my television to death if Francis Galton didn't crop up in a discussion of eugenics, and although admittedly I spent a minute in the kitchen during this part, I didn't hear Galton mentioned once (I haven't, however, destroyed the television. I'm saving that for the next time some pop 'historian' lets "And the Victorians, yeah, they like totally covered up table legs 'cos they looked well rude" drop out of his or her mouth). This seems a little too much like intellectual dishonesty to me, not least because Dawkins was keen to point out that eugenics is not Darwinism, yet it's the figure of Galton who muddies the waters on this point. Firstly, because Galton - who actually coined the term eugenics - was thinking about these kind of things throughout the 1860s and 1870s in articles such as "Hereditary Talent and Character" (1865) in Macmillan's Magazine, and books such as Hereditary Genius (1869) and Inquiries into Human Faculty (1883), which pretty much does for Dawkins' implications that these were twentieth century ideas (and therefore nothing to do with the uberVictorian Darwin). Secondly, and closer to home, it's rather disingenuous to say that eguenics had nothing to do with Darwin whatsoever, when the very term was invented by his cousin. Yes, you heard it here four hundred and twelfth.

There was also another moment of "Did he actually say that?" (although I suppose Galton was "Did he actually not say that?") towards the end, when musing on humanity's capacity for altruism. Dawkins wondered how we could explain such behaviour as charity, kindness, the establishment of asylums for the mentally ill, the Poor Law... Um - go back a bit. It's well known that Dawkins despises Foucault (mainly, it seems, for proposing ideas that can't be conclusively verified, and often doing so in a stylistically challenging manner. Or perhaps for being bald and French, who knows?), but you don't have to have read Discipline and Punish or The Birth of the Clinic to understand that asylums were less instances of human kindness and more instruments of social control and normativity. Similarly, the Poor Law as monument to empathy? Has he read Oliver Twist, or any of Dickens' (arguably the key empathetic figure of the nineteenth century) critiques of the system? Perhaps Dawkins thought the Poor Law sounded nice, but then that doesn't explain why council tax isn't called the Super Fun Paradise Ticket. Ah well.

Next week - finally, Dawkins gets round to religious resistance to Darwinism. Why hasn't he looked at this before?

Finally, some Darwin; or, What Would Terry Eagleton Do?

2008-08-06T11:44:00.006+01:00

Hello all. Apologies for the two-month hiatus, but these last two months have been somewhat busy. Off to the US for much of June, various conference dates (as keen readers will already know) in July, and now a relocation. Yes, as of 8th August, the Doughnuts are moving from the terrorist's medium sized city of choice, Exeter, and up to Newcastle. In the meantime, however, I'm sad to report a muffin retraction. You'll remember a few months ago how I congratulated the Continental Airlines ground staff at Gatwick for their service in getting me good seats, with the cry of 'muffins all round'? Unfortunately, Continental's response on my return to the UK at the end of June was to act with such incompetence across two continents (starting with ineptitude and hungoverness at Oklahoma City, going on with massive inconvenience at Houston, and ending with startling rudeness at Gatwick) that I doubt there will ever be muffins for Continental again.

Right, to business. Finally, some Darwin, as on Monday I caught the first part of Richard Dawkins' The Genius of Charles Darwin on Channel 4. I sometimes wonder what Dawkins' RAE contribution must actually be, because for the last few years he seems to be spending increasing amounts of time wandering away from science and into lacklustre cultural analysis and godawful episodes of Doctor Who (of the series finale, I'll say this - it was mostly fun to watch but utterly embarrassing to think about). This has been characterised by his shift from evolutionary biologist to professional atheist, from The Blind Watchmaker to The God Delusion, from being implicitly questioning to explicitly blunt. As an atheist myself (primary school RE was always on the back foot after the six year old me couldn't quite reconcile prayers to a loving god with the footage from Ethiopa; secondary school RE and I didn't get on when I kept taking what might best be called the Gregory House approach) there were parts of The God Delusion I liked; as a cultural historian, there were parts I found incredibly weak. The problem is that for Dawkins, evolution immediately refutes any religious narrative, as if the two were mutually exclusive. But for many people, they aren't. Are these people just plain wrong? Or are there more complex cultural and social reasons for this seeming contradiction and the persistence of religion? I'm guessing the latter, and this is where Dawkins falls down, as he simply doesn't have the philosophical background to deal with such questions. For instance, his treatment of Anselm's ontological argument in The God Delusion is astonishingly intemperate; dismissing it as a playground exchange as swiftly as he does leaves no room for the consideration that, although it seems silly now, it obviously had great rhetorical power for a different historical culture. That said, I'm more tempted to side with Dawkins than with Terry Eagleton, whose review of Delusion in the London Review of Books began with some good points before sliding into a diatribe that said more about his own sentimental attachment to Catholicism than anything else (God is not a man on a cloud, but rather a precondition for existence? Huh?).

Similarly, there are of course plenty of people for whom evolution and religion cannot co-exist and who reside on the frankly mental side of the coin. Three examples from my personal experience should suffice. Firstly, a friend of mine once showed me a leaflet from his local church on how to be a good Christian. There was a ten point plan for spreading the word, the final point of which was (and seriously, I'm not making this up) "If somebody wants to talk about the existence of dinosaurs or evolution, change the topic of conversation." Honestly. Secondly, an encounter with a man on the street who started talking about the wonder of the world and how there must be a intelligent designer. I let him speak for a bit before explaining why there wasn't an intelligent designer. He said that, actually, in like, later life, Darwin said his theory, was, like, totally wrong? I told him I lectured in Victorian culture at the local university; he told me that I should probably move on and let him have a crack at someone else. The final example, and the one in which I was completely unable to keep a straight face, was when I met another evangelical on the street, who started a lecture on how amazing the human eye was. How could so perfect an organic tool have come about with design? It was just too good to be true. The fact that she delivered this earnest speech wearing glasses about two inches thick somewhat undermined her claims to the divine perfection of eyes. God moves in mysterious ways, mostly around Specsavers.

I've drifted from the point slightly. The Genius of Charles Darwin is a perfectly fine programme, but it's let down somewhat by Dawkins' own limitations as a cultural historian. The way Dawkins tells it, evolution was an insight that seemingly came out of nowhere but the mind of an intellectual superhero. Although attractive, such a narrative largely ignores the many other cultural influences around the appearance of the theory, in favour of a Romanticist notion of the lone genius turning the world upside down (ah, should have read the title). Alfred Russell Wallace, who was coming to the same conclusions at much the same time, is mentioned briefly but grudgingly; Herbert Spencer, who really coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest,' hasn't appeared at all yet, which is bemusing because at points Dawkins seems to drift into a more progressive Spencerian model of evolution than the more chance fuelled Darwinian mode. Admittedly, this is a three part series, so there's still time for more of this (next week, on eugenics, had better mention Francis Galton, otherwise I'm kicking my television to death), but I can't help but feel that it would benefit from more historical precision and fewer scenes of kids looking for fossils. Or perhaps more lines like "Hello, I'm Richard... so how long have you been a sex worker?"

Tour dates 2008

2008-05-31T18:19:00.003+01:00

Something of a makeover this week, doughnutfans; since the day after I adorned the top of this e-journal with my strange double-exposure photo of scenes of Exeter (c. 2001) the city was caught up in the war on terr'r (to use George's pronunciation), I thought something more immediately Victorian might be appropriate, not least because the Victorian content suggested by the title hasn't been much in evidence so far this year. More to come in the forthcoming months, honest. I really can't wait to get hold of a scanner and share with you the late Victorian/Edwardian delights of The Doings of Vigorous Daunt, Millionaire, a kind of prototypic James Bond who first appeared in the Harmsworth Magazine at the turn of the century. The illustrations are great, marauding tigers and revolvers all over the place. In the meantime, you'll have to make do with Sidney Paget's image of John Watson from Conan Doyle's "The Boscombe Valley Mystery" in volume two of The Strand Magazine, 1891. Those of you wanting more gloss on this image should see what I said about it in Victorian Periodicals Review, 40.1 (2007). Ah, the distinctive aroma of self-promotion. While I'm about it, anyone in the academic business who wants to say hello (and to moan about the lack of Victorian stuff so far this year) can do so at any of the three forthcoming conferences I'll be speaking at in the next few months.

Firstly, there's Crime Cultures: Figuring Criminality in Literature, Media and Film at the University of Portsmouth, 14-16 July 2008, where I'll be presenting on urban myth and Edwardian crime fiction, in particular Marie Belloc-Lowndes' novel The Lodger. Although we tend to associate urban legends with twentieth century popular culture (and in particular fifties Americana onwards, I would guess), there's a persuasive case that such stories were all over nineteenth century popular culture, and certainly by the time Belloc Lowndes took a hearsay story about Jack the Ripper and turned it into fiction in 1912. It's probably a little on the late side, but you can book your front row seats here.

Secondly, and in the same week, a rare hometown gig; Artistry and Industry: Representations of Creative Labour in Literature and the Visual Arts, University of Exeter, 18-20 July 2008. This one is a development of the research area I unveiled at Birkbeck back in October, magic and conjuring in Victorian fiction. Like that paper, there'll be some Dickens in there, but this one is more generally about Victorian conjuring's internal struggle with its aesthetic status (is it an art? 'Yes,' says David Devant and other successful fin de siecle magicians; 'um maybe' says the public; 'Hell no' say the arbiters of high culture, but they obviously say it more politely). Expect side discussions of spiritualism and perhaps a bonus bad Derren Brown impersonation.

Thirdly, and finally for now, off to Leicester for Victorian Bodies: Touch, Bodies, and Emotions, 1-3 September 2008. Although last on the list at present, this one is part of my primary research project, being a cultural history of London Underground (those of you who have been paying attention to a psychotic degree will remember I mentioned this about fifteen months ago). Here, I'll be looking at how the establishment of the Underground in the 1860s gave popular culture a new space for fear, unease, and general terror, in particular in John Oxenham's 1897 crime serial A Mystery of the Underground, a story apparently so terrifying that readers refused to travel by underground. Or so Peter Haining argues, although I'm finding actual evidence for this rather scant (itself an interesting point; why are we so keen to accept narratives of terror about the underground?). Tour T-shirts to follow, featuring rockin' John Watson; yours for thirty pounds each.

Billie Piper at the Gates of Dawn

2008-05-21T19:03:00.002+01:00

I've kept away from Doctor Who for long enough this year, but last week's episode was a goad too far; when they start poking about in detective fiction and table-rapping Agatha Christie, then I'm compelled to comment (the same would be true of the Dickens episode a few years ago, except that this site didn't exist then). "The Unicorn and the Wasp" was fairly characteristic of the series so far this year - nothing dreadful, but nothing you'd want to watch twice, either. The first half promised an interesting dialogue between the Christiean world (admittedly, a version of her novels collapsed into three dimensional Cluedo, which is at least two more dimensions than the 1990s televised version) and a huge murdering wasp; the second half, unfortunately, took a banality pill and revealed that the giant wasp was really a shape-shifting alien creature hiding in the guise of a vicar, and that all this craziness was the real reason for Christie disappearing for a while. Add some strange directorial decisions (how best to convey that Christie turned up again as an amnesiac at a hotel in Harrogate? Ah, we could have someone say it, and then cut to Christie looking confused beside a big sign saying THE HARROGATE HOTEL. Whaddya think? Too subtle?) and some rather rushed narrative twists, and the results safely veered away from the potentially fascinating collision of genres so interestingly threatened at the beginning.

I was reminded of two things watching this; firstly, Gerald Heard's 1941 crime novel A Taste for Honey, which I'd just been asked to endorse for a forthcoming reprint. Here the murderer breeds a particularly aggressive type of bees, who fatally attack anyone who comes into contact with a certain substance. On paper (well, on a website) it sounds silly, but the tone is such that the interaction between the almost science-fiction elements and the crime narrative work rather well (as I said, it's a cross between G. K. Chesterton and John Wyndham). This is where "The Unicorn and the Wasp" could have been heading, although the fact that the wasp in question was huge lends the potential of a Magritte-esque surrealism. Instead, the second thing I was reminded of while watching it was Timothy West's performance in Tales of the Unexpected back in the 1980s, where West gradually turns into a bee, complete with interspersed 'buzzes' in the dialogue. It wasn't a particularly effective narrative trick then; the fact that it was reproduced almost exactly in nu-Who doesn't make it any better, no matter how flashy your CGI is.

The Christie book titles crammed into the script didn't help, either. By the end, I wondered why they hadn't included someone called Evans, so he couldn't be asked something, or a classic Doctor Who countdown heading towards zero, or maybe a depressive called Cypress. While we're on the subject, why are Doctor Who's historical celebrities almost always literary figures (except for Queen Victoria in the second series)? I would like to see this as an underlying message of "Hey kids - reading is cool!", but I also suspect there's a hint of "Hey kids - reading is historical!", notwithstanding this episode's revelation that people will be reading Christie well into the year five million (and still with the freaky 1970s book covers, too). Perhaps next series, we could see Jimi Hendrix defeat Cybermen at Woodstock, or perhaps Syd Barrett and daleks. Actually, anything Doctor Who can come up with is probably fairly pedestrian compared to the kind of things that were running through Syd Barrett's head. But it would allow for an episode crammed full of Pink Floyd references: "You people are animals!" "We're on the dark side of the moon", "go at 'em, hearty mother!" It would be better than all the sinister corporations and gas creatures we're getting week after week, anyway.

"Hey George - High Five!": Laurie Anderson, Homeland

2008-05-05T11:43:00.004+01:00

As promised earlier, a review of Laurie Anderson’s Homeland, which I saw at the Barbican Theatre last Friday. But before the main feature, a support act: a few words on the Barbican itself. My, it’s confusing, isn’t it? Not being completely familiar with the city end of London, a walk from Old Street soon turned into a confusing labyrinth of signs for the Barbican Centre, but all pointing in slightly different directions. This is obviously why they include a map with the tickets. Secondly, once you’ve found it, finding the appropriate entrance seems to be a matter of luck. And finally, once inside, you’re in a cultural centre of mezzanines and staircases designed by M. C. Escher. Finding the right auditorium was easy enough, but I’m sure I walked past the same ticket desk three times on the way to the toilets.

Now for the main event (and, incidentally, cheers to the Barbican/Anderson for a free programme, rather than the £10 gouge for jewellers adverts it usually is nowadays). Homeland, a song cycle on the themes of the ongoing war and national security, is stripped-down Anderson – the multimedia stuff has gone (hell, today Powerpoint makes everyone multimedia), and apart from the instruments, the stage is bare except for a couple of hundred small candles and lightbulbs hanging low from the ceiling, in much the same way as Yukio Ninagawa’s Hamlet in 2004. Typically, Anderson is not interested in rock artist ‘at last, here I am’ posturing; barely after the stage lights come up, she and the three other musicians stride on and get started. And Homeland starts brilliantly; violins competing with the rumbling bass of the groove electronics which, as promised, dominate the performance. And then there’s the voice. She sounds exactly as she does on disc (unsurprising, since apparently Bright Red was recorded with one of the most expensive microphones available), and pretty much looks the same too (no surprises in height here). The opening section, based on Aristophanes’ The Birds, moves between spoken-sung meditations on the birth of memory and a time before there was land, and a floating haunting chorus which she delivers effortlessly. Moving into ‘Bad Man’, here come the politics, the angry references to war and bombings. Anderson's status as an American - a New Yorker, no less - allows her to rip into US foreign policy with a vehemence that might seem like lazy prejudice coming from Europeans. Apparently a group of people walked out during Thursday’s performance – what did they expect? “Hey George – high five!” This is actually rather dark stuff (and as a whole, the work resembles the heavier stuff of Bright Red replayed in the style of Life on a String, in particular the pulsating electronics on “My Compensation” and “One Beautiful Evening”), and one wonders where the humour has gone. Oh, here it is, in “Only an Expert,” familiar now from numerous YouTube appearances and the closest Homeland gets to a lead-off single. But on the whole, this is serious stuff, performed passionately; Anderson really does seem disbelievingly upset at where her country has been and where it's going.

As a collection of Anderson’s new work, Homeland is compelling; as a coherent performance essay on the themes of security, information, and nation, however, it’s slightly less convincing. There are some brilliant lines (eyes "like dead stars, their light trapped in time”; similarly, the reflection that what makes the stars wonderful is that we cannot damage them, although we’re reaching for them nonetheless), and a few clunky ones (some sections of “Only an Expert”). Homeland and other stories might have been a better (if clumsier) title, because the promise of the opening section to offer an intriguing interplay between myth and the current state of the world doesn’t quite come off, although the Birds song’s thematic opposition of sky and land recurs a few times throughout the piece. ‘Heart of a Child,’ seemingly about the death of Anderson’s father (again, back to Bright Red and Life on a String here) is moving, but feels out of place. 'The Underwear Gods' (those huge people on billboards - 'always in their underwear') is funny (and the closest Anderson gets to Philip Larkin) but also seems like a sidestep. The best parts are when Anderson gets back to storytelling, and - yay! - the voice modulation comes out again when the mike gets dropped a few octaves for her to take on a male persona, acting as a kind of chorus. We're never quite sure whether this is another character in a sometimes wayward concept album (someone rueful about his own experiences in the intelligence industry, perhaps), or Anderson herself (there are brief references to working for NASA, an even briefer visual nod to the video for 'O Superman'). But these are some of the best bits, when the intellectual rock concert veneer splits open to reveal the performance art beneath, and lines such as 'Your silence will be considered consent' and 'there's trouble at the mine' gradually take on sinister undertones. There were only two of these interludes; frankly, I would have liked more, because of their potential to knit the whole piece together. But the performance ends almost as well as it begins, with "The Lost Art of Conversation," an analysis of modern alienated relationships (a bit like a pared down version of String's "Broken"), and the encore is wonderful; Anderson alone on stage playing a brief violin piece, weaving between the candles and constantly watching the audience.

Ultimately, Homeland is a superb collection of stories, but a ropey novel; the music is often fantastic, the performance compelling, but there's little sense of progression over the ninety minutes. This may, of course, be because in performance you only get to see it once, and Anderson's work is usually best appreciated after a few listenings. It's going to be released as an album next year (again, a measure of her difference from everybody else in HMV - who else would even consider touring a whole year before a release, taunting the bootleg gods?), and it'll be interesting to see if the whole thing survives as a double-disc bonanza, or if a more coherent, edited performance emerges. Either way, I'll be queuing up outside 'Music Solutions' for my copy in 2009.

What's that? You want a star rating out of five? It's not the Radio Times, fercryin' out loud. Oh, OK: ****.

In English, Brainiac

2008-04-30T22:54:00.004+01:00

At about this time last year, I wrote a mini-essay on the imminent death of Doctor Who. And, aberrations such as Steven Moffatt's "Blink" aside, the series seems content to wander in time and mediocrity. So far this year, we've had a plot about weight loss pills that was anorexic, a so-so Pompeiian runabout, a rather better but thematically hackneyed slaves in space affair (although some rather nice direction did a lot to raise it above the competent), and last week, Doctor Who and the Narrative Autopilot. Just thinking about it is tedious, so I won't.

Instead, let's consider television for grown-ups. Ah, a new series of House is here. I say new – I’ve actually already seen three episodes as part of the in-flight entertainment on the Continental flight I mentioned a few weeks ago. Without wishing to reinforce lazy gender stereotypes (although clearly here, I do), why do Continental’s film choices have to be so obviously, well, gendered? On the flight out, the choices were Bookclub Romantic Comedy Slush and Childcare Romantic Comedy Slush, while on the way back the options were Boom Boom Smashy Bang and Witless Sports Knockabout. Do they think the US is gradually filling up with the ladies (in Houston?), while antler-locking males are hotfootin’ it to Gatwick? At least someone had the sense to rack up a few episodes of what is one of the few dramas worth watching at the moment, and which also makes it truly laughable that Torchwood is supposed to be for adults. True, the plots are often silly (she had a koala mite in her ear all the time!), but the scripts should make Russell T. Davies weep with sheer inadequacy. After all, you need to be more than competent to make the cantankerous genius model of narrative work nowadays, but House does it.

Channel Five have their mitts on it at the moment, having shaken their sharks and Nazis phase (tonite – when shazis attack), and at the beginning of the year were promoting it with Numbers (sorry, Numb3rs. You know, like Se7en or all ‘Genuine Vi4gra’) as ‘clever television.’ The idea is that both centre around intellectual heroes (and remember, in the world of television the monarch of public intellectuals is Carol Vorderman), but that’s really as far as the similarities go. A telling distinction is that while House refuses to feature a regular character whose function is to scratch his (always his) head and say “In English, brainiac,” Numb3rs is crammed full of expositionary dialogue in which the Byronic genius outlines a vaguely relevant mathematical theory, before using it as an excuse to draw a circle right in the middle of the map the FBI types were all looking at. Of course, genuinely mathematics related-crimes are few and far between, leading the writers to rely on two annoying tropes. The first is the opening sequence's banal speech that "We use math every day..." Maybe, but only in the same sense that we use physics, linguistics, biochemistry, cultural studies - in fact, pretty much anything you like - every day, and they don't get their own glossy cop show. The second is the amazingly flexible definition of mathematics, primarily in the fact that one week our hero will be working with imaginary numbers, the next with turbulent flow, which makes as much sense as J. Hillis Miller, P. I being about Dickens one week and Piers Plowman the next.

There are also consequences for narrative. It seems that mathematics and detective fiction should naturally go together; there are tempting connections to be made between investigative paradigms, the solving of problems. In practice, however, the marriage is often a misjudgement of Liza Minelli proportions. The mathematician narrator of John Dickson Carr's The Hollow Man never really shows us his analytic stuff; Guillermo Martinez's The Oxford Murders is fairly dire (and, christ on a pedalo, they've made it into a film), offering us a supposed mathematical genius who is stumped by a child's puzzle and, bizarrely, no real reason for why this mayhem should be happening in Oxford and not, say, Nuneaton. The good news is that the novel is full of ciphers; the bad news, they're the main characters. Ultimately, this all comes down to the fact that while maths and detection look good together, behind closed doors they have marital arguments of, well, Liza Minelli proportions. Modern crime fiction insists on focusing on the psychology of crime, its individuality. Critics of the genre are rapidly growing tired of all the Foucauldian disciplinary pessimism and returning to the genre's embrace of the romanticist troubled soul as the root of criminal mystery. This isn't to reinstate some tired argument that science doesn't capture the mysteries of human consciousness, just to say that crime fiction and determinism don't get along, because if criminals turn out to be so predictable, then pursuing them is simply dull. And this is where Numb3rs is behind the game; whenever Charlie suddenly realises that the criminal's movements can be determined and - the real kicker - predicted, as if the psycho were a variable rather than an actual person, then it's time to turn off. Who needs psychology or depth of character when you have graph paper?

Terminal disease

2008-03-29T12:16:00.004Z

Calm down, doughnutfans - I mean dis-ease, but I thought the cute use of punctuation in the title to undermine conventional meaning might be just too nauseatingly deconstructionist for the more delicate of you. I refer, of course, to the current Spencerian (Frank, not Herbert) management at Heathrow Terminal 5, and British Airways more generally. Whether it's losing the luggage of an entire small town, getting tangled up with caterers who sack their staff by megaphone, fixing prices or having their pilots go on strike, British Airways are rapidly becoming the Norman Wisdom of the skies. The world's favourite airline - if you like to point and laugh.

One of the effects of the embarrassment over Terminal 5 has been to entrench even more deeply a widespread scorn of Heathrow in general, one which I've always found rather unfair. In fact, I rather like airports. The first sentence of Douglas Adams' The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul suggests that "It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression 'As pretty as an airport,'" which is witty enough, but also misses the point. Airports are never going to be architectural white knuckle rides, for two reasons (conveniently enough, arrivals and departures). Arrivals: no tourist economy is going to survive a situation whereby the airport is more fantastically exciting than the country outside (hence, no log flume at LAX or Quasar at Gatwick, notwithstanding the immediate appeal of thirty people lumbering around a smoky room with their hand luggage). Departures: let's not forget that the anodyne aesthetics of the airport are really a prelude to what remains the spectacular experience of actually taking off (hardened travellers with their nerves cauterised by enough air miles to take them to the moon might consider times when the plane has lurched unexpectedly when 'scaping the surly bonds of earth to punch god on the nose) and being a stupid height above the ground. In fact, it's at the airport ends when flight becomes most interesting, when the pedestrian view of the landscape suddenly unfolds into panoptic mode, when it turns from a postcard into a map.

The other accusations are that airports are boring and uniform. But, with the exception of seven hours in Chicago O'Hare (a reflection on the sheer mass of time waiting, not on O'Hare itself, although they generally need better bookshops), I can't remember ever being bored in an airport. This may be down to the fact that I've usually got something to read, but I prefer to think that it's the influence of a steady and ambient tension. How boring can a place be when there are people walking around with guns? And, furthermore, walking around with guns because there may be other people with guns, or something more devastating? In his recent (and rather controversial) collection The Second Plane, Martin Amis makes the observation that global terrorism really led to a rise in its opposite - global tedium, as we all spend longer waiting in the same lines to be asked the same questions, those thirty or so seconds replicated around the world thousands of times and adding up to whole years of boredom. The irony is funny, but at the same time there's an undertone that security should really just be for the tanned and turbanned. It's the annoyance of guys who look a bit like Peter Ackroyd at having to take their shoes off at Heathrow for less than a minute - what now? I don't believe this - and their luggage innumerate wives (I love the social precision of the announcements that make it quite explicit that "a lady's handbag" constitutes one item). They see the strict division of airport space (before and after security) as an encroachment of the police state, without realising that all public spaces (and a good few private ones) are already pretty much parcelled out for various types of social utility. That's the good thing about the use of space in airports; the honesty is refreshing. Incidentally, on the pre- and post-security divide, why is it always a strikingly nicer environment after security? They've got you by then - at this point, you're either ending your visit in a plane, a van, or a bag. You wouldn't have thought they'd have bothered by then, but seemingly without fail it's lighter, more open, and generally less of a scrum.

As for airports being uniform... I've seen enough American ones to pick out the differences. Sacramento's two terminals seem to be embodying some kind of historical tension, one of them a typical NorCal hippy child of the sixties, the other all chrome and glass. The McNamara terminal at Detroit Fort Wayne offers the rare experience of standing at one end of a room and not being able to see the other; it's about 1.3 miles long, a gigantic parody of a baronial banquet hall (it's disappointing to get to the other side and find there isn't a huge pig on a spit, revolving in front of the plate glass, although the salt could easily be passed by the internal monorail). Passport control at San Francisco is weirdly quiet; Las Vegas, inevitably, has slot machines at departures and the huge windows on the desert just seem like cinema. As for the UK, this is where I stick up for Heathrow again, as opposed to its less well-to-do sibling Gatwick. My experiences of Heathrow (admittedly, mostly limited to Terminal 3) have all been pretty fair. Gatwick, if you want to get psychogeographical about it, seems to be at some confluence of bad juju and worse weather (flying into there in January, we descended right into the middle of a storm so bad that planes on the ground were refusing to take off , leaving us to make numerous futile, bumpy and vomitous approaches for half an hour). Heathrow, by both M4 and underground, acts as the gateway to London; Gatwick seems to be simultaneously in the middle of nowhere and handy for Croydon. The shuttle buses are a spectacular rip off, even for airport transport; my wife and I once paid £5 to be taken around a corner before disembarking at a hotel from which we could quite clearly see our original bus stop. We walked back the next day, one area in which Gatwick scores over the siege mentality of Heathrow - they'd still let the trojan horse in, though, because it was on wheels. What Gatwick need to do now (as if there were any real competition between the two) is capitalise on the terminal 5 debacle, which they've already started with their South Terminal redevelopment. If enough of us ask, they'll put in Quasar.

The Californian Bookselling Massacre

2008-03-11T21:08:00.003Z

Bad news this week, bibliophiles (at least, those of you in Northern California). A paltry week or so after adding the link for Woodland's Next Chapter bookshop over there to your left, comes the news that the shop is to close. Read all (or rather, in internet friendly newschunk format) about it here, thanks to the Sacramento Bee:

http://www.sacbee.com/101/story/775661.html

All right - but we'll still be able to go to Bogey's Books in nearby Davis for second hand literary goodies, yes? Well, no:

http://www.sacbee.com/101/story/487057.html

Thanks again Sacramento Bee, bringer of depressing news, although it's also nice to see that this counts as news, rather than the minutiae of football that constitutes important information over here. I suppose the BBC might have covered this, but only if they had a programme about it to publicise. And I thought the licence fee was there for a reason, i.e. to avoid incessant corporate advertising and rip-offs of ITV talent shows. Ah well.

But this is beside the immediate point. Naturally (since I wouldn't be writing about it otherwise), these closures are saddening, since these two shops in particular formed a large part of my time in Yolo county (also: apricot pie from Raley's, though not their fried chicken, which is of British standards; cobbler from the Memorial Union at UC Davis; and In-n-Out. Honestly, I'm only overweight by the smallest medically defined amount). The Next Chapter in particular will be missed, since my wife and I lived a few blocks away from it, and it contributed a good many of my memories of Northern California. For instance, finally finding a copy of Georges Perec's A Void (all right Oulipo purists, La Disparition) there. Or just English amazement at being able to go second hand book shopping at eight in the evening (once you get back here, opening hours seem somehow prudish, and late night opening once a week before Christmas is no longer the glimpse of stocking it once might have been). And the smell of the place, a combination of books, coffee and, just to stop that being a hackneyed combination, American wood. It did, after all, use to be a hardware store. And yes, American wood smells different, as does the slightly differently sized paper. Hell, the whole country has a hint of cinnamon about it, especially the airports. As for the bookshop, I always intended to pop back once I'd got a proper academic job and pick up that set of E. W. Hornung they had ($15 a volume is pretty good, but not quite on a graduate student salary). For now I'll just have to get round to reading the copy of Roy Vickers' The Department of Dead Ends I got for $2.50.

Bogey's wasn't quite so central to my Californian life, but still pretty important (and useful for picking up some John Dickson Carr as well).For some reason, the memory of walking there one evening after a day spent in the library at UC Davis in December 2005 has particularly stuck in my mind, like a Wordsworthian 'spot of time' but with slightly better weather. I even sold them a few books as well, but not very good ones (I suspect my copy of Mick Jackson's Five Boys was still there at the end), so maybe I should feel a little complicit in the closure. Or we could just blame Borders around the corner. Yeah, let's.

They're American planes, made in America.

2008-02-26T20:13:00.000Z

The last couple of months have seen me take a couple of technological strides (well, shuffles) forward. Earlier this month, on a research trip to the British Library, I finally got myself an Oyster card. Like anybody else new to this system, I spent the next few days in a fug of self-satisfaction at saving money, perfecting my Oyster Slap (the nonchalant yet forceful placing of the wallet against the yellow pad when passing through the gate) and guffawing inwardly at those still fumbling with their card tickets, waiting all that time for the barrier to take the card and spit it out again. I was, of course, aware that real life Lunnoners were similarly guffawing at me last year, and will indeed miss the cardboard Underground ticket (its dimensions making it somehow perfectly suited for bookmark duty), but as with any other popular technology, there's a pervasive sense of "How could I have been so arse rippingly stupid as to carry on with the old stuff?" Paper tickets, VHS, portable CD players... bringing me to the second (or, chronologically, first) technological leap - the MP3 player, which I adopted in December. For the moderately frequent flyer, this constitutes a whole revolution in carry-on luggage. No more stuffing the seat pocket in front of me with a CD player and a couple of fabric clams containing the best prog-, art- and classic rock the 1970s has to offer (you try Bach on a plane), leaving no room for one's knees, and even then forcing one to have already taken out the superfluous magazines and duty-free brochures already in the pouch, and putting them in your neighbour's pouch before he or she arrives (then feigning ignorance when they pull out the in-flight film guide and seven copies of Sky Mall tumble out as well). No more juggling all that stuff - just a tiny silver thing that fits in the pocket. And so it was that one of the best moments of last year (after getting married, 'f course) came right at the end, flying to Oklahoma City on New Year's Eve. Having scored the holy grail of economy seating (exit row, window seat) thanks to the quite superb Continental check-in staff at Gatwick (muffins all round), the final approach into US airspace was undertaken to the equally dramatic soundtrack of Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" in its compressed digital glory. It was difficult to be precise, but I'm fairly sure that we entered the US just as the track ended and as I had semi-intended (look, it can get boring up there). That was good. What was better, however, and which came as a rather more unintended surprise (as surprises tend to be), was that the next track, immediately after entering the States, was Laurie Anderson, "From the Air."

Which brings me to the subject of this week's (um, month's?) doughnut, Laurie Anderson. Anderson is somewhat prominent in my head at the moment, not only because of her taking a significant chunk of my MP3 player at the moment (incidentally, it's not an Apple, more of a clementine), but also because I've just bought tickets for her new show, Homeland, at the Barbican this May, and am hugely excited, because despite the centrality of performance art to Anderson's career, I've never seen one of her performances. The theme of Homeland is America’s current preoccupation with national security, which at first I though was something of a retread of old concerns, until I actually thought about it and realised it’s not something that crops up in her earlier work (there’s a possible exception in “Night in Baghdad” from Bright Red, perhaps). Rather, the World Trade Center attacks and everything after have been retroactively superimposed over the songs, most obviously the 1982 ha-ha vocoder fest “O Superman,” Anderson’s most famous piece (“Here come the planes. They’re American planes. Made in America”). The 2007 re-issue of Big Science (1982) rams the point home with uncharacteristic bluntness, the back cover showing the twin towers themselves. “From the Air,” the piece that accompanied my aerial entrance in the US, is narrated by the captain of an aircraft which is about "to attempt a... crash landing." There's a silent 'uh' implied before "crash." It's that precise. And humorous too, when the Captain's instructions to the passengers rapidly devolve into a game of Simon Says. But the reason why this song was so perfect as a soundtrack for entering America was not only the plane setting (it is, after all, about a crash, so perfect in the slightly masochistic sense that it re-establishes that the big turbine thing just outside your exit row window seat is also what your entire world relies on), but the album's evocation of America as a whole, a technologically sated society from the cities to the slightly indeterminate out-of-town zones wonderfully evoked in the title track of Big Science. There's more aural precision here: "Big Science" gradually becomes "Big Signs," which puts me in mid of the towering neon to be found on most highway sides in the midwest. So while Anderson hasn’t yet directly tackled the idea of Homeland Security, it’s always been there in the background, since her work has obsessively explored the idea of what it is to be American, or at least be in America. This may be why her last album to date, 2001's Life on a String, got some rather mixed reviews, since it opens out the sound to include influences from the slightly oddly named 'world' music, and some of the tracks move away from Anderson's characteristic concern with postmodern experience to present meditations on the theme of Moby Dick. I actually quite like Life on a String, particularly the emphasis on the violin, although the lyrical flirtation with cliche will have alienated some; 'Dark Angel', with its rather banal observation that maybe material possessions don't really count for much, is better left out altogether in favour of 'My Compensation,' 'Statue of Liberty,' and the beautiful 'Pieces and Parts.' In fact, I was listening to these an awful lot when flying to the US in December 2006. From the air, indeed.

The Doughnuts: End of Year Literary Awards

2008-01-04T17:59:00.000Z

No Guildhall setting, BBC4 coverage, or public intellectual punditry; but similarly, no forced smiles in defeat, or Richard and Judy. Let's crack on.

Best New Author: Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

A new author to me, anyway (by the way, few if any of these awards are actually going to reflect the white heat of publishing in 2007 - does this look like the website of one who can afford hardbacks that aren't from a remaindered shop?) and still alive, which is the other rule for this category. Last year was a closely run race; first it was going to be Liz Jensen, then D. M. Thomas, then Christopher Priest stole it right at the end of 2006 with The Prestige. Then, in a weird symmetry, Ishiguro shows up three days later with the first novel of 2007 and sets the benchmark for everyone else to not quite meet. Another win, then, for the 'Is it science fiction or not?' subgenre, as Kaz escapes the fame shadow of The Remains of the Day with a near-future tale of growing up in an organ-harvesting facility boarding school (perhaps a bit like Billy Bunter in Logan's Run). It combines a rather moving mournful tone with hot-damn readability, and although the plot resolution is not quite the killer punch it could have been, that's not really the point.

The also-rans:

Matthew Kneale, English Passengers (runner up)
A. S. Byatt, Angels and Insects
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Best Neo-Victorian Novel: Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

A slightly, almost dementedly, specific category, but this kind of thing is my bag. Faber doesn't count for the category above (he won in 2003, after all), but this would have been a strong contender, and now sits at the centre of my module on NeoVictorian fiction. An academic colleague of mine described it as "more intelligent than anything Sarah Waters wrote," which is a little harsh, but then again Faber's recreation of the Victorian novel seems more instinctual and direct than Waters' sometimes self-conscious updating of nineteenth century tropes (the sensation novel in Fingersmith, and Affinity is soooo Foucault, or at least so I would say if in a Berkeley coffee shop). I'm also loath to recommend a book as a mathematical relation of pages involved to reading time, but nine hundred pages have rarely passed so quickly. It wins int he face of some tough competition from the aforementioned Byatt and Kneale, moderate challenge from Caleb Carr's The Alienist, and laughable muppetry from the 1850 sections of Mitchell's Cloud Atlas.

Best Victorian Novel: George Gissing, New Grub Street

Re-reads are disallowed, to prevent Bleak House winning five times a decade, so I'll have to confess to not having read some big Victorian titles (it's OK to do that, they published a hell of a lot). A fantastic portrait of late Victorian publishing which, because this is Gissing, is laced with naturalist misery and privation. Similarly, a startlingly prescient account of post-PhD career paths in the humanities and probably too depressing to read before the interviews start appearing.

Best Novel: Ian McEwan, Saturday

For a while, McEwan has been the David Bowie of literature; famous, influential, interdisciplinary, and with a prodigious output of works characterised by being fantastic except for some annoying flaw, a chapter or plot development that seems out of step, that doesn't quite work (now come on, do you really listen to Heathen from beginning to end? Aren't you slightly annoyed that "Slip Away" is the third track, leaving the rest of the album somewhat anticlimactic?). Saturday, finally, is the McEwan novel without the "yes, but...". I know some people have complained about the penultimate chapter's implication that all it takes to reform criminals is poetry (good liberal humanist thinking there, and accordingly the poet in question is Matthew Arnold), but that scene just somehow works. But what is really nice is the way the reader inhabits the mind - not the brain - of the neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, a committed materialist, so that our very access to his thoughts becomes a kind of challenge to his particular brand of scientific positivism. There's also some marvellous writing (yes, the BT tower is "seedy and municipal" by day) which is stylish but not grandstanding (I think Martin Amis would make this tiresome). Some may find the debate over the Iraq war clunky, but Perowne's ambivalence towards these events makes for an interesting perspective and corrective to auto-outrage. Finally, to those reviewers on amazon.co.uk who found the novel irritatingly smug and middle-class - I'd probably stay away from novels about neurosurgeons who live in Fitzrovia if I were you.

Worst Disappointment: Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

Quite a packed field, this year. The term 'disappointment' is also crucial; had this been 'worst novel,' then Paul Auster would have run off cackling with award-winning glee thanks to Travels in the Scriptorium. Here, an amnesiac (charmingly called Mr. Blank) wakes up in a bare room to be visited by - you'll like this - characters from Auster's other novels. Is Mr. Blank the figure of the artist? Is it Auster being visited by his own characters, complaining about how they've been treated in much better novels? Is it us, the reader? All these questions and more are- no, it's just dull talking about it. Walks in the Wankery may count as a disappointment in the context of Auster's other novels (and it does have the distinct feel of a writers' block exercise that mistakenly got sent to Faber and Faber), but since another colleague of mine had already warned me about it, it doesn't quite measure up. Similarly, Stephen L. Carter's The Emperor of Ocean Park missed out because I didn't finish it, and I'm not that unfair. A 'thriller' based in the largely ignored by fiction milieu of affluent black Americans, this was a tedious affair undone by a narrative voice that put me in mind of Morgan Freeman doing a really bored narration. There are also some astonishingly crass moments, such as when the central character literally sees red when he thinks of white injustices to the - sigh - 'darker nation,' and chess references that have the subtlety of Jim Davidson swinging a wrecking ball bearing the face of Bernard Manning at a big sign saying 'POLITICAL CORRECTNESS' (talk of white men interfering with the progress of black men, black men blocking other black men...).

But this distracts me from the year's biggest let-down, Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, a novel which has inexplicably received an almost universal adulation, although I suspect most of this comes from goth girls or those who think that Fighting Fantasy books count as literature. I was reading the 'Author's Preferred Text,' which did nothing to excuse some really clumsy sentences, or the fact that even though this story has been through two or three different versions, it seems as if Gaiman is making it up as he goes along (oh yes, there's an angel down here... she's a bad angel... and hell is in there too). Similarly, Richard Mayhew is simply too absent as a central character, and so uselessly bemused it's amazing he isn't killed in the first hundred pages (the fact that he's named - or so I assume - after the Victorian urban explorer Henry Mayhew is the best part of the book, and that's a gag only Victorianists are going to get). But there are two more serious problems with the novel. The first is that Gaiman's idea of London Above (that is, normal, full fat, four star, actual London) is painted in such broad strokes that we don't get a sense of how weird London Below actually is by comparison, or how it might relate to the world we know. It's as if Gaiman wrote a novel about a city with no other experience of it than one of those glossy guidebooks sold at tiny newsagents in the West End (obviously, a friend bought the brochure and sent it to him in, I don't know, Burkino Faso). The second is the political aspect of the narrative. The original television series was based on the idea that the homeless are, effectively, invisible, as we walk past them every day without offering any recognition. This is a potent way of putting it, until you then decide that the homeless are invisible because they live in a world that is actually far more exciting and interesting than the one we live in, where they have super adventures and implicitly despise the humdrum lives of the affluent. Hurrah! Bang! and the social problem is gone! Admittedly, one character towards the end of the novel says to Mayhew that the homeless don't live in a fantasy world - they freeze to death in winter. But that's it - one sentence, potential for a rather darker narrative brushed aside in favour of whizz-bang swordfighting. The review on the back of my copy says that Neverwhere is what Franz Kafka and Terry Pratchett would produce if locked in a cell together. I imagine Kafka went straight to sleep and Pratchett decided to see what he could come up with in fifteen minutes. Before, of course, fashioning a paper-mache head and hollowing out the grille at the back of the cell with a broken-off spoon.

Nietzsche's Coming to Get You: Cloud Atlas continued

2007-12-09T20:43:00.000Z

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.

NeoVictorian Bandwagon in Wheel-loss Incident: or, the first chapter of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas

2007-12-02T11:37:00.000Z

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 In-Flight On-Screen Round-Up

2007-08-22T19:15:00.000+01:00

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.

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.

Doctor Who and the Critical Backlash

2007-04-15T00:11:00.000+01:00

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.

Neo-Victorians at 36,000 feet

2007-04-03T03:40:00.000+01:00

A week into my latest California trip, and there have been none of the anticipated Curb Your Enthusiasm high-jinks I mentioned a few weeks ago. So instead, I’m going to talk about books and (stage) magic, and hope that maybe I'll get into a bizarre confrontation in the next eight days or so.

I was pleased to see that The Prestige was one of the film choices offered on the plane. Somehow I didn’t find the time to see this at the cinema, which can only mean that I’ll never find the time to visit the cinema again, since if any film was meant to appeal to me it was surely this one, with its inspired blend of the late Victorians, stage magic, and David Bowie. It perhaps didn’t help that I’d been put off by lukewarm reviews from friends, or maybe I was afraid that something combined of so many delicious ingredients could all too easily turn out to be a horrible mess, like finding a fillet steak stuffed in the middle of a chocolate fudge gateaux. Finding this film on the plane was also something of a pleasant coincidence, since on my last US tour (literally a tour this time, taking in the airports of Washington Dulles, Philadelphia, Chicago O’Hare, Oklahoma City, Los Angeles LAX, San Francisco, and Sacramento (where I learnt that customer service at NorthWest Airlines follows a formal structure of a) theft, b) hiding, c) lying, d) suggesting that I am lying, and e) indifference)) in December, I had been reading Christopher Priest’s novel upon which the film is based. I had started reading it in Heathrow Terminal 3 (the site of last weeks’ entry, doughnut fans), and got about a hundred pages into it before boarding. Incidentally, when boarding the plane, I decided I’d had enough of historical conjuring for the moment and stopped reading, in order to watch The Illusionist instead, a film with similar conjuring themes but which deserves some sort of award for the most frenetic final two minutes of narrative (a bit like the end of The Usual Suspects but instead of just being able to walk normally after all, Kevin Spacey also gets out a sack containing the heads of every character to have appeared in the film, including that of the detective who’s just been interviewing him). The Illusionist is a good film, but an oddly muted one since nothing about it seems particularly original, from its plot twists to casting Rufus Sewell as the bad guy. Once I’d watched it, I wanted to get back to Priest’s novel, which seemed to be developing into something quite different. Unfortunately, an annoying thing like the MLA convention got in the way of finishing it as quickly as I would have liked, and there are probably more atmospheric places to read the final pages than the foyer at the Philadelphia Sheraton. Nonetheless, it is a superb piece of storytelling which I recommend to anybody who’s bothered to read this far.

Achtung! Spoilers ahead!

(Well, maybe not really, but I once knew somebody who, while watching films he already knew the end of, would make various comments throughout which while seeming to him cryptic and veiled hints, were to the rest of us glaring premonitions of what was to come. So during Planet of the Apes we would get “Oh yes, they’re so very far away from Earth,” or perhaps “It’s hardly as if they’ve got the Statue of Liberty around the corner.” It was the social equivalent of the bit in B. S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo where a few pages have a hole cut through them so you can see what’s going to happen before you actually get there (Albert Angelo is another highly recommended novel, and easily found in your local Waterstone’s as the first part of Johnson’s Omnibus). So, if you don’t even want to receive obvious hints or perhaps semi-spoilers, I should go somewhere else for now.)

To what may prove the dismay of some of my friends, I also liked the film a lot, and I think this divergence of opinion has something to do with narrative expectation. I suspect The Prestige will become known as a ‘twist’ film, the kind of movie judged solely against its ability to conceal the fact that Gwyneth Paltrow’s head was really a ghost, or something similar. Having already read the novel, however, the film would have to be something more than already knowing all the secrets. And, you know, I think that it was. My friends complained that the film’s twist was too obvious, that there were far too many clues. Admittedly, there are parts which are handled clumsily; Christopher Nolan should surely have known better than to have heavily made up and virtually mute characters appear momentarily on screen, but otherwise get mentioned a lot. But that doesn't seem to matter somehow, because the film's main twist is in many ways so obvious that it almost doesn't qualify as a surprise - and yet, when it comes, it still has a surprising quality. It also helps that the story is sufficiently strong that, given sufficient production values and quality of acting (which are both evident here), it can withstand most of the more common indignities of adaptation. There are changes both significant and subtle here; the modern day strand of the novel has been dropped to good effect, while a slightly more low key alteration in the plot (regarding the effects of Tesla's invention) makes the whole thing even more sinister than Priest's already satisfyingly macabre original. The attempt to delve into the history of magic is laudable - the inclusion of Chung Ling Soo is a nice touch and for those us familiar with the field, a nice foregrounding of later events - although it does trip the film up at times (one character mentions the 'sawing a lady in half' trick about twenty years before it first appeared). If there is a failing, and one which I think may account for some of the more lukewarm reviews (rather than the 'twist' or otherwise which most people seem to have focused on), it's that the film is not quite so good as the original novel in sliding from one genre to another, when the sleights of hand turn into science fiction. There is time and scope in the novel to make the change gradual and persuasive; the film also does it well, but I suspect many may be unconvinced by the switch.

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.

Live from Heathrow

2007-03-25T11:47:00.000+01:00

"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.

The Cast of "Casualty" doing an Abba Medley

2007-03-15T15:42:00.000Z

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).

Tour Dates

2007-03-04T15:54:00.000Z

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.sall.ex.ac.uk/conferences/daphne-du-maurier-cent-conf.html

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.

Why Darwin's Doughnuts?

2007-02-28T15:30:00.000Z

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.