Still going...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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: ****.