A very happy holiday to you, my faithful and shockingly patient readers.
Hope you had a good day yesterday, and that any more time you have off between now and the end of 2010 is positively bottom-kicking.
I raise my steaming mug of tea to you, whoever and wherever you are, and wish you the best.
Spotted in the Reference section of WHSmith.
I think this might be an example of irony, but that’s a word which has had its meaning diluted to almost homeopathic levels by that Alanis Morrisette song and other misuses, so I hesitate to call it such.
That said, though…
Well, I entered, but as the shortlisted folks have now been contacted and it doesn’t appear that I was one of them, I thought I’d take the opportunity to share my entry with you lovely people. Waste not, want not, as they say, and hopefully it’ll amuse you…
I Still Dream Of Orgonon
Deciding that Operation Paperclip had been very successful, in the mid-1940s the US government ran another operation collating scientific knowledge, once again targeting foreign nationals resident in the USA.
An admin error put Albert Einstein and Wilhelm Reich in the same group, but the two had met previously, and got on well. They talked about how Reich had fudged his figures last time, and Einstein candidly admitted that he’d pretty much done the same in introducing the cosmological constant, and they laughed, and set to work.
Within a few months, they announced that Reich had been right about Orgone after all, and whilst the UK set up a Health Service, the USA provided tax incentives for the mass manufacture of Orgone Accumulators. By the early 1960s, there was an accumulator in every home, and the average life expectancy had increased by 23 years.
Other countries followed suit; in 1983, the UK used Reich’s cloudbusting technology to improve their weather, and other countries used the same technology to counteract droughts and turn deserts into meadows.
Global population levels, but most notably those in societies with a strong religious influence, stabilised once it became clear that channelling sexual energy served the common good, and in many countries state-funded single-sex boarding schools for teenagers replaced power plants, boosting power reserves and education levels alike.
Einstein and Reich both lived to be centenarians, though tragically neither saw Project Iapyx, and the launch into space in 1999 of the first Orgone-powered spacecraft towards Barnard’s Star.
Iapyx I is expected to report back in 2012.
Make my friends rich dept:
My old friend Ian, and his bandmates in Katalina Kicks, have just released a new single called ‘Me’, and it’s available to buy via iTunes, for the very reasonable price of 79p.
Not sure if you want to trust my opinion on it, especially as I tend to write about books and writing as opposed to music? Okay, I understand. Here’s the video:
What’s that? Oh yes, it does rock. Told you so.
I’m pleased to be able to tell you part of the reason why I’ve been so absent from blogging recently, and it’s legitimate and real and relates to actual writing and everything.
I’m one of the four writers on the daily smartphone drama Persona, which is coming from the lovely folks at App-Media in January 2011. There are three other folks contributing words (Phill, Ronnie, and Adam), and between us we’ve written the first ‘season’, which will cover the whole month of January.
It’s been genuinely interesting writing my ‘slice’ of the show (the various strands weave in and out of each other, and new episodes – or, rather Appisodes – will be released on a daily basis. As I understand it, you’ll be able to buy the app from the appropriate online place, and then you’ll automatically get the new show delivered to you. Sounds a lot like the Cracked Reader for the iPhone which I have, and am very happy with.
As you can see from this set of photos, a rehearsal was held on November 27, though I won’t say (or perhaps can’t say?) which cast members are involved in the storyline I wrote. But if you want to see the character breakdown, it’s here, and those of you who’ve followed the blog for a while will probably be able to guess which characters are ones I’ve come up with (clue: look for the usual verbosity)…
Shooting is taking place this week in London, and if you’d like to be an extra, I believe they’re still looking for people to do just that. You will, of course, get to feature in a pretty revolutionary bit of drama, but more than that you’ll get to meet the nice people involved (I can speak from actual ‘IRL’ encounters with them, they’re lovely), plus you’ll receive a credit and get food and travel expenses paid for. If you’re available this week in London and interested, the best ways to get in touch with them seem to be either Twitter or Facebook. Tell them I sent you.
Anyway, it’s been a genuinely interesting (and hopefully for all involved, productive) time writing the scripts for Season One (or ‘January’, as it’s more commonly known), and I’m looking forward to being involved with Season Two – and, of course, seeing how the cast play the lines I’ve written. One thing which it’s certainly reinforced in my mind is the fact that redrafting is vital for me, and as much as I might like to think it’s the case, the first thoughts out of my head onto the page are very rarely the best. Even the brightest jewel, I like to think, needs a bit of polishing to shine (ahem).
I’ll tell you more about how to view the show, and where to buy the app, and the like, as soon as I know more. And, of course, if you are an extra, do drop me a line and let me know how it goes, eh?
Well, no, that’s putting it mildly; on my return to Blighty, it was diagnosed as amoebic dysentery and an infection of the intestine, but what’s relevant to this tale (which started charmingly, I think you’ll agree) is the fact that it utterly scuppered my holiday and made me have to stay in my hotel room much of the time, visiting the bathroom literally dozens of times per day, and being unable to eat for a couple of days. Over the course of the ten days or so it lasted, I lost a stone and a half (but no, I would not recommend it as an approach to weight loss).
After a week or so of this, I’ll cheerfully admit that my mental state was pretty strange; I was dehydrated and lacking in intellectual stimulation (you can only stare at the ceiling for so long before it starts getting boring – for me, about three days is my limit), and the vast majority of my interactions with other people (mainly hotel staff) were being conducted in French, leading to a slightly odd state where my mind was simultaneously translating my thoughts even as I was thinking them. In short, I was not a well chap.
They say that if you don’t use it, you lose it, so I decided to stop the mental rot, and do a bit of writing. I started well, coming up with a pretty decent ‘Elseworlds’ Batman story (that is, a story based in a slightly different version of the Batman set-up), but that was about it for writing, until the wooziness and general illness passed again and I decided to make a deal with the universe.
Yes, you read that correctly. Don’t ask me to explain it, just chalk it up to me being profoundly unwell.
So, I made a deal with the universe, which went pretty much like this: if the universe let me live, and get well again, I’d finally get round to reading the key books by all the ‘big and important’ authors. The ones I’d always pretended to have read, but really I was just bluffing based upon having seen them referred to in other places, or having read the back covers or other synopses. Don’t look at me like that, you’ve done the same sort of thing, whether it was about books, films, music, art or whatever. You don’t fool me.
Anyway, I compiled a list of authors, and then against each name, put the most important or famous book they’d written (if you’ve never made such a list, I recommend it as an intellectual exercise – it’ll make you realise just how daunting it is trying to read all the books that are supposed to be classic or important or both). And I made a solemn vow that if I got well again, I’d keep up my end of the bargain.
As you can tell by the fact I’m telling this story in the present day, I didn’t get better – I died alone and unmourned in a Morocco hotel room, and my body was shoved into the wardrobe of the room, the better to frighten the next inhabitant of the room. Or, rather: I got better, and returned to Blighty, and there, once I was strang enough to leave the house, and the urge to sleep non-stop, along with the infection, fled my body, I set about buying the books on the list. And then, more importantly, reading them.
I’m not going to name the authors or books involved (well, with one or two minor exceptions; see later), but a lot of the authors were male, a lot of them were reviewed as groundbreaking and important, and a lot of their books were either boring or self-indulgent or pointless or all of the above. Several of the books featured self-absorbed male characters (I won’t call them protagonists, for reasons Robert McKee acolytes would understand), wandering from one joyless and cold sexual encounter to another, full of loathing for, and a baseless sense of superiority to, the world around them.
It was hard work reading these books, and whilst with some of them I struggled all the way to the end, it was after about ten such tomes that I developed my reading rule, which I live by to this day, and which I think is worth your considering as well, so I’ll put it in bold here and now: If I’m not enjoying a book, I will stop reading it after 100 pages, or one-third of the book’s overall length, whichever is the shorter. Obviously, we all define ‘not enjoying a book’ in differing ways, but I think there are common ways in which the lack of enjoyment manifests: not remembering the character’s names, not remembering story details, not caring what’s happened or what might happen to the characters, staring into space instead of reading, having to read pages over and over again, looking at the page numbers and figuring out how much further you’ve got to go… that sort of thing.
I know a lot of people feel that once they’ve started a book, they have to finish it, and some are even thoughtful enough to say that the author probably worked hard on it, so they feel obliged to do do. I don’t feel this way – I think there’s an implied agreement that the author will try to hold your interest, and if they fail to do that, you can leave – and anyway, there are so many good books in the world that I’ll probably never get round to reading that I really can’t afford to spend time on ones I consider to be … let’s say ‘not good’.
Interestingly, the male authors tended to be the ones who interested me least, and after feeling things were improving a bit with The Bell Jar, I found that next on my list was To Kill A Mockingbird. And what a relief it was to read: likeable characters, a moral centre to it, a mystery element, courtroom drama, issues of race and prejudice, and an ending which came as a bit of a surprise, despite it being referred to early on (if you’ve read it, you’ll know what – or rather who – I’m referring to). A brilliant book. That’s how you do it.
For me, working my way through the list of ‘great books’ was a bit of a chore, and because of that, a revelation. I remember being told at college* that the ‘canon’ of good books was heavily influenced by F.R.Leavis (who we all know best from his appearance in the Bridget Jones film), and whether or not this is strictly accurate, I certainly learned that it doesn’t always do to take other people’s words for it about books.
Bearing in mind that I haven’t posted in a while, only to return with what appears to be textual diarrhoea (perhaps appropriately, given the opening paragraphs), I’d like to try and find some message or conclusion to all this, maybe even a lesson or two, so here we go – what I learned:
– If you’re unsure about your stomach’s resilience, don’t have salad in Morocco
– Read books because you want to, not because someone else insists you must (unless you’re a student)
– Some classic books may be respected because of the step they made at the time, not how they read now
– The library is your friend (as is Project Gutenberg if you’re techno-hip and modern), especially for relation to books you may only read once (if that)
– To Kill A Mockingbird is a fine book, and if you haven’t read it, I heartily recommend it.
I hope this has been helpful.
*I was, on the other hand, told this by someone who believed that books were the one and only valid art form (forget about painting, photography, film, or music), so I should perhaps have taken the remark with a kilo or two of sodium chloride. 
Well, no, that’s putting it mildly; on my return to Blighty, it was diagnosed as amoebic dysentery and an infection of the intestine, but what’s relevant to this tale (which started charmingly, I think you’ll agree) is the fact that it utterly scuppered my holiday and made me have to stay in my hotel room much of the time, visiting the bathroom literally dozens of times per day, and being unable to eat for a couple of days. Over the course of the ten days or so it lasted, I lost a stone and a half (but no, I would not recommend it as an approach to weight loss).
After a week or so of this, I’ll cheerfully admit that my mental state was pretty strange; I was dehydrated and lacking in intellectual stimulation (you can only stare at the ceiling for so long before it starts getting boring – for me, about three days is my limit), and the vast majority of my interactions with other people (mainly hotel staff) were being conducted in French, leading to a slightly odd state where my mind was simultaneously translating my thoughts even as I was thinking them. In short, I was not a well chap.
They say that if you don’t use it, you lose it, so I decided to stop the mental rot, and do a bit of writing. I started well, coming up with a pretty decent ‘Elseworlds’ Batman story (that is, a story based in a slightly different version of the Batman set-up), but that was about it for writing, until the wooziness and general illness passed again and I decided to make a deal with the universe.
Yes, you read that correctly. Don’t ask me to explain it, just chalk it up to me being profoundly unwell.
So, I made a deal with the universe, which went pretty much like this: if the universe let me live, and get well again, I’d finally get round to reading the key books by all the ‘big and important’ authors. The ones I’d always pretended to have read, but really I was just bluffing based upon having seen them referred to in other places, or having read the back covers or other synopses. Don’t look at me like that, you’ve done the same sort of thing, whether it was about books, films, music, art or whatever. You don’t fool me.
Anyway, I compiled a list of authors, and then against each name, put the most important or famous book they’d written (if you’ve never made such a list, I recommend it as an intellectual exercise – it’ll make you realise just how daunting it is trying to read all the books that are supposed to be classic or important or both). And I made a solemn vow that if I got well again, I’d keep up my end of the bargain.
As you can tell by the fact I’m telling this story in the present day, I didn’t get better – I died alone and unmourned in a Morocco hotel room, and my body was shoved into the wardrobe of the room, the better to frighten the next inhabitant of the room. Or, rather: I got better, and returned to Blighty, and there, once I was strang enough to leave the house, and the urge to sleep non-stop, along with the infection, fled my body, I set about buying the books on the list. And then, more importantly, reading them.
I’m not going to name the authors or books involved (well, with one or two minor exceptions; see later), but a lot of the authors were male, a lot of them were reviewed as groundbreaking and important, and a lot of their books were either boring or self-indulgent or pointless or all of the above. Several of the books featured self-absorbed male characters (I won’t call them protagonists, for reasons Robert McKee acolytes would understand), wandering from one joyless and cold sexual encounter to another, full of loathing for, and a baseless sense of superiority to, the world around them.
It was hard work reading these books, and whilst with some of them I struggled all the way to the end, it was after about ten such tomes that I developed my reading rule, which I live by to this day, and which I think is worth your considering as well, so I’ll put it in bold here and now: If I’m not enjoying a book, I will stop reading it after 100 pages, or one-third of the book’s overall length, whichever is the shorter. Obviously, we all define ‘not enjoying a book’ in differing ways, but I think there are common ways in which the lack of enjoyment manifests: not remembering the character’s names, not remembering story details, not caring what’s happened or what might happen to the characters, staring into space instead of reading, having to read pages over and over again, looking at the page numbers and figuring out how much further you’ve got to go… that sort of thing.
I know a lot of people feel that once they’ve started a book, they have to finish it, and some are even thoughtful enough to say that the author probably worked hard on it, so they feel obliged to do do. I don’t feel this way – I think there’s an implied agreement that the author will try to hold your interest, and if they fail to do that, you can leave – and anyway, there are so many good books in the world that I’ll probably never get round to reading that I really can’t afford to spend time on ones I consider to be … let’s say ‘not good’.
Interestingly, the male authors tended to be the ones who interested me least, and after feeling things were improving a bit with The Bell Jar, I found that next on my list was To Kill A Mockingbird. And what a relief it was to read: likeable characters, a moral centre to it, a mystery element, courtroom drama, issues of race and prejudice, and an ending which came as a bit of a surprise, despite it being referred to early on (if you’ve read it, you’ll know what – or rather who – I’m referring to). A brilliant book. That’s how you do it.
For me, working my way through the list of ‘great books’ was a bit of a chore, and because of that, a revelation. I remember being told at college* that the ‘canon’ of good books was heavily influenced by F.R.Leavis (who we all know best from his appearance in the Bridget Jones film), and whether or not this is strictly accurate, I certainly learned that it doesn’t always do to take other people’s words for it about books.
Bearing in mind that I haven’t posted in a while, only to return with what appears to be textual diarrhoea (perhaps appropriately, given the opening paragraphs), I’d like to try and find some message or conclusion to all this, maybe even a lesson or two, so here we go – what I learned:
– If you’re unsure about your stomach’s resilience, don’t have salad in Morocco
– Read books because you want to, not because someone else insists you must (unless you’re a student)
– Some classic books may be respected because of the step they made at the time, not how they read now
– The library is your friend (as is Project Gutenberg if you’re techno-hip and modern), especially for relation to books you may only read once (if that)
– To Kill A Mockingbird is a fine book, and if you haven’t read it, I heartily recommend it.
I hope this has been helpful.
*I was, on the other hand, told this by someone who believed that books were the one and only valid art form (forget about painting, photography, film, or music), so I should perhaps have taken the remark with a kilo or two of sodium chloride.
And what, you may wonder, have I decided is the best way to re-commence regular blogging activities? Why, tis nothing less than the perennial subjects of love and hate… well, kind of.
Love and hate, we’re often told, are two sides of the same coin. Or there’s a thin line between them. And so on. Basically, we’re often fed the idea that the two of them are very close together – it’s simple enough to see why, they’re both extremes of feeling or opinion, and particularly in the field of emotion, disappointment and annoyance with someone we’ve formed an attachment for can easily cause us to become equally vehement in our negativity towards them; in films and TV shows, it’s often quite common for characters who spend a long time being antagonistic towards each others to end up smooching, though I have to say that (relaxed licensing hours notwithstanding) I haven’t seen that happen quite so frequently in real life.
If we’re going to be honest about it – and I think we ought to, as life is often more complicated than simplistic presentations of emotional duality in programmes such as the Jeremy Kyle Show would have us pretend – there’s actually a long distance to travel between love and hate, if we’re using the words in their strictest sense. I love reading, and it would take quite a lot of negative reading experiences (that is to say, bad books or whatever) before that affection for the activity turned into hate. I’m sure you can think of things which you enjoy immensely – would it really take the equivalent of a coinflip, or a hop over some imaginary line, to make you hate them with equal intensity? I doubt it.
In reality, the line between love and hate, when viewed in three dimensions, manifests as a vast plane, with slight disaffection and indifference and irritation with at various stages between the two extremes. And if love and hate are sides of a coin, we should be honest enough to admit that it’s actually more of a cylinder than a coin, with enough stages and distance from one side to the other as to make the particle acceleration corridors at CERN look like a cupboard for the electricity meter.
I increasingly feel that there’s a problem with people presenting arguments or opinions in a way that suggests you either love something or you hate it; you’re either a fan or a hater. And whilst we’ve often seen this used to simplify political debates – in 2002, a popular simplification was to suggest that any doubts about military action in Iraq equated with approval for the regime of Saddam Hussein – it also seems to be used increasingly in relation to more everyday issues.
Let’s take an issue which, in and of itself, doesn’t really matter, but which is often portrayed as some kind of ideological battle; the question of whether Apple products are better than PCs. To read a lot of review columns, or to hear people talk, you’d think that one was vastly superior to the other, and that using the opposition’s products is the action of a seriously ill-informed person, whose brand allegiance (in whichever direction) is akin to that of a brainwashed dupe. The reality, of course, is a lot more nuanced – let’s be honest, both have their merits (Apple’s stuff is visually appealing, reportedly more stable [the iPhone 4 signal problems and iOS’s tendency to eat battery life could be argued to have undermined this in recent times, though], and generally held to be technically superior; PCs are cheaper, and used in more workplaces and so more familiar) and their flaws. But the problem is, nowadays, you’d think that people either have an Apple or Microsoft logo tattooed on their heart, and this means that the discussions tend to be polarised – and this simplification means that facts get overlooked – such as the fact that Microsoft helped Apple financially in the 1990s by giving them $150m to bundle Internet Explorer with new Macs as the default browser; so, that big hatred and fighting between them you read about in the press? Probably more like business rivalry, but of course that’s not so interesting, and it’s more fun to portray their customers as engaged in some teeth-baring hatred.
The major problem I have with this situation is the way it reduces everything to a non-discussion, and removes any possibility of people conceding that their so-called opponent has a point (watch the way politicians will invariably try to ignore facts or events in debates, even if empirically and provably true, which don’t make their argument look entirely true, as opposed to the best-guess opinion it really is). It means you can’t point at flaws in anything without being labelled a ‘hater’ or ‘anti’, even if you’re only trying to say that something has weaknesses in certain areas (cases in point: Lady Gaga is really not as stunningly original as many people insist, and Steig Larsson writes a lot of exposition).
As I’ve mentioned with tiresome regularity on the blog, my favourite TV programme of all time is Twin Peaks (it is my equivalent of Mark Kermode’s love for The Exorcist), but I’ll cheerfully admit that it’s got flaws (the second season loses its way, certain storylines are just risible, and it’s painfully clear at certain points that they’re just making it up as they go along). As long as the catalogue of weaknesses in something doesn’t overwhelm the things we like in it, then there doesn’t seem to be any problem in liking it, but there’s equally no problem in admitting it’s not perfect – very few things are unimprovable (despite what the most vocal supporters might say).
Am I asking too much? Is it really now the case that you’re either a rabid fan of something or a hater? I’d like to think not, and I’d also like to think that it’d be possible to see discussion of topics (and by ‘see’ I mean ‘encounter’, though if televised debates – on whatever topic – would like to actually show people admitting the strengths in their opponents’ arguments and the weaknesses in their own, I’d welcome that) which actually reflect that there are many waystations between the positions of support or loathing for something, whether it be a political stance or a work of art or a brand of cola or whatever. Much of the time, opinions on things fall into the median, grey band of ‘meh’, and it feels to me that pretending that you have to pick a position at one end of the spectrum and fight it doggedly with closed ears and mind is oversimplifying, and doesn’t actually enable a proper discussion to take place.
Although – ahem – I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that I’m not so convinced of this that I don’t welcome discussion of it. That would be hypocrisy, and of course the Post Comment button exists for your input (and not just about Apple, Gaga or Larsson, ideally)…
*That would be the number “They Know”, by Shawty Lo Featuring Ludacris, I believe. Not really a fan, but it seemed appropriate to refer to it, by way of illustrating that merit may lurk where we don’t expect it.
… and nor is this blog, I assure you.
So, apologies to regular readers for the hiatus in updates – consider this, if you will, my summer holiday – and there will be a return to regular blogging soon.
After all, if I didn’t post my idiotic and fleeting notions here, they’d just be lost to time and memory, and that simply would not do.
Thanks to those of you who’ve been so sweet as to send me a message asking if I’m okay – I assure you I most definitely am – it’s just proving difficult to find time to blog in recent weeks. But that may change soon, and who knows what nonsensical thought-posting, its hour come round at last, slouches out of bedlam to be typed?
The instructions from a box of Optrex, but I can’t help thinking it looks more like a deliberately mischievous series of diagrams telling a new drinker what to do with vodka shots…
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