For some indefinable reason, I have the feeling that tomorrow could be a somehow dangerous or otherwise troubling day.
No real reason, just one of those feelings, y’know?
Category: Pictures Page 20 of 46
I don’t know if you’ve seen the film iThree Amigos! or not. It’s not particularly good – it has its moments, but overall it’s a bit obvious and feels somehow self-indulgent. Still, there are far worse things you could see on TV.
My own feelings about iThree Amigos!, though, are rather coloured by the first time I saw it. It was round at a friend’s house, where we watched it on video, and as the film ended and we all agreed we thought it was only so-so, one of us pressed STOP, bringing up the default TV channel, which turned out to be a BBC channel.
Onscreen, Kate Adie was speaking over live footage of people being shot in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. It was 4 June 1989, twenty years ago to this day, and under orders from the government, the army were shooting protesting students. Any lingering traces of feeling lighthearted or flippant after watching the video dropped away pretty sharply.
The exact number of people killed that night is unknown; some reports have it in the thousands, whereas others suggest that hundreds died. Whatever, it’s a matter of historical record that a large number of students died for protesting that night, as a result of an order from their government. Officially speaking, on the other hand… well, it’s pretty much as if the events didn’t occur.
Which is, to my mind, an intellectual insult to physical injury (and far worse); attempting to erase these events from history, as if the past were an Etch-A-Sketch is just plain daft. And given the evidence that it occurred, pretending it didn’t is akin to a government pressing its hands to its ears and singing ner-ner-ner can’t hear you. Though that’s pretty much the overall attitude to human rights from the ruling party in China, it seems (ask the Tibetan people).
I’ve written before about my dislike for the habit of ‘rewriting events’, and I still find it frustrating to this day (mainly because it means a choice of some sort to ignore things which happened in favour of things which didn’t happen), but when it manifests on a national scale, it’s even more alarming.
Granted, the UK isn’t immune to this either – from the way people carry on, you’d think that the nation did nothing but venerate the Princess of Wales constantly before her death, and that nobody at all was fooled at the time by the lies about weapons in Iraq – but it doesn’t tend to end up with tanks rolling into the middle of a protest zone and hundreds of teenagers dying of bullet wounds, only to have their blood and their memory wiped away as if it had never been.
This post, along with a lot of other online information, may not be available to Chinese readers, for which I apologise, though in a way I feel it backs up the point made.
There’s a fairly interesting article-cum-review on the New Yorker magazine’s website this week, about the history and nature of creative writing courses in US academic institutions.
The article’s essentially a review of a book on the subject, but it’s opened and closed by some interesting history of the growth of such courses, and of course a fair amount of discussion of the time-honoured question in relation to creative writing, and indeed one might say writing in almost all its forms: can it be taught?
My personal feelings in relation to this are mixed, and you’ll be unsurprised to learn that this is very much a result of my personal history; my grandfather was a very good storyteller, and my parents encouraged me to read from an early age, and so it was that at about the age of 13 or so I found my brain bent out of shape by reading the work of Alan Moore, Harlan Ellison and Dennis Potter, and the growing realisation that you could do pretty much anything with words.
Just by arranging words in a certain order on the page, or saying them aloud, you could elicit reactions, hold people’s attention and convey information and more, and this still appeals to me to this very day. It’s pretty common for people to say that school wasn’t very supportive of what later becomes their passion, but I have to say that my secondary school, whilst sorely lacking in many regards, was never actively un-supportive of me wanting to do creative writing; there were two English teachers who helped me to do the creative writing option which was available to do as an adjunct to the English Literature A-Level, though with the 20-20 vision of hindsight it’s clear to me that I should have strayed out of my comfort zone a bit and taken English Language as a subject instead of Literature, even if that meant doing the class at the ‘rival’ school down the road.
So I started to write things, mainly for my own amusement at first, and then I started submitting scripts to comics (a bit of the reason for that is given in this post), and I guess that was when I started trying to think about writing in a slightly more technical way, as I guess might be taught in classes and courses.
Much of my approach to writing remains kind of instinctive and gut-level, stemming from basic ‘what if..?’ ideas, but the actual practice of it is a bit more technical now, with conscious decisions about character development, actions being consistent with characters’ personalities, and stuff like that. But as these are usually the fancy icing on the instinctive cake, I suppose I have some kind of uncertainty about whether creative writing courses will focus on the creation or delivery of story, which I tend to see as two different (and at times potentially opposing) things.
That said, I think it’s entirely possible to sharpen the saw, as it were, and there are many very good books written by popular and successful writers about the business of writing (as well as books written by people who’ve arguably been less successful as writers, but some of them are very astute on the technicalities of what works and the like, so they shouldn’t necessarily be dismissed too speedily). I’ve read a few of the good ones, and a couple of the bad ones, and in a strange way the latter are still kind of useful in an way, as they make you feel a bit more certain about your approach to things, even if it’s only because as you read and disagree with the text you’re forced to articulate to yourself just why you don’t agree.
As the New Yorker article alludes to, a ‘workshop’ environment is often used in Creative Writing Courses, and I have to say it’s not something I’d feel necessarily comfortable with; people can take courses for a lot of reasons, and have very different beliefs about what a specific assignment is, or should be, trying to achieve, and so you can end up with a document not written by, but instead critiqued by, committee, which is … well, not necessarily an entirely productive position to be in. And it’s a fairly stark contrast to the TV Writers’ Room environment, which many writers (myself included) would like to see increase in the UK, even if it’s very much a production- and economically-derived situation, for the simple reason that it’s a room full of people who are meant to be pulling in the same direction (oh, and the more important reason that it would make writing a less solitary activity).
I have my doubts about the environment, then, and as I don’t know exactly what’s taught on these courses, I’m rather vague on the content too; the article suggests there’s quite a lot of introspective work, perhaps even adherence to the maxim ‘write what you know’, and having written enough ropey self-absorbed poetry as a teenager (by which I mean a handful of poems, but believe me, that was more than enough), I’m not sure if that’s the way to go. But that’s probably my ignorance of what’s involved manifesting as suspicion.
So, I’d be interested to hear of your experiences of creative writing courses, and assessment of whether, ultimately, they were a good thing for you, and were well-run by people who knew a lot about the nature of storytelling and the like. I’m unsure whether I think they’re best for nurturing a nugget of innate writing tendency or not, really (not that it has any material impact on things; I’m not currently proposing to quit work and take a writing course), so input from people with proper experience and knowledge here would be welcome.
In relation to the sprawling narrative above, I was thinking about my one and only experience of attending a writing group. It happened when I was on the dole for a while, and a friend suggested I come along to the writers’ group arranged by her partner; I did so, and the way it panned out amused me at the time, though I suspect it’d now turn out quite differently.
After a number of people had read out their pieces, many of which were about emotional traumas or relationship upsets or staring out a train window and wondering what life was all about, I read out my offering, a short tale of a man coming across a book which detailed the events of his life, including events yet to come. It was a slightly fantasy-based piece (and might even qualify as ‘magic realism’, though that’s not a term I have much certainty about), and as such it was greeted initially with a slightly awkward silence, and then with some guarded and uncertain but polite comments, leaving me feeling that I’d rather misjudged my offering (and this muted response may well be why I didn’t go to any of the group’s meetings ever again).
Imagining this taking place in the very-different present, though, and given the way that fantasy and science fiction are seen as mainstream if not quite cutting-edge in terms of fiction, I suspect that the person who’d be stared at blankly in such a group today would be the one who read out the emo-style poem about their depth and sensitivity, and the way that the world just doesn’t understand them.
Mind you, being treated as the pariah would be good fuel for that day’s journal entry. Or perhaps even another poem.
… although looking at the page count of Kanye West’s humbly-titled forthcoming book, it seems he’s only got half a book in him; he involved a co-writer.
For a book which totals 52 pages.
Is that even a book? More like a novella, surely. Then again, releasing it in a spiral-bound format will make it look a bit more substantial an item.
Coming in August, order now. It’s clearly the perfect Christmas gift!
For people you don’t really like that much, I mean.
Offer of the week from the always-interesting DVD firm Network is One Summer, a series from 1983 which was written by Willy Russell and stars – as you can see from the picture – a young David Morrissey.
I’ll be honest : I don’t know anything at all about the series (though it’s clearly got a pretty good pedigree) – what really caught my attention was the quote from the Daily Mirror which is reproduced at the bottom of the DVD cover:
“David Morrissey and Spencer Leigh are most beguiling.”
I’m more than willing to believe this is the case, but it’s almost impossible to imagine this sort of turn of phrase appearing in a TV review in the Mirror nowadays, isn’t it ?
Assuming that quote’s contemporaneous with the series’s original broadcast date, I find myself somewhat amazed that in 26 years, the Mirror‘s writing style has changed from sounding like a character from one of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories to… well, sounding how I suspect characters will sound in Guy Ritchie’s forthcoming Sherlock Holmes film*.
*This comment is, I realise, the very embodiment of prejudice; however, the idea of a re-imagining of the Holmes canon really does smack of a paucity of originality. Intead of ‘re-imagining’ or otherwise riding the creative coat-tails, how about ‘creating’, or even plain old ‘imagining’ new characters?
I was at a wedding last weekend. Well, strictly speaking it was a ‘civil partnership celebration’, but unlike the state of California, I don’t count same-sex couples as second-class citizens, so as far as I’m concerned it was a wedding.
Anyway, I’d made a bit of an effort for the occasion, and was wearing a new jacket-n-trouser-combo, so I was quite pleased when another guest told me I looked like someone famous.
“Really?” I asked, genuinely surprised.
“Yes,” he said. “That chap from TV… Patrick something… Patrick Macnee.”
I was amused by this, and images of the ever-debonair Macnee as John Steed in The Avengers ran through my mind.
“No, hang on, not Macnee,” he said. “Patrick… um…”
As he tried to recall the right name, I became pretty sure it was more likely to turn out to be Patrick Moore from The Sky At Night than Patrick Dempsey from Grey’s Anatomy.
“That’s it!” he said. “Patrick McGoohan!”
As an admirer of The Prisoner, this comparison also amused me (as did the fact that both chaps did some sterling work during what one might see as a classic age of British TV).
“I don’t really see it,” Mrs Soanes said to me a bit later that evening, and I’m afraid I have to agree with her. Not only is it slightly odd that someone might mistake Mr Macnee for Mr McGoohan, it’s also very hard to see many points of similarity between me and either of these two chaps.
Mind you, given that McGoohan was very sharply dressed much of the time in Danger Man and The Prisoner and was reportedly one of the first actors approached to play James Bond onscreen, and that Macnee in The Avengers is seen as sartorially very dapper to this very day, I am more than happy to assume the chap’s comments were related to the fact that I was wearing smart clothing.
The moral of this post? Like so many of us, I am more than happy when (to paraphrase A Midsummer Night’s Dream) compliments aimed at me, and truth, keep little company.
In recent years, rather like M’chum Jed, , my metabolism has slowed down, and so I’m now the not-entirely-proud owner of a bit of a belly.
Now, it’s nothing too excessive (though it usually slightly surprises people who’ve known me for years, as historically I’ve tended to the scrawny end of things), and I’m all too aware that if I want to shed it – I mean really want to shed it – then all I have to do is to eat less and move more (running’s usually the best form of exercise for me, but we all have our preferences). It’s pretty straightforward for me, really, though I’m aware there are many people who don’t necessarily lose weight they want to lose with such a linear element of causation.
And so, clustering the shelves of your local pharmacy, there are a number of products which are advertised as helping you lose weight, and I’m sure that many of them live up to their claims. However, slighty less advertised are some of the side effects, and of course that’s what I want to talk about here.
A couple of products on the market (such as Formaline and Alli) act in an interesting way on the digestive system; they stop fat binding in the usual way within the gut, so that it doesn’t hang around, and instead of loitering in the stomach area, it moves on, as undigested fat, through the colon and out into the sunlight.
All very well and good (if you ignore the messing-with-the-natural-order side of things, that is), but it seems that products of this nature are not without side effects. Or, as the website for Alli prefers to call them, “treatment effects”. What kind of side effects, you may be wondering? Have some examples:
- Gas with oily spotting
- Loose stools
-
More frequent stools that may be hard to control
Is that nice? I don’t think so. Surely the risk of soiling yourself in public is a deal-breaker? Well, if it’s not, here’s Alli‘s suggestion on how to incorporate the new and ever-present risk of plop leakage into your life:
“You may feel an urgent need to go to the bathroom. Until you have a sense of any treatment effects, it’s probably a smart idea to wear dark pants, and bring a change of clothes with you to work.”
Let me just repeat that, with emphasis: if you take Alli, “it’s probably a smart idea to wear dark pants, and bring a change of clothes with you to work.”
Sweet fancy Moses! If it’s a choice between being ‘that slightly tubby chap’ or being ‘that 38-year-old guy who smells like his nappy needs changing’, I know which I’d choose.
Just in case you think I’m making this up, here’s the link to the page where Alli detail the side – er, treatment effects of their product. I like the way they try to hide the more soggy possibilities amongst other, more bearable, effects. The textual equivalent of wearing dark trousers when you’ve shat yourself, as it were.
You have been reading the words of John Soanes, sophisticate and high-falutin’ fop about town. Thank you and good day.
Rooting through some old CD boxes this morning, I found my much-played copy of Electronic’s Getting Away With It, and was driven to wonder the following:
Am I utterly delusional, or is that one of the most simple yet elegant record cover designs of all time?
My claim in the profile to the right about climbing mountains isn’t an idle one (honest), and so I found this book, detailing some of the not-so-ethical behaviour on Mount Everest, was very interesting. And, at times, unsettling.
Michael Kodas tells the story of his own ill-fated attempt to summit Everest from the Tibetan side, and contrasts it with the death of Nils Antezana, a 69-year-old doctor who died whilst descending on the Nepalese side of the mountain. Whilst Kodas’s attempt floundered due to conflicts within the assembled team, Antezana died alone on the mountain after summiting but being left to descend, alone, by his guide.
These two stories are well told and quite unnerving, but there are other snippets as well – one climber was forced to rappel down one of the routes, and it was only by chance that he looked over his shoulder and realised that the (fixed) rope he was descending had, for no apparent reason, been cut off; had he not turned to look, he would have fallen to his death. Other climbers find their tents or equipment have been stolen as they ascend to higher camps on Everest.
There’s some good analysis of why 2006 saw so many deaths on Everest, and the chilling fact that almost anyone can claim to be a ‘guide’ and charge tens of thousands of pounds to lead you up Everest, even if they’ve had limited – or next to no – experience of guiding.
The book sometimes strays from the central narratives a bit, though it only tends to do this when recounting something else of interest or which adds to the background, so I felt this could be forgiven. The writing style is good and straightforward, and thankfully it generally avoids giving lines of dialogue when no witnesses were to hand, or speculating wildly about events. There’s a lot of referencing and quoting from eyewitnesses, and a bibliography and index to back all this up.
So, if you’re interested in Everest, or climbing generally, this is a solid account of an aspect of the mountain which doesn’t tend to get much coverage. I was lucky enough to be given a copy of the hardback (thanks, Mrs Wife!), but the paperback’s out in November, so you could save your recession-hit pennies until then. Either way, I recommend it.
When you’re as old and jaded as I am, you gradually come to accept that there are certain events on TV programmes and in films that just don’t happen.
The example I usually turn to is that of the ‘dance-off’ amongst disagreeing groups of people, which I have never ever ever seen anything even vaguely approximating, actually taking place out there on the streets. Lord knows I’d like it if people were more willing to settle their ideological differences by busting some funky moves on a street corner by a fire hydrant with a boom box, but unfortunately people seem more keen to use knives and guns and bombs than diplomacy or a good old-fashioned groovin’. Sigh.
Anyway, one thing which shows up in films and on TV quite a bit – and which is certainly more easy to replicate in the real world – is that of someone (usually a woman) throwing a glass of wine in the face of someone else (usually a man who’s been behaving like some kind of rotter). Aside from a story I vaguely recall from the 1980s about Anna Ford chucking wine at a TV executive who’d fired her or otherwise acted the cad in a professional sense, I have to say that I have never seen this this in real life, so I wanted to ask : have you ever seen anyone do this?
The first person I asked in this very scientific poll was m’good lady wife, who astutely observed that many people wouldn’t want to waste wine on someone they disliked that much, and would probably just throw a punch instead. I can see the logic of that.
So, can any of you report having seen a fine wine arc through the air to land on someone’s mush? Perhaps a glass of Pino Grigio was flung facewards by a friend of yours, with dry-cleaning-requiring results. If so – or if the answer’s emphatically NO – please let me know by posting a comment. I’m keen to know if this event actually occurs, or if, like ship captains performing marriage ceremonies, it’s naught but a fiction within fiction, as it were.