Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…
The New Statesman has an excellent interview with Sir Terry Pratchett. It is well worth reading. He’s not going gently into that Good Night; but instead with his head held up high and fearlessly facing the final curtain. I wonder if I could do the same.
Here’s Terry Pratchett’s award-winning documentary “Choosing to Die”
Please watch it.
After that last post, I needed something to give me hope. Perhaps the news of the opening of the Book Mountain and Library quarter in Spijkenisse, here in the Netherlands, is something to restore my spirits.
I’m currently reading (very slowly) Steven Pinker’s magisterial The Better Angels of Our Nature. It’s a history of violence in human societies, and his thesis is that violence has actually declined over the centuries. It seems difficult to believe, but Pinker marshals his facts and presents a convincing case.
And on the theme of the distressing fact that violence and humanity are inextricably locked together, here’s Nina Paley’s offering on that theme.
More about the film, Seder Masochism, together with a handy guide to who’s killing who, can be found on Nina’s Blog.
Harry Harrison has died. When I was going through my phase of devouring SF books during my teens and twenties, he was one of my favourite authors. On one level, his books could be read as action tales, but there was usually a serious underpinning. So Deathworld was underpinned by Darwinian selection, Bill, The Galactic Hero by an almost Swiftian satire, and Make Room! Make Room! by the question and consequences of human overpopulation.
But I think my favourite of his novels remains Captive Universe, which opens with a heartstopping sequence (quite literally) in an apparently Aztec setting. It develops into a thought-provoking tale about colonisation and eugenic control. Well worth reading.
In the novel, The Midwich Cuckoos, by John Wyndham, one of the characters, Gordon Zellaby, says:
“I wonder if a sillier and more ignorant catachresis than “Mother Nature” was ever perpetuated? It is because nature is ruthless, hideous, and cruel beyond belief that it was necessary to invent civilization. One thinks of wild animals as savage but the fiercest of them begins to look almost domesticated when one considers the viciousness required of a survivor in the sea; as for the insects, their lives are sustained only by intricate processes of fantastic horror.”
Using that as a springboard, Kij Johnson has penned a page of unsettling ruminations: Mantis Wives.
Eerie, disturbing, and practically factual descriptions of the sex lives of the Mantis.
“Cloud Atlas” is the name of a remarkable book by David Mitchell. A Russian Doll of a book, it contains stories within stories that link and arc to form a narrative that spans centuries and civilizations.
And now, it appears that a film of the book has been made. Even the trailer is almost six minutes long – it will be interesting to see how the film stacks up to the book. There are, at least, some good actors involved, so one can but hope.
Update 4 September 2012: there’s a very good article on the making of the film in the current New Yorker. Definitely worth reading. I still fear for how the film will turn out. The Wachowskis are known for their bravura visual style over depth of characterisation (e.g. The Matrix), while the book is almost the complete opposite. Still, fingers crossed, the film may yet stand on its own feet as a work of art.
I didn’t write about the fact that Ray Bradbury died on the 5th June 2012, simply because I didn’t feel able to say anything of note. Like millions of people, I grew up recognising my feelings and emotions in some of his stories, and being amazed and shaken by the visions of others.
However, Neil Gaiman has the ability to pen something that is a worthy memento of Bradbury. Go and read his short story: The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury.
If you have ever read anything by Bradbury, you will feel the echoes and remember anew.
That’s the title of the latest book by Samuel R. Delany.
Judging by this review, it is a book that, like The Mad Man, simultaneously repels and attracts.
Delany writes like an angel even when he’s describing the depths of hell, and he makes it sound like paradise.
Um, I think I’ll add this to the library and open it when I feel strong enough.
Hurrah! The British Film Institute has just released the complete UK ‘X’-rated version of Ken Russell’s The Devils on DVD. It’s in its original aspect ratio of 2:35:1 and looks absolutely stunning. Derek Jarman’s sets are seen to the best effect, and the cast give all they’ve got to Ken’s extraordinary vision.
It’s forty years since the film was first released, and Russell had problems with both the studio (Warner Brothers) and the censors. For years, the only version that was available was a cut version of questionable technical quality in the wrong aspect ratio.
In retrospect, it’s hardly surprising that Russell had to fight to get his vision realised. Even after forty years, the mixture of religion, politics, sex (both sacred and profane) and violence is a heady brew, with more than a whiff of brimstone about it. As my favourite film critic, Mark Kermode, says, it is:
Russell’s greatest work. A fearsome, breathtaking masterpiece.
Despite the extravagance of Russell’s vision, the core facts of the story are historically true. His screenplay is based on Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun, which documents the events of the time, and includes letters written by the protagonists. Wikipedia sums it up thus:
Urbain Grandier was a priest burned at the stake at Loudun, France on August 18, 1634. He was accused of seducing an entire convent of Ursuline nuns and of being in league with the devil. Grandier was probably too promiscuous and too insolent to his peers. He had antagonised the Mother Superior, Sister Jeanne of the Angels, when he rejected her offer to become the spiritual advisor to the convent. He faced an ecclesiastical tribunal and was acquitted.
It was only after he had publicly spoken against Cardinal Richelieu that a new trial was ordered by the Cardinal. He was tortured, found guilty and executed by being burnt alive but never admitted guilt.
I must get a copy of the book for myself.
I watched the DVD last night and what struck me was how little things change, the same religious and political struggles are still with us, as are those who are prepared to use them for their own ends.
There’s a book review in today’s Guardian. It caught my eye, because the book’s title is The Science Delusion, which sounded rather provocative.
Turning to the review, I saw that it was written by Mary Midgley, and my heart sank. I read the review, and she likes the book. That settled it for me. The book, by author Rupert Sheldrake, is probably tosh, and not worth getting. She also ends her review with a not-unexpected swipe at her bête noire, Richard Dawkins.
I see that Dr. Adam Rutherford has felt moved to add in the comments on the review:
I’ve read this dreadful book, and fail to recognise any of it in this review. It is, I’m sorry to say, drivel. Drivel that stands in opposition to Dawkins’ work to cynically promote Sheldrake’s many times debunked fantasy supernatural gubbins. If there is a philiosophical point therein, I missed it for all the tales of dogs who know when their owners are coming home, experiments abut the Nolan Sisters and Sheldrake’s woo phlogiston which he calls Morphic Resonance.
A couple of years ago, I wrote this piece on Sheldrake, which applies to this current book too. A book for ignoring.
Based on my previous exposure to both Midgley’s and Rutherford’s work, I judge Rutherford’s opinion to be the more sound. The book is almost certainly tosh and I definitely will not be buying it.
There’s a wonderful article in today’s Observer. It’s by Susannah Clapp, and it’s reminiscences about her friend Angela Carter.
Carter was a brilliant novelist who died of lung cancer ten years ago at the young age of 51. As Clapp says:
She was 10 years too old and entirely too female to be mentioned routinely alongside Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan as being a young pillar of British fiction. She was 20 years too young to belong to what she considered the “alternative pantheon” of Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing and Muriel Spark in the 40s.
I see I have twenty-two of her books in my library, a couple in multiple editions. Time to go back and re-read them, I think. Meanwhile, if you’ve never heard of Angela Carter, do go and read the article, and then get one of her books: I suggest either Nights at the Circus or Wise Children.
If you saw last night’s Sherlock episode (The Reichenbach Fall – note the singular, by the way, a nice joke), you’ll know what I’m talking about. If you didn’t, and don’t want spoilers, then stop reading now.
…
I suppose, in a way, with a title echoing the climax of the original Conan Doyle story The Final Problem, which features the Reichenbach Falls, it was obvious what was going to happen; but the question is: how did he do it? There are lots of theories floating around, and while I’m unsure of the precise mechanics, I’m fairly sure of the following:
Some viewers have complained that we shouldn’t have got obvious confirmation that Holmes faked his own death by seeing Holmes alive in the closing seconds, but I thought it was a good plot device:
The writing and the acting of this series has been outstanding. Hats off to all concerned.
What books get up to at night.
I sometimes wonder what happens in my library deep in the night as well.
(hat tip to Matthew Cobb over at Why Evolution is True)
So, Christopher Hitchens is dead. He has left Tumortown and passed beyond the Land of Malady, after leaving us with some last words of advice on dealing with mortal illness.
I’ll miss his voice and his writings. We now have all that we are going to have from him.
I can’t resist adding his widely-quoted words of wisdom:
“The four most over-rated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics.”
Like Christopher Hitchens, I’ve enjoyed them all. Over-rated? Possibly. Enjoyable? Certainly.
RIP, Hitch.
A few years back, I bought The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick. Although it’s ostensibly a children’s book, I was attracted to it because the book is a work of art in its own right. Even when the book is closed and sitting on the bookshelf, Hugo’s eye stares out at you and you feel yourself drawn to reach out and discover what lies within.
The only bit of colour is the book’s cover, everything else is black or white or shades of grey.
Selznick mixes pages of black and white drawings into his text, and, as befits a story that concerns Georges Méliès, the sequences of drawings, on pages edged with black, flow like an unfolding film, with pans, zooms, and cuts. Indeed, the very first page invites the reader to imagine sitting in a darkened room waiting for a film to start:
And now, a film has been made of the book. Because this is a children’s film, the director, somewhat surprisingly, turns out to be Martin Scorsese. But it makes sense when you realise that he has a great knowledge of, and affection for, the history of film. The trailer looks good (although I detest, with a passion, the sound of the trailer narrator’s voice), and the film is garnering good reviews.
It doesn’t open here in The Netherlands until next February, but, when it does, I’ll definitely make one of my rare trips to the cinema to see it.
Here’s a flavour of what it means to be a book-collector
I don’t really fall into the category of being a book-collector, but I do have an inkling of what it means…
A couple of months ago, I went to the book market at Bredevoort. I found a version of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea published in an English translation with annotations by Walter James Miller. It is a large (almost A4-sized) book, profusely annotated in the margins of the text and containing many illustrations sourced from old engravings – some of which come from the original French edition of the book.
Intrigued, I bought it, and have now finished reading it. It’s been a revelation. I knew of the story, of course, along with others by Verne, but I have never actually read any of them. I had always thought that they were books written for children, but it turns out that my view was probably formed by osmosis from the reactions of the English-speaking literary establishment to the English translations.
Miller takes as his starting point the standard English translation produced in the 1870s by one “Mercier Lewis”. This turns out to be Lewis Page Mercier, a theologian. This “grim parson” (Miller’s description) thought nothing of excising 23 percent of Verne’s original text, often where he apparently disagrees with Verne’s views (e.g. on Darwinism). The remaining text is subject to hundreds of errors of translation, and he destroys many of Verne’s character sketches and jokes. What remained, and has formed the basis of the English translations ever since, is a travesty of the original novel.
Miller restored the missing 23 percent with his own translation, and provides annotations to show where Mercier, either unknowingly or deliberately got it wrong. Some of the translation howlers seem unbelievable, as where Mercier translates lentille (French for either the lentil or a lens) and has Verne write that Ned Land (the harpooner) could light a fire by holding a lentil up to the sun…
The restored and annotated translation thus becomes a completely new and powerful story for adults containing Verne’s scientific, social and political predictions. To quote from the dust-jacket:
In an imperialist age, Verne was concerned not only with the treatment of primitive peoples, but with the burgeoning power of what today we call the military-industrial complex; Nemo himself lives out the principles of philosophical anarchism. Verne also foresaw the smouldering of French separatism in Canada, the rebirth of China, and the rise of the American Goliath – all this in addition to his scientific prophecies, ranging from the use of electric “stun guns” to the ecological problems that would be caused by hunting the whale and other sea creatures to extinction.
What adds another layer of resonance to this tale is that the copy of the book I have is stamped with the imprint of the library of the merchant ship Royal Viking Star. So perhaps this book, before coming to rest in my library for the moment, has travelled twenty thousand leagues over the sea…
The latest (and, I assume, the last) book of George R. R. Martin’s epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire has finally been published. It’s A Dance With Dragons, bringing the saga that began with A Game of Thrones to an end (he said, hopefully).
As you will gather, I am not a fan of the series, having lost hope whilst slogging through book two (or was it three?). In that, I seem to be in a minority, but I took heart today from coming across a fellow critic: Hulk!
Some weeks back I mentioned that I should put Jon Ronson’s new book: The Psychopath Test on my list of books to read. I did, and I’ve now read it.
I liked it very much. Ronson’s style of writing is easy to read and often laugh-out-loud funny, although there are parts of the book that also made me gasp in astonishment. Don’t get it expecting to read an academic study on psychopathy (as some people who have reviewed the book on Amazon.com appear to have done, and who are then pissed-off to find it’s not). It’s not that at all. It’s more an exploration of some of the ways in which humans can behave, for better or worse. His jumping-off point is the strange story of a mysterious book: Being and Nothingness by an author Joe K (not Jean-Paul Sartre) copies of which were sent, out of the blue, to a number of neurologists and other academics. Ronson is invited by one of the recipients to get on the trail of who was behind the book, and along the way becomes intrigued by what defines mental illness.
From there he meets Tony, an inmate of Broadmoor (one of Britain’s three high security psychiatric hospitals) who claims that he faked a mental disorder in order to get a lighter sentence, but who is now stuck there, because nobody believes he is sane.
At the end of his book, Ronson returns to the story of both the mysterious book and Tony. Along the way, he meets many people involved in the “madness industry”; those who define the various labels of madness, those who wear the labels and those who use the label-wearers to make a living.
I found chapter 8 – The Madness of David Shayler – the saddest. Partly because it tells of the impact on Rachel North, who survived the Kings Cross bombing of 7/7, only to discover that conspiracy theorists claimed that there were no bombs and that she herself was a government mouthpiece who had been tasked with disseminating disinformation. And partly because it tells of the journey of David Shayler from being a former MI5 security officer to someone who believes that he is the Messiah. Ronson charts the degree of media interest in Shayler and concludes:
David Shayler’s tragedy is that his madness has spiralled into something too outlandish, too far out of the ball park and consequently useless. We don’t want obvious exploitation, we want smoke-and-mirrors exploitation.
At the heart of the book is the Hare PCL-R Checklist, used to identify psychopathic traits. Ronson meets Bob Hare, the inventor of the checklist, on a number of occasions. The checklist becomes a leitmotif in the book, with Ronson musing on particular checklist items whilst describing the behaviour of those he meets, or even whilst describing his own behaviour and thoughts.
It’s a good book.
No, it’s no good, I must stop reading the stuff that Mark Vernon is prone to write (and, I might add, get paid for!). It’s not good for my spleen.
This time he’s using some philosophical fenceplay from Raymond Tallis as an excuse to trot out his (Vernon’s) own earnestly desired wish that we are not just wetware, meat machines; that consciousness simply has to be more than just neurons firing.
While I rather like the work of Tallis as an author and philosopher, it does strike me that he’s got a book to sell (Aping Mankind), so coining terms such as neuromania and Darwinitis may be good for the book sales, rather than having any real basis behind them. I note also that his book has garnered glowing reviews from the likes of Roger Scruton and Mary Midgley – neither of whom I count for much when it comes to the field of science. And on the basis of this article, that goes for Mark Vernon as well.
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