Longform
A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson (Books 2023, 6) 📚
Atkinson’s Life After Life was the wonderful story of Ursula Todd, who kept repeating her life, dying in different ways each time. One interpretation or explanation for this strange experience is that she was trying to create (or find, or reach) a version of her life in which her beloved brother Teddy survives the Second World War and lives to grow old.
A God in Ruins is the story of that timeline.
Or maybe a couple of timelines. While this is in most ways a more straightforward tale than its predecessor, we do see two or three possible different endings for Teddy. It’s also about his descendants: his daughter the infuriating Viola, and her two children. It’s kind of a redemption tale for some characters.
I enjoyed the bits about Teddy’s wartime expreiences as a bomber pilot most. Overall it’s not as good as Life After Life, but not bad.
Interzone 294 Edited by Gareth Jelley (Books 2023, 5) 📚
I posted a photo of this when it arrived, to show its new paperback-book format. It’s an issue of Interzone: it’s fine, but nothing in it was particularly outstanding. Several decent stories, an interview with Christopher Priest, the usual book and film reviews and ‘Ansible Link’, the cut-down version of Dave Langford’s Ansible newsletter(the mailing list of which, I realise as I type, I seem to have fallen off; I haven’t seen it in a few months).
Interzone is worth getting to keep up to date with the scene, if nothing else.
That all sounds bad. People worked hard on these stories. I think I just don’t really get on very well with short stories, something I’ve mentioned here before.
Sister Act, 1992 - ★★★
A daft but fun enough romp, in which Whoopi Goldberg is a nightclub singer who has to hide out from the Mob after witnessing a murder. Obviously the safest place to hide her is in a convent where Maggie Smith is the Mother Superior.
Obviously the convent has a terrible choir, so she can whip them into shape. With completely predictable results. But as I say, it's fun. Spawned not one but two sequels, I see.
On the Basis of Sex, 2018 - ★★★
That case, though, is interesting. It was a sex-discrimination one1 where the discriminated-against party was a man. He was a carer for his elderly mother, and the fact that he had never been married meant he wasn’t entitled to a tax credit, where a woman would have been.
Ginsburg was able to convince the judges to declare the law unconstitutional, as it discriminated arbitrarily, on the titular basis. And with the ACLU, she was then able to tackle the many laws that discriminated similarly against women. Clever.
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Or gender-discrimination, as they renamed it, because ‘sex is all over the brief’, and it would distract the judges — male, of course; at least, according to the film. And I wonder if we can draw a line of causality from that decision to the position of gender in the culture today. ↩︎
The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald, Translated by Michael Hulse (Books 2023, 4) 📚
The Rings of Saturn is a very unusual book. My copy has this classification on the back: ‘Fiction/Memoir/Travel’.
Well make up your mind, I might say!
And yet, it is all those things, and the combination makes a compelling, readable whole. Sebald (or the narrator) goes on walks around Norfolk and Suffolk. Along the way his thoughts carry him on paths that both parallel his physical ones and diverge far from them in both time and space. He muses on history, architecture, biography, geology, ecology, and much more.
This Guardian ‘Where to Start With…’ article saves it for last, as ’the one you’ll want your friends to read’. Which is fair enough.
I still don’t understand why he gave it that title, though.
Suzanne on the Stage
To Cambridge, on Thursday just past, and to the Corn Exchange, to see Suzanne Vega. My one-word review: spellbinding.
I had never been to the Corn Exchange before (to be honest I’ve rarely been to a gig — especially an indoor gig — outside London these last thirty-six or so years). But it’s one of those places that feels slightly legendary to me, because I’d see it listed among the tour dates in Sounds or NME back in my youthhood.
Turns out it’s a lovely, clean, modern venue, with Old Speckled Hen on tap. We were seated in the balcony (on the balcony?), which was fine.
And as to Ms Vega: I’m not steeped in her work, so the fact that she essentially played a ‘Greatest Hits’ set was ideal for me. She even explicitly said, ‘I’m gonna play some of the well-known ones early, so people don’t worry that they won’t get them.’
This after she’d opened with ‘Marlene on the Wall’, followed by ‘Small Blue Thing’.
She had one accompanying musician, a guitarist called Gerry Leonard, who has worked with Bowie, among others. He was great, making heavy use of those sampling/looping pedals, making him sometimes sound like three or four players at once.
So, like I say, the whole thing was spellbinding.
Penny-Farthings and Paranoia
Watty was wearing a badge, one of the big, old kind. Probably two inches across, round. They used to advertise them in the back of Sounds, NME, Record Mirror (and I think there was a fourth member of the British weekly music press, but I can’t recall it). They always included the size, in old-fashioned imperial units: one-inch, two-inch. Probably inch-and-a-half.
In the early days we wore the big ones. My first one was almost certainly a Beatles one, but I don’t remember what design it had. I do recall a glittery Thin Lizzy one, when I went through my period of them being one of my faves. Wings, maybe? Probably.
Anyway, with punk, the badge size that was considered cool, or even acceptable, reduced. Anything bigger than an inch across would lead to mockery, for sure. Although I think Brendan’s Stranglers badge, saying ‘Something Better Change’ (‘Because I like the song and I like what it says’) was of the two-inch persuasion, but that was in the early days.
Watty’s one, the one that I’m talking about: that was probably even earlier. It was white, with the outline of what I had to get quite close to realise was a penny farthing bicycle. And a number: 6.
‘What’s that about, then?’
‘It’s The Prisoner! Do you not know about it?’ Watty wasn’t too bad in this way, but the default reaction to someone being ignorant of something you liked was mockery, back then, when we were 13, 14. To be honest, probably for a decade or more after that, too. Instead of the healthier attempt to infect the ignorant one with our own enthusiasm. Or at least inform them about it.
I learned, though, that it was a weird programme that was on late at night, and anyway it was over now, so even if it hadn’t been on at a time that I wouldn’t have been allowed to stay up on a school night, it was finished, so there was no chance I’d ever get to see it.
Pity.
Of course, The Prisoner was originally broadcast in 1967-8, so if Watty was watching it ten years later, it does show that repeats were a thing. If only there were a way we could have our own copies of TV programmes. But what a fantastic, farcical idea!
I know it was the early days, because the name ‘The Prisoner’ did not immediately make me think of The Clash. The B-side of ‘(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais’ shares a title with Patrick McGoohan’s paranoid cold-war ex-spy drama. I don’t think it has anything else in common with it, but you can’t be sure.
I finally saw some episodes in the early nineties. I bought some on VHS, along with my friend Johnny, who also hadn’t seen it. But that didn’t prove very practical, as we live in different cities. And VHS was expensive. Two episodes per tape for, what fifteen quid? So that petered out.
Much later I got the DVD box set. And it’s been one of the things we’ve been watching over the last few months. Er, years, maybe. It might have started in lockdown.
Tonight we finally watched the last two episodes. Which were much better than I had been led to believe.
It’s kind of amazing, saturated as it is with sixties fears about mind control, brainwashing, hypnotism. Is anything real after the unnamed main character gets gassed in the opening of the first episode (repeated in the opening credits of almost every episode)? Maybe the whole thing is a hallucination induced by the gas, you know?
There are certainly plenty of actual induced hallucinations or dreamlike states in the series. Which is why you can’t trust the increasingly psychedelic ending.
The whole thing is a mindfuck. I loved it.
Gosford Park, 2001 - ★★★½
Another old one that I’d never seen before.
Considering it’s by the same guy who wrote Downton Abbey, it’s much more negative about the landed classes than that is.
Comfort and Joy, 1984 - ★★★ (contains spoilers)
This review may contain spoilers.
Kind of daft film that somehow I’d never seen.
Set at Christmas, as I should have realised from the title, But not a Christmas film. Great opening scene with the shoplifting, And then the bizarre next scene, where she’s leaving him, but hasn’t got round to telling him yet.
Then the actual plot gets going and runs on down to quite a flat ending. Makes me wonder if all the ice-cream stufff was his delusion caused by grief at his beloved leaving.
Our Man Flint, 1966 - ★★½
I remember seeing this as a kid and absolutely loving it. We talked about it at school, probably played at being Flint.
It’s a Bond spoof. James Coburn as Flint is a super agent who is brought out of retirement to save the world from some mad scientists who are controlling the weather.
I only remembered two things about it. His ability to stop his heart for maximum rest, and the device in his watch that got him started again; and his lighter, with ‘82 functions… 83 if you want to light a cigar.’
It’s daft nonsense, but fun in places. There’s even a lesser agent called 0008 (Triple Oh Eight) who tells him ‘It’s bigger than SPECTRE.)
Watched on Saturday February 4, 2023.
Tár, 2022 - ★★★★
Tár is a much-discussed, disputed, disagreed-upon tour de force. Not since Moonlight have I read so much about a film after seeing it.
Lydia Tár is a conductor who is rehearsing with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra for what should be the pinnacle of her career, a live recording of Mahler's Symphony No 5. But she has a past, and it's coming to get her.
Perhaps my favourite interpretation is the too-long-titled 'Tár Is the Most-Talked-About Movie of the Year. So Why Is Everyone Talking About It All Wrong?', from Slate. It posits that the last third or so is, essentially, fantasy, hallucination, or similar.
There's a lot to get out of this — not least encouraging me to listen to Mahler's Fifth — and I'm looking forward to watching it again.
The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Sydney Padua (Books 2023, 3) 📚
Fantastic graphic novel about the inventor of the Difference and Analytical Engines and the first programmer.
Together they fight crime.
Well, not quite. But they do meet Wellington, Brunel, Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), Mary Ann Evans (George Elliot), and other famous Victorians, and have adventures.
A fabulous romp.
Bomber Jackson Does Some by Bob Boyton (Books 2023, 2) 📚
First, cards on the table, Bob is a friend of mine. Bomber Jackson Does Some is his first novel, self-published in 2012. He gave us a copy back then, and it’s taken me till now to read it.
Just because of the size of my to-read piles, not any quality concerns.
Bomber is an ex-boxer and an alcoholic. At the start of the novel he has just got out of prison. As you might imagine from such a setup, things largely go downhill from there. His thoughts include a fair amount of slang, some of which I didn’t understand, but the meaning was usually clear from context. For example, he refers to two homeless men as ‘real old-fashioned paraffins’. Paraffin lamp = tramp, I assume.
It’s written in first person, present tense, which I think is quite a hard voice to sustain. Bob does a good job of getting us inside Bomber’s head, and the story flows along at fine old rate.
All in all, top stuff. Recommended if you can get hold of a copy.
The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years, 2016 - ★★★★½
Watched on Tuesday January 17, 2023.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, 2022 - ★★★
The usual Marvel daftness. I enjoyed it, but really, there's just so much of this stuff now that it's become ridiculous.
And I kind of hate what they've done to Wanda between this and WandaVision, which this kind of follows straight on from.
Summer of Soul (...or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), 2021 - ★★★★
Excellent documentary about the Harlem Cultural Festival, an outdoor music festival in 1969. The same year as Woodstock, but much less well-known. The footage was shot at the time, but lay in a basement for fifty years, because the then-filmmakers couldn't get it broadcast.
We get Nina Simone, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Sly & the Family Stone, Mahalia Jackson, Stevie Wonder…
If I have a complaint it's that I'd like there to be more of the music and less of the interviews. Or not less of them: the interviews are good. I especially liked the ones that started with some of the surviving performers watching their younger selves. But for most of the acts we just get one song, and an interview gets superimposed over part of it.
Well worth a watch, though.
Together We Will Go by J Michael Straczynski (Books 2023, 1) 📚
Content warning: suicide
The first book of the year. JMS of Babylon 5 fame tells the story of a group of people who, each for their own varied reason, want to end their life.
One of their number arranges a final bus trip, across the USA, with the plan being to drive off a cliff in California. There are legal implications, so the law gets involved.
It’s desperately sad, yet happy and life-affirming at the same time. It’s told through first-person accounts of each of the characters, who have been asked to journal their experience. They’re very well-developed and you grow attached to them.
So you don’t want them to die. But you do want them to make it.
A Look Back at my 2022
The Year in Blogging
Only 98 posts in 2022, broken down as follows.
| Month | Posts |
|---|---|
| Jan | 11 |
| Feb | 11 |
| Mar | 7 |
| Apr | 5 |
| May | 2 |
| Jun | 5 |
| Jul | 4 |
| Aug | 6 |
| Sep | 11 |
| Oct | 7 |
| Nov | 11 |
| Dec | 18 |
I’m shocked that I posted less than 100 times, but there you go. I’ve been busy with other things.
Other Things
Writing a Novel
What time I had for writing outside of work, I tried to spend mainly on completing my novel. You’ll recall that I did a Creative Writing MA in 2020–21. I graduated in May 2022. My dissertation was essentially the first 15,000 words of a novel (along with a preface on how it had all come together). I promised myself that I’d finish it by the end of the year. I haven’t quite achieved that goal, but I expect to in the next couple of weeks.
New Job
But to that ‘outside of work’, above: I started a new job in February. I never quite got round to writing about it here, except on my /now page, which is an infrequently-maintained page that’s meant to say what I’m up to at any time. I was and am glad to have it, of course, but it’s amazing how much working 9–5:30 again takes away from your ability to do other things.
The job itself? I was employed as a Java Developer — that’s literally in my job title — and I have written precisely zero lines of Java.
Instead, I found myself plunged into the exciting new world of infrastructure as code, or IaC, and the Terraform language. I might write more about that at some point, but in short, it seems I work in DevOps now, and I’m enjoying it.
Digression: On Writing at Work
I’ve written over 70,000 words of a novel over the past year-and-a-half or so. But since February I’ve written something like 100,000 words at work. This comes from keeping copious notes on what I’ve being doing and what I’ve learned, and so on. I thank Obsidian for making it easy to do so, and for working in a way that matches how I want to work. But I wonder: why didn’t I keep notes like this before? I always wrote things down, of course, but not this systematically, this comprehensively.
It’s a mystery.
Jury Duty
In May I spent three weeks on a Jury at Wood Green Crown Court. That was an interesting experience. I might write more about it one day.
Etc
And all the other things that make up life. Hey, I even read 33 books last year!
RRR, 2022 - ★★★½
A mad, wild ride, by turns gruesome and hilarious. It's essentially a superhero bromance set in India during the Raj.
A lot of fun, but maybe just a tad too long at over three hours? Good way to see out the old year and see in the new, though.