Jerusalem by Alan Moore (Books 2017, 5)

Yes, it’s halfway through the second-last month of the year and I’ve just finished my fifth book. Five in a year. That’s very poor. But this book was a large part of the reason for that.1

At over 1000 pages of very small text — close to a million words, I’ve heard — this is a mammoth work. It’s also really, really good.

As befits such a large work, it is a whole made of many parts. It’s split into three main sections, with each of those having eleven chapters; along with a “Prelude” and an “Afterlude.” The first is a series of short stories or vignettes, most of which are not obviously connected. They are all set in and around an area of Northampton called the Boroughs, at various times in the past and present.

In the second we find out what happened to Mick Warren, the closest thing we have to a protagonist, after he died aged three, before he came back to life again. The third brings it all together, after a fashion. Moore has always had trouble with endings — just consider the mighty Watchmen, whose ending was actually improved by the movie.

Did Alma Warren’s pictures save everything, and stop the destructor? Of course not: it always happened that way and always will. That’s the central thesis of the novel, the idea of eternalism, that time is static, and we only experience change because we happen to be moving along that axis at one second per second. This is of course similar to the viewpoint of Dr Manhattan in the aforementioned Watchmen, so we could suppose it’s a worldview that Moore has had for some time, though in his acknowledgements he suggests that he came to believe it during the years he was writing Jerusalem.

There is a chapter in book three that is written in the style of Joyce in his Finnegan’s wake days. It’s hard work to get through, but well worth it (though with hindsight if you were to skip that chapter I don’t think you’d miss much of the plot). Anyway, it’s a monster work, and well worth the time it takes to read.

  1. To be fair, spending a lot of time reading on the web, plus some reading comics, etc: these also need to be considered. ↩︎

Rock and Death

I appreciate this piece about AC/DC and Malcolm Young’s legacy. I never really cared for them myself. I was on the other side of the punk/metal wars, of course, and screechy vocals always put me off.

I completely understand the spirit of that piece, though, and feel the same way about The Clash, the Velvet Underground, probably others. But there is one telling line in it that says something about the different attitudes of the different sides in those not-really wars. I don’t know, maybe not; but this:

But we thought we were gonna live forever. The music too.

is not how things were for me, for us. We didn’t think we’d live beyond the eighties. The nineties at a pinch As Queen put it, we were the ones who:

grew up tall and proud
Under the shadow of the mushroom cloud.

But so too did the author of the AC/DC piece. He’s a decade older than me, but that still means he experienced the cold war.

Maybe it’s not generation, but location. I lived a few miles from the Faslane naval base, where the Polaris submarines were based (and where the Trident ones are still). We knew we’d be one of the first places to go.

Generations are too abstract, too arbitrary to make sweeping statements about in any case. But I still sometimes find myself surprised to be here, now, in this century.

Missing Dates

I’ve just noticed that this WordPress theme I’m using, Independent Publisher, doesn’t show dates and times of posts. And as a side effect it doesn’t have permalinks for posts without titles (the datestamp should be the permalink in that case).

How can this be? Has it always been like this and I just haven’t noticed? I hate sites that don’t have dates on posts.

One way or another, this will have to change.

To Nano or Not?

NaNoWriMo is just around the corner, and I still haven’t quite decided whether to throw myself into it this year or not. I’ve taken part several times in previous years, but never completed the 50,000 words. And this year I still have the novel that I’ve been working on intermittently for about four years, that I’d like to finish off.

Maybe it would be better, and more in the Nano spirit, to start something new. But I think if I were to do that, I’d never finish this one, and it would sit there forever, haunting me. Maybe taunting me too, who knows.

I should have a better chance of getting the word count up this year, as I have a longer commute, and I usually get a seat at or near the start of the longest part (Dalston Junction to West Croydon, if you’re interested). So it should be entirely possible to get two free blocks of writing time each weekday. But I have found it to be strangely offputting to write in that environment, when there’s a person sitting on either side of me.

Sure, they’re probably not in the least interested in what I’ve got going on, but as Stephen King says in On Writing, you’ve got to write the first draft with the door closed.

Still, I have recently been looking at the novel again, and I think I’ve worked out how to end it. That has always been the problem for me: I don’t do a detailed plot, but I need to know how a story’s going to end if I’m going to have any chance of finishing it. If I just start writing with only an idea, maybe a setting and some characters, I tend to meander around all over the place and never get anywhere. Or at least, not to a sensible end.

I don’t have to know much about the route, but I need to know the destination, in other words. So as I now know the destination — or at least have a much clearer idea of it — I think it’s time to take one last run at this thing.

But this is me declaring that I’m throwing my hat in the Wrimo ring. I’ve signed up, and even given it a working title1 — by raiding that fount of quotes, The Tempest.

  1. Another problem has been and remains that I don’t have a title for it. Why are titles so hard? ↩︎

On Blade Runner 2049

Spoilers ahead, obviously. Although I don’t go into much detail.

We saw it in the Rio in Dalston, because all the Hackney Picturehouse showings were full (or at least just had a couple of separated seats left). Which makes me surprised to read these stories about it not doing very well on opening weekend. And weirdly, from the balcony. I don’t know when I was last in a cinema with a balcony. I mean, the Rio, obviously, though probably not since Harry Potter 8; but I hadn’t been in the balcony before, and I don’t think I even realised that it had one.

But to the film of the moment. I tried to lower my expectations, I really did. But I’d read that Guardian review, which was so unbelievably glowing. I listened to Mitch Benn hoping they wouldn’t fuck it up and believed that they hadn’t.

But…

OK, they haven’t fucked it up. But I’m going to have to break ranks with all the legions of newspaper reviewers who love it to death & back (honestly, I can hardly find a bad, or even a mixed, review), and nearly everyone else.

Because I didn’t enjoy it all that much. I spent a lot of the time (of which there is a lot) saying, “What the fuck is going on here? Why did they do that?” The former is fine, as long as it becomes clear over time, which it generally did. The latter less so: understanding characters’ motivations is fundamental to understanding and enjoying a work of fiction.

But much worse than those: I spent some of the time bored.

The main reason for that is that it’s paced like an 80s movie. Which is to say, much more slowly than we are used to today.

I should have expected that, I suppose. The original Blade Runner moves slowly even by 80s standards. That’s part of its visual and storytelling style. So it’s reasonable that a sequel, even one thirty years later, should follow suit. But they could have picked the pace up a bit.

The reviews all describe it as “thought-provoking” or similar, and it’s true that the questions of what it means to be human or to be artificial are in there. But to my mind there’s not enough of that. Which in a way is linked to another problem: world-building.

As before the world is very visually striking. What we have is the world of Blade Runner with thirty years of technological advancements. Like the film, the pace of advancement has been slow, but I suppose that’s not surprising, given how damaged the world is.

But slowly or quickly, technology advances in parallel with a conversation about that technology. What’s missing here is any in-world debate about the legal and ethical status of replicants. Certainly there’s a nod to the idea that the casual use of “skin-job” is insulting and shouldn’t be used. But it never seemed that insulting anyway — indeed I think it’s only the voiceover version of the original that tells us it is an insult. Deckard likens it to the n-word. (He does so using that word, which, rightly, would not happen today.)

In a more realistic world there would be a debate about replicants. There would be rights groups campaigning against using them as slaves, and even for them to be given full citizenship status. And from others there would be discrimination against them, abuse of them. That could all be going on in the background of this society — and the debate is not what the film is about — but I think a small acknowledgement that the debate existed would at least hint at a richer society.

That all applies to the original too, of course, but now it’s much more common for the replicants to be living among humans on Earth, so the conversation would be that much more active.

And speaking of that commonality of the replicants on Earth, one question you might ask is, are there any humans actually left on Earth? Because only two characters appear to be unambiguously human.

One is K’s boss in the LAPD, Lt Joshi, who could unknowingly be a replicant, though nothing suggests that. The other, Ana Stelline, who creates the memories that are implanted in replicants. She lives in isolation because of sensitivity to the environment, and the implication is that only a human can provide the memories. But since not all of the memories are actually hers, all that needs is gift for imaginative imagery. And, now that we know that replicants are fully-biological beings who can reproduce (whether only with each other or also with humans is unknown), then anything is possible.

The situation appears to be that anyone with the money and without any disqualifying problem has left Earth. “A new life awaits you in the offworld colonies,” after all. I always suspected that the colonies would consist of grinding hardship based on subsistence farming, but I suppose the idea is you have replicant slaves to do the work.

The Earth that we see is incredibly empty. The original’s LA streets were packed with people, but now it seems sparsely populated at best. Empty highways — because of course nobody’s driving cars anymore. But the air is empty too. Mostly there’s only ever one car flying at a time. All those giant buildings might be filled with people, but you don’t get any sense of them being there.

San Diego is a literal dump, and Las Vegas a nuclear wasteland. Apart from the still-standing casino hotel, of course. A million bottles of whisky and you choose Johnnie Walker Black Label? Come on. (That brand is owned by Diageo, though, which is the first of the big neon advertising signs you see.)

I don’t know, I wonder if it was just my expectation of something more striking, more startling. Don’t get me wrong: I didn’t hate it, or even dislike it. I was just disappointed by it. Yet I think I want to see it again.

I loved the music, by the way, though it was perhaps a bit overwhelming in places.

And as a last thought: I still see people talking about the replicants being ‘robots’ or ‘androids.’ If it wasn’t clear from the first film, where they bled what seemed to be blood, it is powerfully obvious now: there are no robots in these films. The replicants are fully biological. They are probably more like clones, genetically engineered for enhanced strength and stamina.

The original book had androids (the clue was in the title); but not these films.

The Kickstarter Corporate Communication Conundrum

Today I chanced to see an email in which a manager was asking his staff to work for extra hours. Well, ‘asking’ is putting it generously, to be honest. There didn’t seem to be much that was optional about it.

The Kickstarter connection, though: you’ll be familiar with the idea of ‘stretch goals.’ If not, the idea is that the basic target is to make X amount of money, but if we make X + 10%, or whatever, we’ll be able to do these other things. Develop additional features, make the item in more colours, or whatever. My guess is that the term originally comes from sports.

So this email included in the subject the phrase ‘stretch targets.’ Meaning we want you to do more this week/month/whatever, than we originally planned. It was clearly written by someone who thinks that the way to develop software faster is to work your staff to the bone. When in fact that’s much more likely to result in people taking shortcuts and making mistakes.

In this team they’re already working weekends, and now they’re being ‘stretched’ even more. It bodes ill. But perhaps co-opting the language of positive things for something so negative is worse.

Blades and Running

Watched Blade Runner in preparation for tomorrow. Chose the original theatrical cut, voiceover and all. I think I’m increasingly down with Mitch Benn’s thinking on the matter.

And you should watch the video of his song, ‘Don’t Fuck Up the Sequel to Blade Runner’

Also started watching Dangerous Days, the ‘making of’ documentary. Fascinating and surprising to learn that Rutger Hauer came up with the ‘tears in rain’ line.

Anyway, more news tomorrow, perhaps.

Trekking

Past

I can remember when I first saw Star Trek.

That’s not so unusual, but if my memory is right — and I’ve just more or less confirmed that it is — then when I first saw it was the absolute first time anyone could see it, in this country, at least.

Here’s the memory (and it’s tied up, as many good things are, with Doctor Who).

It’s 1969. It’s the summer holidays, and we’re in a holiday home with a TV. That in itself makes me doubt the memory, because back then holiday houses just didn’t have TVs. A lot of houses in general didn’t. But this memory has always told me that we were on a family holiday. And it’s Saturday, late afternoon. I’m settling down at the TV, and somebody says — I think it’s my sister — ‘Martin, Doctor Who finished, remember?’ Because it was Doctor Who time.

And I said, ‘But this is like Doctor Who!’

And as the new programme started someone else — my Dad, I think — said, with a tone of surprise, ‘He knows all about it!’ And then the Enterprise swooshed towards me out of the screen.

I’ve long wondered how true this memory was. It was 1969; I’d have been five. But I just checked:

Initially, the BBC was the first-run broadcaster of Star Trek (12 July 1969-15 December 1971).
…
The series was shown in four seasons, the first on Saturday evenings at 5:15 pm (in the time slot usually taken by Doctor Who).

Which exactly matches my memory: summer, Saturday, Doctor Who slot. And the calendar confirms that the 12th of July 1969 was a Saturday.

I wouldn’t be five for another month plus. Not a bad bit of early-memory retention. I wouldn’t have remembered it at all, if it wasn’t for one thing: trauma caused by fear that my parents would turn the TV off just as this exciting new programme was starting burned it into my brain.

My Dad always liked Star Trek too, so I guess I was partly responsible for that.

Present

Yesterday I watched the first two episodes of Star Trek: Discovery, which are on Netflix (in the UK and Europe, at least; in the US they’re on CBS’s own new streaming service). And I really enjoyed it. I wouldn’t say it felt like being that nearly-five-year-old again, but it did feel like they’re trying something new and potentially very exciting.

Today I was looking at its entry on IMDB. It turns out there are user-written reviews there, which I don’t think I’d been aware of before.

Sadly they are almost universally negative. ‘It’s not Star Trek,’ is a common theme. But there’s a strong whiff of racism and misogyny coming through. Two non-white women as leads means ‘social justice warriors’ are running the show, it seems. Well from what I’ve read of Gene Roddenbery, I think he’d have been happy to be called a social justice warrior. Star Trek was always about diversity and tolerance.

Future

I don’t know how many episodes of this new series they have lined up, but I know I’m looking forward to watching them. So is my inner five-year-old. So would my Dad have been. And so would Gene.

Harvest Home

Collected a load of Apples from the garden yesterday. Started to write this post, too, but left it for a bit, and Micro.blog had lost it when I went back. It felt very autumnal. And the title ‘Harvest Home’ cane to mind because there’s a Big Country song by that name. So I listened to The Crossing for the first time in years. Still really good.