Tales from the Bitface

Radio saying SpaceX’s latest launch will be the first to orbit over the north and south poles. That’s wrong, of course: there have been plenty of circumpolar satellites. I wonder if it’s the first human-occupied one to enter that orbit; or just the first commercial one to do so.

Really fun romcom from 1940. It cleverly keeps you guessing about who's going to get together with whom till very nearly the end.

Carrot Weather catching the vibe of the day as usual.

I tried the ‘Hey Siri, what month is it?’ question, since people have being saying it can’t answer that.

It gave me to today’s date. Which seems fine. It’s more than I asked for, and includes the information I wanted, so…

When did the 20th of March become the first day of spring? I saw lots of mentions of it yesterday, and they’re even saying it on Radio 3 this morning.

I remember seeing Brunner at a convention 30 years ago, or more, talking about ‘the death of the midlist’: how writers who sold their work steadily to publishers, and to readers, used to be able to make a living from doing so, but no longer could. I wonder what he’d make of the publishing scene today.

Anyway, this slim book from 1966 hides its science-fictional nature till almost the very end. Unless you’ve read the blurb. Or indeed, this post, or the wikipedia entry about it. A theatre actor, a recovering alcoholic not long out of a sanatorium, gets the chance to work with a hip writer and director.

They’re going to get a troupe together, coop them up in a house in the country, and work collaboratively to construct a play.

Or at least, that’s what they want the cast members to think.

It’s not bad, if a little inconsequential.

Currently reading: Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose 📚

And on page 40, this quote:

Finally—and there is no way to convey this unless you read the sentence aloud or at least, as your first grade teacher cautioned you not to do, say it silently, word by word, in your mind

What are they teaching kids in American first grade? What does she mean, you were taught not to say it word by word in your mind? How do you read without doing that? Or at least learn to read?

An Agatha Christie book from 1961, and set round about then, too. We start in Chelsea espresso bar, where the main narrator, Mark Easterbrook, observes a fight between two beatnik/proto-hippie rich girls, and the first clue is sneaked in.

Easterbrook is no famous detective, though, either professional or amateur. He’s a historian who is trying to finish writing a book. But things happen, and soon the action moves to the English countryside where its author is most comfortable.¹

He meets Ginger Corrigan, who the blurb describes as ‘his sidekick’, which suggests to me an ongoing series and many adventures. And maybe that’s what Christie had planned, who knows. But this is standalone.

Anyway, the titular Pale Horse is a former pub where three women live, and perhaps cast spells. Certainly they give seances and such. But are they using magic to murder people remotely? Well that’s what our heroes have to find out, of course.

I really enjoyed it.

This isn’t a story so much as a floating mass of jellyfish tendrils with which the viewer intermittently comes into contact. And the show’s premise is a joke that neither a Hollywood millionaire or a Silicon Valley behemoth have any right to make. It’s a long, long exercise in seeing how long your customers will tolerate being laughed at.

I don’t agree with the early part of this New Statesman article, but there are some good points in it, not unrelated to my post the other day.

I’m finding season 2 of Severance quite annoying. The pacing is glacial. Every episode, I wait for something to happen, and they pile up more mysteries. Very slowly.

Take episode 7, for example, where they filled in Mark & Gemma’s backstory. All very nice, but completely unnecessary. We already knew they’d been a loving couple. We knew she was dead, and that she’s not actually dead. They didn’t need to spell out every little detail. What’s going on with her now is intriguing, but I no longer even care much about what is going on, just why? And when are they going to burn that fucking Lumon cult to the ground?

There’s this idea with modern ‘prestige TV’, that telling a story (or adapting a book) as an eight- or ten-episode series is better than trying to squash the same story into a two-hour film. And there’s a lot to be said for that. Give the story room to breathe.

Severance spends too much time listening to its own breathing.

I wouldn’t mind all this so much if I knew how much more of it there was to go, and that there was a fully-planned story, and that it would actually get made. I’ve not forgotten the deep disappointment of Netflix’s completely random cancelling of The OA. And there we know Brit Marling had the whole thing planned out across five seasons.

Also the reason for my title: it’s trying too hard to be Twin Peaks, and failing. You’re not David Lynch. No one is any more. Stop it, and just tell the story. A bit quicker.

Just heard the first ice-cream van of the year. Whaaaat???

I wish people wouldn’t post links to videos without warnings. You tap or click through to read something, and suddenly a video blares out. Most annoying.

There was a post about how ‘You can’t post your way out of fascism’ that did the rounds a few weeks ago. I have a feeling it might have done some harm.

I didn’t read it in detail. Saw the headline, skimmed it, got the gist. Resistance to Trump/Muskism and the other right-wing authoritarian risings around the world: it needs more than tweets, toots, blog posts.

Fair enough.

But not everyone can do more, or give more. And even those who can, or could or should: for some of us, writing is not just what we do, it’s what we are. We need to write. And I know I’ve felt some discouragement a few times lately, when I might have written about Trump, or Musk’s nazi salute, or the general horror of things. I’ve thought, ‘Yeah, but “You can’t post your way…"’

I wouldn’t go so far as to say my memory, my knowledge of the existence of that post has stopped me posting. Other things, or a combination of things, have done that. But it’s in there, like a spectre at the writing table, saying, ‘No, this isn’t enough, so you shouldn’t do it.’

That is almost certainly not what the writer intended. But I think it’s unhelpful at best, and may be harmful to some people at worst.

Posting won’t be enough to get us out of fascism, but it might help some people to get through it.

So please, everyone, don’t be discouraged; and don’t stop posting.

As The Dispossessed starts with a wall, Annihilation starts with a tower. And as LeGuin’s wall round a spaceport both closes the planet off from the rest of the universe, and encloses the universe, depending on how you look at it; so VanderMeer’s tower has its topological oddity. It starts at ground level and goes down, into the ground underneath it, rather than rising into the air.

Or so the Biologist sees it, But this is Area X, and things are rarely as they seem.

The Biologist is the first person narrator. Accompanied by three other women — the Psychologist, the Anthropologist, and the Surveyor — they are the latest in a series of groups sent in to investigate the mysterious zone.

Almost everything is unexplained in this book. It is incredibly compelling, gripping, even, but everything remains unexplained, the ending is open. Yet while there are three more books in the series, I feel it’s such a perfect little nugget, beautifully crafted, that to read on would almost spoil it.

I suspect that’s not true, though. We are in safe hands with VanderMeer, so I expect the continuation will be sound. I remember my friend Simon having a similar response when he read Hyperion. Its perfectly-crafted open ending seemed to him like it didn’t need a sequel. But of course The Fall of Hyperion was magnificent, and so were the two Endymion followups.

Anyway, this is great, but you probably already knew that, what with winning awards and being ten years old.

I got lucky(?) in a prize draw at work, so tonight I’m going to the Brit Awards finals. Taking my daughter. I suspect she’ll get more out of it than me.

It was 30 years ago today, PJ Harvey tells us, that To Bring You My Love was released. Sounds as good as ever.

Give it a listen.

Looks like Amazon’s deal with Iain Banks’s estate to make a series out of Consider Phlebas is back on.

Pity it’s Amazon, but at least Adele is involved as an executive producer.

I remember Banksie saying all he wanted to see was the fight under the hovercraft, so let’s hope they leave that in.

We started watching Miss Austen, the BBC serial about Jane’s sister Cassandra trying to get hold of Jane’s letters a few years after her death. That made me want to read some more Austen, the only I’ve read before being Pride and Prejudice.

So I tried Northanger Abbey. Which is mainly a spoof of the gothic novels that Austen herself would have been reading at the time, and also, of course, a romance.

I enjoyed it a lot, but it ended very surprisingly. It has the omniscient narrator you might expect for a book of its time, but it’s mostly written in close third-person. We are privy to Catherine’s thoughts and fears. But the thing is, when we get to the climactic scene, when everything is going to be resolved and our heroine end up happy (it’s not much of a spoiler), Austen (or the narrator) turns away.

Instead of being with Catherine as the hero rides to her emotional rescue, we are told about it. We’re kept at a distance, no longer aware of what’s going on in her head. It’s an absolute masterclass in the difference between ‘showing’ and ‘telling’ in writerly terms; but the wrong way round for a really satisfying experience.

Perhaps it was a continuation of the style of those gothic romances she was parodying, but read today, it’s a strange choice.

This film is at number 95 on this Time Out list of the hundred best films of all time that we've been dipping into.

Why?

It's really quite a bad film. Characters of no merit, dialogue that sometimes reaches snappy but often sits in the leaden cliché realm, and just general horribleness.

It's good for the scenes of New York, the crowd scenes in bars and restaurants, and yes, it has its moments. But overall, no, didn't do it for me.

It's not like amoral characters make the film amoral, but you need to have someone to root for. That should be the gossip columnists's sister and jazz guitarist who were a couple. Sadly they're just too feeble (and too sidelined) as characters.

I think I read somewhere that this ends on a huge cliffhanger. It doesn’t. Or I wouldn’t describe it in those terms.

It has an epilogue, entitled ‘The Old Man at the End’, set 50 years or so after the main story. Someone we take to be the protagonist fears for his life; and the close-third-person narration hints at or mentions some events that intrigue. But we’re not left hanging.

The book is described as ‘a Long London novel’. though, so we certainly expect additions to the series in time.

The term ‘Long London’ is not used in the book, I think, though our normal, everyday London is called ‘Short London’ at one point. ‘The Great When’ is used, and is one of the terms for another London that exists parallel to ours in some sense. Certain people, with certain kinds of imagination (or damage), can find and use some few portals between the two realms.

You know the sort of thing. Parallel worlds, unseen realities, aren’t exactly new. But Moore is such a good writer, this is a high, fine example of the form, even if there have been others like it before. The richness of his description and believability of his characters make this a five-star affair, if I gave stars to books.

And books are key here. It all kicks of in 1949, when Dennis Knuckleyard, 18 years old, orphaned in the war, and working in a second-hand book shop, comes into the possession of a book that doesn’t exist.

It is imaginary, being named in an Arthur Machen tale. Which means he has to get it back to the other London before very bad things start happening.

Highly recommended, and I eagerly anticipate the next volume, despite not being cliffhung by this one.