📗 Books 2025, 8: The History of Rock ‘n‘ Roll in Ten Songs, by Greil Marcus
Should I include it if I started it years ago? Yes. Is it beautifully written? Yes. Is it definitive? Certainly not.
Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat, 2024 - ★★★★½
Absolutely loved this jazz-fueled documentary about the events running up to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, first and short-lived prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1972.
It's a bleak, dark story, but so well told, and with such a great soundtrack, that you rarely feel anything other than pulled along by the narrative.
Which itself is kind of a piece of jazz in the way it's structured. The style has some similarities to Adam Curtis's work in its use of archival footage and the way it lets text, sound, and images overlap and interact. Though Curtis uses a voiceover narrative (or at least did in the one I've seen, while Johan Grimonprez here, does not, simply letting everything speak for itself.
I should note it’s Petroc Trelawny’s last day on the BBC Radio 3 Breakfast show today. I’ll miss his dulcet tones, and especially his weird pronunciation of ‘Bach’.
The Ipcress File, 1965 - ★★★★
Great, stylish sixties spy story, with Michael Caine. He's a man who cooks! and makes coffee in — get this — a cafetière (french press to our American friends). Très Moderne!
More to the point, British scientists have been giving up their roles and/or disappearing mysteriously. The word 'defecting' is never used, The USSR is not mentioned explicitly. But this 'brain drain' is harming Britain's defensive capabilities. Harry Palmer joins a team that is investigating the disappearance of the latest scientist.
The plot isn't all that good, to be honest, it's a bit bumpy in places, not as coherent as I'd like. But the overall style of the thing, the way it plays to fears of mind control and brainwashing, and the general verve with which it's done, get it a high mark from me.
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.
The Philadelphia Story, 1940 - ★★★★
Really fun romcom from 1940. It cleverly keeps you guessing about who's going to get together with whom till very nearly the end.
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.
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?
📗 Books 2025, 6: The Pale Horse, by Agatha Christie
Christie does the supernatural! Or not? And reaches the 60s.
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.
The Severed Floor is not the Black Lodge
In which I complain about Severance being too slow, not guaranteed to finish, and not Twin Peaks.
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.
Maybe You Can Post Your Way Through Fascism
Some thoughts on how that post about posting not being enough might have discouraged some writers.
📗 Books 2025, 5: Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer
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.