Most uncanny

I accidentally - I won't say how, you'll think I'm weird - saw this blog in Google translation. It was like having a weird French double, an alternative cuisson homme...

The So-Called Thirty-Nine Steps, Pt. II

My Mum sent me a press clipping about the Rubbish Thirty-Nine Steps: apparently it's caused all kinds of furore in England. Unfortunately, said furore seems to have mostly occurred on the part of people who read the Daily Mail, which I worry exposes some unconscious right-wing proclivities I might have. The BBC have attempted to justify the manifest inadequacies by arguing that the novel is 'far-fetched' anyway, claiming that the adaptation is 'faithful to the spirit and period of the book' (it isn't, actually) but liberates the writer to 'feel free to re-imagine it for a modern audience'.

All of which begs the question: what is the historical 'grain'? Surely fidelity to the (bad) ideology in the novel would not have seen Penry-Jones's Hannay profit from a learning curve in gender relations - as soon as the protagonist becomes progressive, we stop seeing the rude actualities of the era as Buchan inadvertently exposed them. Surely it's better for a modern audience to have a genuine grasp of the ideological realities of a moment in time so that a genuine sense of historical distance can be created? I'm not sure I agree with the political redemptions or mollifications of characters like Hannay: do we need him to develop in order to become the mouthpiece for a liberalism which we already (and problematically) take for granted? Isn't that just a sop to the vanity of our own moment's self-awarded notion of 'progress'? Does the drama become better when Hannay becomes more likeable?

Rubbish Thirty-Nine Steps now has its own Wikipedia entry.

'It's not the type of people or group you want your pub to be associated with'

Trowse publican bans BNP meeting in his pub after they book a function room under a group alias.

This might be a good point to refer you all back to Nick Griffin's confident assertion that the only types in the region who find the BNP offensive are 'a bunch of silly students and elderly University of East Anglia lecturers who do not represent Norfolk people', pace this post.

Andrew Coleman now vies with Chesley Sollenberger for my 'man of the week' award.

Football, Sublime and Ridiculous

I just celebrated being offered an interview by watching the paradigmatically graceful goal 'new Zidane' Yoann Gourcuff scored for Bordeaux against Paris St. Germain last weekend whilst simultaneously listening to the hook where it all goes 'Scottish Tourist Board advertisement' in the first song on the new Mogwai album (still up in its entirety on MySpace). Here's the goal:



But football: bloody hell. I'll be chirruping the disapproval of a billion know-nothing Daily Mail columnists here, but this 'Kaka to Manchester City on half a million quid a week' affair is absolutely beyond the already-hugely-budged pale. I won't insult your intelligences by pointing out how much useful stuff that money can purchase.

Elsewhere this week - I read Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March and Malcolm Lowry's Ultramarine, and now I'm re-reading Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. And did some other stuff. Writing, mostly.

Looking for work...

So, there's five CVs out there now. I'm one of those people who finds asking for jobs roughly as easy as walking up to a stranger and asking them on a date (ie, practically impossible), so I think I've earnt a bit of cooking time and a can of beer.

Went to the National Gallery again yesterday. Wish they'd give me a season ticket for free or something. I'll post something more interesting about it when I've chased away the 'jobhunt butterflies'.

New Year, Old Myopia

Kate Kellaway's article on place in literature. Apparently, setting a novel in Hounslow or Willesden is a radical departure from the Hampstead convention. Except Kellaway tries to defend the Hampstead convention by making out that its critics (J.G. Ballard, a Hounslow-and-Willesden man himself, is one of these) are actually promoting an anti-woman agenda. (!)

Of course, the eye of this article only shifts away from London and its immediate environs about halfway down, when we're given examples of regional fiction which are either so blindingly obvious as to scarcely need mentioning (anyone writing an article on literature for a serious newspaper should know better than to try and present Niall Griffiths as an obscure author) or simply not regional. Phillip Hensher's The Northern Clemency, for example, is the product of a southern-minded, if not precisely southern, author looking to show that he can 'write the north'. The thing about The Northern Clemency, however, is that it packages its content with the London-based reader in mind: as a record of the Miners' Strike, for example, it is very much of the persuasion that the strike requires a framing of quaint, Full Monty-ish, otherness rather than (as in the case of David Peace's GB84) becoming the metanarrative in itself.

Reading M. John Harrison's Climbers, and A.L. Kennedy's well-founded remarks in Kellaway's article, I'm led to think that the real regional novel needs to make as few concessions as possible to a demand for the staged regional picturesque. Climbers uses its locational details in a way that would seem deictic or anatopic to the non-northern reader; that is, all place names ('Stand Edge', 'Holmfirth', 'Ellesmere Port') are unframed and stand-alone. Descriptions of, say, the industry of the Cheshire plain are made with reference to a knowledge that is already familiar with that place: Harrison rebels against the pressure of the industry to situate the non-provincial reader, implicitly arguing that the north-west is only as in need of locational explication as, for example, Regent's Park. One finds the same in many of Mark E. Smith's lyrics (my favourite? 'They talk of Chile/ while driving through Haslingden', from English Scheme.) One might even note that the Lakes Poets tended to treat their settings as givens, rather than write 'I drove up the M6 for four and a half hours/ got stuck in traffic on the toll bit near Birmingham/ listened to Radio 4 on the way/ made knowing remarks about Withnail and I/ then wandered lonely as a cloud.' That's what people like Hensher don't do, and I think that this detail is more important in the scheme of English cultural politics than is commonly admitted.

Anyway, I've covered most of this before. It's actually coalescing into a proper, grown-up article now - has anyone heard of a Journal of Northern Studies I can submit it to?

Happy New Year

I hope 2009 delivers, whoever and wherever you are. I'd type more but Hungarian lager/ shampagne has immobilised the part of my brain which makes sentences. Perhaps an excursion into the time-old alibi of music vids on Youtube will make up for this...



Bloody hell, as Alex Ferguson might say....