Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama is the Classic Serial on Radio 4 at the moment. I wouldn't normally mention this but for the fact that I spent yesterday evening reading up on what I like to call 'spooky space stuff' in the wake of the International Space Station's near miss with some orbiting litter earlier this week.
Rendezvous with Rama is one of the most depressing books I've ever read, even by the standards of most post-1945 science fiction. I'm not by any means saying that sci-fi is bad, but its typical tropes - the evacuation of the earth, travel over multi-generational time periods, sequestration in stasis - leave me pretty cold. The one that genuinely pisses me off, though, and this is unquestionably a highly significant part of Clarke's weltanschaung, is the reduction of female characters to childbearing and nurturing roles. In Rama, this (covertly) has the structure of a revenge fantasy: the woman who ends up tasked with the 'Eve mission' - Rama, it transpires, is a celestial opportunity for humanity to start again, and its investigators have been lured there for a short, knockout, Darwinian tournament - begins the novel as a highly-respected scientist. It's over a decade since I read it, but I'm sure that there's a lot of male-endorsed chaff about her nascent maternal stirrings. Anyway, there seems to be a lot of that about in science fiction. However women come out of Flaubert's work, or even that of an unrestrained cock-waver like Henry Miller, it's very rarely like this.
That said, I'm interested in the power a lot of sci-fi has to induce such a sense of dislocation in me. Dostoevsky or Kafka or Sartre or Camus or Blanchot or Robbe-Grillet (okay, maybe The Plague, which has certain tendencies in common with sci-fi) don't do that to me. Ray Bradbury or William Gibson, on the other hand, do. If someone could venture to name the effect I'm discussing, I'd be fascinated (I don't think 'the uncanny' does enough work, in this case).
Saturday, 14 March 2009
Thursday, 12 March 2009
'A small club gamely failing in a rich man's world' (or not, as the case may be)
Eminently correct football Cassandra David Conn on the crisis at my club, which only seems to find itself in the news when everything has gone wrong.
Wednesday, 11 March 2009
Me, last week:
Julie Myerson is right to say that our writing tells us much about ourselves that we don't already know.
Last week, what I didn't already know about myself was that I was writing a sentence about someone who was about to become extremely (in)famous indeed. It's come to a pretty pass when the literary affair of the year isn't the Sartre-Robbe Grillet debate, or even a spat between Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens, but a kerfuffle over the self-indulgent 'mumoirs' (THAT IS MY NEOLOGISM TM TM TM COPYRIGHT IDST!!! Seriously, I just made 'mumoir' up. They might as well give me the royalties cheque now...) of an Islingtonite mother-of-three who can't get her head around the fact that her son smokes a bit of dope.
In all seriousness, I recognise that 'a bit of dope' actually does - contra the assertions of many of the smug hippies on the Guardian's Comment is Free blog - have the potential to derail one's life in potentially serious ways. This probably deserves qualifying by saying that something approaching the opposite is true for many individuals (cannabis can focus people just as it can distract them; not all users spend their entire life in a smoky room watching Harold and Kumar), and that those who are affected negatively by it are often negotiating less contingent stresses and strains. From what I've read about the Myersons, it seems that her son was ludicrously overpressured by parents who felt that they were doing anything but: from my teaching experience, I can say that Britain is overrun with teenagers who have had it banged into them that nothing but relentless, quantifiable achievement will do. This doesn't mean that kids are being encouraged to learn about things; it means that they are (implicitly) being pressed to learn by rote - wherever that's possible - so they can get the best grades/ the best job. IMO/ IME this is a specifically middle-class problem. There are lots and lots of potentially talented individuals for whom university becomes a self-destructive circle of mechanistic revision and joyless socialising, rather than an opportunity to, well, find out about what I remember Karl and I, in a flash of almost revolutionary wisdom, agreeing to term 'stuff'. It is all too rare to meet a student who says something like 'I picked English Lit/ History/ Classics because I find the subject bottomlessly interesting and, to tell you the truth, I don't give a fuck what grades I get because the studying is rewarding enough in its own right.' That's a pity, because they're invariably the ones who get the best results.
Anyway, despite not liking the idea of Jake, who I get the feeling is probably one of those pious weedheads who listen to Manu Chao, I am on his side. His mother is hacking out the typical Islingtonite route of building a literary career grounded on an erroneous belief that their own experience is somehow more vital and visceral than that of anyone else (what price the mother of a heroin addict from Burnley being given the opportunity to publish such a book?) and, on those terms alone, offends my most deeply-held principles. She's the new Wife in the North.
Oh, and my own parents? They are bloody good at 'no pressure', to the extent that not an eyelid was batted at my numerous C-grade GCSEs. In the most memorable example of 'no pressure' (as far as I'm concerned), my mum once semi-encouraged me to go to London for a play-off final when I had a four-hour exam in Norwich the next morning. True to form, I refused to go and spent the evening in the pub instead, but it was nice to be trusted to be able to do well even if I had gone to London. I get the feeling that the meddling committed by the Myersons of this world doesn't accomodate pre-exam play-off piss ups...
Julie Myerson is right to say that our writing tells us much about ourselves that we don't already know.
Last week, what I didn't already know about myself was that I was writing a sentence about someone who was about to become extremely (in)famous indeed. It's come to a pretty pass when the literary affair of the year isn't the Sartre-Robbe Grillet debate, or even a spat between Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens, but a kerfuffle over the self-indulgent 'mumoirs' (THAT IS MY NEOLOGISM TM TM TM COPYRIGHT IDST!!! Seriously, I just made 'mumoir' up. They might as well give me the royalties cheque now...) of an Islingtonite mother-of-three who can't get her head around the fact that her son smokes a bit of dope.
In all seriousness, I recognise that 'a bit of dope' actually does - contra the assertions of many of the smug hippies on the Guardian's Comment is Free blog - have the potential to derail one's life in potentially serious ways. This probably deserves qualifying by saying that something approaching the opposite is true for many individuals (cannabis can focus people just as it can distract them; not all users spend their entire life in a smoky room watching Harold and Kumar), and that those who are affected negatively by it are often negotiating less contingent stresses and strains. From what I've read about the Myersons, it seems that her son was ludicrously overpressured by parents who felt that they were doing anything but: from my teaching experience, I can say that Britain is overrun with teenagers who have had it banged into them that nothing but relentless, quantifiable achievement will do. This doesn't mean that kids are being encouraged to learn about things; it means that they are (implicitly) being pressed to learn by rote - wherever that's possible - so they can get the best grades/ the best job. IMO/ IME this is a specifically middle-class problem. There are lots and lots of potentially talented individuals for whom university becomes a self-destructive circle of mechanistic revision and joyless socialising, rather than an opportunity to, well, find out about what I remember Karl and I, in a flash of almost revolutionary wisdom, agreeing to term 'stuff'. It is all too rare to meet a student who says something like 'I picked English Lit/ History/ Classics because I find the subject bottomlessly interesting and, to tell you the truth, I don't give a fuck what grades I get because the studying is rewarding enough in its own right.' That's a pity, because they're invariably the ones who get the best results.
Anyway, despite not liking the idea of Jake, who I get the feeling is probably one of those pious weedheads who listen to Manu Chao, I am on his side. His mother is hacking out the typical Islingtonite route of building a literary career grounded on an erroneous belief that their own experience is somehow more vital and visceral than that of anyone else (what price the mother of a heroin addict from Burnley being given the opportunity to publish such a book?) and, on those terms alone, offends my most deeply-held principles. She's the new Wife in the North.
Oh, and my own parents? They are bloody good at 'no pressure', to the extent that not an eyelid was batted at my numerous C-grade GCSEs. In the most memorable example of 'no pressure' (as far as I'm concerned), my mum once semi-encouraged me to go to London for a play-off final when I had a four-hour exam in Norwich the next morning. True to form, I refused to go and spent the evening in the pub instead, but it was nice to be trusted to be able to do well even if I had gone to London. I get the feeling that the meddling committed by the Myersons of this world doesn't accomodate pre-exam play-off piss ups...
Sunday, 8 March 2009
Arsenal Stadium Mystery
Arsene Wenger compounds his resemblance to Jack Straw by claiming that Arsenal may be a priority target for extremists. It's not the greatest excuse for falling into fifth place, is it? In fact, it's almost 'dog ate my homework' country.
I think he's been reading this novel.
I think he's been reading this novel.
Wednesday, 4 March 2009
'In our hour of financial need'
The Guardian staples its colours to the mast: as hundreds of jobs go in the media, Farringdon expresses solidarity by paying Matthew Fort to optimise our pizza-buying experience. Well, as they say, if you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem...
Let's just say Nero's tuning up again.
Let's just say Nero's tuning up again.
Tuesday, 3 March 2009
Disappointment
Am I the only one who was misled by the adjective in this article?
Actually, come to think of it, I probably was...
Actually, come to think of it, I probably was...
Writing: fun?
Writers respond to the question 'writing for a living: a joy or a chore.'
Will Self's answer is probably most consonant with what I think about writing fiction. Nobody is making you do it, contra to what Amit Chaudhuri seems to be arguing (I've met Chaudhuri a few times and this point seems typical of his Eeyorishness - he's also a classically-trained singer and one occasionally gets the impression that he'd rather be doing that most of the time.) It's pleasing that self refuses angst here. Ronan Bennett is straight to the point as well: 'I am not a tortured writer', he says, pleasingly opting out of the mythopoetics I was discussing last week. Julie Myerson is right to say that our writing tells us much about ourselves that we don't already know, and that this can often be frightening (but, I think, it's just as often comforting or reassuring). Geoff Dyer claims to prefer the tinkering and toning to the initial act of invention, something I can sympathise with at times.
But John Banville? Bloody hell. I'd like to credit him with being ironic here, but I suspect - having read The Sea, simultaneously the least original novel ever and the one that behaves as if is the most radical - that he isn't. Banville's utter pomposity is perhaps matched only by that of the actors in Blackadder.
Self is riding the updraft of my estimations at the moment, though. As a bonus, read the transcript of his absolute demolition of Richard Littlejohn and his 'novel' To Hell in a Handcart here.
Will Self's answer is probably most consonant with what I think about writing fiction. Nobody is making you do it, contra to what Amit Chaudhuri seems to be arguing (I've met Chaudhuri a few times and this point seems typical of his Eeyorishness - he's also a classically-trained singer and one occasionally gets the impression that he'd rather be doing that most of the time.) It's pleasing that self refuses angst here. Ronan Bennett is straight to the point as well: 'I am not a tortured writer', he says, pleasingly opting out of the mythopoetics I was discussing last week. Julie Myerson is right to say that our writing tells us much about ourselves that we don't already know, and that this can often be frightening (but, I think, it's just as often comforting or reassuring). Geoff Dyer claims to prefer the tinkering and toning to the initial act of invention, something I can sympathise with at times.
But John Banville? Bloody hell. I'd like to credit him with being ironic here, but I suspect - having read The Sea, simultaneously the least original novel ever and the one that behaves as if is the most radical - that he isn't. Banville's utter pomposity is perhaps matched only by that of the actors in Blackadder.
Self is riding the updraft of my estimations at the moment, though. As a bonus, read the transcript of his absolute demolition of Richard Littlejohn and his 'novel' To Hell in a Handcart here.
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