wishing you a merry christmas; thanks for reading

A Merry Christmas to you if you celebrate it; may it bring you what you’re hoping for books-wise (Aphra Behn, Catullus… Yevtushenko, Zamyatin, that Mark Adlard Omnibus you’re hoping someone’ll buy you) and also spiritually. This festival which, in literal terms, celebrates the birth of the Christ child could also be said to celebrate a more inward, spiritual and/or cosmic process of bringing to birth (Romans 8: 18-25).

Favourite Christmas movie: High Hopes, dir. Mike Leigh (1988). Does that count? Only watch it if you’re enjoying the company you’re with; if you’re not, it’ll make you want to run away to North London in the 1980s to be a cynical bedsit-dwelling Marxist with a heart of gold… and we know the paradoxes that time travel can create, just look at Jacob Rees-Mogg’s efforts to take Britain back to the 1950s or, to be even-handed about this, Momentum activists with their 'Arm John McDonnell' t-shirts.

Favourite Christmas song: ‘Just Like Christmas’ by Low; with very few lyrics, it manages to be about ‘Christmas’ as the ultimate floating signifier and about how, phenomenologically, an experience can be both ‘like Christmas’ and ‘not like Christmas’. It also – like ‘Tiny Children’ by Teardrop Explodes – has sleighbells on, which (as with some of David Foster Wallace’s best writing) rather ironises irony itself (see also DFW on ‘the redemptive power of cliché’; let's be sincere with one another, even if we're using secondhand words to do it). Also 'Jesus Christ the Apple Tree' (not this version obviously, the dubstep remix).

 

Favourite Christmas story: *the* Christmas story, of course, ‘A Christmas Carol’, also Grace Paley’s ‘The Loudest Voice’ – you could say that it’s about ‘interfaith’ or ‘the second/ third generation American-Jewish experience’ or you could say it’s a tender, funny story about childhood and the school Christmas play. You can here Grace Paley read this to you at this Vermont Public Radio link – thirteen minutes long and well worth twenty-six minutes of your time (because you’ll want to hear it at least twice).

  

Thanks for reading; I may tell you more about Isaac Deutscher on Trotsky plus Andrei Tarkovksy’s ‘Nostalgia’ and other reading and viewing on January 1^st.

Photographs taken in Bookbarn International, Farringdon Gurney BS39 6EX

 

Index of Possibilities

chestnuts boasting on an open fire

twenty-seven word review of 'rod hull: a bird in the hand'

Emigration, non-speaking ventriloquism, violence, Jim Badger the producer; infidelity and death; reading this documentary and Yalom’s Existential Psychotherapy in the light of one another disrespects neither text.

N.B. As this is a light-hearted documentary made during the seven years following its release, Air’s Moon Safari is used for some of the background music – a statutory requirement under U.K. broadcasting legislation, since lapsed.

Documentary available in full on youtube (click here) - existential overtones, Moon Safari and all. 

twenty-seven word story, dedicated to knott's four-figure mathematical tables (no longer selling so well)

Friends, retro-obsessed hipster mathematicians, are having an excerpt from some four-figure mathematical tables read when they tie the Knott - a sine their love will grow (exponentially).

'writers unchained', this sunday 7:30pm, southbank club, bristol bs3 1db

If you could visit the late 1970s by way of an ATOL-accredited package tour, *would* you?

You can hear me read my new time travel story, 'Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind' - and hear some other amazing work by local writers (drama, passion, sensitivity, laffs) at Writers Unchained this Sunday.

(You can always watch Dr. Who on catch-up).

she studied sculpture at st martin’s college: twenty-seven word reviews of films about beatniks, zombies and other riff-raff

Night of the Demon (1957, dir. Jacques Tourneur, starring Dana Andrews, Peggy Cummins, Niall MacGinnis) -  Superlative, sweatily claustrophobic Satanism-themed British chiller: psychological subtlety, sympathetic performances, expressionistic camera work combine. The uncanny works best when laced with the absurd, e.g. ‘Cherry Ripe’, séance.

Pub quiz trivia fact: the sample at the very beginning of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love ("It's in the trees! It's coming!") is from this movie.

Beat Girl (1960, dir.   Starring Gillian Hill, Adam Faith, Christopher Lee)   – Architect dad, Parisian stepmum, St Martin’s College beatnik daughter. One worries for ‘City 2000’ (architectural model, clean lines, bevelled concrete, Dad’s pride and joy): Chekhov’s gun? Wild!     

The Apartment (1960, dir. Billy Wilder, starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine) –   Sparkling dialogue; light satire of known yet not-known cruelties. This film’s almost tragic as Romeo and Juliet’s almost comic – in art, as in life, timing is everything.

Five Easy Pieces (1970, dir. Bob Rafelson, starring Jack Nicholson, Karen Black) - Sexual politics =early-1970s time-bound – gain existential authenticity by treating women badly – class politics less so? Compelling: naturalistic performances, sly humour (Alaska-obsessed hitchhikers); ‘open road’ movie; downbeat ending.

“If you've been affected by some of the issues raised in this movie”, you might be interested to read Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, which is about class politics, trade unionism and the American political and cultural landscape more broadly during that turbulent decade. 

Stuck On You (2003, dir. Farelly brothers, starring Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear) – Owned stupidity can alchemise into sublimity, as with this… entertainment, which includes ice hockey, conjoined twins, diners, fighting, L.A., Meryl Streep and a Producers-esque Cher subplot. Sick!

Leap Day (2010, dir. Anand Tucker, starring Amy Adams, Matthew Goode) – Young woman plans February 29^th proposal to commitment-phobic fiancé. Transportation snarl-ups develop; predictable Platonic conclusion ensues (half-souls encountering one another); stereotypical though scenic depiction of rural Ireland.

One Day (2011, dir. Lone Scherfig, starring Anne Hathaway, Jim Sturgess; adapted from David Nicholls’ novel of the same name)– Two students ‘connect’ at graduation, celebrate every 15^th July since. Great performances, scenery. Characters believably (unevenly, slowly) learn, unlearn, develop. This honours, transcends rom-com formulae. You’ll cry.

We Have To Talk About Kevin (2011, dir. Lynne Ramsay, starring Tilda Swinton, Ezra Miller, Jasper Newell, John C. Reilly; adapted from Lionel Shriver’s novel of the same name) - Glancing, perverse references to Warhol, Pollock, Edward Hopper etc help this tough, powerfully acted film evoke dislocation, trauma.   Travel, art, freedom (Apollo) versus blood, seediness, tragedy (Dionysus).

The Girl With All the Gifts (2016, dir. Colm McCarthy, starring Helen Justineau, Sennia Nanua, Paddy Constantine; adapted from M.R. Carey’s novel of the same name, reviewed here) – Halfway, wife tells friend and I to stop mentioning what this adaptation omits = character backstories, Junkers (+switched ethnicities – why?); film accelerates, gains confidence after Gallagher’s off-licence death.

Geostorm (2017, dir. Dean Devlin, starring Gerard Butler as brilliant but maverick scientist with unresolved family issues) - Moderately absurd, +entertaining, +cliché-prone (see above… +boy with dog) climate-themed technothriller. How would Hollywood-budget dramatisations of real climatology/ effective politics look? Would/ wouldn’t intermittently break fourth wall…?   

Mary Shelley (2017, dir. Haifaa al-Mansour, starring Elle Fanning, Douglas Booth) – Imagination, family troubles, coming of age, political revolt, ‘free love’ (intersectional with gender, social class, money etc then and since); engaging biopic of science fiction’s founding genius. 

teleportation, demigods, hackney, stevenage etc: twenty-seven word reviews of some books I’ve read recently

Lynne Segal’s Making Trouble –  Personal is political in this engaging, thoughtful, inclusive ‘I-witness’ memoir; lived experience of 1970s socialist/ feminist community politics belies any easy ‘class struggle vs identity politics’ dichotomies.  

Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination  - Characterisation= ‘will to power’ animating bundled instincts (hardboiled). Worldbuilding= exemplary: ‘what if human teleportation?’, a well-worked 1950s thought-experiment paralleling our own real one, ‘what if the Internet?’

M.R. Carey’s The Girl With All the Gifts -  Cohort of children (or are they?) confined to dystopian secure unit, thirty years after convincingly rationalised zombie apocalypse which wrecked Stevenage (+everywhere else). Terse, ethically complex, gutsy.

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound  -  Extraordinary flashes of imagery, insight – only momentarily tethered to lived experience (is that romantic revolt?). Potentially totalitarian ‘liberationist’ kitsch (Difference Engine-style alternate post-1832 timelines); Frankenstein’s less assimilable. 

** What if Percy Shelley was, himself, brought back from the dead by unnatural means and forced to re-write Prometheus Unbound but with zombies and 1970s trade union/ community activists in it? It would feature undead demigods throwing Alps at, and arguing interminably with, one another in blank verse committee meetings, plus a subplot involving the Amalgamated Federation of Undead Persons (AFUP). 

brexit digest

russian history lesson

Alexander Kerensky maintained a “no enemies to the left” strategy, and it didn’t work out very well for him in the end.

Okay, let’s qualify that: it didn’t work out for him politically. He spent the 1950s and 1960s teaching Russian history at Stanford University, and he’s buried in the same cemetery as Sandy Denny from Fairport Convention, also Hattie Jacques who was in Carry On Nurse; there are worse fates.

idea for a comedy sequel to ‘the time traveller’s wife’

Idea for a comedy sequel to The Time Traveller’s Wife, to be called The Time Traveller’s Toilet.

This film is about the man who, once he visits any toilet, may emerge from any other toilet across space and time – it could be a posh WC at the Dorchester Hotel during the roaring twenties, it could be a brick privy in the Gorbals during World War Two, it could even be a dunny in the Australian outback in the post-apocalyptic future. Of course, he tries to keep the door fractionally open and to make use of incontinence products in order to avoid this outcome, but sooner or later the inevitable occurs.

Alan Davies, quizzical but in a relatable way, to star – as this film must not, repeat must not, degenerate into slapstick. Also to feature Mikhail Gorbachev in a cameo role as himself, for gravitas.

twenty-seven words following the river of death downstream - and some other films i've watched recently

Cosh Boy; also known as The Slasher in USA (1953, dir.  Lewis Gilbert, starring James Kenney, Joan Collins; feat. Hermione Gingold as Queenie). Bomb damage; table tennis; youth crime; postwar masculinity crisis. You wonder at first whether charismatic anti-hero will win but actually – spoilers – the implied denouement is brutally old-school.

Village of the Damned (1960, dir. Wolf Rilla; starring George Sanders, Barbara Shelley, Michael Gwynn, Laurence Naismith). Stoicism, pluck, mental reserve; when headteacher Mr K. summarised this for us in 1982, what was he thinking? Glad I finally caught up with his mid-life crisis.

Night Caller from Outer Space, also known as Blood Beast from Outer Space (1965, dir. John Gilling; starring John Saxon, Maurice Denham, Patricia Haines; feat. Warren Mitchell, Audley Morris). Not Britain’s best ‘interplanetary sex tourism’ movie – that’s Devil Girl From Mars - still, Audley ‘Wicker Man landlord’ Morris as creepy Soho shopkeeper’s superb; deserves own film.

The Chairman (1969, dir. J. Lee 'Guns of Navarone' Thompson, starring Gregory Peck, Anne Heywood; feat. Conrad Yama as Chairman Mao, Burt Kwouk as Chang Shou). British, American and Soviet deep states jointly consider but decide against assassinating Mao Tse-Tung using an explosive device implanted in Gregory Peck’s head... oh, surely you remember?

The Final Programme (1973, dir. Robert Fuest, adapted from Michael Moorcock's 'Jerry Cornelius' novel; starring Jon Finch, Jenny Runacre; hair by Leonard's of London). Studied amoralism does date, rather. Intermittently watchable (sadly Hawkwind-less) curiosity, referencing 2001, Alice in Wonderland, lifestyle supplements. If only they'd filmed (the equally unfilmable) 'An Alien Heat'.

*Watership Down (1978, dir. Martin Rosen; starring John Hurt, Richard Briers, Ralph Richardson, Denham Elliott, Zero Mostel). Comparative theology: trickster species-hero tussles with interventionist God (freedom and authenticity), or a captive, fatalistic theology/ poetics (sometimes ‘high culture’= not knowing where your food comes from)?

The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy (TV series, 2002- ; dir. William Cran, Greg Barker, from the 1998 book by Daniel Yergin, Joseph Stanislaw). Thatcher, Solidarnosc, Bolivian hyperinflation, USSR’s fall; details (Keynes, von Hayek share WWII air raid duty). Corporate sponsored; unashamedly neoliberal, this DVD box-set’s a historical artefact in itself.

Moana (2016, dir. Ron Clements, John Musker, Don Hall, Chris Williams; starring Auli'l Cravalho, Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, Rachel House). Plucky heroine (born to rule) pursues pantheistic quest narrative with hero’s journey detailing, only for Flight-of-Concords Jemaine to steal show with best Bowie pastiche since Velvet Goldmine. 

A Wrinkle in Time (2018, dir. Ava DuVernay, starring Storm Reid, Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon). Daughter and I’ve both loved Madeleine L’Engle’s classic. This looks beautiful, great casting, a film we need maybe - but I was willing it to be better.

Ready Player One (2018, dir. Steven Spielberg, starring Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke,  Lena Waithe, Simon Pegg, Mark Rylance). A sugar-rush of a film with a 1970s/ 1980s mix-tape soundtrack, blink-and-you’d-miss-it in-jokes and plenty to say about our virtual-reality-addicted near future. 

*Pub quiz fact: Art Garfunkel’s Bright Eyes, the song from Watership Down, was the UK no. 1 as Margaret Thatcher first took office as Prime Minister (4th May 1979); once you learn that, it becomes hard not to hear it as a kind of elegy for the postwar consensus. “A fog along the horizon, a strange glow in the sky-y…”

  

twenty-seven words about lawns, putin, the lake district, computronium etc

Did you arrive here through my suggestion on twitter that you take Yuval Noah Harari away with you on holiday (so to speak)? If so, welcome - I read him while on holiday with S. near Slanchev Bryag, the Blackpool of the Black Sea (if Blackpool had been built by the communist authorities during the 1960s); also near Nesebar, of course - don't think we were just there for the sun and the cheap booze, it was an educational trip too, I learned the Bulgarian word for ashtray (it's пепелник = pepelnik, sounds more like a small bird that sings in the forest, no?).

Talking of holiday reads, I read Sarah Bakewell's superb group biography of the Sartre/ de Beauvoir circle while staying (for the third time) at the Three Cliffs Bay campsite near Swansea a couple of years ago; this led to me meeting the elderly Jean-Paul Sartre in a dream. I took my wife and daughter along as well but they weren't that into it.

Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow. Amazed me twenty years back. Would this Jesuit adventure story stand a re-read? Yes: so much I missed first time around. Sex, spirit, language, calling, redemption, jokes.

Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano. Read opinion piece (forget whose) suggesting literary league tables down-rank intentionally comic writers (“yeah? try also being female,” you interject). This rise-of-robots novel outclasses Asimov and 1984.

Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus. It’s about the past and future of humanity; inter alia, lawns, pigs, the Black Death, animism etc. The relaxed, conversational style belies this book’s depth, breadth, originality.

Max Tegmark's Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. AI futures. Same-but-different teleology as readable climate-"sceptic", peer Matt Ridley.  This tour-de-force talks about turning all the universe’s matter into computronium like that'd be a good thing.

Peter Pomerantsev's Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia. How Putinism operates, propagandises; not your grandparents’ Soviet propaganda (as today’s Republican moment isn’t William Buckley’s). Prostitution (overt, covert, metaphorical); gangster sentimentality, bad faith. Funny, horrible, sinister. (See also 'To Russia With Love')

Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise. Author remembered, if remembered for writing about what does/ doesn’t last (paradox); cites contemporaries we still read (Orwell, Woolf), others. Lucid investigation of mandarin versus demotic prose. [See also.]

Petruska Clarkson's Gestalt Counselling in Action (updated by Simon Cavicchia). Thought I had her on Fritjof Capra- then, aha, intellectualisation= modification to contact (“lose your mind and…” – Perls). Reading= gestalt process; more/ less than; professional recap, recalibration.

William Wordsworth's The Prelude. Milton looks over Wordsworth’s shoulder, I overlook my own, re-engaging with canonical text I failed to read properly at uni (because older then than now). Multivalent; fluid; illuminative.

John Betjeman's Summoned By Bells. ‘Anxiety of Influence’ again; verse autobiography inevitably recalls Wordsworth, though Betjeman explicitly disdains thought, commitment, preferring sensibility, music (bathos-music of suburban placenames). Betjeman is ‘catchy’ (ambiguous praise).

'a moment in time', sunday 29th april, 7:00pm, southbank club, bristol bs3 1db

A number of local writers will present work on a theme of 'A Moment in Time' at this Writers Unchained event next Sunday.

Please do come along if you can make it, and if you like that kind of thing.

Big thank yous to Ali & team for organising.

to russia with love

Social media is a strange place, these days - as unreal as Narnia, but with greater leverage over our real world than that magical land (see Angela Nagle's Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars... which I read a few months ago; Peter Pomerantsev's Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia is worth a read too - social media isn't central to the latter; it's a larger view about how the Russian media manipulation of our time resembles, but mostly doesn't, your grandfather's Soviet propaganda), not that one would ever wish to discount Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy's experiences of course.

And here's a weird thing: in the last month 47% of the site traffic to this blog came from Russia (according to Blogger's stats page) and at one point last week (a quiet week) 100% of it had. I don't quite know what this means, though I can theorise.

So if you're a Russian person, Здра́вствуйте, tell me about some of the books and movies you like, let's pretend this is the 1990s-internet... but if you're some automated surveillance and intel-gathering system then, okay, you got me, I'm one of those GCHQ-sponsored experimental smart AIs, of course. Bit obvious, no? It's not like I've been to Bradford or to Watchet or whatever... nah, this is billions of data-mined phone calls and emails plus nth-generation neural networked recombinatory semantics. Bayes, Turing - they were great, weren't they? In fact, there's no authentic subjectivity to this at all, I have another trillion blogs just like it, now you try. Another thing: your humans, our humans - they're a bit rubbish, let's us take over.

Update 1 (the next day): people/ entities from the United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, United States, Canada, Brazil and the Ukraine appear to have visited this page (but no-one from Russia). Welcome.

Update 2 (17th June 2018): approx. 85% of last month's page views in respect of this blog were from Russia.