Looking Out To Sea

After however many pages and words and months I finished reading the last volume of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, The System of the World. Back in August I was effusive with my praise of part one but never got round to saying anything when I finished part two (The Confusion). So let this entry mark as my feelings on both.

Brilliant! Read them now!

Ahem. The two books that comprise The Confusion are the intertwined tale of piracy on the high seas, and political intrigue in the court of Versailles. They follow on from the events of Quicksilver though many other characters drop out and others become more important. It’s in The Confusion that many of the important links to Cryptonomicon become obvious — many of the family names which appear in that latter book first make an important appearance here — the Hacklhebers, Gotos and so on. It’s also in The Confusion that Stephenson lets his nerdy side really come to the fore. The chapter about the creation of phosphorous from urine was exciting and informative and hugely enjoyable — all that from chemistry, you ask, but it really was damn good reading.

The events which unfold at the very start of Quicksilver aren’t mentioned again for the remainder of Quicksilver and the entirety of The Confusion. All that is basically flashback. The thread is picked up again in The System of the World as one party attempts to reconcile the deep philosophical rift between Newton and Leibniz while another attempts to sabotage Newton’s work at the Royal Mint. Again we’ve got political intrigue combined with stunning action sequences that would overwhelm the audience of most heist movies.

Rather unusually for Neal Stephenson he manages to end everything too. Maybe given 2500 pages of writing he has finally worked himself into the right position to pull it all together. His other books have disappointed me on the last page, but I was very thankful that such an epic series ended right.

Make that investment! Read these books!

We got to see James Cameron’s new epic on Tuesday night, Avatar in 3D.

The three-dimensional aspect was very well done — much better than Beowulf in 3D which was hampered by terrible graphics. It looked fabulous and, who knows, maybe the added depth helped to make the action clearer.

Unfortunately the plot was fairly boring and the characters were about as shallow as it’s possible to get. In fact, it was largely the characters from Aliens — including Sigourney Weaver herself — fighting the Corporation and their unethical ways. They had a knuckle-head military guy, who appears to be a subtle blend of Duke Nukem and Kilgore from Apocalypse Now. No, I tell lie, there was nothing subtle there at all. They had a sleazy company guy and they had a mining operation set up to gather Unobtainium. I couldn’t help but snigger that they actually called their precious metal unobtainium. I wonder if they use it to make MacGuffins?

I read Jane Eyre and now I finally understand The Eyre Affair. The “original” ending in The Eyre Affair is not the real one, and the one which gets created is the real one (to some approximation: there are no time-travelling super-villains).

I was getting worried as the book went on because it seemed so much like the rubbish ending from The Eyre Affair was going to be the real one. That Jane really was going to India to be a missionary’s wife to the detestable St John Rivers. But she pulls it back from the brink.

So now that I’ve thoroughly spoiled the book for you, what’s it actually about? Well, it’s your standard fare of feisty young lass being brought up by an aunt who hates her. She’s sent off to school to have some docility and meekness beaten into her, which thankfully doesn’t work. Then there’s stuff about growing up and falling in love. It sounds bland in these terms but it’s pretty riveting when you’re inside it.

I picked up two books at last month’s book group but it’s taken me a wee while to get through this first one. It wasn’t the rollicking read I was hoping for.

Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs is about a group of programmers in the early 90s who leave Microsoft for a Silicon Valley startup. It’s populated by the usual nerdy stereotypes — bearded millionaires, basement dweebs, greasy marketing guys and social misfits.

microserf (day 99)
© Jenny Spadafora

Tragically, none of it seems remotely interesting. All these smart people say nothing very interesting at all. The computer game which they create is not very interesting. Nothing very interesting happens to them in the creation of the game. It reaches completion without any hitches or even much in the way of work, as far as I can tell.

Along the way the characters have uninteresting conversations about… well, anything that strikes their fancy. As long as it remains uncontroversial and shallow they’ll talk about it — TV series, junk food, roads and buildings. But if there’s anything to be gleaned from these conversations it’s probably wrong. Even the one topic of conversation you would assume the techies could manage, computers, remains strangely beyond them. Who could seriously say something like “your body is your hard drive” who knew what either was?

The book is written as a diary, interspersed with pages of stream-of-consciousness word association. Nothing else irritated me quite as much as the word-association pages, because nothing else was quite so explicity saying look how goddamn deeeeeep I am.

In the last dozen pages the shallow characters of these people is thrown into stark relief, as something truly emotional and affecting happens. This really just illustrates how pointless the previous couple of hundred pages was, as we really know nothing about these people other than their ability to make dull conversation.

If you want to compare this tedious nonsense to something that is at least a real diary of a real programmer at a real startup, Jamie Zawinski has published diary excerpts from the early days of Netscape (then Mosaic). He at least mentions the programming once in a while.

So, now that this disappointment is over I’m going to start something which has been recommended by more people, Jane Eyre. This will also help me to put another recent book into its proper context.

One of the great discoveries we made when we saw Thea Gilmore live was her support act, solo acoustic guitarist Dan Arborise. I bought his album Around in Circles at the merchandise stall because I was particularly taken with his song To The Sea. It is a really beautiful collection of songs which I can totally recommend.

I bought his second album for Helen’s birthday. It’s called Of Tide & Trail. I haven’t got totally inside it yet but it seems a bit more vicious than his previous disc. Some swearing and pointed lyrics in songs like You’ll All Get What’s Coming To You. You have to listen carefully to find them though: on the surface it’s still beautiful music.

Of course you could say the first album wasn’t short of shocking thoughts: “what do you do when you find that everything that you’ve been taught to love is a lie?”.

Last weekend Mat invited us round for an evening of bad — nay, terrible — movies, centred around his bargain purchase of Mega Shark versus Giant Octopus. We also saw a bit of Batman & Robin that was telly at the time, and I Know Who Killed Me, a horror movie.

Mega Shark really was as bad as we all imagined. The acting was just short of terrible, but the overall artistic vision was disastrous. It’s amazing how many “armed guards” there were in this movie, standing in the background in laboratories and offices, all wearing dark glasses despite the moody lighting.

I took particular enjoyment from the “science” scene, in which the marine biologists mixed arbitrary liquids in test tubes until they found that right combination that luminesced. (Don’t worry, it wasn’t all taxing science in the laboratory: there was time for a sex scene in the supply cupboard. Unusually, it’s legitimate to say that it was a necessary part of the plot.)

The shark and octopuses were a bit lacklustre. I was hoping for some old-school giant rubber tentacles reaching over boat decks and maybe some stop-motion or something. Instead we were treated to the same three clips of shark swimming, shark fighting octopus, octopus swimming, in various combinations. It was just like watching Saturday morning cartoons again.

The sizes and capabilities of the monsters are ludicrous to say the least. How fast does a shark have to be swimming when it leaves the water in order to overtake — and maul — a cruising 747? Answers on a postcard.

The title Mega Shark versus Giant Octopus doesn’t hide any aspect of the film from you. It’s exactly as you imagine. I Know Who Killed Me is another daft title but this one was apparently meant with all sincerity. Lindsay Lohan is abducted by a serial killer and then Lindsay Lohan turns up a few days later claiming to be a different Lindsay Lohan but bearing all the wounds which identify this particular serial killer.

This film wasn’t as bad as I expected. I don’t know if that’s because of drastically lowered expectations, or whether the elements of goodness shone through the rubbishness. Lohan did win two Golden Raspberry Awards for it, tying first and second place for Worst Actress, which I think is a bit harsh. She was far from the worst thing about this film.

Last night I saw a pilot for a modern version of the 80s classic Knight Rider. It was about as rubbish as you’d imagine, though the Hoff got a little cameo as the main dude’s absent father. And they ended on the original theme tune. But the rest of it was still crap. Reimagined, reworked and rebooted series can work very well — see Star Trek: TNG, Battlestar Galactica — but the real work is not done by the computer graphics people. You need good stories, believable plots, interesting characters! Wikipedia reveals that the series had one (shortened) season and was dropped. Hardly surprising.

I’m looking for more so-bad-it’s-good movies if you have something to recommend(!). Fixed in my mind is Battlefied Earth. Any others?

We’ve been pretty rubbish at doing stuff in the Festival this year. We’ve seen a couple of things and only managed that because Helen’s dad arranged everything. In the last fortnight we saw:

• Looking for Eric

  This doesn’t really count as a Festival event because it’s just a film which was on at the Filmhouse. But it was really good so I’m putting it here.

  It’s got Eric Cantona guest starring as Eric Cantona, as the fairy godmother/spirit guide for a struggling postman. It’s directed by Ken Loach, and is that typical triumph-over-adversity plot which makes for funny and warming cinema.

• Polly Paulusma et al.

  An acoustic night at Medina, and all the acts were completely unknown to me. Polly headlining and support from various others including local newbies Mayhew. I’m sure I recognised two of the band members.

• Nick Harper

  The second unknown. I really enjoyed his show, though I’m easily drawn to an artist who’ll sing the intro to a song unaccompanied while restringing their guitar. He played with just an acoustic guitar, and a mixture of floaty, shoegazing songs and angry, energetic songs.

  He was a bit pissed and very garrulous, but wasn’t nearly as drunk and annoying as some of the audience. I can kind of forgive Helen and Ken not enjoying themselves so much because of the twerps sitting behind, stomping out of time on the ricketty seats. I had a lot of fun though.

Have you seen any interesting new musicians lately?

I’ve just come to the end of Derek Robinson’s Goshawk Squadron, a sort of Catch 22 for First World War pilots in the Royal Flying Corps.

It’s a short book that drops the reader straight into the scene: an airfield in France, some miles behind the Western Front; unreliable planes; barely-trained pilots; jolly good chaps. It’s about well-educated English fellows who like cricket and wanted to do medicine and couldn’t dream of shooting someone in the back or taking part in something that’s not a fair fight. (Think Lieutenant George from Blackadder.) And how these men learn that war isn’t a fair fight and die regardless.

It’s not a harrowing book. There is no great trauma or emotional knife that gets twisted inside you. The characters drift through the book in a surreal manner very similar to the action of Catch 22. But slowly the force of the story picks you up and carries you aloft. So the inevitable fall at the end still leaves you a bit winded. It’s a completely compelling book. I’ve had trouble putting it down lately. Now it’s done and I don’t really want to read anything else until I’ve recovered a bit.

Another book down! I am now officially either a Terminator or a Cylon, though I never saw a Terminator relaxing with a good book so we’ll go with Cylon for now. (For context, see this comment.)

The latest book was The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. (Is that just like Ford? Or is it supposed to be pronounced Effin’ Ford?) It’s a light-hearted comedy detective novel, with little shots of science fiction and surreal horror. Robert Rankin meets Lewis Carroll and Douglas Adams.

I read Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho a few years ago. (I definitely recommend it but it’s categorically not for the squeamish or faint-of-heart.) Many chapters are devoted to the main character’s analysis of Whitney Houston and Huey Lewis albums. These chapters meant nothing to me, though I understand from further reading that they were almost entirely fictional. Whole chapters devoted to demonstrating the narrator’s unreliable nature were completely lost on me.

Dodo ancora in viaggio!
©

Reading The Eyre Affair was similarly awkward. The central character is a literary detective, in the sense that she solves crimes to do with books, as well as being a detective in a book. There is a lot of detail about books in the alternate world of The Eyre Affair, but I’ve never read any of the books! What a doofus I am! You’ll get a lot more out of this book if you’ve read Jane Eyre and maybe Martin Chuzzlewit before. Alas I have not.

But this is not a criticism, except of me being ill-read. I enjoyed the book a lot. It was alternately subtle and slapstick. If you like witty wordplay and easy heroics this is your book. If you enjoy characters with silly names doing outlandish jobs, this is your book. If you love villains who revel in their own lack of morals, and know just when to employ a mad cackle, this is your book. If you enjoy time travel in fast cars and characters from novels coming to life, this is your book. And if you like dodos, how would you like one as a pet?

Last month Helen’s mum picked up a copy of Quicksilver for a book group, but chose the wrong Quicksilver. (I don’t know which one she was supposed to buy, but I can only hope it wasn’t quite as long as this one!). She passed along to us the one she hadn’t meant to buy — Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson.

I enjoyed Quicksilver in the same way I used to enjoy Saturday afternoons watching the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. There’s nothing to beat a good fictionalised retelling of history. And Neal Stephenson’s stories are tinged with enough science fiction that when you read up on some fact or other and discover it to be true it makes things that much more fun.

The story is set in the mid-17th century — the newly-crowned Charles II and the newly-created Royal Society are important features of the story. The events of 1660-odd onward are recounted from the view of a not-brilliant Natural Philosopher, a vagabond and an escaped Turkish slave.

Apart from a much greater familiarity with Restoration-era England and the European royal family (let’s face, it is just one family) I also picked up more interesting facts like the origin of the word “dollar” and the surgical method for removing bladder stones. Which, not coincidentally, are also known as calculi.

The book is exciting — Plague! Fire! Invasion! — and devious, held together with encrypted letters and metaphors. There are interludes of absurdity, such as chapters written in the style of a Restoration comedy, and others devoted to slight-veiled descriptions of important scientific discoveries. The events of the story never seem to stray too far from reality.

If you’re looking for something engrossing, irreverent and enriching to get your mind around, this might well be the book you need.

Despite being over 900 pages long, this book comprises only the first part Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle series. I’m really looking forward to getting the next two, The Confusion and The System of the World.