Looking Out To Sea

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.

This month for the book group we’ve both been reading science fiction stories. I had Foundation by Isaac Asimov and Helen read Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. My book was quite short so I ended up reading them both.

I’ll have to give my thoughts to the group next Sunday so I have to work out what they are!

Foundation seemed very old-fashioned, even more old-fashioned than Swallows and Amazons. It really seems to be true that nothing dates faster than our idea of the future. The truth is, Foundation was mostly a Victorian adventure story set in the future — men with moustaches arguing things out over brandy and cigars and taking Science and Religion to the Heathens. For a book about the collapse of a galactic civilisation it really seemed like all the action took place in a single room, like it was really a stage play rather than a drama set across the full length of known space. Each scene was a set-piece where the Protagonist meets the Antagonist and subdues him with Superior Intellect.

The book is a collection of short stories in the lifetime of a small planet at the periphery of the aforementioned galactic empire. The empire is collapsing and various planetary warlords and tinpot dictators are appearing out of the anarchy. Each chapter was published as a self-contained story, each taking place a generation or two after the previous one. The central conceit of the whole series is the invention of “psychohistory”, a statistical method of predicting the behaviour of extremely large groups of people (ie, quadrillions of people). At the start of the first story the inventor of psychohistory predicts the imminent collapse of society and records a series of further predictions which are played back at appropriate points along the thousand-year lifetime of the planet, to coincide with the society overcoming some new problem that threatens that their lives.

Each story takes place as some slow-burning problem comes to a head and just in the nick of time some Übermensch steps into the breach. Every single damn time it looks like their society is about to come a cropper someone with amazing intellect and wit and guile manages to manipulate the situation so the threat is deflected and the force of the attack is used against the attacker. It’s interplanetary political judo, innit?

I read another of the ‘Foundation’ books when I was younger but don’t remember liking or disliking it particularly. It’s strange that it seems so silly when given a fresh reading now that I’m old enough to understand it. I didn’t dislike the stories but they were rather juvenile and not very well written. The characters were interchangeable and I found it fairly difficult to determine who would turn out to be the central character in each story. They were all rather boring people.

The second one was Flowers for Algernon. It’s set in the “present day”, which I guess was some time in the sixties. The story is told through a series of diary-style reports written by Charlie Gordon, a retarded man who later undergoes an experimental procedure to increase his intelligence. The simplicity of this approach is devastatingly effective in the opening chapters. We see the events of Charlie’s life through his eyes, but can infer all the details which he misses from the narration. It’s a really saddening experience to watch Charlie stumble through things and having people who he thinks are his friends take advantage of him.

The Algernon of the title is the lab mouse who was made super-intelligent and which led the scientists in the story to try the technique on humans. Charlie becomes more intelligent but remains emotionally immature, while Algernon begins to regress. By this stage Charlie is clever enough to understand the experiment he was put through and discovers why Algernon — and ultimately Charlie — only had a short-lived brilliance.

The closing chapters of the story follow Charlie’s own regression. It’s sad and sickening, like watching someone lose their faculties to dementia over the course of a dozen pages. The frustration is palpable, as the books around him become harder to understand, his writing skills deteriorate, his concentration drops and his memory fades. It’s a book with many questions and no answers — and it’s hard to even know if the questions are good — but it’s well worth your time.

We’re finished, finally finished. Five seasons of the re-imagined/rebooted Battlestar Galactica. It certainly wasn’t cut short like Firefly, for which we can always be thankful.

What is it? That’s easy — it’s a war story. The main characters are the defenders of the last of humanity, the military crew of the titular spaceship. But there are other places and people too — the civilians that truly make up what is left of the human race, and the enemy who chase them through the stars. It’s an epic, a space opera in the least pejorative sense of the word.

And since it’s written on such a grand scale there is plenty of opportunity to examine the minutiae of life and society — fledgling government, military rule, religion, war propaganda — as well as larger questions of humanity. Like any good science fiction, it provides a safe, removed theatre in which to examine some tricky subjects.

If anyone wants to borrow the complete thing, we have a substantial number of DVDs here. I totally recommend it.

This month’s book at the Science & Society Reading Group was The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, a fairly recent publication edited by Richard Dawkins. It’s a collection of excerpts and articles from twentieth century writing about science — mostly written by working scientists themselves.

The essays were all chosen by Dawkins so it’s not surprising that there’s quite a heavy biology and evolution bias. But there are other exciting things too — Conway’s game of life, an introduction to Shannon’s information theory, and a fair amount of physics and cosmology. There are also the strange and frivolous, poems and fantastical stories, and that category of things which Douglas Hofstadter writes.

I think the only person who finished the book had read it last year and couldn’t remember much about it. The rest of us were still working on it. I think I was the only person not reading through in order, but hopping from article to article depending on what caught my interest. It meant there was a very small overlap between what I had read and what everyone else had read.

I was worried that much of the conversation would be taken up by nature/nurture conversations (which had got quite tedious the previous session when we discussed the movie XXY). It turns out I was foolish and naive — the main topic of conversation was bitching about that Richard Dawkins. Apparently he’s quite opinionated in his introduction; too much for some of my fellow readers anyway. I didn’t really notice this belligerent tone so I guess we just read different passages…

Overall there was a general unease with the book. Many others thought it wasn’t as focussed as it could be, with too many small and disparate ideas. And some people, confusingly, thought it wasn’t challenging enough. Maybe this was a natural effect of a roomful of biologists reading many of the biology-heavy essays at the beginning of the book. I don’t know. But I do feel I have a lot more to read. Every time I brought up the articles which interested me, everyone else hadn’t read them. How disappointing.

One interesting aspect about this book — and this is something I have noticed elsewhere — is the complete absence of the third science. Where is chemistry? Where are the popular writers for chemistry? Even asking chemists seems to draw a blank.

There has been no decision made about what we’ll read next. Suggestions mooted so far have been some philosophy (particularly, Russell’s History of Western Philosophy or some Daniel Dennett, who is easier to tie in with the science focus of the group). In my own reading list I have Gödel Escher Bach and The Annotated Turing, though I fear suggesting the Turing book to a mixed group of readers would not go well!

Does anyone have other “accessible science writing” suggestions I could put forward? In the past they’ve had Bad Science and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Maybe good scientist biographies exist too?

Philip Pullman’s trilogy Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass adapted for the stage. Quite an undertaking. The story is huge, and covers many fantastical worlds. The adaptation for stage does some necessary cutting but still takes two performances, each about 3 hours in length, to tell the story.

We were due to watch it on Sunday (both shows in one day!) with other friends but ended up double-booked. So we passed our tickets on and got new tickets for the Thursday and Friday evening performances. These are my thoughts after each performance. Despite what you may think from reading them, I did enjoy it a lot!

Part 1, Thursday night

I’m quite enjoying it so far. It’s a long production but I haven’t ever felt bored. The story has quite a pace. I’m not convinced it translates very well to the stage though. You have to know the story to work out what’s going on, I think. And obviously there are so many elements that can’t be reasonably represented on stage — the armoured bear fight between Iorek and Iofur is an obvious example — and are better left to the imagination.

There’s quite a big cast of players but sadly the actor playing Lee Scoresby has the worst Texan accent ever concocted. It isn’t even an accent. It’s just a silly, shifting, intangible “voice”. The actor’s ham-fisted attempt at being Texan was getting a lot of laughs, and not in a good way. It was embarrassing, like a bad amateur production.

I’m also not sure about the daemon puppets. Some of them are good — Roger’s collie was particularly good, I thought, and Pantalaimon is generally excellent — but they still fall short of the descriptions. The children’s daemons never change shape, which is odd considering that’s a large part of the story.

Maybe I’m just spoiled by special effects, of course.

Part 2, Friday night

Yesterday was the first performance of part one in Edinburgh. There was another performance earlier today. So why is the first performance of part two so empty? There are two sets of audiences who you’d expect to be here. Maybe it’s just because it’s a Friday night, and people are more likely to have other plans. There are a couple more days after this to see it.

The atmosphere of the performance shifts quite a bit in this half. There is more slapstick, more laughs. The Gallivespians, for example, were extremely silly. I guess there is no way to depict 4-inch tall people with the necessary level of gravitas, so why bother.

The ending of The Amber Spyglass is one of those intensely emotional experiences that leaves a person listless and disconnected for an extraordinary length of time. I know it has that effect on me, which is why I haven’t re-read the book as much as I have the first two. It’s just not worth the emotional anguish. The ending of the play was similarly harrowing. I could hear restrained sniffing coming from all around me, as people just welled up uncontrollably.

I’m glad it’s over, but I’m still rather shocked at the power that ending has over me.

Within the last week we’ve seen Star Trek and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, two science fiction movies with a great deal of difference in the craftsmanship put into them.

Star Trek could also be called The Young James Kirk Chronicles, but in a good way. I’m not mocking Indiana Jones here, after all. This story creates an alternate history for James Kirk and the original crew of the Enterprise, and follows their story from Starfleet Academy. But don’t worry, it’s not the Hogwarts School of Exploration and Astrophysics. They quickly head out to war rather than staring into their own navels.

All the characters from the original set appear, with subtly altered stories to suit the new timeline and to make things a bit more interesting. Kirk’s a tearaway, Spock’s been suffering some playground abuse for being half-human, and Bones… we’ll he’s still a cantankerous pessimist so that’s okay.

It was a really great movie, neatly treading the line between the high camp silliness of the original Star Trek series and a modern action movie. At one or two points they veered into Galaxy Quest territory but they also balanced this with some heavy emotional stuff. Well worth seeing at the cinema.

The contrasting X-Men Origins: Wolverine was terrible on almost every level. The script was leakier than Rab C Nesbitt’s semmit, and you have to use a lot of brainpower not to think about all the ways these people with superhuman powers could have solved their problems earlier.

The story was long and lumpy, which only frenetic action scenes can disguise. The editing was woeful. If you care about spoilers, jump to the end of this paragraph. But there is no good reason why Victor is seen climbing up the outside of the building in Africa because he does nothing up there. There is no good reason why Gambit being elbowed in the face should leave him running across the rooftops. But those scenes still happened, completely without context or explanation.

Even the individual scenes were so terribly cliched it’s hard to remember them without cringing. Surely Hugh Jackman’s got bored of cradling people in his arms and screaming at the sky?

The big secret about this movie is the two separate teaser endings. We didn’t know about them and left the cinema early (very unusual for us, and doubly irritating because of it). The two different prints are distributed randomly between cinemas and the idea is that you see the film twice to catch both endings. Either that or it’s an attempt to create interest in the pirated films, which will probably be available with both endings. Cos really, who’s going to see this dreck twice for the thirty seconds of extra footage?

I’ve just finished Screen Burn, the collection of Charlie Brooker’s TV review columns from the Guardian, collected in book form. In short, if you like Charlie Brooker then you’ll like this.

It was quite interesting for me because it’s been several years since I was a regular TV watcher. Even then, I was never interested in the soaps or reality TV shows for the most part. (With noted exceptions of the hilarity that TMF would occasionally show during the day. Jessica Simpson really is that absurd.) Reading Screen Burn allowed me to live through the worst of dumbed-down TV broadcasting without actually having to watch it.

Most of the programmes were stuff that I have already seen or was not interested in catching. Except when Charlie Brooker gets very excited about 24 about halfway through the book, then the second season comes around — and then the third! The one I haven’t seen! I actually caught a teeny spoiler for the third season completely by accident. I just glanced at the page and bang the information was in my head.

There were a few shows which got excellent reviews but I had never heard of and seem not to have made a big impact. No second series, no transfer to BBC2 from the hinterlands of BBC4.

But mostly, I just read it for the witty rage that is brought to bear on so much of the tedious television programmes. The kind of stuff that I no longer watch.