The Me-me-me-me meme

With a curtsey to Michelle. This has been around and about for such a while that I'm struggling not to feel like the schmuck at the bottom of the pyramid scheme, but, hmm, perhaps the good authors of this site might need a little encouragement.

What is the total number of books you own?

Not very many. Due to a combination of crunchingly mindless bureaucracy (on their part) and inattention (on my part), a few years ago I lost - lost as in 'had taken away from me', not lost as in 'misplaced' - a number of boxes containing maybe 600-700 books, two of which were first editions worth more than a thousand pounds between them. Gah. I'm back up to maybe 80.

What was the last book you bought?

I think it was Return to Reason, by Stephen Toulmin.

What was the last book you read?

Not sure. These days I seem to be good at getting into books but bad at getting out of them. I'm dipping into Neil Gaiman's Smoke and Mirrors, am partway through a Pratchett, and began Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell a while ago. I suspect the last one I actually finished was either Dahl's Danny the Champion of the World, or Pratchett's Going Postal.

What are five books that mean a lot to you?

Striker, by Kenneth Cope

A childhood indulgence. It's a novel spun off a BBC kids' television series from the mid-'70s, about a boy's striving to become a footballer against his father's wishes. As a kid, books were about comfort for me, rather than about expanding horizons. I didn't have all that many; I wasn't really given books as presents, and my parents didn't have books around them except for the occasional airport pulp. But that was okay, because I just read and re-read what I had, and was very happy with that. Every so often I'd head to bed early and read Striker from cover to cover, typically finishing, exhausted but fulfilled, in the wee small hours. The familiarity was the thing; I could escape into my own private world for a while, and I loved that. Out of print, I'm sure, but Amazon or abebooks might find you a copy.

The Sirens of Titan, by Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut's best, and it gets better with re-reading. It has exactly the right idea about humanity's significance in the universe. Vonnegut doesn't do moving very often, but the last scene is profoundly so.

The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins

Dizzyingly brilliant. It unfolds with the precision and elegance of a Chinese puzzle box, and you won't ever see the world the same way again. It's one thing to have a vague idea of what evolution is, how it works, and what the implications of that are, but it's quite another to see it with the clarity that drips from every one of Dawkins's words. He lays into theism more explicitly elsewhere, but this is where his assault began, hammering away at the idea that complexity needs design, and that beauty in nature requires a guiding hand. If I could choose to write like anyone, it'd be Dawkins.

Bridge of Birds, by Barry Hughart

Because it's a bloody masterpiece, and because hardly anyone has heard of it. You'll laugh and cry and gasp with wonder, sometimes all at the same time.

So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, by Douglas Adams

It's even more patchy and undisciplined than most of Adams's stuff - which is saying something - but his best fiction writing is here, because it's a love story that mirrored a love in his own life, and those emotions tempered his sometimes-glib cleverness, alloying it with a humanity and optimism that's conspicuously missing from earlier books.

Suds

Back from working my way through a mountain of dirty clothes at the laundromat this afternoon. The inconvenience of not having our own machines is noted, but still, I've always found something oddly pleasing in the ritual trek. It's made all the more significant when almost everything wearable one owns begins dirty and winds up clean, folded and ready for action.

There's a sense of quiet contemplation in a laundromat - and this has been my experience wherever I've lived - that's very appealing. One gets a couple of hours effective privacy, whilst sharing in a commonality of purpose. It - yes, I can hear you out there thinking this - almost has the shape of a religious observance. In that one emerges cleansed, it's a confessional of sorts. It's also a meditation: a drift with Dreft. And it flattens societal strata into a single, simple class.

It sometimes reminds me of Casualty, in a way that might make no sense at all. The programme is only ostensibly about medical matters. It's really about injury as the catalyst for catharsis. Lives are serendipitously pushed to crisis by injury and the pieces are thrown into chaos, from which trees the wood finally begins to emerge. Relationships are rescued; long-overdue decisions are taken with fresh energy. Mutatis very much mutandis, I imagine the same being true of a laundromat setting. Where Casualty is about the washing of metaphorical dirty laundry, in my laundromat show - call it Suds - things get fixed by washing real laundry. Hey, who needs a metaphor when you've got the real thing. And which of us doesn't feel better about life with a drawer full of clean underwear. See?

Scarecrows to the left of me, Jokers to the right. Here I am, stuck in the meta with you.

I think this is one of my problems: I'm stuck for too much of the time in the meta-level processing of stories. Now, as I could bore on the subject for hours, I think meta-level story processing probably overwhelms story-level processing in a modern culture. Rather than relating to story characters as people whose emotions we might share, or in whose situations we might empathetically see reflections of our own, we compare stories with stories: we ask how this author typically constructs plot to give us clues about the story we're currently processing; we assess the likely future of a character in a film plot based largely on the above-the-titleness of the actor; and so on, massively so in Hollywood genre-stuff. The meta-stuff is all the more powerful for being largely un-reflected-on. (Which doesn't of course preclude screwing subversively with those meta-level expectations. LL Cool J's cook character in better-than-it-ought-to-be Deep Blue Sea very explicitly discusses the meta-level expectations for his character, based on his being black. It's a bit of meta-meta, and fun exactly because it reminds us how much meta there is.)

Or is this just me? Or is this just me to such a great extent? What happens for me is that, as I've alluded to before, I find myself moved by structure, rather than character. My own meta-level story-processing completely squishes any character-level response. It makes me worry sometimes that we're wearing out stories; that there's nothing new; that we can only process stories as they relate to other stories. There's an innocence gone somewhere. Maybe it's okay to be moved primarily by structure, though. I mean, isn't the point to be moved by something, and in the end does it really matter much what it is?

Thinking about this absent-mindedly tonight after seeing Batman Begins, which I thoroughly enjoyed but wasn't blown away by. The usual meta-level gripes are what I came out with: the structure is weakened by having too many bad-guys; the final third has a clunkiness that the rest of the film doesn't deserve, as the plot-gears crash backwards and forwards. Christian Bale is very very good, though. He's been hiding himself for a while in solid but wilfully unstarry roles; that's not going to last much longer, I think. Here's the thing, though: Shane Rimmer. Shane fucking Rimmer. Biggest smile of the film was seeing him at the end.

Oh, and in other news, I've hardly been able to rouse myself to write anything about Sith since I saw it. It's awful, in that airless way Lucas seems to have made his very own. A handful of scenes are so criminally bad it's hard to believe they're not meant to be some sort of fiendishly-clever internal parody. The critics who've praised it must be on particularly good recreational drugs. Of those I've read, only Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian and Anthony Lane in the New Yorker got it right. Lane:

Meanwhile, the Chancellor of the Republic, Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), is engaged in a sly bout of Realpolitik, suspected by nobody except Anakin, Obi-Wan, and every single person watching the movie.

Ay-yup. Here's a clue, George, from Screenwriting 101: It's okay to make a film that fills in the back-story of another film. It's cool, really. But you've got to give the new film its own back-story. Trust me. That's just how it is.

The Law Train

I don't have good dreams. Never have. Nor do I have 'bad' dreams, except on extremely rare occasions. No, what I have are weird, surreal, fucked-up dreams. I also have the usual recurring dreams sometimes about running away from Something Bad, but here's the thing: I figured out long ago that, though running forwards away from some terror is practically impossible, because as you might entirely expect I forget how to run, all I have to do is turn around and run backwards. I can always remember how to do that. Maybe something to do with facing the terror?

This morning, after I'd gone to sleep for the third time after a night of sleeping not particularly well:

I'm on a train. Lots of people, seemingly young and American, but that makes sense; it's where I live. The train itself doesn't seem out of the ordinary, but it's very busy. We're all together, it seems. There's this one slightly creepy young man, I think he has a camera or a camera-phone, and he's acting like he knows me, talking about stuff we've done together, or are going to do together. I don't think I know him, so I brush him off, to everyone's amusement - they think he's creepy too, apparently - and then he seems to continue hassling some of the girls. But soon he disappears. We look out of the window, and one of the guys - reminds me of Johnny Depp? Or actually is Johnny Depp? - looks out of the window and admires a place selling trailers (except they're much more like British-style caravans). Says he'd love one of those. I can see that, apart from the trailer place, we're travelling through a desert wilderness.

Walking around, a girl beckons me slightly conspiratorially. She seems to be a friend, but I don't remember her. She tells me that she left some documents for me. She names them, but the names don't mean any sense to me. I feel both relief and foreboding. She says that she left them with my stuff. I'm not entirely sure what she means, so I go looking. I start to realise that we are all together. We're on the train heading for some sort of training to become - lawyers, I think. I get the impression I'd had second thoughts and tried to back out, but that the girl had believed she'd done me a favour by keeping me in the system. I'm partly glad she did - it's something to be doing - but also realise that this isn't going to be right for me. Way too many people. The train is very very social, and I feel, as usual, like an outsider.

I wander around looking for my stuff. At this point the train becomes unfeasibly wide. The carriages are like hotel rooms. It's getting dark. At the end of the train I find what looks like a dormitory. Some young men are already there, settling into bed. On each of the other beds is a pile of documents, each named as belonging to one of the students. I look through them all, but don't find mine. Heading back to the main part of the train, I realise that the girls' dormitories are way at the other end of the train, to keep us apart. I see some of them in pyjamas, doing girl things and getting ready for bed. Then I find a second boys' dormitory. It's dark, smaller than the other one, and feels very cold. The walls are lined with shelves full of something I can't make out at first, but which turn out to be packages of wood. I assume it's to fuel the train. Through the window I see the desert; it's cold and dark now, but the train keeps steaming along.

I find the bed with my stuff on it.

Dear Macy's

Those store guides of yours. You know, the ones by the elevators. Well, perhaps this hadn't occurred to you, but they're actually metaphors. They don't just tell clueless shoppers what's on which floor. No, they also metaphorically represent the topology of the store. Cool, huh? So when your store guides show the first floor above the second floor, and the second floor above the third floor, but you then carelessly put the actual first floor below the actual second floor, and the actual second floor below the actual third floor, what you're doing is messing with my head. Yes, yes, I get that they're just signs, but, well, nothing's just a sign.

Would it be too much trouble to ask that you move the first floor to above the second floor, and the second floor to above the third floor, and so on, so that you unbreak the metaphor? Too much to ask?

Okay, then maybe you could just fix your boneheaded signs instead. Thanks in advance!

Random notes

Some random notes from last month's LA Times Festival of Books, before I forget the two days of peaceful rambling up and down the hills of UCLA. How relatively little fiction, for a start. How much space given to self-help books and self-publishing organisations (if that's not contradictory).

Ricky Jay was endearing at only perhaps a third of his capacity, pushing his new book on bizarre acts and playbills of long-ago vaudeville and variety. His talk was captivating mostly just to be in the presence of a man whose demeanour is that of a genteel mobster, who could project a playing card directly into your brain stem for some small violation of magic etiquette and then continue civilised discourse as if nothing had happened. I did get an answer to a question that'd been bothering me for a while: why does he sometimes waste his time with parts in films that are obviously beneath him? As this fantastic New Yorker article makes pretty clear, it's because Jay has a genteel yet massively expensive habit.

A not terribly compelling SF panel with Harry Turtledove (a geek who grew older but not exactly up), Paul Sammon and Michael Reaves, hamstrung primarily because the panel had been given a pretextual topic that none of them cared about much. The whole affair was livened up considerably by the presence at the end of the table of Richard Matheson, who played Dormouse in this Tea Party, slumbering beneath a flat cap rather than by the tea pot, and beginning most of his answers by asking to be reminded what the question was. I suspect it was a little early in the day for all of them.

Nicholas Meyer completely rescued a parochial panel on Hollywood business with dry appeals to the audience and deadpan punchlines. I can see why he likes to pepper his genre scripts with quotes from the classics (famously giving Moby Dick to Khan in Star Trek II); it's 'cause he does that himself. After Linda Obst and Peter Bart had rambled endlessly, he'd cut their feet from beneath them with a line of pith. Bring a writer to a panel with producers, and the writer'll win, I think. And not one but two profoundly tedious grandstanding sermons masquerading as questions from the floor from (out of work, it seemed) actors with way too much baggage. Time and a place, guys, time and a place.

And then a funny, gentle, almost hatefully convivial panel of women writers (Paula Woods, Elizabeth Berg, Chitra Divakaruni, Janet Fitch, Lisa See) talking about their readers and their experiences as readers. It set me to wondering about general differences between male and female writers and if there actually are any. Is there anything to the notion that women writers are more likely to seek to share, to enlighten, to illuminate - aspects of reading that bring people together, you might say - whereas male writers are more likely to seek to achieve a degree of mastery over their readers, to be puppeteers of plot and affect? Might female writers care more for the connection with the reader then the male writer, who is more concerned with story as artefact?

I caught a reading by Laurie Notaro in a windswept outdoor venue that was nevertheless packed. She was funny, but the sense was always of trying a bit too hard. I think she'd kill to write like David Sedaris.

And then winding up with Eric Idle at the cavernous Royce Hall. He began with a couple of lame oppressed-husband jokes that might have come from the '50s, but warmed up nicely later on. My impression these days about the Pythons is that it's amazing they stuck together as long as they did. Despite some commonality of class and education, they're such vastly different personalities. Gilliam is a visual artist, Jones is a scholarly historian, Palin is an actor and wanderluster, Cleese is an amateur psychologist, but Idle is really just a throwback cheeky-chappie performer. I don't think his bullshit detector is quite as functional as most of the others', so he just pours out the shtick and hopes some of it hits.

Woof bloody woof

Now that it seems Bad Wolf spoilers are creeping out of the BBC, it might be time to stick my neck out a bit before all is revealed.

But first, a bit of appreciation, because the whole affair is a wonderful exercise in viral something-or-other. Not marketing, exactly. Just viral fun, I think. Most viewers couldn't care less, I'm sure, but for the geeks both sides of the camera it's been a lovely game of observation, detection, and some fantastically extrapolated guesswork. It's three-dimensional story-telling.

That the Bad Wolf might be The Doctor himself - that the person we've been watching all through the series might have been somehow substituted or taken over, only for the true Doctor to prevail in the end - is an idea dazzling in its mind-fuckness, but way too daring for the programme's remit. Likewise for Rose. And both of those despite the playful little red herrings that have been seeded: Rose as Red Riding-Hood and such.

Nah, Captain Jack now seems obviously to be the key. His two years of missing memories were insufficiently motivated by the last story, and promise further utilisation. He's a time traveller, which provides endless possibility. He lured The Doctor and Rose to his time and place on Earth, for reasons which might end up being even more complicated than the gothic gas-mask plot. He's now with them, and would serve very nicely as a Trojan horse.

I don't think it's him, though, otherwise his innocent soliloquising at the end of the last episode would have to have been implausibly meta. So he's either carrying something, in the manner of Twin Peaks' Bob; or he's being controlled, quite possibly without his knowledge, by some other bad-guy.

It's the Bad Wolf because "Who's afraid of the big bad wolf", of course, not because it's going to be particularly lupine. It's something The Doctor is afraid of, probably connected with the Time War that's been bubbling under as a bit of fertile back-story. Some foe from that war, who is using Captain Jack as a Trojan horse in order to get to The Doctor to kill him. That's my guess, anyhow.

I somehow doubt it'll be an enemy that we've seen before. I actually hope it isn't, because one thing this series has conspicuously missed is a threat with the weight and character to carry a prolonged narrative. Something notably humanoid, because that just makes for a better conflict. The Master would do, I suppose, but I have a hankering for a new Nemesis, and I have a feeling that Russell would too.

If it is Jack, it might be nice to see him do some mean things to that 'excellent bottom' of Rose's first. Hey, if bisexual characters are okay in kids' programmes, a little bit of meanness to an excellent bottom would seem harmless.

The First Night

Is it just me, or is there some sort of universal law that says whenever you move to a new town/country/whatever, the place you find to eat that first night will be somewhere you never go to again? And not because it's necessarily sucky. Walking around Santa Monica tonight, we passed the first place we ate at here - we pass it every time we walk westwards, and it's only a couple of blocks away. It's a perfectly acceptable little cafe, and yet we've never been there again. I think Something is Going On.

To Seaton Carew, To Seaton Carew

It's age, probably, or the gradual creep of some alien disease, possibly, but I find myself Seaton Carew-ing a whole lot these days:

Seaton Carew [verb]. To begin typing the URL of a website which, moments earlier, seemed quite imperative, only to discover that one can remember neither where one was going, nor why. Analogous to finding oneself in the kitchen with no idea why one is there. When in the kitchen, it typically turns out that one is in fact intent on grazing from the refrigerator. When on the 'net, it typically turns out that one is in fact intent on some scurrilous porn.

Quite a discovery that, Liff-like, the name for the phenomenon was but a golf-ball's drive from North Gare. Oh, and, while I'm in amongst the gazetteer:

Aymestrey [noun]. The inability to spell 'asymmetry'.