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July 18th, 2008
01:57 pm - Holiday begins
I am just setting off for Brittany now. Catch 11pm ferry from Plymouth to Roscoff etc. I have packed a surfeit of books. My son has decided to come with us which I am glad of.
The last few weeks have been so stressful that I hardly have had a chance to think about this break, just endure until it arrives, and now it has arrived.
A very special thank you to ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) happytune for helping me over the recent difficult times and also for taking care of my cats (with V my friend from work) which allows me to get away for a couple of weeks.
See you all in August.
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10:57 am - The Light is Tearing Me to Pieces
I have seen people on my f-list post links to the trailer for Watchmen, but I haven't been looking. I didn't want to be disappointed-to-enraged.
But in the end I succumbed and - wow - it actually looks really promising. Watch it here. If only, if only, they made films like they do trailers, abandoning exposition and characterisation for dream-like enchantment. Perhaps I need to get spaced out before I watch it.
The Terminator trailer also looks good (T3 having being utter shite). Quantum of Solace looks good.
And making it four for four iainjclark links to a trailer for a movie I hadn't hear of: Outlander, which is vikings vs aliens starring John Hurt. Sounds fab.
Oh. I am setting myself up for so much disappointment aren't I? But I can't help it, it's like supporting the England football team. Blockbuster movies I know you will never let me down again how I love you. What?
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July 17th, 2008
04:36 pm - Punishment of Luxury
In 1979 my favourite band was Punishment of Luxury (we used to call them Punilux). Lefty SF influenced punk rock. Their LP Laughing Academy was wonderful. Well, I thought so as a teenager.
There's an article on them in the Guardian today. God that takes me back. I saw them play live just once and I loved them.
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03:59 pm - Life is a pure flame and we live by an invisible sun within us
I think you'll like the cover designs for the Penguin Great Ideas series. A range of texts all of which are 'must-reads'. The covers combine lovely typography, beautiful design, and excellent choice of quotes from each text.
Series 1
Series 2
Series 3
My heading is from Thomas Browne's Urn Burial (full text here) That's a lovely quote but one of the least successful designs. Most of the others are a lot more elegant, eg. Darwin, Nietzsche, Woolf.
(Nabbed from the side-bar at Making Light)
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July 14th, 2008
06:59 pm - 600 years ago
A quiz, nabbed from i_smell_shite: Who would I be in 1400AD?
( Read more... )
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04:40 pm - The neural impact of Shakespearean language
Here is a very interesting article on the neural effect of poetic language: specifically 'enallage' - the use of words which are semantically familiar but syntactically jarring:
What is now called functional shift or word-class conversion ... when one part of speech is suddenly transformed into another with a different function but hardly any change of form. It sounds dull but in performance is almost electrically exciting in its sudden simple reach for a word. For example: an adjective is made a verb when in The Winter's Tale heavy thoughts are said to 'thick my blood'. A pronoun is made into a noun when Olivia in Twelfth Night is called 'the cruellest she alive'. Prospero turns adverb to noun when he speaks so wonderfully of 'the dark backward' of past time; Edgar turns noun to verb when he makes the link with Lear: 'He childed as I fathered.'
Subjects were wired up to an electroencephalogram, and read versions of a line from Coriolanus (hurrah!):
( Read more... )
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July 11th, 2008
03:18 pm - What has he got in his pockets?
This autumn on the BBC Andy Serkis and David Tennant to play Albert Einstein and Arthur Eddington, the Quaker scientist who advocated Einstein's theories in England. Might be good.
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July 10th, 2008
10:17 pm - The Mist
The Mist is an interesting film. It resembles Starship Troopers in many ways: it's about people fighting massive bugs, it's a fairly close recreation of an older type of SF, and it's a rather broad left wing allegory wrapped round right wing iconography. But which is the heart of the film, the lefty parable or the right wing metaphor? And is it ironic or not? Also, like Starship Troopers it's extremely silly, with rather cheap actors (and Frank Pembleton - yay).
In other ways The Mist is nothing like Starship Troopers. It resembles a black and white cold war 1950s SF film, rather than a lurid golden age SF pulp novel. It's an elevator episode (in fact it's very like that recent Doctor Who set in the bus) not a space opera. It's frugal rather than expensive.
( some spoilers, not awful )
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10:46 am - Quiz meme
From vilakins. The Best Thing quiz...
( Read more... )
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10:42 am - Book meme
Stolen from the_wild_iris, a book meme:
( Read more... )
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July 6th, 2008
09:11 pm - Bad weekend
I had a difficult weekend, helping a friend who has had a very bad experience. Not anyone you will have heard of. Not a person on live journal. Therefore I didn't do any of the things I was planning this weekend. But very late on Saturday night, at this person's house, I watched a recording of the final Doctor Who. It seemed to me that the episode was utterly terrible. It may be that I was just feeling very tired and unhappy.
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July 5th, 2008
08:03 am - CV One
There's a company called 'CV One' which has been set up as a private company to run the precinct in Coventry (postcode CV1 of course) and other council stuff. I'm very annoyed with them at the moment. There are criticisms you can make of the public and the private sector, but surely the worst load of incompetent money-grabbing wankers are those who are funded and protected by government, but affect to be ruthless capitalists. The companies that profited from the Iraq war are the worst of these I suppose. CV One are imps compared to those Beelzebubs. It's just they have frustrated me this week. Twice!
It was supposed to be poetry evening on Thursday, but the Liquid Bar has been closed down. BY CV One. It's the Free Festival in the park this weekend, and it's been ruined, and turned into a stupid fenced-in rock concert instead of a community event. By CV One. Bastards! Why are you spoiling my fun?
( Read more... )
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July 2nd, 2008
03:19 pm - Not a number
Remake of The Prisoner starring Ian McKellen and Jim Caviezel?
Poll #1216175
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: AllGood or Bad?
ETA - broken link fixed now
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July 1st, 2008
03:55 pm - 150 years of enlightenment
'It was on 1 July 1858, 150 years ago today, that the idea of natural selection was first presented to the public in a joint reading of Darwin's and Wallace's papers at the Linnean Society of London'. More info here live webcast here. Exhibition here. Read the Darwin-Russell paper here.
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09:39 am - Books I read in June
June, fewer books than any other month this year. Not sure what was going on for me. I think it's a combination of being very busy at work and at home, and that I was finishing off books I started in May.
Misreadings: Umberto Eco
Translated essays from an Italian magazine. Not that good to be honest. I expect Eco fans will disagree.
The Princess and the Goblin: George McDonald Fraser (audio)
A favourite book from when I was a child, done as audio. It's a Victorian children's fantasy.
All the pretty horses: Cormac McCarthy
I'm still reading this. I am simultaneously attracted and repelled by Cormac McCarthy's writing, which is so painful it's almost like plunging into freezing water.
The country you have never seen: Joanna Russ
This is really interesting, and I might post about it separately when I finish it. It's a collection of SF reviews by Joanna Russ, dating back to the 1960s and 70s. Fascinating, intelligent, prescient, amusing: albeit sometimes a bit irritable and sketchy (like her novels). I think the bit of the book I haven't got onto yet includes essays. Recommended to SF historians and critics.
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June 30th, 2008
11:23 am - Euro 08 Final: Spain vs Germany
An excellent match, and the better team won. The whole Spanish team, but in particular Torres I thought, gave it their full heart. I love to see that. Torres just kept running and running. He's terrifically fast, like Michael Owen used to be. His goal was very courageous. Whereas the German side really got on my nerves.
Before this tournament I didn't think I'd enjoy it, but it has been brilliant entertainment (with one or two dull matches). I think possibly the best team won.
I often do the ironing while I watch telly. It's no problem during dramas, which obviously follow some sort of rhythm which I subconsciously understand, because you just know when to look up, when it's safe to look away. But I tried that for the first 7 minutes last night and it just didn't work. Football doesn't follow a predictable rhythm, but sets it's own structure as it goes, you have to watch it in a different way.
The other thing I find is that football brings back that feeling I was talking about last week, that we live in this narrow band, with the future utterly non-existent. That's because in normal life, things are fairly predictable, so your model of the world includes a model of the future which is almost always pretty accurate, but in football that model is sometimes suddenly overthrown, so you are aware of how unreal the model is.
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June 28th, 2008
08:02 pm - Doctor Who
( spoilers )
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05:39 pm - Readers' Rights
lamentables quotes the Readers' Bill of Rights by Daniel Pennac:
1) The right not to read
2) The right to skip pages
3) The right not to finish
4) The right to reread
5) The right to read anything
6) The right to escapism
7) The right to read anywhere
8) The right to browse
9) The right to read out loud
10) The right not to defend your tastes
I do all of those. What about you?
( poll )
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12:34 pm - Far beyond the pale horizon
This week I have mostly been listening to Virginia Plain by Roxy Music. if you don't know it, or it's a long time since you heard it, it's well worth a listen. So much in there, in a way that is hard to define. Awesome.
The first link above is to the classic Top of the Pops performance of the song. Here are two spoofs of that exact sequence:
From Vic and Bob. Puerile, kind of ugly, and yet funny. Brian Eno is played by Johnny Vegas (duh - thanks ninebelow).
From Big Train. Grown up, complex. I've come back and edited this, because at first I wrote 'not funny'; now I think it is, but it continues past being a straightforward joke. Brian Eno is played by Mark Heep, looking thin and fabulous (he only appears for a second, a couple of times). Also check out Simon Pegg on guitar. Wow.
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June 27th, 2008
04:28 pm - Just the way a kiss should be
nihilistic_kid posted this eight days ago. I didn't post it at the time because I thought, a bit lazy to just copy a piece of writing from someone else's blog. But I've thought of it a lot since then, so here it is:
I pleaded for hours. The babysitter continued to refuse. I threatened to open a vein in my wrist. She remained adamant. Rather asininely I grabbed a Lego piece and sawed on myself with that. Finally a drop of blood appeared and she — the beautiful babysitter — rushed to my side and allowed me a kiss. (I was even able to cop a cheap feel!) Bells went off in my head. Outside, a gaping hole opened in the street and scorpions poured forth. Right behind this came a strange glow that turned the sky as green and alarming as a spinach compote. Meanwhile, every dog in the neighborhood was barking like a maniac, and something big and dark flew down the chimney and commenced to thrash in the corner...just the way I like it, just the way a kiss should be.
— "Chimney"
from Corn & Smoke by Blaster Al Ackerman
I think it's brilliant. Never heard of Blaster Al Ackerman.
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10 (55.6%)
