Archive for January 2009
Weekend
Saturday morning usually means two things: a) I’ve got a hangover and b) I’ve overcome this to go out and buy the Guardian. It’s doom and gloom in the main section and slim pickings in the rest of the paper at the moment though. About the only noteworthy thing in the whole of today’s newspaper is the fact they have overhauled the Weekend section. It isn’t particularly radical. In fact, it mostly consists of including a lot more white space. However, they have made everything a bit simpler and bolder and it works well despite the fact a cynic might think they were just padding out the magazine in these lean times.
The contents themselves are mostly unchanged. They still start with the relentlessly banal celebrity Q&A, for example. It does have a new general knowledge crossword but it is a bit pointless and also tricky to write on what with the paper being all shiny. Elsewhere on the same page, I got 6/15 on the quiz this week and, more importantly, learnt about the darts player with the best nickname in the world.
I Heart Awards
Adam Roberts is a man with a mission: total internet domination. By my count, he already has eight blogs of his own and that isn’t counting the myriad other venues where his views and reviews appear. Anyway, to further his aims he has just started a new column at Futurismic. His first column is entitled SF Awards – rubbish and it does exactly what it says on the tin (except it doesn’t, really.) As is my wont, I have already reduced this issue to its fundamentals elsewhere but perhaps I should actually say something a bit more substantive. I think awards are great for much the same reason lists are great. These are:
- They generate debate and get people talking about books
- They bring attention to work that people might not otherwise be aware of
- They always pick the wrong work and therefore provoke slapfights
- They satisfy my anal retentive urge to impose order on the universe
- They are brilliant poll fodder
“Alas! when passion is both meek and wild!”
In his introduction to his review of Revolutionary Road, Peter Bradshaw refers to the rehabilitation of the source material:
It was a novel I first opened owing to the compelling evangelism of Nick Hornby, who made one of the suicidal characters in his 2005 novel A Long Way Down carry a copy of the book, so that it could be discovered on his corpse – an inspired continuation of the books romantic, self-sacrificial agony. Hornby almost single-handedly triggered a resurgence of interest in Yates, which led very materially to the emergence of this movie, a serious and intelligent response to the novel.
Now, I’m sure Hornby helped but I would suggest the 2000 Vintage edition of the novel with Richard Ford’s evangelical introduction had rather more to do with it. By the time Hornby’s novel was published it was already canonised in Time’s All-time 100 Novels list.
Otherwise it is a good review, although perhaps he gets a bit carried away whilst describing Kate Winslet’s face later on:
Her face, so powerful in its impassivity, yet with unreadable hints of fear and anger, has something massive and monumental about it up on screen, the sculpted form of a Roman empress: like the gigantic marble head of Faustina the Elder, famously unearthed with the colossal statue of Hadrian in Turkey last year.
As Others See Us XXIII
David Barnett has a post up on the Guardian Book Blog about that old favourite, As Others See Us. I have long held the view that rather than just being harmless smirking at the ignorance of others who Just Don’t Get It this sort of thing is actually indicative of a poisonous persecution complex that hurts the SF community. Barnett pitches his piece in an agnostic tone, it is designed to generate debate rather than impose a view. It is mildly disappointing to see the same old suspects being brought up – Margaret Atwood features prominently – and the same old arguments being re-hashed but the comments to the article are actually some of the more balanced I’ve seen on this issue.
As it happens, Atwood will be publishing another SF novel – The Year of the Flood (Amazon have got the title wrong) – later this year. It appears to be set in the same world as Oryx And Crake or the synopsis references it, at any rate, but the events of that novel don’t seem entirely compatible so it will be interesting to see how it turns out. I am certainly looking forward to it though and hope to review it later in the year.
It seems appropriate to close this entry with this: Margaret Atwood On Science Fiction – The Great Hits.
Zombie Strippers (2008)
The film opens with a news bulletin informing that us that George W Bush has just been elected for a fourth term and that due to the lack of soldiers caused by the dozens of wars the US is fighting across the world scientists are experimenting with re-animating dead tissue. We then immediately cut to a research centre where said experiment has gone very wrong, zombies are loose and an army unit has been sent in to wipe them out. In the course of this one of the unit is bitten and, not wanting to be executed by his colleagues, escapes out of a window. Into a strip club.
This club is called the Rhinocerous which – extraordinarily, bafflingly, pointlessly – is a nod to the play of the same name by Eugène Ionesco. You expect reference to this classic of the Theatre Of The Absurd in a work like The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera, you are less likely to expect it in a work called Zombie Strippers. There is precious like evidence of a deep engagement with the text though, it mostly just does what it says on the tin: there are zombies, there are strippers and there are zombie strippers. After the cheap, crude but mercifully brief introduction we are treated to half an hour of pole-dancing before stripper-in-chief Jenna Jameson gets bitten. As luck would have it, zombies make excellent strippers and soon the dancers want in on the act.
That is about all there is to the film. There are some attempts at humour and some pretence of social commentary but both pitifully weak. I hoped this would be an intelligent exploitation flick like Planet Terror, instead it is unreconstructed exploitation trash with an incredibly thin veneer of postmodern justification over the top. Basically it only exists to allow you will see four pairs of exposed breasts. Once again I’m remind how hard it is to make a good B-movie.
Dream Smaller
Revolutionary Road was the only book of his own that Yates considered a masterpiece, regretting that he’d written it first.
Nick Laird has a great article that is nominally about the release of the Sam Mendes adaptation of Revolutionary Road but is a rich look at the way Yates’s fiction mirrored his life.
Also of interest in today’s paper: Josh Lacey reviews the second volume of Octavian Nothing, Karen Joy Fowler reviews Spirit by Gwyneth Jones and the Guardian start their 1000 novels list (on which Revolutionary Road appears.)
The Black Company
My review of The Chronicles of the Black Company by Glen Cook is up now at Strange Horizons.
It is an omnibus of his first three Black Company novels and the books tugged me back and forth in a couple of directions and I’m not sure how I feel about the finished review so I would be interested in any comments on it from those who have read them. (Niall would kill me if I didn’t say this: leave the comments over on Strange Horizons rather than here.)
Sugar And Spice And All Things Nice
The Pink and Blue Projects by JeongMee Yoon:
The Pink and Blue Projects were initiated by my five-year-old daughter, who loves the color pink so much that she wanted to wear only pink clothes and play with only pink toys and objects. I discovered that my daughter’s case was not unusual. In the United States, South Korea and elsewhere, most young girls love pink clothing, accessories and toys. This phenomenon is widespread among children of various ethnic groups regardless of their cultural backgrounds. Perhaps it is the influence of pervasive commercial advertisements aimed at little girls and their parents, such as the universally popular Barbie and Hello Kitty merchandise that has developed into a modern trend. Girls train subconsciously and unconsciously to wear the color pink in order to look feminine.
Everything Is Nice 