alexsarll: (Default)
Went to the Globe last night, my first time there. I'm sure that as a sunny day fades to evening, As You Like It would be magical there. Last night, even seated and out of the rain ourselves, it was mainly a lesson in why people who are being bugged use running water to muffle sound; if an actor wasn't facing towards you, you couldn't hear them. Or if you could, it was such an effort to follow the words that you couldn't get any emotion out of them, only bare meaning. We bailed at the interval to go pub, and then I headed North to 23.3 Pints Day. It's culture too.

It was watching In Bruges which reminded me that for ages I'd been meaning to read Georges Rodenbach's Bruges-la-Morte, one of those books I kept seeing mentioned in promising contexts. And it is the melancholy Symbolist classic I was promised, albeit with the usual problem that there's a certain seriousness in French decadent literature which makes it very hard to translate into earthy old English without inadvertent comedy. Plotwise, it's Vertigo minus the action, as a mournful widower sees a young woman who looks just like his lost beloved. But as the title suggests, really it's all about the city:
"It is as if the frequent mists, the veiled light of the northern skies, the granite of the quais, the incessant rain, the rhythm of the bells had combined to influence the colour of the air; and also, in this aged town, the dead ashes of time, the dust from the hourglass of the years spreading its silent deposit over everything."
...to the extent that I think this might be the first book I've read by a non-Briton which really felt like psychogeography. For sure, there are plenty of American tales where a city is a character - I'm thinking particularly of New York in Richard Price's Lush Life or Woody Allen's Manhattan. But it's only ever *a* character, even if the lead character; somewhere between the old frontier tradition of rugged individualism (where the lead will always be bigger than the city) and the quest for the Great American Novel (where the city will always be standing in for the nation). In Iain Sinclair's London, or Will Self's, or Patrick Hamilton's, London is *the* character; everyone else is either an emanation of it, or a miniscule pest scurrying among its interstices. I've seen it attempted with other places in Britain, of course - Alan Moore's Northampton, Bryan Talbot's Sunderland, Jarvis Cocker's Sheffield - but while these places may be less overwhelming, they still define their lesser characters like a king defines his court. Of course, by the author's attempt to define the city, he covertly reasserts himself (and it is usually a man, isn't it? Not that I buy some of the more culture-of-fear notions about why women have been less often involved in the psychogeographical project). Even in fantasy, most of the great cities are aspects of London - Ankh-Morpork, Viriconium, New Crobuzon. The best American fantastic city is Gotham - and all the best stories of Gotham are by Brits.

I've also finished Thomas Disch's The Genocides, an alien invasion/end of the world story for people who find JG Ballard and John Wyndham too optimistic. The aliens don't war on us; they simply plant their crops, which out-compete and thus extinguish the vast majority of Earthly life, and then send automated drones to get rid of the few human 'pests' which survive that. Such humans as struggle on are reduced to the status of worms within an apple, yet a few have enough idiotic Protestant work ethic yet remaining to believe that Something Must Be Done. The mood is somewhere between the Jacobeans, Lovecraft and the myth of Sisyphus; one is surprised not so much that Disch killed himself, as that he could wait 40 years after writing this before doing so.

Oh, and GBH did remember to blame the Right in the end. Phew.
alexsarll: (crest)
It's not often I find myself wishing PG Wodehouse books had footnotes, but as I sat reading the first Blandings in the twilight of Stationer's Park, I found myself deeply puzzled. A young lady suggests to the protagonist that if he looks at the ads in the paper, he may find something more congenial than the job he hates. He looks, but is disappointed to find only a series of philanthropists, keen to share their fortunes. How is that a bad thing? Was this the 1915 equivalent of a Nigerian email scam?

I've already mentioned that, given the acclaim Alan Bleasdale's received as a social realist, I was surprised to find less moral ambiguity in his GBH than in Torchwood: Children of Earth. I'm now more than halfway through GBH and would further add that Torchwood was much more psychologically realistic in its portrayal of how power corrupts, and how the struggles of political entities destroy the little human lives caught between them. But what really astonished me was that Children of Earth also had significantly less Doctor Who fanw@nk than GBH, in whose fourth episode crucial scenes in a hotel take place against the background of a fan convention, with drunken Earth Reptiles and Cybermen cavorting around, and eventually a Dalek pulling Polly while chanting "FOR-NI-CATE'.
I'm still watching, mind. It may be a pantomime, but Robert Lindsay and Michael Palin are giving such performances that it still compels.

Even in this age of reunions and reissues, I never thought 2009 would find me writing about Angelica, not least because I was never that bothered about them in the first place. But lo and behold, the headliners at last night's 18 Carat Love Affair gig (not entirely convinced by the whole drummer-in-front-of-stage idea, though I appreciate their reasoning) were the Angelica singer's new band. Just her and a drummer, who had a bike basket on the front of his kit, and a harness thing with recorders in so he could blow and drum at the same time. At one stage she hit the drums too with what appeared to be a skipping rope. Yes, they were fairly twee, as it happens. If you wish to investigate further, they're called The Lovely Eggs.

On Monday, in a charity shop, for 99p (well, a quid since they had no pennies) I found a copy of the old Neil Gaiman-conceived shared-world anthology The Weerde: Book of the Ancients. Which has an early Charles Stross story* I fancied rereading, and which I also knew was worth rather more than a quid. This copy was further signed by one of the authors, Liz Holliday, "To Alison, with thanks".
Between the pages of the Stross story, I found an autumn leaf. On which, in silver ink, "To Jess, Happy Xmas, love from Alison".
Now I don't think I can bear for it to be passed on again. Which is why, among the careers closed to me, is that of eBay trader.

*Interesting to read something of his from 1993, before he could write about the internet and expect anyone to have a clue what he was talking about. Yet his 'Red, Hot & Dark' nicely prefigures the Laundry books, with its intersection of ancient horrors, bureaucracy and espionage. Some of the themes of 'The Missile Gap' are here too, in particular the idea of communism as another preconception about the world which can be shattered by alien contact.

December 2017

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