'huge, queer and tawdry' but 'much admired by the public'

Way behind everyone else, I've just read Vernon God Little and...well, it's a lot better than most of the dross that gets anywhere near a Booker, clearly. It's funny, it has a plot which slightly gets away from it but is nonetheless recognisable as a comedy adventure, it has moments of real power and insight. But, the set-up is fundamentally untrue. The way in which Vernon, the survivor, is scapegoated for a high school massacre - that doesn't happen, does it? I'm not going to claim expertise on every school shooting but this story is about one of the ones which really catch the public imagination - so we're talking Columbine, Virginia Tech, the major ones. And in both of those cases it was taken as read that the dead kids are the guilty kids. The need for a living scapegoat on which Pierre hangs his plot, doesn't exist (or at least not in the sense of a single schoolchild - people blame Hollywood, or Grand Theft Auto, or Marilyn Manson). And he's got the verve that the book still just about works in a way that something similarly flawed in concept like Asimov's 'Jokester' doesn't. But still, that makes it at best a flawed masterpiece, not the best novel of its year.

And partly because there are so many books I haven't got round to, I may have mentioned before that I don't reread much. Well, not prose, anyway - comics and poetry, more so, because they tend to be quicker. On Monday I broke this habit; John Crowley's 'Great Work of Time' had been bugging me for a while, I think perhaps since I read Stross' 'Palimpsest' (which is about the same length, has some of the same themes, and I generally feel may be influenced by it - or even if it isn't, in my head they're companion pieces). I only read the Crowley a little under two years ago, and I did pretty much remember it, but still...rereading didn't feel like a waste of time. I may do more of this. Though at 70-odd pages, obviously this was a very different proposition to a whole novel.

Thought I'd got another Audrey Hepburn classic taped, but of course because The Children's Hour was on late, that meant some arse in the corner of the screen was gesticulating and totally ruining it. OK, she only took up about a sixth of the screen rather than the quarter used by the red-sweatered gimp on Colonel Blimp that time, but still enough to make it unwatchable. Is this why the apparent villain of the group in C4's new disability comedy-drama Cast Offs is the deaf one (I mainly watched because the writers had Skins and Thick of It credits and, while it's not in that league, it's pretty good)? So I ended up with Black Book instead. A hilarious account of Dylan Moran's drunken escapades in the Resistance A depressing bloody film and no mistake. Lest my posts on Hepburn and Nabokov suggest I always start with the obvious work, I was watching this subtitled Verhoeven film having never seen Robocop or Basic Instinct - but, comparing it to Total Recall and Starship Troopers I am forced to conclude that Verhoeven being realistic is far sillier than Verhoeven doing OTT SF. What could have been a claustrophobic little tale of a Jewish woman sleeping with a high-ranking Nazi (played by Sebastian Koch, who seems rather to specialise in such roles) to help her Resistance friends gets increasingly silly as double-cross follows double-cross while she takes far too long to realise that she should be trusting nobody as a general rule, and in particular not the obvious villain of the piece.

Possibly I'm just biased against Logan's Run because I'm 31 and was watching it with a 22-year old. But it really is very silly, isn't it? I mean, even if one takes as given the whole futuristic-utopia-maintained-by-killing-everyone-at-30 bit...why are all of the Sandmen who enforce this situation such abysmal shots? How can a robot which is following its programming but with unforeseen consequences end up cackling maniacally when this results in threats to people, when surely it should be going about its business calmly because it believes it is doing its normal routine? And once again, one feels comparatively mild about the Blue Screen of Death and its compatriots when one sees once more how people in the future thought computers would crash, ie, give it one 'does not compute' and the entire city explodes.
Lovely design work, though. And Jenny Agutter was very pretty. Michael York less so, but I think that was mainly the haircut.
In other age-related news, circa 5pm today I mark my gigasecond. Being alive for a billion seconds probably only feels like a landmark if you read a certain school of science fiction (I first encountered it in the works of Charles Stross), but still...a billion anythings is a lot, isn't it?

SB aside, I haven't mentioned my weekend. Well, by way of a handy reminder that London still has other clubs which feel like home, Friday was Poptimism, at which I was particularly glad to hear Pet Shop Boys' much-underplayed 'Flamboyant'. On the way down, I passed the Fourth Plinth for the first time since they started putting people on it; there was a woman in a safari shirt with two cuddly toys and a sign reading DAKTARI. I hoped she might be reenacting episodes but turns out just to be the name of some sanctuary for which she was raising awareness. That net around the plinth really spoils the effect, doesn't it? Good old 'health and safety'. See also the decision that the ground floor of the Fullback's Ewok Village is 'substantially enclosed', ie not rainy and windy enough to be a legitimate smoking area.
Sunday was understandabaly less active, spent mostly reading crime comics and listening to jangly indie

Why are there so many T-shirts around for the remake of The Taking of Pelham 123, which has been pretty much universally panned? If this is viral marketing, is it paid, or are some people just really desperate for free Ts? I mean, they don't look like derelicts.

The Bacchae opens with Alan Cumming's arse descending from the heavens, upside down. And a very nice arse it is too, so fair enough. All these centuries on, Greek tragedies are a damned hard thing to get right; if you've never seen a cod-Shakespearean translation staged with dusty solemnity by an am dram shambles, then count yourself lucky. You need to balance the stage as the distant place in which the story unfolds, and the stage as the platform from which a speaker interacts with the audience. You need to balance the alien with the intimate, and only an incredibly rare director will be able to do both sides full justice. So maybe this production doesn't quite capture the strangeness and the terror - the music for the Bacchae's chants would need to be catchier for that, and just generally *more* - but it has the intimacy, the immediacy. And that's all down to Cumming, and the masterstroke of playing Dionysus as a pantomime character. Or two, perhaps - he's a hybrid of the Dame and the Principal Boy. I suppose he's the father of carnival, isn't he? So they're both his children, no wonder if we should think he resembles them both when really it's the other way around. And at times the staging catches glimpses of his power - you can feel the flames which burn Thebes, and the light when he appears in all his pomp is genuinely dazzling.
Translator David Greig has his tone about right (I particularly like his use of 'The Scream' rather than 'The Roarer' as one of the god's names). It's a long time since I read the play, but I don't recall it being quite so one-sided when I did - or rather, I knew that *I* was entirely on Dionysus' side, but I thought that was as much me as the text. Now...well, as Greig says, "There are still men who would control women in order to bolster their shaky sense of self. There are still men who are lost because they refuse to lose themselves in dance." He could add that some such men are also obsessed with male pride, and absolutely petrified of alcohol and 'corrupting influences' of the wider society, just like Pentheus. So for all that I liked Pentheus as the no-nonsense Scot unaware what a nonsense it is to resist Dionysus, I think the times and the translation would have been better served by dressing him as an imam.
My biggest problem with the play, though, is one I'm sure was in the text, but which I never really noticed, because when you're reading a play, you can...if not skim the bits you don't enjoy, then at least read them faster. Staged in front of you, there's no fast forward. Once Pentheus gets his come-uppance, once the others who slighted Dionysus and his mother get their just desserts, they don't half spend a while wailing about it. Look - I don't care. You were idiots. You had warnings, and still you stood against a god - and not just any god, but an incredibly cool god. Now you have been destroyed, as puny humans will be in such circumstances. And you were miserable sods, so I'm glad. Where's the tragedy? This isn't Shakespeare, or even Sophocles, where people are trapped impossibly between contradictory imperatives which must all be honoured. This is more like the end of The Wicker Man - ie, party time.

Speaking of puny humans, a marvellous quote I keep forgetting to post:
"At moments like this I hate being an unreconstructed human - an island of thinking jelly trapped in a bony carapace, endless miliseconds away from its lovers, forced to squeeze every meaning through a low-bandwidth speech channel. All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night."
- Charles Stross, Glasshouse. The speaker is a future human used to being able to swap bodies quicker than we'd swap outfits, confined by lunatics to a normal human body in a re-creation of the 1950-2050 Dark Age.