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You know when you feel like you somehow missed the weekend? Last weekend, I didn't get that. Between Batman and barbecue and British Bulldog, not to mention trees and croquet and dark secrets and lashings of ginger beer, I came as near as I've managed in a while to living without dead time. If I have a regret, it's not the demise of a long-serving shirt (it met as fine an end as any of us can hope for, and I've always been a great believer in the noble art of dying well) - it's just that I forgot to listen to 'The First Big Weekend of the Summer'.
I was introduced to the myth of John Kennedy Toole years back; though he wrote the scabrous, satirical romp of a very nearly Great American Novel that is A Confederacy of Dunces, he never lived to see it published - his suicide at least implicitly blamed on the publishers' rejection. What the myth never mentioned was that he'd written another book, The Neon Bible - and somehow when the Arcade Fire borrowed that name for their second album, I never learned the source. So when I saw a book by him, with that name, in a charity shop - well, no deliberation was needed.
I recently read The Neon Bible, and I now know why the myth omits it; it's bobbins. Forgivable bobbins - it's juvenilia, after all - but bobbins nonetheless. As a tale of hick life, it's pretty much a PG-rated And The Ass Saw The Angel, which is not what the world needs, is it now?
I've now moved on to something far more powerful - Greg Bear's latest, City at the End of Time. The jacket quotes big up his hard SF credentials, but the debts to Arthur C Clarke and Olaf Stapledon which that and the title imply - and make no mistake, they are massive - are easily equalled by the echoes of Wolfe's Book of the New Sun and Harrison's Viriconium. The grandfathers of slipstream, in other words - and not just in terms of the tone with which Bear describes that majestic, crumbling city in which the last humans live out their long, forgetful lives. For some of those last humans dream of a time long past, and in a Seattle which may or may not be our world's, three modern people dream of the future...
Which is not a technique I'd normally like, because it smacks too much of a targetted reader-identification character, and I almost always hate them - modern humans lower the tone. But whether or not Bear was nudged in this direction, he can carry it off, capturing that sense of entropy, captivity and impending doom so often remarked upon these days, offering an explanation for it. One which ties in everything from the Indonesian 'garden of Eden' to all those typos in books these days - and there was me thinking it was just laziness, illiteracy and cheapskate publishers.
(Though in City at the End of Time, I should note, I have yet to spot a single error bar one of those maddening American references to a paper apparently called the London Times. It is perversely, brilliantly well-edited for a product of this entropic age)
Doomsday is a very odd film. Neil "Dog Soldiers" Marshall clearly wanted to pay homage to some of his favourite films - Escape from New York, Mad Max, maybe even traces of Excalibur and Lord of the Rings. So he strung together a load of scenes which would fit in those films, and then decided to worry about it making sense later. And then forgot that bit. It's entertaining enough to watch once, with drinks, in company. And it at least explains how Rhona Mitra's so unflappable in Boston Legal - once you've fought feral cannibals and armoured executioners, even James Spader doesn't seem that scary. I'm a little puzzled as to why it needed to be set in the future, though - it portrays a horrifically overcrowded London where the public transport is at a standstill, and Glasgow reduced to a state of barbarian savagery, but that only needed the datestamp 'Saturday night'.
I was introduced to the myth of John Kennedy Toole years back; though he wrote the scabrous, satirical romp of a very nearly Great American Novel that is A Confederacy of Dunces, he never lived to see it published - his suicide at least implicitly blamed on the publishers' rejection. What the myth never mentioned was that he'd written another book, The Neon Bible - and somehow when the Arcade Fire borrowed that name for their second album, I never learned the source. So when I saw a book by him, with that name, in a charity shop - well, no deliberation was needed.
I recently read The Neon Bible, and I now know why the myth omits it; it's bobbins. Forgivable bobbins - it's juvenilia, after all - but bobbins nonetheless. As a tale of hick life, it's pretty much a PG-rated And The Ass Saw The Angel, which is not what the world needs, is it now?
I've now moved on to something far more powerful - Greg Bear's latest, City at the End of Time. The jacket quotes big up his hard SF credentials, but the debts to Arthur C Clarke and Olaf Stapledon which that and the title imply - and make no mistake, they are massive - are easily equalled by the echoes of Wolfe's Book of the New Sun and Harrison's Viriconium. The grandfathers of slipstream, in other words - and not just in terms of the tone with which Bear describes that majestic, crumbling city in which the last humans live out their long, forgetful lives. For some of those last humans dream of a time long past, and in a Seattle which may or may not be our world's, three modern people dream of the future...
Which is not a technique I'd normally like, because it smacks too much of a targetted reader-identification character, and I almost always hate them - modern humans lower the tone. But whether or not Bear was nudged in this direction, he can carry it off, capturing that sense of entropy, captivity and impending doom so often remarked upon these days, offering an explanation for it. One which ties in everything from the Indonesian 'garden of Eden' to all those typos in books these days - and there was me thinking it was just laziness, illiteracy and cheapskate publishers.
(Though in City at the End of Time, I should note, I have yet to spot a single error bar one of those maddening American references to a paper apparently called the London Times. It is perversely, brilliantly well-edited for a product of this entropic age)
Doomsday is a very odd film. Neil "Dog Soldiers" Marshall clearly wanted to pay homage to some of his favourite films - Escape from New York, Mad Max, maybe even traces of Excalibur and Lord of the Rings. So he strung together a load of scenes which would fit in those films, and then decided to worry about it making sense later. And then forgot that bit. It's entertaining enough to watch once, with drinks, in company. And it at least explains how Rhona Mitra's so unflappable in Boston Legal - once you've fought feral cannibals and armoured executioners, even James Spader doesn't seem that scary. I'm a little puzzled as to why it needed to be set in the future, though - it portrays a horrifically overcrowded London where the public transport is at a standstill, and Glasgow reduced to a state of barbarian savagery, but that only needed the datestamp 'Saturday night'.
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