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

Been on jury service this past week, and while obviously I can't say anything about what happens inside, I can say that it chucks out earlier than work, and closer to home, and while this weather has been a little hot, better now than in the rain, right? So I can stop off in a park to read and bump into the Cthulhuchild and family en route to the slides, or wander via Ally Pally to see the inflatable Stonehenge (though I didn't bounce myself - far too many rules for something called Sacrilege). And I have to admit, the Olympics haven't been the bane I thought they would. Transport has been standing up, there's a certain quiet happiness in the air, and even if I still don't care myself who done the best swim or whatever...it's all very nice. Perhaps because everyone is on the same side, as against that nasty tribalist twinge to the footballism? Even the opening ceremony, which I skipped because a) sport and b) it's a decade since Danny Boyle made a decent film - well, by the sound of it modern masques are more his forte than films now. I was rewarded with the emptiest streets I have ever seen in Finsbury Park or Dalston, though.

Other expeditions:
Peckham Rye, a park I've never quite found before, for the first picnic in too long. I think we got out of the habit of organising them, when summer seemed to have turned traitor. They have been missed.
Camden for a quiet afternoon pint, which turned into a pub crawl home. If nothing else, I have now finally been to Kentish Town's Pineapple. It is quite good.
Devon, to see the parents. Did lots of active, rural things, like hefting logs up hills, and clambering around on cliffs just along from where there was that fatal landslide a few days later. Didn't die, obviously, because I'm not a loser. But I did get melancholy over the way the streams, beaches and fields in the distance always seem so unattainably lovely, and when you get there, they're perfectly pleasant but ultimately just a stream, or a beach, or a field. This point has already been made by better writers than me, of course. I think this feeling was accentuated by coming back on a Sunday, which may have been a mistake - instead of returning to London's bright lights and fun, it just feels like the end of the holiday.

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'.