Showing posts with label Books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Books. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 04, 2015

Back to Back; Belly to Belly




To one of the charges he makes.…I must with shame plead guilty. He has caught me using the word "literally" where I did not really mean it, a vile journalistic cliché which he cannot reprobate more severely than I now do myself.
       
C.S Lewis



C.S Lewis never won a Hugo award, although he has been retrospectively nominated for two. He was offered a C.B.E. by Sir Winston Churchill but turned it down. His sermon, The Weight of Glory, engages in some fairly rarefied conjecture about the nature of heaven and the afterlife. He speculates that, in heaven, the feeling that the human race has had since the Fall of being alienated from the natural world may be overcome. Perhaps we won’t just admire the beauty of the sunset, but actually be a part of it? 

What is the point of such theorizing? Lewis draws a moving and edifying moral: 

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.… There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.… Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses…

J.C Wright’s essay on Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is clearly influenced by Lewis’s sermon. He asks the vaguely interesting question "Why do the woodland animals help Snow White with her household chores?" and proposes the vaguely interesting answer "Because friendship between humans and animals evokes the innocence of the Garden of Eden." 

In the middle of the essay, he goes off on a tangent:

No doubt by now some readers are puzzled at my repeated use of the words "virgin"and "maiden", and if those readers went to public school instead of getting an education, they are not only puzzled but offended... Much as it appalls the brain dead zombies indoctrinated by public schools, innocence is better than the cynicism or shared guilt or victimology [1] taught by modern thought, and if we place faith in the account Moses told the Children of Israel about Eden, it was lack of innocence that drove the parents of mankind out of paradise. Even more appalling to the zombies, the perfect symbol and image of innocence is virginity…

C.S Lewis once told a child that the secret of good writing was to know exactly what you want to say, and to say exactly that. Don’t say infinite if you mean big or you’ll be stuck for a word when you want to talk about something infinite; don’t say sadism if you mean cruelty or you won’t have a word left when you want to talk about an actual sadist. I think that Lewis would have admitted that there could be such a thing as hyperbole and poetic exaggeration. When a schoolgirl says "My piano teacher is like literally a thousand years old" she knows perfectly well that her piano teacher is not literally a thousand years old. That’s what makes the remark funny. I read in the Guardian that Boris Johnson is popular in London because "London…is solely inhabited by millions of braying, espadrilled berks [2] who communicate exclusively in emojis". Obviously this isn’t literally true, but we get the joke. "People in London communicate exclusively in emojis" is a funny way of saying "Many Londoners spend far too much time on their mobile phones". 

It isn’t literally true that people who went to public-school [3] are brain-dead; a term we'd normally only use to describe someone in an inoperable coma; and it certainly isn’t literally true that they are corpses that have been animated by a voodoo priest. Brain-dead might simply be hyperbole for stupid. The Hugo-nominated Wright thinks that people who went to public school are uneducated, which is hyperbole for poorly educated;  but poorly educated and stupid are not at all the same thing. And in what sense are they poorly educated? Is the complaint that the teaching is rather inadequate — so not very much of what is taught is understood or remembered? Or is the problem that public school children are being taught the wrong things: that they are learning about political and economic geography when they should be learning about fairy tales and flogging (see The Voyage of the Dawn Treader)?

The allegation relevant to the subject at hand is that a public school education coarsens people, or is morally deficient. People who went to public school either literally don't know what a virgin is, or else they don't understand why someone might think that virginity was a Good Thing. But how you get from "they have a loose standard of sexual morality" to "they don’t have brains" and "they are like the walking dead" I have no idea.

In the UK sending a kid to a private school costs about £18k per child per year. The average worker earns £26k per year; the legal minimum wage is around £13k. (And if we obey the Pope, sorry, the magesterium, and only use natural birth control, we are going to have to find school fees for an awful lot of kids.) "People who went to public school instead of getting an education" essentially means poor people, where "poor" is defined as anyone whose parents are taking home less than, say, eighty grand. In other words, about 93% of the population. 

The right wing press depicts foreigners as an impersonal blob. Dark skinned people are always pouring and surging into our white and pleasant land in tides and floods and waves. It seems to me that the Hugo-nominated Wright thinks of the poor as an ever-expanding depersonalized hoard that will eventually overwhelm us; carriers of an infection which will eventually destroy us. 

And while we are at it: innocence. A child who doesn't know where babies come from is innocent in one sense; an adult who knows perfectly well but doesn’t believe in sex before marriage is innocent in a different sense. The innocence which is the opposite of cynicism is different again; and obviously all are different from the person who maintains their innocence in a court of law. It is simply wrong to say that "lack of innocence drove Adam and Eve from Eden". In the story, Satan tricks Eve into disobeying God; and God kicks them out as a punishment for disobeying him. It is true that, before they sinned, Adam and Eve are said to have been, like very small children, indifferent to nudity. But no-one proposes that because Snow White was innocent, she would have been just fine joining the dwarfs in the boys' showers after a hard day down the mine. Just the opposite: that kind of innocence implies exceptional modesty. (The Hugo-nominated Wright rightly mocks the idea in some 60s science fiction that future-humans will be naturists.) Isn’t the theological consensus that if Adam and Eve hadn’t sinned, they would still have had sex, and sex would still have been brilliant, but they would only have wanted as much of it as was necessary for making a sensible number of babies? Which, by an astonishing coincidence, is exactly how the Eldar function in Middle-earth. I digress. 

This kind of thing keeps happening. We are in the middle of a perfectly reasonable point, and suddenly shoot off at right angles into a massively bizarre piece of hate speech. And the more one pokes and scratches, the harder it is to work out what the Hugo-nominated Wright is actually trying to say. 

Two more examples will be more than enough. 

The Glory Game is a novel by the Hugo-nominated Keith Laumer about a military hero manfully avoiding being morally compromised by the political realities of war. (The writing style is "masculine, muscular, brief" apparently.) Hugo-nominated J.C Wright thinks that it illustrates Plato’s question about whether it is better to be good (even though everyone thinks you are wicked) or to be thought of as good (even though you are wicked in reality). Which I daresay it does. It is not to be confused with Hunter Davies’ book about Spurs football club. 

In the middle of the essay, we go off in the following random direction: 

In one glaringly anachronistic scene, a newsman actually asks him for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and reports it. That scene would be laugh out loud funny if someone tried to write it about newsmen of this day and age. Can you imagine a newsman actually being interested in the truth? It is like a whore being interested in chaste romance.

What? Where did that remark come from? 

There has been some bad stuff in England over the last few years about journalists spying on members of the public to get salacious stories. And lots of us are worried about billionaire newspaper owners encouraging their staff to spin stories to fit in with their own political beliefs. On the other hand, we’ve had campaigning journalists uncovering details of MPs dodgy financial dealings, the (ahem) Daily Mail doggedly pursuing the Steven Lawrence case; not to mention hundreds and hundreds of jobbing local reporters diligently reporting what the Mayor said about allotments on the Gloucester road and what the Magistrate said to the guy who exposed himself to a lady on the Downs. Some journalists are honest and some journalists are dishonest. The idea that anyone would find the idea of an honest journalist funny is laughable. 

And there are lots of stories about prostitutes who want chaste romance. Les Miserables for one. La Traviata for another. It's so common that "tart with a heart" is a byword for a literary cliche. No-one finds the idea particularly funny. Because, get this: a prostitute is not an alien life form with different kinds of feelings from everybody else. A prostitute is someone’s daughter and someone's sister and very probably someone's mother, a human being for whom Christ died, who at a particular point in her life (and very probably not at another) has decided to let men have sex with her in return for money. [4]


The Hugo-nominated writer doesn’t think a great deal of The Left — or indeed Marxists, Liberals, Post-Modernists and Feminists. He uses the terms pretty interchangeably. It’s all equally a lot of P.C nonsense, along with climate change and quantum physics. At one point he blurts out:

The demand made by these subhuman genetically defective control freaks is that you, the reader, stop liking the books and stories you like… and start liking the books and stories which these genetically defective control freaks demand you should like, in the name of the glorious cause of whatever the glorious cause is this week.

The control freak bit I get. He thinks that The Left are not really interested in the causes they espouse: the idea that they actually care is like the idea of a prostitute with human feelings, simply funny. According to him, The Left uses the idea of racial equality and women’s rights and environmentalism as a pretext to tell other people what to do. In a certain light, you can see what he has in mind. 

The subhuman part takes more work. I get that he doesn’t think that you can stop people from being racist by preventing them from saying the N-word and that you can't make men and women equal by making people say paramedic and firefighter instead of ambulanceman and fireman. I get that he thinks that the idea that you can amounts to a superstition. I even get, up to a point, that he thinks that those of us who prefer to use inclusive language have been bamboozled by commies. But how on earth do you get from gravely mistaken to subhuman?

Our mutual friend C.S. Lewis more or less defined humanity as "having a concept of right and wrong". His extended essay the Abolition of Man is a reductio ad absurdium against a school text book which apparently taught that all values whatsoever were subjective and should be debunked. Lewis imagines what would happen if that way of thinking won the day. He pictures a distant future in which mankind has evolved into a race of super-intelligent relativists: a species who believe that morality is purely a construct, and who are capable of constructing new moral values and instilling them into the next generation. He says that if that ever occurred, it would amount to the end of the humanity — the abolition of man. 

I think that this is what Wright has in mind. But where Lewis envisaged a master generation at some remote point in the future, Wright thinks that any liberal — anyone who believes in any kind of cultural relativism; anyone who is skeptical about any aspect of traditional morality; almost anyone whose opinions differ from J.C Wright and the Pope — has already stopped being human. Liberals, like prostitutes, are by definition an alien Other.

Asimov, who was a Liberal, had no understanding of what morality was or what it was for, so it never appears in his stories...

Which sounds very like nonsense.

But even if we accept that liberals and post-modernists have no concept of morality whatsoever, how do we get from sub-human to genetically defective? The Hugo-nominated Wright hasn’t argued for this. I don’t know what kind of genetic defect he envisages which might cause someone to think it’s okay for two guys to fall in love with each other or think that we ought to avoid words which demean people or believe that slightly higher taxes and fewer guns in private hands would be a good idea. But if liberal beliefs are the result of genetic defect, then I can only suppose that the Hugo-nominated Wright thinks that liberalism is part of one's essential nature; hard-coded into one's DNA. But isn't "I’m not a free moral agent, my genes made me do it" precisely the sort of thing that he would denounce as victimology if it were being taught to poor people in a public school?

Lewis’s theological speculations lead him to a renewed love of his fellow-man. Wright’s arguments lead him to a renewed hatred of…practically everybody. The political left are sub-human; prostitutes can never fall in love; news reporters can never tell the truth. It is true that Lewis thought that some human beings might, apart from the grace of God, become nightmarish creatures; and that certain bad philosophical ideas might, if extended out to infinity and beyond, cause the human race to lose its humanity. But for Wright, this has already happened. 

There is a parable in the New Testament about a farmer who found that he had planted wheat and thorns in the same field. There was nothing for it but to let the wheat and the thorns grow up together — but come harvest, the thorns could be separated from the wheat and burned. But thorns are thorns and wheat is wheat and a thorn can't become a wheat however much it wants to or tries. Some of the crop is predestined to be burned come harvest time. If the Hugo-nominated Wright didn’t proclaim his Catholicism on every page, I would suspect him of being a hyper-Calvinist.

continues....




1: Logos means word  or reason and -logy usually means the study of: sociology, the study of society; anthropology, the study of human beings; psychology, the study of the mind. For all I know, American state schools may teach victimology, the study of victims, which might be a very interesting subject. (How do courts in different jurisdictions treat victims of crime? How do victims deal with and recover from their experiences?) But I think that when he says that modern education teaches victimology the Hugo-nominated Wright means the modern education teaches children to be, or to think of themselves as, victims (rather than taking personal responsibility for their lives.) I wouldn’t be bothered by this sort of thing if the Hugo-nominated Wright wasn’t so pedantic about neologisms which aren’t to his personal taste.

2: Berk was originally cockney rhyming slang: Berkshire Hunt = cunt. But the word has acquired a much weaker and less obscene connotation — fool and specifically upper class fool. Language is like that sometimes. 

3: Public School in American English is equivalent to State School in British English — a free school paid for by taxation. It probably has connotations like the British Comprehensive School — "the most ordinary or generic kind of education". (c.f Tony Blair’s bog standard comp.). A Public School in British English is equivalent to a Private School in American English. Did I mention that language is sometimes like that? 

4: In the essay After Priggery, What? the aforementioned C.S. Lewis riffs on the idea that the social status of a dishonest journalist ought to be lower than that of a prostitute.("He gives his customers a baser pleasure; he infects them with more dangerous diseases.") I rather suspect that the Hugo-nominated Wright has this passage at the back of his mind, but hasn’t quire remembered what Lewis’s point was.





Sunday, August 02, 2015

What does Sean Connery eat when he goes on holiday to Cornwall?

On page 279 of the Hugo-nominated collection of essays Transhuman and Subhuman, John C. Wright writes the following:

Now, it must also be clear that men have free will, and can train themselves either to fulfill their nature or oppose their nature. Merely because we have a natural inclination toward something tells us nothing about whether we ought to do or avoid that impulse. I have an impulse to be kind to children with big eyes, which I think I should indulge, and I have an impulse to stab my rivals through the eye and into the brain pan with my sword cane, which is an impulse I think I should suppress, not the least because my blade is dull and I am past the age when one can face the gallows with dignity. 

As a matter of fact I agree with Hugo-nominee J.C Wright’s point. You can’t get from an “is” to an “ought”. You can’t make gut-feeling the arbiter of morality. You should sometimes suppress your urge to be kind to cute children, say, because this particular cute child is a Skrull agrent; or because giving that one more chocolate will make him sick and rot his teeth. 

But what a bizarre way this Hugo-nominated writer has of expressing himself! Why talk of stabbing someone with a sword-cane, when you are a citizen of the United States and could legally obtain a hand-gun if you wanted to? And why talk about “facing the gallows” when your home state carries out executions (by gas and lethal injection, not hanging) only about once a decade, and then only for the most grotesque and heinous multiple murders? Why not write “I have an impulse to shoot my rivals, which is an impulse I think I should suppress, because I’m a rotten shot and I shouldn’t think I would cope very well with jail?”

And anyway....is it really true that the main reasons for not murdering people are that you you don’t have an appropriate weapon and that you are afraid of the punishment? Isn’t the main reason that you think that a higher authority than your own gut-feelings — God or the Tao or natural law — says that murder is wrong? And doesn’t that same morality tell you that you should not only be kind to cute children, but ugly ones as well?

At the end of an essay about Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the Hugo-nominated Wright muses that it is possible to imagine angels telling stories or writing poems, but not to imagine them telling fairy tales. Fairy tales speak to our sense that, since the Fall, we humans don’t quite belong in the natural world, so angels wouldn’t have any reason to make them up. This is a perfectly decent point. It’s a perfectly decent point derived from Tolkien’s Essay on Fairy Stories and C.S. Lewis's Weight of Glory, but none the worse for that. Good writers borrow; great writer’s steal, as the fellow said.

The Hugo-nominated essay concludes: 

Why should they daydream, and not do? No youth sighs over his beloved's picture when she is in the bridal bower and demurely shedding her veil.

In the bridal what? Demurely shedding her what? Why this sudden lapse into archaism? Wouldn’t “No young man drools over his girlfriend’s photo when she is already undressing in front of him” have made the point better? I should have been inclined to write “No-one surfs for porn while they’re having sex with an actual human being” but I probably go too far in my preference for plain speaking. 

Having said that, this Hugo-nominated author writes very well. Many of the essays in this volume are worth reading, even if they don’t exactly push the boat out in terms of radical or challenging subject matter. Why do science fiction stories so often imagine future wars being conducted with swords? Because swords evoke an older, more chivalrous, version of war. Who were the great writers of the Golden Age? Heinlein, Asimov and (unjustly neglected) Van Vogt. Is it better to be regarded as good, or to actually be good regardless of what anyone thinks of you? Better to be good. What characterized classic science fiction? Competent men solving problems by gumption, ingenuity and intelligence. What is the secret of great writing? Show, don't tell; tell the truth; fulfill your promises to your readers. Was Arthur C. Clarke's critique of religion a bit naive? Yes. Was the Desolation of Smaug very good? Er... No. His pen has a habit of running away with itself, but he has the knack of summing up a train of thought in a forceful paragraph.

Here he is on the fact that science fiction readers — as opposed to mundanes, or, as he amusingly calls them, muggles —  positively like to be confused or baffled by a setting. In return, the science fiction writer — like the traditional detective story writer — has an obligation to play fair. He has to understand how his world works, and he has to give the reader reasonable clues so he stands a chance of working it out for himself. But:

This willingness to be lost tends not to work across genre boundaries. The reason why a collective groan of disbelief rose up to heaven from the massed fans of Star Wars was because of one line in one scene from the Phantom Menace, when the Jedi say Jedi powers are based, not on a mystical energy field binding the galaxy together, but due to microscopic bodies in the bloodstream. The groan was because the genre boundary had been crossed. 

I couldn't have put it better myself, and indeed didn’t. Unless…maybe that crossing back and forth between genre was part of the point of Star Wars to begin with? Maybe a mystical energy field which is also a side effect of telepathic micro-organisms is very much the same thing as an old-fashioned sword which is also a high tech piece of hardware? But let's not press that point. He's dead right that making Obi-Wan "a crazy old wizard" is a different proposition from making him "a student of mind science" even if the super-powers are the same either way.

He thinks that science fiction is more about mythology than prediction, and defines mythology thus:

A mythology is an explanation by means of concrete images of the abstractions and passions of the age; myth speaks in a vocabulary of anthropomorphoized figures.


Very well put: that’s just what mythology is, and it would be worth running the definition past the kinds of people who think that the Bible (for example) is either the LITERAL HISTORICAL TRUTH or else a PACK OF LIES. In fact, he's rather good —  if a little verbose and shrill —  on the whole idea of science and religion being necessarily at odds: 

With apologies to my fundamentalist brethren in Christ, all that happened is that one small group in schism with the Roman Catholic Church, militant fundamentalist Christians who reject the authority of the Magisterium to interpret and teach scripture, has decided on a literal interpretation of Genesis, and insist on a six-day timeline of creation that does not fit geological, astronomical, or biological evidence......


Meanwhile, another small group in schism with the Roman Catholic Church, militant fundamentalist atheists who reject the authority of science to say what is and what is not science, has decided on a mystical, Shavian, Hegelian or Marxist misinterpretation of Darwin’s Origin of Species....


These two groups, neither of whom represents mainstream Christianity or mainstream scientific thinking, have decided that there is a war going on between science and Christianity....


I mean, it's a bit of a stretch to see fundamentalists as schismatic Catholics and a big stretch to see Dawkins' lot that way, but the idea that "religion vs science" is not a clash of two mighty ideologies by a quarrel between too tiny sub-groups is really very well played. 

And he’s pretty good even when he’s being deliberately contentious. He is very annoyed with Hell is the Absence of God, a satirical short story by three-times Hugo award winner Ted Chiang, because (he thinks) it sets up a straw-man version of Christianity instead of engaging with what Christians actually believe. The Hugo-nominated Wright claims to have been an atheist when he first read the book, and says that even then his reaction was “doesn’t Ted Chiang know any Christians?”

The major charge of honest atheists is that the claims of the Christian religion are false…. When asked politely if they can see the Wizard, the atheists are told that no one can see the Wizard, not nobody not no how. Small wonder the atheists are skeptical. You do not undercut this fairytale by saying that The Wizard is an evil bunny-killing tyrant and that the Wicked Witch of the West is merely a soulful and misunderstood victim of circumstance. 


This is a good analogy. I shall probably steal it at some point. It's the flip side Ford Prefect's "isn't it enough that the garden is beautiful without believing that there are fairies are the bottom of it?" Can't you say that you don't believe in fairies without lying about what the fairy tale is about? 

But in the same essay, the pen of Hugo-nominated J.C Wright demonstrates its tendency to run out of control: 

The major objection honest atheists must level is that religion is false; that even if true, it has no claim on our loyalty; that the reason of man, being reason, cannot be bound by dogma; and that the claims, true or false, are repellent to the dignity of free and rational beings. 


Well, no. Those are not arguments that an honest atheist must put forward. These are four different arguments that four different kinds of people might possibly have for rejecting religion. 

1: Religion is false

2: Religion has no claim on our loyalty

3: Humans can’t be bound by dogma

4: The claims of religion are repellent

I think what the Hugo-nominated writer is trying to get at here is that you might plain and simple not believe in God. On the other hand, you might be far from sure that God does not exist, but very sure indeed that there is no need to worship him even if he does. Or again, you might be agnostic about God's existence but still have a problem with the absolute claims of some churches. You might even say that religion is so horrible that you don't care whether or not it is true. It obviously isn't the case that an honest atheist must say that the claims of religion are repellent. Lots of honest atheists say "It's a lovely story. I can see why you want it to be true. But I don't believe it is." Perhaps the Hugo-nominated Wright means to say "an honest atheist must level one or more of the following claims against religion"? But that doesn't work either —  only the first claim is strictly atheistic, and there are many more than four reasons for rejecting religion.

The sentence is a muddle because one word, religion, is being pressed into service to mean

a: Theism, the belief in God

b: Religion, the practice and worship of a particular God

c: Catholicism, a particular version of a particular religion.

And a single word, atheism, is being treated as "the opposite of religion" so it covers “people who don’t think there is a God”; “people who don’t practice any religion” and “people who aren’t Catholics.” It doesn't help that dogma has a technical theological meaning and a popular, colloquial one and that it isn't clear in which sense it is being used.

The Hugo-nominated Wright likes to present himself as a bit of a donnish pedant, worrying about the proper meanings of words and distinguishing between Aritstotle's four different ways of answering a "why?" question. But he actually writes quite carelessly, particularly when he's affecting to be annoyed about something. And he has a habit of saying the same things over and over in different words. (He is also addicted to reiterating statements using various synonyms.)

*

There is a certain kind of modern art where the idea is more important than the object. It is quite funny to know that a Frenchman once put a toilet in an art gallery and labeled it “Fountain”; it’s not so necessary to go and see the actual loo in question.

Similarly, the idea of a book is sometimes more important than the book itself. It is quite funny to know that someone once translated Winnie the Pooh into Latin, or photographed every public lavatory in London, but once you know that they have done so, you do not necessarily need to read the books.

The Hugo-nominated Transhuman and Subhuman is best thought of as a conceptual book. All the talk about sword-canes and hangings and bridal bowers is a bit of literary cos-play. The book is an homage: a pastiche. It has a point  — an obnoxious point, but still a point — but it makes that point by existing, not by arguing any particularly compelling case. People who agree with the point will own a copy; and quite possibly vote for it in the 2015 Hugo Awards. But they will not necessarily read it; at any rate, not right to the end. (The last two extended essays defeated me, and I'm the sort of person who is good at struggling through difficult books.) 

This is a Hugo-nominated essay collection that is trying, very hard, to sound as if it comes from 1920s England, not 2015 California. The rhetoric, and many of the actual arguments, sound like something out of C.S. Lewis. It keeps lapsing into flowery archaic language, and sometimes pretends not to understand modern vocabulary. It doesn’t reference any philosopher more recent than Aristotle. Its science fiction reference-points are books that I was reading at school: A Princess of Mars, The Foundation Trilogy, Childhood’s End, the Lensman series, classic Star Trek, the original Star Wars. Not insignificantly, the author appears to deliberately dress like G.K. Chesterton.

The medium is the message. You don’t need to read any modern science fiction to know that it's all awful. You don’t need to read modern philosophy to know that it’s all codswallop. The Golden Age is past: schools no longer educate children; journalists no longer tell the truth; and science fiction has turned away from the one true way of John W. Campbell. 

So the thing to do is to huddle together writing very old fashioned essays on very old fashioned books in very old fashioned language, and wait for an intellectual savior in an old fashioned hat, and old fashioned frock coat, armed with an old fashioned sword cane to stab the dragons of modernity through the eye (and into the brain pan) on our behalf. 

.....continues


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Tuesday, July 07, 2015

Please Sir, Can I Have A Hugo Award?

What religion is the pope?

Put another way, what metaphysical creed does the pontiff subscribe to? What are the theological underpinnings of Jorge Mario Bergoglio's world view; what organized collection of beliefs and cultural systems does the Bishop of Rome use in order to relate humanity to a higher order of existence? What symbol-set does the Holy Father use to explain the origins and meaning of life?

Hold onto your hats, because I am about to say something that may shock you. 

The Pope is a Catholic. 

But obviously, you can't say that sort of thing nowadays. "The Pope is a Catholic." The self-appointed guardians of morality; the people who elected themselves to safeguard our ethical well-being — who like the President, want to repeal the Second Amendment and make marijuana compulsory — won't let you. The Pope is a Catholic. The Pope is a Catholic. When was the last time you heard someone come right out and say it? 

But when the message falls on your ears even for the very first time; if thou art truly a being of humanity and not a professor of humanities, thou wilt discern the truth in thy most very heart of hearts; like the joyous relief  thou feelest when thou divesteth thyself of thine diaphanous undergarments to facilitate thine all-too-human need to defecate: the Pope is Catholic. The Pope is Catholic. Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh mine dearest reader, how couldst it ever have been otherwise?

And what of caniform mammals of the genus ursidae? What do they do when they experience that all-too-human (or as I must eftsoons say, an all-too-ursoid) need to relieve themselves? Do they demurely turn the lock to "engaged" in a small "water closet" cubical; or trudge down the garden path to a neat, earthy outhouse; do they perchance call for the necessary women and squat coyly over a ceramic chamber-pot; have they mayhap been trained to use a strategically positioned tray replete with what shall here be referred to only as kitty-litter; or does weather permitting a human companion walk a step or two behind them gathering their stool with a pooper-scooper and placing it in a bin, thoughtfully provided by the post-modernistic anarchist socialist liberal marxist municipal authority (that fully supports the murder of countless thousands of helpless babies every week.)

No; nay; never; it shall not, nay, it will, and if I might be permitted to say so against the riding tide of relativism which denies the whole concept of truth, it cannot be so.

For most truly is it it said that bears shit in the woods. 





Saturday, October 11, 2014

The point of those articles was that someone said that they like a certain thing even though they thought it was terrible and I thought "I wonder what they mean by that."

Friday, October 10, 2014

Goldilocks Was a Hipster

work in progres

No Hipsters. Don't be coming in hear with your hairy faces, your vegan diets, your tiny hands and your sawdust bedding. No, wait. Hamsters. No Hamsters.

7

Wil Self wrote a piece in the Spectator entitled "Why I Hate Hipsters." I hope they commission another piece called simply "Why I Hate". And then one from a hipster entitled "Why I Hate Wil Self." 

I got as far as the bit where he complained about people who play loud music in coffee shops and got lost. I think he is mainly cross about the existence of cappuccino. He uses the words "frothy coffee" and "dickhead" interchangeably. A Daily Telegraph sub-editor asserted that hipsters were now the world's most derided sub-group; which must come as quite a relief for all the pedophiles. 

Some people hate hipsters. They hate them even more than they hate immigrants. One of the things that makes them really really cross is that they drink orange juice out of jam jars, which is to say, one of the coffee shops on Stokes Croft has jam jar shaped glasses. I find that sort of thing quite fun, but I can't imagine getting cross about it. I suppose it's a class thing. When people say that they hate hipsters with their beards and their Oxfam clothes and their orange juice what they mean is that they don't like the way in which all the boarded up shops have been taken over by coffee shops and bakeries and forced the crack dealers and whores out of business.

It's gentrification, innit? According to Wikipedia, I myself am 60% Hipster.

I think that one of the things which make "Hipsters" so derided is their affected sense of ironic detachment. The hipster goes to the Cube and the Arnolfini but only in order to strike a superior pose and complain that they've gone awfully mainstream recently; the hipster gets a ticket for the first night of a new play but doesn't appreciate it because he was so busy appreciating how clever and sophisticated he was for appreciating it. When I get accused of being a hipster (a thing which has hardly ever happened) it's never because I re-read Judge Dredd comic books or have Superman radio episodes on my IPod. It's always because I once heard a concert by a Senegali guitarist.

Oooo you hipster! You only went cos you wanted to feel clever!

The hat possibly doesn't help.

8

I don't think that the person who says that he knows the books he likes are terrible or says that her preferred genre is "trash" has a low opinion of the things which they love. I think that they are simply signaling that they want to suspend criticism. They would rather you stopped thinking, please. They don't want to have, for the seventeenth time, the debate about whether one of the character's was a bit racist and whether there were enough female characters. (He was and there weren't but shut up about it already.) He thinks that if he lies on his back with his tale between his legs, no-one will start a fight with him.

And I was kind of expecting (and so were you) this lecture to end up with me saying "Silly people! Asking me to switch my brain off!  Telling me that I can only see Guardians of the Galaxy is I leave my critical faculties at the door! Saying that some things are immune from criticism! If I can write a long Freudian Essay about King Lear I can damn well write a long Freudian essay about Superman Brought To You By The Makers Of Kellogs Pep (the Super-delicious breakfast cereal.)

But instead I am going to wonder out loud: why does anyone think that this kind of thing is worth saying in the first place?

Isn't it because the hipsters and the critics and the fan fiction writers and the subversives and the social justice vigilantes and the people who should really have grown out of this nonsense years ago are always trying to erect a veil between you and the thing you are watching or reading. Who want to prevent you from, in Lewis's sense, ever receiving any work of art ever again. Who want your primary experience of Guardians of the Galaxy to be that it didn't have any major female characters in it. (Groot knows, the lack of major females characters in Guardians of the Galaxy was as obvious as the fact that Geoff Tracey was a puppet.)

I think that "I like this, but it's rubbish" is trying to safeguard a few tiny drops of actual, primary, artistic experience. In a moment, I'm going to use the word authenticity and everyone will be forced to leave the room.

I think "I like this even though it is terrible" means "don't look at the strings".

I think "I like this even though it is terrible" means "I want to watch this, not through a veil of hipster pretension, but actually itself"

I think "I like this even though it is terrible" means "I like this uncomplicatedly despite the fact that we live in age of irony"

I think "I like this even though it is terrible" means "I like this."

I think "I like this even though it is terrible" means "This is good."

I like Clone Wars even though it is terrible; I like Superman on the wireless even though it is terrible; I like 60s Marvel even though it is terrible. 

But truthfully; truthfully truthfully truthfully, I think that Doctor Who and Star Wars and Macbeth and the Ring Cycle are terrible too.

Thursday, October 09, 2014

Goldilocks Was a Hipster

work in progress


6

I have a friend who makes a point of reading stories against the grain. If it's a comic book about a hero who catches thieves just like flies then he decides that the thieves are all heroic Jesse James types and the hero is a fascist oppressor. (OK: the idea that bankers and vigilantes are baddies may not be that much of a stretch.) If it's a story about heroic warriors fighting bug eyed monsters in space he recasts the bug-eyed monsters as oppressed colonial victims. I assume he thinks that Doctor Who is a racist: the Daleks are just misunderstood. Or possibly Doctor Who is just impossible to misread; which probably means it's not worth reading in the first place. 

I can see how this game might keep an intelligent brain occupied while it's owner was watching movies about Cowboys and Indians and Cops and Robbers. (Perhaps if you are bright and creative enough to rewrite the film in you shouldn't be watching the Lone Ranger in the first place.) I would guess that it renders (for example) Watchmen practically un-watchable. The text already undercuts itself so radically that it's hard to see what is gained by a clever reader willfully subverting it. "Let's read Watchmen as if Rorschache is the good guy." Well, yes, the text positively encourages you do that.  "Let's read it as if he's the bad guy." Yes, the text positively encourages you to do that as well.

On Lewis's terms, this sort of playful approach is the least "literary" imaginable. It is only interested in using the text as raw material for a game; anything that the actual author put onto the actual page is likely to disappear under the weight of subversion. Turning Star Wars (in your head) into a story in which Luke Skywalker is a religiously inspired terrorist is only one step up from school kids pretending there are dirty bits in Middlemarch. (Which is what they had do before the invention of the internet.) But can it really be that an active reading is worse than a passive one? Couldn't one equally make the case the kids comic annual that says "Look, space ships" and leaves the kid to do the actual imagining is one of the highest and most dynamic forms of literature. (It's also how good pornography works. So I'm told.)

If you are already taking the trouble to imagine that perfectly clean books are dirty ones; or of reading one novel and making up a different one in your head, then why not go the whole way, write your day-dream down on paper, and create completely new stories of your own? I suppose that's how Fanfic got started.

I don't think that a gay teenager, reading Legion of Superheroes and deciding that (I think it was) Bouncing Boy must be gay was consciously engaging in a subversive queer reading. I think that was a natural thing to do when there were no gay characters in comic books. The whole idea of Robin and Bucky was that you got to imagine that you were Captain America's or Batman's Very Special Friend. At one level, fan fiction writers are using popular fiction in the exact way it's always been used; in the exact way it's intended to be used. (Has any one ever read Harry Potter and not pretended that an Owl is about to drop a very important letter through their bedroom window? See also: Power Rings, Jaunting Belts, Light Sabers, Lenses...)

But it seems to be that when fan fiction becomes too much of a thing, the Legion and Harry Potter are basically reduced to a commodity: raw material to be chewed up and spat out and in new form, one where the baddie is the goodie and both of them are having kinky sex with each other. Which is fine. I mean, its fun, and its creative and its interactive and it doesn't do anyone any harm. I think it might be a pretty good working definition of the difference between a fan and a critic. A critic writes an essay about a book. A fan write three more chapters. (And then dresses up as the main character.)

But. There is Doctor Who fan fiction online before the closing credits of this weeks episode have been ruined by the continuity announcer. When Amazing Spider-Man 2 came to an end, I sat in the cinema for eight minutes to see if there was a post-cred. My fan-fic writing friends used those eight minutes to write a short story based on the premise that Aunt May was having an affair with Norman Osborne, and posted it to the internet before I left the cinema. They must literally sit through the actual movie thinking "What if this character were gay? What if I added a sex scene here? Could that background character be reimagined as the protagonist of the movie?" They have their reward. But this critic wonders if they can be said to have ever actually "seen" the movie they are writing about?


there's more

Wednesday, October 08, 2014

Goldilocks Was a Hipster

a work in progress

5

Some people would say that the writer who can write a 15 minute script which ends with the hero getting captured in such a way that millions of children literally can't wait to find out if he escapes or not is just as clever -- maybe cleverer -- than the one who can write 4,000 pages about the minutiae of his childhood in such a way that the broadsheet newspapers salivate over it. But I don't think they really believe it. People also say "You have to be just as good an actor to play Widow Twanky as you do to play Hamlet" but I don't think they really believe it either."

I think that what everyone really believes is that there is a sort of league table of genres with Superman at the bottom, Middlemarch is at the top, and Agatha Christie in the billiard room with the lead piping.

Which means we have been making very heavy weather of a very easy question. "I like this even though it is bad" means "I like this despite its low position in the the hierarchy of genres"

Emotionally, I am pretty sure that this is what I believe. Middlemarch is "better" than Superman. One is about a whole community and a whole nation and asks us to redefine our whole definition of psychology and narrative, where the other sold breakfast cereal to American kids. I definitely feel that Middlemarch is better than "some text that some copy writer wrote on the back of a box of Kellogs Pep" although I also accept that advertising copy writing is a hard job and neither me nor Mary Evans could have done it. 

But I am not sure that I could rationally defend these feelings. What does "better" even mean?  I could just as well argue: 

Superman — Poked fun at the Klu Klux Klan when it was dangerous to do so; encouraged literally millions of kids to practice tolerance and clean living

Middlemarch — Approved of by F.R Leavis

Superman — Millions of kids ran home to school to listen to it 

Middlemarch — Literally no-one would read it if someone hadn't decided that an English Literature GCSE was needed to get certain kinds of job. 

Superman - Figure who literally everyone on earth has heard of; genuine 20th century myth. 

Dorothea Brooke - Who she?

6:

Mr C.S. Lewis proved that what defined a "good" book was that the reader had a "good" literary experience. One of the markers that a "good" literary experience was taking place was that once the reader had finished the book, he might go back and read it for a second or third time. The person consuming a romantic story in Woman's Realm (intending to throw it away once he's finished it) is doing a different kind of thing to the person sitting down to read Barnaby Rudge for the fourth time. 

I have never read Barnaby Rudge. I have no idea why that was the example which occurred to me.

I don't know if would be prepared to argue (except in order to annoy my Mother) that Doctor Who is "better" than Coronation Street in some objective way. I don't think that it necessarily has better actors, better writers, better directors or cleverer plots. I suppose I could say that it's cleverer to create an alien planet that people believe in than to create a Manchester kitchen that people believe in but on the other hand we've spent 50 years apologizing for the sheer unbelievableness of many of Doctor Who's planets. And some of his kitchens.

But there is no question that we Doctor Who fans do go back and watch our favourite episodes over and over again; but the the idea of anyone going back and listening to old episodes of the Archers is obviously silly. I think I am correct in saying that soap fans, if they miss a few installments, don't try to "catch up" by watching the parts that they missed: they simply start watching again from this weeks episode and take it for granted that the characters themselves will bring them up to speed on what has been happening while they've been away. A bit like real life. There are DVD collections of Inspector Morse, Grange Hill, and the Banana Splits but none of EastEnders or Coronation Street.

On Lewis's view, a "good" reading is one which "receives" the book — that looks at what is there, and only what is there, which appreciates what the writer is doing and tries to have the emotional reaction that the writer wanted you to have. A "bad" reading is one that "uses" the book: which takes some descriptions of sails billowing in the wind and jolly rogers being run up flagpoles as a jumping off point for a day dream that has nothing very much to do with what the author wrote. It's the difference between the person who listens to the classical concert in silence (because he wants to hear every single note down to the last triangle) and the person who is glad that the brass band has started playing because it gives him the excuse to sing along terribly loudly. On Lewis's terms, virtually all pop music is bad. The whole point of pop music is that you "use" it: you dance to it; you use it create ambiance for your party. If you go to a live concert you scream down the band. 

Well, yes. But a dance band is there to provide music for people to dance to; and it might do that well or badly. It might take just as much skill to get everyone in the disco bopping as to win a standing ovation from the cognoscenti in the Albert Hall. Lewis is right that sitting and listening carefully is different to singing along; but I am not sure where he gets "listening carefully to music is better than dancing to it" or "music that you listen carefully to is better than music that you dance to" from. Morally? Psychologically? Theologically?



continues....

Tuesday, October 07, 2014

Goldilocks Was a Hipster

a work in progress



3

When someone claims to like bad books or bad movies, they are not using "bad" as a description of quality. They are using it as a label for the kind of book that they like. 

At some point in the past "soap opera" was simply a cuss word meaning "bad drama". "Space opera" was what clever science fiction fans called the stuff that they didn't read. We'd now happily say that Iain M Banks was writing "space opera" without even the slightest implication that he really ought to have been trying harder. "Pulp" used to be a literary slur directed at stuff written quickly and printed on cheap paper: it's now a perfectly neutral way of describing stories about detectives and barbarians and pirates. 

("What a shame we are no longer allowed to go out into the garden and admire all the homosexual flowers and listen to a homosexual tune on the wireless!")

People who like "bad" books might perfectly well draw a distinction between good "bad" books and bad "bad" books. And we could point to any number of bad "good" books. The possibility of bad good "bad" books and good bad "bad" books is left as an exercise for the reader.

Some people think that a long literary novel with a forty page digression about the smell of the protagonist's granny's nightie is basically a pulp novel done badly. "Silly man" they say "He understood so little about pacing that he honestly thought we wanted endless pages about a Russian psychopath wondering the streets thinking about predestination and existentialism when he obviously should have cut straight to the actual murder." (This condition, known as "subtext blindness", is more common than you'd think.) And some people think that a pulp adventure novel is what you are left with when someone tries and fails to write a serious literary psychological doorstep. "Why didn't the writer focus on the effect of shell-shock and PTSD rather than wasting our time with endless descriptions of medieval cavalry charging down orcs with lances?" they ask.

The blessed Germain Greer thought that the Spider-Man movie took a wrong turn when Peter Parker decided to use his powers to fight crime. Surely it should have been about the Kafkesque alienation of an insect person? (She also felt that Master and Commander was too focused on boats.) Paul Merton claimed that Lord of the Rings was the worst book he'd ever read because it didn't contain any laughs; which is a bit like John Cleese telling Malcolm Muggeridge that Chartres cathedral wasn't a very funny building.

Germain Greer didn't really say that the Aubrey-Maturin series was too much about boats. What she said was that setting a story in the Nelsonic navy is a choice: in this case, a choice to tell a story which is mainly about manly men being macho and hardly at all about womanly women being feminine. Only caricature feminists have ever said that Moby Dick, Hornblower and Master and Commander ought never to have been written or that they ought to have had alternate chapters about what the mostly female civilians were doing while the mostly male sailors were out annihilating aquatic mammals and flogging each other, or that they would have been improved by the addition of one of those folk song ladies who dressed up as a boy and went to sea. What feminists actually say is "There are great number of books of the first kind, and very few of the second kind. And only the first kind seem to get turned into movies. Why do you think that is?"

Fanny Price only gets to spend three chapters agonizing about what necklace to wear to a ball because there aren't any French people firing cannon balls at her head. 


4

My go-to example of loving and forgiving something which I believe to be bad is, of course, my MP3 collection of the 1940-51 Superman wireless serials. There are about a thousand 15 minute episodes and I adore every one. (Well, maybe not the alien cook who speaks in rhyme.) I understand that it went out 5 evenings a week, to be listened to by American kids when they got home from school. Episodes are simultaneously breathlessly fast paced and excruciatingly padded. The kids have got to be engaged; but the story has got to be drawn out for as long as possible. Copy boys run to Perry White's office with urgent messages; but it can take a whole episode for anyone to actually get around to reading them. "Message you say, can't you see that I'm too busy to read a fool message?" "Gee, chief, but there might be something important in it, we haven't heard from Lois for three days" "I can't nursemaid every girl reporter on my newspaper! And don't call me chief!" "What about the message?" GET ON WITH IT!

In this kind of format, it's essential that you can tell which character is which the minute they open their mouths. So practically everyone is a stereotype. Henchmen speak in that "de spring is sprung de grass is riz" Brooklyn accent. Policemen begin sentences with "to be sure, to be sure". Cab drivers sound like de black fella. Butler's are English cockneys. Jimmy Olsen says "swell" a lot. On one occassion the villain leaves a white rose at the scene of the crime and Clark Kent questions the florist. Sure enough, he sounds English and effeminate.

This tendency to very broadly drawn characters is part of the show's texture; part of the aesthetic; part of why I adore it. It wouldn't be improved by telling me about the florist's background; or by casting against type and making him a big tough guy with tattoos. But the line between broadly drawn characters; stereotypes; and out-and-out racism can be quite a wiggly one. There's a 1942 episode in which Clark switches two prisoners and remarks. "All Japs look much the same, after all." My attitude to the series might be rather different if most of the wartime episodes were not lost to posterity.  

But then again. In a pulp war story, all the enemy have to pretty uncomplicatedly baddies. That's part of what makes it a pulp war story. If you stop the action to wonder who the Jerry you just shot was, and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart; or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home, and if he would really rather have stayed there in peace, well, you might possibly have a better story, but you'd have a much worse pulp war story. 

So perhaps the person who says "I like this even though it is rubbish" is not talking about aesthetics or genre. Perhaps he is admitting that his pulp books are bad because they are, or sometimes are racist -- or sexist, or morally simplistic. He's not talking about literary quality, but morals. He is much more like someone saying  "I must admit that I enjoy looking at pornography, even though I know I ought not to" than someone saying "I must admit that I like this painting, even though the lady's head is out of proportion and her leg twists round in a direction it couldn't actually go."

continues in this vein for pages

Monday, October 06, 2014

Goldilocks Was a Hipster

A work in progress



dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
1


Do you remember Thunderbirds? 

That is a rhetorical question. Of course you remember Thunderbirds. 

Did you like Thunderbirds?

That is also a rhetorical question. Of course you liked Thunderbirds. 

Did you like Thunderbirds even though you could see the strings? 

Did you like Thunderbirds because you could  see the strings? 

Are you pretty sure that most of the time you couldn't actually see the strings?

Or did you just wish everyone would shut up about the bloody strings?

I mean, it would be perfectly reasonable to regard the strings as an insuperable barrier to enjoying Gerry Anderson. This is an action adventure series where the characters are obviously dolls and where no-one has gone to much trouble to conceal the fact that they are dolls, so remind me, why is anyone watching this thing to start with? 

It would be also be perfectly reasonable to watch it "ironically": to watch it because you can see the strings, because it is funny that you can see the strings, to endlessly replay sequences where the strings are see-able, and to pat yourself on the back for being so much cleverer than those silly people in the 1970s who couldn't have spotted a string if it had leapt out and bit them on the nose. 

And it would be understandable if a Gerry Anderson fan got all defensive and said that actually you can't see the strings most of the time and televisions were much smaller in those days and lots of people were watching in black and white and they were meant for children who just accept this sort of thing for what it is and just shut up about the strings, okay? 

It's a while since I last watched Thunderbirds. If I recall correctly, for the first ten minutes the strings are intrusive, but you rapidly slip into a state of mind where you are perfectly aware that what you are watching are puppets but somehow you bracket off the puppetyness and accept it as an exciting science fictiony James Bondy disaster movie. At which point the one with the aliens in the pyramids is quite claustrophobic and the one on the bridge is quite tense and Lady Penelope is always a hoot. 

Yes: of course they are puppets. Any fool can see that. Why did you think it was even worth mentioning? 

See also: Clone Wars.

2


People sometimes say that they like a particular book or movie or television programme "even though it is terrible". 

Sometimes they sat it in a self deprecating way. "Ha-ha silly me I love trashy horror novels!" 

Sometimes they put it in a defensive way "I love the Twilight series and yes I know it's rubbish." 

And sometimes they are positively aggressive: "What I like BEST is to find some RUBBISH to read and the BIGGER LOAD OF RUBBISH it is the BETTER I'll like it." 

Can you like something and consider it bad? I would have thought that "Works of art I like" and "Works of art I think are good" are pretty much synonymous. Wasn't it Plato who said that no-one considers themselves to be evil, apart from Galactus?

Everyone agrees that Moby Dick is the greatest novel ever written — certainly the greatest long American novel about whale hunting. Everyone also agrees that it is is long, uneven, repetitive, digressive, pretentious and repetitive. But no-one can quite agree what the editor should have done to improve it. The minute you say "Well, he could have ditched the 40 page sermon about Jonah for a start" someone else well say "But that's my favorite chapter."

Moby Dick is seriously flawed. But then, everything is seriously flawed. (I think Theodore Sturgeon said that.) If you are only going to read flawless books, your reading list is going to be quite short.

See also: Cerebus.

Some people do seem to read with their eyes ever vigilante for the chink in the armour that will reveal that this is not the Perfect Book and therefore does not need to be read. "Well, I started reading this book, but on on page 3 the elephant hunter used a rifle that didn't go into production until 1898 even though the book is set in 1897 so naturally I didn't read any further." "On page 54, the writer used a word I didn't know so naturally I tossed the book to one side." I forget who it was who stopped reading Lord of the Rings after Elrond said "This is the doom we must deem".  

F.R. Leavis used this method to reduce his reading list to four English novelists. You have limited time on this earth; and most great novels require several readings, so why waste your time on any book except the great ones? 

C.S.Lewis, on the other hand, felt that the correct approach to a study of sixteenth century English literature (excluding drama) was to read every surviving scrap of literature from the sixteenth century plowing through pages and pages of "drab" writing in order to track down the occasional good bit. I don't suppose Lewis would have said that he liked 16th century literature "even though it's terrible". (He would probably have said that he was a scholar, and "liking" and "not liking" were neither here nor there.)

Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad. Of the four dead white males two were female although one of them had a boy's name. When asked if there was anything special he wanted for his fiftieth birthday, Lewis replied "I suppose the head of F.R Leavis on a platter would be rather too expensive?" 

Continues indefinitely....

Thursday, September 04, 2008

Nicholas Parsons: ...the subject is "science fiction". Will you tell us something about that subject, in this game, starting now:

Chris Addison: Science fiction is generally associated with the sorts of boys who generally don't find it easy to get girlfriends and also find it rather difficult to... [FX: BUZZ]

Nicholas Parsons: ...you have 53 seconds on "science fiction" starting now:

Sue Perkins: People who like science fiction want to explore brave new worlds whilst failing to understand simultaneously there's one they're living in right here and now. They never seem to be interested in what happens out side their front door instead they like to peruse comics and magazines which splik glibly... [BUZZ]

Nicholas Parsons: ...37 seconds available, "science fiction", starting now:

Julian Clary: Science fiction isn't a literary genre I've ever paid much attention to, but I can make some up on the spot for you because it really is that easy: "Mr Gobbledegook walked down the road, and sudd...[BUZZ]

Nicholas Parsons: ...you have got "science fiction", the subject, 24 seconds, starting now:

Paul Merton: ...Kurt Vonnegut wrote a wonderful book about...er.... [BUZZ]

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Thought for the Day

Dave Sim: Having just finished a biography of William Blake, I understand he suffered terribly from this. In many ways, he was the original self-publisher.

I mean, I really want to do a good multilayered story with Cerebus, and I have a compulsion to say a lot of -probably too many- things in the six thousand pages.

But, man, at least I don 't have a sense of being put here on Earth to put everything right. To me, Blake clearly thought he was Moses or Jacob or the heir to their legacy, anyway.

Chosen by God to tell the world what really happened, get everyone to agree that every Renaissance painter he didn't like was a fraud and everyone he did like was a prophet or a beacon on the hill. everyone he liked was an angel from his personal God until he didn't like those people anymore, at which time they were one of the Legions of Hell sent to torment him.


People like that I find very worrisome....

Alan Moore: ...If (Blake) occasionally seems to have an inflated opinion of himself, it would seem to me only a natural counter-reaction to his seeming wretchedness and failure in all save the eyes of a few close friends (and, of course, posterity).

You're right in naming him the first self-publisher, near as damn it, and I think that you might find more in common with him than there seems to be at first glance: a man who had a vision and decided that the best way to convey it was by devoting his life's work to an extended fantasy narrative, a symbolic world where invented characters would play out the drama of the creator's divine insight

....This is not to discount your own view of Blake of course, simply to suggest that my own is maybe a bit more forgiving and more prepared to overlook the occasional bout of hubris.

Lord knows, Dave, we're not above the occasional bout of hubris ourselves, are we? And we haven't even written London or painted Glad Day yet.

(William Blake: Nov 28 1757 - Aug 12 1827)

Friday, August 10, 2007


"The whole spirit in which we enjoy a comic rogue depends on leaving out the consideration of the consequences which his character would have in real life: bring that in and every such character becomes tragic. To invite us to treat Jingle [in Pickwick Papers] as a comic character and then spring the tragic side on us, is a mere act of bad faith. No doubt that is how Jingle would end in real life. But then in real life it would have been our fault if we had originally treated him as a comic character. In the book you are forced to do so and therefore unjustly punished when the tragedy comes...."

C.S Lewis


"I find these letters which I still occasionally get (apart from the smell of incense which fallen man can never quite fail to savour) make me rather sad. What thousands of grains of good human corn must fall on barren, stony ground, if such a very small drop of water should be so intoxicating! But I suppose one should be grateful for the grace and fortune that have allowed me to provide even the drop"

J.R.R Tolkien (after receiving a fan letter from a young boy who said he had just read The Hobbit for the eleventh time)




"Sure, it’s simple, writing for kids. Just as simple as bringing them up.

All you do is take all the sex out, and use little short words and little dumb ideas, and don’t be too scary, and be sure there’s a happy ending. Right? Nothing to it. Write down. Right on.

If you do all that, you might even write Jonathan Livingston Seagull and make twenty billion dollars and have every adult in America reading your book!

But you won’t have every kid in America reading your book. They will look at it, and they will see straight through it, with their clear, cold, beady little eyes, and they will put it down, and they will go away. Kids will devour vast amounts of garbage (and it is good for them) but they are not like adults: they have not yet learned to eat plastic."

Ursula Le Guin

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Fight! Fight! Fight!

"Dawkins seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms."

" For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is."

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

A.N W.I.L.S.O.N I.S A S.H.I.T

For those of us who have read A.N Wilson's mendacious biography of C.S Lewis or his goofy book on Jesus this is quite siimply the funniest thing which has ever happened in the entire history of English literature.

Friday, August 04, 2006

Asexual Pride

"....and I think in the same way there are things that men can read which can send out signals, I think, which are deeply unattractive to women."

"Such as?"

"Well, sci-fi and fantasy. I think if you're the sort of man who's reading one of those lurid books with sort of triple breasted amazonian women on the front cover and inside it's all about swords and sorcery and so on then I think what you're communicating to any woman is that you're still an adolescent"

"Unless the woman is into that kind of thing, of course, I mean, it's possible"

"It is, it is, but I have friends who love that sort of stuff and many of them are still looking for women who are also similarly interested in that particular subculture. "



"Stick your nose in a book and you could find love. How the right book can find you the right partner." Today, BBC Radio 4, August 1st

Monday, August 08, 2005

This is completely unfair....

....and if anyone gave a similar treatment to Tollers or Jack, I'd be deeply sniffy. But it made me laugh and laugh and laugh....

His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, Condensed