Monday, February 09, 2015

-365

Yes: I remember Star Wars Trading Cards. They were very much a thing.

A very American thing. Tiny little Bazooka Joe bubblegums with tiny little cartoon strips, which weren't funny and were full of references to "principals" and "coaches" and "baseball" and "kids" who formed "gangs" in "alleys" near "fire hydrants". I suppose that an American child would have been just as puzzled by the Beano. If you collected 10,000 or 100,000 strips you could trade them in for a gift. I don't know if anyone ever did. I don't know if the offer even worked in the UK, although I did get a club membership goody bag, with a plastic ring which was already too small for my fingers. It was meant to whistle. You were meant to communicate with other members of the gang using morse code.  

American comics still had tiny small ads for novelties inside the front covers and I believed in every single one of them: the disc that would allow you to hypnotize people; the giant robot that obeyed your commands. Plans for a giant robot, I think it was. In the long decade between Turnabout Intruder and V'Ger, Star Trek was such a small thing that memorabilia was being flogged alongside sea monkeys and live (guaranteed) sea horses: a replica Tricorder (I suppose the Aurora snap together kit); cuddly Tribbles; rubber Spock ears. The tenth anniversary of the original series conveniently fell in 1976 and could therefore be referred to as the Tennial. (The US Bicentennial was very nearly as big as the Queen's Silver Jubilee.) There was a silver plated medallion to commemorate it. It must, I suppose, have been very very easy to commission silver plated medallions. One of the first pieces of merchandize I ever saw advertised was a silver plated Spider-Man medallion. If I had bought it, then by now it would be worth very little.

I could conceive of saving up a pound and somehow turning it into two dollars and somehow sending it to America and getting a life size model of the Star Ship Enterprise (with real warp drive) months later via boat-mail. There were mythical aunts with American bank accounts, and legendary documents called International Reply Coupons. (This was before Paypal.) But collecting a thousand pieces of bubble gum was too far fetched even for me.

Bubble gum was almost as prohibited as tobacco at school. Cigarettes killed you, but bubble gum made a mess under the desk, stuck to people's shows, and spread diseases. You could be slapped for possessing either, although no-one ever was. Chewing gum was somewhat different. Grown ups chewed chewing gum. It was and is sold in serious little packets as if it was headache tablets or condoms. Bubblegum came in colorful "hey-kids!" packaging. It would kill you if you swallowed it; choke you to death; stay in your stomach for the rest of your life. And there was something not quite nice about a sweet that you put in your mouth in order to spit it out again. No-one minded about the Great British Gobstopper.

I suppose that at one time, cards had been given away free with gum; and as time went by the gum got less and less important and the cards got more and more important and you ended with five picture cards that came with a small flat strip of bubblegum that turned to powder in your mouth. Football cards were different. No gum in football cards, so far as I remember, although possibly if you collected enough you could trade them in for a toasted sandwich. (*) I remember sheets of stickers as well. Dozens of tiny stamp sized stickers one, not on any particular theme, just things that might come in useful to a ten year old boy: "Top Secret"; "We Hate School";  "No Girls Allowed". Like gum, it felt thrillingly naughty even to handle one because a friend of a friend in a different class had definitely been slapped for putting one on text book.

Just before there were Star Wars cards, there were Marvel Comics cards. It sort of bothered me that people who were not Marvel Comics fans were allowed to collect them. There was one golden play time when a cool kid with a big collection challenged me to name all the characters, which I could do easily, and everyone was (for about an hour) un-ironically impressed. But then Star Wars happened. No-one had seen Star Wars, because it wasn't out yet, although I had read both the book and the comic, which put me at some advantage. I had a few cards; some of the cool kids with more money had complete sets. Someone had his collection stolen and for two days all the grown ups went completely insane. Our form teacher inspected everyone's desk and our year head -- can I be making this up? -- cancelled lessons to question everyone one at a time about the location of the cards. "It doesn't make any difference to me if it's twenty picture cards or 20 blocks of gold that had been stolen, I will not have a thief in my form." I suppose they had agreed in advance to massively over-react to the first instance of stealing so as to put across the impression that they took stealing very seriously indeed. I don't remember if the cards were found or if anyone got slapped.

Did one of those cards really have a photo of Biggs on it? But there would have been nothing very surprising about seeing a photo of Biggs on a card in 1977. He is not in the film. But "not being in the film" and "not being in Star Wars" were still two different things. Star Wars was a comic first; and then a book; and then a series of picture cards; and possibly a set of free gifts in cereal packets; and certainly a series of action figures. The Force Blade has a much greater claim to being the real lightsaber than any replica or schematic or freeze frame still from the movie. Because that's what we knew about and that's what cool kids with money owned. The film is now all we have left, which is why it hurts so much when Lucas messes with it. But Star Wars is quite unrecoverable. And Star Wars was never a movie. The picture cards and action figures are where these characters lived.

*

Mr Abrams decided to reveal the names of the character in the Star Wars VII trailer in the form of retro style picture cards which no one aged under 50 will really understand. This is a good thing, in that Abrams wants to play with nostalgia; and a bad thing, in the sense that he sees Star Wars as a collection of dead relics to be venerated, not a living tradition to be continued.

These are our First Glimpses of characters who please George please please we will grow to know and love like Luke and Leia and Jar-Jar and Pooh and Piglet and all of the others.

* It might have been that the robot was just a bit of hardware. But in fact she is "BB-8". (Does that mean that she is not an R2 unit, or just that her name is Artoo Beebee?)

* It have been that the face in the X-Wing was just Red 9, standing by. But in fact he is someone called Poe Dameron.

* The girl on the speeder bike is Rey.

* The scared Stormtrooper is Finn.

"Rey" and "Finn". Don't have last names. If we had been told that they were called Rey Skywalker or Finn Solo, that would give us massive, massive hints about the plot. Which is why I am going to bet that that is indeed what they are called. Poe Dameron would be an odd name for Skyalker or Solo descendant. And the guy with the funny lightsaber is Kylo Renn, which is just a name: not Darth Renn or Darth Kylo or Kylo Renn Skywalker.

Obviously, none of this tells us anything whatsoever. But we can enjoy chewing on a bit of sickly-sweet retro-nostalgia.








(*) Think about it.

-385

28 Dec 2014 - Trailer for Star Wars Episode VII released.

[PLACEHOLDER] 

Wombles; Little and Large; Treasury Edition; weekly comic; action figures; glow in the dark swords; all subsequent movies, and indeed all subsequent life something of an anti-climax.

[FULL DISCLOSURE]

I refer to Mr Abrams previous attempt to revamp a much loved science fiction franchise with the word "star" in the title only as The Abomination, and did not go and see the second one.

I thought Episode I was quite good, but a bit of a let down, when I first saw it, and have not significantly changed my mind since. I do not feel that the director made it out of personal animosity to me, as some people I believe do.

The TV cartoon series I positively like. 

[COMMENTARY]


0.10 Black screen, sound effects, leading to 

0.14 Desert scene. The trailer for Episode I started with an unfamiliar image of gungans walking through reeds,  but with the unmistakable "Luke Skywalker theme" telling us where we were. This one relies on the fact that Tunisian Desert says Star Wars without any aural clues. And it is not self-conscious about being Star Wars: there is not attempt to disguise itself as the Seven Samurai. 

When I saw Star Wars my head was full of Flash Gordon, or possibly I stuffed my head full of Flash Gordon because of Star Wars, and I felt that each film ought to be set on one of those mono-ecological kingdoms: the ice world, the city in the sky; the swamp world; the forest world. But more and more everything seemed to be about the desert world. (And they spoiled the desert world in Phantom Menace by making it big — huge Ben Hur arenas where it should have been bored farm boys racing each other to the canyon and back. It's a backwater. If there's a bright center to the universe etc etc etc.) Our first image confirms that It's All About The Desert World. Star Wars is about Tatooine and Tatooine is about Star Wars. 

0.20 Dark brown voice: "There has been an awakening; have you felt it." It doesn't sound like Yoda, and it isn't British enough to be Obi-Wan. I have no idea what "an awakening" could be: perhaps it means a new, powerful Jedi has come on the scene. (When Obi-Wan taught Luke to use the Force, could this have been described as an Awakening?)

0.23 Black man in stormtrooper gear pops up, looking perturbed. (This is John Boyega, an actor. There is no clue about his role, apart from the fact that he is playing a perturbed stormtrooper, or a perturbed man pretending to be a stormtrooper. Is he perturbed because he as just Awakened, or because he has just encountered someone who has Awakened?) 

In the original movies, we never saw a Stormtrooper take its helmet off, although Luke and Han spent the middle act in uniforms. In the Clone Wars period, "clone troopers", who are all clones of Jango Fett, are goodies; it is assumed (though we've never out and out been told) that the stormtroopers in the original films are clone troopers repurposed to be baddies by the Empire. This guy does not appear to be a Jango-Clone ... he doesn't look like the troopers do in the cartoon, at any rate.

0.29 A droid whizzing past some hardware. It is whistling like R2D2. The hardware isn't anything specific, although one of vehicles looks slightly like the tiny little ship that gets eaten by a Star Destroyer at the beginning of Episode I.  

The scene looks quite like Star Wars, grimy and run-down like the original films, not shiny and boring like the prequels.

0.39 Shots of Stormtroopers in a vehicle of some kind: presumably about to "parachute" down onto some alien planet. 

Sinking feelings: that technique of showing you a glimpse of what is happening before it blacks out, of everything being pressed together and claustrophobic works well in Battlestar Galactica and Alien and things which are meant to feel a bit like the real military would if it was in space, but is a poor match to A Long Time Ago In A Galaxy Far Far Away. The Abomination took something shiny and happy and 1960s and made it dark and cynical and crap. But surely if he hated Star Wars the way he hated Star Trek, Disney wouldn't have let him lose on their expensive new toys?

0.42  A young woman wearing a costume indistinguishable from Leia's in Episode VI, shooting across Tatooine in a vehicle strongly reminiscent of the speeder-bike from that movie. (This is presumably "Rachel" the 17 year old orphan who learned to make her way in a tough, dangerous town -- the role for which Lucasfilms did an open casting call in 2012.) This pretty much confirms what we guessed already: that "Rachel" is the "Leia" stand-in (and that "Tom", the other role they had open auditions for, is the surrogate Luke.)

.The TV Tropes website coins the phrase "flanderisation" to refer to the process whereby a character in a long running series becomes defined by one single characteristic. (In the first season of the Simpsons, Ned Flanders had a number of personality traits, one of which was church going. By season 6 he was The Comedy Christian.) The Clone Wars TV series shows signs of flanderisation: a small number of scenes and images from the movies are replayed over and over, as if they define the genre, which arguably they do. (The room falls silent, the music drops, we hear breathing and the swish of a light saber activating in a corridor. We see face shots of six pilots checking in with their calls signs in quick succession. I haven't seen Rebels yet, but the trailer is a close pastiche of the iconic opening seconds of Episode IV.) In my essay Little Orphan Anakin I noted that the iconography of Amidala in Episode 2 was so similar to that of Princess Leia in Episode IV as to effectively amalgamate the two characters. 

0.48 Amphibious X-Wings: and why not. Note that it only takes, what, half a second to allude to the seminal "Red 6, standing by!" sequence in Episode IV.

1.00 "The Dark Side...and the Light". The croaky voice makes one wonder if perchance it could be a revivified Emperor who is speaking the narration. 

The phrase "The Dark Side and the Light" tells us literally nothing about the movie; it's almost as if a Sherlock Holmes film had the tag-line "the detective must solve...a mystery". (I don't know if the two bits of speech are meant to run together, so it goes "There has been an awakening? Have you felt it: the dark side and the light?") 

I am not sure about the cruciform lightsabre. To me, what is and should be cool about skiffy is going back and seeing the same bits of hardware over and over again; the same phasers, the same jaunting belts; the same lightsabers. But I suppose we are committed to newer and cooler weapons in each episode and we've done the double-headed sword in Episode I. 

The lightsaber is red. In the Original Trilogy, the goody's lightsabers had blue blades and the baddy's lightsabers had red blades. So perhaps this person stumbling through the dark snowy forest is the baddie. His cloak slightly calls to mind Luke Skywalker at the beginning of Return of the Jedi, meaning that I can't quite shake the thought that the plot of the new trilogy might involve Luke having turned to the Dark Side. 

That had better not be Vader breathing we can hear in the background. 

1.10 Woot! Woot! Millennium Falcon. Woot! Woot! Proper TIE Fighters. 

Obviously the big big big problem with the prequels was that you couldn't have any of the really cool iconic stuff from the real movies; which made it harder and harder for us to grab hold of any part of the film and say "yes, that looks like Star Wars." One doesn't want to wibble too far the other way: Empire introduced AT-AT walkers and Jedi introduced those three winged shuttle craft, after all; there's no point in a series of sequels which just repeat images from Star Wars over and over again. But it's pretty sly to make a trailer which contains all of the cool stuff from the original trilogy (plus some stuff with strong Original Trilogy overtones). It's like it's saying — not quite sure about the prequels — that's fine...this one will be like coming home. 

Is that water the Falcon is flying over in the first seconds of the shot? Would that be the same lake the X-Wings are skimming? Does that mean that someone Tatooine is no longer all desert? (The latter Dune novels involved introducing water onto Arakis, didn't it?)

[CONCLUSION]

This doesn't tell us anything that we couldn't already have guessed, but we didn't expect it too. 

It's set partly on Tatooine; it's got X-Wings and the Millennium falcon in it; there's an evil Jedi with a cruciform sword; one of the main characters spends some of the movie in a stormtrooper uniform, and another is a dead ringer for Leia-Amidala. 

Nothing contradicts the default rumor, that this is basically going to go back to draft one of The Star Wars, two Jedi kids going to rescue their father from the baddies. I'd guess "Rachel" and "Tom" are the children of Leia and Han, though probably not the Jaina and Jacen of the now non-canonical Extended Universe. They are ignorant of each other's existence, and for some reason think their parents are dead. Uncle Luke has recently Gone Over To The Dark Side; but his Nephew and Niece "awaken" to the Force and set out separately to bring him back to the Light. 

It all looks quite a lot like Star Wars, and there's nothing to suggest that Abrams is going to take the piss out of whole franchise, as he arguably did in the abomination. 

Those of us who care about Star Wars can probably feel cautiously optimistic. Those who don't are going to have a tedious twelve months.








I wrote a book about Star Wars. I think it's the best thing I've done. 


Friday, February 06, 2015

How To Make The Bible Mean Whatever You Want It to Mean



In his Christmas column, the Guardian's tame religious pundit, Giles Fraser, asserts that Christianity is a radical, anti-establishment religion. Those in authority do not like it, because it involves the belief that there is a higher authority than the king. 

I think that this is probably the kind of thing you would expect a Church of England vicar writing in the Guardian to say. It's not completely true and it's not completely false. Historically, religion has been a tool in the hands of those in charge just about as often as it has been a thorn in their flesh. Fraser may think that conservative, establishment clerics are not true Christians. But they could say the same about him, and do, very frequently.

In support of his thesis, Rev. Fraser asks us to look at Jesus. As soon Jesus was born King Herod was trying to have him killed, because he could see that a divine king would be a threat to his earthly kingdom. And in the end, the Romans had the grown up baby-Jesus crucified because they saw his radical kingship as a threat to empire and emperor.

But wait a moment. How do we know that Herod tried to kill baby-Jesus? From the prologue to Matthew's Gospel. Wise Men from the East know that a king has been born because there's a new star in the sky; they head for the palace because that's a good place to look for a king; when there is no king there; they check out Bethlehem because that's where Jewish kings are usually born. Herod gets scared and orders a cull of all the babies in Bethlehem but baby-Jesus is whisked away to Egypt in the nick of time. The story isn't in Luke; it isn't anywhere else in the New Testament and it certainly isn't mentioned by any secular historian, even ones who hate Herod and would quite like to attribute a massacre to him. And it feels a bit too much like Harry Potter for comfort. The consensus is that it is not historically true. It's folklore, mythology: a story. (*)

Only the most tedious kind of pedant hears the question "How many sheep did Noah take onto the ark?"(**) and thinks that "None! Because there was no Ark and no Noah and no sheep! It's a made up story!" is a clever answer. It very probably is a story; but it's one of the stories which it is the job of Christian priests to tell and retell and explain. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that when Giles Fraser says "Herod tried to murder the child born in Royal David's city" we are supposed to hear an unstated "in the story..." at the beginning of the sentence. In the story Herod murdered the children because baby Jesus was a rival King. In the story Mary and Joseph ran away to Egypt. In the story the Romans killed Jesus because he was a subversive. 

Except that they didn't. Not in any of the four stories in the Bible. "In the story" it's the religious authorities who turn against Jesus: because he appears to be preaching sacrilege; because he appears to be threatening the Temple; because he was claiming to be Messiah without doing any of the things Messiahs are meant to do. "In the story" the the chief Priests, the teachers of the law, and the pharisees collude with Judas Iscariot to arrest Jesus. "In the story" they have to persuade the forces of occupation to have him killed. "In the story"—in one of the four stories, at any rate—the Roman Governor repeatedly says that he doesn't think Jesus has done anything wrong. 

So where does Rev. Fraser's notion that Jesus was killed by Romans for political reasons come from?

Some people are not content to just say "in the story". Some people want to read between the lines and infer what "must have" "really" happened. Some of those people think that the story in which the religious authorities had Jesus killed is an after-the-fact anti-Semitic slur. The story of Jesus being killed as an anti-Roman rebel is a bit of a hard sell if you are proselytizing in Rome. So someone (Constantine, probably: Giles Fraser blames everything on Constantine) came up with a different story, one in which the Jews are the baddies and the Romans are exonerated. Some people think it's a nasty story. It has certainly provided the pretext for a lot of anti-Semitism.

Let's reserve judgment about whether this theory is correct. Let's also hold back from wondering how you conduct an Easter service if you think the Passion story in the New Testament is a work of fiction, and nasty fiction, at that. The point which interests me right now is the ease with which a religious writer can move from talking about a story which is in the Bible, but which practically everyone thinks is folklore, to talking about a story which is not in the Bible but which some scholars think may be closer to what really happened, without giving the slightest indication that he's moved from one kind of story to another.

Perhaps Fraser himself regards the evidence for the "historical Jesus" as so overwhelming that he has long since discarded the Jesus of the Gospels in favour of the historical reconstruction. Perhaps, indeed, he has forgotten that there ever was any evidence: perhaps he has moved for so long in academic circles that to him "Jesus" means "the Jesus of historical reconstructions" and he has forgotten that it ever meant anything else. Maybe, when he looks at a passage which says "the chief priests and the teachers of the law were looking for some sly way to arrest Jesus and kill him" (Mark 14:1) he sees "the Romans realized Jesus was a threat to Imperial power." Maybe he's trying to throw some relatively benign dust in our eyes. Maybe he thinks that the story of how the Priests conspired with Judas to kill Jesus is so horrid that it can't be true. Perhaps he hopes that if he repeats the story about how the Roman's killed the revolutionary Jesus often enough, it will become the story which "everybody knows", in the same way that everybody knows that Three Kings followed the star to Bethlehem.  

Or perhaps his illustrations from the life of Jesus are really nothing more than blustering woo. Jesus is neither the character in the stories we have; nor the hypothetical figure historians think they can infer. He's just a place holder for "whatever Giles Fraser believes this week". Anti authoritarianism is good; Jesus is good; therefore Jesus is an anti authoritarian. No-one asks "what would Jesus do" unless they already know the answer.

It is this kind of thing which has caused so many of choir to which Fraser should be preaching to lose patience with the institutional church; even to the extent of muttering words like "post-evangelical" and "modernist". We have all, over the years, been told things by clergymen which couldn't possibly survive any even moderately engaged reading of the Good Book. This has made us suspect that some of them either haven't read the Bible (unlikely) or that they have read it but are relying on the fact that we haven't, and never will. This leaves us with an unpalatable choice between the crazies who have read the story and insist it all really happened, stars and whales and arks and all; and the professionals who were never very interested in the story to start with.  



(*) The Pope points out that in the first century, Bethlehem really was a Little Town. If it only had a population of a few hundred, then "all the babies" might only amount to five or six, not the thousands and thousands of later myths.
(**) Seven. Or possibly fourteen.


BUY MY BOOK or the Pope will spank you. 



Tuesday, February 03, 2015

Looks Like a Dave Sim Hand

So, Andrew, when are you going to start blogging again?

Over the last few months of 2014 this blog was causing me more unhappiness than fun.  I found myself taking down an extended essay on Richard Dawkins and (for different reasons) a short piece about Star Wars because I wasn't able to deal with the criticism they came in for. Some of the things which happened made me feel physically unwell and unable to sleep. The "limits of good taste in comedy" piece never went up at all; even the epigram had people telling me I'd gone insane. Yeah, in retrospect, starting a piece on offensiveness by saying something incredibly offensive wasn't the cleverest idea I ever had. And of course, that was last year, when it was all political correctness and trigger warnings; and this is this year when words are only marks on paper and can't hurt anyone and no-one has any right not to be offended. I'm doing it again, aren't I? 

And there's the problem. I think I'm sometimes quite interesting and sometimes quite funny. More interesting than mumble-mumble-mumble but less interesting than Philip Sandifer, say. But in order to sometimes be quite interesting I have to give myself permission to free-associate wildly and see where I end up. If I feel I have to rein myself in I never get started. 

All of us struggle with the voices in our head saying "how dare you think anyone cares about anything you have to say?" "what are you wasting your time writing about that for when you could be writing about this?" "this thing isn't nearly as good as that other thing, I should give up if I were you". But nowadays the little voices appear in little boxes underneath your essay. The little voices saying you are brilliant would be just as problematic if you believed in them, but no-one sensible does. A musician I admire once thanked me for being honest about his record. That pleased me. 

That's one reason why I've enjoyed the new thing of podcasting so much; it's just off the cuff conversation and folk music doesn't have the bullshit associated with it that the other fandoms do. If you like my blogging, I wish you would listen to it. It's only "about" folk music to the degree that one my "Doctor Who" articles are "about" Doctor Who. Some people think that it isn't kosher to listen to a review of a gig you didn't go to because why would you be interested in gigs you didn't go to; and some people, in fact, some of the same people, think it isn't kosher to listen to a review of a gig you did go to because you already know what happened so why would you want to know what happened?

A vicar once told me that he was very pleased when someone told him that they didn't agree with his sermon. That probably meant that they had listened to it. 

Remember Natalie? Buddhist lady who wants everyone to write. Her advise is to just sit down and write. Not to be confused with Dorothea; Freudian lady who wants everyone to write. Her advise is to just sit down and write. Or indeed Julia, hippy lady who wants everyone to write, whose advise is to just sit down and write. I gave my copy of Brenda away. I think that she thought that the best thing was to just sit down and write, but in a terribly middle-class about it. Dorothea thought that if you just let yourself go, then your Right Brain would automatically say brilliant things through you. Natalie thought that if you just let yourself go, then your Wild Mind would automatically say brilliant things through you. Julia thinks that if you just let yourself go, then God will say automatically say brilliant things through you. (This works even if you don't believe in God.) 

There is something to be said for this kind of stuff. The Higher Power thing is as necessary for us writers as it is for you alcoholics; not as a theory about how evolution happened but as a way of not answering the question "Whats writing for?" "It's kind of like meditation" "It's kind of like psychoanalysis" and "It's kind of like praying" are the closest things to answers anyone is likely to come up with. 

But she did us all a lot of harm. She told us that it was all about sitting down and letting words flow out like endless rain into a paper cup, and that there was nowhere you could be that wasn't where you were meant to be. You don't become a swordsman by years of study and training; it's not skill and experience and technical knowledge that makes you a great pilot. It's all a matter of faith. Just switch off your conscious self and act on instinct.

It comes all comes back to that damn movie. Everything always comes back to that damn movie.

I was once at a church meeting, and someone said "shall we plan a structure for the Easter meditation, or shall we just allow God to lead us." Quick as a flash the Vicar (a different Vicar) said "Why, don't you think God can lead through planning and preparation?"

Who was it who said that the greatest impediment to a religious revival in England today is the fact that the word "Vicars" rhymes with "Knickers"?

Even Neil is in on the stunt: see him only the other day saying that either you can make the process of writing unnecessarily complicated or you can just sit down and write. But that's not the question the clueless newbie is asking. The clueless newbie is asking what this mysterious "just writing" thing involves. Does the Neil really just sit at his desk and produce words all day and eventually realize that he has pooed out a book? Well, okay, that might very well apply to Ocean at the End of the Lane, but Sandman and American Gods and the spider one show signs of him having taken some trouble over them. And that's all the clueless newbie wants to hear.

I heard Robin Hobb at Worldcon, a very good writer impressively uncontaminated by silly notion of Making Good Art. She has kids and animals and a busy life, but her characters are always in her mind, and in odd moments she writes down a few sentences about what happens to them next. At the end of the day, when she has time to herself, she types up that day's notes. Eventually she has the draft of a novel. I don't believe that I could ever write like that; for me it's about the sensation of typing, of getting lost in a huge swirly labyrinth of me and feeling that my fingers are much, much cleverer than I am: but it's the kind of thing the newbie wants to hear. What "Just write" and "Make Good Art" are really saying is "Oh, it's mysterious and ineffable and I can't put it into words."

I once read a book by John Braine. I think he was the man who wrote Room at the Top, which I have never read, and nrbrt intend to. He said that you write a novel in two stages: first draft; synopsis; final draft. First of all you sat down and batter out your novel making it all up as you go along; and then you read it, summarized it, fiddled around until the plot actually made sense, and then you rewrote it, and sent that second draft off to the publisher. I believe in that much more than I believe in all those cork boards with pins telling you what colour eyes the heroine has and the name of her second favorite citrus fruit. 

If I had spent more time with that and less time with The Way of Becoming a Wild Writer things might have turned out differently. The Internet didn't help very much, either. 

It's like we've discovered a new drug; and the only options we can think of are total abstinence or lotus eaters indulgence. We were the first, and as it happened, the last, generation of "TV natives". Our parents thought of TV as something of an impostor in the living room. Do you really need pictures on the radio? You surely can't be going to sit and watch TV all day? But we weren't "watching" TV, staring passively at it. It wasn't like that. TV was a place. It was the place we lived in. It was where everything happened. And even if what was happening that day wasn't anything you cared about, like the election or football or a documentary on barrel organs -- you had to go there because it was where all your imaginary friends hung out. 

That is why Jimmy Savile is so uniquely traumatic. Not just because he was a child molester; or because he was a prolific child molester; or even a famous prolific child molester. He was an absolutely central part of the place where we all lived called Television. It was never really clear what it was that he did, but he was almost certain to be on hand when you dropped by. The revelation that he was only in it for the under age sex has rather poisoned the whole thing retrospectively.

The next generation neither sit google eyed in front of Blue Peter and Songs of Praise; nor do they fear TV as a mind sucking alien. It's just a thing that delivers content. They still Watch Telly in the sense that we still Go To The Pictures, but telly isn't for them what it was for us any more than cinema is for us what it was for Grandpa. They can handle the Internet. We can't. Oh, there are a few old people who don't see the point of it and are pretty sure it will all blow over in a few weeks anyway and who write articles for the Guardian about how they survived a whole afternoon without their mobile phone. There were people in the Olden Days who had sworn terrible oaths that they would never allow a TV into their house. (My Uncle Bill refused to have a television, I believe for socialist reasons. My Aunty Laura, more sensibly, had one but refused to actually switch it on.) But most of us are more like middle-aged men in the first and as it turned out only age of TV, slumped in front of our screens with the Radio Times on one knee and the TV Times on the other knee. O-mi-gud we can sit here and watch movies and porn and music and porn and sport and porn and comics and porn all day long and never leave our desks again, and now Apple has invented a little baby one that we can take to bed like a hot water bottle and hug like a teddy bear. It's me who is intoxicated by Marvel Unlimited (I only bought my IPad for Marvel Unlimited started) like a junkie mainlining ecstasy because o-mi-god I can read every single issue of Captain America and I have to do that as quickly as possible so I can read every single issue of the Fantastic Four. The digital natives aren't excited by this stuff: why wouldn't you be able to read a 40 year old comic if that's what floats your bag. It must be one the internet somewhere?

I am not worried about little toddlers running their finger over the front page of the Guardian in the hope that it will make the pictures get bigger. I am not worried about bigger kids who think that "doing their homework" means cutting and pasting a paragraph from Wikipedia without reading it first. I am much more worried about the ones who have found an HTML version of Pong or Space Invader on their Dad's laptop. They are ancient games, not very good to begin with. World of Warcraft or Minecraft well; yes of course. A Dungeons & Dragons game that goes on forever with an infinite number of little metal figures that you don't have to paint; a box of Lego you literally never get to the bottom of. Who wouldn't be addicted to that. But it sometimes seems as if anything which keeps finger twitching and eyes vaguely focused on a glowy thing does the job just as well.

"Just write". And once we have just written, just publish. And a lot of our creative power is spent just writing on Twitter, just writing on Facebook, just writing on Usenet. Ha. I am the only person in the whole world who remembers what Usenet even was.. C.S Lewis left 2,000 pages of unpublished letters. T.S Eliot is up to volume 5, but he hasn't been dead quite as long. 

I could announce that I am giving up blogging and writing a book about, oh, the peritext of Jackson's Lord of the Rings or a novel about, oh, 1980s comprehensive schools, sexual repression, and the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons. I promise I won't although I am quite pleased to have finally found an excuse to use the word peritext. But even if I did start a Project I would be confronted by Page 1, Chapter 1 and suddenly start doodling away about a thing I read in the paper about Mary Magdalene and political correctness, and nothing would happen. 

Before you ask: I have precious little to say about Peter Capaldi, and will probably get around to saying it eventually. I think that the thing that Russell Davies turned Doctor Who into — a dating comedy about a series of women so preternaturally perfect that almighty god falls in love with them — while a perfectly good premise for a show is not the premise for a show which terribly interests me. Matt Smith was so luminously brilliant that for three years I was prepared to pretend that I hadn't noticed the problem. Take him away and what you are left with is nothing I care very much about.

"Oh, but Peter Capaldi is excellent."

Yes. I absolutely accept that Peter Capaldi is an excellent choice to play the romantic lead in this sci-fi dating comedy. I'm just not quite sure what the Cybermen were there for.

"Ah, but Doctor Who has been many different things over the years; you don't specially like the thing it is now; but you are bound to like the thing it is next, or the thing it will be after that."

Well, no; no, I don't think so. "Rose" set the template for what New Who is about so brilliantly and so perfectly that eight years later we are still watching a series of variations on a theme, Nothing short of cancellation and eighteen years off air is likely to erase that. Our early instincts were right. Billie Piper destroyed Doctor Who: not because she was terrible but because she was wonderful. 

So anyway.

Episodic collections of essays that might eventually get gathered into books are where it's at. For the time being. Probably. And since I've made the pact with the demon internet I suppose this is where they will continue to happen. Mostly. I have a few ideas about what collections I'm working towards. Hopefully that will become clear over the next day or three. But one thing I am doing, I'm afraid, is leaving the comments mostly switched off. This was the advise of the cleverest person I know, and I am very much afraid he was right.



"Yeah" he sighed "I don't know any writer who's happy. But what else is there to do?"
Natalie Goldberg - "Thunder and Lightening."