Archives » 2008 » August

Writers’ Bloc Update

Just in case anyone was thinking of attending (and of course you were, we put on a great show) the gig at the Owl and Lion I mentioned in my previous Writers’ Bloc post and where yours truly is scheduled to read has now been put back a week.
I will confirm this nearer the time.

Flags

A relatively recent post by doctorvee got me thinking about flags (again.)

I was first struck by this, of course, seeing all those US TV programmes where a flag stood in the corner of a schoolroom or court, hanging from a house wall, or on a special pole erected in a front garden.

More forcefully, it was after holidaying in France and Northern Ireland in successive years that an explanation of sorts occurred.

I noticed the French tricolour flying (hanging limply actually) outside the local mayor’s office in every town. Now, coming from a place where the national flag was only flown from the pole at the municipal buildings on high days and holidays (or the Queen’s birthday – whether real or official) this habitual flaunting was a strange phenomenon. It seemed such a symbol of insecurity. Though I have seen two or so saltires flying from back gardens in Fife, the county where I now live, they are aberrations.

In Northern Ireland, of course, Union jacks or Irish tricolours fly in profusion from every available location – even the bloody kerb-side stones are painted in three colours in certain areas.

I just can’t get my head round the mindset involved in this sort of thing.

I know who I am. I don’t need a flag flying outside my door to prove it.

I don’t mean to upset anybody – I’m genuinely puzzled about this – but what could all this flag waving be about?

In a word legitimacy; or the lack of it.

The French got rid of their king (twice – three times if you count Louis Napoleon.) They’re now on their fourth or fifth Republic – it’s easy to lose track – rioting/revolution is almost their national sport. Deep down they know their state is illegitimate. They fly the flag to disguise this fact.

Same in Northern Ireland. The unionists know it’s not their country really and have to bolster their insecurity with a show of bravado. The nationalists know they’re not in charge so fly flags to assert themselves. All this in itself is relatively harmless; it’s certainly not as bad as blowing people up.

Does the same sort of reasoning apply in the US? They too got rid of their monarch, albeit not by executing him, though it was still bloody. I can understand why recent immigrants would wish to assert their new citizenship, but are native-born Americans really so insecure they need to fly a flag to give themselves confidence? After all, most other evidence is against this interpretation.

Wall.E

I don’t go to the flicks much but it was a wet day (again) last week, not quite dreich but nearly there; and so off with the good lady to the local (12 miles!) multiplex to see Wall.E. Apparently it is pronounced wally. Don’€™t Pixar know what that means in Britain?*
First we had to suffer the barrage of ads and promos – 30 minutes worth! (Why, apart from there being likely to be children present, is C-Beebies being advertised in a cinema?)
The film as a whole is clearly derived from (or at the least, influenced by) Silent Running, which also had robots and a long sequence without dialogue. This is to the good. Silent Running is one of the films which I remember very fondly.
Wall.E‘s opening visuals of a skyscraper city consumed by rubbish, in some cases constructed of rubbish, are impressive. We see a somewhat dishevelled, grungy Wall-E happily trundling about the place collecting detritus, compacting it and stacking the cubes skyscraper high. In the first 30 minutes or so there is no dialogue, except for electronic banner adverts automatically activated as Wall.E motors past them, but these ads do contain some necessary background info.
The establishing of Wall.E’€™s world before the change which chunters up the plot is an example of what can be done filmically. A piece of written fiction of an equivalent reading length but without dialogue would be hard going.
In this world there are no plants; but there must be oxygen as Wall.E has a small companion, a cockroach – whom he accidentally crushes at one point, an occurrence which is clearly distressing, but relief comes when the cockroach survives. (Okay, it’€™s an animated cockroach; which would need no oxygen.) Wall.E’€™s only other source of companionship is a video of Hello Dolly, two songs from which he plays to himself incessantly.
This placid existence is disturbed when a rocket lands – one of those stylised V2-shaped things which is the iconic image of a rocketship. It disgorges a smooth, gleaming, white! robot which starts scanning the surroundings. Wall.E is fascinated by this arrival, follows it about and is almost killed when he makes a noise and the robot immediately discharges a weapon from the end of its arm. The re-holstering of its arm after this, like a gunslinger from a western, was a nice touch.
Eventually Wall.E and the robot, EVE – Wall.E’s pronunciation sounds like EVA – make friends. How emotion can be conveyed with gestures and movements or in EVE’€™s case a slight constriction of the blue lines that are her face€ is familiar from Wallace and Gromit films but is still affecting.
The idyll is broken when, as a present, Wall.E gives EVE a plant he has found and saved. She scans it, takes it inside her casing and shuts down apart from a green blip on her torso. She spends some time totally immobile while Wall.E carries on collecting rubbish before the rocket returns and takes EVE away. Wall.E, off on his duties, panics at the thought of losing his only speaking friend, scurries back and has to hitch a ride on the outside as the rocket blasts off.
It’s at this point that I thought the film lost its way in a way that Silent Running did not, as it became not a portrayal of Wall.E’s relationship with EVE so much as an excuse for a romp, big action sequences, and other filmic references, though there is a modicum of humour in these scenes. I’€™m probably hankering after a more adult film here, this latter stuff is certainly more likely to appeal to kids than to me.
I did, however, appreciate the earlier foreshadowing which, in most cases, is agreeably subtle and arises naturally out of the events as they unfold.
However, the humans they then meet are rendered in that computer animated style which I find distracting. Unlike the cityscapes, these seem too unreal. A plus, since I’€™d not read anything about the film before going, was the pleasant surprise on recognising Peter Gabriel’€™s voice on the end-credit song.

Adult quibbles.
Why would an apparently self-contained space-going environment need a waste disposal airlock? Surely everything, including metal, would have to be recycled?
The plant is at one point exposed to vacuum. Wouldn’€™t it immediately lose all the water from its leaves and therefore die? Instant plot killer there, though.
A fire extinguisher vents in a vacuum to propel Wall.E through space, but still makes a noise. (That’€™s a cliché I suspect will never go away.)

In sum, I enjoyed Wall.E. Give it a shot, at least when it comes on TV. Yes, it has moments of sentimentality (it is, after all, a Disney film) but it is also engaging. However, it does lack one thing that Silent Running had in spades, and that is the performance from the superbly laconic Bruce Dern.

[*In this case not a set of false teeth (which are, in any case, pronounced differently.)]

Viva La Vida (¡Loca!)

Monty Python, thou should’st be living at this hour! Coldplay hath need of thee. (To send them up.)

Imagine the scene.
Prelude to the battle of Cannae. Massed Roman legions about to face up to Hannibal’s army.

Hurrah! The Roman cavalry rolls up, the day is surely ours!
And then they line up, tallest at the back, and start singing?

What, I wonder?

“Gaudeamus Igitur?”
“He’s got a gladius and he’s okay, he sleeps all night and he fights all day?”

That’ll frighten the Carthaginian hordes,* eh?

No wonder the Romans lost.

Chris Martin? More like Ricky Martin.

(*The Carthaginian hordes were actually severely outnumbered.)

Berwick Rangers 1-2 Dumbarton

Shielfield Park, 16/8/08

At last! 5 games into the season and we finally beat someone over 90 minutes. And away at that.
Plus we came from behind again which shows a character missing in the recent past.
Up from 4th bottom to 4th top in one game, 3rd if you don’t count goal difference.
A point of concern, though, is that no forward has yet scored in the league.
But a win’s a win and it was badly needed.
Big game now on Saturday.

Everything You Need by A L Kennedy.

Jonathan Cape, 1999

This blog is supposed to be about writing, fiction, football and whatever; yet so far I’ve posted nothing about writing. Here’s the corrective. I don’t know whether I ought to or not but I intend to post reviews of the books I have read recently. This is the first.

Everything You Need
by A L Kennedy

Everything You Need cover

Kennedy comes laden with praise and plaudits but I’ve always found it difficult to find a way into her work. There can be an opacity about her prose that obscures understanding (or is that just me?) Everything You Need has this opacity at the start but does become more transparent once the story gets into its stride.
It’s mainly set in Wales on an island retreat where a group of writers support one another in their literary efforts. As such it breaks one of the little spoken rules of writing – don’t write about writers – but, of course, as one of the characters says near the end, there are no rules. There are also occasional forays to a London publisher’s or to literary parties.
A newcomer, Mary, brought up elsewhere by two uncles – one of whom isn’t – comes under the tutelage of Nathan, an established male writer whose connection with her we know to be closer than she ever suspects. The novel teases out the development of their association over several years as they each successfully conclude a novel – Mary’s first and Nathan’s long awaited “serious” one. We are given extracts of Nathan’s novel – but not Mary’s – at various junctures. This delineates his past and present, and will finally reveal his secret to Mary (but only after Everything You Need ends.)
In terms of characterisation the homosexual relationship between the two “uncles” is handled matter-of-factly and without tripping into sentimentality later on where it might have, though strangely – the book is set in the 1990s – the treatment of Mary’s relationship with her boyfriend Johnno felt a little old-fashioned. There was a touch of the 1950s about it. The novel also had echoes of The Wasp Factory – even before the obvious incident late in the book where this comparison is most apt.
I must say the picture it portrays of literary London is not flattering. (Perhaps Kennedy wishes not to be invited to any more literary dos.)
Since it is over 500 pages long (though the type face is large) and my reading time is short, I had put off reading this novel for years. However, it does not feel like time misspent. The characters were well drawn and mostly engaging, though Nathan’s dithering was a touch annoying. But without that there would have been neither plot nor tension so I’ll have to forgive Kennedy there.
Everything You Need contains nothing particularly startling or revelatory about the human condition beyond displaying how difficult communication can be between people – especially if they care for each other – but there are worse ways to while your hours away.

Glenrothes By-election.

The recent death of MP John MacDougall has meant a by-election is now due in a constituency next door to the one I live in.
Scottish Labour is in disarray, with a leadership election to distract the members, and the SNP is riding high.
My wife has relatives in Glenrothes and even before the result in Glasgow East they were saying a lot of local people were going to vote SNP next time. Sadly for Mr MacDougall’s family the time has arrived sooner than expected.
This, remember, is effectively the constituency which elected the staunchly anti-monarchist and utterly Labour MP Willie Hamilton for so many years and parts of which even returned communist local councillors once upon a time but it may be now another poisoned chalice for the Labour candidate. Who is going to be their sacrificial lamb, a la Margaret Curran, this time?
Labour will no doubt put great effort into retaining the seat but I expect the momentum carried over from Glasgow East should carry the SNP through.

Pointless Friendly?

So; we can beat somebody, then.
I take it none of this lot (“Sons had the following personnel on show: McGeown; Yule, Brittain, Lennon, Wallace, Tiernan, Gray, Weir, Gourlay, Andy Moore. Subs from: White, Mushet, Brannon, McSorley, McCuaig”) will be starting on Saturday.
I reckon we’ll be lucky if we keep up our sequence of 1-1 draws.

“Blink”

Delighted to see that the Doctor Who episode “Blink” written by Steven Moffat, directed by Hettie Macdonald, won the Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form category at this year’s Hugo Awards.
I can’t comment about the other awards as I mostly have not read the stories/journals concerned. (You should see my books-to-be-read pile!)
“Blink” was to my mind the outstanding episode from the 2007 season and well deserves the accolade. Like all of Steven Moffat’s episodes it was head and shoulders above those written by Russell T Davis. Hopefully the fact that Mr Moffat is assuming the oversight of Doctor Who bodes well for future series.
“Blink” was also notable for only having about three minutes worth of David Tennant in it. Good as he is as the Doctor, “Blink” nevertheless showed that a proper, intelligent Science Fiction story could be done on TV without (much) of the Doctor as a prop.
Pity this could not carry over into “Torchwood” of which I watched the first episode and promptly gave up. I never caught the Sarah Jane spin-off stories, which, given the last two episodes of the 2008 Doctor Who season may have been a blessing.

Georgia On My Mind

Burnt-out tanks in the Caucasus have unfortunate echoes. Not necessarily of the Second World War – where German armoured units are said to have reached the Caspian Sea – but of more recent events.

This is what we see when multi-ethnic states break up. We’ve seen it before in this same region, in Chechnya. We’ve seen violence in the break up of India, of Pakistan when Bangladesh became independent, in the former Yugoslavia. Personally, knowing its early 20th century history, I was surprised that state held together as long as it did after Tito died.

Now, as Kissinger said in 1982 apropos the Falklands, “No great power retreats forever.” Remember, this part of the world was under Russian control via the Tsars long before the Soviet Union existed. This is perhaps the start of Russia’s comeback.
It is, though, an invasion by Russia of a neighbouring sovereign state and seems like a land grab on Russia’s part – though there are suggestions that they want regime change in Georgia as well.

I’ll get this straight first. I abhor any such action by anybody. War is not an acceptable way of settling disputes between states. Russia’s excuse of protecting its citizens in Georgia is just that, an excuse. It is not a justification.
War must be only a last resort, in self protection after an attack – ie no pre-emptive strikes – or, if a police or humanitarian action, carried out by an international force.

Unfortunately we in Britain do not have a moral leg to stand on in condemning the events in Georgia because we have very recently pre-emptively invaded a sovereign state for no good reason, on flimsy pretexts, without UN authority, and subsequently effected regime change.

At this point I must say, yes, Saddam Hussein was a thug and his demise was welcome. But I will not accept preaching from those who came to this view late. I had a personal interest in Saddam’s Iraq long before even the first Gulf War, as I had some Kurdish friends whose families had suffered under him and let me know all about the situation there. I had as fervent a wish to see him removed as anybody.

But we had no right under international law to do what we did when we did. Had it been done as a consequence of expelling Saddam from Kuwait all those years earlier we would now be on firmer ground, with more international sympathy, and Russia would not have that later precedent to cast in front of us. We must expect to be called hypocrites if we condemn others who follow our example.

I also doubt Russia would have acted so precipitately if Georgia did not wish to get so close to NATO. I think allowing any former Soviet country (though not necessarily the non-Soviet Eastern European ones) to join NATO is a major strategic mistake. It is bound to engender fear and suspicion in Russia – a country which has been invaded, to its great cost, 5 times by western neighbours.

Imagine, for a moment, what the US reaction would have been if, say, Mexico had joined the Warsaw Pact.

Actually there is no need to. Consider only what the actual US reaction was to the Zimmerman Telegram in 1917. War with Germany soon followed.

Russia inevitably sees NATO expansion to its borders in exactly that light. A buffer zone around it would have given it more of a sense of security and may, I say may, have seen more temperate attitudes to its neighbours.

It is just possible that the world was a safer place when the Soviet Union was in existence. Khruschev, after all, did not push the Cuban crisis over the brink (though it cost him his job in the end.)

Peaceful, mutually agreed break-ups of bigger states are the rarity. I can only think of the separation of Norway from Sweden in 1903 and of Czechoslovakia more recently.

Anyway, I know this is not about the same Georgia and is more likely to be about a woman but here’s Ray Charles.

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