under the dome

My review of it may well be in the Grauniad tomorrow.

more great fantasy

Watching: the first series of The Ren & Stimpy Show. C doesn’t get it. I’m not sure I get it myself anymore. What’s funny about watching the lungs of a badly-drawn psychotic chihuahua come out through his mouth ? I don’t know but I started laughing as I wrote that down. Ren & Stimpy’s enactment of “Robin Hoek & Maid Moron” is one of the great epic fantasies of our time, & should have been on the list.

Off to Lisbon for a week tomorrow, back the following Tuesday. What’ll we do til then, Ren ?

read this book

Rather than writing, David Constantine seems to perform an act of visualisation on the reader’s behalf; what he makes us see is matter-of-fact but at the same time somehow light, unmoored and thoroughly poetic. His stories are evidence. Everyone in them is a witness, sometimes to a death, more often to a birth; sometimes, to something which is too complicated to describe as either but somehow partakes of both. More.

bad move

Watching environmentalism wrong-foot itself to this degree is sad. Now they’re just rolling about on the floor with all the other “narratives”. When everything’s a clash of fantasies, nothing ever gets done. Will postmodernism ever end ? Probably not–too useful to the legal, political & religious professions. But on a more optimistic note, at least string theory (“postmodern physics”) seems to have given up on itself. The universe can go back to being inelegant.

Reading: Irene Nemirovsky, All Our Wordly Goods. Life doesn’t get much better than that. Looking forward to: a nice Indian lunch with Mic Cheetham. As for this, it’s as clear & beautiful as Nemirovsky, & as long as we all use our intelligence to understand what’s going on, it’s the upside of making narratives. It goes well with this, & with Municipal Archive’s whole project.

reader, I wrote her

“What’s your book about, Carlos ?”

“It’s about the romance & holiness & mystery & paradoxical matter-of-factness of all books. & it’s about my struggles with this book, my book, the one you hold in your hand. & it’s about women, the romance & holiness & mystery & paradoxical matter-of-factness of women, & about my struggle with this woman, the woman you–”

“Next.”

the booklover angle

My boredom benchmark for Euro-Lit mysteries in which the writing, translation, publishing, selling & curating of books is cleverly interwoven with philosophical puzzles, mild sex & Real History, is Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier, a novel in which almost nothing happens except book-chat, & of which Isabel Allende said, “A treat for the mind”, an assessment I still find puzzling. So far, Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Angel’s Game isn’t anything like as boring as that. It’s an amiable meander over the same kind of territory as The Shadow of the Wind, vaguely irritating about the romance & importance of being a hack writer (& indeed about the romance & importance of being any kind of writer) & rather lacking the energy of the kind of fiction it claims to admire; but otherwise entertaining. What I find objectionable about all these novels is how they attempt to flatter the reader by “sharing” –ie, masturbating–the readerly experience. While I’m reading them I want to say: Fuck off & curl up with a good book somewhere else, Carlos (or Pascal), it gets you no points with me, because though I’ve read a lot of books, I’d rather break my left leg than rub shoulders with your idea of what that’s all about.

Someone got here yesterday by typing “sheo (sic) & sock porn”. Welcome friend! Want to learn more about “stealth rubber” ? Then have a look at these little puppies.

how mass can be relevant to you

Discoveries would include the God Particle, a tiny entity also called the Higgs Boson, which is believed to give objects – including people – their mass.

Don’t you just love the grammar of this, that wonderful “also called” ? Followed swiftly by the reminder that mass is important because “people” –ie, Observer readers like us–have it, & peopleness is what underwrites the project of science, after all ? Is there anywhere else in the world where middle class journalism feels it has to do this particular form of mealy-mouth ? Is there anywhere else in the world where the values of the Lifestyle & Wellness section have to be carried through to the science reporting ?

all hallows

Yesterday I walked past a shop with a sign in its window, “Buy your complete Halloween outfit here!” & realised I was almost insane with boredom. Everything we have as a society–everything we do–is completely fucking spineless & irrelevant. It’s a “world” with no connection to the world, held in place by the biggest military deployment the world has ever seen so that 35 year old kidults can wear plastic witches’ hats on a Saturday night. People say: science fiction is over because reality caught up with it. I say: by the same token, fantasy is over because three whole generations are living in one. When are we going to grow up ? When is someone even going to suggest that ?

meet tim & seth

Vacuum downstairs & bedroom
Wash kitchen floor
Air downstairs
Empty bedroom waste bin
Make bed
Move wash bag, clothes etc downstairs
Get chocolate croissants, Earl Grey etc
!!MEET TIM & SETH @ 5.45!!

Reading: Journey into Fear, Eric Ambler. Transcribing: notes made in the Radiography reception area, St Mary’s Roehampton. Wishing I’d been at: The Manchester Fiction Prize bash last Friday.

all good cognitive stuff

Quantised perception, perceptual acceleration (or not) in times of high adrenalin, etc, here. Also, a fact about phantom limb. Maybe the next stage is to induce the phantom limb experience in subjects who haven’t lost anything, thereby enabling them to make personal choices about their neural structures & procedures. I can see this as being part of the industrial process that produced Seria-Mau in Light. It would be another resource for the tailors. (Not that “extrapolations” –ie, rubbishy assumptions–like this are something you necessarily want to parade in the text itself; the author needs to make lots of them, & the story & texture should depend upon them, but the reader should see as few as possible.)