“no reason, no explanation, no solutions”
by uzwi
Quoted at the Anais Nin blog, here.
Reading: Notes from Walnut Tree Farm. Though he knows a lot, & loves facts because they channel him towards a closeness with the world, Roger Deakin isn’t big on explanations, either; he’s more concerned to pass along the experience of being there.
“Now there’s a green woodpecker feeding like a blackbird under the mulberry tree, pecking about for tiny grubs in the grass. The velvet-green of its breast and the crimson lake of its nape are perfectly complementary; except that they are never simple colours but a subtle, complex blend of many.” [p44.]
Watching the BBC’s revision of The Day of the Triffids, with its puerile inventions, its utterly pathetic attempt to fauxthenticate the natural history of a fictional species, I felt sick. The text was constantly pawing at you, whining, “Believe in this, please believe in this”.
Rationale is always the sound of the stuffing falling out, the jaw jaw jaw of a nauseating lack of imaginative intensity. & yes, pace Nin, a complete lack of anything that could be called love.
the m john harrison blog 
Remember – you are watching this crap so that we don’t have to…
Please do more reviews so that I can finally avoid TV and bad books altogether. Although I haven’t seen any published reviews of yours for a while, keep up the Charlie Brooker spleen.
Mobile, deadly, plants (!) – presumably glyphosate sales would rocket and monsanto would be even more powerful.
This week I am mostly watching Deadwood – Lovejoy Goes West.
Too right. The BBC Triffids was mediocre, with dreadful dialogue, lazy CGI and a risible attempt to update the original by dragging in global warming.
28 Days Later ripped-off Wyndham far more effectively.
And the problem is, after Ballard you have to try very very hard to make disaster/end of the world seem original and dramatically effective. The BBC settled for a star cast and a lazy script.
“Rationale is always the sound of the stuffing falling out, the jaw jaw jaw of a nauseating lack of imaginative intensity”.
This sentence will be my mantra and perhaps my epitaph when they say: “He died of natural causes”. Thank you.
Triffids sounds bad.
I’ll add that the Dr. Who holiday special was no picnic either. Apparently Christmas came down to a forced choice scenario: mobile, deadly plants or Timothy Dalton’s Time Lord spittle. Can someone explain that one? I doubt it, but there is a solution that’ll make the next installment easier to bear:
http://tinyurl.com/yfrv9rs
Or I could just stop watching. I know I should, but I’m a weak man.
Triffids – what a disappointment. There was more genuine unease in the Howard Keel version; Izzard wasn’t even trying, and Richardson should have given up her sci-fi career with Event Horizon. For my money Wyndham’s horror is more to do with the lack of connectedness within humanity; the despair and the pervasive, easy, random, futile death, as individuals fail to cope with their dramatically altered circumstances. Masen in the novel also almost seems to consider that the world deserved no better, a view that I found more chilling than the prospect of 15 foot venus flytraps. And where did all the guns come from?
Does Saramago’s Blindness owe a debt to The Day of the Triffids? Which is the better book?