Wildlife Day 6, .Portnoy's Complaint, the beginning of The Centaur

Getting back into the habit of reading multiple books at the same time, swapping from one to the other. I suppose it is a bad habit, shows an inability to concentrate on one thing at a time. But I need to change. I read the first chapter of Portnoy's Complaint last night, and  before 8am in the morning, then finished Wildlife. In between I read the first dense, lyrical paragraph of The Centaur again, as I'd found my old brown paged paperback copy on the table, in the kitchen. I did write "battered" but it came out as "nattered" , and then I decided that it was too cliched a description and deleted it.  But "old brown paged paperback copy" seems too long and ponderous. Get rid of the copy.  An old brown paged paperback.  Still too long. a brown-paged paperback.  But I don't like brown-paged, even with the hyphen. The pages are brown now, especially at the edges, and I wanted that to be known, but brown-paged?? It's too ugly a construction.  Browned paperback.  Maybe that's it - now it becomes a better piece of prose - I can get rid of the "old", as well and  looking back on it I've retrospectively added the commas, after "dense" and after "table" - that just counts as correction.  But maybe that first comma doesn't belong there. Maybe the second comma doesn't either.  It doesn't read right. Maybe it should be:

In between I read the first dense lyrical paragraph of The Centaur again, as I'd found my browned paperback copy on the table in the kitchen.

Now I'm having problems with the "again". It jars the rhythm of the sentence too much. It could become:

 In between I read the first dense lyrical paragraph of The Centaur , as I'd found my much read browned paperback copy on the table in the kitchen.

But "much read" is too twee.  Just a  reread" instead of a "read".  And I've taken out all the commas again to make it one long trot of a read to the end of the sentence.

 In between I reread the first dense lyrical paragraph of The Centaur as I'd found my  browned paperback copy on the table in the kitchen.

Now I have an urge to to put "fiercely dense" in, which alliterates with "first", and gets across the  intensity of that first paragraph. Over-egging?

 In between I reread the first  fiercely dense and lyrical paragraph of The Centaur as I'd found my  browned paperback copy on the table in the kitchen.

This is why I like having a real life editor as well as an electronic capability to endlessly revise and revise.

Time now to pay homage to the computer and the word processor.  But when I look back at pages of prose that I've written in notebooks way way before home computing I can see the same process going on, but just full of scribble and scrawl and crossings out. Might be interesting to try writing a whole story in Word with Track Changes on.

Here's that first paragraph anyway, with the second paragraph thrown in for good measure as I actually reread that as well. Being a favourite book I have it on the Kindle as well as in paperback.


CALDWELL turned and as he turned his ankle received an arrow. The class burst into laughter. The pain scaled the slender core of his shin, whirled in the complexities of his knee, and, swollen broader, more thunderous, mounted into his bowels. His eyes were forced upward to the blackboard, where he had chalked the number 5,000,000,000, the probable age in years of the universe. The laughter of the class, graduating from the first shrill bark of surprise into a deliberately aimed hooting, seemed to crowd against him, to crush the privacy that he so much desired, a privacy in which he could be alone with his pain, gauging its strength, estimating its duration, inspecting its anatomy. The pain extended a feeler into his head and unfolded its wet wings along the walls of his thorax, so that he felt, in his sudden scarlet blindness, to be himself a large bird waking from sleep. The blackboard, milky slate smeared with the traces of last night’s washing, clung to his consciousness like a membrane. The pain seemed to be displacing with its own hairy segments his heart and lungs; as its grip swelled in his throat he felt he was holding his brain like a morsel on a platter high out of a hungry reach. Several of the boys in their bright shirts all colors of the rainbow had risen upright at their desks, leering and baying at their teacher, cocking their muddy shoes on the folding seats. The confusion became unbearable. Caldwell limped to the door and shut it behind him on the furious festal noise. 

Out in the hall, the feather end of the arrow scraped on the floor with every step. The metallic scratch and stiff rustle mixed disagreeably. His stomach began to sway with nausea. The dim, long walls of the ochre hall wavered; the classroom doors, inset with square numbered panes of frosted glass, seemed experimental panels immersed in an activated liquid charged with children’s voices chanting French, singing anthems, discussing problems of Social Science. Avez-vous une maison jolie? Oui, j’ai une maison très jolie for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain throughout our history boys and girls (this was the voice of Pholos), the federal government has grown in prestige, power, and authority but we must not forget, boys and girls, that by origin we are a union of sovereign republics, the United God shed his grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood —the beautiful song was blindly persisting in Caldwell’s brain. To shining sea. The old baloney. He had heard it first in Passaic.

Updike, John (2007-08-30). The Centaur (Kindle Locations 117-135). Penguin UK. Kindle Edition. 

Wildlife has a strange distant feel to it - Richard Ford's 16yr old protagonist is nothing like as on fire as Alex in Portnoy. His view of his parents split is filled with pain, but it's unexpressed except in his blank thoughts, and his trying to say and do the right thing in a situation that he just does not comprehend. He is a lonely boy who only has his parents, he has no friends in Great Falls. I find these characters strange - the boy is very like the 16yr old in Canada - it doesn't feel like my experience of adolescence. Updike and Roth both capture this intense sexuality and richness of feeling and thought, whereas Ford is describing, is telling a story, though the eyes of an almost completely uncomprehending child who has not even begun to understand his own life.

Wildlife - day 2,3, Neal Asher - The Other Gun

A slow pace of reading, mainly because preoccupied with other things. And I did read a new Neal Asher short story in Asimov's Science Fiction. Which wasn't quite satisfying. Set in the Polity universe that he has created (Orbus is the best novel in this series), it's full of hardware and alien technology, trademark exotic weaponry, interesting twists. I read it like you might read a celebrity magazine*, with a faint sense of titillation but a sense of unease.

Unease. Typifies how you feel when you have a cold sore (herpes simplex), a visible, unsightly and painful sore with accompanying flu like symptoms. I used to get them more regularly  after catching the virus from an old girlfriend at drama college. No idea where she is now - I think she emigrated to New Zealand and has disappeared from view, but I have, every so often, this insistent reminder of our relatively short relationship.

Wildlife is still good, but I'm slightly impatient with its slow progress. It definitely feels like a rehearsal for Canada, which is a better book.

*Or how I imagine people read celebrity magazines, or those magazines aimed at women at the supermarket check-out. They can't have sweets there now, so they have translated those desires into a taste for sugary shlock horror true life horror. Trauma is relative of course, for the celebrity there are headlines, fucking headlines, about a roll of fat round the waist caught by some low life paparazzi, whereas the true life lower class real life stuff consists of women married to serial murderers who have gradually dispensed with their children, children brought up in dustbins without any TV, that kind of thing.

Wildlife - Richard Ford - day 1, New Yorker Magazine, Mar 25

Back to proper fiction courtesy of that strange book shop in Trafalgar street where nearly all the books are pile in length ways, so that you can't see the spine or any of the titles without taking a shelf height pile of a dozen books out.  Wildlife feels like the first version of Canada - 16 year old protagonist trying to make sense of his parents life, before he begins to try and make sense of his own. The writings so good though, effortless and flowing. I'm wondering if, like the artists who trained with the old masters, I should just take this book and rewrite it as my own, copy the style like brushstrokes, trying to get inside the structure and the form.

The New Yorker always - always what? - delivers the goods? provides something surprising. I feel like just making another bullet pointed list of the weird and wacky stuff it contains, but that would be a little repetitive.  But a street rapper turned bespoke rich clothing retailer, turning out made to order gear for crack dealers, boxers and rappers.? Strange story. Rags to riches stuff of course(Americans love that shit).  Then this alarming article about that rich bitch mining magnate in Australia, suing her father, suiting her children, obsessed with her money. Even more unsavory than Murdoch.

What else? Saw two films - The Spirit of 45 at Komedia, The Hunger Games on Netflix at home. '45 was a restrained polemic, it just let the poverty and anger and distress of what had happened before the war speak for itself, matter-of-factly and quietly.  Then the nationalisation of everything and the creating of the NHS.. And then from Thatcher onwards the gradual dismantling of everything except the NHS. 

Big Data, New Statesman, dreamthinkspeak, Hayward gallery light show

Big Data is one of those books written by experts who you heard talk somewhere ( Start the Week , BBC Radio 4 in my case) and thought, yeah, that's interesting. And I've got a hangover professional interest in data as well from HFEA days. The trouble is, that the book just restates, (certainly in the first three chapters), what he managed to say quite well on the radio.  Basically, we have such huge data sets ( and I mean if you think the number of little triangles in a Risk set is big, then you're thinking way way too small) that accuracy, and meaning aren't important anymore. Google found a correlation between bits of their data in searches and the spread of flu in the United states that predicted outbreaks two weeks before the medical authorities were aware they had a problem.  Big messy data, unstructured, incomplete, but containing within it correlations that allow you to make real time predictions. Women buy certain kinds of goods when they first know they're pregnant, so you can bombard them with baby stuff months before anyone else sees them ordering a babygro. Vital signs monitoring in premature baby units show, counter-intuitively,  certain very stable patterns just before they go down with an infection, so you can predict ahead of time. Don't know why, just know what is going to happen. Don't know what the causal link is - just know the prediction. 

Well it sounds like epidemiology to me. Give a million people statins everyday and less of them will die of heart attacks and strokes.  Monitor a million people who smoke vs a million who don't, the smokers die earlier. We don't really know why, pertinent for me in the case of statins - if I take them I'll halve my chances of a heart attack / stroke in the next ten years. Why? Don't really know. 

I am getting bored writing about stats because the final awful certainty of it is that Amazon, Google and Facebook are going to sell a lot more stuff a lot more successfully to you, and you are going to buy more material goods than you ever had before. Ain't that a good idea. Oh well. We have the data and the processing power. 

But at the Hayward Gallery there were three rooms, one brightly lit in green, one rose pink, one blue. Walk from the green into the rose room and that rose is the deepest most intense rose pink you'll ever see. All you green cones have been saturated with the green light - all you can see is pink.  It was really powerful almost overwhelming. The attendant outside the room was doing a whole sing and dance act, attracting people in, a sort of random rap, "All you gotta do, is take off your shoe, it's your birthday in this room, you won't have no gloom". He was kind of freindly and weird and joyful at the same time.

Later on, I overheard the head attendant saying to another, "Can you hear him? What shall I do, shall I just tell him to shut up?"  I couldn't resist intervening - I said it's OK, it's a bit of harmless joy, nobody seems to mind.

dreamthinkspeak were as atmospheric and elegiac as ever. Instead of the department store that covered  one floor of the Cherry Orchard in Brighton, we were invited into the headquarters of Fusion Inc, to see the PetBots (actually built in Brighton), or the flame something, the demonstrators speaking the same mixed argot of intalian/spanish / german /russian and nonsense language that they spoke in the department store. This will mean nothing to you if yo have never seen dreamthinkspeak. Just see them, whenever you can. The Somerset House event is sold out to July though. Nothing that new in it though if you've seen them before, but still a dreamy, immersive experience, with moments of power and beauty.  They seem better when they are working with a myth or text like the Cherry orchard, which gives a more unifying and balanced theme. Lacking in meaning. We know working in call centres is dehumanising. We know that some high tec companies value the tech above all everything except whether it will sell or not.

I was a bit snotty about the New Statesman in a previous entry so bought one to read on the train up to London. It kind of met my snotty expectations. A bit local (though very European - article about how we always needed/ resisted the Germans!). Best article was Will Self writing about Costa in terms that you might expect, but so so stylishly.

So not a great day for reading, = a bit of a boring ramble of a blog. In my view.

Zona - Day 4, Stalker

You can't talk about Zona , which I finished this morning, without talking about Stalker obviously. But I'm writing an account of reading a book which is an account of watching a film - how far back can you go in this kind of recursion.  Well not very far, no-one is going to write an account of reading a blog about... etc. etc. It's  great to find someone else who loves this film, who is happy with its impenetrability and odd beauty.  I say odd beauty because Tarkovsky eschews dramatic images for lingering shots of puddles, bits of wasteland, syringes and rubble covering the floor, often under water.  Even in the beginning of Solaris, the bit that sticks in my mind is the marshy, slightly muddy bank with the clear water flowing through the water weeds.  I'm saying that purely from memory, even if it's wrong that's my image of Tarkovsky's visual sense.  Always water in Tarkovsky, still, flowing, reflecting, rain. 

In the end of the Stalker his wife lights a cigarette and speaks direct to the camera. She speaks of love and loyalty essentially, but the author of Zona hates the fact that she lights a cigarette, that there is a burnt out match there - hates the sight and smell of cigarette smoke. It touches on one of those things that can always happen, even with the books and films you love, there are parts, scenes, images that you just don't want, that trigger a visceral disgust that belongs to you, not the film. So I'm thinking, while the stalker lies on a small island of grass and rubble and lets the beetle crawl over his hand, how I would not like to be the actor having to let the beetle crawl over him, I'm not watching the film so much as imagining being the actor. 

Dirty Havana Trilogy pt 1 Day 6-7 , Zona Day 2-3, Stalker, New Yorker Magazine, Mar 18

So a messy weekend and a quiet, crawl back under a duvet whenever possible Monday. In fact i watched the Stalker on YouTube, where all of Tarkovsky's movies are now, on my Nexus, because I'm reading Zona, which goes through the entire film step by step. Third time,maybe fourth, watching Stalker  and maybe the best time. The sound is quite faint so I used my iPod earphones and lay in bed watching this small but clear screen.  I could stop whenever I wanted, and somehow, even tho' it's only a 7 inch screen it was more immersive than watching it on the TV in the sitting room, with all the intervening space of floor, rug, coffee table getting in the way of you and the film. It's why I like cinema so much more than watching a film on TV - it's dark, it's quiet (unless you're watching a blockbuster in some prole pit like the Odeon, when people just can't shut up), it fills your vision without interruptions.  Amazingly watching on the Nexus captured some of that feeling, and my attention was kept on the images.

There's a famous sequence, where the Stalker and the Writer and the Professor are on a small petrol driven rail cart, rail clanking along at a steady speed - we just see the backs of their heads, each in turn, while this grey, ruined mix of countryside and abandoned buildings and industry passes by. It's restful, interminable in a good way. Then the cart stops, and the film immediately goes from this weird monochrome to full colour, a long steady shot of greenery, trees, long grass, big weeds, overgrown meadow.  It's a very gentle startling moment of great power, I'm not sure why. I've seen it done before, in Heimat, where in a time of leanness and hunger the camera focuses on potato cakes frying in a pan in black and white - they fill the whole screen, until colour floods in and blasts you with the smell and taste to be of the potato cakes, a kind of cinematic synaesthesia. Zona is good enough, it has a real respect for Tarkovsky, while not sidestepping the issue that so many auteurs can be such wankers. Just had to quickly look up auteur, to make sure I was using the right word, and I think I was. Yet again the internet's availability changes reading, having the film of Stalker right by me, in my fucking hand, watchable in an instant while I'm reading Zona, changes how I would have read the book.  I can instantly see where he's right or wrong - he's mainly insightful and right, but it is a beetle that crawls over the Stalkers hand , not a fucking ant. Unless they have huge ants in Russia. That look like beetles. I could go and check again, but I can't be arsed.

I've finished the first book in the Dirty Havana trilogy, which ends abruptly in rural idyll, staying in a hut on his cousins farm, helping out with crops, 5am starts in sky, land and sun.It works this ending - you just feel that the intensity of Havana has got too much, everybody needs a break, even the reader, everybody needs to go somewhere quiet, natural and away. 

The New Yorker Magazine though. Crazy magazine, but so much more interesting than any English equivalent - though maybe I should check out an issue of the New Statesman but I hate well meaning po-faced left journals nearly as much as shit slinging right wing rags like the Spectator.  

I read these long articles on:

• Transgender reassignment, pre-puberty issues and more
• The throwing of acid in the Bolshoi directors face earlier this year
• The Republican leader and their retreat to lick their wounds after their defeat
• Florida's sinkhole peril
• a profile of Ruth Bader Ginsburg ( a Supreme Court Judge)
• Aaron Swartz - the guy indicted for downloading millions of articles from an academic database, who then committed suicide

Highlights might be:

• advice given  to (male) Republican politicians in campaigning - don't talk about rape
• The history of the sheer corruption and in-fighting at the Bolshei ballet - always a badge of respectability for every tyrannical politician from Stalin to Putin
• said of Swartz - he had " a tremendous and in some ways pathological capacity for compassion"
• it costs over $100,000 to get a dick made out of your vagina if you are F.T.M (Female to Male), but it's cheaper and easier the other way round (M.T.F). That's a bit of a cheap thrill highlight actually - the article does spend time explaining that sexual identity isn't all that gender re-assignment is about. 

The New Yorker Magazine is great for reading at the table, around 7am, when I've made coffee, breakfasts, sandwiches and am drinking my own black liquid kick-start and beginning to feel ready to face the day.

Dirty Havana Trilogy Day 4, Day 5 , Zona Day 1

Starting to get a bit lost in some of the unevenness of the stories in the first book of the Dirty Havana Trilogy, so have slowed down reading. Then Zona came though the post today, - as it says on the cover "a Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room" - it's a book about Tarkovsky's Stalker, one of my favourite incomprehensible films. So I started reading that - the first few pages anyway. I hope it gets a lot fucking better than the start, which is mildly interesting, a bit laboured. But the man thinks that if he hadn't seen Stalker his responsiveness to the world would have been "radically diminished".  It pisses me off that he has said that, firstly because I agree, and secondly if this guy turns out to be a right little tosser who's written a crap book about one of my top films, I will , in some sense, feel radically diminished myself in some unexplained way. And if you think that is unclear, then you had better watch the Stalker.  

So. I'm actually writing this waiting for a poker tournament to start - there seems no point to stopping until it does start as what would I do?  I don't like to read things while I'm keeping an eye on something else. Writing is ok.  It's like the mental equivalent of lifting your eyes from the screen to look out the window to rest them, watching out for the names that should soon appear in the tournament roster. I have to keep an eye on them because I look up their status, and make a decision whether these players are crap (fish in poker terminology), or good, or there isn't enough information to decided. You can look up every poker players online results for all their poker playing career, unless they have actively written to a site to block their stats being shown.  Which some do. I don't - I'm quite proud of my ROI (Return on Interest) - at least it's positive - yes I win money at poker! But not very much. A few hundred quid every six months (total profit that is).