Angles

Partly on the recommendation of Llewtrah and partly to keep on track with my commitment to read more books by those pesky female authors, I've been reading Kate Fox's Watching the English.

In fact, I'd noticed in the bookshop some months ago, but had put it back on the shelf, and probably wouldn't have picked it up again if Lovely Boo (who is no longer Small Boo, after we watched a documentary about primordial dwarfs and she said: "See, I'm not that small after all, am I?") hadn't brought it back from a recent trip to London.

The thing that had originally put me off was a back-cover quote from the Daily Mail. Now, that in itself isn't a reason to reject a book, but there was just something definitively Mail-y about this particular comment; in particular the observation that "fortunately she doesn't write like an anthropologist but like an English woman".

Now, in the first instance, there's the implication that the two are distinct, that there's something specifically un-English and un-womanly about the discipline of anthroplogy, with all the attendant baggage of the Mail mindset that foreigners are peculiar, and working women are selfish and evil.

But what annoys me more is that the Mail is one of the most strident proponents of the notion that the British education system is dumbed down, that kids are being regurgitated from school with 10 A*s but without the ability to count or spell or remember who won the Battle of Waterloo. Which may or may not be true: but how does this attitude tally with the notion that any kind of incursion of serious academic discourse into the Mail-reader's intellectual universe is something to be avoided? It exhibits a peculiarly idiotic strain of Anglophone conservatism, one that demands academic 'standards' but cowers away from anything suggesting real intellect (which is presumably what those standards are meant to measure, because otherwise they're pretty much redundant). Foreigners and working women may be dodgy, but an academic anthropologist is just plain weird, and probably a damn pinko to boot.

In any case, Fox's book seems to me the best sort of popular science: she's writing for a non-specialist audience but, rather than avoid the technical terms of her trade (acculturation, participant observation, cultural genomics, ethnographic dazzle, etc), when she feels that they'll serve a purpose, she uses them, with an explanation for the uninitiated. She is writing like an anthropologist, but one who seeks to express the joys of her trade to a wider audience. She even creates her own wry technobabble, including The Ironic-Gnome Rule, which is worth the cover price on its own.

It's part of a marketing process I've noticed in recent years: rather than making books or movies more stupid, the publishers and distributors dumb down the blurbs and trailers, making the product seem stupider than it actually is. It's better than the alternative, but maybe still self-defeating: punters lured by the soft sell will find something less accessible than they were hoping; while people who might have appreciated it will walk away. Although I do rather look forward to Century making use of the anonymous review that Private Eye ran of Katie 'Jordan' Price's (try to imagine ironic quotation marks around that apostrophe) latest novel, Crystal:

"It's actually quite hard to open its pages without feeling your lips go slack and the drool beginning to form."

Done because we are too menny

I wasn't going to write about The Wire. Well, that's not quite true: I was going to write about it on several occasions, but thought better of it. At first I was going to write about how odd it was that a show that had provoked such a positive response from those who'd seen it was being tucked away from view, and whether this was a conscious effort by producers and programmers to keep it cultish and nichey, and what that means for the future of television and other media. And then I was going to write something about Urmee Khan and her very odd CiF piece about the essential maleness of the show and its devotees, and whether art was more or less 'gendered' since the development of feminist criticism. And most recently I was going to write about how annoying it was that those devotees (Charlie Brooker, Nick Hornby, Alexei Sayle – maybe Khan did have a point) seemed unable to explain the greatness of The Wire beyond variations on "It's the greatest TV show ever made, and you've just got to blimmin' watch it, right?"

Of course, this was all before I'd actually watched it, so I'm rather glad I didn't write that last piece, because that's pretty much my pitch as well, although I don't think it's quite the greatest TV show ever, but more of that later. An argument could be made that the truly great works of art are like love and God and hummus, in that they transcend the normal constraints of critical language, and all you can really do is to affirm your own faith in their wonders and hope that someone else takes the hint.

But now I’ve chainsmoked every episode of the first two seasons, I can hazard a few one-liners as to why The Wire is so good. Many people herald its authenticity, but since I’ve never visited Baltimore or sold heroin I can’t comment on that. It comes from the same creative stable (and has the same urban backdrop) as Homicide: Life on the Street, a truly great cop show that has been consistently edged out of the critical canon by the distinctly inferior NYPD Blue (in much the same way as Chicago Hope never had a prayer against the earnest breastbeating of ER). Where The Wire betters its predecessor is that it has the nerve to stretch a single storyline over an entire season, and then to withhold from the audience any real notion of closure. This is why Wire evangelists insist that you can’t judge the show from a couple of isolated episodes. You have to invest time and emotional commitment.


This insistence on challenging and stretching the viewer is shared with The Wire’s only competitor as the greatest American crime show ever – the first season of Murder One, which also had the balls to follow a single case, with all its longueurs and reversals and dead ends, and dare the audience to keep up. (Too few did, it seems, and so by the second series it had become just another bloody lawyer show, in easily-digested chunks. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.)

Of course, in order to become the greatest cop show of all time, anywhere, The Wire would have to cut free from the safety harness of even that one single, season-long case, and throw its characters into a state of messy, almost plotless existence, where all they can do is react to occurrences that seem beyond their or the scriptwriters’ control. And they’d have to make all the cameras hand-held, and make the sound really bad, and ensure that it looks like it’s about to rain 90% of the time, and have that bloke from Early Doors in it. Oh yeah, and bribe critics to use the word verité in every review. But I don't want to dwell on The Cops; instead, I'll keep it up my sleeve as a card I can play every time someone tells me that American TV is now the best in the world.

Going back to the first time I thought about writing about The Wire, but decided not to, I’m still aware that only a minority have watched it, so this may all be academic. Once again, I’ll encourage you to seek it out, because it is very, very good. But I’d better throw you something a little more inclusive, about which more of you might have an opinion. It’s a tired cliché, usually in the context of high vs low culture, that if Dickens were alive today, he’d be writing EastEnders. This is probably true, and it’s usually predicated on the fact that his novels were originally published as serials. Anyone who saw the fabulous BBC version of Bleak House from a couple of years ago will understand the notion of his narratives as blue-chip soaps.

But Dickens wouldn’t have been able to write The Wire. His plots, however fragmented, always lead to resolution and closure. Not all his characters are absolute demons or angels, but he’s not into moral ambiguity; there’s always a sense of rightness and justice in his authorial voice. At the same time, even when he’s challenging an evil of his age (bad schools, workhouses, the convolutions of the legal system), he’s too conservative to challenge the fundamentals of Victorian patriarchy and capitalism that let them all exist.

Compare this with the best works of Thomas Hardy. Although many of his novels, like those of Dickens, were originally written as serials, I’ve always thought they have more of an overall narrative arc; the self-contained bits of business with characters that pop up for a couple of chapters, then recede, are far less common. Also, he usually spares us those incident-packed journeys from one location to another; instead, his locations have the chance to settle in the imagination throughout a story, so that in many cases (most notably Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native), they can be regarded as characters in their own right (in the same way that Baltimore exists as a brooding presence in the universe of The Wire, and the favelas exert a malign influence of their own in City of God).

Hardy’s characters are as developed and ‘real’ as those of Dickens, but they exist in an amoral universe, buffeted and blown without recourse to any notion of happy endings; if a vaguely happy ending does occur, as in Far From the Madding Crowd, it's as much by dumb luck as by anything, and there's still going to be plenty of collateral damage. Hardy was only 16 years younger than Dickens, but his world view is utterly different: uncertain, agnostic, post-Darwinian. His heroes - think of Jude or Tess - try to better themselves, but get slapped down for their presumption. 19th-century Wessex and 21st-century Baltimore are united by their abject unfairness.

So, the pat response is that if Dickens were writing mainstream soaps, Hardy might be writing something like The Wire, where the environment itself becomes the most important, powerful, predatory player in the game, and the only one that knows all the rules. And, if you’re tired of over-enthusiastic remote-wielders urging you to accept their gospel that The Wire is or isn't better than The Shield or Lost or Balamory, maybe it’s time to sidestep that particular argument, and accept my contention that Hardy is better than Dickens.

Architecture and morality

In which I try to remember what was going through my head six years ago, and resist the temptation to waffle about Baudrillard again, but he can be glimpsed through the dust and debris, if you look closely enough.

Roll play

I've just noticed that, thanks to the odd format of that Thai advert, edging beyond the right-hand margin of its post, anybody using Internet Explorer will have found my blogroll and archive and general gubbins shoved down to the lower depths of the page, only accessible to the sort of people who hang around in the cinema to discern the name of the Third Assistant Gerbil Wrangler.

By my calculations, with this post, the advert and its attendant complications should have gone over to the other side (as Doris Stokes would have had it), so it seems appropriate to commemorate the return of the blogroll. I'm working on the basis that the blogosphere is really one enormous Venn diagram: my blogroll has five names in common with X's blogroll, which has seven different names in common with Y's, and so on. What I want is for you to scroll down my list of lovelies, pick a site that you haven't visited before, go there and leave a message. (Note that a few of them aren't strictly blogs, so you get a second chance if you pick one of them.) It's up to you whether or not you describe in the comment box the route that took you there; or whether you come back and tell us where you went and what you thought of it; or, indeed, whether you put a similar suggestion on your own blog, if you have such a thing. But if you do, it could mean that the blogosphere stops looking like this:


and starts looking like this:


which can only be a good thing, surely?

Of mice and postmodernists

On the advice of Ian Hocking (who is now, I trust, happily ensconced in Canterbury), I've been reading Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes and it's very good, as he declared. I won't bother to review it, as Ian's done a fine job of that already, but two points suggest themselves.

First, dear God, the title. Before Ian began hymning the book's praises, I'd noticed it on the shelves of my second favourite second-hand bookshop in Bangkok, and walked past, simply because the title seems to suggest some sub-Wildean soft-porn potboiler about golden-haired youths fumbling each other into manhood behind the bikesheds of Eton in about 1905. When a movie version was made in 1968 (of Keyes's novel, not of my imaginary posh gay smut), they retitled it Charly. I normally object to that sort of thing as inane d***ing d**n that insults the intelligence of the audience and the integrity of the author, but in this case I think it was a good call.

The other thing is that some aspects of the novel (or, more specifically my reading of it - hold that thought, I'll come back to it in a moment) provide a neat clarification of Roland Barthes's 'Death of the Author' theory. This is something I touched on in Welcome to the Machine (available at a half-decent bookshop near you, if such a thing still exists), but hell, why not give it another run round the digital paddock?

Essentially, Barthes argues that it's pointless to second-guess the intentions of an author of a piece of writing, whether by reference to his or her biography, or to the words themselves. A book is 'created' not by the author, but by the reader, whose own experiences, opinions, prejudices, previous readings, etc all have an influence on the meaning derived from the reading. By extension, it's quite feasible to argue that Book B is an influence on Book A, even if B was written after A, and even if the author of A never read it. If the reader of A has already read B, it can influence the reading of that text.

In WTTM, my example was the perceived influence of a book by Philip K Dick on the themes of OK Computer, even though Thom Yorke protested that he'd never read the book in question. As I read Flowers for Algernon, elements of the book triggered thoughts of books I'd read before. Parts of the book are written in a deliberately primitive first-person voice, suggesting the intellectual and social 'otherness' of the narrator, as in Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker or Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. (This does raise an unrelated issue, one that's been niggling me for some time: if we're getting to the stage when the majority of people communicate in sub-literate txtspk, how does an author convey the notion that a character is sub-literate? Or will the concept of sub-literacy cease to exist?)

Also, a white mouse plays a more significant role than you might expect (see Zadie Smith's White Teeth and The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams); and the moral ramifications of using medical intervention to take someone to a state of intellectual 'normality' have their echoes in Awakenings by Oliver Sacks. Now, all five of those books were published well after Flowers for Algernon first saw the light of day. But, according to Barthes, they all influenced it, because they affected my reading of it.

By pure serendipity, I just found a quotation from Marcel Duchamp on the Radiohead site Pulk-Pull*:

"All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act."

Now, I don't know whether Duchamp had read 'Death of the Author'; he died just a year after it was published, so the chances are that he didn't. But of course, according to both Barthes and Duchamp, that's a very minor detail.

Toy story

In which I decide that we'll have to poison our kids in the interests of economic development, sort of.

Fiction factory

When I was young and energetic and inclined to sublimate surging hormonal overactivity into creative endeavour (I don't know which faded first, the hormones or the creativity), I used to write plays. Actually, that's not entirely true: I used to write and rewrite a single play. Because whatever the play was about (revolution; Shakespearean heroes; our old friend Sisyphus), there was always a moment where the central figure discovered a script that showed his life and death were predetermined, proving that he was nothing more than a (wait for it) character in a play. Alert readers will be able to deduce my slavish devotion to the works of Pirandello and Stoppard and Woody Allen; and I'm sure it's quite easy to trace a lineage from them to my play McB, which ended with Macduff telling Macbeth that he couldn't win, because the author wouldn't let him, although, to justify my existence, I had the Thane bumped off by the First Witch, who'd been having an affair with him behind Lady Macbeth's back, but then transferred her affections to Macduff after she'd read to the end of the script. Or was there a lesbian sub-plot with Lady M, who wasn't really dead? To be honest, it's all a bit hazy now. The play was performed on the Edinburgh Fringe in 1989, attracting the description "unbelievably atrocious" from Mario Relich of The Scotsman, thus immediately tripling our audiences, so that we very nearly broke even which, as anyone who's 'done' the Fringe will tell you, is some achievement, so thanks, Mario.

Yeah, anyway. Even in the 1980s, this was a theme that had been done to death in the theatre: what's surprising is that the cinema has usually been resistant to the idea. Of course, there's been metafiction - the technique of drawing attention to the artificiality of a narrative - in movies for decades: Tarantino didn't invent everything. Check out the sublimely daft Hellzapoppin' (1941) if you want to see a movie about the writing of itself. But in recent years it's been more a case of knowing nods and winks, from Ferris Bueller's post-credits appearance to tell the audience to go home, to the slew of horror and other genre spoofs that began in the mid-1990s and were never as good as Airplane! And then of course there's the permanently raised eyebrow of Quentin Tarantino. (Quick break here for a pocket Grindhouse review: the Tarantino half is better; the Rodriguez half is more enjoyable.)

Adaptation (2002) brought the writing process back to the centre of things, with a script by Charlie Kaufman that featured himself as the main character, alongside his twin brother Donald, who doesn't exist, although that didn't stop the Academy nominating him for an Oscar for co-writing the piece. The fact that the script was nominally based on a real book, the author of which appears as a character, adds to the fun.

More recently we've had The Number 23, in which Jim Carrey finds a book that seems to tell the story of his life; and Stranger Than Fiction, with Will Ferrell as a meek auditor who starts hearing his actions being narrated. These turn out to be the words of a novelist (Emma Thompson) with a reputation for always killing off her heroes, so the plot turns into a battle to save his life, made more poignant because he has at last found love with bohemian baker Maggie Gyllenhaal (and serenades her with a Wreckless Eric song). The love story is nicely done, but it distracts from the central conceit, rather blunting the challenge to the audience's sense of reality. Indeed, it combines two tried and tested Hollywood themes: the antisocial nerd redeemed by the love of a slightly uncoventional woman (Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby or Steve Carell and Catherine Keener in The 40 Year Old Virgin); and the man fighting unseen powers for his right to live (David Niven in A Matter of Life and Death).

Hollywood is finally tired of green-lighting genre spoofs, it appears, so they may be room for more of this literary self-awareness, albeit wrapped up in something like the easily digested romance of Stranger Than Fiction. But I doubt it, for two reasons. First, writing isn't cinematic. It's easy to make a film about making a film; much harder to create excitement from someone hammering at a keyboard and drinking coffee. And the other reason lies in Hollywood's politics. Somebody like Charlie Kaufman, a screenwriter who gets as much kudos for a finished film as the director, is an anomaly. Mainstream moviemaking is still in thrall to the 50-year-old auteur theory, that holds the director responsible for a film's artistic worth. Too many films about the creation of a story and the words that tell it, and they'll have to start giving the poor bloody writer a bit more credit.

Life of Brian

Of course, I never knew Brian. Not in the way I know family, friends, colleagues or even the nice lady who works in the mom 'n' pop store where I buy milk and mosquito repellent. I just knew the basics about him: that he lived in Donegal; that he worked in advertising; that he was married with a seven-year-old son. And of course that he was dying of pancreatic cancer, which is why he started the blog in the first place.

Maybe it wasn't a great blog. He never got the hang of links, or tags or blogrolls. The spelling and grammar could have used some attention. But, hell, why should he have cared about little things like that? As he said, his mission was "trying to squeeze the sweetness out of every second".

He was diagnosed in early April, and they gave him between six and twelve months. He didn't even get that. He died yesterday. And as I read his last post, and the bad news from his friends, and the comments from those who knew him and those who didn't, I realised that this is what blogging is about. All the whining about whether blogging is taking over from journalism is an arcane backwater, the preserve of crap hacks who can't stand the heat. It's something bigger.

Patroclus calls it a conversation, which is very true. But there's something else going on. Brian's illness and death obviously affected a lot of people. But through his blog, the ripples went out just that little bit further, so a few more of us got a taste of the quiddity of Brian. Yes, the posts and the comments were a conversation, but the whole thing acted as a sort of amplifier, bringing what can only be described as Brian-ness to a wider audience.

"Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night." -- Dylan Thomas

"Only connect." -- E.M. Forster