In a naked bid for a higher Technorati rating, recommendations for reading for Paris Hilton:
Papillon, Henri Charriere, translated by Patrick O'Brian (I prefer the earlier one, with more of the French slang left as it is)
Marching Powder, by Rusty Young
Cool Hand Luke, Donn Pearce
The Miracle of the Rose, Jean Genet
I suppose she can read?
It happens sometimes when the Matrix changes things. Now there's just a brick wall there.
Michael Hamburger is dead. His obituary is here. He sent some of his early poems to Eliot for his opinion. In one of them, where Hamburger had written "bird" Eliot wrote in the margin: "What sort of bird?" I call that constructive criticism.
Writing often reminds you how much you fail to look, or it does me. I'm always asking things like that, even for newspaper pieces. If a dog's mentioned, you ask, "What was the dog called?" If a tree falls on someone and kills them, you want to know what sort it was.
Much of the humour of pieces can derive from that sort of thing. Brand names are funnier than generic descriptions. "He was hit in the face by a cake" is clearly not as good as "He was hit in the face with a Sara Lee Double Belgian Chocolate Cake, which had been bought at Bejams for £4.99".
But I don't know the names of trees or birds or anything like that, really. Or rather, I know the names, but their effect on me is entirely divorced from their real presence. "Cedar" and "Maple" and so on have an effect, but it's entirely onomatopoeic; "Snow Falling on Cedars" strikes me as a good title (not enough for me to have bothered reading it yet, mind you). But I don't know what a cedar looks like. In Steppenwolf, Haller likes hanging around in a porch with an araucaria. But isn't an araucaria a monkey puzzle tree? They're bloody huge things, so what's it doing on the highly-polished encaustic tiles in some hausfrau's porch?
I was once given a book called Trees of Great Britain and Ireland. I really must dig it out. I approve of trees. So did quite a lot of surprising people. Dr Johnson was always going on about them.
Back to Hamburger. His grandfather's budgerigar was confiscated by Customs at Harwich. I know what a budgie looks like.
This story is all over the shop: usa today's version is at http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2007-05-29-deviant-thinkers-security_N.htm?csp=34 I must learn how to do that thing where you write here and it shows up in blue and you just click on it. Anyone know how?
I'm now going to try it to this. Ha! It works. Thank you Farah. Now I know html and shall conquer the world. Mwahahahaha! Thank you to sour grapes (first comment below) who I think is really called alan, but i don't have any globe things with goggles on them on my machine or display. Do you perhaps use some evil Microsoft-style system? Anyway, back to the post, but you can expect future posts to show off with thises and heres all over the place. Ha!
USA Today is news for beginners, of course, though it once described me as one of the best and most famous obituarists in the world. A crowded field, eh? I've written a bit about these advisors at the other blog (click on the right), but they haven't put it up yet. That is the trouble with mediated blogs.
Well. A few additional thoughts, and remember that I'm a conservative; that I take the view that 9/11 did make a difference, and I know whose side I'm on in the war against terror (though it's a bloody stupid way of describing it); that there was a case (though not the case which was presented) for invading Iraq; that the removal of Saddam Hussein was an unequivocally good thing; that George Bush is not a blithering idiot; and that I like Larry Niven and Greg Bear's books well enough, and don't feel the need to throw Jerry Pournelle's stuff across the room all that often.
Remember too that I am a liberal in the British conservative tradition, and think that the defence of individual liberty is more important than catch-all legislation which may or may not (it will not, actually) do anything to reduce terrorist threats; that the right to freedom of speech is well-nigh indivisible (even on race-, sex-, religion- and sexuality-based issues) or else worthless, that I am fervently opposed to ID cards, DNA profiling, and imprisonment without trial; and that I wrote the introduction to a book called Glorifying Terrorism which contains many good stories by top Leftie sf writers and was edited by the nice and clever Farah Mendlesohn who wouldn't agree with me on 99.999 per cent of anything if you paid her.
The first is the point I make over at the Telegraph, but slightly differently. Why restrict it to the physics graduates with the postgraduate degrees? They're the ones to ask about tachyons and building a space station. Or even, at a pinch, what sort of mobile phone masts will do the job well.
But what governments want to know is how people will actually behave. I suspect they wouldn't like the answers that they'd get from Bruce Sterling and Ken MacLeod and Neal Stephenson and William Gibson and Charles Stross and so on, but aren't these the guys that are quoted by newspapers and advising coolhunters and corporations and all that? (Ken MacLeod is now going to email me saying "As if. I could do with the money.")
Well, if Pepsi and Hyundai aren't seeking his advice, or some continental university appointing him professor of the public understanding of the networked future, that's their loss. Don't blame me. Except, of course, that you'd be nuts to take his advice. But you should listen very carefully to his arguments.
The more serious objection to Sigma is that they're volunteers. You should never take advice from a gang of people who've signed up to tell you that you're fundamentally on the right track. You need a group made up of some people who think you've not gone nearly far enough, some who think you're mad, and some who think you may have got it right, but only by accident and for all the wrong reasons, and that disaster looms unless you listen to them.
But only I, in all of this debate, can be counted upon to speak any sense at all. Twas ever thus.
Peep dis bitchin info, J-P Sartre, an get clued well up, innit.
Or not, actually.
I was thinking about what to witter on about today and found, as I so often do, that I was stuck. So I thought instead, good, or rather, rubbish philosophy graduate that I am (MA, scraped), that I would state the problem(s):
(i) There are too many books to write about
(ii) There are too many books that I haven't read.
(iii) There are too many books that I have read that I don't understand, or have not troubled myself to attempt to understand.
(iv) I often dislike critical analysis, in the same way as the audience doesn't want a magic trick explained.
Action:
(i) Consider the kind of books I like. Have they anything in common?
Conclusions:
(i) I'm not sure that I, or anyone else who reads, likes a KIND of book. What has Daisy Ashford in common with Homer, or PG Wodehouse with John le Carre, or Lawrence Durrell with Evelyn Waugh?
Let's tackle them writer by writer, starting at the beginning. But we will leave out Ladybird, The Radiant Way and the like, and assume you can read words.
All right. Blyton.
I do not now, on the whole, enjoy books which do not, to some degree, demonstrate an affinity for language. It is actually all but impossible to read The Da Vinci Code, because it is illiterate. It is so badly written that the words distract you from the narrative, which might provide some pleasure were it not for the fact that it is predictable, inept, nonsensical, heretical, moronic, laughable, ocean-going, 24-carat, shite. It is only just possible to read Jeffrey Archer, and only by pausing to throw the book across the room every three paragraphs shouting "That's just not English!"
So a book ought to be written in a way which does not constantly affront you with grammatical or aesthetic solecisms. This is not to say it need be very well written. Many thrillers can be good if the language is serviceable, and the plot fast-paced and interesting. Predictability is all right, but not to the point of crassness. So even cliche mongers like Agatha Christie and James Hadley Chase can be enjoyable, though you cannot claim that they are good writers (at the level of the sentence, as Sam Leith nicely put it when dissing Jacqueline Wilson) without being accused of having a tin ear.
That is a start. Adopting this standard, Enid Blyton is not a writer. So why is she vital if you are a child? Because, I think, she is a mechanism for instilling in the imagination certain kinds of structures and narrative conventions, for constructing certain sorts of immersive created scenes, characters and acts of wish-fulfillment, and for inculcating in the child the physical habit of picking up a book, moving his or her eyes across the page and demanding another book as soon as each is completed. She is what ought to have been in the syringes in Snow Crash. She is the reading meme. The mind-curdlingly repetitive nature of her prose - if you can dignify it with that label - is simply the next step up from rote learning the alphabet.
Other children's writers can be good, okay, or not much cop, but few match Blyton for sheer stultifying unreadability. Even Roger Hargreaves's repetitions, rhetorical questions and annoying banalities have a kind of rhythmic insistence.
Her only competitor among adult books is Dan Brown, who is an affront to the idea of the word. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent. One cannot begin to speak of his badness. He is badness incarnate. He is badness visible. His badness is transcendent. Even Ken Follett kneels before his badness, silenced by the majesty of its appalling Blytonian awfulness.
Who shall I kick next?
