Not Books II- Kaijus and Monkeys

My first attempt at cataloging the non-book entertainment I spend/waste my life soaking up like a sponge wasn't as messy as I feared it would be, so this is my second attempt. The first installment was a collection of quick thoughts written over the course of a few days, but the plan now is to keep an open .rtf file to be added to when I finish something, and published when it looks long enough. For some reason you all need to know this.

TV Shows-

The IT Crowd- Series 01-04 & Special (2006-2013)

A good traditional British or Irish sit-com seems hard to find these days, at least to the standards of the classics. As a very English person from England, I don't really have much interest in the voluminous quantities of US comedies (though my girlfriend can't get enough of them), but I do have that undying loyalty to certain classic six-episode season favourite examples like Blackadder, Red Dwarf, Father Ted and Black Books. Those last two were created by the same writer; the annoyingly-talented and likable Graham Linehan, and I've enjoyed them for years (the thing I love about this style of comedy is that even though most shows don't have a huge episode count, they have always had immense replay value amongst my friends and I, to the point of excess), which is why it suddenly seems very strange that it took me so long to get around to watching Linehan's third sit-com success, The IT Crowd.

The IT Crowd charts the adventures of three unfortunate souls working in the basement at Reynholm Industries in the IT department, where they spend most of their time answering phone calls with 'have you tried turning it off and on again' over and over again. The format and style is essentially identical to that Father Ted and Black Books, where the characters' mundane lives are occasionally inturrupted by unexpected situations usually caused through their own doing, then get worse and worse until they somehow escape at the end. Stretching to four seasons and a final special, I think the show initially suffered from a concept that didn't strike a chord with as many viewers as, say, a bunch of ridiculous Irish priests did, but the show gained in popularity as it got older.

It gets better with age too, as Lineham seems to get a better grasp on how to use his characters. The fourth season is the best, in my opinion, and by the end I felt it was a big shame it didn't go for one more series. Altogether I don't rank it as highly as I do Ted or Books, but then I've seen those multiple times and only sat through the full run of IT Crowd once, so that might change over the coming years. 

The Simpsons- Season 01 (1989-1990)

I'd been pondering for some time the possibility of tackling perhaps the greatest TV show of all time from the beginning. Not to the end of course, besides the fact that it may never finish I doubt I could maintain my interest for that many episodes, but through the classic years, at least the first ten seasons. Now in the interesting times we live in DVDs are cheap and plentiful, especially if you don't mind buying pre-owned copies, and the hypnotic notion that we all need to collect every season of TV show we've ever liked combined with the eventual realisation that we probably really shouldn't means that there are plenty of cheap DVDs available for all. I don't know what the moral of this tale is, other than it's kind of surreal and ridiculous when you think about it and the nature of the human race and all that.

So, the first season of The Simpsons. Everybody's seen at least a few episodes, especially the first one. In my case even though I hadn't seen many of these episodes for perhaps ten years or more, I remembered most of the plots and punchlines thanks to my copy of The Simpsons: A Complete Guide to Your Favourite Family, an episode guide covering seasons one to eight (that I really wish I still had, hopefully my sister has it somewhere). I used to really enjoy episode guides when I was a kid, probably thanks to the difficulty in obtaining a full series of a TV show back then (unless you wanted to deal with a million video-cases), though it gave me a strange sensation watching through these episodes knowing that my memories rely on the guide.

When watching these episodes I tried to keep in mind that these were originally made when the world as a whole had never heard of The Simpsons, at a point where the creators were trying to sculpt their vision and comedy while being popular enough to justify the show's position on Fox. The animation, obviously, is a little sketchier than later standards, presumably due to the budget, and the character voices are sometimes slightly off in relation to how I've come to know them. Also there's much more of a serene pace to it all, with less outlandish plots than we'd later see, focusing on family life and happiness, in a surprisingly existential way. My favourite episode from the season was easily Moaning Lisa, where Lisa is shown how to musically express her sadness through the blues by legendary character Bleeding Gums Murphy, but every episode is pretty great in its own way. 

Luther- Series Three (2013)

When I first discovered this take by the BBC on the gritty maverick detective format of crime fiction I binged through it in a few days, though that really wasn't difficult since the first two series are comprised of only ten episodes. With lead actor Idris Elba becoming something of a Hollywood star over the past few years it didn't seem likely that a third series would be made, so it was fantastic news that four more episodes of Luther were on the way, because DCI John Luther is a seriously fantastic and captivating character.

Elba's brooding, charismatic portrayal of Luther went hand in hand with some nasty crime fiction scripts from creator Neil Cross, featuring suitably disturbing serial killers mixed in with conspiracy and in-fighting amongst the police. The third series totally re-embraces the format, with Luther under attack from all sides. Like series two, three features four one hour long episodes. There's an underlying plot running through the whole season where Luther has to deal with a vengeful internal investigations group, but there are two killers to be dealt and they get two episodes each. Compared to most shows that's not much content, but even though I love the show I have to admit that the brevity improves it. The same plots and style stretched out over too many episodes would've been overkill thanks to how past-paced the show is.

Series three is, I think, not quite as good as the second, but better than the first. My only real problem with it was Luther's almost super-human abilities of recovery and speed (in the last episode at least), which kind of took me out of it. I have read criticism from others about the repetition of the theme of so many people in the police trying to screw Luther over, but that's always been part of the nature of the series, placing as many obstacles as possible in his way to increase the tension and drama.

As the show makes use of the inverted detective format (where the audience is privy to the crime and criminal at the start of the show, rather than a whodunnit) and since Luther usually takes about ten minutes to figure out the identity of the murderer it leaves lots of room for thematic moralising. The show's greatest strength is Elba and his ability to communicate the character through his body language and movement, and at the core of that character is basically a hero fighting against the evils of the world and resisting his own corruption. That's really all I want from a TV show.

Films-

Pacific Rim (2013)

From one Idris Elba project to another, Pacific Rim was one of those films where, beforehand, I felt like there was a chance that it could be amazing if done right, but such anticipation led to paranoia and I kept putting off watching it for a while. After watching Luther I was in the mood to watch it, the first new film I've seen in about six months. Pacific Rim was, as far as I'm aware, a pretty successful blockbuster so you've likely seen trailers and summaries etc, so I'll summarise the plot quickly; giant robots fight giant monsters. Easy sell, really.

Full of spectacular CGI, Pacific Rim looks like it cost a ton of money, full of extended battle scenes where cities are destroyed and giant monsters are thoroughly punched in the head. The plot of the film is fairly simple, with further details about the origins and purpose of the giant kaiju monsters left purposefully limited, which really ended up being my only real bugbear (that's a real phrase, right?) with the movie. I understand the films purpose to be a 2014 Hollywood representation of a popular Japanese movie sub-culture didn't require too much background detail, but to be honest, even though I'm happy to watch this kind of CGI destruction, I've also seen it so many times in so many mediums since the dawn of modern CGI in films that it doesn't offer enough by itself.

On a more positive note, the world presented in the film is fantastic and compelling, largely thanks to the great decision to introduce it with an introduction telling of the arrival of the monsters before moving further into the future to a much-changed world; there could be some great comics written from this. The performances are all pretty good and likable from a mostly unknown (to people like me) cast, although I was a bit disappointed that Elba didn't get to do more than play a fairly one-dimensional army commander type. Other than that I didn't really get much from this film at all except action, which I suppose is okay from an unpretentious action blockbuster, so a general thumbs up.

 Kick-Ass 2 (2013)

Kick-Ass the first caused quite a stir when it came out in 2010 for having the temerity to show an eleven-year-old violently killing people and swearing a lot. I quite liked it as a black-humoured snarky deconstruction of some modern comics and film, particularly thanks to Nic Cage being genuinely brilliant in it. Since his character snuffed it he wasn't going to be back for the sequel, so this time Jim Carrey stepped in to fulfill the role of box office draw- only to cause another wave of controversy when he withdraw his support for the film thanks to its continuing brand of adolescent uber-violence. In the end, though none of this really mattered when Kick-Ass 2 was released because it was unfortunately condemned as not a very good movie, probably bringing an end to creator Mark Miller's hopeful franchise.

I mostly enjoyed it, but a lot of it was as a visually-based guilty pleasure. The storyline barely evolves from the first film, with Kick Ass desperately trying to make a difference as an urban hero, this time finding and joining a whole group of fellow vigilantes inspired by him, led by Carrey who is honestly superb as a good guy character who's a heavy rip-off of Watchmen's The Comedian. Villain The Red Mist from the first film and takes things up a notch by forming his own group of supervillains. Pretty standard stuff, propped up by immature dialogue that I found pretty funny. The action is extremely fast-paced and violent throughout, though it's so consistently non-stop that it lost some of its shine. When it tries to take itself seriously though, through deaths of supporting characters and such it just doesn't work on any level, and I didn't really care whatsoever if Kick Ass or Hit Girl learned and developed or whatever because the tone of the film excluded that from the start. I did enjoy it though and I'd probably watch it again in a few years, assuming we're not all zombies by then or something.

Computer Games- 

The Secret of Monkey Island- Special Edition (1990/2009)

Last time out in Not Books I praised the Phoenix Wright series for being brilliant modern takes on the classic adventure game genre. Since I finished the second game in that series, I went back to a game I probably haven't played in five years but which I could almost complete with my eyes closed. Probably considered THE classic adventure of all time, Ron Gilbert and LucasArt's The Secret of Monkey Island gave me an excuse to play it again when I finally got around to buying the now-five year old special edition remake. For those not acquainted, the Monkey Island series follows the cartoon adventures of wannabe pirate Guybrush Threepwood and his many troubles with the evil ghost pirate LeChuck, who's always trying to turn Guybrush's on/off girlfriend Elaine into his undead bride.

Originally released in 1990 for the Amiga and on DOS amongst others, the original version is graphically very, very dated but is revered today for having one of, if not the funniest script in gaming history. The special edition thankfully doesn't change any of the latter, and makes an attempt to update the former somewhat. Unfortunately (for me) I didn't really like the new graphics much at all; I was hoping for it to be redrawn in the smooth, bright and colourful cartoon style of The Curse of Monkey Island (the third installment, from 1997), but instead the developers try to update the grim, deep colours of the original and the result is a kind of overly shiny, barely detailed pseudo-3D. I found it so ugly that for a while I switched to the original graphics again until I realised that was a bit of a waste of money since I've got the original on CD somewhere.

The audio is mostly better. Voice actors from the more recent Monkey games return to fully voice this remake and it's generally good, though on occasions the voice actors seem to get the timing and projection horribly wrong. The music is also redone and it's great throughout. Finally the original interface is updated, I believe mostly to simplify things for the X-Box controller, and the updates are fine. Other than that there's not too much to say about the remake as a whole other than praising the original game. To be honest even though I enjoyed the playthrough I'm still not especially pleased with the remake thanks to the graphics redesign that I was hoping for so much more from. Oh well, I've got the Monkey Island 2 remake lined up and at some point I'm going to sit down and try to perform the sourcery necessary to make Monkey 3 work on my modern (ish) laptop, which is probably going to drive me insane.

Truman Capote- In Cold Blood

In Cold Blood

Penguin Modern Classics

 Truman Capote

1966

“I thought that Mr. Clutter was a very nice gentleman. I thought so right up to the moment that I cut his throat.”

When I finish reading a book I always enjoy browsing the Internet to do some amateurish research on it (never before I finish reading for fear of spoilers), usually beginning with the brevity of Wikipedia. Goodreads often follows that with some quick and often utterly infuriating reader reviews, finally followed by whatever random links Google search gives me, where the most interesting stuff usually comes from. I hope that doesn't make me seem unoriginal or lazy, it's just that I'm always curious as to the wider world's reaction to stuff that I've just formed my opinion on, which I suppose is asking for trouble. Anyway, Truman Capote's seminal genre-defining In Cold Blood led to one of those rare occasions where I  agree with a lot of contemporary opinions (as opposed to professional ones where reviewers aren't really allowed to be honest about disliking classics). On Goodreads I decided to rate it four out of five stars. I was momentarily torn on that since I can certainly see why the book is unanimously considered a modern classic but my own tastes knocked a star off... and I'm getting ahead of myself.

Like apparently every other amateur reviewer, my first introduction to Truman Capote was through Breakfast at Tiffany's, which I very much loved. It's an easy book to love; thanks to its novella length it doesn't outstay its welcome; its prose is gorgeous, its characters are mesmerising, a brief glimpse into a perfect fictional world. After reading that it was obvious that my next encounter should be with In Cold Blood, which, from what I knew of it, promised to be a much heavier and more harrowing experience. In truth I knew very little of it thanks to my prior unintentional avoidance of all things Capote, which included the Oscar-winning biography film from 2005. I'd never heard of the Clutter family murders, Dick Hickock or Perry Smith, didn't know of Capote's in-depth investigation of the crime, and, to be honest, didn't even know that this book was non-fiction until skimming the blurb while ordering it from Amazon.

As a result of all of this ignorance I was able to start reading the book with a clean mental palate, which, in hindsight, was mostly for the better. Time for a quick summary; In Cold Blood tells the true story of the build-up and aftermath of the night of November 15th 1959 in Holocomb, Kansas, where criminals Dick Hickock and Perry Smith murdered four members of the Clutter as part of a home invasion robbery that netted them less than $100. Capote began his journalistic investigation of the crime almost immediately afterwards but took six years to finish the book, basing it on meticulous lengthy interviews with the people involved in the case, including the killers themselves. The gravitas of the reality of the situation permeates every line in the book, but, as everyone apart from me already knew all along, Capote isn't simply a normal, plain true crime writer, he's a literary giant; and so In Cold Blood is composed with the care and attention to narrative of a classic fiction. Perhaps more care and attention, necessary in order to manipulate the awkwardness of reality into more palatable, engrossing reading.

At this point the argument emerges of whether such stylish arrangements combined with allegedly manufactured conversations between characters automatically damages the quality or integrity of the book at its core, but to really answer that subjective question you have to decide for yourself what the key purpose of the book is. Now personally I don't really care too much about the absolute one hundred percent accuracy of the story, at least in terms of Capote's presentation (and probable dramatisation) of conversations and his interpretation of the thoughts and feelings of the characters, but I do care about the core message of a book resonating with me through the characterisations and the overall style, which is where I lose lit. crit. points somewhat by admitting that Capote's work here didn't do it for me at the level of my favourite classics.

Dick Hickock & Perry Smith

The key to the book, in my opinion, is the in-depth characterisation of the Dick and Perry beyond just the Clutter murders, though I've read many people focus almost exclusively on the disturbing nature of the crime. Author Tom Wolfe famously coined the term Pornoviolence (in his critical essay of that name) specifically in relation to In Cold Blood and the percieved enticing anti-glamour of the crime existing as the attraction of the book, but I vehemently disagree; Capote doesn't spend a huge amount of time on the night in question alone to the extent that the violent details are tame by modern standards, particularly in the true crime genre. The key to the novel is Capote's deep but not overt analysis of the killers' characters, and he far from glamourises them as people; this isn't American Psycho or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it's an often disconcerting look at what might make a complex person capable of committing a psychotic crime. On a personal level I didn't really start enjoying the book much until after Dick and Perry's arrest (spoiler alert), specifically the depiction of the trial and then their times in prison on death row, mostly because of the introspection they offer now they have the time to consider their actions.

The undoubted consensus is that In True Blood is an American modern classic, vital reading for any serious literature fan, but, there does seem to be a similar consensus that it's not a huge amount of fun to read throughout, unlike, say, key work by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Norman Mailor or Capote's more stylish other smash hit, Breakfast at Tiffany's. The narration is often very dry, which works extremely well in contrast to some of the quotes, but clashes with the clear stylistic arrangements used to drive the narrative of the story. The style also seemed, to me, to demand that the reader take the seriousness of the crime at face value; which is again fine (though limiting) when taking the novel as pure crime fiction, but suffers through its simplicity when pushed into the more uncertain boundaries of pseudo-fiction (I found it impossible to be shocked by anything in the book, especially compared to a contemporary novel like Naked Lunch, for example, released seven years earlier). Finally along those lines, it was hard for me to get fully invested in a non-fiction character study of the two killers when I didn't feel like I could completely trust their stories, particularly anecdotes from childhood that seemed relevant.

But these are criticisms for criticisms' sake, because this is my blog. Though it wasn't the instant favourite I naively had hoped it might be, In Cold Blood struck me hard with a compelling real story put together by an incredibly talented writer. In just the few days since I finished it I've found myself thinking about aspects of it more and more, to the extent where I know this isn't going to be a book that quickly fades from memory. It's an often chilling and almost always fascinating modern classic, and though the style wasn't to my exact taste I can only compel every fan of such literature to find a copy and come to their own conclusions regarding the effects on them of such an experimental idea.

L-Space- Louis Theroux in LA

After posting some brief thoughts on Orwell and I yesterday, I wasn't intending on writing another post quite so soon, but almost immediately ran into another interesting, albeit far more modern, article that took my attention thanks to its author. Louis Theroux has long been a cult favourite of mine and many others; son of iconic travel writer Paul Theroux (and brother to screenwriter Justin), Louis made his name with the BBC in the mid-90's through a series of investigative documentaries entitled Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends. In each show the mild-mannered, amiable and very likable Louis threw himself into a particular sub-culture, usually in the US, and tried to understand what made the strange people he met click. As his popularity grew he began to make increasingly serious shows about more dangerous social issues from across the world; including introducing much of the non-US world to the cult of the Phelps family at the Westborough Baptist Church, in Louis' most famous work. In 2005 he released as yet his only book The Call of the Weird: Travels in American Subcultures, which I own but unfortunately didn't enjoy as much as his TV work.

Louis Theroux & Friend

The article that I read was written by Louis (I have to always call him by his first name because he's so nice, so nice that my Grandmother named her dog after him) and published on the BBC News website as a preview of his upcoming three-part series of documentaries (the first is airing tomorrow night on BBC2 in Britain). It's entitled Louis Theroux: Moving to Los Angeles and exists as a personal take on the making of these shows (themselves named Louis Theroux's LA Stories), where he writes about the effect of temporarily moving his immediate family to Los Angeles at the time. He refrains from detailing too much of the shows' contents and instead talks about the concepts behind them, all the while assembling his own overall impressions of life in such an apparently strange city, which is really what made the article stand out for me.

One of the main appeals to Theroux's persona is his completely convincing presentation of himself as a such a likable English chap in the face of such oddities as porn stars or pro-wrestlers or genuinely disturbing extremists; and it's also his greatest strength in terms of encouraging his interviewees to open up to him. When you consider his life and career as a whole Louis is probably stretching the truth somewhat with his disbelief at the strangeness of LA (in comparison to his time in Johannesburg, for example), but as a fellow Englander it was easy to understand his point of view. I've never visited LA and I probably never will, but it's existence as the global capital of entertainment production has ensured that I've encountered more fictional versions of it than I can remember (off the top of my head, video game LA Noire and superior Buffy spin-off Angel seem most prominent to me).

Serious Face.

Most of this fiction is likely heavily fake, but the concept of so many different versions of this place, twisted this way and that based on the whims of writers and directors, resonates heavily with the unbelievable aspect of the real city. The philosophy of life imitating art is something I strongly believe in throughout everyday life and human behavior, and so the idea of a city that is largely based around fictional versions of itself is fascinating. It's also a little scary, when briefly thinking about how out of control the human race is in regards to its consumption of various forms of entertainment (especially now that 'reality' TV is clearly anything but and just accentuates the issue). Authors like Paul Auster, who I'm currently beguiled by more than ever thanks to Oracle Night, seem to recognise the surreal nature of our reality and presents fiction that challenges our perceptions of it, which is brilliant in a way but also digs further into the massive, unending black hole of transubstantial reality, where, as the classic scientific idiom goes, it becomes impossible to analyse something without effecting it.

I'm going to wrap this up now because I didn't really intend to start rambling on for so long and I've got no intention of trying to write some sort of lengthy essay on such a hard-to-define subject. Also I'm getting away from the original point of the post, which was to link to a very enjoyable and well-written article by a respected journalist. I'm very much looking forward to the three upcoming documentaries, and they''ll almost certainly turn up in the next installment of Not Books, which I've been occasionally working on and discovering that, for someone who writes a book blog, I watch entirely too much television.

L-Space- Confessions of an English Literature Reviewer

I have the day off work, so a lazy morning of watching awful morning television shows while lounging about on the sofa eventually turned into a short trawl through Wikipedia links. Wikipedia is my go-to place in times of boredom, and I've set the random article function as my homepage (which more often than not results in a short article about a village in Eastern Europe for some reason). Through reading an article on litotes (and trying to work out how to pronounce it) I was quickly led to an article about George Orwell's Politics and the English Language (1946) (here, originally published in Horizon magazine), an essay I'd never read before. I found the full essay (here, possibly even legally) and it's fairly short and succinct; a well-written rant against the way that a few factors had been leading to the decline of the English Language.

Orwell's main cause of discontent was the manipulation of the language's various faculties in political writings in order to disguise the nature and/or hypocrisy of its actual meaning, and of the writer or political party behind it. As a natural-born cynic regarding the topic I can't really say much about the political aspect, only that almost seventy years later such techniques are undoubtedly ubiquitous in particular segments of modern society, the most obvious of which is advertising (and we all know advertising rules the world). Orwell wrote the comedy novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying on the subject of advertising, which one day might get re-read and reviewed here.

 

My most necessary rule.

Orwell goes further in his essay by addressing the application of political dialogue in literary criticism, which is, to be honest, what made me thoughtful enough to write this short post. His point is that a lot of literary criticism relies upon the reviewer creating a kind of false sense of immaculate articulation through tossing in to their reviews as many longer words as possible, regardless of their actual effect or even meaning. It's not difficult to recognise Orwell's point (and some of the examples quoted in the essay are ridiculous), and now I'm constantly set to worry that I regularly do the same thing in my reviews; sacrificing accurate reviewing for the sake of flowery prose, thus making the whole exercise a waste of time. Muddying the waters, so to speak.

I think everyone who's ever written a few articles on absolutely anything must be guilty of this to a small extent at least, and it's not something that a writer should overly worry about if it doesn't occur to them that it's something that they're prominently doing already. Personally I am worried, so this short post is an attempt to follow Orwell's rules while talking about them (very meta, I think). I started this blog to hone my non-fiction writing skills precisely thanks to the quality of prose displayed by my favourite authors like Orwell, and almost two years on I think the project is progressing decently, but not perfectly. Ah well, onwards and upwards and all that. At present I'm currently reading Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (albeit slowly) so that will be on the review schedule, as will the next Discworld book and possibly, possibly the continuation of the Comics Snobbery series. But maybe not.

Terry Pratchett's Discworld 19- Feet of Clay

Feet of Clay

Corgi

Terry Pratchett

1996

Other Terry Pratchett Reviews- The Colour of Magic - The Light Fantastic - Equal Rites - Mort - Sourcery - Wyrd Sisters - Pyramids - Guards! Guards! - Eric - Moving Pictures - Reaper Man - Witches Abroad - Small Gods - Lords and Ladies - Men At Arms - Soul Music - Interesting Times - Maskerade - Feet of Clay - Hogfather - Raising Steam - A Blink of the Screen - Sky1 Adaptations- Dodger - The Long Earth (w Stephen Baxter)

"It was Carrot who'd suggested to the Patrician that hardened criminals should be given the chance to "serve the community" by redecorating the homes of the elderly, lending a new terror to old age and, given Ankh-Morpork's crime rate, leading to at least one old lady having her front room wallpapered so many times in six months that now she could only get in sideways."

Back when I started reading Discworld books for the first time, Feet of Clay was one of the newer installments, and to me that somehow made it seem more exciting. I think I hadn't fully settled with the now-inescapable notion that Terry Pratchett's long-running series wasn't the type to concern itself with long-running, over-arching plots across multiple books, and that instead the franchise was a highly-developed  framework in which Pratchett could indulge his talent and love for satire, parody and pure storytelling with the added benefit of established characters now-guaranteed to sell a copy or two. The permanent changes in circumstances that did exist for his favourite characters (such as the introduction of Agnes Nitt to the Witches group in Maskerade) occured solely to allow Pratchett to reshuffle the deck somewhat to keep things fresh and align the universe in the direction of his philosophy. 

A boring black cover.

I mention all of this because it strikes me that Feet of Clay marks a point where things shift somewhat, where the creator of the Discworld became more embroiled in the development of his fictional universe and all of its minutia than ever before, to the extent that such world-building unfortunately (for me and my tastes) diminished the sense of wonder and awe established by the hints and asides regarding mysterious kingdoms and magic and such things in earlier Discworld novels such as The Colour of Magic and Pyramids. Also I don't mean to criticise the standards and consistency of Pratchett's authorship at this point and there are a few notable examples of more fantasy-based, genre-fiction parodying Discworld books to come (The Last Hero anyone?), but I do think it'd be naive to ignore the power and awe of a successful franchise and the inevitable changes that ensue upon becoming one.

Anyway, I should probably talk about the book for a bit. Feet of Clay is the third book to star the City Watch, led by Samuel Vimes and also featuring Fred Colon (a human), Carrot (human adopted by dwarfs also undoubtedly long lost heir to the throne of Ankh-Morpork), Detritus (a troll), Angua (a werewolf), and Nobby Nobbs (a... something) in an inter-species ensemble cast that only continues to grow with this novel (and future Watch books, of course). Having established themselves through the events of Guards! Guards! and Men At Arms as a legitimate force in the city, and somehow successfully protecting the city from dragons and gunpowder, here they are faced with an altogether more complicated murder mystery that delves further into the complexities of Pratchett's lead fictional city, serving to signal Pratchett's intentions of mimicking the real-life melting plot of cultures and ethnicities of metropolises such as London or New York. The chief suspect in this case is a golem.

I don't wish to give much away regarding the winding plot of this novel, but the business with the golems is only one piece of a larger puzzle involving a political conspiracy threatening to depose the long reigning Patrician of Ankh-Morpork. Watch Commander Sam Vimes has basically become unwilling nobility through marriage, something which goes against every fibre of his being as a born-in-poverty street-smart anti-establishment type, and he must deal with the criminal dregs of society, the criminal high society, and the criminal minorities of society. In this book, the latter of which are the golems, who exist in a rather curious state of satirical limbo; there are no Jews on the Discworld or much of an equivalent, so he can't satirise them in the way he did with Roman Catholicism in Small Gods- though I really don't know very much about classic Jewish culture whatsoever, so a lot of it might have gone straight over my head- but he does use the fantastical, mystical existence of the golems to great effect in relation to magic on the Discworld.

Pratchett's interest in fleshing out his satirical look at the planet Earth on a more specifically sociological basis didn't start with this book of course, but it does stand out to me as the first example of him dealing with the topic of a clash of cultures in a now-familiar environment. Reading about Ankh-Morpork was second nature by 1996, but the post-Feet of Clay Discworld series would see the core concepts of the series in general slowly move further away from its origins in fantasy satire towards this more intensely focused universe that, by now, millions of readers were invested it. As we move further through the Discworld series (almost half way now, I honestly never thought I'd reach this far) I must lament the fact that we've definitely just moved out of what I consider to be Pratchett's finest streak of novels (from Reaper Man to Interesting Times to be specific) into a more inconsistent yet varied future. I must admit I'm not a big a fan of Feet of Clay as I am the prior Watch novels, but it does provide an equal, if not larger amount of things to mull over.

Perhaps equally as important, it marks the point where the characters of the Watch become almost ubiquitous in their appearances. Next in the series is an interesting one for me, the first Discworld book I ever read; Hogfather, where Terry Pratchett ignores everything I've just said about him changing the nature of the Discworld series to write a high-fantasy book about Death fighting the auditors of reality for the sake of Christmas... sorry, Hogswatch.

Paul Auster- Oracle Night

Oracle Night

Faber & Faber

Paul Auster

2003

Other Paul Auster Reviews- The Invention of Solitude - The Country of Last Things - Moon Palace - The Art of Hunger - Mr. Vertigo - Timbuktu - The Book of Illusions - Oracle Night - Invisible

“Thoughts are real', he said. 'Words are real. Everything human is real, and sometimes we know things before they happen, even if we aren't aware of it. We live in the present, but the future is inside us at every moment. Maybe that's what writing is all about, Sid. Not recording events from the past, but making things happen in the future'.”

An unpredicted but undoubted discovered throughout writing this humble blog has been a personal improvement in the average amount of focus I put in to reading a book. It wasn't instantaneous upon starting out, but falling in to the habit of reviewing each book often led me to begin composing short snippets in my head as I read; as a way of processing things as they go along. Back in the yea olden days of pre-blog, I was sometimes guilty of lightly speed-reading books without properly absorbing enough of what I was looking at, making the whole exercise somewhat of a waste of time. This was especially true with library books, the advancing date on each encouraging me to rush through to the detriment of the experience. This is what happened the first time I read Oracle Night by Paul Auster.

Picador edition

Fast-forward five years of so, and after buying my own copy and then eventually picking it up off the to-read pile, I sat down with a much more concentrated attention span, and, within only a few pages it became quickly apparent that Oracle Night is a novel that deserved and required my full attention; packed as it is in the author's familiar style consisting heavily of post-modern symbolism, meta-fiction, elongated (but relevant) tangents, and varying degrees of magical realism. As is common with Auster's fiction, he makes his lead protagonist a writer; Sidney Orr is a successful novelist living in Brooklyn (another of the author's tropes, from the days of his first smash hit The New York Trilogy) who, at the start of the novel, is slowly recovering from a life-threatening illness. Written in the first-person, Auster establishes Orr as a normal, thoughtful and imaginative man, and introduces his small, close-knit environment consisting of his wife Grace and their long-time close friend and fellow author John Trause. Sidney meets the novel's fourth and final 'real' (I'll get to that in a second) character of any relevance, Mr. Chang, when he somewhat randomly ambles into Chang's new stationary store in downtown Brooklyn, where he finds himself compelled to buy a particular unassuming blue notebook, in which he begins to flesh out what he hopes will become his latest novel. 

For the first half of the book at least, Sidney's new story is given as much space and detail as its framework- though despite what the some of the many lazy reviews of Oracle Night I've found around the net suggest, it ends abruptly with plenty of the main story to go- but it's only the first (and largest) of several extended tangents produced via the blue notebook. It did, however, quickly endear me to Oracle Night through its basis in another novel I greatly enjoyed (and must re-read and in all honesty re-review) in pulp detective fiction writer Dashiel Hammett's The Maltese Falcon; Trause suggests to Orr to re-imagine a full version of an anecdote that Hammett's classic gumshoe Sam Spade tells in Falcon, about a man who survives a random near-death experience and from that moment decides to abandon his life completely and begin a new one. Sidney Orr's protagonist does the same thing in greater detail, and with this story within a story Auster manages not only to tell a compelling yarn (with a postmodern theme similar to Auster's earlier novels, particularly, for me, The Music of Chance) but add to the depths of both Orr's character and the ethereal background tone of the novel that doesn't definitively move into realistic fantasy but goes as far as it can otherwise. 

Paul Auster's serious face

  As the pace of the events in Sidney Orr's life quicken towards the end of the novel, following a series of tangential stories and experiences that deeply effect the narrator's thoughts, things come to more of an organised head, leading to a somewhat conclusive ending that satisfied my curiosity as to the fate of Orr and his wife (who I found myself very attached to, perhaps more so than any other of Auster's leading characters) without being too definitive. In an act of meta-blogging I'd been heavily thinking about the intents and effects of Oracle Night long before I'd finished it, composing mini-reviews in my head, many instantly forgotten. The ending of the book didn't change much in terms of my overall perspective of the novel, and could perhaps be criticised as somewhat of a lacklustre finish. Essentially though the very nature of this book is the entwining of the various narratives and storylines in it, and how they ultimately effect the life of Sidney, particularly in relation to the strange blue notebook. I've seen it described as an exploration of synchronicity, a less-defined look at fate, choices and the power of narrative (thinking about it now there are some similar notes to a key theme and idea of Terry Pratchett; narrativium).

If you've looked at the little goodreads blogspot gadget somewhere down the right hand side of this page, you may have seen that there I rated Oracle Night as five stars out of five, essentially a perfect score (though I'd never call it a perfect book, it's just that taking the average standard of books listed on goodreads and the inflated average scores that pretty much everything recieves, by those standards this book is absolutely five stars). Though I place that opinion based on the flawless quality of prose, layered characters, and masterly composition of varying complicated ideas to produce a literary work of art, I wouldn't necessarily offer Oracle Night up as a book everyone will enjoy. There's a certain madness in the style that relies on a prior appreciation of the authors work and certain expectations based on that appreciation, so it's not the perfect place to start with the author (no matter what the front cover blurb declares), I'd recommend Mr. Vertigo for pure storytelling or The New York Trilogy for in-your-face edgy postmodernism. Luckily for me I think I was in the perfect place and time to enjoy Oracle Night, much improved over speed-reading for the sake of a return date. A fascinating, uncompromising book.

Not Books

Okay, this is it; my attempt to catalogue the various films, TV shows and games etc. that consume all of the spare time I should be using to read books. I'm no expert in any of these categories, nor do I try and fulfill the same role as artistic snob as I do with literature, so this is probably going to all be fairly random, and hopefully much less serious than my usual efforts. Also let me preface it by saying I really don't watch  very many films these days, particularly in comparison to episodic TV because I just don't have the patience to sit in the same spot for more than an hour, therefore if my film selection seems... odd, then it's just because nine times out of ten it's something my girlfriend was watching on television. Finally if you've got a few seconds then please visit the comics-centric blog Every Day Is Like Wednesday, because I've ripped-off this concept from that site wholesale. Sorry Caleb.

Films-

American Psycho (2000)

Though my memory is awful, I'm fairly sure that I first saw this film a few years back after reading Bret Easton-Ellis' 1991 contemporary (if 1991 is still contemporary, that is) cult-classic, and it joined its similarly-themed and often-compared sister film/book Fight Club in being one of the few examples of a film improving over the source material. This was perhaps the third time I'd seen it and probably the most I've enjoyed it. Directed by arty-punk type Mary Harron (whoever that is), this film works because Christian Bale is awesome as Patrick Bateman, straddling the line between cartoonish and villainous masterfully throughout the film, dipping further into one side or the other whenever necessary to maintain the essence of both a disturbing look at aspects of modern life and consumerism and that of a deeply black comedy.

Personally I find the whole film to be very funny, whatever that says about me. Though it could be construed in some aspects as a horror film, the unorthodox ending and the lack of a sympathetic viewpoint (well maybe except for Bateman's assistant Christie, but she doesn't have a huge role) throws that notion on its head. It's by no means a perfect, five star classic film; as a story it's rather unbalanced, with the hazy chronology and postmodern attitude towards what we actually see Bateman do not translating to the screen as easily as it does on paper, but Christian Bale is so unbelievable charismatic in the role that it didn't really matter to me. I enjoyed it so much that I've made a mental note to read the book again, though who knows when that will actually happen.

10 Things I Hate About You (1999)

I first saw this film over ten years ago (I am old now) when at secondary school (or high school if you prefer) while the class were studying Billy Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, and left with fond memories of it as a surprisingly fun film. I don't think I'd seen it since until a few nights ago when my girlfriend started watching it on TV and I couldn't resist joining her. Ten years on and it's still a surprisingly fun film, but I really have no desire to ever watch it again. This romantic comedy thematically based on Shakespeare's play is perhaps most notable these days for being future-Joker Heath Ledger's breakout role, and he was undoubtedly the best part of this film without question. Suave, ranged, and annoyingly handsome, his charisma easily outshines every other performance in the film, including fellow future Batman co-star Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Though the comedy is generally a lot of fun, the film falls apart for the older-men in its portrayal of rebellious teenagers, particularly Julia Styles as the waspy lead. The cool, snarky dialogue is hacked, corny and annoying throughout, although in that respect also probably somewhat realistic. It's all part of creating the overall vibe of a teen romantic comedy that sits somewhere in the middle of classic teen films like The Breakfast Club and not-so-classic more modern (well, not anymore) gross-out stuff like the American Pie series. I did vastly prefer this film to said gross-out teen comedies and I think it has a mass appeal that would probably ensure that everyone could enjoy it once, so I suppose it really is a very good film for what it is, but I never need to see it again.

Austin Powers- International Man of Mystery (1997)

From a film I never wish to see again to a film I've seen about a billion times, this was on television too and what was supposed to be a quick look at the beginning at least ended up being another re watch. This is by far my favourite of the Austin Powers trilogy, and not only because it doesn't re-tread the same old jokes over and over again; there's a sense of innocence and naivity about the whole thing. Yes Liz Hurley might be an awful, awful actress but I actually buy the relationship between her and Austin to the point where I kind of wish there hadn't been any sequels. I don't really have much else to say about it because you've all likely seen it multiple times, only that somehow, despite the utter ridiculousness of it all, this time I found it to be a much warmer and somehow more charming film than I ever did before.

Video Games-

Ace Attourney- Phoenix Wright: Justice For All (Nintendo DS) (2006)

I don't spend much time playing video games anymore, but in my youth I was a fiend for such things. In the attic at my parents' home sit a variety of old consoles and games, most of them missing half the wires required to make them work (I've got a Sega Megadrive console without any wires or games at all for some reason). My favourite type of game, however, the type I used to spend my time and meager pennies hunting down in various second hand game stores, are adventure games. Sure, I love a bit of Street Fighter and Mario Kart, and I think The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is a legitimate work of art, but the narrative-based gameplay of mostly PC (as in computers, not political correctness) games like the Monkey Island and Broken Sword (the first being my favourite game of all time) series are what I enjoy the most. The hours I wasted trying to get some of the rarer, older gems to work on MS-DOS (screw you, Little Big Adventure) could've been used for far more productive activities, but I enjoyed it all nevertheless.

After years and years of people mourning the adventure game genre as dead it returned to prominence in a big way on modern consoles through developers incorporating crucial aspects into wider-reaching games, such as LA Noire. Despite my delight at this, I still yearned for a more stripped-down, back to basics game more closely resembling my older favourites, and Capcom (oh lovely Capcom) obliged by providing the Ace Attourney- Phoenix Wright series, of which I just finished playing the second installment.

Initially developed for the Game Boy Advance in Japan then ported to the Nintendo DS, the games put you in the shoes of Phoenix Wright, a do-gooding quirky lawyer who I became immensely attached to almost immediately. The games are divided into separate cases, mostly self-contained stories that involve Phoenix, a defence attourney, taking on a new client accused of murder. The gameplay is split into two parts; investigating the crime scene and related areas for clues and witnesses, then going into court and using the evidence to grill each person on the witness stand in search of the truth. The investigations are very similar to classic adventure game gameplay, but the court scenes are fairly unique and a huge amount of fun. To be honest the cases are fairly easy but also usually very long and absorbing.

The key to why I love these games so much is down to the writing and characterisation. The characters are mostly strange oddballs, but with enough depth to provide tension and shock when revelations in court come to light. It's done in a controlled anime-style, but the dialogue is often genuinely brilliant, with the humour mostly coming from the established nature of the characters. It's the strength of these characters that made me really care about proving their innocence or guilt, and, to my delight, many of the best ones return in further cases. Having finished the second game leaves me a bundle more to get through, hopefully continuing the journeys of characters I've grown very fond of while introducing great new ones. I'm going to stop rambling now lest this turn into a video game blog, but I'll finish by mentioning I've literally just ordered the third in the series off my trusty friend Amazon.

TV Series-

Star Trek: The Original Series 1-2

Yeah, I'm a bit of a Trekky. I got into through watching The Next Generation on BBC2 back in my school days, and that quickly spread to each of the other series. With the advent of cheap DVD boxsets I started watching them through from the beginning, so, with the aid of public libraries, slowly over the past seven years I've watched every episode of Star Treks TNG, Voyagers and Enterprise (I started DS9 but it was so very boring). Even though I'd watched and enjoyed various single episodes of TOS over the years it took me a while to get around to starting the adventures of Kirk and company from scratch, but it's been a lot of fun.

Unlike other Trek shows I find it extremely hard to chain-watch episodes of TOS, thanks partly due to the 50-minute run-times and partly due to the intensity of most episodes, but this has been for the better. Despite not yet getting around to watching the third and final series I'm happy to declare TOS to be my favourite Trek series. The holy trinity of Kirk, Spock and Dr. McCoy is such a strong connection that even during the really stupid episodes (of which there are more than a couple) their inescapable charisma carries me through. Kirk, especially has grown and grown on me as an extremely likable, even sometimes believable leader who I would follow to the end of the Earth.

It's definitely not a classic TV show that you have to enjoy or anything, but it is absolutely classic genre fiction. One of the most appealing things about TOS to me is that the style of writing, the plotting and thematic basis for each episode combined with the relatively low budget and special effects makes it all seem incredibly similar to pulp sci-fi novels and short stories. That's kind of an obvious observation I suppose but it's easy to forget when thinking about Star Trek as a franchise. Unlike the all-knowing deus-ex machina abilities of the characters in the later TV series or the action stars of the film remakes, TOS really does give me the illusion that these guys in their tin can in deep space might not be alright after all. They always are, of course.

Karl Pilkington- The Moaning of Life

Sky One's follow-up to the very successful pseudo-travel series An Idiot Abroad this time went ahead without any appearances from Ricky Gervais and Steven Merchant, but is no worse off for it. In fact, this was my favourite Karl Pilkington show of them all, thanks to less of a focus on Karl losing his mind with frustration and more of a focus on his comic philosophies on the strange and exotic things and people he meets. Rather than being sent around the world to places he's almost guaranteed to hate, Karl chose the places he wanted to go. There's also the sense that all of his prior experiences have forced him to grow as a person, something confirmed by his eagerness to participate in dangerous or embarrassing activities that I would never of imagined him wanting to do in An Idiot Abroad.

Production wise it's the same polished package as before, just with a different theme. This time each episode is themed around a topic like Marriage, Children, Death etc. Karl spends each episode in various exotic and mostly third-world countries, finding out about local traditions and meeting various people. Like An Idiot Abroad its both fascinating and amusing, and gives me the impression that I'm really not doing enough with my life. Ah well.

Fittingly, the last episode of the series is the best. The theme is Death, and Karl visits a number of countries where he gets taught how to professionally mourn, tidies up a corpse for a public display, and has someone make him a coffin that looks like a twix packet. Some of it is silly, but there's a more touching side to the proceedings, particularly at the end of the episode when Karl pays for a public waste bin with a memorial to the Ghanian woman who he made up for her funeral, placed on the promenade at the beach in Hastings, England, and watches various passers by take a look. It's better than I describe it, anyway.

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Well, that was kind of fun. If the above reviews are awful then I apologise, but I need a little more practice with this kind of stuff before I get to the substandard quality of my regular stuff. Anyway, enough of that.

Stuff and Nonsense

This is one of those non-post posts where I feel lazy for not writing anything in a week or two, so I've opened up the new post page of blogger and am frantically tapping away at the keyboard in the vain hope that something remotely legible might appear. 

Since I finished Amaryllis Night and Day it took me a few days to start anything else. I eventually decided on Absolute Sandman Volume 4, something I've had sitting proudly on the to-read selection for a few months now. As it essentially finishes off The Sandman series (there is a volume 5 but it's just a money grabbing collection of miscellanea that I'm not going to buy), I left it there waiting in that curiously strange thing that readers do where they leave the last book in a series, or the last novel they haven't read by their favourite author for a far longer time than a normal person would. I call it Desmond Hulme syndrome.

Anyway, I need to force myself into writing various things by mentioning that I'm going to write them here, so here goes. Obviously the Discworld series will continue, though I took a break from it because the next one is Feet of Clay and I don't know how to approach it. Also I've got the Comics Snobbery series which I seemed to heroically give up on after two installments with another three to go.

Also I'm thinking about doing an Everything Else style semi-regular post, an idea I've ripped off specifically from the Every Day is Like Wednesday blog, probably my favourite blog on the net. It would just be mini reviews of the latest TV shows, films and other media stuff I've been indulging in recently. I'll probably never get around to it. Anyway, I think that's enough words to justify posting this.