I’ve been having an annoying day of dealing with letting agencies, and was feeling pretty grumpy on my way home. As I idled up my street, my eye fell on an odd piece of garbage on the street:
(I’m just too prudish to have it on my front page, but you can click through for NSFW object)
After a brief discussion between me and Alan (“Is that a…?” “Yeah.” “Look, it’s got crusty poo on it!” “That’s not poo, that’s blood.”) we took the above photo to mark the day we found a sex toy loose on the mean streets of Heaton. I’m not sure if that was the correct thing – the object did have blood on it, so perhaps I should have disposed of it safely. In a biohazard site, or something. I have nightmare images of a dog chewing it.
However, that wasn’t even the strangest thing I found. One street over, I found a 110 volt hammer drill sticking out of a skip. Considering these things retail at around £200, it seemed odd to just chuck it in the skip when you’ve finished renovating a house. They did take the plug off it before disposing of it – as if plugs were the expensive part of power tools.
I really wonder what’s going on that I could find these two disparate objects discarded in my neighbourhood. I am, however, the proud owner of a (probably broken) 110v hammer drill. Yay!
Some people suggested that I combine the two found objects. However, I have a personal rule not to take home blood-encrusted sex toys that I find in the street. I didn’t know that I had this as a personal rule until today, but you have to admit it makes a lot of sense.
I’m reading Infinite Jest as part of the Infinite Summer project, and I’ve got some reservations.
Infinite Jest is a big book, but I’ve read bigger, and I’ve certainly read better. I think my flatmate summed it up best: when I pointed out the size of IJ, and how I wasn’t really enjoying it, he said that it was the short books that leave you wanting more.
I don’t think Infinite Jest is a well written book. I believe that it has traces of greatness; some of the parts that I’ve read have really stuck in my mind. But I’m up to the mid-six hundreds now – it should have got round to being gripping at this point. The fact that it isn’t says a lot, mainly that the book coasts on those few points of excellence and the dry black vein of humour it’s written in.
Earlier on I said that perhaps the reason that American’s like it is because it’s such a big book. I think I’m going to have to stick with this theory; it’s like the way that Harry Potter is lauded for being good writing. Actually, the Potter books are pretty workmanlike; it’s the fact that they got sold as an event that launched J.K Rowling into her celebrity and subsequent success. I think a similar thing has happened for this book. After all, it’s not like there aren’t other books out there which are as multi-layered and referential. Perditio Street Station, for instance, is similarly tome-like and has a fucking storyline that pumps relentlessly.
I’m reading this book in order to get a better grounding in books that don’t have spaceships on the cover. But I do find that once I step out of the SF getto, there is a lot of muddying about what actually makes a good book – and this time, I got suckered.
“Eighty percent of everthing ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading” James Howard Kunstler
What are hackerspaces? I don’t mean in terms of physical location, but in terms of what societal function do they have? Deyan Sudjic’s new book, “The Language of Things” proposes that design is trying to become more interesting, higher up the cultural chain, now that the process of manufacture is so mechanised. Does the existence of playful venues for the exploration of computer technologies point to a similar attempt at cultural evolution? Or, are these venues part of the same upward motion from those involved with design?
The quote at the top of this post by Kunstler is a similar attitude, but this time focused towards the great suburbs of America. These vast non-spaces have been more fully explored in literature by writers such as J. G. Ballard and Douglas Coupland, who have come to the conclusion that their existence shows a flattening of culture and physical location. Where Foucault claimed that our contemporary existence would become an “epoch of space”, Virilio points out that space (as in the place one mile above us) is merely another theatre of war to the ruling classes of the military/industrial complex.
These are all reductionist theories – from Sudjic to Ballard to Virilio, all convinced that the contemporary movement of society is towards a levelling and a widespread homogeneity of variance. Whilst this might be true in some regards (notice the lack of subcultural movements now that the internet is part of the mainstream) there is a barrier of knowledge that stops those involved with Hackerspaces becoming entirely subsumed by fashion. Hackerspaces (and the like, of which more later) are frequented by a type of individual who has a number of unusual skills, and the venue operates as a place where those skills can be celebrated.
Whilst they might be venues that allow for the infiltration of design-led ideas into “High Art”, as positied by Sudjic, most of the artifacts created are either too ephemeral (code-based) or bespoke to enter into a fashion-driven mainstream culture. They might function as early detection centres for work that might go on to be more influential, in the way that the Homebrew Computer Club helped to give birth to modern computing, or they might be another part in an increasing homogenisation of creativity, where even the strangest forms of art are disseminated and discussed.
My reading of Infinite Jest is part of Infinite Summer, an online reading group of the novel by David Wallace Foster
Infinite Jest: is it really that great a novel, or is it merely called a great novel owing to its size? After all, American’s like big things: Buicks, skyscrapers, Texas. And Infinite Jest is a big book, at 1079 pages in total.
Although currently on track with the reading schedule as laid out on the Infinite Summer website, I’ve been holding myself back. I’ve got a really high reading speed, and I’ve been reading other books at the same time, as I’m not finding Wallace’s writing style that interesting. Yes, it has some good points, and some amusing funny parts, but it’s sheer length finds it unfocused, the narrative is all over the place (despite being a few hundred pages in), and the over-reliance on footnotes is a distracting affectation.
(For instance, in this paragraph I’m writing in the main body of the text to tell you that the footnotes are considered one of the novels main strengths by IJ’s aficionados, pointing to the fragmentary nature of reading via the internet as an excuse for this strange writing quirk. But by writing in the main body of the text you keep the narrative flow but still impart information like I’m doing here. I think authors refer to this as ‘writing skills’.)
Infinite Jest is, no doubt, an interesting book. But whilst reading it I’ve been reminded of all those short novels that you are heartbroken to leave behind once finished. One such book that I’ve been using as ballast for my reading speed is Catherynne M. Valente’s Palimpsest, a story about searching for a way to a magical realm. I’d heard it was a good book via the underground sci-fi grapevine, but not paid too much attention to the plot. I probably should have done, because the mcguffin that gets you into the magical realm of Palimpest is having sex.
Valente’s book has a lot more sex in it than the ordinary fantasy books I come across – er, I mean read. But it is sensitively handled, and belies the underlying theme of the book – that of seduction. Those who wish to travel to Palimpsest are seduced by the city, and it’s promise of a different life, but Valente makes it clear that sometimes those promises are lies.
While Palimpsest was in no way the novel I was expecting, it’s concise effort to tell four interleaved tales served as an ideal counterpoint to Wallace’s rambling style. Valente knows how to write the sort of punchy prose that made me keep reading, her style reminiscent of a sexier, gothic-ier Neil Gaiman. Having finished Palimpest I only wish that there was a sequel I could pick up – I doubt I will be left with a similar yearning once Infinite Jest is finished.
Infinite Summer is a group reading of the novel Infinite Jest. I’m slowing myself down from speeding through that book with my high reading speed, sometimes by reading other things, sometimes – as this weekend – by drinking and going to barbecues in the sun and small country pubs. This weekend truly felt like there was an infinite amount of summer to go around.
I have a deep antipathy for Torchwood. You see, Doctor Who was my introduction to Science Fiction. I mean the old-school Target book series, which were novelisations of the broadcast episodes, unrestrained by budgetary considerations. A deep space station can only be written in a way that it appears in deep space, whereas careful financial planning might make a televisual space station appear a bit like a collection of washing up bottles painted grey. And let’s not even start on the aliens, huh?
Use a tissue next time, okay buddy?
When the TV show finished the books continued the story of the Doctor’s travels in space and time. Except that the authors didn’t need to worry about budget constraints, leading to a fantastic series of stories from authors such as Lance Parkin, who recreated the Time Lords was a species locked in a perpetual war across time, using regeneration to create creatures bred for war. Parkin, and other authors working in this period, used the long attention spans needed to read a book to create an amazing back-story.
When Doctor Who returned to TV, it was assumed that the attention span of anyone watching it was tiny, and the majority of the back-story was scribbled out. Each episode was as self-contained as possible, with only the existence of the Doctor character linking the events happening within the story to a larger, scifi-tinged universe. Torchwood removes the need for that link, and instead gives us lowest-common-denominator storytelling.
This radio play, “The Dead Line”, uses the idea of a malicious phone signal that makes people’s brain stop working – like a computer virus for brains. Thankfully, after forty-five minutes of pissing around, the Torchwood posse decided that the computer virus metaphor meant that they could just zap the brains of the affected with electromagnetic waves and reset everybody.
(Thanks, Roy. Your Torchwood invite pack is in the post.)
Of course, no concern was given that this freaky brain-wipe via telephone behaviour came from a lightening storm that hit an office building, nor that there’s been a bunch of people incapacitated with the same symptoms since 1974 (or something) and nobody in super-elite Torchwood noticed. Mind you, they are a state department, and therefore need to uphold that level of efficiency that we expect from government workers. Don’t expect a work-related bonus this year, Jack.
The notion of phones being an attack vector for something is insidiously scary. Stephen King broached it in Cell, and there’s a film based around the same idea called The Signal, which I’ve not seen. This is because I’m a big wuss and don’t like watching horror movies, and the basic premise of the The Signal is that the ‘infected’ lose the niceties of civilisation and start acting crazy.
This is the sort of adult-themed entertainment that media representation of Torchwood would lead me to expect. However, I’m always disappointed by the Torchwood show. Yes, Ianto loves Jack, and they’re both men – so what? I really hope that the mention of a same-sex relationship isn’t the only passport to mature that Torchwood has, as that expired sometime around 1994 with the use of lesbians in Brookside.
We don’t get crazy zombie behaviour from this rogue noise in “Dead Line”, instead the victims fall into a coma. This is another missed opportunity for radio, as we could have a great monologue from any of the victims as to the scary nature of being locked into your own body, like in Metallica’s video for One. And, of course, there is the scary sound, which sounded a bit like a bucket with a mobile phone in it. Whatever happened to the Radiophonic workshop?
At a time when British SF is harder, leaner, and more popular than ever, I don’t understand why we get this sort of dumbed-down shit from the British Broadcasting Corporation. The public can cope with far more than this simple children’s tale, and although the voice acting from the principles was pretty good, unless they are given some real stories to tell, we’ll never see anything particularly good come from the Cardiff Torchwood team – as this radio play proved. The talent is there, just not the stories, and I don’t see commissioning editors changing their tactics anytime soon.
