I am going to be in Lisbon, Portugal next weekend attending Fórum Fantástico 2010 as a guest. I am hoping to be wandering about on Friday (12th Novemember) afternoon. On Saturday (13th November) I will be giving a talk on ‘worldbuilding’ in the morning and talking about my books in the afternoon.
Here’s the programme.
Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds is currently showing at Tate Modern. A Chinese artist who has suffered severely for being politically outspoken, and who was the artistic consultant on the glorious Bird’s Nest Stadium at the recent Olympic Games, Ai Weiwei has produced a work that says much about China today and in the past. Consisting of 100 million sunflower seeds handmade from porcelain, fired at a high temperature, handpainted, then fired again. According to him:
“Seeds are a household object in China and a revolutionary symbol at the same time”
Conceptually (I’ve not actually seen it), I read in it several layers of meaning.
Porcelain, an industrial and artistic product with which China supplied the rest of the world, links China’s past with today when she has become the workshop of the world.
I am reminded of the Terracotta Army – another example of Chinese labour being lavished to produce something beyond the capacity of almost any other people (excepting perhaps the ancient Egyptians). These are at the same time displays of what humans can achieve if bent to a single goal, but also the dehumanization involved: when we look at the Terracotta Army we are thinking of the brilliant but megalomaniacal First Emperor. Similarly with another of his megaworks – the Great Wall. With the rise of Mao, once again it is an individual who looks out at us, while his people, identical and beneath notice, lie beneath his feet.
I find the sound of a harpsichord (cravo in Portuguese – a word that is also used for the carnation flower and cloves – perhaps some kind Portuguese speaker could explain this), and other related instruments such as spinets and virginals, exquisite – though prolonged listening to it can become a tad wearing.
Recently, at night in a tent on the shoulder of a mountain beside a ruined Roman fort (nothing wrong with setting the scene! *grin*), I listened to a harpsichord piece by Rameau very LOUD. The metallic, machine-like quality of the music blew me away. If you think of Babbage and his difference engine rather than bewigged men in frock coats, then it becomes a sort of steampunk cybernetic music.
No doubt there were many reasons why the harpsichord was abandoned for the piano, however, one of those was volume – a problem that has been eliminated by modern amplification. Another reason is that harpsichords are unable to produce variations in loudness – pianos can (thus the term piano forte soft loud). My understanding is that this was considered essential to convey emotion. This may have led to some of the excesses of sentimentality of the Romantic period that I personally dislike.
A harpsichord is in effect a digital instrument – while the piano is analogue. It is interesting that the harpsichord only came back into favour in the early 20th century as a result of champions like Wanda Landowska. That this coincided with the advent of computers seems to me rather interesting. Perhaps the harpischord is more of a 21st century instrument than is the piano?
(Here are some examples, Skip Sempé playing Scarlatti, the wondrous Rameau and Royer’s exciting March of the Scythians)
[update: been meaning to put a link to this Robert McCrumb article in the Guardian that seems to agree with my thoughts in this post.]
A few days ago I discovered that the book I’m currently working on (working title: Matryoshka) is not in fact a novel, but rather a novella. Initially I was rather dismayed. After some investigation I realized that of course it was a novella – not only because it is going to be less than the 50000 words that (apparently) marks the boundary between novella and novel, but because it is a novella – look at this definition from mantex.co.uk:
The essence of a novella is that it has a concentrated unity of purpose and design. That is, character, incident, theme, and language are all focussed on contributing to a single issue which will be of a serious nature and universal significance.
What I am working on fits this description pretty snugly. Of course, this should not have been that much of a revelation since I’ve recently been rather fixated by – well – novellas, d’oh!
The reason I was dismayed is because it seems that mainstream publishers don’t much like publishing novellas. Once upon a time they did (The Time Machine, Death in Venice, Heart of Darkness) but in these more commercially-fixated times, they don’t. This seems to be because there are minimal costs associated with publishing any book and so a novella probably has to be charged at the same rate. Someone picking up two books that are almost the same price, but one is sliver-thin, and the other thick enough to prop a door open (a joke made to me often about my own books – and a not unreasonable point – after all, a student riot should be able to see off even the best armed police with a few volleys of my books *grin*).
An aspect of ‘physicality’ is that it finds a different, perhaps more instinctive, way into our brains. For example, when I see a time such as 2:36pm on a digital display I always think – oh, that’s only 20 minutes away – so it is really 3pm and there’s no point in starting anything new (this mostly happens when I’m working…). However, if I see the same time displayed on a clock face, it suddenly looks much more like half an hour before 3 and that’s plenty of time to do something. 2:36 is a virtual form of the time, and we can easily play games with virtual things. A clock face is like looking at a sliced up cake – and the size of a wedge of cake is not something I for one ever make mistakes about!
Anyway, my core point is that once books move into a virtual form on an ebook – then their thickness will vanish into abstraction. Of course the number of pages will still be displayed for a book – but this is just one number versus another – not something you can ‘feel’. and this on a plethora of devices with different numbers of pixels, where the font size can be modified according to the preferences of the reader – all of which will change the number of pages that any book will span in the device. It seems to me likely that other aspects of the book will come to dominate the mind of the reader.
It seems to me that we are on the verge of a renaissance in shortforms. We are all so busy these days and there is so much out there to tempt us and to consume, that naturally people are gravitating to art that can be quickly and intensely enjoyed. Though I’m sure there will always be time for more leisurely pleasures, as with the ‘album’ in music – an artistic form dictated by the capacity of a standard vinyl disk – once freed of physical constraints, an artistic ‘object’ can find its own natural size and form. For me such a day of liberation cannot come soon enough.
Every year we have had mice coming into out house presumably to find a place to hibernate. We would be perfectly happy to let them do so if they didn’t insist on scurrying around in the walls and invading our kitchen. Then there is the danger that they will chew through electrical cables and start a fire. They already gnawed through a water pipe and caused a flood. So, eventually, we put down poison.
Now, every year, the mice come into the house and they die in the house and, of course, not in any part of the house we can reach. As a consequence, we had to endure the stench of rotting mouse. The first two years this happened it upset me a lot – the stench is an unwelcome presence (only in a utility room and the bathroom… “only”!??!) and takes time to fade.
However, this year, somewhat less hysterical about the whole thing, I decided to just accept the stench in good grace. Strangely, as it has changed (analogously in my mind with the change in flavour that results from my new habit of drinking successive infusions of green tea – throwing away the 1st, drinking the 2nd through to 4th or 5th) it has evolved into a scent that now walks the edge between unpleasant and interesting. Am I becoming a connoisseur of the scent of decay?
And why should such a concept be ridiculous? Consider how many people – especially in the West – aquire an enjoyment, passion even, for the odour and even taste of rotting milk – ie. the more extreme cheeses.
I was drawn to this piece by the welcome news that the terrible disease rinderpest has been eradicated. However, as I read it I became irritated when I came to this innocuous enough paragraph:
As the virus spread, it left vast numbers of dead livestock in its wake, and communities without meat and milk. The loss of the animals, which were used to plough the land, crippled farming and led to widepsread starvation.
My irritation stemmed from knowing something about these “communities” that starved. In one of those consequences of Western imperialism that is still being conveniently forgotten, rinderpest, introduced by Europeans, devastated the pastoral cultures of East Africa. What we now think of as the ‘wild’ African plains may actually be the legacy of human action. The Serengetti, no less manmade than the rolling arable landscapes of England. The disaster that rinderpest spread across these parts of Africa led to large swathes of the human populations succumbing to famine. One Masai elder later recalled of the dead:
So many and so close together that the vultures had forgotten how to fly.
So that when Europeans arrived they found the survivors of the once proud and rich cultures reduced to beggary; people who, needing ‘civilized’, became part of the “White man’s burden”.
The consequences of this disaster live with us still and, in the West, we still persist in seeing these parts of the world as we have always chosen to see them – ignoring the truth even though it’s there in plain view. The Guardian article I link to above does not lie directly, as was once common, but the omission covered by that bland paragraph I quote seems to me bad enough.
My friend Rem modified this photo I took of my dog, Ninja (a name given her by her previous owners) – having caught a rat, but that’s another story – as part of a discussion on facebook… The effect is pretty horrible and there was talk about how much people loathed insects (and arachnids) in general.
I used to share these feelings – so much so that, for a long time, I was unable to eat prawns because I had begun to see them as ‘insects of the sea’. Then I moved into the country and, gradually, with constant exposure to the critters, I have almost entirely got over my prejudice.
At one point I imagined how I would feel about insects if they were tiny little dogs or cats. Horrors would suddenly be transformed into Disney cuteness. Of course all I was doing was applying mammaliocentric criteria to the poor beasts.
I had already (like so many people) promoted bees to be ‘honorary mammals’ – like flying teddybears. I also made exceptions for butterflies… and ants… it isn’t all that difficult to stretch the ‘honorary franchise’ to wasps and moths and beetles… Before you know it, they all start looking friendly – and you begin to see just how exquisite they are… like jewels, or knights in enamelled armour. What’s an extra pair of legs between friends?
But I am being somewhat dishonest, for I have not quite extended the franchise to spiders. And it’s not just that they’ve taken the extra legs thing just a bit too far… It’s their faces… Most creepy-crawlies have the decency to have ‘faces’ we can get on with – you know: two eyes, a mouth (though perhaps not quite one you could put lipstick on) – but spiders make no concessions to the ‘face’… It’s those clusters of eyes that I find unnerving, and that have had me wondering what they think about what they see with all those eyes… and what they’re thinking about… because, though you can imagine ants are singing ‘hi, ho, hi, ho, it’s off to work we go…’, and bees are just humming something quietly to themselves, spiders are watching and waiting and plotting and thinking – and I don’t really like to think about what they may be thinking as they watch me from a corner of my livingroom through their many eyes.
So, in my house, spiders haven’t yet been given the vote – not that I bother them in any way. When I find three of them – three enormous bruisers – having some kind of conference in my bath – I drape some toilet paper over the edge as a ladder – just in case they’re having difficulty getting out.
After all my brave talk, I have to confess that it may be a while before I’m happy to have one crawling around on my hand.
When I was younger, it never occurred to me that most of what I said might not ‘get through’ to the other person. Similarly, I believed that I understood most of what was said to me. I no longer feel that way. Now it seems to me that thoughts survive the leap from one person to another only very rarely. Mostly, we are islands to each other.
I do not see this as a cause for despair, but something that, in the accepting of, allows us to be more merciful to others and to ourselves. For, if you believe that communication is normally clear and possible then, when others misunderstand you, it is either because of some grave fault on your part, or else something deliberately perverse on theirs. Neither conclusion is likely to lead to happiness. By instead accepting that communication is a distant semaphore through mist, or rain or blustery weather, I neither give myself unreasonable expectations of what I can express, nor blame others for not understanding me…
I have just come back from walking my dog to hear someone talking on the radio about a theory he has of the perception of time that sounds essentially the same as one that I have held for a long time. So I thought I may as well put down my thoughts for the record.
Some years back I came back from shopping and realized that I had been there and back and could barely recall anything that had happened. It was almost as if I had not gone shopping at all – though I had the full bags to prove it… This then provoked in me an insight that gave me an answer as to why it was that time seemed to move faster the older I became.
People are always saying that time seemed to move so much slower when they were children – that the summer holidays seemed to last for ever. It seems to me that the reason for this is simply that, when we are children, we live profoundly ‘in’ our senses – that is, we are constantly monitoring sensory input. An extreme example of this would be a baby learning to take her first steps. The crossing from one side of the room to the other is necessarily a major undertaking. As a consequence, the experience is overwhelming – every totter, every regaining of balance, every step forward is experienced with exquisite awareness. Now, when you or I cross a room, we are no longer aware of our balance, of each footfall and the reason for this is that we’ve automated it. I remember my first driving lessons as being rather analogous to the child tottering. With practice, the mechanical processes of driving a car, that had once left me in a sweat of concentration, slipped into my subconscious, so that now I can drive barely aware that I am doing so.
As we age, we gradually automate everything, until we reach a state where we can negotiate almost our entire lives on ‘automatic’. Though our brain is still processing sensory input, our conscious mind is not. And, when consciousness is untethered to the senses, then we lose that childlike time perception. Apart from our body clocks (that operate in a different way), our perception of time is entirely given to us by what is happening outside us. If we stop paying attention to that, then time becomes entirely fluid, becoming the slave of whatever it is we are paying attention to: if something boring, time drags – if fascinating, it gallops.
So the answer to why time speeds up as we age is that we are progressively disengaging from the real world, the world of our senses, and instead choosing to spend our time in virtual worlds that reside entirely in our heads. Worse, we most of us deliberately annihilate time. How many of us do not sit at our desks longing for the weekend to come? – and by so doing, we compress the weekdays. Or we spend time looking forward to a holiday – and thus compress the weeks to that time…Interestingly, a proof of what I’m saying seems to me to be provided beautifully by holidays – especially those challenging ones where we go to a foreign country. There, our ‘automations’ so often don’t work. Consequently, we are forced back into our senses as we try and ‘make sense’ of things… Thus, on such holidays, a week appears to be a month. Holidays seem to expand time, though, of course, it is not the holiday that is expanded, but the rest of our lives.
So, the rate at which time moves for you is up to you. If while you are eating your cornflakes in the morning you actually pay attention to their taste and texture in your mouth, then your breakfast, rather than being a null-time event, will stretch to occupy a sizable period – an eternity even *grin* Of course, when I got to this point, I realized that this is what Buddhists and yogis have been saying for centuries – all that ‘listening to the breath’ – for, after all, what is listening to your breath other than tuning into the ‘real’ tick-tock of your life, rather than paying attention to that mechanical tyrant on the wall.?
I have been watching Spartacus: Blood and Sand with much enjoyment and would like to counter various sneering reviews such as this (it was another review I can no longer find that provoked me to write here)…
The general drift seems to be to point out the banally obvious, that the show contains a constant diet of sex and violence, and to state that there is no plot. It seems to me that this entirely misses the critical point: that the sex and violence are the plot. Both serve to demonstrate the core aspects of the politics and culture they represent.
When you have two privileged people chatting about the day’s business, while each is ‘fluffed’ by a slave to get them sexually aroused, before they enter into full copulation, with these and other slaves watching – then it seems to me that we are being given a profound lesson in cultural history that it might otherwise take screeds of text to convey.
Similarly, when you observe men highly trained to kill, decked out in armour and weapons exquisitely customized to provide entertaining matches (yes, like a computer game, but these were real people being maimed and slaughtered) before a baying crowd of gorethirsty ‘citizens’ – then something of the politics and morality of the Roman Empire is clearly communicated. Apparently, after a day at the Colosseum, whores would gather in the streets outside so that the audience, their libidos inflamed by hours of torture and bloodshed, could sate their passions there and then on the street. From what I’ve read, sex and violence were endemic to ancient Rome and many other urban centres of her empire – and these excesses were not something enjoyed underground but in the full glare of day, promoted by the state, indulged in by even the highest stratum of society…
Further, comparisons with Frank Miller’s 300, though superficially true (Spartacus makes many stylistic borrowings), again seem to me to miss the point. 300 deliberately (or ignorantly) misrepresents history. To have Xerxes, the Persian King shown as some kind of S&M pervert (homosexuality being implied among other things), is a gross inversion of the truth. From what we know, Xerxes was a profoundly moral man, hedged about by a religious (Zoroastrian, arguably) code that was far more chaste than anything the Greeks had to offer. Indeed, those Spartan heroes, if correctly portrayed, would have spent the time before battle, combing their hair and primping themselves to appear as beautiful as they could in the coming battle. This from a military elite among whom homosexuality was compulsory. Not that I am expressing any judgement about this. Rather, I could not help being aware, while watching 300, of how Frank Miller had twisted his representation of history to reflect what appears to me to be a sinister notion of West versus East – a self-serving white hat/black hat analysis that has political consequences even today…
So, Spartacus: Blood and Sand is indeed comicbook – gloriously and creatively so, somewhat fantasy, and there is quite a lot of rather dodgy acting, but it is nevertheless a visceral portrayal of some aspects of Roman culture that goes some way to explaining why their slaves rose up, not once but several times, in grotesquely violent and desperate attempts to free themselves from the degradation and harm imposed on them by their masters…
