This morning I’ve been re-reading bits of Ridley Walker. No links, it’s exquisitely planned revelations can be spoiled too easily. The basics though: Ridley Walker is a 13 year old boy living in post apocalyptic Kent, the story is written by him. It’s the first work of post collapse narrative, a kind of echo of Beowulf maybe. The whole thing is written in a transformed and scabrous version of English leaving the reader to pick through it’s awkward spellings and double meanings in the same way that the people of “Inland” understand their surroundings and historical context only murkily leaving Ridley to unpick and interpret the mysteries of his environment.

I was reading it as a kind of counter blast to the surprisingly pervasive and seductive idea that a civilisational collapse could be a good thing or, you know, liberating in some way. Logical argument is all fine and good but it doesn’t change minds very easily. Not as well as you can with 200 pages of fiction.

Right, now for some Left 4 Dead 2. Fun Apocalypse!

Bono being a f***ing tool is not exactly news but it’s worth noting that in protecting his own (un taxed) interests he’s now promoting the surveillance of everybody’s internet traffic. Presumably if people were sending copies of U2 cd’s around in the post he’d be happy for the post office to open everyone’s mail. You know just in case.

In discussing global freedom, Bono waxes about “the trouble an aroused citizenry can give to tyrants” and how the power provided to citizens “via cellphones, the Web and the civil society and democracy these technologies can promote, is being felt by those who have traditionally held power.” Surely Bono realizes that those technologies can only promote freedom when they are built so that the citizens using them cannot be tracked, censored and spied upon (and ultimately punished for expressing their views).

Indeed, when accused of violations of basic human rights, China and other authoritarian regimes are happy to equate the development of their apparatus of online repression with other countries’ censorship and surveillance systems.

And by far the best weapon they have in this global battle to erode the neutral role of service providers is the entertainment industry, which so regularly calls upon ISPs to actively police and censor the world’s networks. Perhaps Iranians, Chinese and North Koreans will find in the next decade, as he predicts, “their Gandhi, their King, their Aung San Suu Kyi.” But if all communications are built with the surveillance infrastructure and censorship policies he wants to force on ISPs, how will these emerging leaders protect their ability to motivate and inspire the world’s people?

As one of the world’s foremost champions in fighting global poverty, Bono has testified to Congress about the impact of excessive pharmaceutical patent enforcement on the availability of life-saving drugs. Given his understanding of the benefits of flexible IP reform, Bono’s new call to seize control of the Internet by embedding content tracking in the name of ensuring full payment for the movies, music, and media that are overwhelmingly produced by rich countries sounds especially off key. After all, the net transfer of wealth due to an excessive emphasis on copyright enforcement is overwhelmingly from the world’s poorest countries to the world’s richest. The flourishing of local art and the fair trade of native culture from developing countries needs the flexibility of the global copyright regime, not a war on piracy.

The whole short piece can be read here

The problem highlighted by snow, originally uploaded by toffeemilkshake.

They’ve recently re layed out our road to be more friendly to pedestrians (dissapointingly the didn’t adopt the scheme where they were to put in chevron parking and make the whole road a chicane also reducing the amount of on-street parking – but hey the plan seemed better than nothing), the pavement has been widened etc. in practice what has happened is that cars have started driving on the pavement. And motorcyclists have been cutting across the new pedestrianised sections nearly wiping me out on a couple of occasions.

I only mention this because people are always complaining about cyclists on pavements. From here are some statistics (via Jim G)

On an average day, two pedestrians are killed by motor vehicles in the UK.

Only two pedestrian per year are killed by bicycles, almost always on the road.

On pavements and verges, motor vehicles kill around 40 pedestrians every year, nearly one per week.

Only three pedestrians have been killed by pavement cyclists in the last 10 years.

Also, I’d like to be able to put a car sized container in a parking space outside our flat (which I’d pay for at standard residents parking rate) in which my neighbours and I can keep our bikes. c.f. this

PS I hope to write a post about how Westfield shopping centre pays lip service to pedestrians and cyclists but actually puts them in dangerous situations. It will, naturally, be in green ink.

The blog’s title was always supposed to remind me of that.

Anyway, inspired by renewed blogging by Alex F and Dan I’m back.

Delayed festivity: My favourite Christmas carol is “We Three Kings” mainly because of the Myrh verse

Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume
Breathes of life of gathering gloom
Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying
Sealed in the stone-cold tomb

Happy Xmas!

Last years media diet (inspired by Art Garfunkle):

• Books
• Games (incomplete as I’m never sure when I’ve really finished with a game. Also table top fare is not included (lots of Ticket to Ride Europe which I never win))
• Films

Please use the comments section to discuss the wrongness of my hastily pasted up opinions.

DVD box set viewing not recorded but I loved 30 Rock’s first series (hint mr Lisher)

Music review of the decade possibly forthcoming …

Happy new year!

An old lady my mum knows died and people only found out after 16 pints of milk were sitting on her doorstep … Her neighbours didn’t care because they didn’t know her. They were all probably watching science fiction on the internet.

from here

Bothering me at 6am, where did I read this story?

Here’s the plot: There’s this unemployed guy, all he does all day is play this incredibly complex baseball league simulation of his own devising, it involves paper and dice and reams of stats and folders and it’s his entire life. After a while he’s thinking of giving it up but then this really great new rookie appears on the scene and everyone (in the game world) is really exited about this new star and it renews the guys interest in the project. Then he makes the rarest dice roll in the whole game, like 3 snake eyes in a row or something ( i remember thinking it probably wasn’t unlikely enough – 1/7000odd would come up a couple of times a month if all you did was roll dice all day – and that the author should have made it a more statistically improbably event) and the player is killed. And our player is shocked and obviously he could just ignore the roll but then all of this vast edifice, his life’s work is totally meaningless, but he was going to give it up any way wasn’t he etc. etc.

Sounds like it might be Paul Auster maybe, you know baseball, chance events, obsession etc. But I can’t place it. I don’t know, any ideas? It’s a cool story obviously, though I might be misremembering it or maybe I dreamed it or someone else told me about it.

Still haven’t got my scanner connected but I’ve got a deadline looming so needed to step up the procrastination by writing something here. This is related to a couple of posts back about reading comics.

close up.

Above is the first page of Acme Novelty Library #18. Our heroine (on the far right of the spread) is experiencing insomnia. If anyone ever asks me what comics can do that novels and films can’t (no one ever does) then I show them (or rather would show them if they’d ever asked) this. It’s at the precise intersection of art, typography and literature and perfectly captures the feeling of spiralling worry that often accompanies bouts of 3AM sleeplessness. Because you can start reading it at any point you’re plunged straight into the circular logic of this kind of worry, it’s not about cause and effect, worry begets further worry and the layout of interlinking circles recapitulates this fucked up state of affairs.

Below is the last page of Acme Novelty Library #18. Whilst it’s layout is more traditional than the audacious opening spread it’s no less formally specific, relying for it’s power on a close reading of the preceding 56 pages and encouraging the viewer to flick back and revisit certain incidents from the main story. Whilst it looks at first glance like a simple chronologically ordered layout each frame or set of frames is from a totally different time period in the heroines life and is decoded by the reader noticing/ referring back to various background cues scattered through the rest of the ‘text’ (most obviously the presence of her lover but also the position of the lamp, clothes she’s wearing, the cat, the view out the window etc.). It’s a typically bleak Ware ending “I am entirely, 100%, horrifyingly alone”, the character gets some sleep but it’s fitful, the similarities with the books beginning are unavoidable and you get the feeling that the dreadful suicidal insomnia of the opening scene is always close. Cheery stuff!

close up.

PS my favourite textual description of insomnia is in Ray Bradbury’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes” (thanks Dan)

I was reminded of this dish that Simon G’s mum made us once by a tweet from @inavaccuum mentioning Mississauga. I’m guessing the name comes from evacuee kids during WW2. It’s kind of a war type meal with ingredients including (presumably cheap) ground beef, ketchup and Heinz spaghetti, the kind of thing you make on scout camp along with corn beef hash and other 1940’s delicacies. The sort of thing I love but not the kind of thing E’s going to eat I think.

• 8 to 12 onions, peeled and chopped in big chunks
• 4 tablespoons oil
• 1 cup ketchup
• Worcestershire sauce to taste
• 1 cup water
• 2 pounds ground beef
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• Salt and pepper to taste
• 2 can (each 28-ounce/796mL) Heinz spaghetti (can re replaced with leftover pasta in tomato sauce-any shape will do)
• 1/2 to 1 pound Cheddar cheese, grated

Preheat oven to 350ºF. In a large, enameled, cast-iron Dutch oven, sauté onion in oil until translucent but not brown. Add ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, and water. Simmer until onions are mushy and mixture is soupy. This is your first layer. While the onions are bubbling away, brown the meat in a frying pan with garlic and seasonings. Drain fat and layer meat on top of onions to make second layer. Cover meat with spaghetti. Cover spaghetti with cheese. Bake for 1 hour. Serve with garlic bread and a crisp green salad. Serves a crowd.

from here

[though let's be honest I'm never going to manage more than one part]

Just read a big long PDF article on Watchmen by Andrew Rilstone that Alex F sent around. I didn’t think there was anything really new in there with regard to Watchmen but it’s a really great synthesis of ideas that have been floating around for a while and has some brilliant insight filled asides, about amongst other things, “silver age” Superman comics.

Supergirl’s blunder is in fact a blunder against the rules of the comic book: ‘Supergirl’s existence is a secret’ is a rule, in the same way that ‘Kryptonite robs Superman of his powers’ or ‘Lois Lane can never discover that Superman is Clark Kent’ are rules. On page 1, we were asked the question: ‘We know that the rules of the comic say that Supergirl must return to the future – but what will cause her to do so?’ The final page replies ‘She returns to the future because she realises that the rules of the comic says she must.’ It’s is a closed system, derived entirely from its own premises.

Anyway, it’s made me do a lot of thinking. As someone who never really read superhero comics as a child (some JLA and some books of the superman film and the Batman TV series but otherwise I went Beano -> Archie -> Oink! -> 2000AD -> ) I kind of get what he’s saying, there are certain levels on which the comic presumably operates which I just totally miss but then I don’t think that’s an issue particularly (though people might disagree).

Andrew Rilstone’s analysis is very definitely from the point of view of someone who has studied English lit. read an awful lot of comics and can put all this into a well written well structured 60 page essay. My reading of Watchmen is from the point of view of someone who’s studied Comp Sci, has read a few comics – more interested in the visual side of things than the stories – and who frankly couldn’t structure 60 pages of critical thought if his life depended on it.

Alan Moore is a writer of comics so why should someone like me who’s basically in it mostly for the pictures be up for buying everything he produces?

For me Watchmen’s strength is in it formal characteristics, the rigid layout and controlled use of variation in the layouts to create pacing is absolutely masterly and the way the story is pieced together as a whole is similarly controlled and meticulous Moore is famously didactic about this aspect of his comic writing, Rilstone gets this but it seems peripheral for him, for me it’s absolutely central to why Watchmen is great, the superhero stuff is a vehicle for Moore’s formal mastery. The keystone in my reading is the Fearful Symmetry chapter in which each page reflects in layout and theme it’s counterpart i.e. first page reflects the last on so on into the middle.

OK, this is getting long now but I may as well carry on seeing as I’ve started: So for me what I love about comics, more than the individual bits of the artwork (Dave Gibbons is a good comic artist and perfect for Watchmen for the following reasons, he’s a typical of the vernacular mid/ late 80’s style, works well with the reproduction technology of the day, superb attention to detail, consistency and just the right level of complexity. A winning combination) … what I love about comics, more than the individual bits of the artwork is the way the whole works are structured, at their best comics are like beautiful architecture (Dan Clowes’ Ice Haven, almost anything by Chris Ware) the details are important but the visual structure and it’s utility are what’s *really* important and it’s and effect that just can’t be achieved in novels (though Alan Moore tried with Voice in the Fire) or in films. This is the property for me which separates enjoyable pulp like Joss Wheddon’s Buffy Season 8 comics from brilliant transcendent pulp like Alan Moore’s Tom Strong stories. I don’t know if I’m explaining myself particularly clearly here will add more to this later …

JAMES TIPTREE, JR. The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon.
By Julie Phillips.

I often find when I finish a book that there’s half a dozen or so pages with the corners turned over for future reference, half of these I can’t figure out what it was precicely that struck me and the others I store away to think about or discuss or mention to someone and then promptly forget about. Instead I’ve decided to note them down here and then forget.

On oppression

Writing as Tiptree, she wrote,

Incredible how top dog always announces with such an air of discovery that the undedog is childish, stupid, emotional, irresponsible, uninterested in serious matters, incapable of learning – but for god’s sake don’t teach him anything! – and both cowardly and ferocious, [...] The oppressed is also treacherous, incapable of fighting fair, full of dark magics, prone to do nasty things like fighting back when attacked, and contented with his place in life unless stirred up by outside agitators. [...] Once I learned the tune I stopped believning the words- about anybody

On the joy of science

At last Alli had clear, conclusive results, [...]. She was overjoyed. [...] She felt she had stood “bare-faced in front of Nature” and asked a it question. And Nature had grumble, stalled, made her rephrase the question , then finally answered yes. It was, she recalled, “the most thrilling moment I have ever had in my whole life.”

On sexism in science / science fiction etc.

Arthur C Clarke, for example, had recently sent a letter to the editor of Time magazine agreeing with astronaut Mike Collins. Collins had told Time that women could never be in the space program, subce in zero G a woman’s breasts would bounce and keep the men from concentrating. Clarke proudly claimed he had already predicted this “problem”. In his novel Rendezvous with Rama he had written “Some women, Commander Norton had decided long ago, should not be allowed aboard ship: weightlessness did things to their breasts that were too damn distracting.” When Joanna Russ tried privately to explain why this was insulting, Clarke, responding publicly in the SWFA newsletter, asked why Commander Norton shouldn’t be attracted to women – didn’t Russ want him to be? He added that though some of his best friends were women, the level of discourse of the “women’s libbers” clearly wasn’t helping their cause.

Amazingly and unfortunately this kind of sexism is still alive and well in the IT world the geek feminism wiki has the details: “But some of my best friends are women!!!!“