Bold As Love

May 13th, strong sun, cool breeze

And so farewell, The Daily Reckoning, my US flavoured Jiminy Cricket peephole on the City Of London. It was fun, even if I never did take you up on any of your surefire tips. Here’s hoping to meet you again in your new guise next week. Here’s a DR thought for today, outlining a scenario familiar to those who followed Bold As Love to the Rainbow Bridge:

“By the time China has the world’s largest economy; it will also have 30 million young men who cannot hope to find a wife. What will they become? Soldiers! Then, China will have the world’s biggest and most modern military…and a keen desire to show the rest of the world how things should be done.

How do you say “we surrender” in Mandarin? We don’t know, but the Pentagon may want to look it up, just in case.”

Jacquetta Hawkes: swinging fifties chick about town, also archaeologist, anthropologist and populariser of the Preshistoric. Married to J.B.Priestley at one time. The woman who found the Tabor Skull, best piece of a Neanderthal yet to be uncovered, and who first noticed that the Minoan civilisation seems to have been run by women, not men. I’ve just been reading her Ancient Monuments of England and Wales, it’s an eye-opener. Dartmoor, Bodmin, okay, but according to this, in the days when human life subsisted on the uplands, above the impossible ocean of the great forests, England and Wales were standing room only. No wonder they were routine cannibals. . . Whitehawk Camp, four thousand year old feasts of human babies, oh that. Everyone in Brighton knows about them. But megalithic tombs in Kent, I never knew that. I bet there’s been much depredation since 1973, but am compiling a list of must see places. Including Creswell Crags, where, spookily, a whole eldritch underground Stone Age city* was well known and thoroughly explored in Hawkes’s day, but the Cave Art was only discovered in 2003. Until which point, our ancestors looked like a prosaic lot. Big cells made of boulders, filled with inedible bits of dead bodies and buried under mounds, that was our main contribution to European Culture.

*Don’t panic, only a little one. Not talking The Rats In The Walls here.

Monday May 12th
fine, warm weather continues. There hasn’t been fine weather like this for Brighton Festival for a long, long time. . .

25th Last month Charlie Stross featured a project by John Scalzi challenging writers to post extracts from their favourite amazon one star stinker reviews. I’m not so sure, thought I. The critical reaction on amazon is honest in bulk, but if you’re working with a small sample (like most of us), any individual response may be suspect. Skullduggery can occur. Your prose style, your science content may not be the real problem. . .

I have screaming amazon one-liners I treasure, and ancient stinkers I remember fondly, far more memorable than praise Lesbian tripe that chokes the reader with jargon : Escape Plans, by my old mucker Brian Stableford, 1986. But what about the long review of The Fulcrum (short story of mine, sf noir spoof) posted on a site called gunsandgangsters? Guns and gangsters is a non-genre gun lobby site, passionately promoting the idea that life in the UK would be much, much safer if there were a whole heap more deadly weapons on our streets and in our hands. I’m happy to say the person didn’t like my story, but why review an sf story at all? There was nothing about guns, for or against, in The Fulcrum.

The reviewer may have sensed that I was poking fun at a certain kind of “post-cyberpunk noir” sf, where hardboiled characters talk out of the side of their mouths and sentient life is held cheap. But that implies a gun lobby sf fan, who has sought out my work on purpose, who may know that I’m definitely against more guns in the real world UK, and even campaign for global small arms control. . . Dear me. Maybe I’m in trouble. A person like that could easily know my address. Spooky! Rest assured, dear readers, I shall be sleeping with my Uzi water pistol under my pillow from now on.

Nothing I can do, needless to say, except be annoyed. But is there a warning here for fans of hardboiled noir sf? Who are convinced they’re sophisticated liberals, unlike those crass Military Industrial Complex dinosaurs who favour Space Opera? Who would not want to be implicated in certain violent views? Not saying anything against anyone’s taste in mindless entertainment, but contrary to wishful fan opinion, being cynical about politics (not exactly hard work, eh?) is not all it takes to make you a good guy. Think on, lads. And ladettes.

On a more cheerful note, against all my expectations, how many times have I seen that team snatch defeat from the jaws of victory?, Manchester United secured the League and Giggs scored the winning goal, which is just what I hoped for. And we have at least one set of back legs in the plasterer’s tub. Picture follows, when I get round to capturing the relevant tad for a photo session.

6th May

weather: same as it was two hours ago.

Well, I’ve resolved some of my problems with the Inland Revenue Self Assessment Online. It transpires that Firefox and the new system do not mix. No use updating, the problem is with Firefox in any shape, guise or form. You have to use Internet Explorer, says the friendly helpdesk, there is currently no alternative.

Firefox worked fine last year, but no more.

I think I’m going to end up sending for a paper return.

Tuesday 6th May warm, sunny

The Sky At Night: Dark Energy, Dark Matter, Axis of Evil (I really think they ought to change that last label. Axis of slightly annoying unexpected results: doesn’t have the same ring I suppose). Something sad about a Sky At Night programme that says nothing about what you might see if you go out, tip your head back and stare (hardly any of Peter’s current students have ever seen the Milky Way, in their entire lives), still it was a good round-up. I’ve come to favour MOND-type explanations myself, ie anything that suggests that local conditions might not prevail everywhere & I wonder, idly muttering epicycles to myself, doesn’t this mess suggest a long ago historical precedent, much further back than 1900. & I fantasise, as a science fiction writer, what could shake loose, what new worlds this time?

A sunny, warm Bank Holiday Monday? There must be some mistake. Still, why not grab the goods while they are going, we can always say it was a misunderstanding if we get collared. Eschewing the delights of the sea front or the traffic jams, we took the bus out to the Universities, walked up the lane and followed tracks and paths up Blackcap, May blossom dog violets, ground ivy very vivid this year, and thence down the scarp to the Half Moon, a pub of fond memories. Reports said it has been refurbished so we approached with trepidation, but the yellow half moon sign with that improbably batoid creature (sort of flying fox with the head of a chicken) appears intact, the white otter still snarls and and the Barn Owl quietly lurks in its corner above the shadowy oaken interior. What’s changed? Maybe the floors, maybe it’s been opened out a bit. We’re not exactly regulars. Good beer, lot of customers, not so great food.

Wildlife at close quarters: one yellowhammer in a thorn bush, fine russet bird with that startling yellow head, one young thrush yelling rather unmelodiously in a beech tree, one affectionate acid yellow spider, lot of peacock butterflies. The constant shower of birdsong, the quietly hazing blue sky of afternoon. The walk down through Stanmer woods was very fine, quiet and fresh, bluebelled enough for them to scent the air, and no sign of Spanish interlopers.

Oak and ash review. The oak has it. So we’ll only have a splash, which is what the Met is promising (heheh, for where I’ll be, anyway). Caveat: I tried to track down the rationale for that rhyme once. Got absolutely nowhere.

The swifts are back. A squadron of them came screaming between the houses right over my head about six on Saturday evening. I love the way they arrive.

Friday 2nd May

Cool, sunny.

Reprieve from global warming? A decade of good old English summers and snowy winters? Excellent. Due to unprecedented masses of cold water entering North Atlantic. Hm, not sure if I like the sound of that. . . But it won’t come to anything. I truly believe that none of the high impact low probability scenarios will come to anything. Life (in the forseeable future) will just get more uncomfortable for the poor, and any other non-humans.

Not so much distress for the human poor, however, as they will all have starved to death so the human rich can carry on driving two cars each.

Went to see Persepolis last night at the Duke’s, alone as for Juno. This time I win, it was brilliant.
Now, imagine a world where I was the one trying to coax my compadres into coming to see esoteric treats like There Will Be Blood, (Please, you’ll get something out of it, it’s not just obscure nutty oilbaron machismo, got a Johnny Greenwood score. . .); or No Country For Old Men, (c’mon, be loyal, the Coens have done movies you really liked. . .) and movies like Persepolis were blockbusters. Doesn’t make sense, of course, the term blockbuster has certain connotations, but just imagine…

More homepage links:

La Cenerentola has been posted on my site for a long time, but you may not know there is now an excellent audio version, over at starship sofa:

Burning of the tax docs, rather disappointing. I vowed I would start destroying my papers, gravegoods, because now I know what happens to all that detritus in the end; and begin with the old bus tickets etc one is supposed to keep for the taxman, but only for a few years, whereas mine were going back to 1984. It turned out that one of the tin trunks was full of Gabriel’s stuff, and about half the other pure memorabilia, destruction of which Peter vetoes. Still, it was melancholy fun. My smoke rose up forever, ashy fragments of my transactions with publishers, schools, agents, sf conventions, creative writing groups, drifting on the spring breeze.

1st May, cold weather, sun and cloud and rain

Reloaded: The renovated homepage is finally up, and I’m the possessor of a highly unexpected Pilgrim. Awarded by the august Science Fiction Research Association, highest honour they can bestow. Good heavens. I had no idea I was a renowned sf critic, none at all. And to celebrate, here’s some links to the relevant topic:

String of Pearls

Sex and horror, perfect playmates or evil twins? Is this a genuine m/f divide? Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel

Wild Hearts In Uniform

Secrets of the Pause: What did military sf do, in that brief hiatus when the USA was scratching around for a new external enemy? The answer may surprise you.

And one more short story:

In The Forest Of The Queen

An Adventure: From this terrible battleground to a future where life is sweet.

Watched The Battle For Chernobyl last night. My God. Enough to make you think there IS a God, Who for some reason best known to perself wants us to survive, and actually intervened, twenty two years ago. God and a few thousand doomed comrades who were judiciously prevented from finding out the extent of their own heroism. . . Could only have happened in the Soviet empire? Where the people were consistently lied to, corruption was rife at all levels and all safety measures were routinely ignored?

Give me a break. We live there.

Should be required viewing for all those happy people who think swapping fossil fuels for plutonium is a really sensible idea.

25th April

sun and rain

I’m sorry I complained when LoveFilm sent me Fear Eats The Soul instead of a Hollywood movie. I really liked it, and all the more because I felt I was seeing Fassbinder himself, through the mask of the middle-aged cleaning lady Emmi, innocently, courageously wide open to falling in love with a beautiful Morrocan guy, who is luckily equally accepting. And these two innocents come to grief, of course they do, in a morass of neighbourly spite. Oh, I felt for them. And the stillness, the emptiness of each scene, very arresting. (I have one complaint. Brigitte Mira’s fingernails. Her character is supposed to scrub floors ever day. She might have well-tended hands, with dedication: not those dainty, filed to a point and subtly polished nails. I suppose it means beauty and sensualitn within, or something, but it isn’t feasible.)

I remember that cool people loved Fassbinder movies, long ago when they were made. This may be hip but life is too short, was my feeling. Well, I was wrong. Found a thoughtful essay on line about the movie too. Worth reading, if you have ever seen it or mean to.

I do quite a bit of repenting, you should try it, it’s good for you. Not in excess, of course.

Wednesday 23rd April

warm grey sky, full of sun and rain

Finished cleaning out my homepage. A new version will be up soon, no loss of weight visible, all the sludge had sunk. More developments to follow, maybe. Some people are trying to convince me to join the 21st century. Shame, I’m fond of my rare, living fossil techniques, I feel the pre-cambrian of web publishing has its own charm. But I may be overruled.

Reading New Scientist on capitalism’s answer: If Greenwash approximates to the fervent growth of Victorian Christianity (with about the same relation to the actual problem) then Carbon Trading is equal to those huge, ornate urban churches of nineteenth century Europe, planted cheek by jowl with the horrific squalor of the slums, frequented by smug crowds of the well-heeled, chasing the best sermon-givers and feeling good about themselves. Repulsive business. Don’t Carbon trade.

Augh, the nematodes #2 have arrived. Now somebody will have to water the garden with them.

Monday 21st April

a little rain (not enough), sun breaking through, warm

To Patching Woods yesterday, bluebell worshipping. A week earlier than last year by calendar date, and more than a week earlier for the beeches, hardly showing leaf at all. The flowers, deeper in colour, not such full seas, green sunlit, as when they are full blown, but still incredibly beautiful under the naked trees, and the earlier trip means the wood anemones are still at their peak, white starry drifts along the blue ocean, and the primroses, in great abundance this year. Oak vs ash? Not clear, but I know what’s going to happen come July, without the assistance of folklore. We’re going to pack up the car, drive to la belle france, and get very, very wet. Also penniless. And to think, only in January I was arguing with my brother, insisting on the strength of the pound and the great wisdom of staying out of the euro. I was being contrary, it had been a long drive…

Walked around every path we could think of, unwilling to leave. Stopped for a pint at the Hammerpot on the way back, and the talk at the bar was all about the bluebells. They’re a wonder of the world.

Spring rituals, spring cleaning. What about that household TO DO list? We were so active this time last year. . . Optimism & energy will now commence. Think healthy breakdown, healthy renewal.

18th April, Friday

Cold and grey, cats indoors, finally convinced that if it’s cold, grey and windy out the back of the house, it will be same conditions whichever door they try.

Here I was, ready and willing, figures all gathered, ready to while away the fag-end of a Friday afternoon filing my tax return, but I can’t. Can’t get past the bugs on UKIRS. Hope they get fixed soon.

Love film, not in my good books either. I did not prioritise Fear Eats The Soul. I prioritised Michael Clayton. Can’t I be omniverous? Oh, and here’s Ginger, her best photo (or will be when I fix the redeye).