annafdd

Yeah, yeah, some people read 20 books this month. I read the equivalent of several novels in internet flaming, does that count? Thought not. And there are, of course, the many, many "currently reading" tomes.

1. Flat Earth News, Nick Davis
This has moments of absolute, absorbing brilliance, and a lot of stuff that, frankly, is a lot more interesting for a professional journalist than a reader. The whole chapter on how lack of resources has forced journalism into recycling pre-prepared press releases, for example, is vitally important but I got the point after a few pages and moved on. The chapters on the "black arts" are also far less relevant than the ones about pre-cooked news fed by intelligence agencies, and takes forever to tell.

All the same, it is a book I won't forget in a hurry. The chapter on the Daily Mail alone is worth the price of admission, and the first few chapters outline in devastating, depressing detail what's wrong with journalism today, and how much of an impact it has on the concept of democracy itself.

Not something we didn't know, obviously, but rather more in depth that I had ever read.

Definitely recommended.

2. The Character of Cats, Stepehn Budiansky

Slim volume I found while clearing up cables behind the TV and read in a few hours. I think I had already read it at one point, but it still taught me a couple of new things about cats, for example the fact that they do, experimentally, show vastly different personalities. Most of the other things it says I knew already (hey, I've had cats and read about cats all my life) but a refresher course never hurts. It drums the evolutionary rationale of every single bit of information into you at length, band it gets tiring after a while, but still a fun read all the same.

I have more or less given up on reading fiction, and I am fairly sad about it. I remember when it was the main pleasure of my life. What can I say? My attention span is what it is.

A couple of days ago I finally caught up with one of the movies I wanted to see but was too knackered to actually go out for, Rendition. I was ambivalent about it because most of the critiques had said "worthy but predictable", and I wasn't really all too keen to go through two hours of impending torture for a message I already believed in.

However, there's Jake Gyllenhall in it, and I have spent a long time researching torture, and so I thought, why not?

I was really surprised. it is not one of my top ten favourite movies, and yes, it is a little too predictable to be stunning - but it has plenty of other stuff going to it. I'll try to explain without spoilering.

For example, what the critics have neglected to mention is how gloriously beautiful it is - there is one shot on a landing strip that just left me gaping. And despite the fact that they did acknowledge how good the acting was, they didn't adequately stress how Gyllenhal manages to convey with harrowing subtlety the unraveling of the young, eager, motivated CIA agent who has to supervise the torture, to the point that it is almost more painful to watch him than the unfortunate chemical engineer caught up in the rendition. Nor did they tell of Meryl Streep icy, fierce ruthlessness.

But my chief source of surprise and amazement is that this film gives voice to the Other. Literally. No, wait - what I mean is, about half of this move is not about white Americans.

There is one plot strand that gives the movie its title, and it is pretty obviously lifted from the story of Maher Arar. Then there is the other plot line, and this is about the Egyptian chief of police's daughter, Fatima, who is refusing to consent to marry the husband her father has chose and has decamped to her spinster (and apparently very happily so) aunt.

Fatima has a growing fondness for a boy she has met at school, and when her aunt goes away for a work trip, she moves in with him, leaving her family in frantic despair.

Her father is a gruff man, with occasional bursts of anger, but he also very clearly loved by his family, including Fatima. And he is obviously in agony about the rift with his daughter, which he is too proud to repair.

This is the story I don't want to spoil, so I won't say more, but this story takes up about half the movie, and is completely narrated in Arabic, with subtitles. One of the wonderful thing in this movie, in fact, is the language. The Egyptian characters speak a wonderful, sweet language, and only when we hear it turn harsh during a political demonstration we realize that we mostly get to hear Arabic spoken in anger. My parents (and a large part of their generation), who lived through World War II and personally heard a lot of German spoken, have been left with the unshakable idea that German is a language of barked orders and totalitarian speeches. The generation before them, though, thought of German as the language of Mozart and Goethe, and simply could not believe that is could express evil.

The Arabic we hear spoken in this movie is the language of real people, with complex lives, real emotions that are far more subtle than the simple storyline would lead one to believe.

And when the Egyptian characters speak in English, they do so with the unmistakable accent of the well-educated third-world elite: maybe English ears are more attuned to reacting to such subtle cues, but it is obvious in listening to those cultured tones that these are not thugs, these are not simple people in a simple story: these are educated people who are far more aware about the larger picture than any of the American characters (including the poor engineer) are.

The Egyptian storyline is shot in an Arabic setting (Marrakesh - one could argue that it is an act of cavalier insensitivity to pass Morocco for Egypt, but one understands why Morocco was pretty much the only country in North Africa where such a movie could have been shot), which is the familiar landscape of exotic location shot and yet totally different. It's the same place where Indiana Jones snaps his whip and Jason Bourne rides through, only this time it is not an exotic locale. It is the characters' home and we see it though their eyes, and it appears as totally different. Marrakesh is, of course, a place of wonder and beauty, and I doubt Cairo is as magical, but still, there is something touching in the stunning beauty that is revealed in the interior of Khalid, Fatima's boyfriend, house when we go from seeing it from the outside, as a square block in a poor quarter. Khalid shares the house with his grandmother (we will only see her in one of the last, most moving scenes), and the grandmother's room is a poor woman's room done in stunning shades of blue and turquoise. It's a small thing but it gives back to the Other its dignity, its creativity, the homeliness of its homes.

There are moments in Fatima and Khalid's love story that I found a touch sentimental (I so wish the wet sucking noises of kisses were not included in a soundtrack - they are truly icky to an external observer), but they can't stop me feeling awfully impressed by the fact that is the first American movie that I remember seeing which manages to show a different culture from within, as if it has equal dignity and equal complexity (if not more). This is the first time I remember seeing the Other told through its eyes and not, as for example happened notoriously in The Last Samurai, through the necessary point of view of a Western character.

In short, I was dead impressed by this movie. It is not easy viewing, it is not cheerful, and sometimes it is almost impossible to watch - but it is more than worthy, it is honest to the marrow of its bones.

Even in the more conventional storyline, there is far more subtlety and the answers are far less easy, the judgment far less cutting, than one could anticipate.

But I am really really tired, so it will be a sort of bullet-points review

"Everything bad is good for you" - by Steven Johnson

Interesting book - it argues that, far from dumbing us down collectively, popular culture (games, TV drama, even reality TV) has become more complex, more challenging, and is probably responsible for what he calls the "Flynn" effect, that is the raising of the average in IQ across all demographics.

It really deserves to be read - the graphic illustration of the increasing complexity from Dragnet to Starsky&Hutch to Hill Street Blues to The Sopranos is worth the price of the book alone. Hey, anybody who goes on for so long about HSB and how revolutionary it is deserved to sell books.

Some of its arguments are - yes, playing online games is not like reading books, but this means that they two activities cannot really be compared: the cognitive stimulation of computer games is not in the plot or in the characterisation but in how it forces the player to be inventive in probing the game structure, and exercise and build up their problem-solving skills.

Fruition of popular content has gone from "lowest common denominator" being the winning selling strategy (ie when tv series were aired at one fixed slot and there were no repeats, on demands on vcr) to "depths of layers and addicted albeit smaller audiences" being the winning profit-making model - because content is repeatable, and you sell DVDs that people are induced to buy if the series withstands repeated viewings.

All very interesting and I highly reccomend it, with only two minor whines:

a. It's a slim book, and there is a lot of repetition. One thing probably has to do with the other. Especially at the beginning (before I started giving myself permission to skip) I found myself muttering, yes, yes, this is the THIRD TIME you're telling me this, what do you think I am, stupid? On the up side, it's a really easy and engaging read.

b. The thought kept going through my head: ok, if Americans are all getting collectively so much smarter, how come they keep voting for what is, to the eyes of any person with an ounce of brainpower, a brain-damaged control-freak incompetent?

I think the review on Pandagon of this book points out that there is very little discussion of how this raising of the IQ plays across class divisions; that might be a factor (not many X-box and cable subscriptions in the sticks, I suppose). Another might be that highly conservative demographics are not much in the markets either for World of Warcraft of the Sopranos, and indeed part of the homeschooling movement is aimed a preventing the "corrupting" influence of popular culture to reach the blessed minds of the little innocent dumb fucks.

Or maybe it's just a very fascinating theory that happens to be wrong.

Finished "The Black Man", was blown away. Now I will read it properly, like, line by line, since I tore through it in a mad rush and skipped a lot.

Of course I forget now where all those thoughtful reviews that I mentally bookmarked were. Why don't you read books when they come out, Anna?

I do remember vaguely one reviewer (Edited to add: This one saying that this is a book about alpha male violence, and knows it, and explores it knowingly and in depth, and the question remains, does this self-awareness raises the book above the status of violence porn or not?

I am thinking about it. I think I need to re-read the book better before I pronounce myself, because I don't think I read anything specifically addressing the unclean fascination with violence that all of Morgan's book share. (I am not saying "unclean" as if it's a bad thing). Being into BDSM, I don't find attraction to violence strange, and I stopped being apologetic about it. This doesn't mean that I don't consider it problematic: just not in the sense of being _wrong_ in itself.

Even if Morgan's books were simply violence porn, I would be inclined to say, "you say that as if it's a bad thing". Violence unleashes powerful emotions, just like danger and suspense, and nobody blames Scorsese for his unclean fascination with suspense (although I think Hitchcock did get a bit of flak in his time).

There's a wonderful bit in The Excession that summarizes in one powerful monologue the whole question. One ship, a Culture ROU (a warship, in other words) finds itself suddenly reflecting on the pride and joy it feels in being a warship. It's deeply convinced of the Culture ethos and therefore abhor violence, but it's also a weapon of the Culture, and the more it tries to excuse and justify away its love of action, the more its guilt grows, until it ends up killing itself.

The fact is... this is no suicide. There is another ship, shadowing the first, a renegade ship who is used to manipulating minds, something the Culture itself finds so repulsive that it barely tolerates the ship. The renegade ship is still, thought, a Culture ship through and through.

So, the Culture recognizes that violence is necessary, but can't resolve the contradiction between needing it and hating it, loving it despising it, and despising itself because it loves it. But it takes an external observer to bring this contradiction to its destructive ultimate end.

Morgan's protagonists have very little qualms about violence. They may be sickened by it but they don't find it morally wrong in itself, and they certainly don't find it disgusting: the reason they find it sickening is that even when they are called "sociopaths", they are all actually perfectly able to feel empathy. The books themselves though... sometimes they are a bit like that ROU. They look at themselves in fascinated horror.

As I said, there is plenty here that I have only skimmed and want to go back and re-read and re-think. Frankly, I did not expect this book to be so rich in interesting stuff - I was expecting a guilty pleasure read, mostly.

(BTW, this book drips testosterone. I mean, I put it down and I was basically compelled to do a whole lot of DIY jobs around the house I had put off for months. I mean, I found myself identifying circuits. Coincidence?)

One of the curious things I've just noticed about Morgan's books is the apparent total lack of homoerotic content. I can't think of any character, even peripheral, in Morgan's books, who was gay. None. There are examples of apparent total homoblindness - for example, towards the beginning of the book the co-protagonist, a female NY ex-cop, wakes up on the sofa in her apartment after having thrown a party and having got herself totally drunk. When she goes into her bedroom she finds a naked shapely young lady sleeping there. Now, even a confirmed total het like me in such a circumstance would think: oh hey, did we do the deed? But this protagonist doesn't even consider it for a moment. She's hang over and can't even remember what she's supposed to do that day, but her assumption is that the woman is somebody else's date that got dumped at the party. This despite the fact that when she asks the woman "Who told you you could sleep here?" the answer is "You did."

This is not bigotry or homophobia, I think. It just seems like the subject just doesn't emerge ever in the author's consciousness. Very strange.

On the other hand, I just finally saw "The Departed", which I liked but didn't blow me away, probably because I had heard too much praise heaped upon it. Maybe it's the disconnect between seeing Matt Damon (whom I adore) playing such a creep in this film after seeing him play such a straight-up, uncomplicated, flat-out good guy in the various Bournes (anybody up for seeing the one in the theater btw? I keep wanting to go and failing). Maybe it's too much Nicholson. I got bored with Nicholson playing Nicholson several years ago. I actually walked out of - what was that movie called? Things change? - because I had suddenly had enough of Nicholson. But whenever Di Caprio and Whalberg were on the screen I was totally captivated. Well, Damon too of course, apart from the disconnect I mentioned.

Also, my parents spoiled the film for me long before I saw it (DAMMIT) and therefore several times I found it terribly uncomfortable to watch it, because I thought I knew where it was going.

I am not as thrilled by Chabon as I should be. This is the first book of his that I manage to finish, and despite it being little more than a novella, I struggled. I found it awfully overwritten, slight and unsatisfying. I also did not get the resolution at all.

Yes, yes, description is a fine art, but there is a point when it becomes stifling. Yes, yes, homage to Conan Doyle, but I have to say that Conan Doyle is a lot more entertaining.

I'm still wanting to get around to read Kavalier and Klay one day. When it will come out of its box.

I just finished Jo Walton's Farthing after having spent three days waiting eagerly for the tube commute so that I would get time to read. It's been far too long since I have been so thoroughly sucked into a book, and as I finished it (stealing precious time from my sleep, which I deserve after an 11 hours uninterrupted workday) I was reminded of what intense, satisfying pleasure reading was for me. Why don't I get the same rush from most books? I used to. Maybe my standards are higher now, or maybe something in my mind became more restless, I don't know.

However it goes, it is a wonderful book. I have to be honest now - I never managed to get into The King's Peace. Something about it made me bounce off, maybe the narrator, I don't know. Or maybe Jo just became better and better with time. I can say that I loved both Tooth and Claw and Farthing immensely, and can't wait for the next Jo Walton book to come out (you hear me, Tor?). They now go on the buy-on-publication-in-hardcover-at-whatever-price list, moving there from buy-cos-it's-a-friend list. Well ok, that happened with Tooth and Claw.

When I started Farthing I thought that as much as I liked it, I was just a little disappointed that Jo had written another "book in the voice of". I no longer am. I couldn't tell with TAC, but Farthing is both homage and satire of the the English classical mystery, and it uses its conventions brilliantly, mirroring in its gentle mocking of them the genteel resistance of the characters to the snobbishness and substantial class problems of the society they sprung from.

I stopped reading Agatha Christie when I read the novel where the culprit is the adoptive child, but where it is stated outright that the victim was asking for it, what adopting all those children who are god knows whose sons. This books vindicates me.

The weird combination of first person and close third person, which I found uneasy at first, reflects very cleverly and effectively the different personalities and voices of the narrators, the candid, frank, open voice of an English girl we at first took for a bit of a babe, so bubbly and happy that we don't realize her strength and intelligence for a long while, and the reserved, guarded, detached view of the police inspector, who has his own reasons not to let his guard down.

In a way, it's not an easy book to read, especially in these days. I mean, it's supremely easy, but leaves you with a deep sadness, a sense of impotence and anger.

(Yesterday I had a wonderful brief chat with my landlady, who I liked already but whom I found to be a nice, progressive, resolutely down-to-earth no-nonsense Old Labour lady. I was for some reason immensely glad. Maybe in these days of legalizing torture and privatizing health we need all the fellow feeling we can get).