... by bryan talbot, which my son (11) and i have been greatly enjoying, along with the follow-up, grandville mon amour, steampunk detective graphic novels set in a parallel version of history in which france has invaded and subjugated britain and guillotined the royal family and recently granted the country independence. london and paris are inhabited anthropomorphic animals of various species (humans appear infrequently in a few subordinate roles as fetchers and carriers) and the muscular badger inspector lebrock is called upon to investigate and solve dastardly crimes often resorting to somewhat excessive level of violence which, sadly, appeals greatly to my son. sly literary references abound which also appeal to me. not that i'm averse to a bit of blood, too...
This blog is in a state of suspended animation
I am much more active on twitter (@mark_haddon) and on instagram (@mjphaddon)
(stephen batchelor is the tiny-fonted author of buddhism without beliefs) all rather wonderful in their own ridiculously diverse way (even the campiness of the agatha christie). the only thing that left a slightly sour taste in my mouth - and it's not easy to say this given the terrible manner of tony judt's death and the extraordinary mental strength it took to write the memoir (composed in his mind at night while he lay sleepless and paralysed by lou gehrig's disease, then dictated to an assistant in the morning) - was the strain of old world misogyny running through the book, not just in his discussion of student / tutor sexual relations, but in his dismissive references to his unnamed wives (e.g. taking advantge of the lengthy - and increasingly welcome - absence of wife no. 2). i guess it's hard to be a towering public intellectual - or indeed a towering public anything - without some deficits elsewhere.
i've only been a couple of times and slightly dread it, largely because we've been going on holiday near hay-on-wye since before the festival began so, despite all the manifest economic benefits to the town, it always feel slightly invaded during the festival week. in the event it was wonderful. i had a large and enthusiastic audience for my event (incouding my 11 year-old son), a great interviewer (rosie goldsmith), a very warm atmosphere and such a long queue for signed copies of the red house that they ran out of copies and i wasn't able to buy one to give to someone as a gift, which is one of life's more uplifting problems. the green room was good, too (i have never enjoyed dispersed festivals like oxford or cheltenham with no centre of gravity and therefore no place for authors to socialise). it was a joy to meet nathan englander, andy stanton, hardeep singh kohli, lemn sissay and kay redfield jamison (a hero). it was less enjoyable watching her being 'interviewed' by stephen fry who, despite being funny and a good thing in various ways, is in increasing need of an off button. best of all was staying here, the location of which is going to remain a profound secret...
never, i think has the sheer sullen tedium of the life of the 15 year-old smalltown metallica fan been captured this well. this is rather beautiful. and daniel's friend ky is glorious...
[disclosure: we share an editor - dan franklin - who is a man of taste and discernment]
this 15 min looping film (and the large circular banquette-style seating from which you are encouraged to view it) is the centrepiece of an exhibition by shezad dawood at modern art oxford (which also contains paintings and light sculpture). it's very enjoyable (my two sons - 8 and 11 - watched it all the way through, which i wasn't expecting). i also found it fascinating, though not perhaps for the intended reasons.
the film is edited down from a full-length feature, piercing brightness, dawood's lo-tech science fiction film set in preston city centre which deals as much with the city's different faith-groups as with anything alien or otherwordly. and not just edited down but chopped up and re-ordered in a non-narrative way. the soundtrack has been pretty much removed and replaced by music.
the question for me was a version of that old chesnut: to what extent is an artwork created by it's being situated in a gallery and called an artwork? (almost entirely in some cases, but that's a subject for another longer day). in this instance i kept asking myself whether the experience of the film could have been replicated by taking any low budget film, chopping it up and re-ordering it and adding the right soundtrack. i suspect that the answer is a qualified 'yes'. would anyone watch the whole of a feature film during a gallery's normal opening hours? very few. was the original feature film any good? it's impossible to tell. if the original feature wasn't a terribly good film but the edited version is good then we are looking at the work of a film editor and, outside the smaller oscars, when did we last salute the work of a film editor? come to think of it, did dawood do the editing himself...?
a related matter: the soundtrack is fantastic. lots of layered mogwai-eque drones (i'm a sucker for mogwai-esque drones). and i thought it delivered a good proportion of the emotional experience. it's by makato kawabata / acid mothers temple (of whom i hadn't heard). they may be mentioned in the credits but the credits pass by so quickly that no-one is going to know. nor are they mentioned in the accompanying literature (unless, perhaps, you buy the monograph). indeed, to be scrupulously accurate, despite some concerted googling i can't be wholly sure that they did create the soundtrack, only that they created the soundtrack for the original feature. i think the shorter film is, in truth, a collaboration and i think it's dishonest that the identity of one of the collaborators has been quietly wiped form the record.
after watching the film i kept thinking, unfairly perhaps, about christian marclay's video masterpiece the clock of which i saw a part at the hayward gallery last year (the whole thing is 24 hrs long): another work created from imported and re-ordered slices of other films; thousands of clips in various languages in all of which there is a clock telling the real time in which you are watching the video (if that doesn't make sense watch this youtube clip - but you have to watch it starting at 12:04 pm).
googling marclay / clock while writing the above i see it has been co-purchased by the tate, which i didn't know. the idea of it being in the turbine hall at some point makes me very happy...
just back from another wonderful week teaching creative writing with william fiennes for the arvon fouindation at totleigh barton (during which the red house happily entered the world under its own steam). at the risk of saying this for the 652th time, it is a fine institution doing a fine thing with fine people.
http://www.arvonfoundation.org/
but it is also very hard work and it is fantastic to come home and be able to draw / paint without having to think about any words whatsoever.
in the immortal words of mr rolf harris...
... from the top of the galata tower.
... by david eagleman (he of the wonderful and sui generis book of short stories, sum, about 40 different versions of the afterlife).
this is really good stuff, mostly. the greater part of it is an exploration of how much of our seemingly conscious experience is carried out by zombie routines over which we have no control, to which we have no access and of which we have very little knowledge and how this enables to live such sophisticated lives. anyone who reads a bit of contemporary popular neuroscience every so often will be unsurprised by this since this is the direction in which the subject has been moving for a long while, the role of the conscious, self-aware part of the mind (I’ll come to what eagleman might or might not mean by that in another post) being slowly reduced in depth, range and importance. eagleman suggests that the process parallels the copernican revolution in which we lost our places at the centre of the universe but, despite initial widespread reluctance to embrace such a frightening state of affairs, we consequently discovered ourselves to be inhabitants a universe of staggering beauty and complexity.
the new idea which eagleman adds to this picture (my reading in the area is not rigorous enough to know precisely how new) is that the brain is a team of competitors, or a parliament of opposition parties, whose efficiency depends precisely upon the doubling up of tasks. partly because it works better (just as a democratic state works better than a one-party state). this seems to me a genuinely exciting concept which has the shock of one of those truths which are retrospectively obvious. it has, I think, precedents in the area of robotics: I recall many years ago a friend working in ai saying that the problem of how to make the 6 legs of a mechanical ant work successfully together had been solved only when researchers gave up trying to run the creature by means of algorithmic central planning and instead arranged to have each egg leg operated by a simple and entirely separate program of its own.
eagleman is less convincing when he moves into the area of the law (he is a research fellow in the institute for ethics and emerging technologies – i just checked this on his own website where he announces that he was also named one of houston’s most stylish men in 2011; make of that what you will). he is right, I think, to say that modern neuroscience is undermining traditional ideas of criminal responsibility. as we discover more and more physiological and environmental factors which exert strong and sometimes overpowering influences on behaviour it becomes increasingly less logical, and increasingly unjust, to think of most people as having access to the same freedom of choice and equally responsibility for making bad choices.
the answer, he suggest, is to sidestep the thorny question of blame altogether and move towards a model of justice in which punishment is tailored much more specifically towards enhancing the possibility of rehabilitation and lowering the risk of re-offending. it seems like a noble ideal and it might work in a white-box, thought-experiment society where all variables can be carefully controlled. but this is America (perhaps I should say that is America) and quotes like, our social policies work to cement into place the most enlightened ideas of humanity to surmount the basest facets of human nature, seem staggeringly naïve, even without the Tayvon Martin case as a reminder of the context in which he is writing. and when he slips into the persona of the-man-who-has-been-asked-to-run-the-world the effect is chilling: for the smooth running of society, we will still remove from the streets those criminals who prove themselves to be over-aggressive, under-empathetic, and poor at controlling their impulses. the american justice system has many substantial shortcoming – racism, the death penalty, legal inconsistency between states, police brutality, guantanamo, the almost complete absence of rehabilitation programmes, political appointeeism, profit-driven private sector prisons… - beside which philosophical tinkering with ideas of criminal responsibility seems like very small beer indeed and ivory tower philsophical politics seem laughable.
a footnote: i first bought this book as an ebook on the kindle (see the kindle post below). it was an embarrassingly shoddy piece of publishing. i stopped halfway through and bought the hardback instead. it was properly proofread, you could actually see the illsutrations and it was clear whether you were reading the main body of the text, a footnote or an annotation to an illustration.
dolphins alongside the ferry to kadikoy / cups of hot salep with cinnamon sprinkled on top, made, it transpires, from the tubers of wild orchids, whose subsequent decline has led to the banning of their export, so that drinking it is like a very mild version of eating panda burgers / the perfect stillness and proportionof the library of ahmed lll in the topkapi palace / in the archaeological museum, the most beautiful tiny clay tablets covered in hittite cuneiform inscriptions and slipped inside slightly larger clay envelopes also covered in cuneiorm script / the vertiginous panoramic view at the top of the galata tower from which, in the early seventeenth century the ottoman traveller evilya celebi flew across the bosphorus on artificial wings / the grand bazaar for all the obvious reasons / drinking tea beside the bosphorous, watching monumental container ships (one of them carrying several hundred farm tractors) en route from lord alone knows where to lord alone knows where / the way the calls to prayer compete and overlap / the street dogs / the smell of thyme / storks / parakeets...
... in the emerald city, by rajiv chandrasekaran, who is currently national editor of the washington post. not the essiest read but important and quite astonishing in parts. it's the story of the american occupation of iraq told from the point of view of the green zone, the highly guarded enclave in baghdad from which the whole operation was run. anyone who read the newspapers at the time knows, to some extent, but perhaps not the whole extent, that the project was hobbled by abysmal planning, ignorance, hubris and a wilful refusal to involve the iraqis themselves, all of which resulted in the most godawful and tragic mess. what i had not fully realised was that much of this resulted from an over-ridng belief in neo-conservative political and economic ideology. it was believed by pretty much everyone involved in running the coalition provisional authority that an externally imposed free-market system would save the country, a system which was culturally alien, which had not worked terribly well in the poorer parts of america, which ran contrary to the hague convention (which forbids occupying powers from disobeying local laws except when it is necessary to preserve public order and safety), which was never going to work in a place so obviously toxic for foreign investors and which was, quite often, dangerous (you fire a hundred inefficient workers from a factory and you have created a hundred poor and angry people). and the reason most people in the cpa believed in this ideology was that, with very few exceptions, staff were chosen not account of their local or technical expertise but on account of their republican party allegiance (the few beleagured democrats involved styled themselves the donkeys in the desert). consequently the occupation was run by a small handful of genuine experts, a rump of people who simply toed the party line and some cowboys who filled the gaps. the question, you realise, by the end of the book, is not whether it was a good idea to topple saddam hussein, but whether it was a good idea to try and turn iraq into america, which took a few hundred years in american itself. as a poster in the british section read, Yee-haw is not a foreign policy.