Are there drugs here I don't know about?

I really hope my summer plans work out, since I seem to mostly have put my one big egg in my one really tiny basket. I checked the materials I mailed overseas, since I registered them, and found:

Your item left the United States from ISC NEW YORK NY(USPS) at 7:29 am on November 13, 2010.

Which I thought was kinda cute. My item has left the country! Safe travels, item!

So I was annoyingly sick for 8 days mid-November. I never get sick, and wow, does that suck. It's ok for a couple days because you can catch up on movies and you don't feel too bad about just lying there not moving. But by the time the second weekend approaches, it's like, um, ok, I've got shit to work on, you know? And then bam, one morning you wake up better. So that was nice to FINALLY get over. And no, mom, it was not Cape Town Plague. ;)

I didn't get to see anything too terribly awesome. First I watched Date Night because I knew it was supposed to be mediocre, but I figured it had to be good for some laughs. Plus, Tina Fey, good times, why not?



Oh sigh. So did you know? you can't just put 2 people in a movie, say, "Go!" and hope for the funny. No. You cannot. Because someone DID that here, and hey whoa, it did not work. I would have turned it off halfway through but I think the remote was just out of reach. It wasn't wretched, just such a colossal waste of time and talent.

Then I moved on to 9 1/2 Weeks, which I had somehow never managed to see before. It certainly holds up fairly well, considering how 1986 it is.



It's not the jaw-droppingly steamy number I'm sure it was in 1986, but it still has its moments. Good bonus points for the obvious fun that someone had coming up with food sex scenes and playing with the lighting. I also though the psychological aspect of the film worked pretty well and was really interesting. So that was surprisingly entertaining...



Hee hee, couldn't help it, sorry.

After that it was just some TV, some Californication, Being Human and Paradise Kiss.

And now hopefully I won't get sick again for another fifteen years! Kthxbai.

Sir, you sound like the mall Santas when they come back from lunch.

As so often happens, this is old and just never published...

It can't be that bad of an evening. First of all, I had a really, really great time seeing Sara Bareilles last night. I was stunned how packed the place was, though. Apparently it sold out months ago, and what's even stranger? House of Blues is about 4x bigger than the Dallas location. Not that Bareilles isn't worth it, I just didn't think she had that big of a fanbase! When I got there, I was instantly reminded of the Katy Perry show I saw in Dallas. Crazy.

The last time I saw SB was the night before I flew out to upstate NY to hit Cornell with Veloute. I went to each of those shows by myself and each was really incredible. I was especially happy to hear an uber-jazzed up "Bottle It Up," which was the first song of hers I heard that made me wonder who was singing...

...and that was my old post.

Back to today!

It's the day before Thanksgiving, and I need to knock out a bunch of work on my corporate complicity paper, study some evidence and really study some agency law. And I also got a new case for (mock) trial starting in December. Double homicide, anyone? Woot.

I still need to see the new Potter, however much it may suck. Far more likely, however, are the odds of seeing a completely different flick. Well, so this new movie came out today and it's probably really wretched, but it has Anne Hathaway. And I kinda have a big huge weak spot for Anne Hathaway. It has Jake Gyllenhaal, too, but I'll be watching it for the lady. ;) I can't even be bothered to drop names; for one thing, it took me like a month to remember what it was called, it was so forgettable.

27 days til Texas, that's all that matters! And however much it will suck to come back, I do at least have a happy little ticket waiting for me on the fridge for the second week of January...

Into The Nahanni

I'm still in the midst of writing Heaven & Hell, and I'm already thinking of future books. The third book I have in mind will start close to home, with a sequence set in the Gatineau Hills (if you're ever in the area, visit it!). And later in the book, a game of cat and mouse will ensue, between hunter and hunted, in the wild landscapes of the Nahanni, deep in the Northwest Territories.

The North and South Nahanni Rivers make their way towards the Mackenzie River via the Liard, passing through what's now Nahanni National Park and its surroundings. It's a place of myth, legend, unforgiving landscapes, incredible scale, and exceptional beauty. I have not walked its ridges or paddled its rivers (yet), but it's a place I intend to get to, and a place that'll feature strongly down the line in writing.

My first real exposure to the Nahanni has been in the photography books of Pat and Rosemarie Keough, a husband and wife team of photographers who have used the Nahanni, the Ottawa Valley, Sable Island, and the Niagara Escarpment as their subject. Their skills with a camera astonish me to this day.

The Nahanni has a long and colourful history, home to native tribes since the last ice age ended, and it's a place that seems obvious for tall tales and dark foreboding warnings. Some of the tall tales tell of fierce mountain tribes, white warrior women, gold deposits, or hot springs that hint at a mystical shangri-la. Well, there are hot springs.

As for the dark foreboding warnings? What do you think when you hear of place names like Death Canyon, Death Lake, Headless Creek, or Deadman Valley? One tale has two brothers a century or so ago, their skeletons found side by side, their heads gone. Another story tells of a man who was found in the spring by a friend, kneeling by a campfire, frozen solid. So of course the place is fertile ground for a book's setting.

Where to place those scenes, that's the question. One, I suspect, that can only be answered by visiting the place first.

In the meantime, have a look and see what the Nahanni is all about...

S Is For Sentencing

Muppet Supervillain Sentenced To Death

Convicted murderer and muppet Fred Johnson, aka Fat Blue, aka Mr. Johnson, has been sentenced to death in the murder of Elmo. The balding mustached muppet and proverbial nemesis of Grover, whom he framed for the death of the little red menace, was outraged by the guilty verdict two weeks ago. Now, in the wake of a death sentence, he was even more so.

Grover was exonerated in a stunning turn of events through the legal skills of his attorney, Kermit the Frog, who brought forth evidence damning Johnson and clearing Grover's name. The evidence was used by prosecuting attorney Ben Matlock, who sought to redeem his reputation with a conviction.

"Justice has been done," the white haired legal ace told reporters after the hearing. "That bloody little muppet murdering bastard has an appointment with the needle. I commend him to hell, where he belongs." Reporters asked Matlock about his colourful choice of vocabulary. The prosecutor smiled serenely, and replied, "**** you."

Defense attorney Robert Shapiro, previously best known for helping get OJ Simpson out of a minor little scrape, was flabbergasted, promising an appeal. "This is a travesty! My client was railroaded into prison! Well, this will not stand! We will continue to fight to free him! At least until his money runs out!"

Johnson was removed from court by federal marshals. He's due to be flown out west to a supermax prison to await execution. Reporters saw his removal, and Johnson was ranting. "This isn't over!" he bellowed as marshals took him down the corridor. "You hear me? I'll find that blue bastard Grover! I'll find him and kill him! Vengeance will be mine! Vengeeeeaaaaaannnncccce!! Ha ha ha ha ha!!!"

Grover himself was in court for the sentencing, and seemed subdued when reporters spoke to him. "Well, sir, I do not understand why Mr. Johnson was so agitated with me. All I did, sir, was try to help him out from time to time. He did not have to frame me for murder, you know, sir. Now, if you will excuse me, sir, I have a date with my two favourite people."

This reporter attempted to reach Lars Ulrich, the RCMP Inspector who was brought in to solve the murder and arrested Grover. A call to his post was taken by a junior officer, who, when asked for the Inspector, first stated that the Inspector is not with Metallica. When this reporter explained that he merely wanted the Inspector's opinion on the sentencing, the officer explained that the Inspector was out in the back country wrestling a Sasquatch.

Theatre of war

I haven’t yet seen last night’s episode of Jimmy McGovern’s The Accused, which dealt with bullying in the British army in Afghanistan. As such, I’m in no position to judge whether it was good or bad as a piece of drama, which is surely the primary consideration. On the other hand, a number people who have seen it didn’t seem particularly bothered about whether it was any good or not, preferring to focus instead on whether it was factually accurate and/or offensive.

Chief among these are General Sir Peter Wall, current head of the British Army, and Colonel Tim Collins and General Lord Dannatt, both retired senior officers; the latter called the drama “a nasty programme inappropriately aired while the Army is conducting difficult operations in Afghanistan.” He was also very exercised by the fact that the programme depicted the drinking of alcohol on the front line, which he claims never happens. The interview with Dannatt on this morning’s Today programme is currently here.

It’s easy to counter complaints such as these with the argument that McGovern is making a fiction, about characters and events that he’s invented, but it’s not quite that straightforward. Any fiction writer, except those working in genres such as SF or fantasy, has a duty to ensure that the events depicted might possibly happen in the real world; even genre writers need to make their texts internally plausible. However, the correlation with fact that writers claim for their fictions vary greatly, and viewers or readers need to keep this in mind. The Tudors purported to be an account of historical figures whose real lives are well documented, and because the writers mucked around with  this reality, anybody with a passing knowledge of 16th-century England might feel entitled to criticise. Similarly, the movie U-571 took a very specific episode of World War II (the capture of the Enigma machine by the British in August, 1941) and rewrote as a triumph of derring-do by the Americans, who hadn’t even entered the war when the real events took place.

McGovern’s drama takes place during a real conflict – the Afghanistan campaign – but doesn’t claim to be depicting real people or real events. To complain that X or Y didn’t happen would be as daft as saying that Spooks is inaccurate because the real Home Secretary doesn’t look anything like Simon Russell Beale. Dannatt may be right that The Accused contains innacuracies, and that no alcohol has ever been consumed on the front line, but I’m not sure how he can claim to be certain. It sounds more as if he doesn’t want it to be true.

Which leads to the second point, about whether such a drama is in some way offensive; presumably to those serving in Afghanistan, and their families. Governments would usually prefer that any dramatic depictions of conflict should be uncompromisingly patriotic, at least while the conflict is still going on. The only major film about the Vietnam War before it ended in 1975 was John Wayne’s jingoistic The Green Berets, although works such as M*A*S*H and Catch-22, which depicted earlier wars, were clearly ‘about’ the contemporary conflict to some extent. (The question remains as to which of the ‘real’ Vietnam films were really about Vietnam: I still maintain that The Deer Hunter is about masculinity and the decline of working-class communities, while Apocalypse Now is about madness and megalomania and film-making and Francis Coppola. But anyway.)

Presumably Dannatt et al would prefer that film-makers and novelists and other artists maintained this unspoken embargo, and waited until the war is over. They rely on the respect that “decent people” – a phrase that Dannatt used several times, sounding increasingly like a Daily Express editorial – have for the services at a time of war. But I think he’s got it wrong. Certainly there’s a huge level of support and respect for the soldiers themselves; the days of Kipling’s ‘Tommy’ are long gone. But if Dannatt and Collins and Wall think this translates into uncritical respect for the Army as an institution, or for the conduct of the war in Afghanistan – to the extent that artists, and consumers of art, are prepared to suspend their critical faculties for the duration – then they’re the ones who seem to have a problem with reality.

Serif, don’t like it

Jonathan Lethem, from his latest novel Chronic City:

Did I read The New Yorker? This question had a dangerous urgency. It wasn’t one writer or article he was worried about, it was the font. The meaning embedded, at a preconscious level, by the look of the magazine; the seal, as he described it, that the typography and layout put on dialectical thought. According to Perkus, to read The New Yorker was to find that you always already agreed, not with The New Yorker, but with yourself. I tried hard to understand. Apparently here was the paranoia Susan Eldred had warned me of: The New Yorker’s font was controlling, perhaps assailing, Perkus Tooth’s mind. To defend himself he frequently retyped the articles and printed them out in simple Courier, and attempt to dissolve the magazine’s oppressive context. Once I’d enter his apartment to find him on his carpet with a pair of scissors, furiously slicing up and rearranging an issue of the magazine, trying to shatter its spell on his brain. “So, how,” he once asked me, apropos of nothing, “does a New Yorker writer become a New Yorker writer?” The falsely casual “so” masking a pure anxiety. It wasn’t a question with an answer.

As Lives A Memory

A recent passage from Heaven And Hell, ending one chapter. Have a look.

The Shrine of The Book was a peculiar looking structure, the white dome resembling an onion, or a woman’s breast. It stood in the midst of a reflecting pool and a large sun baked terraced area. The dome was across from a black basalt wall, the two structures a stark contrast from each other, representing an eternal struggle between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness, as Sabra had explained. It was also the home of the Dead Sea Scrolls, among other ancient documents. The entrance itself mimicked that of a cave, beneath the basalt wall. It led to a first gallery, bright and airy, displays along the walls.  A corridor lay directly ahead, up a short, wide staircase.

The cave motif seemed to repeat itself in the corridor, with displays marked both in Hebrew and English, soft lighting giving a view of precious artifacts. Devon noticed how caught up Stryker seemed to be as he examined the old writings beneath display cases. There was a reverence and silence about the place, as if the other visitors didn’t even dare to speak. Sabra walked alongside her, her eyes falling across documents of precious scripture and ancient documents of her people.

Devon knew the story of the Dead Sea Scrolls, found decades ago near Qumran. Most of it was parchment, with some papyrus, found first by Muslim boys. They were some of the earliest Hebrew biblical texts to survive to the current day, and their value to Israel was priceless. The writings were in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, Sabra had told them. She looked back at Stryker as she and Sabra moved on towards the inner chamber. He picked up his step, joining them.

The inner chamber, beneath the dome itself, was circular, built with a tile floor and walls of ancient rock, the displays behind glass in recessed areas of the walls. Once again, the cave motif asserted itself. Devon looked about, studying displays, her eyes drawn to the intricacies of the shrine’s design. It was strangely appealing. She looked at Stryker, who appeared to be reading a document encased in one display. She wondered absently if he was privately rueing never picking up ancient Greek or Hebrew.

Her eyes were drawn to a staircase leading up, neatly blended into the building. Sabra slightly nodded, led her into the upper area.  Devon realized they were in the dome itself, the shape mimicked in the interior of the rotunda, horizontal lines weaving their way to the top. The room was centered on a large black sculpture, raised above the rest of the room. After a moment, she realized what it was meant to be: a replica of a scroll handle found in most synagogues. A nod to the past and tradition, she thought. Indeed, the ancient parchments themselves were displayed on the sculpture, just as if the Torah was being unrolled by a rabbi to be read at services. More documents could be seen under glass in the display cases around the walls of the room. The room was the heart of the collection, and of the museum itself.

“Well,” Devon softly whispered.

“Impressive?” Sabra asked her.

“Very much so,” Devon replied.

Sabra nodded to the sculpture.  “We call that the ez hayyim.  It’s the ceremonial rollers around which the Torah is placed.” She gazed up at the scrolls, reverence in her expression. Devon decided that though Sabra might well be secular, she at least held this place, and these artefacts, in great esteem. It was, she decided, something worth esteeming.

                                                ***

Stryker remained below, taking his time among the display cases. Voices drew his attention away, and he turned, his eyes falling on two men, one slightly older than the other. He immediately recognized the younger man, had seen him before. The first time had been three years ago, during his university days. The second had been in London, two weeks ago, on the night of the party at the Dorchester. The night President Touqan had been assassinated.

It was ***** ****** *

* What, did you expect me to name the guy?