'The Librarians' is inspiring and depressing, in unequal measure

I’ve been wanting the opportunity to see The Librarians since reading about it on social media a few months ago. It was a pleasant surprise to find out that it was screening on iPlayer as part of the BBC’s Storyville strand.

I think it’s probably not a surprise to anyone to learn that right-wing populists are on the ascent, but it’s still incredibly scary to see the effects of that. This feature-length documentary follows the struggles faced by librarians in the face of aggressive campaigns of intimidation and abuse. A pseudo-grassroots book-banning campaign to remove LGBTQ+ books, books about race and books about fascism from library shelves becomes incredibly ugly when seen up close. The amount of intimidation and hatred faced by these librarians - librarians, for god’s sake - is incredibly depressing.

It’s amazing to see what they endure. It is utterly unsurprising to discover that the campaign run against them is calculated, co-ordinated and run by a millionaire who is slightly to the right of the kaiser. School boards, it seems, have become the latest target of the right’s strategy to consolidate power. It makes me wonder how progressive politics can ever effectively counter such an organised and calculated approach. You have to believe it’s possible. You have to.

Watch ‘Storyville: The Librarians’ on BBC iPlayer

'White Riot' by Joe Thomas

On a recent trip to the library, this was the last thing I added to my pile, but the first thing I read when I got home. A fictionalised version of the racism and corruption within the Metropolitan Police in the late 1970s and early 1980s, this multi-threaded crime story reminded me of James Ellroy’s American Tabloid. Like that, I absolutely hoovered through this and wanted more by the time it was over. It’s only book one of a proposed series, a fact that I both like and loathe in equal measure. It’s disappointing that there isn’t really a sense of conclusion here, but I’m already looking forward to the next installment.

I think I also just miss London a bit. I know the streets and estates talked about here.

Buy White Riot by Joe Thomas at Bookshop.org

Don't Buy Anything for Prime Day

As much for myself as much as anybody else, a little reminder not to be tempted to buy things from Amazon, particularly not on the gluttonous carnival of ‘Prime Day’.

I’ve really reduced my usage of Amazon over the years, but still find myself looking at the listings when big ‘bargains’ present themselves. I still have a Kindle, but I’m trying not to buy any new books from Amazon, partially because I want to read more physical books but also because the company appears to be run by bloodsucking ghouls who feed on human misery. But that’s just conjecture. I’m trying to find other ebook vendors, although getting them onto a locked down device is an issue to be sorted out.

In case you need reasons as to why shopping at Amazon is bad, I reluctantly recommend this Guardian article by Corey Doctorow. Honestly, I find a lot of Doctorow’s articles seem to boil down to Me and my friends used to be able to do whatever we want and we should go back to that, without ever addressing issues like how artists get paid for their work online. But whatever. The article does a good job of going through the numerous ways Amazon screws over vendors, customers and workers.

Radiohead x Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror

This ‘cinematic mashup’ pairing the 1922 vampire film Nosferatu with Radiohead’s Kid A and Amnesiac albums could have been great. Unfortunately, the execution is so slapdash and careless that it feels like a missed opportunity. Rather than put any thought into which tracks might work with which scenes, the editor just runs the two albums over the film.

It’s frustrating, because there are moments where it almost works. Idioteque playing over a manhunt is a good sequence and there are moments here and there where picture and sound match up, but that is more by luck than judgement. The whole thing just felt so sloppy, with scene changes (demarcated by title cards) happening 10-15 seconds after different tracks come in. This could have been fixed so easily that it feels like a wilful act of apathy not to do it. The other infuriating decision by the editors is to add pulsing patches of colour to the black and white film, timed to the music. This adds nothing to the film, serves as a distraction, and meant I was getting a headache about two thirds of the way through the runtime.

I’ll concede that the second half of the film works a little better with Amnesiac, but that’s probably down to that record being a bit more open and ambient than Kid A. This was a crushing disappointment, seemingly tossed off with little care for either element. The company behind it is releasing more of these combinations, including mixing Buster Keaton’s The General with the music of REM, which honestly sounds pretty awful.

I saw this at the Depot in Lewes, but I believe it’s been released nationwide. I’d skip it, to be honest.

Irregular Choice to close

Sad to hear that bonkers shoes and accessories shop Irregular Choice is closing down. My wife wore a pair of their shoes at our wedding and their shops were always worth having a look around. I mean, just look at this amazing Flash handbag:

They’re having a closing down sale, but there’s not much left, so have a rummage ASAP.

Irregular Choice

Trainspotting to Trash Humper

One of the few downsides of leaving twitter was losing track of people that you don’t know, exactly, but whose posts and work you’ve come to appreciate as part of your ongoing diet of stuff.

One of those people was Chloe Maveal, who runs (ran?) The Gutter Review, which featured a lot of really good comics criticism, mainly around 2000AD. I didn’t see any updates in my RSS reader for a while and the site seems to have gone dark. You never know with online folk. Sometimes you don’t hear about them and it turns out they’re struggling and sometimes it turns out they’re doing really well.

Given that she’s now co-hosting an official 2000AD podcast, it seems that Chloe’s doing really well. I was very happy, though, when news came out of a new zine she had made.

Trash Humper ($5 on Gumroad) has two essays in it - one about the Trainspotting sequel, T2, which was serendipitous as I’ve found myself thinking about the film lately and the way it handles aging, memory and nostalgia. Although I’m finding sequels, prequels, franchises and “IP” to be horrendous concepts, there was something about T2 that seemed genuine and thoughtful. Perhaps sequels are only worthwhile when they’re shot decades later. I don’t think Richard Linklater’s Before films with Julie Delphy and Ethan Hawke are a franchise, but it has restored a bit of my faith in long-form episodic story telling. I think I just want the form to be longer and the gaps to be bigger than most producers would be willing to countenance. (I’m also thinking of Sally Wainwright’s Happy Valley, which took a seven year gap between series 2 and 3.) What I find so tiring about the desire for episodic content is its relentlessness - that there are always new episodes, that they must be released to a continual schedule, that you must consume or face being left behind.

The other essay in Trash Humper is about Peter Milligan, a comics writer I’ve somehow always managed to miss. I think I’ve got a week or two left on my DC Universe subscription, so I’ll see if I can look up some of his work, including Face, the somewhat grisly piece of body horror mentioned in the essay.

Anyway, the zine is good. I’ll admit that it’s scratching the very specific niches in my brain, but isn’t that what zines are for?

Buy Trash Humper: The One About Obsession, Heroin, and Choons on Gumroad

Dawn of Midi – Dysnomia

Well, it might appear that I only ever listen to music released by Erased Tapes, but that’s not true. (I also have a Radiohead playlist that I listen to when I’m writing!) I can’t deny that a lot of their releases are in areas I’m interested in - classical, electronic, minimalist, experimental-but-still-listenable.

I think I got an email newsletter from them today and looking for something led to me discovering Dawn of Midi’s Dysnomia, which is one of those acoustic records that has a very electronic feel – lots of of repetition, variation, elevation and evolution. As if that wasn’t enough, the whole album runs together like a DJ set. (If you play it using the bandcamp widget above, I’d recommend flipping back to track 1 to get the full effect.)

Dysnomia was released in 2015 and to my knowledge there hasn’t been anything else from the trio, which I sort of like as it adds to the specialness of the album. What I’ve read about the group suggests that this was meticulously created, but it feels like one long session done on the fly. I don’t usually like instrumental breakdowns in songs, band jams and there is nothing I would rather listen to less than a solo, but that feeling of improvising is capivating, even if it is a lie and the result of many, many hours of meticulous planning.

Buy Dysnomia by Dawn of Midi on Bandcamp

Stick with 'Smoke' on Apple TV - it gets a lot more interesting as it goes on

I had tried watching the first of Dennis Lehane’s Apple TV projects, ‘Black Bird’ but didn’t make it past the first episode. While the premise was good - convict goes undercover in order to get incriminating evidence on another inmate - something about it didn’t quite make me want to watch it. Part of this might be that I find Taron Egerton quite an offputting actor for some reason (more on this in a bit), but it meant that I wasn’t that excited about Smoke.

The thing that made me think that I might give it a go was the fact that it was about arson investigation, a field that I find interesting. The trailer was OK (and I noted that the theme song was by Thom Yorke) but it was definitely just a maybe. I don’t always agree with Lucy Mangan’s TV reviews in The Guardian, but her assessment of Smoke (“No TV show has ever been worth sticking with more” - a little hyperbolic, but we’ll put that on the subs) made me decide it was worth watching the first two episodes at least. I’m glad I did. What seemed like a formulaic premise from the off turns out to be something of a bait and switch and Taron Egerton’s performance is the lynchpin for the entire series. I had one of those a-ha moments when I realised “oh, you’re not supposed to like him” which, in retrospect, seems sort of obvious as he’s a real prick.

Dennis Lehane knows how to amp up tension and the entire series turns the screw little by little until the very end (my wife found it too tense and refused to watch the final episode). I think it also benefits from being on a streaming service, in that the series is nine episodes long and feels perfectly paced, without any padding. It also allows for the narrative turn to happen at the end of the second episode, whereas a broadcaster would probably require it to be the kicker of the first. I honestly don’t know if that would be better, as an extra episode really beds in the misconception that this is a pretty standard cop procedural. That may be to its detriment, however, as I would imagine that a lot of people would dismiss it after the premiere.

Now that I’ve watched all of Smoke, I’m inclined to give Black Bird another go and it’s also made me more enthusiastic about the forthcoming adaptation of Jordan Harper’s She Rides Shotgun, which is the one book of his that I haven’t read. (The Hollywood agent noir Everybody Knows was one of the darkest novels I’ve read in a long time and I have mixed feelings about there being a sequel. On the one hand, I can see that there’s more material to be mined in this area, but on the other I’m tired of everything having to be part of a series.)

Anyway, I’d recommend Smoke. It’s available on Apple TV+.

'The Poet' by Michael Connelly

Honestly, Michael Connelly books are kind of cheeseburgers for me. Even reading them occasionally is probably a bit too often. That said, we’re only human and sometimes a cheeseburger is exactly what you fancy.

While Bosch, The Lincoln Lawyer and now Ballard are the more well known characters, I always like thrillers with journalists as protagonists. Here, Jack McEvoy’s brother is a homicide detective who commits suicide… or does he? The reporter investigates and finds out that there’s more to this than meets the eye and so on and so on.

Really, I only mention it here because it came out in 1996 and it made me nostalgic for pre-internet technology. A major plot point centres around the use of a digital camera - an item so rare that it has to be ordered from a specialised dealer. Sending a fax from a computer is a key piece of evidence. McEvoy has a laptop computer and mentions it every chance he gets. There’s also a very unpleasant computer bulletin board system, which perhaps is a preview of the online horrors to come.

I don’t want to come across like a luddite - I’m posting this on the internet, after all - but there is something really soothing about not having an investigation based around looking things up online. As is often the case with these series of genre novels, there’s a little preview of another book in the series at the end of The Poet, set many years later and the protagonist goes on Instagram in the first twenty pages. Even our novels don’t have attention spans any more. I wonder how all this will date. I can’t help but think that the early 2010s stock line of dialogue, “It’s trending on twitter” will seem as hopelessly anachronistic as the 1990s thrillers that dedicated 30-40 seconds of screentime to a character using dialup internet. Perhaps we just need more time to pass and these things will seem cute and nostalgic.

Buy ‘The Poet’ by Michael Connelly at bookshop.org

I decided not to read 'Julia' by Sandra Newman

It might be good, but as an endeavour it feels like it’s moving us one step closer to the Orwell Cinematic Universe, and that’s something I can’t bring myself to contribute to, even with my time. (For the record, I’m not talking about a Burmese Days movie or the 1997 film adaptation of Keep The Aspidistra Flying, but rather the grim inevitability of a Winston Smith Jr. spin-off for young adults or a How I Became Big Brother prequel.)

I think my main reason for wanting to read it was a description of the novel-writing machines Julia works on, but in this instance it didn’t really scratch that itch.

Fiction was a vast and windowless factory floor that took up the first two basement storeys of the Ministry of Truth. The space was dominated by the plot machinery, eight mammoth machines that looked like simple boxes of shining metal. When you opened them up, their guts were a bewildering array of sensors and gears. Only Julia and her colleague Essie knew how to crawl around inside without doing damage. The central mechanism was the kaleidoscope. It had sixteen sets of claws that selected and transported plot elements; hundreds of metal sorts that were grabbed and discarded until a group was found that fit together. This successful pattern was assembled - again by machinery - on a magnetized plate. The plate was dipped into a tray of ink, then swivelled out and was stamped onto a roll of paper. The printed length of paper was cut away. A production manager lifted it free.

The result was a gridded print, jocularly called a 'bingo card', that coded the elements of a story: genre, main characters, major scenes. A Rewrite man had once attempted to explain to Julia how these were interpreted, but to no avail. Even after five years on the floor, to her they might as well have been Eastasian picture-writing.

Now she watched as a production manager snatched a new print off the roll and waved it about to dry the ink. When he was satisfied, he rolled it, inserted it in a green cylinder, and shoved the cylinder into a pneumatic tube. From up on the walkway, Julia could watch the cylinder's flight through a tangle of translucent plastic hoses on the ceiling to plop into a bin at the southern end of the room. That was Rewrite, where men and women sat in long rows, muttering into speakwrites, turning bingo cards into novels and stories. But by that stage, no machines were involved and Julia's interest was at an end.

Which, I suppose, is the most logical way of constructing a novel-writing machine, but it just producing a ‘bingo card’ of plot feels disappointing. It kind of speaks to the problem with prequels, in that they have to provide mundane answers for casually mentioned things that fire a reader or viewer’s imagination. How exciting and mysterious did ‘the clone wars’ sound in Star Wars and how boring was George Lucas’s version of it in the prequels?

OK, when it’s got to the point of complaining about the Star Wars prequels, it’s time to wrap it up. Julia is going back to the library. If you’ve read it, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

Buy ‘Julia’ by Sandra Newman at bookshop.org (affiliate link)

'The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death and Legacy of One Laptop per Child' by Morgan G. Ames

I was always fascinated by the One Laptop Per Child programme, both from an ideological point of view and as a piece of industrial design. I was never really convinced by the founders’ notion that cheap computers were the developing world’s path out of poverty, thinking that things like schools and clean drinking water were more of a priority. But the fact that it was so different a priority meant I tried to understand where they were coming from.

This study of the project takes the view that it was flawed from the outset, that the project leaders used their own, relatively privileged backgrounds, as justification for the project, without any real understanding of the actual social and economic factors at play. Put simply, they had prospered with computers, so thought that everyone else would, too. The author frames this as the archetype of the ‘technically precocious boy’ – a category I always thought I fit into when I was younger, until I met people who were actual examples. Being able to run a word processor on an Amstrad CPC wasn’t the same thing.

Anyway, this is largely an academic text, which brings with it some problems. The first of these is that it has a specific argument - that ‘charismatic’ technology is attractive and exciting, but often so much so that it blinds people to its actual utility or lack thereof - and goes about showing examples of its theory at work. If you’re studying the use of new technology in economically depressed environments, it’s useful to have case studies like these, but I honestly wanted a more general overview of the project. I’m a layperson, craving details about the organisation of the project and particularly the design process. Perhaps that’s the technically precocious boy inside me.

Adi Robertson had a good article on The Verge, giving a big-picture overview, but I would have liked more detail. I also would really still like to have a go on one. There’s an online emulator for its Sugar operating system and from the sounds it, the XO laptop had a number of recurrent hardware faults. Still, as the article says at the end, “I’ve still never seen anything like it.”

'The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death and Legacy of One Laptop per Child' by Morgan G. Ames is published by MIT Press (I got my copy off eBay, though)

‘Bitter Harvest’ by Ann Rule

I don’t read a lot of true crime. I’m not really sure why, as crime fiction makes up a reasonable proportion of my leisure reading. Perhaps I just prefer it to be made up. Still, I picked this up from the library as something to read on my week off. As I understand it, Ann Rule has a pretty good reputation for this sorry of thing - better, at least than a lot of the more salacious parts of the market and now that I’ve finished it, I can say it was… pretty good.

The thing about writing stories is that you come to understand their shape. I spent quite a lot of this book expecting a turn in the narrative. It never came, perhaps because it’s based on real life. They say that truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense. That’s sort of true, but I think it’s also worth mentioning that truth is often a lot more mundane than fiction. That, maybe, is the appeal of true crime. It’s not the glamour, it’s the mundanity.

(Also, can I just mention that the marketing on this cover is weird? “A mother’s sacrifice” is certainly one way of framing it.)

https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/bitter-harvest-a-woman-s-fury-a-mother-s-sacrifice-ann-rule/4936811?ean=9780751579178

(It seems the iPad version of Squarespace doesn’t allow you to put links in blog posts. That can’t be true, can it?)

Reiches

1

Sometimes things arrive in threes. This is slightly unfortunate when it comes to Reich-related content, but I’m trying to keep the momentum up with posting these little notes, so I’ll record them here anyway.

Firstly, I listened to Steve Reich Essentials on Apple Music, which revealed a much more diverse range of compositions than I was aware of. I’m quite a fan of 20th century minimalist music and in that field Reich is a big name, mainly for his use of phasing. (My wife also loves Clapping Music, considering it one of the best things ever made by a human). The playlist had a lot of music I wasn’t familiar with and showed that Reich is not just someone who goes du-du-du-du-du-du-du and did-did-did-did-did-did.

Amongst the pieces in the playlist is Different Trains and hearing it again made me think of the Song Exploder episode dealing with the composition of the first part of that piece. It’s one of the longer episodes of that series, but is still only about 30 minutes. Most podcasts are too long, but Song Exploder is the exception. I love hearing about the creative process in all its forms. The podcast (as well as One Song) are also a potential source of stems for sampling. I always wanted to make a series called Song Imploder, which used the musical snippets from the show in order to make a musical counterpoint. Unfortunately, I am coming to terms with the truth that I am not really very gifted musically. I am slowly making my piece with this fact.

2

Another Reich, one whom I am unsure is related to the first or not, is former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich. He’s interviewed on Kara Swisher’s podcast On with Kara Swisher. (That was a horrible sentence. I’m typing through the first coffee of the day.)

I’m really trying to limit the amount of US politics I ingest at the moment. It’s difficult to ration it, though, as the news seeps through everywhere. This interview was interesting to me, though, as Reich talks about the mistakes that were made in his time in the Clinton administration and how the Democratic party lost touch with its base. I don’t know what happens next, but it feels like progressive parties (both in the UK and the US) can’t carry on along this same track.

Anyway. link to episode here.

3

Finally, we get to Robert Reich’s son, Sam Reich, who is the CEO of streaming service Dropout (formerly College Humor). He’s interviewed by Fast Company about how he acquired the company and the ethos of mutual benefit he’s tried to instil there. I find it really interesting - and encouraging - when people make successful businesses out of the simple principle that you don’t have to screw absolutely everyone you meet. He’s also quite funny and charming, which makes it an easy listen.

Sam Reich Fast Company interview

(If a podcast doesn’t have its own site, I’ll use a link to Apple podcasts, just because it seems like the standard repository. That said, I find the Apple Podcasts app to be pretty horrible. I’ve been using Pocketcasts for a while now, mainly because it allows you to play podcasts through a Sonos speaker. This used to be a premium feature, but is now free.)

'Strange Houses' by Uketsu (trans. Jim Rion)

Conceptually, I love the idea of telling mystery stories through floor plans[1] and this Japanese book sets out to to exactly that. It begins by the author noticing a space between two rooms - a gap in the house that seems to serve no practical purpose - and expands from there, tracing a narrative through the arrangement of walls, windows and doors over several architectural floorplans. The design is functional and while I didn’t love the typesetting, it does manage to feel very different from a regular novel. I say that the cover design was very well done - simple and effective use of vectors by Luke Bird, although now I look at it I’m realising that actually I think I just like floorplans.

Sometimes I read a book in two sittings and somehow have managed to break at an inflection point. The first half of Strange Houses was inspired - a real story emerging from seemingly mundane details. Then the book goes into explanation of why these houses have been built this way and I kind of lost interest. There was a point at which family trees were introduced and I thought that this was going to be another kind of structure that would reveal details through odd interconnectedness, but it didn’t quite happen.

Most of the book is not told in standard prose fiction, but as scripted dialogues between participants and reportage of their movements. Later, when the story delves back in time, there are sections of regular prose, but contained within correspondence, a device that always feels somewhat inauthentic to me.

It’s a shame, because I would recommend the first half of the book without equivocation. I haven’t read the previous Strange Pictures, but skimmed it in the bookshop and it didn’t have the same appeal as the floorplans. I might get it from the library if it’s available, and hold out hope that the forthcoming Strange Buildings will concentrate more on buildings than world-building.

Buy ‘Strange Houses’ by Uketsu at Bookshop.org

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[1] I tried to do this with Proposal for the Elimination of Rick Burgess in my 52 Murders project, but feel that I didn’t quite nail it.

‘Invisible’ by Paul Auster

I picked this up in a closing down sale of a local independent bookshop, which was a shame. As nice as the shop was, its location meant it was probably doomed (in the basement section of a sparsely populated artisanal shopping centre, away from the high street). The fact that I can’t even remember the shop’s name is possibly significant. The fact that I also picked up a quite nice rug for my workroom there is probably less significant to anyone but me.

Anyway, I hadn’t read any Paul Auster in a long while, but remembered enjoying The New York Trilogy somewhat and The Brooklyn Follies somewhat more. There’s sometimes a satisfaction in reading a writer so established in their abilities that they can write pretty much anything and it comes out readable and moreish. I wouldn’t say this was one of his best, but I certainly didn’t expect the content of the book’s second part, which was caused a bit of a double take.

It’s also one of those books without quotation marks for dialogue. I’m trying to get to the bottom of this and decide whether it’s a contrivance or a sensible piece of efficiency. I think I might be too square to write dialogue without inverted commas.

Buy ‘Invisible’ by Paul Auster at bookshop.org

Disappearance at Clifton Hill

This low budget Canadian thriller is better than this misleading poster graphic suggests. Don’t want to say too much about it, but off-season resort towns, 80s magicians and big cats feature in it.

It’s currently on Netflix UK and worth a look.

I do love a penalty shootout

It’s such a stupidly pure way of settling a match. I would say that perhaps all games should be settled this way, but it wouldn’t be the same if the participants weren’t physically exhausted and their nerves utterly shredded.

Congratulations to the England women’s team. Commiserations to Spain’s. Football can be cruel.

A Real American

Hulk Hogan died. He was, to say the least, a unique figure in popular culture. A balding, handlebar-moustached, bemuscled hot dog of a man. Wrestler, actor, union buster, fantasist of Baron Munchausen-level proportions, racist, MAGA spokesperson and a lot more besides. He seemed to spend his later years ‘living his gimmick’, which lead to the slightly surreal conversation when deposed as his ‘real’ self, Terry Bollea, where he attempted to explain to a befuddled lawyer that Hulk Hogan had a big dick, but Terry Bollea didn’t.

To those of us in the UK who first became aware of him in the 1990s Sky Sports WWF boom, he was brash, kind of appalling, but also sort of amazing. A mass of contradictions. Someone who clearly took steroids, but told kids to say their prayers and eat their vitamins. Like a lot of fairly cunty people, he did a lot of work for charity, but talk to anyone in the business and you’ll hear tales of him screwing people over left right and centre. Perhaps it’s no surprise that he ended up as a Trumper, as his version of the USA always seemed to be a star-spangled hamburger box. He was loud, he was brash, he was strong and heroic, but nonsensical and a cheat and weirdly petty.

In short, to us at the time, the song was right. He was a real American.

Minimal effort, minimal results

Today didn’t work out as planned and I didn’t do as much writing as I had hoped - only a few pages in the notebook, writing filler scenes that need to exist, I’m just not quite sure where.

Drafting non-linearly is a change for me and for the most part I’ve found it to be a more measured, interesting approach. But I’m now reaching the point where all these little islands need to connect and I feel my bridge-building skills are sorely lacking. If the first draft of everything is shit, then this is wet and messy and all over the place.

(Sorry - that’s quite disgusting, but I’ve had to clean up after the cat twice today and it’s obviously had more of an impact than I realised.)

I’m consoling myself with the fact that, in those couple of pages, there’s a few sentences that I’m pretty pleased with. That will have to do.

Black Sabbath - Planet Caravan

Ozzy Osbourne died. Some might say it was amazing he lived as long as he did. I’m not someone who listens to a lot of rock, but in my obligatory someone died, so let’s listen to their hits session, I heard this between ‘Paranoid’ and ‘Iron Man’ and it’s much more my speed.