by flares

A la recherche de notes perdus

“The Lost Notes” (2015)

So, of course, the voice isn’t quite right. Michael Palin is not Oliver Postgate — but he’s close. Cathy Butler suggested David Attenborough, but I think the natural history vibe would be too much. But, still, imagine the classic scene from Life on Earth with Attenborough and gorillas, but add Clangers.

It’s odd, though. We always call it The Clangers, although the definite article isn’t in the title screen. That familiar Earth in space, imagined first in a time when we’d hardly seen that view. The Moon’s there, too, which I think is new. Then the move through space to the Clangers’ planet (that took much longer in 1969, but consider on a £10 budget how much a slow zoom can save) and looking at the Clangers themselves. Compare today’s budget.

Pretty much as I remember them, no tubby Dalek redesign, and of course the planet is probably too curved to fit with the scale of the whole, with an angled shot to play with perspective. We even see them upside down. Neat. The dust from the surface — someone has thought about gravity but they never could have done the dust in 1969, and I’m guessing the first animation was pre-Armstrong and Aldrin.

It feels like a classic Clangers plot — the notes from the music tree have blown away and the Clangers go searching for them. This gives us cameos from the soup dragon and the iron chicken — no froglets, and what is that sky hippo from the credits? Seen it before, I’m sure. The fort da game is completed, of course — as I said to Chris last night, jeopardy is hard for children’s television. Restoration, but also change. An environmental subtext?

Oh, and adult subtexts: is the music as the storm gathers a hint of The Wizard of Oz? I hope Mother Clanger gets more to do than laundry and that’s a phallic telescope, Major Clanger. Granny asleep?

I believe I have moist eyes.

There’s a moral pointed, though. “Never give up, never surrender.” Heavy-handed? Maybe.

by flares

Memories of the Noise Machine

Despite preferring written to visual science fiction, I suspect I began with television sf. I suspect the first sf I encountered was The Magic Roundabout and The Clangers. Later today, the BBC will broadcast the first new episode of the later in forty years. Given the treatment of The Magic Roundabout, I am understandably nervous.

That actually needs a bit glossing – the sf part of The Magic Roundabout was a film, Dougal and the Blue Cat, of which we had the album, the soundtrack cut to about sixty minutes. The Magic Garden comes under threat from the Blue Voice and her minion, Buxton, the Blue Cat, and the garden’s inhabitants are thrown into prison. Only Dougal evades capture, going under cover as Blue Peter (the Blue Dog) and is sent on a mission to the Moon… I never saw the film until it was released on video, but I did eventually get to see it on a big screen. It resonates through my unconscious.

The Clangers, like The Magic Roundabout, was originally broadcast on BBC1. My memory is they came at the end of children’s television (Blue Peter, say) and before the evening news, but it clearly varied from week to week. The creators, Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin had been producing paper- and puppet-based animations since 1958 in a converted cowshed just north of Canterbury. The earliest Clanger appeared in Noggin and the Moon Mouse (1967), a spin-off book from Noggin the Nog (1959–65); the concept evolved into a species who live on a small planet, converting rubbish and debris into useful stuff.

Firmin is still around, in his late 80s and I’ve occasionally seen him around, even sat next to him at a screening of The Clangers. His wife, Joan, is a bookbinder and artist, and they had six daughters, at least two of whom are artists (and Emily is the girl in Bagpuss). He still is active, as far as I can tell making limited edition linocuts and vinyl prints on an antique printing press. He was the creator of Basil Brush and worked with Rolf Harris and then Wally Whyton on children’s television in addition to his collaborations with Postgate.

Postgate PlaquePostgate, who died in 2008 in Broadstairs, is the more intriguing figure of the two, whose voice is engraved on my memory. He was the son of radical historian Raymond Postgate and Daisy Lansbury, the grandson of Labour party leader George Lansbury and classicist John Percival Postgate and great grandson of surgeon and food campaigner John Postgate, His aunt, Margaret Cole, was a Fabian politician and social campaigner, whose husband G.D.F. Cole cowrote The Common People, 1746–1946 (1946) with Raymond Postgate. Postgate was a conscientious objector and anti-nuclear campaigner, and the last episode of The Clanger was broadcast on the eve of the October 1974 election, satirising the political process at the time. (There used to be a blog of Postgate’s thoughts on the Iraq war – I have been unable to relocate this). It should be no surprise that a Malcolm Hulke-scripted episode of Doctor Who features the Master watching an episode of The Clangers.

The Clangers is a product of a different era. An innocent era, one might say, but only on the surface (Rolf Harris?). The Postgate and Firmin animations have a charm that I think stays the right side of whimsey, there is an inevitable slowness to them that would be closer to, say, the first of the Wallace and Gromit stop motion animations than the latest Shaun the Sheep. And for whatever reason, I find the Clangers (and the inhabitants of the Magic Garden), realer than most CGI.

There were only twenty-seven episodes of The Clangers ever made – and my heart sank when I heard there would be a remake. I’d shuddered at the Nigel Planer-voiced The Magic Roundabouts that Danot had made after Eric Thompson stopped (Mr MacHenry is not Scottish – know your canon), gave up partway through the Dougal movie and couldn’t bring myself to watch the new cartoons (apparently the line “‘Time for Bed,’ said Zebedee” was nixed because the audience might not be going to bed when they watched the episodes). I am scared.

But NuClangers has the involvement of Daniel Postgate, and I am sure he would want to honour the spirit of his father’s work. The Solar Eclipse episode was reassuring https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsAyyOKoTik but when I get to watching the new episodes, on iPlayer I suspect, I will feel a little trepidation.

Incidentally, a number of Postgate/Firmin puppets are on show at Canterbury Heritage Museum, but note that outside of Easter to September it is only opening during school holidays. There is also Postgate’s Becket frieze.

by flares

Take It On the Chin

When publishing, even in academia, your work is sometimes reviewed.

In fact, the only thing worse than being reviewed is not being reviewed.

Perhaps your book is so awful, no one wants to review it?

I’d say I’ve had a mix bag of reviews — and I have to say that I often find myself agreeing with some of the flaws the reviewers spotted. With Fifty Key Figures in Science Fiction (2009), we knew that the standard review would consist of “Why didn’t the authors include x, y or z?” and that few would note that that would lead the book to be renamed Fifty-Three Key Figures in Science Fiction. It wasn’t the fifty best, it wasn’t even the fifty key, it was fifty key. Other keys are available. I know one person who seems sweetness and light in person, but who has only really been critical of what I’ve written. So it goes.

So I was sent a review the other day and its author, who I don’t know, didn’t like the work in question. They raise a valid point, but that aside I didn’t get the sense that they’d engaged with the book. I could write a letter of response, get all defensive, but frankly I’ve never seen that kind of thing happen without the complainant looking like a dick.

There was the author a week or so back who demanded a retraction of a one-star review on Good Reads and who proceeded to make themselves look more and more of a dick. Eventually they deleted their comments — but the internet never forgets. Ironically, whilst this has given them all kinds of bad publicity, I would say that  it has probably brought some people to the book, too. In various fora  where there have been Puppies  vs non-Puppies debates, I’ve seen people say that they will now read the book by X because the opposition hate it so much.

No publicity is bad publicity.

So, I’m saying nothing more public or specific about the bad review. I’ve dealt a few myself, and I’m bound to get a few in return.

What I do want to say — and a perverse part of me is sniggering at this — is the reviewer was poorly served by their editor. I recently wrote trust the editor, they are there to save you from yourself. I would hope that the editor could spot the misspelt names in your review, the wrong word being used and the error of fact. Because it’s a thread to pull at in the meantime.

Meanwhile, revenge is filleting negative reviews for pull quotes …

… joking. Honest.

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Not8chrs

When I first used a word processor — possibly something like WordStar or Works or LocoScript and then eventually Word 2 — there were a couple of limitations. I recall having to carry six floppy disks around with me to run the programme, and I think that was in addition to the actual file you were working on.

REMOVE DISK 5

INSERT DISK 3.

And those 3 1/2 inch disks were somewhat new fangled.

The other thing was that filenames were of the type abdcefgh.123. Eight characters and a suffix — txt, doc, ps. My PHD thesis, which I have most of electronically was

INTRO.DOC
1CHAP.DOC
2CHAP.DOC
CHAP3.DOC
CHAP4.DOC
CHAP5.DOC
CHAP6.DOC
CHAP7.DOC
CHAP8.DOC
CONCLUSI.DOC
BIBLIO.DOC

No, don’t ask me why the naming convention isn’t consistent.

These days we don’t have to use eight characters and we’re much more used to having nested folders — but equally used to using several machines, pendrives, clouds and gdrives. We can be sensible in our naming conventions.

Let us imagine that I am working on a chapter for a Cambridge Companion.[1] I write a file and I save it as CAMBRIDGE.DOC. That’s nine characters. Living on the edge.

Professor Neil James is editing a Cambridge Companion which consists of twelve chapters. So far, the day after the deadline, he has seven files called CAMBRIDGE.DOC.[2] This, obviously, is aggrannoying, so he renames them by contributor and then I get back a file called BUTLER.DOC. To go with the fifty or so I already have of that name.

Now, what would be more sensible is to have a naming convention where the project and author is clear. So call it CAMBRIDGE BUTLER.DOC. Or, maybe, BUTLER CAMBRIDGE.DOC, but I reckon the first will alphabeticise better. Then go a stage further and add a date or a version.

This is a whole other bundle of fun – I have a file called CAMBRIDGE FINAL.DOC. Which is fine, until I come to rewrite the file or I spot something else to change or there’s a possible edit to make but I don’t want lose the other version. So try something like CAMBRIDGE SUBMITTED JUNE 2015.DOC.

Ah, dating conventions.[3] To my eyes small, medium, large is sensible. So, day/month/year is superior to month/day/year. Fourth of July, not July fourth.

But alphabeticisation means CAMBRIDGE SUBMITTED 2015 6 14.DOC is better than CAMBRIDGE SUBMITTED 15 6 2015.DOC.

I’m noting that increasingly whatever version of Word it is I’m on, it opens the file as Read-Only and when I try to save as, I’m told the file already exists so CAMBRIDGE SUBMITTED 2015 6 14.DOC becomes CAMBRIDGE SUBMITTED 2015 6 14a.DOC. But maybe an archive of each version per day you’ve done is useful, even if you need to tidy up every few days. You risk editing older files in error if you’ve not sorted properly.

The next trick is to start investigating the tags and comments functions, to help you find the file that you are after in Windows Explorer (or equivalent). And to make sure I put this into action myself.

Notes
1. In fact I’m writing for two, but that’s another story.
2. The other five have yet to be submitted.
3. Split the bill.

by flares

The Singer Not the Gun

Emily St. John Mandel, The Singer’s Gun (2010)

Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014) won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Some critics have complained it is, if not a cosy catastrophe, then a clean apocalypse. I pass no comment as to whether this is a good thing or not — but clearly it was a novel about the survival of culture and what stories need to be told or should not be told.

Perhaps cleanness is Talfamadorian.

Don’t look at the nasty moments.

Perhaps by virtue of the book’s already burgeoning reputation — Waterstone’s were promoting it — at least one of her earlier novels is in print in the UK. It is difficult to read The Singer’s Gun without the later novel in mind.

So Anton Walker works in an office in the new World Trade Center complex and is hoping to marry his girlfriend Sophie on the third attempt. One day he discovers he has been demoted — there’s some question about his nationality or his qualifications — and he’s exiled to an office on the mezzanine, where his former secretary, Elena, also demoted, begins a secret affair with him. Walker’s parents sell stolen goods from their shop and Walker had been in business with his cousin, Aria, selling false passports to immigrants such as Elena. Anton had been bribed to do one last thing for Aria, and now the chickens are coming home to roost. He is waiting, wifeless, on the island of Ischia of Naples, and people have been on his trail.

Station Eleven moved between the start of the disaster and the aftermath, twenty years later, and here again there is an achronological structure, as if Mandel is scripting a puzzle movie. Anton knows more about Elena than Elena realises, we know more about Elena than Anton does and we know about the agent. We move backwards and forwards in time. We are trained to ferret out the connections — although that makes us wonder why Walker is so trusting.

On one level, this is noir territory. The introspective, flawed protagonist who has sinned and must be punished out of all proportion, the untrustworthy women (the agent, the cousin, the girlfriend/wife, the mistress, all save his almost silent mother), the waiting for someone to come in through the door with a gun in their hand. He will be screwed (over). There are two MacGuffins — a package and a cat. You’ve got to love the cat.

And yet — there’s that cleanness. You are driven forward to read, you can see the ironies and the trap closing… But this is, what, a comedy? Walker seems curious carefree, even as he puts an acquaintance into the frame. There’s that gun, the singer’s gun, that has to be used because it is over the metaphorical fireplace of the title. The singer herself is only briefly there. Aria is a song. Elena sings, so to speak, in a slang way. But someone has to be shot — and it’s clean. It’s not the dirtiness of the noir — it feels curiously inconsequential, although the moral/immorality of the noir is selective in its punishment of characters. Or rather, there are worse places to be than in jail.

And, then, at the heart of the novel, the real trade, the real reason they are on Walker’s trail — ah, spoilers. That centre does not bear thinking of. That centre is sometimes glimpsed on the news and contains images which the viewer may find distressing, on one shore or another of the Mediterranean. We see it head on once, I believe, in a brief chapter. But it’s not dirty enough — or there’s a horror in the cleanness. As I say, you are driven forward to read on, but the punch is pulled.

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What Does Assume Make?

A little earlier, when looking at the latest to-do list, I thought to myself that I mustn’t forget to do that when I convert that conference paper into a chapter. What that is, I now have no idea, although it might have been something about the nature of adaptation or British cinema. I didn’t, of course, write it down, even though I’d thought about adding it to the PowerPoint slides.

Memory like … memory like … memory like one of those metal things with holes in it.

If there’s one thing I haven’t learnt, it’s that those insights are easily forgotten. If I write them down there’s a hope. I can take a note on the iPad or the phone, but that’s only as good as search software. I have moved from a one-fits-all note book to a Moleskin for each project (on the principle I risk losing only so much research at a time) but I am a bad note-taker and too often finish a project before a notebook. I think I need to think again about that.

As to the insight from three hours ago… lost I fear.

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Editing the Editing

This afternoon’s email brought an edited manuscript of a journal article rejected for a special issue (no biggie — it plainly didn’t fit) but accepted for the journal (yay!). I assumed that at some point this summer I’d spend a week going back to the reading list — and the articles on the matters discussed I’d not fitted in — and a chapter I borrowed some ideas from to add, say, a thousand words. But it’s already at a preferred word count and I guess that’s time I can spend on other projects…

So there’s a new title which I need to decide if I like (or maybe I can propose an alternative if I don’t) and most of the endnotes have been incorporated into the text. It’s also been trimmed, with a couple of things added.

For about thirty seconds, I considered digging out my original file, and starting to compare… but that way lies madness and needless defensiveness. Trust the editor.

Unless you find you are saying something stupid and you have to work out if that’s them or you. They are there to save you from yourself. The piece I finished off this morning appeared incredibly lightly edited, given that it contains about twelve thousand words’ worth of information in six thousand. I suspect if I went back to the submitted manuscript, I’d start getting defensive. It’s not worth it.

(Although, a recent chapter had marginal comments from someone who either didn’t get the joke or didn’t get the joke until too late and left their comments. Ah well.)

So, to edit the edits then…

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Fast and Furiosa, Or: Foiling this Fiend’s Foul Plots

Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015)

Just to be clear, the Mad Max of the title should not be confused with that other Max.

But basically we have a feature-length episode of Wacky Races directed by whoever did those Lynx adverts. Only feminist. Honest.

Because that woman who did The Vagina Monologues helped out.

In Road Runner country — although actually it’s a whitewashed Namibia.

It’s post apocalypse time and Mad Max (Tom Hardy) is kidnapped and dragged back to a citadel that produces water and mother’s milk to be used as a blood bank to Tony from Skins (OK, Nux (Nicholas Hoult)).  Meanwhile, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) has been employed to drive a tanker to a refinery, only this is an escape bid for her and the wives of citadel leader Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). The citadel sends out its best warriors and drivers to catch them.

Presumably one of the genetic abnormalities caused by the apocalypse is pale skin, because almost everyone at the citadel looks pasty. The women are of various ethnicities, and presumably mutant free, and I’m guessing they had been kidnapped.

The chasers include Dux, with Max doing a Bane impersonation on the front of his vehicle and a guy with a flame-throwing, double-necked Fender guitar because, hey, in this scarcity world we can afford to waste gas like that. And someone’s been looking at too many heavy metal album covers. Seeing a means of escape, Max jumps ship from the notably rubbish chasers and joins Furiosa, along with Nux.

There’s a bizarre encounter in a canyon — somehow Furiosa has communicated long distance that she can have free passage in return for gasoline, and nobody noticed that she set off to the refinery with a lot of gasoline — and then a pretty sandstorm and then a mudflat (gloriously macabre) and then a meeting with more women, I assume the surviving lifetime subscribers to Spare Rib. And then everyone heads home, somehow avoiding the mudflat.

The action hardly gives you a chance to breathe, although it is mostly followable even if it takes a big dollops of suspension of disbelief. Max is reluctant to give his name, but then I caught barely any of the women’s names.

And somewhere, as you try to work out if the Bechdel Test might be passed in a multi-million dollar franchise, you wonder whether it might not be a much better movie without young Max. He’s clearly heroic and knows both ends of a Glasgow kiss, grunts appealingly and can’t make eye contact in a Heather Ledger/Brad-Pitt-in-Twelve Monkeys kind of way,  but is he necessary for anything other than getting the project green lit, twenty years after first mooted. There’s Ethan Edwards and Shane in the mix of course, as well as the man with no name.

However, whilst the plot is about women being more than baby factories, there is a tendency to slide back to being the hope for the future and the seeds of life to come and female as nature. There is a degree of objectification — but less so than say Princess elia by the time of being chained up in Return of the Jedi. They do seem to be able to hold their own in a fight and there is a minimum of love interest as characterisation. If there’s little character development for them then that’s true of all but Furiosa.

Curious this: a film in which at least three characters find redemption, one way or another, but no character is especially changed.

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28 Dogs Later

“Dogs are not an alibi for other themes [… C]ontrary to lots of dangerous and unethical projection in the Western world that make domestic canines into furry children, dogs are not about oneself. Indeed, that is the beauty of dogs.”

pumpkin
Fehér isten (White God (Kornél Mundruczó, 2014))

I was thrown at first by the nature of the dogastrophe. If we are indeed post-adogalypse, would the headlights on the abandoned car still be on? Would the traffic lights still work?

But still, a pleasingly deserted town, a girl (Zsófia Psotta) cycling in a blue hoodie on the motorway and then a pack of mixed breed dogs chasing her through the streets towards and beyond Aldi.

Flashback.

Dániel (Sándor Zsótér), a former professor (of what?) is inspecting an abattoir (gruesome) and then takes on his daughter (the girl, Lili) and her dog Hagen (Luke and Body, effortlessly doubling) as his ex-wife and her mother heads to Sydney for a conference. Dogs aren’t welcome in the apartment and the dogcatcher (Robert Helpmann Gergely Bánki) soon turns up. The conductor of the orchestra Lili plays in is even less sympathetic. Before you know it, Hagen is abandoned by the roadside. Whilst Lili does search for Hagen, she mainly descends into sex (ish) and drugs and rock’n’roll (or house stuff). Hagen has to avoid the dogcatcher and certain death, but falls instead into the murky world of dog fights and training for them (stop humming the Rocky theme at the back) and is renamed Max. And just when you think he’s hit rock bottom, there is dogalution.

Mad Max: Furry Road.

Oh, please yourselves.

I think I could have lived without the human sections — not that Psotta, Zsótér and others don’t put in fine performances, but it was largely handheld in a shakycam. It veered between the dystopian and the soapian. Ah, but the dog narrative — more Steadicam — did hold my interest, and I presume that soon there will be an American remake with Russell Crowe as Hagen:

My name is Maximus Dogious Magyarus, commander of the Hounds of the North, General of the Canine Packs and loyal servant to the TRUE owner, Lili. Son to a neutered Alsatian, husband to a murdered pooch. And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next.

Hagen, it turns out, is a legendary Burgundian hero, who shows up in Wagner’s Gotterdammerung, and his Tannhäuser becomes a plot point late on. Redemption through love.

Or games of fetch.

Inevitably there is the whiff of allegory and mettaffa — Mundruczó has spoken about the backlash against immigrants, there’s an anti-gypsy/Romany thread running through and the dog shelter with chimneys had a prisoner of war/concentration camp vibe. I had a sense of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (J. Lee Thompson, 1972), although as with that mythos you worry about the political implications of arguing that gorillas “are” Blacks and so forth.

I suspect, however, there is at the end a sense that Donna Haraway would be a way to unlock this film — a sense of not quite supplication, but mutual supplication. It’s not a comfortable film to watch — although the cast outacted Channing Tatum — and I confess I am ambivalent about dogs. I could have done without being handed a certain flier: nighttime

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Spinning Plates Ride Again

So, let’s look at the to-do list based on 26 January  2015, updated 15 March 2015 and last updated 3 April 2015:

  • chapter to write for companion — submitted
  • a  submitted chapter that needs editorial queries answering
  • a keynote to write for the SF postgrad conference
  • chapter to write for another companion — no further than Christmas
  • an article that’s been bounced from a special issue but has been taken up and needs another thousand words adding
  • two a conference papers to convert to an article
  • a book to read for review
  • a book proposal to finish — I’ve had some ideas
  • a book manuscript to rescue — I printed out chapter one…
  • several reference book entries that are missing in action — chased and waiting
  • *new*: an appreciation of Pratchett — published

I note that after a year of researching stuff that has invoked sexism, racism, homophobia and so forth (and some great books and films [and Quest for Love]), I want to go fluffy when I next have an idea.