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The Sorrows of (Not So) Young Werdna

Inevitably this contains several plot spoilers

 

In criticism we – I – start from where we know and head into new territory. We have a political or critical viewpoint – Marxism, feminism, aesthetics – and apply it to a new text. Or we use a text to explain an idea or an idea to explain a text. (There’s a line somewhere from Mallarmé – shameless name drop – about the folly of saying clearly what the author has said opaquely.) We needn’t reinvent the wheel, of course, we build on the shoulders of giants. Sometimes people haven’t seen the giants, so we get people suggesting that no one has written about Katherine Burdekind or that everything thinks John Wyndham is cosy, when, in fact, he isn’t.

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Gold to Guilt

Cotton to Gold (Two Temple Place, London, 31 January-19 April 2015)

“Doubtless prompted by the hardships endured by the workers, the industrialists of the North West supported a wide range of cultural causes that benefitted the inhabitants of the cotton town.”

This exhibition brings together the collections of several textile, rope and other industrial magnates as donated to their local museums — the Townley Hall, Burnley, the Haworth Art Gallery, Accrington and Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery. If you want to know what surplus labour is, have a look at this.

In the Good Old Days, the artisan weaved in their own home, but the process became machine-led and stream-driven and centred on the factories in ever-growing towns, especially in Lancashire. Try this: “One machine could produce around 40 yards of plain weave calico each day.” A single worker could operate eight machines. Calico is presumably made from cotton, that just happened to be lying around. Or brought in from the colonies. We’ll come back to them. Nearby there are the clogs worn by men, women and children in the factory – I forget whether the factory is for rope or textiles, but it hardly matters. The cotton rope on display is “less likely to break while powering the looms, thereby increasing productivity and profit.”

And, presumably, be safer for the workers. If that matters. I suppose it does.

One of the industrialists amassed a collection of eight hundred books, including rare early editions of Chaucer and Spenser, a Third Folio of Shakespeare, a Torah, books in Arabic and from Persia, Buddhist texts… Frankly he couldn’t have read chunks of it — his workers were presumably illiterate on the whole. There’s a first edition of Gulliver’s Travels. Covets.

We have coins and icons and stuffed birds — the collector preferred paintings but still had a range of corpses, a fan of leucistic specimens apparently — and Millais drawings and Japanese prints and Turner watercolours (who doesn’t have one?! I’ve seen thousands of the buggers in municipal galleries) and ivory carvings. There’s a warning about this but there’s an Incan corpse from the twelfth century collected by William T. Taylor, who appears to have been involved in archaeology, but more to the point worked in hydroelectric dams in Kashmir, Nepal, Mexicon and Peru. Apparently “he seems to have paid scant regard to the claims of the local people to the objects he brought back.” No shit.

At the start, the curators claim that “the exhibition highlights the circumstance of the exceptional accumulation” of objects. To a point, yes, to a point.

The industrialists put money into galleries and museums, as well as into churches and cathedrals. They endowed schools and … orphanages. How many of the orphans worked in the factories? How many were orphaned by the factories?

At the same time, one has a sneaking respect for the owner of Burnley Brewing Company, Edward Stocks Massey (whose legacy was used to buy other collections), who promised a large sum of money to the Burnley Corporation, but the amount would drop every time one of his 150 pubs lists its license. Fortunately for Burnley, he died fairly soon.

Of course, very few museums have ethical collections. It’s just that it is rarely so flagrant and hinted at but not entirely visible. There are undoubtedly some beautiful objects here — for me the highlight is a rather crappy Blake drawing. As proven by many dozens of municipal galleries, industrialists had lousy tastes (or kept the good stuff).*

The downfall came in the 1940s when India, apparently the destination for fifty per cent of Lancastrian cotton, boycotted it. The market fell and there were times when a factory a week closed. Bloody colonials, with their demands for independence…
* In this, of course, I may well be being unfair to self-made men. But made on the back of the labour of others.

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Son of the Spinning Plates

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

  • a paper to write for the Sideways in Time conference needs turning into chapter
  • a keynote to write for the SF postgrad conference
  • a book to read for review
  • a book proposal to finish — I’ve had some ideas
  • a conference paper to convert to an article
  • a secondary bibliography to annotate
  • two chapters to write for companions — lots of ideas for one, no further than Christmas for the other
  • an overdue biographical piece to write — submitted 
  • an article that’s been bounced from a special issue but has been taken up and needs another thousand words adding
  • a book manuscript to rescue — I printed out chapter one…
  • a  submitted chapter that I’ve heard nothing back on — chased
  • several reference book entries that are missing in action — chased
  • *new*: an appreciation of Pratchett — submitted
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A Howl of Defeat

Among other things, I’ve been watching a horror franchise over the last month and have reached film six of seven — the idea being to get a paper proposal together for a conference which seemed as much an excuse to return to a particular town as anything else (although I reckon it will be a good conference). The paper probably would be useful context for the next Major Project.

But the deadline for proposals came and went earlier this week and I didn’t write more than a sentence of the abstract. Whilst publicly admitting defeat is usually the spark that makes me think OF COURSE — IT’S REALLY ABOUT … I think I shall admit defeat and stay defeated. (Of course, the organisers may accept a late throw in.) I shall blog the films in due course and will enter self-protection mode. There’s enough to write and redraft as it is.

You win some, you lose some.

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GRUMPiE

CHAPPiE (Neill Blomkamp, 2015)

So the afternoon was skating on ice — the gallery I was going to go to is now only open Thursday-Monday, but that gave me longer to write stuff in the coffee shop. And when I got to the cinema, they said that they might not show the film, because I was the only person to show. But two people turned up for Insurance (which I may well see sooner or later, but I would have hated today) and apparently that was enough — in fact a second person wanted to see CHAPPiE. But in twenty-five plus years of solo cinema-going I’ve never experienced that. I guess they in theory make a loss, but it hardly encourages me to return. I’d hoped to see it in Westgate on Sea, but that was last week.

So Blomkamp teases us — we have the after-the-event documentary and then we have the eighteen months earlier news footage and then, clearly, he can’t be arsed as we go into standard continuity editing. There’s this RoboCop rip-off police system of robot cops remote controlled by head sets which seems to be bankrolled by the guy who won that Slumdog Millionaire (Dev Patel) competition. Wolverine, meanwhile, has an even bigger badder robot that he’s trying to interest Ripley in.

Meanwhile, in another part of Joburg, Yolandi (Yolandi Visser), Ninja (Ninja), Amerika (Amerika) and Hoodie Guy (Hoodie Guy) have pulled off a drug deal only to be caught by Evil Subtitled Guy (Brandon Auret) who shoots one of them and demands 20,000,000 Rand within seven days. Ninja decides that he will kidnap the guy from Skins to access a RoboCop to… do something or other. Skins chappie, meanwhile, has stolen a RoboCop and has developed artificial intelligence when he clearly doesn’t have any of his own.

RoboCop is the spitting image of Sharlto Copley from District 9, or would be if they hadn’t done all that MoFocking MoCapping. It’s pretty, I grant you, but you too easily forget it’s a RoboCop and it seems to have rather too much servo motion. It needed to be more robotic. Copley gives a great comic performance but Woody Allen was a more convincing robot in Sleeper (Woody Allen, 1973). Then you mix in Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), because RoboCop has a broken battery — although it’s five days rather than four years. Skins chappie is a younger and more handsome Tyrell, and you keep waiting for the burning so very bright speech. Frankenstein, too, as he’s a bad father and RoboCop gets bullied by some retrobates and some rather unconvincing fire. We have a Meaningful bit when he ponders why his Creator would give a faulty body and you just know that sooner or later he’s going to need a wife, sorry, Bride of RoboCop.

Wolverine’s robot echoes the military suit from District 9, which in turn echoes the suit from Aliens (James Cameron, 1986), or possibly the first one. It’s pretty poor stuff, frankly, which perhaps explains why the South African police force ain’t buying. By now, of course, you have the sense that it’s really an audition piece for Alien This Time It’s Three, in which Copley and Patel are going to play MoCapped aliens as some kind of mismatched buddies. A certain actor presumably was only there for about two days and you have to admire her presence of mind to grab her coat and handbag before exiting in an emergency.

Copley gets to wander around more South African waste grounds and shanty towns and CHAPPiE has a certain amount appeal even if it requires an awful lot of hand waving. Just as Evil Subtitled Guy (random alleged Nigerian) in District 9 wanted Wikus (Copley), so here Evil Subtitled Guy does too. Presumably he’s evil because he’s got knarked at having his perfectly comprehensible dialogue subtitled. There’s a rather better nonwhite acting quotient here — a Black chief of police, Patel of course, Amerika, a television journalist and so forth — but only two females with any significant dialogue. With the exception of Wolverine, I don’t recall anyone getting a backstory.

Maybe I should have gone to see Insurance? Although, of course, it seems to feature Kate Winslet continuing an audition to be Sigourney Weaver.

 

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See also under: Rugs, Persian

It’s striking how many articles that come into journals for review — or essays that are submitted to be marked — that lack any sense of the secondary literature. Admittedly, I learned whatever craft I have in the days of card catalogue indexes and scholarly indices of periodicals and going through bloody contents pages of journals, so I had it easier than the young rapscallions and skallywags who have to make do with mere search engines to several thousand journals.

Still, it is annoying to locate three articles on a subject that I’ve already published on, which didn’t appear to have been indexed when I’d done the research.

I have a habit of being very — what is the word? — instinctive. I’ll be convinced that X is connected to Y and get some way into writing about Y before I research X. I was convinced, say, that Mary Douglas’s work would help an understanding of The Sparrow, but I didn’t really put this to the test by reading Purity and Danger for rather too long. One of these days I’ll push my luck too far.

So I’d been reliant on my considerable gut on this particular piece and ran out of steam. I needed something else to kick start it. Oddly, I chose to read Adam Roberts’s Science Fiction, one chapter in particular, and a particular term jumped out.

Of course. Slaps forehead.

Searches in search engine for X and Z.

First two results: articles which discuss X, Y and Z. On the one hand, pay dirt. On the other hand, maybe someone already wrote the bleeding chapter. (They hadn’t.)
So, it might be a new journal collection or a new algorithm, but those three articles didn’t show up when I did the research on Y — which admittedly is about two years ago. One of them should have shown up.

But nothing’s wasted, as a chapter I have to write by May will use that very nicely, thank you very much, and my instinct is colliding ideas rather nicely. No research goes unused.

Meanwhile, I am plugging away at a conference paper on “Random Quest” and Quest for Love (you know, the one I wrote on Sunday, ahem) and am struck by how little has been written on John Wyndham. The secondary research on this story has more or less drawn a blank, but my gut says I have enough for twenty minutes.

Meanwhile, here’s one learned analysis of another short story by Wyndham. I shan’t insult your intelligence by telling you which one.

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Spinning Plates Return

It is Sunday, it is 7.30, I am in the library. I have been here since 11.00, delayed getting here by an hour because I thought I’d lost a book I needed (I hadn’t and it turns out I didn’t).

So, let’s look at the to-do list based on 26 January  2015:

  • a paper to write for the Sideways in Time conference — next weekend Sunday
  • a keynote to write for the SF postgrad conference
  • a book to read for review
  • a book proposal to finish — I’ve had some ideas
  • a conference paper to convert to an article
  • a secondary bibliography to annotate — not started
  • two chapters to write for companions — lots of ideas for one, no further than Christmas for the other
  • an overdue biographical piece to write — Tuesday afternoon, I hope
  • an overdue survey chapter
  • an article that’s been bounced from a special issue but has been taken up and needs another thousand words adding
  • a book manuscript to rescue — I printed out chapter one…
  • a  submitted chapter that I’ve heard nothing back on
  • several reference book entries that are missing in action
  • a submitted chapter that may well need a proofread
  • *new*: an appreciation of Pratchett

Hmmm. Let’s see what I can do for March 31st. I have written and published an obituary and written something like three lectures a week.