Fitting the battle of life

This week I recommend:

• In film, This is England. (Watched it tonight, and it’s brilliant, just brilliant. The dialogue’s great, the soundtrack is perfect, and most of the acting is great too.)
• In music, Portland Rise. (Yes, I have a bit of a vested interest in these guys, but would recommend them even if I didn’t know them.)
• In books, Under the Net. (Iris Murdoch’s first novel, and unfortunately the only one of hers I’ve read, but will try and rectify that this summer after my exams.)

That’s my watch, listen and read for this week. I might even make it a semi-regular feature, depending how revision goes.

• (And as a bonus, in podcasts, the Ubuntu-uk podcast episode 2, or uupc as it is become known. It even got a mention on lugradio this week!)

Well, not novel, more short story. Have a look at www.wetellstories.co.uk, where six authors over the next six weeks will be publishing short stories with technological twists, based on classic stories themselves.

The first one, a reworking of The 39 Steps into The 21 Steps, features Google Maps which allow you to follow the action on-screen (the story itself is presented through markers on the maps). Some of the map movements weren’t that slick, with little time for the maps to load when the action was moving fast (e.g. on the tube ride), but apart from that it was a brilliant little idea. Who’s up for doing a Ulysses mashup?

The second one, Slice, is more involved. It’s about an American family who’ve done a house-swap with an English family, and there are two blogs to follow the action on: the daughter’s blog, and the parents‘. Both sets of characters also have twitter accounts, which interact with you. I sent an @ message to the parents and was rewarded with a reply! I’m still waiting for the `daughter’ to respond to my e-mail, but will update when I do. [Update: Both Splice and the parents are now following me back on Twitter! I'm loving this new, interactive creativity!]

There’s also something of a competition, with the chance to win a library of 1300 Penguin Classics books (approx. 25 metres!), and a hidden story (at least in the first - clues about a girl named Alice and phone numbers to ring for hidden messages).

What these stories show is that new technology, although posing questions for the future of the book, is a wonderful medium for creative literature. I’m going to keep watching the site and read the stories - so far the project is very promising.

[Posted in Ubuntu because of the web 2.0/geek aspect of using new technologies]

Well, decided to catch up on some music, literature and comedy all at the same time - god bless Amazon. This week’s deliveries (a few days earlier than I expected!):

• Underworld (Don DeLillo)
• Mozart’s Requiem
• The Flight of the Conchords Season 1 DVD

Well, apparently (according to my recently rediscovered LibraryThing profile) I only have 80 books. For a student of literature this is just appalling. I’m sure I have more, but I can’t be bothered to spend an hour going through every book I have in my room right now, checking to see if I’ve already catalogued it, and cataloguing it if it’s not already there.

Anyway, what with Easter coming up very shortly, and the fact that I’ve only got two exams this year (one’s six hours long though!), I decided to do an Amazon shop for a couple of things we (as a house) wanted to get and throw in a book. Underworld, by Don DeLillo - weighing in at a hefty 800+ pages, it should last me a little while at least. In the meantime - I went for free super saver delivery, of course, being a cheap arse student - I’ll get Iris Murdoch’s first novel, Under the Net, out of the way.

Why choose Underworld? I read Falling Man for a seminar this term, and actually quite enjoyed it. It didn’t strike me as at all amazing, but what I’ve heard of his other work he’s not a half bad writer, and rather than start meekly at the shallow end with something like White Noise I thought I should go for the big one. We shall see how it goes.

I was lying in bed a few moments ago - yes, the lazy student in bed, what a surprise - when I had a fleeting glimpse of an idea. The image came to me of a worker operating a machine (probably in a factory, I suppose) which was a giant grey metal box. On it was a button, and the worker’s job was to push this button every so often, so that the machine would fulfil its function - say, putting the heads on teddy bears or whatever - but of course, the worker has no idea what goes on inside the box machine. He pushes the button and out pops a teddy-bear, but the abstraction of his work (i.e. pushing a button as opposed to picking up the head and manually putting it on) and being unable to see it actually happen leads him to question what the point is, what he is actually doing.

I see a short, quasi-satirical, almost Kafka-esque piece forming in my mind, on this subject, loosely a metaphor for open-source vs closed-source (and in more areas than just computing). I shall update once I make a start - if I make a start. Must remember that I’ve got exams coming up after Easter.

…is using a £20 note as a bookmark in a £5 paperback.

Well, I piled up a few of the books I’m reading at the moment/will start reading in the next few days and realised I have quite a bit to get through. It’s not even all of them, just the ones I have lying around my bedroom at the moment. Fun times ahead!

Well, I read it a couple of years back because it was recommended to me by an English teacher at my school, and I must say I loved Tristram Shandy. Its black page, its marbled page, its ‘missing’ chapters later filled-in, the puns, the digression - I loved every minute of it (except the hundreds of long minutes spent reading it that, I suppose, could have been better employed).

The problem with this behemoth of a book is its terrible, loose structure. I know it’s not really a problem: it’s part of the very fabric of the book itself. It’s just that now, when I come to write an essay on it (The Tristapoedia as a microcosm of TS), I’m hamstrung by not being able to find what I’m looking for. Where does the Tristapoedia get its first mention? There’s no index, no helpful chapter summaries as in Tom Jones (and even those are often a load of rubbish - “Containing matters which will surprise the reader” for instance) . Fortunately, Google is my friend, picking up a JSTOR article that briefly references it in Volume V. A quick flick through finds it in Chapter XVI.

Now I’ve just got to read around it, refresh my memory of key passages (the key being, there are no ‘key’ passages)…and write 3,000 words on it by Wednesday afternoon. Wish me luck.

Last time I promised some comments on the first poem in Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets.

It is the first sonnet that is as good a place as any to begin; what it says is important in a sequence like Elegiac Sonnets, as it sets the tone for the rest of the collection. Smith is evidently acutely aware of this, as Sonnet 1 contains many hints about her concerns as they appear in many other sonnets. The very first line, for instance, introduces the Muse who appears directly in eight further sonnets, and indirectly in others, introducing the focus in many sonnets on poetry as an art, and this same line mentions “my earliest hours”, already emphasising what will be the highly personal nature of the sonnets. Interesting to note also is the final line, which Smith annotates as reference to “Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard,” 366th line.” However, the line reads (as she also notes) “He best can paint them [woes] who shall feel them most.” Smith’s paraphrase, “If those paint sorrow best – who feel it most!” changes the mascline pronoun to a gender non-specific one; giving the original quotation emphasises this difference, making her point stronger: that the female poet is here to stay. We also find nature and landscape making their first appearance of many in the collection, linked as a metaphor for melancholy; Smith’s melancholy is a “rugged path”, and “ills” appears in some editions as “hills”, and her “fantastic garlands” are made of “wild flowers”, such as grow off the beaten track.

The portrayal of the Muse in this first sonnet is a complex one; her “favours” are at once “dear” in the sense that they are valued highly, but also in the negative sense of expense: “how dear the Muse’s favours cost”, she says, if poets must feel melancholy more keenly than others. Indeed Smith plainly suggests that being a poet does heighten the emotional senses, “Points every pang, and deepens every sigh” that she feels. This is not a side that most would see, for the Muse’s is a “delusive art”, with outward shows of “fantastic garlands” that hide the “thorn” that festers “in the heart”. This “thorn” is not just in the heart; that it is “Reserve[d]…to fester” suggests that the Muse is deliberately targetting the poet, keeping the feelings that accompany her misfortunes in place to rot, making the situation worse. It is not that the Muse is creating the situations themselves; she hasn’t placed the poet on the “rugged path”, merely “Smiled on” it and “bids soft Pity’s melting eye / Stream o’er the ills she knows not to remove”; the Muse is asking Pity to produce tears, rather than doing anything to solve the situation. All of this renders quite ironic the Muse’s opening epithet, “partial”, suggesting some kind of benevolent force, as opposed the the picture that comes out by the end – merely reinforcing the “delusive” nature of her art, of course. We might question this portrayal, however, having read Smith’s comments in the ‘Preface’ of the first and second editions, wherein she tells the reader:

Some very melancholy moments have been beguiled by expressing in verse the sensations those moments brought.

Well, which is it, then? Is the Muse’s blessing really a curse, or does writing poetry soothe Smith’s woes? There are nearly a hundred sonnets in the collection, and I’m sure the answer’s in there somewhere.

A few Books well studied, and thoroughly digested, nourish the understanding more, than hundreds but gargled in the mouth, as ordinary Students use

I think we would do well to remember this dictum. What’s the point of knowing only a little about lots when you can know lots about a little? The latter is arguably more impressive; when you know little of lots, you can easily be caught out on the present subject by someone who has but one fact more. Very few can trip you up when you’re an expert in a field.