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Listening to Radio Four this morning Iearned for the first time that Marilyn French had died. (A few days ago, aged 79) The Today Programme had invited Sarah Dunant and Christina Odone to discuss the significance of French's most famous book, The Women's Room. I was slightly apprehensive, expecting a typical & pointless argument about feminism between two women with differing politics, but was very pleasantly surprised by how sane and affirmative the comments were ... at one point the presenter (John Humphries? I can't remember) sort-of-jokingly complained that he wasn't getting a word in edgewise...and then swiftly tried to turn that into a compliment -- how rare and pleasant it was, etc. The two women burst into laughter, and then very politely and attentively paused [astonishing how visual radio can seem sometimes!] for him to say something. He stumbled his way towards a question.
Of course, both his guests have loads of experience as speakers and presenters on radio themselves. But listening to them was heartening -- too often these discussions are nothing more than an excuse for a sort of faux-debate, neither side really listening to each other as they trot out their lines and try to talk over each other and have to be stopped by the host so the other one gets equal time. And that laughter... the laughter of women together.... it lifted my heart and stirred an old memory but I couldn't put my finger on it... Finally I had to dig out one of my External Memory Repositories (aka a book I wrote many years ago called Encyclopedia of Feminism) and eventually -- even though there's not an entry on Laughter (which I now think there should be) -- I found it --
A Question of Silence was a film made by Maureen Gorris (Netherlands) in 1981, and ends in a scene in court, with laughter spreading and swelling through all the women present. A wonderful scene, exhilaratingly subversive as I remember.
As for The Women's Room (getting back to Marilyn French), I recall that when I read it, probably not too long after it came out in 1977, I was disappointed. It struck me as out-dated, a blast from the past, and of little relevance to me, personally. Well, I was young -- Marilyn French was old enough to be my mother -- and what she wrote about seemed very remote, it just didn't chime in with my own experiences of life or relationships. Also, it was quite a depressing book. So, I had a very narrow view, and the fact that it became such a big best-seller surprised me -- obviously, it affected many women much more deeply. I know that in Britain the book was published with the shout-line "This Book Will Change Your Life!" And a recent survey of women readers confirmed that many of them felt that it truly had.
Tags: marilyn french; the women's room; femini
Current Mood:  hopeful
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It's kind of insane, I know, to make a purchase like this at a time when I am trying to clear more books OUT of my house, but I have just bought THE NEW ANNOTATED SHERLOCK HOLMES (edited with notes by Leslie S. Klinger) -- all three huge volumes.
But - oh! -- they are SO wonderful! Pictures, notes, and of course, the stories and novels themselves. And of course -- since I already had the complete works in paperback -- it is mainly all the notes I wanted it for. Original illustrations, old photographs, etc. are very nice, too, but it's the notes about what one scholar (or enthusiast) or other has puzzled out regarding Holmes' private life based on hints and suggestions in "the canon" that I think I love the most. Was he gay? Was he married? Formerly married? Was he a woman? Was Mycroft actually in league with criminals? Hours of endless fun! Such intense scrutiny devoted to a fictional character makes me think -- can Holmes truly be called fictional? He seems more real than many people who actually lived.Tags: sherlock holmes; books
Current Mood: happy
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Just got a flyer through the door advertising the opening of a new hair and beauty salon in the village. Always nice to hear about a new business in these troubled economic times, and I'm guessing that one of the young ladies running it (they only give their first names) is the same person who did a very good job of cutting my hair a few months ago, just after she qualified as a hairdresser.
Then I scanned down the list of "Available Treatments" -- hair colouring, styling and cutting isn't even mentioned, I supppose all those things can be taken for granted -- and noticed along with the !!!!SUNBED!!! (exclaimation marks theirs) they'll be offering aromatherapy, massage, light therapy, colourpuncture [huh??], Past Life Regression --
Oh, hang on. I'm not really sure I want to go to a beauty salon that offers such things. I can just imagine lying there on the sunbed, only to discover I'm suddenly on the sands of ancient Egypt, about to get a whipping if I don't get back to work on building that pyramid...or worse!
And I wonder what sort of therapy "colourpuncture" might be. Like acupuncture, only instead of using needles (such a turn-off) maybe beams of coloured light...??
Tags: local news
Current Location: five miles from the village
Current Mood: amused
Current Music: silence
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The short-list for the Arthur C. Clarke Award is still a few weeks away from being decided, but -- for the first time ever, I think -- a list of all the books the judges have had in to read and consider (46) has been made public, here: http://vectoreditors.wordpress.com/2009/02/11/2009-arthur-c-clarke-award-submissions/
Thus allowing plenty of time for anyone interested to try to out-guess them.
Feeling that I'd at least SEEN (even if not actually read) every single SF novel published in Britain in 2008, I was surprised to find there were still a few on that list I didn't know. But not many. Another caveat: I've only read one (or two -- depends on your definition, I guess) of the "mainstream" titles.
But I won't let that stop me. Here's my idea of what the short-list should look like:
OMEGA by Christopher Evans
THE NIGHT SESSIONS by Ken MacLeod
THE QUIET WAR by Paul McAuley
HOUSE OF SUNS by Alistair Reynolds
ANATHEM by Neal Stephenson
... and since I think it's usually a list of six, that leaves a space for either a book I haven't read, or another one that I wouldn't at all object to seeing there, e.g.:
MATTER by Iain M. Banks or WINTERSTRIKE by Liz Williams or SATURN'S CHILDREN by Charles Stross or even HALTING STATE by Charles Stross (again! what it must be, to be so prolific that your novels can be in competition with themselves)
I hadn't even heard of THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO by Patrick Ness before but what a great title! Looking it up, it sounds terrific, definitely one I have to read, and also like it could be strong enough to overcome my dislike of putting YA titles in competition against novels written for grown-ups. (I love a lot of children's books, but it just doesn't seem right or fair to me to cross categories that way. Yet there will always be the occasional exception, a book that transcends boundaries, and these days I think some books that really were originally intended for adults -- and would certainly never have been published as such twenty years ago -- get published as YA for marketing reasons.) I also haven't read KETHANI by Eric Brown, but intend to do so very soon, maybe even before the real short-list is announced.Tags: arthur c. clarke awards
Current Location: world-o-work
Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: silence
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Big news around here -- what counts as big news in the quiet rural area where I live -- for the past few years has been an impending introduction of beavers to the area. So I knew what the headline referred to when I bought the local paper, but it made me laugh, and although it is early in the year to tag anything as "silliest headline of the year," this one will likely get my vote:
Beavers bask in financial glory
While most people are feeling the pinch of the credit crunch, four furry families are basking in financial glory this week.
_____________________
But did they include a picture of these lucky beavers rolling around in piles of cash? Or heading off to the high street to single-handedly (paw-edly?) rescue Ravvi or Adams' or Whittards or M&S from the financial melt-down? No! And why not? Because they couldn't. Nobody's giving the beavers cash...and anyway, it's only £40,000 pounds, over two years, split between four families -- I don't know how big beaver families are, but if the People's Trust for Endangered Species (PTES) offered my family £5,000 to help us settle into a new country, while we'd certainly be grateful for the money, I don't think it could fairly be called "financial glory" -- especially as we'd be expected to build our own home, and anyway there's not a lot of places that accept cash in Knapdale, or anything to buy, or even shops...
Typical journalistic misrepresentation!
I found one of the headlines on an inside page nearly as ridiculous: Festive Road Checks
Except I know that for a certain type of journalist, the word "festive" pops out like an involuntary spasm when they have to write about anything that happens in the month of December, and doesn't mean the traffic police were wearing Santa suits or investigating that the roads were in a sufficiently jolly mood or correctly decorated with tinsel and lights....
You'd never guess I used to work on a newspaper, would you?
Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Seasonal
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The Magic: The Story of a Film by Christopher Priest (GrimGrin Studio)
The subtitle is somewhat misleading, as is the claim on the back jacket that the book is "a unique insight into the way a major film is developed from a novel."
Unique, yes, as this is Chris's personal take on the film The Prestige, based on his novel of the same title. However, as he admits, he had absolutely no contact with the film-makers, no influence on the script or how the film was made, and his only information about what was going on while it was being made, as he describes quite frankly, came from the same sources available to any other member of the public curious about what Christopher Nolan's new film was going to be -- that is, he surfed the internet, read people's blogs, logged onto discussion boards, and generally attempted to sift fact from fantasy. After the film was released he watched it more than once and, quite naturally, because he is intelligent and perceptive and has a long-standing interest in movie-making, he had some interesting and even insightful things to say about it. But "uniquely insightful" only in the sense that every critically intelligent response is unique to the person who makes it. I was most impressed by his close reading of the complexities of the opening sequence, which was almost enough to make me re-think my own reaction to the film (lukewarm), which does seem to be made in a way that rewards multiple viewings. Chris also makes some very good points about the difference between a story about a mystery, and a story that relies on keeping something secret.
And yet, at the end, I felt his cogent criticisms were at risk of being dragged down or buried inside an over-long, rambling narrative that would have been better reshaped as a shorter, sharper essay. I was left feeling dissatisfied and a bit puzzled, wondering what the point of it was. I suppose the point is simply that he had things he wanted to write, all connected in some way with his book or Christopher Nolan's film (and although the film could not exist without the book, it is not simply a dramatized version of the novel -- it's a different thing), and so he wrote it, and published it himself. (price £16.99, 143pp. indexed.)
Ersatz Wines is another book Chris has published under his own imprint, but this one I think will be of interest to a wider audience. It's a collection of his earliest short stories, most of them never before published (yes, that's right, these are stories he was unable to sell when he wrote them back in the early-to-mid-1960s) -- a dodgy proposition rescued by the context in which they are set: an autobiographical introduction about his beginnings as a writer and notes on what he was trying to do in each story and why it failed.
I think that most writers are interested to learn from the attempts of others; every writer's story is different, and yet there are similarities in most experiences. And even bad stories have much to teach us. This is a very different take on the writer's memoir, and I found it fascinating. I'm just sorry the notes weren't just a little longer and more detailed. (price £16.99, 166pp.)
Tags: christopher priest; writing; book review
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