A beautiful village on the edge of a dusty plain on the Northern edge of the Sierra Nevada in Southern Spain. More on Flickr.
La Calahorra, Andalucia, 1982
Month: January 2024
On the spectrum
Two novels, one small and mean, one vast and generous, both magnificent
This year I started a bookclub in our house – with mixed results if I’m honest. It’s called ‘The Small Book Club’ and I seeded it with a pile of cheap and second-hand novels all of which are less than 200 pages long (some less than 100). You can see what I’m trying to do here – I’m trying to overcome the collapsed attention spans and poisonous TikTok habits of my family by offering them only short books to read. Like I said, mixed results (my own collapsed attention span and poisonous TikTok habit aren’t helping).
Anyway, one of my children actually read a book from the pile – Nabokov’s ‘The Eye‘ – and, when we were chatting about it afterwards, provided a review that ought to be printed on the back of the book. She called it: ‘incel Sherlock Holmes’.
I honestly can’t argue with that. I mean this little mystery is a malignant jewel, composed of equal parts corrosive irony, elemental disdain and lofty amusement. Nabokov doesn’t have a humanist bone in his body. He’s like an aesthete Jordan Peterson. His perspective is so powerfully misanthropic – even the sympathetic characters are drawn with such withering hostility that it’s impossible to identify with anyone here. And the other characters occupy a spectrum that goes from weak and insipid, via stupid and venal all the way to cruel and murderous (also imaginary or dead or both).
I know this doesn’t come close to capturing the magnificence of Nabokov – and I wouldn’t be grand enough to think that I could – and I may have been sensitised to this little book’s nastiness and disdain by the fact that I’ve almost finished another, much bigger book – Victor Hugo’s vast, I mean really vast Les Misérables, which – at least for the minute – is the grandest, most big-hearted and humane (also silly and occasionally demented) work of art I’ve ever encountered.
In fact, I grandly conclude that the two novels define, between them, the entire universe of possibility for a novelist. The whole spectrum. Everything that is achievable in a novel must, necessarily, sit on the line between these two books – between The Eye’s perfect and hateful 80 pages and Les Misérables’ perfect and generous 1,500.
They’re as different as two novels could possibly be. The Eye embodies what must be the very end, the very end-stop, of the novelistic form – beyond which it collapses into all those shorter forms and less magically coherent shapes. And I’m sure Les Misérables must constitute the most expansive form that the novel has ever taken (seriously, it’s bigger and more inclusive than Ulysses – in fact, imagine Ulysses exploded and stretched across 17 years and every lane and back alley and upstairs room in France and you have Les Misérables).
And, really, I’m ready to accept that this spectrum of novels thing is almost certainly unsupportable. I mean there are probably other axes that go off at various angles from the line at the very least – where you’ll find all the other branches of novel-writing and literary expression and involvement with life and love and death and so on.
I’ve been reading Les Misérables for over a year. It was supposed to be all over on 31 December last year (there are 365 chapters, you see, so I’d been getting through it one short chapter per day in a satisfying way) but my Kindle died in October and a kind of defeated tech ennui set in so the project stalled. But I’m back into it now and in the final stretch. Hugo had some ambitions for this one, his eighth novel:
The book before the reader’s eyes at this moment is from start to finish, in its entirety and in its detail – whatever the inconsistencies, the exceptions and the failings – the progression from evil to good, from wrong to right, from night to day, from craving to conscience, from putrefaction to life, from bestiality to duty, from hell to heaven, from nothingness to God. Point of departure: matter. Point of arrival: spirit. Hydra at the outset, angel at the last.
Hugo, Victor. Les Misérables (Penguin Classics) (p. 1114).
Nabokov had some thoughts about the scope of his book, but they’re different – somehow meaner (this is from the 1965 foreword):
I have always been indifferent to social problems, merely using the material that happened to be near, as a voluble diner pencils a street corner on the table cloth or arranges a crumb and two olives in a diagrammatic position between menu and salt cellar.
Nabokov, Vladimir. The Eye (Penguin Modern Classics) (p. 2).
Of course, we enjoy Nabokov’s disdain for us: for his meal ticket, his reason for being. It’s bracing. We forgive him even the several gargantuan spoilers, right here, in the book’s foreword (added for this English edition in 1965). We must be weak.
- Vladimir Nabokov, The Eye, 1930 (Nabokov’s own 1965 translation).
- Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, 1862 (Christine Donoghue’s 2015 translation).
- All the books in The Small Book Club, so far.
- When reading Les Misérables i was constantly getting lost (partly because of the ridiculous way Kindle eBooks are organised, it should be said. Thanks Jeff) so I – seriously – made a spreadsheet listing all 365 chapters so I could tick them off. It’s public. You’re welcome.
- Margaret Lockwood loves Nabokov.
- You can get this stuff on Goodreads.
- And if you’re going to tackle Ulysses, do yourself a favour – own the book obvs but listen to the sublime audiobook, read by peerless Jim Norton (Bishop Whatsisname from Father Ted) and an uncredited (also peerless) woman for the Molly bit.
Skycaps on a break
From the archives. At JFK, 24 April 2005. They’re telling me about the previous Friday night’s $205M Michigan lottery win.
Offset
More like this on old-school photo-sharing site Flickr. And, incidentally, I’ve been sharing my pics to Flickr for twenty years, which is making my head spin a bit. Still the only place that gives me the control I like over metadata, privacy and ownership, though. Seems crazy that Flickr still has essentially no competition, even from the brilliant, AI-assisted Google Photos and Apple iCloud.
Three films that are not one hundred years old
My Substack newsletter is called GROSS. I’m writing about all the top-grossing films since 1913 – but I’ve made an exception for the new year and reviewed three films from 2023.
I feel like I want subscribers to know that I occasionally watch a modern film. Normal service will resume with the next movie, 1931’s biggest hit the original Boris Karloff Frankenstein OMG.
(What you’ll get from GROSS is plain-language film reviews with some political, cultural and economic context – a materialist critique of the immaterial joys of the movies)
May December – never mind the quality, feel the width
Everyone loves this one. It’s in all the best-of-year lists. So you’ll probably disagree but I found it impossible to get past the acting. I mean there’s so much of it. So much in fact that the film turns in on itself and becomes hard to watch – involuted, hyper-ironic. By the time we got to the bit where one of the actors is acting the role of the actor acting the role of the real person who’s actually acted by one of the other actors, I’d essentially lost my grip on reality and found myself just randomly acting in my own house. And I’m not an actor. I understand this excess of acting may be some kind of second-order acting gag. That I might be supposed to laugh at all this acting and acting-upon-acting, that it’s a kind of actors’ in-joke. Actors laughing at themselves for all the acting. Sorry, I cannot.
The Creator – geopolitics in the future is hilarious and stupid
I honestly wanted to like this one. The grand imagery is persuasive, the central robot character is charming. But I ultimately couldn’t handle the ton-weight of Vietnam War analogies (and the grating analogies for American folly in general). My Lai, wartime Saigon, Abu Ghraib, Shock and Awe, Kilgore in his chopper, the highway of death, a kind of Cheney-McNamara hybrid, the Vietcong and the NVA, Condoleezza Rice, a traumatised vet with a grudge. They’re all here. And American policy in the movie seems to be essentially a Kissinger-inspired illegal bombing campaign. It’s a neocon-end of history clusterfuck. American imperial stupidity and solipsism projected forward 40 years.
The future world (we’re in the 2060s) seems to have been divided up using something resembling Orwell’s old map – the ‘New Asian Republic’ is the embodiment of the various paranoid Westen ‘Greater China’ fantasies – it seems to take in a large part of the Continent.
The story’s laboured AI parable is hardly less grating. The film wants us to believe that all the American corporate AI hysteria of the present day evolves into a lethal and deceptive military-industrial conspiracy (not, in itself, implausible). And that this machine is intent on destroying the benign AI settlement arrrived at in New Asia – where robots and humans (and ‘simulants’) co-exist happily, working in rice paddies and robot factories in happy mixed crews. In one establishing scene, a subtitled villager, about to be mown down by a stupid American special forces grunt, shouts something like “you can’t fight AI, it’s evolution!”
In fact, the stupidity and wickedness of the American forces is a theme. The squad sent to recover ‘the weapon’, a device thought to have world-ending power, is so inadequate as to be laughable. At one point, a distracted sergeant and ‘the new guy’ (our equally distracted hero, a human who has sympathy for the AIs because he’s going out with one) are left to recover it from an underground mega-vault. The sergeant is soon dispatched, of course.
Meanwhile, the weapon (actually a cute child-robot hybrid engineered to end all weapons) and our hero basically wander off. This happens multiple times. Vast American resources, er, miss the target, fall into the sea, get blown up by their own bombs (later on we learn that the destruction of Los Angeles – blamed on the AIs – that triggered all this argie-bargie in the first place might even have been American nuclear ‘human error’ – by this point we are not surprised).
I can’t tell if this focus on American incompetence is a deep critique of US military hubris or a cheap way to advance the story. You could easily decompose The Creator’s script into a series of material errors – oops – each of which terminates a scene and sets up the next. It’s mechanical. I won’t tell you how the film ends. I think you can probably work it out. It might be a metaphor for Taiwan or Ukraine or ChatGPT or Elon Musk or something.
The Boy and the Heron – dark swansong
It’s Miyazaki Hayao’s twelfth feature as a director (and his first in ten years). Most people had assumed he’d retired. If it were a live action film it would be in the horror section. Large parts of the movie, especially the middle section, take the form of an arbitrary sequence of inexplicable events, structured like a dream – a nightmare, in fact. In the cinema where I saw it people were laughing at the giant parakeets. This was a nervous reaction. The parakeets are terrifying and obviously the product of a nightmare (I read that they stand for the fascist bootboys of the wartime regime in Japan).
Likewise the bitter little old man who’s somehow lodged inside the beautifully-drawn heron of the title and the endless corridor of randomly numbered doors (I’m pretty sure I’ve had that dream) and the series of portals linking one unlikely location with the next and the ravenous pelicans and the long corridor that ends in a bright light and the tiny wooden dolls and the spooky stacking stones and the frightening avatar for the hero’s dead mother who haunts the film (and don’t get me started on the frogs).
And this nightmare is a profound one that begins in the trauma of a child’s experience of fire bombing. The war is present – floating embers and fierce flames recall the raid that killed our hero Mahito’s mother and we see the the fighter plane parts that his boorish father’s factory makes – fighter plane cockpit farings inexplicably shipped hither and thither on donkey carts – themselves from a bad dream.
We’re in a recognisably Ghibli world – the gorgeous clouds, the fields, the steam trains, the cute Datsun. But this is not Totoro or Kiki’s Delivery Service. The boy is on his own (his father’s a bore), the characters he meets are more likely to mean him ill than to help. Chaos and confusion are not resolved. It’s a dark and disorienting world. This one’s going to be with me for a while.
- Next film: Frankenstein! And not just any Frankenstein. It’s the James Whale/Boris Karloff Frankenstein from 1931. Watch it on Amazon Prime if you want to join in.
- In the UK May December is on various streaming services. The Creator is on Apple TV+ and The Boy and the Heron is in actual cinemas, in subtitled and dubbed versions.
- Here are my Letterboxd reviews.
Final act for the streamers
Netflix introduced ads and now Amazon Prime too. It’s your fault.
It’s a three-act drama
In act one it’s about growth—extravagent, out-of-control, venture-funded growth—you remember that. Piling on millions—hundreds of millions—of users as quickly as possible. And in this act the product improves. It has to. Features are added with no concern for cost—bigger libraries, 4K and HDR video, better sound. Data centres blossom everywhere, fast caches and CDNs eliminate latency. Distribution partners are falling over themselves to sign up, production budgets are lavish—insane, in fact (how about $58M per episode?). This is how you acquire a big audience and a chunky annuity income fast.
In act two—in the classical model—it’s crisis. Cheap money is over, we’re told, capital is withdrawn, invested elsewhere, exit horizons shorten. Services collapse or are quietly closed. Even the biggest corporations—the heroes of previous eras—admit defeat: their shabby content libraries and derivative branding weren’t up to the job. And the sheer profusion of competing services with impenetrable offers and stupid names was bound to produce a shake-out. Carnage.
Act three brings resolution—consolidation. Services are merged, prices increased and catalogues simplified. And, for users, everything gets worse. Say goodbye to 4K and password sharing. And, worse, ads are inserted. For a CFO or an investor the logic of the last one is absolutely unarguable. A huge library of video files, sitting on expensive, top-tier servers all over the world, begins to look like an under-exploited asset—or, worse, a liability. I mean they’re really not paying their way are they, all those MP4s? Just sat there, earning a bit of subscription income.
In this phase, that precious movie library is redefined as a vast store of unsold advertising inventory. And, as the economics gets nastier, not inserting ads—not sweating your asset properly—begins to look like a mug’s game. Especially when everyone else is doing it. Investors will only have one question—when are we introducing ads? In this world, the audience is also redefined.
And you, the happy punter, originally thought to be literally the ideal customer because you were ready to give Netflix or Amazon or Hulu money every month whether you used the service or not (basically a mug) begin to look a bit ‘low-yield’. Not really working hard enough for a decent return on investment. You are now the problem.
- Amazon’s announcement about the introduction of ads in their video streaming service says: “We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers.”
‘Working class golf’ – the posh media will never understand it
Broadcasters and journalists – please stop trying to explain darts.
I know you were privately educated and find darts to be kind of exotic – like chicken shops or pigeon racing – but when you invite a contributor to answer the question “…but is darts a sport?” or laughingly ask what “one-hundred-and-eighty!” means, you’re embarrassing yourself and your profession.
Every now and then we’re offered a vivid snapshot of the class composition of the British media and the instinctive prejudices of reporters, producers, editors and presenters. 16 year-old darts prodigy Luke Littler has given us a fresh illustration of the intractable and tedious ruling-class domination of the media in Britain, of the narrow and backward and tragically involuted interests of the major outlets.
Darts has been a recognised, international sport for decades (although Sport England, the official body, dominated by the men in blazers, only offered darts formal recognition in 2005). The famous players of my youth – Jocky Wilson, Eric Bristow, John Lowe – all went pro in the 1970s and were wealthy celebrities by the mid-eighties.
Playing darts – and the various grassroots championships and tournaments – has been a vital platform for working class men and women to enjoy themselves, to compete, to win fame and even to make some money – for a hundred years. But as a proletarian sport darts has been labelled as aberrant, a permanent outsider to the real sports. Here the chief sports writer from the posh people’s paper explains that darts can’t be a sport because its latest superstar doesn’t work out like Tiger Woods did, dodging the more salient comparison between golf and darts—that when you think about them for more than about a minute they’re both splendidly, indefensibly ridiculous activities.
Real sports in Britain were invented on the playing fields of Eton (and Rugby obvs) and codified by aristocratic amateurs. A pastime that emerged from the pubs and clubs of working people, played in precious time off by people who worked six days a week, couldn’t possibly be elevated to the status of a sport. The very idea that a sport might emerge in a wholly working-class environment, in the total absence of middle-class officials or governing bodies (or PE teachers and headmasters) was anathema. It literally could not be a sport.
So when reporters sent off to attend darts matches amusedly observe the scenes at the back of the crowd, ask fans why on earth they’ve come all the way from Holland and ‘share the atmosphere’ like clever anthropologists who’ve noticed something interesting happening amongst the lower classes, they’re perpetuating the stupid, backward class hostility that still structures life in Britain. They should stay away (send someone from the sports desk).
There have been quiet periods in the history of darts but the PDC world championship is now thirty years old (a break-away championship first contested by 16 leading players in 1994). Prize money was, from the very beginning – if not exactly Formula 1 – at least comparable to other world sports. Games were carried on live TV, winners were celebrated everywhere in the pop media. I once saw 1980s prodigy Phil “The Power” Taylor mobbed by fans and autograph hunters in an Irish airport. He was so chill.
The annual championship meeting has been filling the huge, main hall at Alexandra Palace for over 15 years. Every match sells out. I tried to get tickets for this year’s event months ago and evenings were going for over £250/ticket. Premier League footballers and soap stars fill the front tables.
PDC events have been noisy and chaotic – with crowds encouraged to dress up, bring signs and banners and come up with inventive chants – since at least the switch from Essex to Ally Pally in 2007. It’s one of the most entertaining sporting events you can watch live. Players enjoy the racket, play up to the audience and get extra energy from the noise behind them. Fans from Holland, Canada, the Baltics and elsewhere attend.
And to finish, the rules are really simple (there’s a handy one-page summary) and scoring is easy to understand (honestly, you could be an expert in ten minutes). Print them out and put them on the wall near the coffee machine.
- This scientific study compares scoring results from historic matches with those from the period when matches were played without audiences during the pandemic and actually concludes that there’s a (slight) negative effect from having a noisy crowd in the room.
- If you’re my age you may sometimes find yourself experiencing flashbacks to a 1970s ITV programme called The Indoor League, presented by retired cricketer Fred Trueman. On this 1975 episode you’ll see a 19 year-old Swedish prodigy Stefan Lord piling on the 180s and a tense women’s competition.
- Women have probably played darts for as long as the men (see The Indoor League for examples of competitive women, some travelling from other countries to play, back in the seventies). The women’s World series has been played for over twenty years and there are now dozens of professional players.
- Bullseye carried darts mania right through to the mid-nineties. It was a sweet show. Big-hearted entertainment from another era. Here’s a 1985 episode.
- It was mega-promoter Barry Hearn who perceptively called darts ‘working class golf’—a game played by ordinary people with extraordinary skills.