February 10, 2010 · 1 Comment
And so, the second book of the year becomes a DNF. When I closed The Year of Magical Thinking – perhaps the 21st century’s most highly praised book on death – this evening, around page 120, I knew I wasn’t going to re-open it. Highly praised, but I just didn’t get it; indeed, I found it irritating, and yes I feel terrible for saying that. This is not the story of a woman who lost her husband to a sudden heart attack and who suffered a daughter drifting near to death thanks to pneumonia. This is a book about those real events.
Perhaps it’s not a bad book; but it is not what the reviews and the coverage said it was, and crucially, it was not what I wanted; the danger of writing a book about something, especially something like grief – rather than someone (fictional or real), somewhere, or some story – is that you will attract people who have been affected by that thing in the real world, and drawn by the dark energy of the subject, not the presence of the writing or the power of the book, they are hunting. Those people – and I am one – are looking for something very specific, specific to them, their own truth, and your book about your pain will seem to them meagre, dry and so completely curious as to be incomprehensible. Consider how sad this comment about the book on Amazon is; bone-dry, when the facts are full of tears:
“I bought this book as I thought it was a book to help bereaved people generally, but although parts of it helped regarding the loss of my daughter at the age of 45, I would say that it is really for widows.”
Categories: Books and reading
Tagged: grief, loss, joan didion, memoir, dnf
Via App.itize.us, a new iPhone apps blog, comes 51 Japanese Characters. Simple but fun, it features 51 Japanese “characters” – otaku, samurai, gyaru etc; give it a shake and it’ll mix and match their body parts.
Secondly, from the Japan Graphic Designers Association (JAGDA) and Heidelberg Japan K. K., “(^_^)365(O_O)” (Hello 365) tear-off calendar for 2010. 365 varying images from a variety of designers which the app makes it easy to export, so they’re ideal for use as iPhone wallpaper. The image above is from the 2nd of Feb, and it’s the one I’m currently using.
Categories: Games · Japanorama · iPhone
Tagged: apps, wallpaper
This is and other excellent factoids in a strange little piece on the Guardian website:
“Inspired by Mayor John Bickerstaffe’s visit to the Eiffel Tower in 1889, it survived a fire at the top eight years later and was largely rebuilt in 1921-4 because cheapskate owners had failed to use rust-proof paint. Mistaken for a lighthouse, it lured the Norwegian barque Abana ashore in 1894. With good binoculars, her fragmentary remains at low tide off Little Bispham form part of the middle-distance view.”
Previous posts on Blackpool on The Wired Jester.
Categories: In My Life
Tagged: blackpool, tourism
“You know, when they forced Khruschev out, he sat down and wrote two letters to his successor. He said – ‘When you get yourself into a situation you can’t get out of, open the first letter, and you’ll be safe. When you get yourself into another situation you can’t get out of, open the second letter’. Well, soon enough, this guy found himself into a tight place, so he opened the first letter. Which said – ‘Blame everything on me’. So he blames the old man, it worked like a charm. He got himself into a second situation he couldn’t get out of, he opened the second letter. It said – ‘Sit down, and write two letters’” – An old anecdote, quoted in Traffic
Barack Obama needed a response to the loss of Teddy Kennedy’s old seat to the Republicans, and while he talked about being more direct with the voters, and, as per the advice from Khruschev (or was it Stalin?), he landed a punch on the old guy as well: ”Here’s my assessment of not just the vote in Massachusetts but the mood around the country — the same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office…. People are angry and they are frustrated. Not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years, but what’s happened over the last eight years.”
Fine stuff, but it’s the first part of Obama’s reply that’s really interesting – and perhaps shows his true character, an incisive, but remote observer comfortable with theory, even at his own expense. To be a compelling politician, to achieve his remarkable victory, he needed to be an expression of cultural forces, views and desires.
So what then, is David Cameron – who at times has tried to harness some of the Obama magic – an expression of?
Keep reading →
Categories: Ephemera and links · Photography
Tagged: conservatives, david cameron, images, photoshop, politics
Previously:
Starting the reading for 2010 a little late; it took me a while to finish Richard Holmes’ Age of Wonder, which is both excellent and substantial. As per usual, this post will be updated throughout the year with brief impressions of the books and a slightly less than arbitrary star rating. Thanks to Christmas presents, loans, and plenty of Amazon time, the to-read pile is so tall as to be in danger of toppling over. Time to make a start with a big, thick book then. Based loosely on Hamlet and with some chapters narrated by a dog, first up is a big selling American hit:
16th January – 1st February. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, David Wroblewski.It’s all about a mute boy called Edgar, who lives on a farm in rural middle America with his parents, who breed a unique type of dog. Their perfect world is undone by the arrival of Edgar’s father’s brother. The plot is closely mapped to that of Hamlet, and while, for the first half, mixing high tragedy with modern, detailed prose and a free-roaming viewpoint results in a book that sinks its emotional hooks deep into you and is very compelling, the second half didn’t, for me, manage to reconcile the source with the new setting as seamlessly. It’s still an excellent novel, with beautiful descriptions of the natural world and excellent canine characters.
2nd February – 9th February. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion. I didn’t find in it what so many others did; to me it seemed dry and irritating. DNF.
Categories: Books and reading
Tagged: 2010, novels, reading
Previously:
2006 – 25 books, 28% non-fiction, and my book of the year was Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated.
2007 – 24 books, 33% non-fiction, far fewer contemporary novels, and my pick of the year was Crime and Punishment.
2008 – 22 books, 54% non-fiction, all but one of the novels were contemporary. Best book I read that year was Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.
And 2009? Well, I read more books – 25 – than last year, with one DNF. The number of non-fiction books dropped; only six titles, 24% of the total, lower than ever before. Whether this is related to the fact this has felt like my best year in reading for a long time, I’m not sure. True, two of the non-fiction titles did belong at the bottom of the table – Jung Chang’s wearingly negative Mao biography and Philip Norman’s outdated and joyless Beatles book, Shout! – but the other four were among the best, with Ma Jian’s reckless Red Dust playing a big part in sending me to China on my sabbatical, Michael Lewis’s compelling The Blind Side introducing me to American Football and Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder illuminating the links between art, science, madness and genius in a group of late 1700s scientists and thinkers.
There was also journalist Anthony Loyd’s second volume of autobiography. In the first, he is a heroin addict who decides the best way to get off the junk and get his life together is to do a quick course in photojournalism, and then go to Bosnia at the height of the civil war and give war reporting a go. The follow up, Another Bloody Love Letter, features moments considerably less sane than that. It is, however, suffused with more self-knowledge, more sadness and more righteous anger, all of which make it a terrific book to read.
All four of these non-fiction books are well worth reading. But 2009 was primarily a year for novels; I even managed to read one that was actually published in 2009 – Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply. It wasn’t one of my favourites though; although it showed up on a lot of year-end ‘Best of’ lists in the US, for me, Await Your Reply was the equivalent of an album with a terrific three song stretch and nine ho-hum tracks. I certainly don’t regret having read it, but it’s not the book out of all 25 that I’d leap to recommend. It’s good to see a well written (or, ‘literary’ in publishing terminology) novel which deals with identity theft, the disconnect between the web and the world outside, but you have to read a fairly turgid first half to get to the good stuff. I wrote at the time that ‘when the book kicks into gear, it is terrific, at least for a little while, Chaon managing to remove the bottom from the characters’ world and letting them fall a long way. As good as this part is, it struggles, like so many modern books, to end, and mostly fritters away the menace and meaning of these highlights.’ Looking back, I think that’s a fair judgement, at least in terms of reflecting how I felt.
So what were the highlights?
Keep reading →
Categories: Books and reading · Tech
Tagged: cormac mccarthy, dan chaon, ebooks, haruki murakami
[Book] How could it not be? The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet is the new one from David Mitchell, my favourite living author. It sees Mitchell’s fiction returning to Japan – site of the many of the stories in his first book, Ghostwritten, and a place that helped shape him as a writer:
“In 1799 the young Dutch clerk of the title finds himself one of the few westerners to visit Japan, a closed society that keeps its foreigners confined to a walled island.”
Amazon doesn’t yet have the cover of the book, but preview copies have been doing the rounds, and you can see it here, along with a positive early review from Seth Marko:
“I don’t want to post a full-on review, filled with information that will ruin things for anyone interested, but I did finish reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet last night. Holy shit, what a book. All I will say at this point is this: it does not have the complex, head-exploding machinations of some of Mitchell’s past work (Ghostwritten, Cloud Atlas esp.) but it does prove that Mitchell has been no fluke – his burgeoning talent has hit full stride at this point and Autumns showcases his immense ability to write in any genre he chooses and blow your socks off in the process… There are multiple narrators throughout, as is Mitchell’s wont, but it is structurally done in such a subtle way that you hardly notice – you are just swept along in the flow, wondering, as a foreigner like Jacob, how much of the lush, inner world of Japan you will be allowed to glimpse. My god, if this book isn’t the one that earns him that elusive Booker prize…”
Listed in a pretty good 2010 books preview from the Guardian, which also mentions The Cello Suites.
Categories: Books and reading · Japanorama
Tagged: david mitchell, wishlist
Photoshop Disasters is great fun if you want to see just how warped software can make people (well, women usually) look – think missing limbs, plastic skin and banana-shaped spines – but these images are easy to detect because they’re just obviously wrong. How do you spot the Photoshop work that isn’t a disaster? This post takes a photo from Victoria’s Secret and puts it through a CSI-esque process to find out what’s been fiddled with.
Previously on The Wired Jester: Too Much Photoshop.
Categories: Photography
Tagged: photoshop
[Game] PIXEL!, an Xbox 360 Arcade title, recommended by Jean Snow’s new Game blog:
“The third entry in the ‘Arkedo Series’ of retro inspired games, PIXEL! is a mostly straightforward take on the platforming genre, mixing 8-bit visuals with a current gen sheen. Arkedo still manages to give the game a very modern look, with simple but enjoyable gameplay that harkens back to old-school 2D platformers (with a few little twists). Arkedo is a French independent studio founded by Camille Guermonprez and Aurélien Regard. Releases so far include two other titles in the ‘Arkedo Series’ (the puzzle/platformer JUMP! and the puzzler SWAP!), as well as DS titles Nervous Brickdown and Big Bang Mini.”
Categories: Games
Tagged: indie games, wishlist, xbox 360
Couldn’t find any wrapping paper I liked for Mrs Jester’s presents – something of a dilemma, given that I was shopping in my lunch hour on the 23rd and fully intended to get to the pub after work. The answer came when I gave up and ended up, as is often the case with me, in Foyles bookshop:
A map.
Because maps are paper, too.
Plus, it would be a nice way to refer back to my sabbatical trip in the autumn to China – the Jesteress came with me for the first few days, and then had to return to the UK for work. I bought a large map of China, and wrapped her presents in it, trying to take care to leave some of the locations we’d visited together visible. Worked very well, the paper was easy to fold, and a £6 map covered all the presents.
All that remains is for me to say Happy Christmas, and thanks for reading and for your comments – 2009 has been a successful one for this blog, and I think the distinction between The Wired Jester, and my personal site has been really beneficial. I hope you have a good break!
Categories: In My Life
Tagged: christmas, presents, decorating, maps
