Choosing Books for Children

Someone asking for recommendations for good speculative fiction for children and teenagers got me thinking. As a culture we tend to feed young people the most awful rubbish in this genre. I don't mean books that are badly written or poorly plotted, I mean unrealistic fantasy.

People picking books for youngsters tend to avoid sex and violence, quite reasonably, but will not balk at choosing a book full of unicorns or angels, talking animals and walking trees. Does anybody ever stop to wonder which will do more harm to a young mind, the reality of sex and violence, or the unreality of fantasy and religion? Truth? Or make-believe?

How can we expect children to mature into adults who can understand and cope with the real world if we feed them bizarre fantasy worlds and strictly-censored distortions? As a society we warn parents that TV shows might contain 'themes' - usually meaning the story deals with drug abuse, incest, torture, sex, or some other set of issues that many children could use our help in understanding. Yet there are no warnings for shows that involve magic beings (vampire stories, religious broadcasts, talking dogs, psychics, etc.), vigilanteism (Batman, for instance), or state-sanctioned violence (cop shows, P.I. shows, and war stories).

I'm sure that finding suitable books for children is hard but that doesn't mean we have to feed them the strange fare that currently passes for acceptable. Forgetting the complete abandonment of reality most of these stories represent, just consider the political statements that most fairy stories (and fantasy novels) make about the legitimacy of inherited power, or the complete abnegation of personal moral responsibility implicit in any story involving 'higher powers' (as gods tend to be called in fiction these days) who dictate or enforce moral absolutes.

We can't expect a world full of morally responsible, socially skilled, and politically sophisticated adults if we give our children unrealistic, nonsense to read.

First Puppy: The Motion Picture

I despair. President Obama's dog now has its own series of books for children.

Why do I despair?

1. Because people refer to this pooch as 'The First Puppy'. Doesn't that just make you want to throw up? It's not the dog's fault, of course. If the Obamas had bought a tortoise we'd have books about the First Damned Tortoise instead.

2. The world is full of aspiring writers, some of them writing very good books that will never be published because the world's publishing houses just don't have the capacity to publish every good book that is written. One of the reasons they don't have the capacity is because they're publishing crappy, ghost-written celebrity memoirs, celebrity cook-books, celebrity novels, and, now, stupid celebrity dog stories!

3. The 'vast majority' of the Obama family's US$2.5 million annual income comes from the sale of his own celebrity memoir! No doubt the First Tortoise's contribution will take this income up considerably - especially when the film rights are sold.

4. People are idiotic enough to buy these books. (And, no, I'm not going to give you a link. If you really want to find them, Google on "stupid dog books for the mentally disabled".)

Jathia's Wager - Don't Bother

I just finished watching an open source movie - and it was awful.

Now I like open source software. I use it all the time. It's great. So it seemed worth a look to see what an open source movie was like - especially since this one is a sci-fi movie called 'Jathia's Wager'. Go and see it at the Moviepals site if you have 20 minutes to spare.

I suppose it's early days and open source movies might get better, but this one was very badly written. (The filming, directing and acting looked pretty ordinary too but what do I know from making movies?) There were tedious passages with no dialogue where almost nothing happened. There were tedious passages of pure exposition where absolutely nothing happened. Oh, and did I mention it was tedious? Don't waste your time looking for realistic dialogue or any hint of humour, either.

[WARNING: Spoiler.]

As for the plot, I have no idea what happened. It's a mystery. There was a guy running around a lot. He seemed to be one of some humans left behind when others went transhuman. Although most of the future humans were religious nuts and liked being ignorant (so no change there, then) our hero had the option to join the post-humans , which, after one of the tedious exposition segments I mentioned earlier, he took. Then he came back for his sister, who either went with him and came back again, or had a dream about it and then ran into the hills screaming. Don't ask me which, or why. As for the 'wager' in the title, maybe I missed something...

In places the film had that quirky, amateurish quality that made 'The Man Who Fell to Earth' so charming. In other places it was just amateurish. Parts were even (unintentionally) comical.

I imagine it took the people involved lots of time and effort to put this together, so it is sad that they wasted their opportunity to do something interesting and good. There must be hundreds of excellent writers out there who could have written a script a thousand times better than 'Jathia's Wager'. Maybe the up-side of this is that, having set the ball rolling, the next open-source movie project will attract better writers.

Buy Northern Lights and Upset the Vatican!

What idiots Catholics must be. I'm one of those people who never pay much attention to what new, blockbuster films are being released and I very rarely read a best-selling novel. Yet when the Vatican newspaper l'Osservatore Romano starts trying to suppress a book - and the film of the book - it really gets my attention.

The film is The Golden Compass (staring the strangely attractive Nicole Kidman) and it is based on a book by Philip Pullman called Northern Lights. The Vatican says the book is anti-religious (Big deal. So what?) and shows just how terrible it is to be without 'God'. To quote from l'Osservatore Romano, Pullman's writing apparently shows that "when man tries to eliminate God from his horizon, everything is reduced, made sad, cold and inhumane." Of course, if this is really what Pullman is trying to show, then he is simply wrong. All magical beings, including 'God', have been long since eliminated from my horizon and it has only made life more deep, cheerful, happy and humane. The idea that it could be otherwise seems nonsensical. Surely living in this real world of wonder and beauty has to be a richer and more rewarding experience than living in a bizarre fantasy world of gods and devils? What is wrong with these people?

On the other hand, it is possible that Pullman didn't havethat in mind at all. Perhaps he just wanted to write a good yarn – although it sounds like he did have a bit of a dig at the Church, God bless him – and he does belong to the British Humanist Association. (The cringing, wimps who made the film, apparently removed all references to the Church so that they wouldn't get into trouble with these fanatical nutcases. Serves them right, doesn't it, that they got their wrists slapped by Il Papa anyway!)

Of course, the truly stupid thing about the Vatican's rantings is that if The Golden Compass and Northern Lights really do paint such a bleak and terrible picture of what it is like to be without a god (on your horizon) wouldn't that make them great adverts for the Church? Wouldn't that make people want to give up their life of sense and sanity and start eating pretend flesh and drinking pretend blood like the Pope does? Yet the Catholic League in the USA is trying to organise a boycott of the film saying its purpose is "to bash Christianity and promote atheism.”
If only I thought that was the film's purpose! Then I'd rush out and see it. As it is, not even Nicole Kidman and what I imagine are great special effects will get me into a cinema these days. I might, however, buy the book. Pullman's membership of the National Secular Society being something of a recommendation. Sadly, Northern Lights is a fantasy and I don't really like fantasies unless they are allegorical or extremely entertaining. However, since Northern Lights appears to be both, maybe I will.

Which raises another issue. Why is the Vatican getting so flagellatory about a fantasy? Isn't the point of a thing declaring itself to be a fantasy to say ' Don't believe me. I'm not true.'? But then, the guys at the Vatican are used to reading fantasy and treating it as gospel. Maybe they just can't tell the difference anymore. Or maybe, since the film grossed US$26 million in its first weekend, they are getting nervous about competing products?

All That's Left For Men Is Meaningless Gibber

I saw a film today called 'The Ice Harvest'. Despite an all-star cast, it wasn't great. It has been described as a 'neo-noir' comedy but to say it was 'black' would have been an understatement – 'bleak' maybe! (Is bleak the new black?) Anyway one of the characters at one point says (something like); 'In this country today, all that's left for men is money and pussy.' (The dialogue in films is so hard-bitten these days, don't you think? Maybe it's because Americans admire people who talk tough – or maybe it's just that all American writers are trying to be Ernest Hemingway.) The line was so incongruous in the mouth of the character who spoke it that it really stood out and I started thinking about what on Earth the writers (Richard Russo and Robert Benton) could have meant by it.

Obviously there is the idea here that men are somehow degraded or diminished by our society. This seems like a reasonable statement. I have known a lot of men who feel that society has taken important things away from them, that they cannot be 'real' men, that their dignity has been stripped from them. Some say these things with sad resignation, some with anger. Some feel that society owes them something in return for what it has taken. I have little sympathy with them. They have a dog-like view of the world. They want to push and shove and snarl to find their proper place in the pack. They are frustrated that pushing and shoving and snarling are almost worthless skills when it comes to being top dog. Men with no fangs and narrow shoulders can get the power and the mates by exercising other abilities the complainers don't necessarily possess or value. It just isn't fair.

But this takes us nowhere. In any human society, no matter how it is structured, all that is there for men is 'money and pussy' ('power and mates' – translating from American-filmese). What else is there? (Well, things like knowledge, culture, art, love, and so on but these are all too girly for the great majority of men to care about at all.) To say that power and mates are all there is for men today is just an empty statement. It's all there ever was! It's all there ever will be! It is the very nature of the universe in which we live. Men struggle to acquire power. Power gives access to mates. So what was the guy in the film complaining about?

I dunno.

After pondering this stupid line for an hour or so, I've come to the conclusion it is just one more empty statement. Like so much that is said that sounds profound and meaningful, it is neither.

And I should have known better than to expect to learn anything – or even to hear anything interesting – from a film. It is just not a medium that lends itself to intelligent content. God knows, it's hard enough to find even a book that has anything sensible to say. So I hereby renew my long-standing resolution to look for and to expect nothing at all from films (and novels) except mindless entertainment.

Kinky Boots - A Step Towards Transsexual and Transvestite Acceptance?

You may have noticed the unpronounceable Chiwetel Ejiofor in other things (Serenity, Inside man). He's one of those actors you sometimes don't recognise - they seem so different in their different parts. But you could not have missed him in Kinky Boots playing Lola, a larger-than-life drag queen. I saw this very funny film just a few days ago and was immensely impressed. If you like dry, understated British humour, you'll probably love it too. The film is all about a down at heel shoe factory (sorry) in the English Midlands that saves itself from bankruptcy by producing a line of exotic footwear especially for cross-dressers. Apparently 'inspired by' a true story it is a noteworthy film in several ways.

Firstly, it's good – funny, clever and great fun. Solid entertainment.

Secondly, it is one of a rash of recent films that deal with male cross-dressing. Transvestitism and transsexualism appear to be increasingly in vogue these days. It reminds me of my childhood in the sixties and seventies when films and the media increasingly featured gays, as part of a gradual social change from absolute rejection to (general) acceptance. Maybe something similar is going on for cross-dressers. Seems unlikely but how else do you explain all this media and film activity?

Next there is the way the film was so very sympathetic to Lola the drag-queen-tuned-shoe-designer played by Ejiofor. I haven't seen anything like it since The Crying Game (which would have been a great film except for that silly plot about a terrorist attack it was lumbered with). In Kinky Boots, Lola is a real person, we get to know her and like her. She isn't just a monstrous character or just comic relief (both of which are pretty much what they did to the character of Lady Chablis in the film of Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil, despite a generally sympathetic treatment.)

Finally, it was the first film I've seen featuring cross-dressing that actually distinguished between drag queens (what we old folk used to know as 'female impersonators') and ordinary transvestites. Every film I have ever seen that had a cross-dresser in it has featured a drag queen. These are the RuPauls of the world, the mostly transsexual, gay, stage performers who are the tiny, shiny toe of an enormous submerged court shoe of ordinary non-extrovert, non-performing, and almost exclusively heterosexual men who like to dress up as women. Maybe people like that don't make good material for films, or maybe the drag queens are simply the vanguard of a very long process of changing public perception.

Anyway, rent or buy Kinky Boots this weekend. It is highly recommended.

Confabulation To The Max

I’ve written before about confabulation – to my mind, one of the keys to understanding human nature. Once you are tuned in to the phenomenon, you start spotting it everywhere. In the past couple of days, I have come across two extreme examples: one in the medical literature and the other in fiction.

The medical one first. I came across this on the British Psychological Society website. ‘AD’ is a 65-year-old man who suffered a cardiac arrest which caused damage to the fronto-temporal region of his brain. This brought on a number of ill-effects, including anterograde amnesia (the inability to remember things that have happened since the cardiac arrest). The really interesting thing about AD, however, is that he now tends to adopt different personalities depending on his social setting. His doctors set up some scenarios to test it. In a cocktail bar, AD immediately assumed the role of bartender, inventing an elaborate story to explain his presence there. In a hospital kitchen, he became the head chef, again with a complex story to explain himself. His doctors describe his condition as a form of ‘disinhibition’ but to me this is just an extreme case of confabulation, probably in response to the amnesia. In the absence of any memory of why he is where he is, AD seems to be confabulating plausible stories. The strange part is why he always chooses to be a central character in the situation. It may be no coincidence that the guy was a politician before the heart attack.

The fictional example of extreme confabulation is the film ‘Stay’. I watched this mostly because it has Naomi Watts in it – possibly my favourite actress – but I had fairly low expectations. As it played – a story about an art student (Ryan Gosling) and a therapist (Ewan McGregor) who becomes obsessed with trying to prevent him killing himself – I was finding it interesting enough but nothing special. In fact, as the story began to grow increasingly weird and the identity of the student seemed to be merging with that of the therapist and the direction become more and more David Lynch-like, I was beginning to get a bit irritated with it. I’ve had too many films that go all surreal and ‘deep and meaningful’ on me and I didn’t like the idea that I’d wasted my time with another. Then, in the last five minutes, a wonderful twist was revealed that redeemed the whole thing and turned it into one of the best films I’ve seen in ages. And the confabulation thing? Well, I’m sorry, but if I told you that, I’d give away the twist. But trust me, it’s there.

The Invisible Man

I started reading ‘The Invisible Man’ by H. G. Wells today and what a pleasure it is to read first-class writing again.

The last book I read was called ‘Shock’ by Robin Cook and it was rubbish. Cook has several books in print but I can’t understand why. The man is almost illiterate. His grammar is awful, even for an American, and he has a habit of making up stupid words even when perfectly good ones already exist. He also has a preference for using words like ‘exited’ and ‘commenced’ instead of ‘left’ and ‘started’. I don’t know if it is pretentiousness or what but it is very jarring on the mental ear. Cook is also one of those stodgy, ponderous writers who likes to tell you a lot of trivial and irrelevant rubbish about someone boarding a plane, or buying a meal, in minute and excruciating detail, while leaving out everything interesting or relevant they might have said. The characters were wooden and silly in the extreme – especially the two heroines who, although both had PhDs, were like stupid and naïve schoolgirls living a ripping yarn from a 1930s novel of an English boarding school.

Publishers Weekly describes 'Shock' as, “a crudely conceived, ineptly written and most damning of all totally unexciting story.” My advice: don’t ever read a book by Robin Cook. Instead, read (or re-read) everything you can find by H. G. Wells.

I read a lot of Wells as a teenager and loved it all (except ‘Tono Bungay’ – I could never get on with that one at all, for some reason I now forget.) Although much of the science in the stories now seems quaint, Wells himself probably wouldn’t have minded. He believed that invoking ‘fantastical’ scientific developments was exactly like invoking magic in his stories – a way to create more extreme and challenging situations in which to examine the nature of people and of society. Despite his wholehearted acknowledgement of the work of Jonathan Swift as inspiration, Wells pretty much invented this kind of science fiction. In Wells, the science is very much beyond the realm of what is possible (then and now). Unlike his near-contemporary Jules Verne, he wasn’t concerned with realistic extrapolation to potential new technologies. The whole point of the technologies Wells invokes is to create a magically altered world for his stories in which he can pose the questions; ‘What would people do if this were possible?’ and ‘How would society react?’

Which is, of course, what all the best science fiction writers have done since.

What makes Wells stand out, though, is not that he did it first, or that he was so imaginative, but that he did it so well. As soon as I began reading ‘The Invisible Man’ I was thrilled by the quality of the writing and also by the sudden memory that this man was a consummate storyteller. Which is probably why they still keep making films of his books (although the films seem to get worse with each iteration! Avoid the Tom Cruise version of ‘War of the Worlds’ like the plague.)

Kinda Fonda Jane

I was a boy the last time Jane Fonda spoke at an anti-war rally. Back in the early 1970s, the star of Barbarella and Klute became known to her detractors as ‘Hanoi Jane’, not just for her outspoken opposition to the Vietnam war but for the much less forgivable sin of supporting the communist regime in North Vietnam, and the cause of communism in general. Just a decade or two earlier, she would have been in serious trouble but by the late sixties and early seventies, things had changed and there was a lot more freedom of speech in the US.

I barely noticed Ms Fonda’s antics at the time – I was too busy messing up my own young life – yet it was with an odd sense of déjà vu that I saw her in the papers again earlier this week addressing another anti-war rally in the States. This time she and tens of thousands of others were protesting against the invasion and occupation of Iraq. (And doesn’t that just show how much the climate of opinion has changed over there? At least, until the next terrorist attack.)

It normally upsets me to see ‘celebrities’ spouting off about this and that. On the whole, they are far too stupid to hold opinions about anything and only embarrass everyone when they espouse them. But in some cases, I’ll make an exception – and Jane Fonda is one of them. She has always come across as someone who really does care about what’s going on in the world and, however misled by enthusiasm, ignorance or naïveté – as she has often seemed to be – her heart has always been in the right place. What’s more, she has consistently and doggedly supported serious and worthwhile causes for forty years now. As she put it at the rally, ‘I'm so sad that we still have to do this.’ It’s no wonder her stand is getting so much support.

Good on ya, Jane! Nice to see you back.

What I've Been Doing In My Downtime

Here’s a quick review of some of the books I’ve read and films I’ve watched in the past few weeks.

Poseidon: This remake of The Poseidon Adventure was a real disappointment. It had great special effects but the film was basically a bunch of athletic guys and gals running about screaming for a very long time. This may also be said about the original but at least that one had some characterization and we got to discover a little about – and care a little about – the people who were struggling and dying before our eyes. By contrast, the new Poseidon is so shallow you don’t really care what happens to all the cardboard people it features. Partly this is because modern film-makers don’t use dialogue anymore.

Doom: This is a film based on a video game – a sort of cross between Resident Evil and Alien but nowhere near as good as either. Lots of blood and not much else.

Aeon Flux: Another film of the game – or the comic – but this time surprisingly good. Charlize Theron was incredibly beautiful of course, which helped, but the plot wasn’t too silly (apart from the inherited memories thing) and it jogged along interestingly enough. The fact that Wifie fell asleep half-way through it was probably just a coincidence.

A Christmas Visitor by Anne Perry: This was an incredibly mediocre book by an astonishingly popular author. I’ve never read an Anne Perry novel before and I won’t be reading any more. The writing was dull and sloppy, the characters were shallow and clichéd, and the incredible plot didn’t help at all. On the plus side, it was very short. In fact, the story of Anne Perry’s life is far more interesting than this book.

Shakespeare The Biography by Peter Ackroyd: To be honest, I haven’t finished this yet, but I will. As ever, Peter Ackroyd is excellent value for money. Most people will be familiar with current thinking on Shakespeare’s life. So that’s not why you would read this book. You’d read it for Ackroyd’s deep and colourful insights into the times and places through which Shakespeare moved. I don’t think there is another author who brings the past alive for me the way Ackroyd does – even despite his often dry and academic delivery.

Fiddlers by Ed McBain (aka Evan Hunter): Yes, it’s another 87th Precinct story by one of my all-time favourite crime writers. From the opening paragraph, I was hooked and I gulped down the whole book as fast as I could. McBain’s writing is just great – not quite Raymond Chandler but close. Fiddlers was McBain’s last 87th Precinct novel before he died in 2005 – I am seriously going to miss this series as will many others.

Silent Movies

Have you noticed that movies have less and less dialogue in them? There is an increasingly-popular 'show not tell' philosophy in the film business these days. Apparently having the characters speak - especially about what they are feeling or how they interpret the events that are engulfing them - will 'slow down the story' and 'reduce the dramatic tension'.

I mention this because I saw the film Wicker Park on TV last night. It was a bizarre love story with an incredible plot and I'd recommend anyone not to watch it. It was the 'hero' of the tale - tall and manly, stupid and taciturn to the point of dumbness - that reminded me how silly it has become that no-one talks much in films anymore. I particularly remember the final scene, where the star-crossed lovers finally get together after two years of unwanted separation and, while the camera orbits them a few times (don't you hate that?) and then pulls away, rather than vent their feelings in a torrent of words the way normal people would, they just hug each other and cry, pulling faces that I suppose were meant to convey their relief and joy at having found one another again.

Not too surprising since, during their courtship, they hardly spoke either. Nor does it stand out in the film as a moment of excruciating silence, since most of the film was excruciating and silent throughout.

The thing is, I can't understand how two people could possible fall deeply in love without actually speaking to one another about their feelings. I don't understand how a film can have any depth or subtlety without there being words in it. I know film is a primarily visual medium but, if it aspires to tell a story that is more than just rip-roaring action with clichéd characters, it really does have to use words. If the characters do not speak, we rely on the situation to disambiguate their gestures and give meaning to their actions. Which is to say, the film can only portray feelings and motives with which we are already familiar and can recognise. And, since film-makers are seeking the widest-possible audience, the feelings and motives they portray must therefore be ones which as many people as possible will recognise. They therefore have to be clichés and the characters have to be stereotypes who feel only clichéd emotions and are driven by clichéd motives.

And what an example to our society! Don't speak your loss, just trash a phone box whilst crying. Don't declare your love, just gaze into your partner's eyes with a soupy expression. Don't try to explain the complex mixture of reasons and emotions that drive you to murder, just look as crazed and psychopathic (and, preferably, foreign) as you can and get on with it!

Show. Not tell.

I don't think so.