January 2010
Jan 31, 2010
30 Meeting Roger's badger
Blog posted here.
Jan 30, 2010
Jan 29, 2010
Jan 28, 2010
Jan 27, 2010
27 Mankell, melancholy and me
"I do not really think that I am very much of a melancholic person. I don't think so, but on the other hand you are surrounded in life by melancholic people. What I talk about, in the Wallander stories and in The Man From Beijing, are people that are about 50 or 60 years old and when you are up to 50 to 60 there are certain things in life that you know for sure.
"The first thing is that you have lived more than half of your life. There are very few that live to be 110.
"The second is that you know that you have have done the most important choices, decisions in your life...
"It means that people look backwards to see what have they done with their life and obviously for many people that will lead to a certain melancholic understanding of their own life and because they will find out there were so many things that they dreamt of that they chose not to do and maybe know it is too late and in that sense, in that perspective, I use melancholy as an understanding of people in our century, in our times."
Henning Mankell, talking to Mariella Frostrup, on Open Book.
Jan 26, 2010
26 To tell the absolute truth I....
One of the (many) reasons I thoroughly dislike the Daily Mail is the constant and corrosive assumption that things are forever getting worse and worse.
It is very difficult to read Family Britain (1951-57) and think, gosh, I wish it was still like that..
OK, I thought there was too much swearing in Looking for Eric and I despair when my daughter watches Celebrity Big Brother, but I am glad her recent check-up was in an era when dentistry has moved on from being a bloodsport and violence isn't the main perk of teaching.
That said, I am not averse to looking towards a not very shiny future. I am 20 or so pages away from finishing Karen Boye's Kallocain, a thoroughly unpleasant companion to 1984, We and Brave New World. The setting is a totalitarian Word State, the sort of place a late 1930s Swedish writer would imagine was favoured by Stalin and Hitler, and the plot is driven by the invention of a drug which forces people to tell the absolute truth, thereby incriminating themselves and creating a society where every "fellow-soldier" is a criminal.
Boye was even less interested than Orwell in thinking through the technicalities of surveillance in a ominipresent state. Her 'police ears' that can be covered with a pillow are less threatening than the monitoring techniques of the Thought Police, but I am chilled by the casual description 'human material', more so by the professional heroics of the Voluntary Sacrificial Service - human guinea pigs who give their bodies for science.
Just another future song, just a little kitsch...
Jan 25, 2010
25 A Dose of Reality (Where were you in '76?)
In 1976 I bought Anarchy in the UK, David Bowie's Station to Station... and Stan Tracey: Jazz Suite inspired by Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood.
The Sex Pistols played Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall on my birthday. We thought about going but didn't get round to it on what I remember as a very hot day. Some time around then we did go to, I think, Liverpool to hear Stan play Milk Wood, with a narration by Donald Houston.
I have seen Stan countless times since, with many different line-ups, and have just bought a ticket to see him again.
I have only seen a handful of Bowie shows, but have a large collection of live albums of variable quality and provenance, which now includes the just-released A Reality Tour.
Strange to think that while it seems waning health and creativity mean it is unlikely I will ever watch Bowie perform again, I am pretty confident Stan will be brilliant when he brings the Octet to the Sage in March.
At the age of 84.
Jan 24, 2010
24 Previously, on Sunday evening....
Day 24 has to be 24: Day 8. Two hours of being bound, gagged and tortured until I really do feel like an all-American patriot.
Who will rise from the dead this time...? Who will be back to full fighting fitness within a couple of hours of being shot, incinerated or vapourised?
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