Symbolic Forest

As mentioned the other day, I spent most of the weekend at Caption, the annual small-press and self-published comic convention in Oxford. It wasn’t somewhere I’d visited before – I’m someone who looks on people who can draw properly with awe and admiration – but it turned out to be a nice day out. Held in a community centre which felt like an overgrown collection of church halls inside, it was a nice quiet relaxed event. “Ooh, it’s a bit quiet this year,” said the people I was with, who were veterans, but I didn’t mind that myself. It helped that it was on Cowley Road, which made it easy for us to pop out for a meal in the early evening, then nip back to the convention. And, unlike the centre of the city, Cowley Road isn’t completely flooded with tourists.

Keyword noise: Caption, comics, Cowley Road, indie, Oxford, self-publishing, small press, zines.

As I said yesterday, I’ve been listening a lot recently to the debut album from The Pipettes, released a few days ago. It’s light, bouncy, pop music, always trying to evoke school discos and teenage fumbling. The band deliberately tries to come across, it seems, as a modern indie version of a 1960s girl group; hiding the musicians behind the scenes and relying on the singers to front the band.

It’s a very nostalgic record – a band full of twentysomethings, aimed at twentysomethings, singing at the emotional level of fourteen-year-olds abandoned on the dancefloor. Even when they’re singing about sex, they still sound somehow childish. It’s not surprising to find that they’re fairly closely connected to The Go! Team, whose debut album – which I do like a lot – always strikes me as being the auditory equivalent of a TV talking-head nostalgia show. The Pipettes are similar, a nostalgia band for the London indie scene; you could never imagine this record having been made anywhere other than south-east England.

On the whole, though, it is good to listen to. It’s an easy listen, and there are some good tunes and hooks in there. Whoever is writing the songs knows how to put a catchy melody to equally catchy lyrics, even if the lyrics of one song – “It’s Not Love (But It’s A Feeling)” – always make me think of that cosmetics commercial with Anna Friel in it.^* They will probably do quite well. By the end of the year they’ll be a Radio One staple, cropping up on Radio Two occasionally too;^** then by the end of next year we’ll be wondering what happened to them.

* You know, the one with the corset and the dirty smirk. That is Anna Friel, isn’t it? The particular lyrics are from the chorus: “touch a little tighter, eyes a little brighter”.

** Actually, I have to admit here, the first time I heard them was on Mark Radcliffe’s Radio 2 show, which I listen to if I’m still travelling at that time of night.

Keyword noise: album, disco, girl group, indie, music, nostalgia, review, The Go! Team, The Pipettes.

Sorry to be whining so much about work, but that’s all my mind’s been full of this week. The pressure is so draining, my mind feels numb and empty by the time I get home, and I have nothing else to write about. My mind feels numb most of the daytime too; it’s at the stage where I just sit down at my desk and blank for a couple of minutes until I remember where I am and what the next task is.

At least I’m off away again this weekend, so I should be able to put work out of my mind for a couple of days. I’m going to Caption, a convention for alternative, small-press and zine-style comics. It’s not a scene I know much about, but I am hoping to be educated.

This week I have mostly been obsessed by: Last.fm,^* the website that tells you what bands people are listening to. I’ve been refreshing it regularly just to check that it is correctly identifying which tracks I’m playing – it does sometimes not seem to recognise some obscure stuff.^** I’ll post the link to my profile here, when my profile has more on it. Hopefully it will lead to finding more music I don’t know much about. I am hoping to be educated.

I’ve also been listening over and over to the first album by The Pipettes, a 60s girl-band in modern indie clothing. Review to come when I have time enough to write it.

That’s all for this week, then; one more day of stress stress stress, then at 5pm I can zoom off down to Oxfordshire. And then I’ll come back on Monday all refreshed, hopefully there will be news of the cat, and I’ll be all ready for another week of stress to grind me down. Just maybe, too, I’ll have been educated.

* also known as Audioscrobbler, which always makes me think of The Box of Delights by John Masefield, in which “scrobbling” means “kidnapping”.

** Usually things from Fluxblog, whose mp3s also confuse my mp3 playing software – it can’t read the track length properly, and usually tells me that the file is thousands of hours long.

Keyword noise: Caption, comics, holiday, indie, overwork, Oxford, pressure, small press, stress, zines.

This post has been a long time coming. Ever since I read her obituary, I’ve been meaning to write it, and been putting it off; and that was back in January.

Jan Mark is probably one of the writers who has meant the most to me over the years, at least in terms of understanding writing, and storytelling. She was mostly known as a children’s writer, producing prizewinning, wonderful work such as *Thunder And Lightnings*. My own favourite piece from her children’s books was a short story, “Nule”,^* about two children who treat one of their house’s newel posts as if it’s human, then start to worry that it’s becoming slightly too human.

My favourite book of hers, though, is her single “adult” book, Zeno Was Here. It’s a love story, a very touching one, but it’s mostly about writing itself. It’s about the writing process, the nature of writing, and the feeling of being written about. It’s a novel about the structure of novels, and it’s the book which introduced me to the works of Flann O’Brien.^** It’s about coincidence. It ends with the kind of bone-jarring unexpected coincidence that just doesn’t happen in novels; and then you remember that a hundred pages earlier, the characters were discussing just why those sort of events don’t happen in novels, when they crop up in real life all the time.

It’s quite an obscure book, and – as far as I know – has been out of print for ten years, at least. I found my copy of it by just the sort of coincidences that don’t happen in books: finding out that it existed, and going to my local library to see if they had a copy, I found it among the fifty or so tatty things on the “Withdrawn, For Sale” table. It’s only right, I suppose, that you should find a book about coincidence in that sort of way. If you find a copy yourself, read it, because it deserves to be better-known.

* from the collection Nothing To Be Afraid Of

** Another writer I’ve been meaning to post about, but haven’t

Keyword noise: books, coincidence, Flann O'Brien, Jan Mark, literature, Nothing To Be Afraid Of, novels, Nule, Thunder And Lightnings, Zeno Was Here.

One of the events from my trip to London recently: a gig by the band Montoya, at the Betsey Trotwood pub in Farringdon.^* I have an interest to declare, of course: John, Montoya’s lead singer, is someone I’ve known for years, and don’t see at all often enough.^**

I’d not seen them play before, but they really were rather good; and I’m not just saying that because John’s a friend of mine.^*** Lively, bouncy indie-rock with intelligent lyrics and intelligent chord progressions; look out for them.

I shot off a whole roll of photos, but – like the Shimura Curves gig a few days earlier, I’m not really happy with them. The Shimuras photos had put me off doing natural-light photos; so I went the other way, and produced a roll of brightly-lit shots with horribly detailed backgrounds and hardly any atmosphere. The few I did with natural light were by far the best. Here are some of them; I also didn’t get any good shots at all of the drummer, because he was hiding away at the back.

* Directly above the Widened Lines, and almost above the Ray Street Gridiron bridge – if you look at this 1860s picture, the Betsey Trotwood is above the tunnel mouth on the left, now the Circle Line.

** He’s a regular reader, too – hi John! – and there are photos of his daughter Piglet Jaime elsewhere on the site too.

*** or because he’ll be reading this.

Keyword noise: Betsey Trotwood, Farringdon, gig, indie, live music, London, Metropolitan Railway, Montoya, music, photography, London Underground, railway, Ray St Gridiron, Widened Lines.

So … OK, the Doctor worked out that closing the breach into the Void would suck in all the alternate-universe Cybermen, not to mention the Cult of Skaro refugee Daleks. But did he know beforehand that the Void would somehow manage to suck them all in through one small window, instead of just acting like a big attractor and leaving thousands of Daleks and Cybermen stuck to the side of the Canary Wharf tower?

And am I the only person who thought that a couple of the plot points were lifted directly from The Amber Spyglass? Not just the general travelling-between-universes idea, but more specific things: the breaches between universes causing major climate change; and, of course, the whole ending.

(highlight the following space if you want to read the spoilers)

The ending to write Rose out of the series was, essentially, just like the ending of The Amber Spyglass – two characters with an intense but non-sexual love for each other, who are told they have to stay apart, in seperate universes, because if any of the gaps connecting the universes are kept open then everything will be undone and destroyed.

(end of spoiler space)

The episode did prove one thing beyond doubt, though. Out of Daleks and Cybermen, Daleks have by far the better sense of humour.

* apologies to anyone who didn’t watch the Doctor Who series finale this weekend, so has no idea what I’m on about.

Keyword noise: Cybermen, BBC, Dalek, David Tennant, Doctor Who, His Dark Materials, Phillip Pullman, plot, plot holes, Russell T Davies, structure, television, The Amber Spyglass.

More photos from last week, because I’m too lazy to write something. Hope none of the people in them mind.

Keyword noise: holiday, London, photography, beer garden.

Number two argument why I need to buy a digital camera: scanning photos really is the most boring job in the world.

I intended to post sooner about last Sunday’s Shimura Curves gig, but ended up writing all sorts of random nonsense which has since been deleted instead. I should really have written about the band too, because they really were rather good. They’re rather hard to categorise, though: laptop electronica, dronerock guitar, but above it all some lovely polished girl-group harmonies. The chap who came on before them, singing along to the best 1980s Casio rhythms, wasn’t so great,^* but we found ways to amuse ourselves during his set by standing in front of the ventilation fans and pretending we were on the Baywatch credits instead.

I tried to take photos of the band, but the lighting was truly awful. A complex mauve backdrop was projected over the whole stage and the band with it, turning natural-light photos into an abstract mass of blurred shapes. Still, here are the best I came out with. The order of the band photos reflects their on-stage positions. I hope none of them mind how bad the photos are; and I like the way K Shimura seems to have a halo.

* a couple of days later I was chatting to Anna Shimura in a pub, and I mentioned that I’d been at the gig. “Oh, yes,” she said, “I remember standing in front of you during the first act, and listening to you slagging him off.”

Keyword noise: gig, harmony, live music, London, music, photography, Shimura Curves.

Books I Haven’t Read was supposed to be a regular sequence of articles, but has been on pause since – ooh, last November, by the look of things. It fell by the wayside because of a post I never wrote, about a book I couldn’t finish because I came across a passage in it which seemed to have been blatantly lifted from an obscure Victorian memoir. I’ll manage to write about it, one day. In the meantime, here’s another book I haven’t read. *Iron Sunrise* by Charlie Charles Stross.

I’m not someone who reads much SF, but I do read some selected things. Iain M Banks, for example, because I liked his Iain Banks books^* and wanted to expand. Neal Stephenson, because I liked his historical novels and, well, ditto. And Charlie Stross, because – although I don’t know him – we used to drink in the same pubs.

So, last July, I was heading down to London for work, for a week. Planning it all in advance, I bought an unread Stross book – Iron Sunrise – to read on the train. I was catching the train down to Kings Cross on Sunday, July 10th.

I got onboard my train at Doncaster and opened the book, hoping that it would distract me from worry. Unfortunately, it opens with a mass terrorism attack, one which destroys an entire planet. I struggled to read it until Peterborough, and gave up. I haven’t looked at it since then.

At the time, I didn’t even make the connection as to why I couldn’t read it. The planet-destroying opening was distressing for me to read, with characters in the midst of planning their lives, suddenly realising that their world is being completely destroyed. I didn’t draw the parallel, though, between the characters in the book, and the friend I was worried about.^*** The thought would have been too raw at the time. Looking back, though, the connection is obvious.

I’m planning to go down to London again in a few weeks, and I’ve bought a different Stross book to read this time. Hopefully, I’ll be able to. Hopefully, too, I’ll be able to finish Iron Sunrise one day. I’m not sure I’m ready to try reading it again, though.

* in case you’ve never heard of him: he writes his SF books with his middle initial,^** and his “literary” ones without.

** although you might think it would be easier to write them with a word-processor.

*** The characters in the book – at least, the ones who were worth writing about – realised exactly what was happening to them. I still hope, whenever I think about her, that the friend I’m talking about here didn’t know what was happening to her. Back on that train, it seemed certain that she must be still alive and in hospital unidentified somewhere.

Keyword noise: books, Books I Haven't Read, Charles Stross, Charlie Stross, Iron Sunrise, July 7th, literature, reading, sci fi, science fiction, terrorism.

As I mentioned on Friday, I’ve been rereading How To Travel With A Salmon, a book of comic essays, mostly, by Umberto Eco. I first read it when I was an impressionable, pretentious teenager,^* and hadn’t looked at it for about ten years.

I hate to admit it, really, but reading it back now, the first thing that came to mind was: if it was written today, people would be saying how much like a blog it is. Lots of short essays, each only a couple of pages in length. And the style of writing is, in fact, exactly the style of writing that I’m often trying to aim for myself. Witty, dry, sarcastic, intelligent and good-humoured. Reading it now, I realise just how many jokes I didn’t get as a teenager. It’s been a secret influence on this place for a long time, without me realising it.

Of course, the book is far better than anything that’s been written here. But then again, he’s a much better writer than me, and this isn’t being sold in the shops. It’s always good to have something you can aspire to. It’s also not a blog, despite what I said above: the essays were written over the course of about fifteen years or so, mostly in the 1980s. It’s a book, though, that now I’ve remembered I have I’m going to read again, because there’s a lot for any writer to learn from.

* I can remember where I bought it, in fact – at Blackwells in Oxford, on a school trip to the university’s open day.

Keyword noise: books, essays, How To Travel With A Salmon, literature, review, Umberto Eco.