Kaptain Kristian is one of the best YouTube essayists out there and this video on Hayao Miyazaki, the genius behind Japan’s Studio Ghibli’s animation studio is an excellent example.
He draws out how Miyazaki uses the tools of sound, space and sparingly used music to create unique atmospheres in each of his films. The video itself is a masterclass in how good these essays can be.
I’ve been reading quite a lot of the Bible recently in various translations. I enjoyed David Bentley Hart’s New Testament, and Robert Alter’s Genesis, and this is in a similar vein - an attempt to do a translation that captures as much as possible from the original text.
It would be fair to ask “isn’t that what all translations try to do?” but when it comes to the Bible the answer is often “no”. A lot of Christian translations of Job, for example, try to fit the original poem into a structure that makes more Christian theological sense, making Job into a sort of ultimate stoic and a forerunner of Jesus’s suffering, but the text isn’t like that. Job rails against god, and although he doesn’t “curse” god (as is the point of the work) he certainly has his fair share of criticisms. Pretty well-founded ones too.
It’s an odd work, even in a Christian-focused translation, but reading something closer to the original really shows up how odd it is to modern ears. Besides that, it was probably taken from a conquered culture, meaning that it’s not like a lot of other books in the Old Testament theologically.
This translation is good, and Job itself is not a long book so if you’re interested in reading some of the Bible, then it’s worth a shot.
I listened to the podcast of this on the BBC some time ago, and I’d recommend both. Neil MacGregor used to run the British Museum, and in this he tells snippets of world history by relating it to various items in the museum’s collection. As such, it’s both far-reaching and very specific and is a fascinating read.
A History of the World in 100 Object on Amazon
It’s difficult to capture this novel in a short paragraph without it sounding immensely strange. Effectively, it centres around a single character who dies repeatedly, then relives her life, with things changing slightly in each of these different lifetimes.
As well as having a great central plot, which is much more grounded than the above paragraph would suggest, it also becomes a meditation on the effect of contingency in life. It’s beautiful and moving and one of the best novels I’ve read this year.
I’ve been re-reading The Sandman recently, with its upcoming arrival on Netflix. A few years ago I bought the Absolute (huge) editions, which remain the nicest way to appreciate the artwork. It’s such a wonderful series and each re-reading I notice more. It remains the greatest comics series.
Absolute Sandman vol. 3 on Amazon
You know what you’re going to get with a Bill Bryson book. A well-researched, easily read, book with a charming wit. In this case, Bryson turns his attention to the human body, stepping through the operation of various elements, outlining what we do and don’t know, and how things can go wrong.
I’m a fan of Film Noir and this is basically a long essay on the role of fatalism in the genre. A couple of things stood out for me.
Firstly, that Film Noir the regular use of flashbacks and narratives put us in the position of a being like an ancient audience watching tragedy. We’re seeing events unfold fatalistically - they cannot be changed because they’ve already happened.
Secondly, we are misled about our agency in our own lives. We don’t have as much control over our actions as we think we do. Our history, culture, genetics etc shape us dramatically. This impacts the functioning of democracy because we are not the democratic agents we assume ourselves to be. This is something that democratic societies require of us, but we are not able to provide it.
Like a good Film Noir, both these points are rather dark and disturbing. The book has a pretty light touch though and is very readable.
Fatalism in American Film Noir on Amazon
As I’ve posted, I’ve been reading through all of Agatha Christie’s novels recently, and so I thought I’d get some context by reading her autobiography. It’s a long book, and it takes about half of the work to get past her childhood. It’s a charming, meandering book though and if you have any interest in her, or a personal history of the early 20th century, well worth a read.
An Autobiography by Agatha Christie on Amazon
When I read The Great Gatsby at school, I hated it. Probably because I was made to read it for A Level. I think, though, that I just wasn’t able to appreciate its subtlety and its tragedy as a child. Returning to it, I’ve come to love it almost as much as any novel I’ve read.
I thought, therefore, I’d try some other Fitzgerald. Tender Is The Night is not as succinctly powerful as Gatsby, but it captures the complex lives of rich Americans living abroad, and like his most famous novel, is a deep and moving tragedy.
I love Murakami, and this is one of my favourites of his. The story is, like most of his novels, magical-realist and captivating. An artist going through a divorce goes to live in the secluded house of his friend’s artist father (who has dementia and is in a hospital).
Like a lot of Murakami, there are oddities outside the magic, not least the fact that a plot point revolves around the development of a 13 year old’s breasts, but it’s a wonderful novel nonetheless.
Killing Commendatore on Amazon
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? on Amazon
I wrote about Kołakowski’s and religion here. The book is pretty academic, with flashes of interest. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone that doesn’t have a pretty firm grounding in philosophy, but it’s an interesting read.
I mentioned this in my first post here. It’s a very short book that encourages anyone to share the work they do online. The gist is that if you want to be creative, you should be sharing your work as you go as this improves the work itself, creates communities and aids others. As this blog shows, I found it rather inspiring.
In her autobiography, Agatha Christie talks about how she comes by ideas for various books. This one started with the title, which was a phrase she overheard. The fact that Christie worked back from the title is not a surprise since the solution to this novel is not one of her most plausible or ingenious creations, but it’s a pretty enjoyable book nonetheless.
The book’s set in the fictional golf resort of Marchbolt in Wales. Bobby Jones, a vicar’s son, is playing golf when he discovers a man who’s seemingly fallen off a cliff. While Bobby waits with the man, he dies, saying “why didn’t they ask Evans?” Bobby then joins forces with his friend, Lady Frances “Frankie” Derwent to investigate some inconsistencies arising in the coroner’s inquest.
I’ve been reading John Yorke’s Into The Woods, a book about TV and film screenwriting. What I love about detective stories is that they are perfect examples of the sorts of tools and structures Yorke outlines. As he says “Drama demands that characters must change” and as Bobby finds a purpose, and gradually falls in love with Frankie, his change is obvious. His stammering friend, Badger, changes by showing his bravery. Frankie, though doesn’t seem to change a great deal and as such. Her role in the story seems mainly to sweet-talk a series of middle class professionals stunned by her aristocratic credentials. It’s a relatively minor point but it does make her slightly one dimensional.
More problematically, in Milward Kennedy’s review of the book in the Guardian in 1934 he says "The fault which I find is the overimportance of luck" and I agree. Especially towards the end there are a couple of explanations which stray a bit too close to pure fortune and as such are rather unsatisfying. Relying on luck is always a problem in detective stories, and Christie is normally good at avoiding the trap, but here there are a few too many coincidences to countenance.
Minor character and plot gripes aside, this is a solid Christie story. The books without Poirot and Marple often read like they are the ones Christie enjoys writing, and this is no exception. There’s a lightness and momentum that can be missing in some of the later novels featuring her two most famous characters.
I’ve been working through all of Christie’s novels, and having made it this far, I’m yet to find anything I’ve been impressed by as much as the tour de force that is The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, but this is a perfectly enjoyable yarn.
I came across Leszek Kołakowski’s Metaphysical Horror (1988) on Five Books where Dr Andrew Brower Latz, the head of philosophy at Manchester Grammar School recommended it as a good book on philosophy for teens. I had read a couple of the other books recommended and thought it might be a relatively easy read, but it’s a pretty dense, albeit short, book. Its fundamental argument is that, at the heart of all reality is nothing, and Kołakowski argues the point in academic language sprinkled with some dry humour. I’m not sure I’d recommend it to teens, but I did find his passing comment on the notion of religions being one well put, so I’m going to quote it at length:
When the romantics and many of their followers in our century - whether religious sages or scholars - repeated, in various versions, William Blake’s saying ‘all religions are one’, they had in mind one of two possible tenets and sometimes were guilty of not distinguishing them clearly from each other.
‘All religions are one’ might mean that there is a stock, however limited, of identifiable and expressible important beliefs which are common to all religions and in which all worshippers recognise themselves. This view, whether right or wrong, implies that religion is a collection of statements of which some really do matter and some do not and that those which matter are included in all the known ‘systems of beliefs’.
The same saying might mean, on the other hand, that all religions are culture-bound expressions of fundamentally the same human experience which, however, can never be uttered in its uncontaminated, original quality, but is disguised in a variety of rites, myths, dogmas, taboos and norms, none of which may aspire to enjoy exclusive validity. The core of religious life is indeed the same, but it is not a core consisting of doctrinal assertions which could be distilled from the countless forms of worship as their unifying principle; once dressed in words this core cannot but belong to a particular civilisation; people from various epochs and various cultural territories may share the same experience but every time they try to give it the proper ‘theoretical’ shape they fail: people from other civilisations do not recognise themselves in this reconstruction.
The first of the two versions is almost certainly wrong. It is most unlikely that one could find a universal dogma of all religions, effectively recognised in all of them, unless it be a vague generality, bordering on meaninglessness, or an uncontroversial platitude. The second version is much more plausible, if not as an empirically or historically provable theory, then as a fertile hermeneutic rule. At any rate it helps us look for and find a community of meaning in disparate and unconnected religious life forms, without pretending that the common meaning, thus discovered, could replace the actual, historically shaped worship. It does not even exclude the prospect, however unlikely and remote, of a universally human religious community which has found a common language of worship; even then, however, the expression of religious experience would still be symbolic and historically relative, for the gap between the actual experience and all our symbolic forms, no matter how rich and widely spread, remains unbridgeable.
I hadn’t come across Kołakowski before, but on the basis of this argument alone, he merits some further investigation.
Last night, my wife and I went to see My Favorite Murder live at the Hammersmith Apollo (blah blah “Eventim” - it’s still the Hammersmith Apollo to me). Before I get on to reviewing the show proper, I’d like to comment on how strange I still find it that podcasts sell out places like the Hammersmith Apollo. It still only feels like a few years ago that when I mentioned a podcast the next part of the conversation would have to involve a discussion about what a podcast was, and how to get it. Granted, that time is actually over a decade ago now, but I’m getting old. It’s great that these shows have found an audience in the way they have, but I still find it weird.
Despite being a drag-along (their term for the partners of people who are brought along to live shows by the person who actually listens) I’d been well aware of the show for some time. Another feature of the podcast boom we’re living in is that, whereas I used to check out pretty much any podcast that anyone recommended, nowadays I spend more time begrudging unsubscribing from podcasts I rather like because I don’t have time to listen to them. True crime is not really a passion of mine. I have a passing interest in it, but not enough to try and squeeze the show into my listening habits. I came to the show having heard a couple of excerpts from my wife, but not really knowing much more. I mean, I’m not an idiot, I can work out what a true crime comedy podcast was likely to entail, but I hadn’t listened.
The format was what I expected. The presenters, Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark, were seated on stage, explaining the details of two murder cases (in this case both from the early 20th century) and joking about them. Put like that, it sounds tasteless, I accept, but it really wasn’t at all. There wasn’t anything mean about the show at all. The jokes mostly came at the expense things like of the ineptitude of the murderers and around the fringes of the story. I would also add that I fully accept that anything can be the subject of humour. The main issue is that the darker and more controversial the topic, the more skill is required of the comedians. Luckily, Karen and Georgia are hilarious.
I was expecting to have an enjoyable time, but to feel a little left out, knowing from experience that long-running podcasts build up such a history of in-jokes and stories that to someone late to the party they can be almost incomprehensible, let alone funny. That, though, was not my experience at all. I could spot the odd in-joke, and I’m sure there’s stuff I missed, but overall it felt much more like a comedy gig. All the more impressively, though, it was clearly almost entirely improvised. In (what I’ll call for now) “formal” comedy, improvisation on stage is often carefully coordinated prepared material. Take Eddie Izzard, for example, who can role out a show that feels like it’s been made up on the spot, but in fact is carefully prepared, with the “improvised” beats crafted into the show. My Favourite Murder quite clearly wasn’t like that. It was made up on the spot by two funny women.
In the show, they had a handful of notes about the murder in question, and had gathered some photos of the people involved. One shared the case, while the other commented, and then they reversed roles. At the end, in the “Hometown Murder” section, someone from the audience shared a murder from their own town. For us, Alice from Basingstoke, shared the case of Richard Markham, which I have to admit had passed me by when it occurred in 2003. For someone thrown up on stage in front of a massive crowd, she did an astonishingly good job telling the story.
Overall, it was a great experience. I’m not sure I’ve heard a louder crowd at the Apollo and I’ve seen a fair few gigs and comedy shows there. Communities that rise around shows like this can feel a little like a cult, and this shared a few of those features, but I came away glowing with the warmth of an excellent show and a uniformly lovely crowd.
I’ve been reading Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work, following a recommendation from Ali Abdaal’s YouTube channel. It reminded me how much I missed having a channel to share my thoughts. I realise that the web’s full of channels where I can share my thoughts, but I’ve fallen out of love with a lot of them. I’m not going to dissect that right now because no-one needs another “why social media is bad” post, but I’m sure you can imagine.
What I will say is that I miss the time when people wrote reasonably considered blog posts, and other people answered them with other reasonably considered blog posts. I realise that time has probably passed, and now we’re much more focussed on writing 240 outraged characters about an ill-considered tweet, but it seemed to me there’s still some space for blogging.
I’ve started a handful of blogs over the years with the view that I needed to write something specialised, be it about music, or film, or some other specific area. The world didn’t need another vanity blog, I thought. And yet, the more I considered it, the more I realised that a blog under my own name was exactly the place that could give me the freedom to write how I wanted to. Primarily, I miss writing, and I don’t want to straightjacket myself within a particular genre.
So, thank you for reading this “why I’m starting my new blog” post, which itself feels retro. My plans for this space, such as they are, is to use it as a place to share and learn. To stop thinking of a blog as a potential business where I need to meet the needs of the largest possible number of readers, and instead write things that I’d be interested in reading. If others enjoy it too, then fantastic. I believe there’s still room for a personal blog, not least because I still enjoy reading hundreds of them myself.
So to start, here’s some of the blogs that I still find fascinating to remind you what’s out there.
Brain Pickings - A splendid, intelligent blog by Maria Popova with insights into the seemingly endless variety of books she reads
Inessential - Brent Simmons is a developer at the Omni group, and has a lengthy blogging history. There’s some interesting developer-talk but also a lot about his priorities and life view which I find inspirational
Kottke - Jason Kottke is a blogging god, and if you haven’t read his blog recently, it’s still just as good as ever. Read for posts on typography, culture, history and design
Mary Beard has been blogging at the TLS on ancient history (and many, many other topics) for some years now. It’s fascinating.
Slate Star Codex - If you want a blog that will expand your mind and challenge your worldview, I can’t think of any more adept than Scott Alexander’s Slate Star Codex. He’s a psychiatrist, so many posts are in that field, but his book reviews are from many genres and are always smart and fascinating
Ed Whitfield’s The Ooh Tray is a regular visit for me for charmingly opinionated film reviews
Roo Reynolds’s blog hasn’t been updated in a while, but Roo’s newsletter is full of titbits that bring me joy.
More recommendations will, I’m sure, follow but for now check all of those out and I hope to see you again soon (yes, I can see you right now and dare I say you’re looking splendid).