Pudding

BibliOdyssey

Time

GearPatrol is running a review of a fascinating new book on... wait for it... the history of the timeline. That's right: in a move so meta it makes my head want to pop, the world can now admire a timeline of timelines – dating all the way back to the year 1450.

Cartman

For people who have a crass, puerile and childish sense of humour (that'll be me then), Eric Cartman has to be one of the greatest comic creations of our time. Don't agree? Then take a gander at this story at Paste magazine, which lists 10 parallels between the South Park character and the classic Devil's Dictionary.

Dear Harry

Dear Harry Turtledove

I know that as one of the best – nah, make that THE best – writers of alternative history fiction, you're a very busy man. That online novel you're writing about JFK surviving the Dealey Plaza attack, only to face a reputation-destroying impeachment process (yet another of your I-wish-I'd-thought-of-that-myself brilliant ideas), is probably filling most of your free hours right now.

I realise, too, that anybody else in your position would have retired by now, happy in the knowledge that you've reimagined and rewritten history like no-one else ever could. Ruled Britannia, where the Armada invades England and Shakespeare writes a resistance play? Pure genius! Your Timeline-191 series, where the South wins the Civil war? World class, sir! And your series where aliens invade Earth in the middle of World War II? You knew you'd outdone even yourself there, didn't you?

But, see, I have one more favour to ask. Just a small one. You could even do it as a stand-alone novel (like The Guns Of The South, where you had time-travelling AWB militants supplying the Civil War South with AK-47s). No big deal.

All I'm asking is that you write a novel about Operation Unthinkable. That's the one where Churchill planned to lead a US/British invasion of the Soviet Union (using re-armed German troops) at the end of World War II.

Now THAT would make a great alternative history novel!

Regards,
ItWasThisOrTwitter

I'm Quoted, Therefore I Am?

Permit me a cruel chuckle. French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy (and you have to know that anybody who cites "philosopher" as their day job isn't going to be the most grounded of individuals) has been caught out quoting the works of famous modern thinker Jean-Baptiste Botul... who's famous for being a fictional character.

Holmes

The Smithsonian magazine has a feature this month on Sherlock Holmes's London. And that's all I really need to say about that.

Choose

If you were a child of the 80s you’ll remember those old Choose Your Own Adventure books, where each page ended by giving you a choice of how you’d like the narrative to continue. (It was like a first-person RPG, just on paper...) Wired must’ve loved the Decade of Bright Colours, because they have an incredibly smart story up (a Choose Your Own-style story!) on the whole phenomenon.

The smart folks at samizdat, meanwhile, have mapped out an entire CYOA book for your graphic pleasure.


If you’d like to read the Wired story, click here.
If you’d prefer to read the samizdat story, click here.

Grunge

There's a new book out on Grunge: the music, the culture, the hair, the checked shirts, the pimply youths, the early 90s, the bands, the Seattle sound, the songs, the catchers in the rye, the phonies, the works.

The focus (or out-of-focus) will, surely, be on Nirvana. I kind of preferred Pearl Jam and Alice In Chains. But that's just me.



The pictures are by Michael Lavine, and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth wrote the words. Reckon I might pick me up a copy. In the mean time, though, I'm going to take this news as an excuse to play Pearl Jam's post-grunge Wishlist over and over and over.

Wild Things

Spike Jonze has just made (and released, to mixed reviews) a movie version of the children's book Where The Wild Things Are. Early word has it that the film isn't really, y'know, for kiddies. Clearly amused by all of this, New York magazine has a list up of 12 Controversy-Causing Kids' Movies - or, as they put it: "...child-targeted movies that were bad, too visionary, or, in a few cases, too racist for their own good."

The list includes The Black Cauldron, which I remember quite enjoying as a child. Trouble was, I was a bit of a bookworm (first proper book I read was the book of The Secret Of NIMH, which I was five), so I insisted on reading the books of The Black Cauldron too. Very, very different to the movie, is all I'm gonna say 'bout that.

Nobel

In all the hoo-ha about this year's Nobel Peace Prize, I've been thinking about my now-standard annoyance at the Nobel Prize for Literature. I'm astounded that someone like JM Coetzee could win it, yet writers who've actually made a real contribution to human culture haven't.

I'm talking about people like Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Chinua Achebe, Bertolt Brecht, Philip Roth.

I'm not alone. Great Book Guide have a wonderful list up of "alternate" Nobel Literature laureates, listing the real winners alongside the should've-been winners. (They include Bob Dylan. Brilliant!)

Maybe we'll have a similar Alternate Peace Prize list up sometime.

Crying

I'm busy reading Thomas Pynchon's The Crying Of Lot 49. I should have it finished up by the end of the week - it's only 100-odd pages long. Trouble is, those 100-odd pages are very odd indeed, and the text is so dense and so peppered with allusion, that it's taking longer than most books would.

I like Pynchon. Anybody who has his own Wiki, with notes and explanations for every page, has to be worth reading.

I also like Pynchon's vibe: he's a total recluse, refusing to do telly interviews and making absolutely no public appearances. There is (according to the legend that I'm happy to perpetuate) only one known photograph of him - and it's so old and so arb, it could be of anybody, really. Makes a fascinating change from all those pop culture publicity hounds. And, strangely, it makes his already-intangible (some might say incoherent) prose seem all the more distant.



You've got to have some mystery in your culture.

Tailor Elf

Kay Ryan is the Poet Laureate of the United States, and she has some incredible work to her name. Here's one of my favourite of her poems, called Bad Day:

Not every day
is a good day
for the elfin tailor.
Some days
the stolen cloth
reveals what it
was made for:
a handsome weskit
or the jerkin
of an elfin sailor.
Other days
the tailor
sees a jacket
in his mind
and sets about
to find the fabric.
But some days
neither the idea
nor the material
presents itself;
and these are
the hard days
for the tailor elf.

We've all been there, tailor elf.

Wild

I schlepped (while my wife slept) through parts of Into The Wild on Saturday night. Having enjoyed the excellent book and the even more excellent magazine article, I knew I was going to enjoy the movie too. And I did. But I could've done with it being a tad shorter than its 148 minutes.

I have to agree with Esquire. Their Daily Endorsement today is for the 90-minute movie. Because, as they say, 80 minutes is too short, and 100 is too long.

Is anybody in Hollywood listening?

Lottie

There's a new Winnie-The-Pooh book coming out! According to the BBC: "The Bear of Very Little Brain will make his comeback in Return to the Hundred Acre Wood, the first authorised sequel to Milne's original 1920s stories."

And also according to the Beeb, there's a new character in the Hundred Acre Wood... with the arrival of Lottie the Otter no doubt bringing tears of joy to the Disney marketing people's eyes.

Stand by for the new range of plush toys and Happy Meal cash-ins.

Code

I'm desperately (and geekily) trying to figure out whether the half-angel/half-demon statue they used in the marketing campaign for Angels & Demons is a fake or a forgotten masterpiece. I'm leaning towards fake, but you never know...

In the mean time, though, I'm waiting for the new Dan Brown book to go through its mandatory Early Hype phase before it lands up in one of my local cheap-and-dusty second-hand bookshops. I'm in two minds about The Lost Symbol: on one hand, I've enjoyed all his other books; on the other, I know that Dan Brown doesn't let things like historical accuracy or common sense or good writing get in the way of a good (coughairportnovelcough) story.

While I wait for my used-book bonanza, though, I'm going to keep on creating my own Dan Brown novels using Slate.com's hilarious Interactive Dan Brown Sequel Generator. You enter a city (say, Paris) and a society that ignorant tin-foil-hatters like to pick on (Scientologists, Mafia, Major League Baseball...), and – hey, presto! – the gizmo creates a summary of a Dan Brown novel.

Formulaic? You bet.

Title

I've finished reading Umberto Eco's classic The Name Of The Rose, and there was something in the author's notes at the end of the book that got me to thinking...

While talking about the title of the novel, Eco says that "a title should muddle the reader's thoughts; not regiment them". So a title that gives the entire plot away (like, say, Dick And Jane Get A New Puppy) isn't doing its job as well as one that confuses the daylights out of you.

Like, say, Chinatown.

Or Reservoir Dogs.

Yellow Brick Road

Slate have a nice little story up about L. Frank Baum, who wrote The Wizard Of Oz. I read the book ages ago (seriously, like when I was nine), but I've watched the movie a couple of times since then, and it's one of my all-time favourites.

Who knew that, all this time, it was actually just one big feminist tract?

Codex

I'm busy reading (or audiobooking) The Name of The Rose by Umberto Eco, and it's just as good as I had hoped it would be. (Much better than the movie, which I also enjoyed.) It's all about 13th-century monks and books and weird stuff... and that's had me thinking about the creepy Codex Gigas.

The Codex Gigas is an enormous 13th-century manuscript (like, a metre tall), with beautiful script...



... and fine illumination ...



... and it carries on like that through page after page of Old Testament, New Testament, Josephus's Antiquities, Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae, a necrologium...



... until, out of nowhere, on page 290, it has a massive cartoon picture of a snarling green devil man.



Spooky.

Spookier still, its script is entirely uniform, and it appears to be the work of a single hand – even though it would have taken 30 years to write.

The legend goes that the monk had broken his vows, and was sentenced to be walled up alive. In order to gain indulgence/forgiveness, he vowed to write, in one single night, a book containing all human knowledge.

Around midnight he realised he could not complete the work alone, so he make a Faustian pact with the Devil, asking the Prince of Darkness to complete the book in exchange for his soul.

[Please insert your own creaking door and ghostly howls here. And also please imagine me telling the story with a flashlight shining up from under my chin.]

Wabbit

It pays homage (and I want you to read that in a faux French "ommage" way) to the operas of Richard Wagner, it pays tribute to Der Ring des Nibelungen, it was the first cartoon short to be deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress, and it's been rated as the greatest cartoon of all time. It is What's Opera, Doc?, and it is completely insane.

Consider this your cultural learning for the day.

Block

I love today's Non Sequitur. It reminds me of this old Calvin & Hobbes classic, which I think every writer has saved somewhere on their computer (if not pasted up on their fridge)...