Book review: A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian - Marina Lewycka (2005)

One star seems a bit uncharitable, but two would definitely be too generous. The annoying thing is there are bits about ASHTU that I liked - well, really only one bit, the father - but it's buried under such a will-to-live-sapping heap of such tedium and bitterness that I can in good conscience only give one star.

Oh the tedium! ASHTU may have dethroned The Glass Bead Game as the most tedious thing I have ever read, and TGBG was at least vaguely nourishing. Imagine that annoying person who sits near you at work telling you a story of at-best middling interest in minute detail over the course of about 5 hours. That's how ASHTU reads: things happen in it that could be interesting or funny, but in Lewycka's telling, they just aren't. There's the odd glimmer of microwaved apples and gloop-stuck jam jars here and there, but they're buried in such an entombing mass of desiccated minutiae and formulaism.

Worse still, everyone except the father is painted in such a negative light by the first-person narrator - who herself, in consequence, comes across worst of all. Even when a bartender recurrs after a gap of a few weeks, he's "really let himself go". Engage negativity pump: spray liberally.

I got the sense that this was all based on real-life events, which could have made a good tale, but that Lewycka (and her editor) had been incapable culling the boring stuff or writing well for anything more than a couple of sentences at a time. The narrator certainly seems very pleased with herself: unlike her poor sister, she got to experience The Beatles and feminism, and turned out oh so liberal and stubborn and rebellious. Except, like hell is she anything other than judgemental like an American judge with an afternoon TV slot is judgemental.

Some of the bits about Ukrainian history were nearly interesting, but I recently read If This Is A Man and The Notebook, and ASHTU can't hold a candle to those in terms of WWII-era power. It can't even limply smear a soggy match down a spent strike pad.

Quite how this was so well received is, in all honesty, completely beyond my fathoming power.

Book review: The Notebook - Agota Kristof (1986)

Nice as this edition is, at times you want to be wearing gloves when handling it

The Notebook is the disturbing story of young twin boys growing up quasi-feral and semi-uniquely sociopathic in a WWII-ravaged Hungarian town. Emotionally neglected by their harridan of a grandmother, the twins work tirelessly to perfect their self-reliance and then turn their town into a combined school-of-life and source of plunder, which they then distribute Robin Hood-style to the needy, along with a brand of coldly plotted and violent justice utterly indifferent to the rules of bible and man, based purely on the detached judgements of these all-seeing, all-understanding, self-civilised demi-Gods.

It's sparely written and shocking, but a little too much so, with squalid sex unnecessarily dominating the middle third like a nightmare merger of Tough Mudder and the dark Web. But not even my disgust could stop me tearing through it in about 4 real-time hours of not non-stop reading.

This edition from CB Editions - the first UK print for over 20 years - is a lovely item, with beautiful marbled yellow flyleaves and smooth high-quality paper. It also features a dumb, showboating afterword from Slavoj Zizek that first appeared in The Guardian.

Bathroom windows and Pepsi cups

Lately I keep seeing exquisite beauty in unexpected places.

For example, my bathroom window:

This evening I tossed a Pepsi cup off my seat on the tube, and after pinballing around a bit it came to rest against the lip of the metal grating just inside the carriage doors.

For the next three or four stops it rested there, being rocked just slighty as the doors opened and closed in the nigh-on empty carriage at each of Warren Street, Oxford Circus and Green Park.

It wasn't beautiful in itself, but somehow it seemed imbued with immense potential energy as it rested there unquietly. Almost planetlike. Of course, an 8-gram cup on a 1- or 2-degree slope would actually have negligable potential energy, but because it was resting against the open aperture of a tube carriage - a place from which you yourself would very much not want to be ejected at high speed between stations - its position seemed that much more precarious and momentous and meaningful.

Eventually a father kicked it off at Victoria, thereby relieving both my palpable tension and the guilt I'd been feeling at having unwittingly converted traveller detritus into the (not) very real possibility of catastrophic derailment. Yet even on the platform it retained some of its unlikely power, as person after person daintily avoided the delinquency of an accidental booting.

What does all this unlooked-for beauty mean? I for one am hoping for the rapture...

If I could code I'd ... #1

If I could code I'd ...

Write a feature for a Twitter client that would block all tweets without a minimum, adjustable number of RTs from your timeline. Or, more sophisticated, less realistic version: that would block all tweets RTd less than a certain proportion of each tweeter's average number of RTs.

... but I can't.

Good TV is ruining good conversation

I've since subscribed to Netflix

Back when we still watched TV on televisions, at a time determined by the programme makers and the channel schedulers, we used to go into school or the office the next day and excitedly talk about the latest episode with our friends and colleagues, and then we'd have to wait a whole week to catch the next episode - or months even, if it was the end of a series.

Now that DVD boxsets and internet streaming have come along, we all watch TV at different times. And if you haven't yet seen what someone else has just seen, you either have no interest or you don't want to hear about it because you might watch it when you've done with whatever programme you're currently watching.

Also, as programmes now tend to last for about 60 episodes, all of which are available to us all at once after the programme has wrapped, once we've started something we tend not to watch or do much else until we're through gorging. So once you've established that your colleagues either aren't interested in what you're watching or don't want to hear about it, you've got nothing left to say to them because all you've done every evening for the past three weeks is watch bloody Dexter.

I've just finished watching Breaking Bad, which must have taken up about 50 hours of my life. In filmic terms that's 25 different opportunities to find something in common with people, or in book terms probably around 4 or 5. Instead, conversations have gone:

"Have you seen Breaking Bad?"
"No, I'm watching Game of Thrones."
"Oh."

Good TV is ruining good conversation.

Pillow Fight Day ... the cushiony cudgel of ick

Yesterday was Pillow Fight Day in London. I had heard that the Fight was going to be cancelled, with TimeOut reporting the Greater London Authority as saying that the majority of Trafalgar Square would be fenced off at the scheduled hour for some (in)conveniently timed maintenance. Nothing to do with the reported £2000 clean-up cost from last year, of course...

However, I happened to be heading towards the National Gallery at 2.55pm, and found the Pillow Fight very much about to be taking place. There must have been a few thousand more people than normal sardined into the Square, a good few hundred of them armed with pillows, with dozens more streaming in every second from every direction, and those not holding pillows craning for a better view from every pole, fence and statue pedestal:

The Pillow Fight crowd - the fighters themselves were left of picture

I immediately abandoned all hope of visiting the Gallery, but stood and watched until the countdown hit zero and the feathers began to fly.

As I then wandered off in search of something I could do without having to force my way through a whirling, pumelling throng, two thoughts struck me.

The first was: how many new pillows would have to be bought for the commercial benefit of the Fight to pay for the cost of the cleanup? The cheapest pillow on John Lewis's website is £6, but presumably they sell out of those pretty quickly, even if they do judiciously stock up with extras for PFD.

However, as I headed away from the Square with the fighting still going on, plenty of people were still making their way in the opposite direction clutching pillows, eager to get involved, and I noticed that at least a few of them were holding pillows that were clearly not newly bought, but rather were marbled with antiquating cartographies of sweat and drool stains. Which prompted thought two: how much human and microbiological gunk are these pillows saturated with - said gunk soon to be battered over the heads of strangers and blasted into the air? If this story in the DM is to be believed, rather a lot.

Come to think of it, I do have a bit of a sore throat this morning...

The problem with Room 101, and the (unwitting?) devilry of 1984

**Spoiler alert: This post gives away the climax of the book (and film) 1984.**

Photo by Tom Martin: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thedeplorableword/

What's the worst thing that could happen to you?

Have you thought of something? Good. Hold that thought.

I'm assuming if you've read this far beyond the spoiler alert, you've either read 1984 or never plan to. So:

In 1984, O'Brien says to Winston, who is at O'Brien's mercy in the bowels of the Ministry of Love:

"You asked me once what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world. The worst thing in the world varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal."

And as you'll remember if you've read 1984, the point of preparing The Worst Thing In The World for you is so that The Party can burrow right down to that deepest bit inside you and get you to betray the person you hold most dear in the world by pleading for the thing that is about to be inflicted on you, the thing that is your own personal Worst Thing In The World, to be inflicted on your loved one instead. The point being that thereafter you'll have no more reason - or insufficient self-respect - to resist The Party and their mind control.

My problem with this is as follows: it relies on the person who is being worn down being sufficiently imaginative for their worst fear to be all that bad. I'll expand:

(Actually, let me get something out of the way first: it's no good if the thing you fear most is something happening to your loved ones. If the thing you fear most is your beloved dying, The Party can't get you to betray your beloved by getting you to beg them to kill your beloved's beloved instead of yours, because your beloved's beloved is you (assuming that your love isn't unrequited), and so in betraying your beloved you'd actually be hurting yourself more than your beloved, unless you were absolutely 100% sure that your beloved's worst nightmare was also something terrible happening to her beloved (i.e. you), and nobody ever knows anyone else's mind to that extent (except The Party), and so you'd actually be doing your beloved a favour by betraying them, and so wouldn't actually be betraying them. So things happening to other people are off the table: if that was your Worst Thing In The World then The Party would just use your second Worst Thing instead, okay?)

Now, my worst fears (bearing in mind the above parenthesis) are spiders, followed by heights. And the thing about spiders is that a) they're not actually that scary and b) unless they're from Australia, they're not really capable of doing anything to you. If you were to threaten me with locking me away in a coffin full of spiders, I certainly wouldn't be very happy with you, but I like to think I could withstand your doing it if the alternative was betraying my sweetheart. Hell, the publicity-seeking-missiles that participate in Saturday night gross-out-a-thon I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here do that kind of thing just for cash and the lowest kind of fame every weekend, so I'm sure I could do it in order not to betray myself and the one I love.

Ditto heights: what is The Party going to do, strap me to Felix Baumgartner? I could live with that.
 
Unfortunately, 1984 itself presents a solution to this problem.

Here's the thing: spiders and heights are the things I'm most phobic about, but I'm not that phobic about them: I can and do overcome them. But there are certain things that are logically or rationally scarier and more unpleasant than spiders and heights, such as being brutally beaten or listening to Heart FM. Many of these I could voluntarily withstand as well - maybe even all of them, except one.

In 1984, the thing that Winston finds most unendurable is rats. Now, you might not find rats so scary. But in 1984, The Party's means of using rats against Winston is to put two big, starving, rotten, crazed, filthy, desperate, squirming, mad-bastard rats in a cage that fits over his head, such that the only way the rats can exit the cage is directly via Winston's face.

Yeah.

So the (unwitting?) devilry of 1984 is that, should any situation such as that described in its very pages ever come about, in which an all-powerful person or group is in a position to learn everyone's innermost thoughts and use them against them, anyone who has read 1984 is going to be unable to resist their tormentor, because they're going to have a vivid picture of this contraption involving starving rats and a metal cage and their head (Room 101 may as well just have been called the Rats Eating Your Face Room), whereas most people who haven't read 1984 are probably just going to have to hold a handful of worms or lick a foot and then be absolutely fine...

Except, of course, for those who've read this blog post.