Monday Linkage

Just a quick little link dump today as I have managed to pull a muscle in my back/shoulder region which makes typing a tad uncomfortable.

• I bought Elephants On Acid & Other Bizarre Experiments as a Christmas present for a good friend of mine. I based my purchase entirely on this line from an Amazon review: "Personally, I feel that the first chapter is ill-placed as it's heavy on the animal decapitation and I think that might put some people off". Not that my friend is into animal decapitation, but he would find it interesting, if you know what I mean.
• Oh, stereotyping! Stereotyping People By Their Favourite Indie Bands and Stereotyping People By Their Favourite Author try to pigeon-hole people (in a humorous way, it should be said). So I'm a gay man living in Brooklyn who likes wearing hunter green (or I'm everyone).
• The Hype Machine has collated data on the fifty bands/artists most frequently blogged about in 2009. It's not that interesting, except the list is accompanied by stunning artwork commissioned especially for this list. My favourite is Jamie McKelvie's artwork for the La Roux entry. McKelvie's one of the creative brains behind the wonderful Phonogram comics which I strongly recommend if you are an ageing Britpop relic like myself.
• The Geeky Tattoos Blog is showcasing a knitting tattoo (for knitting is geeky, apparently). The entire blog is worth a browse, although I'm slightly scared by the amount of bad anime tats I see. Thanks, Z. for sending me the link.
• And, finally, I'm halfway in love with this dress though I struggle to explain why.

Kettle Pot Black

I have always been slightly uneasy about my geek tendencies, but there is no denying them. I worked briefly for a computer gaming magazine in my early student years, I have a respectable selection of polygon dice, the shelves boast both Geoffrey Chaucer and William Gibson, and I have seen Star Wars more time than I care to admit. I even saw Revenge of the Sith twice in theatres which is geek dedication, I will have you know. But I won't stand for just any dross just because it has a spaceship, clever future technologies or a ray-gun. No, I like my genre indulgences to be smart, interesting and ambitious (.. or have Ewan McGregor wielding a light sabre).

We watched Franklyn tonight. A strange little genre film starring Ryan Phillippe and Eva Green - the sort of film B-list actors do between mortgage-paying big studio films and which often end up their best showcases (Gangster No. 1 is still Paul Bettany's best film, for instance). I liked Franklyn, I really did. It felt like a British cross between Dark City and Donnie Darko with beautiful photography and stunning art direction to boot. I am not sure it would appeal to people with little interest in "geek stuff" but if you like your slightly surreal alternate realities and high concepts, this film might just appeal. As David said to me earlier: "If I had watched this two days ago, it would have been my favourite film of 2009".

Speaking of "high concepts" I was mildly amused to see Adam Roberts' review of the new Jasper Fforde opus in The Guardian.

A kind of pleasant implausibility has always been at the heart of Fforde's appeal. (..) Shades of Grey, while not laugh-out-loud funny, is agreeably and pleasantly eccentric, cleanly written and nicely characterised. (..) The first 250 pages are narratively underpowered and rather diffuse. Fforde's young protagonist, Edward Russet, putters around his world, and the reader slowly builds up a picture of how things work. The second half is more gripping, and a climactic expedition (..) becomes page-turningly exciting. (..) I finished it with the sense that there's less to it than meets the eye. The narrowness of the high concept is, finally, too much a sort of meagreness, and too little a scalpel edge.

Compare this with my own recent review of Roberts' own Yellow Blue Tibia (in which I sadly omit to mention the strained comedic tone to the first 250 pages and the painstakingly eccentric characters which litter the entire novel):

I read Adam Roberts’ Yellow Blue Tibia this holiday season and I wanted to love it. Its premise sounds like something I would like – Soviet Union, science fiction writers and the possibility of multiple realities – but I ended up being disappointed. Roberts’ writing is sloppy (as is the editing), the tone is uneven and the book does not live up to its premise until fifty pages from the end when you get the feeling Roberts is finally writing the book he wants to write. I was very unimpressive with a running gag about a man with Asperger’s Syndrome which was wholly unnecessary to the plot and jarred badly. Still, the last fifty pages or so redeemed the book from being merely a bad read. It was an uneven and occasionally interesting read.

Maybe Roberts should have called his book Kettle Pot Black instead.

Counting the Days

This entry's by request..

Starting on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, Danes will open so-called "advent presents" and light a candle in their advent krans (I have not made an advent krans since the year one caught fire in my Copenhagen flat and nearly burned down the house). The presents are usually small - I have been known to find novelty socks in my parcels.

However, my gran has obviously decided that a "small present" equals giving me 11 (ELEVEN) balls of yummy DK-weight superwash wool in a rather fetching shade of red. She's included a pattern for a yoked cardigan too. I have three more parcels to go. I dread to think what she might have come up with. Incidentally David found a handknitted beanie in his advent present. I seem to spot a theme..

(Sorry about the '80s feel about this photo - it was the best I could do in order to capture the colour)

The advent calendar is a variation upon a theme. When I was very young, I would get a julekalender instead, much like the one Linn is blogging about. Twenty-four tiny parcels, one for each day leading up to Christmas. The presents were tiny - maybe a pencil or a piece of chocolate - but they served their purpose. I got out of bed on time and I kept track of how many days I had to wait until Christmas.

Linn mentions something which I really miss here in Scotland: the calendar candle (not to be confused with the advent krans). One candle with numbers 1 to 24 clearly marked and each day you burn away one number. Just before December 1st, you make a "juledekoration" to really display the candle (I have fond memories of going to the woods with my family and finding materials for these things) and then each night as you are having dinner or tea, you light the candle. The trick is to get the right size candle so you do not burn away the numbers too quickly or slowly.

And the final way of counting the days? The televised yule calendar. Yup, twenty-four episodes of a special Christmas children's show with one episode shown per day. It's usually about how Christmas is in danger for one reason or another.. You'd get a royal version with princesses and Christmas gnomes,one taking place in Greenland, a puppet version, a 19th century version and, well, one for the grown-ups (all YouTube links and, yes, Danes are very fond of singing..)

Any particular Christmas traditions in your family or in your culture?

The First Of Many: The Times' Books of the Decade

Oh dear, we are going to be inundated with "The Best XYZ of This Decade!" lists, aren't we? One of the first Best Books of the Decade list comes from the Times (thank you, kimfobo) and is an eclectic mix of high- and low-culture, fiction and non-fiction, and Anglophone and translated works. I am not quite sure what the editorial guidelines were - maybe "try to include stuff people have heard of"? Anyway, allow me a moment of indulgence as I track the ones I have read:

• 97: The Brief, Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. I posted about this book earlier this year. Generally favourable towards it, still.
• 66: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. It is not my favourite Mitchell novel (which is either yet to be written or Ghostwritten, depending upon my mood) but CA is great. Still cannot believe anything this clever ended up as a serious contender for the Booker Prize (miaow).
• 62: Fingersmith by Sarah Waters. I still have not made up my mind regarding Sarah Waters as a serious novelist, but her Victorian novels are very entertaining.
• 61: The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst. Or, That Gay Novel Wot Won The Booker. I said it then and I'll say it now: Hollinghurst writes exquisite English and his sentences are ever so beautiful, but he still needs to find the right plot for his style. I will read Hollinghurst just for the way he uses the language.
• 46: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. Maybe I should try this one again because I didn't get the hype surrounding it.
• 30: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. Okay, I read this one for work, mkay? Sentimental drivel of the worst order with incredibly implausible plot points. Mawkish and horrid. No, I didn't like it and I don't care if this book changed your life, omg.
• 29: The Accidental by Ali Smith. This one really got book people talking but I left my copy at Aberdeen Bus Station on purpose as it left me absolutely cold.
• 25: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon. For some people this book was a revelation (you know who you are). I couldn't connect with it (which is rather apt for a book about autism, I guess).
• 22: The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman. This is a bit like Marmite, I suppose. Some people love this book; others could not get into it all. For the record, this is one of the few books that reduce me to tears every time I read it. Go on and mock me.
• 19: The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. Or, Yet Another MAJOR North-American Novel That Karie Just Couldn't Get Into At All.
• 17: Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling. My favourite is still the Prisoner of Azkaban, but Deathly Hallows did make a Saturday at work pass that much more quickly. I actually cannot recall the plot.
• 12: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. Dear The Times, Eggers has become an incredibly influential publisher and he does very wonderful things with the-book-as-object, but we can surely agree that he should never ever be allowed to write another book. AHWOSG is one of the worst books I have ever read in my entire life - and I have read quite a few.
• 10: The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. When compared to Eggers' novel, The Da Vinci Code comes across as an astounding piece of literature with a keen eye for detail, a witty turn of phrase and an intricate plot. When compared to standard literature, Brown's novel is an overblown piece of ludicrous prose, flat characterisation, ridiculous plotlines and simplistic thinking. I read it for work and got exactly what I thought I'd get: an airport novel which earns brownie points for not having a picture of Tom Hanks in an awful wig on the cover.
• 9: Atonement by Ian McEwan. I get the feeling that I would not get on with whoever edited this list because this book is yet another one of my literary pet hates.
• 2: Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. Is this chosen for its literary qualities or because of its cultural significance (i.e. "omg, the Iranians are people too!"). I enjoyed reading this but I wouldn't put it second on such a list.
• 1: The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I described this novel as "superb" and it continues to nudge me ever so often. Exquisite sparse prose and incredibly moving, I have no qualms about this being called "the book of a decade".

Thirty-Love

I have a very soft spot in my heart for tennis. Yes, tennis. It was one of the few sports I was ever good at in school and in the early 1990s I watched tennis broadcasts almost religiously. My favourite time of year is still Wimbledon time. My favourite player was a tall Croat, Goran Ivanisevic, who was maddeningly unpredictable: on good days, his tennis was stunning; on bad days, his games were like watching a car crash in slow motion. You never knew what kind of a day it would be. Ivanisevic wound up winning Wimbledon, but characteristically he didn't do so until he was well past his prime and only admitted to the tournament on a wild card.

Andre Agassi belongs to the same tennis generation as Ivanisevic, but although Agassi was a wildly popular player at the time, I never took to his game. Without going into too much technical detail, Agassi played a defensive game from the baseline relying upon serve returns and solid ground strokes (on today's circuit Scots Andy Murray plays a very similar game). He was technically brilliant, absolutely, and he had a colourful personality, but his game lacked the fireworks of players far more on the offensive (Ivanisevic, Pat Rafter, Pete Sampras, and, later, Andy Roddick).

Coloured me surprised, then, that Andre Agassi's autobiography turns out to be filled with offensive gameplay, if you will pardon the pun.

At the age of 12, Andre traveled to Australia with a team of elite young players. For each tournament he won, he got a beer as a reward. Then in the seventh grade he was shipped off to the Bollettieri Academy in Florida, where his tennis flourished, but his life turned feral. Drinking hard liquor and smoking dope, he wore an earring, eyeliner and a Mohawk. Nobody objected as long as he won matches. The academy, in Agassi's words, was "Lord of the Flies with forehands." Since the press and the tennis community still regard Nick Bollettieri as a seer and an innovator whose academy spawned dozens of similar training facilities, Agassi's critical opinion of him may shock the ill-informed. But in fact, Bollettieri is the paradigmatic tennis coach: that is, a man of no particular aptitude or experience and no training at all to deal with children.

Fascinating stuff which really appeals to my inner seventeen year-old girl who knew there was something sketchy about Agassi. Of course I'm unlikely to ever read Agassi's book (my inner seventeen year-old is torn, though) as I'm now thirty-something .. a fact that was brought home to me yesterday when I was watching the UK Top 40 and I knew exactly two songs..

Boredom Sets In

A brief link today pilfered from elsewhere: Hey, Oscar Wilde!.  It is "a personal art collection of various artists interpreting their favourite literary figure/author/character". I really like this Winnie the Pooh. Health update: I managed to get dressed and head outside today. Okay, I went across the road to the local supermarket and I went straight back to bed afterwards, but it's progress!

Speaking of progress, I finished the yoke on David's sweater tonight. He tried it on and we quickly agreed that the textured design on the yoke didn't work. I ripped back the 40-ish rows and I'm back to the drawing board. I know some might complain, but I'm fine with it. after all, I'd rather have him liking the finished sweater than me finishing something quickly which will never get worn. My shawl is also progressing well (and the list of unlistened-to podcasts is dwindling fast)..

.. I just want to get better really, really soon. If you think my blog posts are dull, imagine how I feel.