Dredd (dir. Pete Travis, 2012): review

Somebody said to somebody: 'I know: let's make a film out of this celebrated Moebius image!':

'What, like Blade Runner?' 'No, I don't mean a Blade Runner remake. I mean a straight Judge Dredd movie, but via this image of the falling man.'  'OK.'

Schooling

Dan started at school this week.  First week: Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, 9am until 12 noon.  Second week and thereafter, 9am until 3pm.  That means that my working day shrinks to (from when I get back from dropping Dan to when I have to head out the door to pick him up again) 9:15 - 11:45.  If I'm nippy.  Two and a half hours.  Not easy to get much done in that slot.  And that's with a job, writing, where I can work from home and structure my own time.  Very few jobs are like that.

I went through this with Lily (now 10), but once again I'm struck by this basic fact: the school system in the UK is set-up around the tacit understanding that children have two parents, one of whom works whilst the other stays home.  Since that hasn't actually been the case for a long time, this has necessitated the growth of a more-or-less rickety structure of add-ons, breakfast clubs, after-school clubs, unofficial swaps with other parents, use of grandparents (not available to us, alas), paid child-minders, drivers to move minivans of kids from school to community hall or somewhere else and so on, all accreted around the basic school day.  Because almost nobody is now in that 1950s situation of being able to do nothing else but take kids to school, pick kids up from school, look after kids during inset days etc etc.  It's boggling, really: expensive, inefficient and a huge practical drag upon the individual worker's efficiency and productivity, to say nothing of their general quality of life. [An example: a friend of mine has had to take some of her annual holiday to cover this week; from next week she's paying an ex-nursery nurse to pick her kid up -- the woman in question has taken maternity leave from the nursery, which is how she's free to do it -- but that will only happen until November and the due date, when my friend will have to put something else in place, or more likely a couple of different things.] Why isn't something done about it?  Cost, of course.  Inertia, I suppose.  People who have kids have one child, or two children, by and large; which limits the (massive!) inconvenience of it to a decade or so in the--usually--middle of a career, until the kid is old enough to schlep his/herself about.  But for that decade it's a crippling restriction on the individual's rights to work.  I would like to see what a school system looked like if designed from the ground up on the understanding that children come from families in which both parents need to work 5 days a week, 8:30-5:30.  It wouldn't look like what we currently have, I think.

Trafalgar Square Poem

The fountain throws up a white haystack of spray;
The strong wind is carrying the sun away;
Night is a geyser from yon blackheath hole;
Darkness that bubblewraps Nelson's stone pole.

Safe until morning
Safe until day
Safe from the east-end
To the west way.

Traffic in sunlight and traffic by neon;
Lion-names are: dumber and dumbest and leon;
The knife b'long Mac, the mainframe's just peasy
But nothing about this set-square is too easy.

Safe until morning
Safe until day
Safe from the east-end
To the west way.

Metropolis stonelands are thridded by rail:
Here living is EPIC and death EPIC FAIL--
The river keeps moving but won't move away
Reluctantly night baton-passes to day.

Safe until morning
Safe until day
Safe from the east-end
To the west way.

Man Booker Prize: the Shortlist

This is a mere follow-up to this post, on the Man Booker longlist; tantamount to a place-holder, but here for reasons of completeness.  I don't see myself blogging any more on this topic, in part because merely thinking about the prize fills me with a gaping sense of the futility of existence and the doleful void at the heart of things.

This is what I said at the beginning of the month:

Only Mantel absolutely deserves to be on the shortlist; although I'd be happy enough to see Barker, Beauman and Moore go through. Of the rest some are interesting more-or-less failures, some are pretty bad, and some are so bad (Frayn, Levy, I'm looking at you) as to make the reader slap his/her forehead in disbelief, Wallace-and-Gromit-style, with his/her meaty plasticine hand.

I added: 'This is the shortlist I expect to see from yon farrago of titles: Barker; Brink; Joyce; Moore; Self; Mantel.'

Today the Man Booker shortlist was announced: Tan Twan Eng; Deborah Levy; Hilary Mantel; Alison Moore; Will Self; Jeet Thayil.  50% strike-rate for me, and a poor shortlist for everybody else.  Mantel's and Moore's are good novels; the other four are all over-written, in various ways (viz: Eng, overpurpled; Levy, pseud's-corner pretentious and often actively bad;  Self, clogged and tiresome and let-me-show-off-my-cleverness-by-flinging-faeces-at-you; Thayil, just tiresome and self-consciously over-poeticised).  It suggests that the judges cannot tell the difference between good writing and over-writing.  Which is to say, they have no taste.  Barker and Beauman, in particular, have good reason to feel aggrieved.

That said, I find, looking back, that when I add-up the total amount of shit I give, said total turns out to be zero. I'm a man. These are some books. Man. Book. Blah. Prize.

Kebabded House

Crowded House's 'Fall At Your Feet' is a lovely song. Fair dos. But that said, I challenge you to listen to the lines:

And whenever I fall at your feet
You let your tears rain down on me
Whenever I touch your slow turning pain

...without thinking of a giant kebab turning slowly in front of its burning-hot elements in the window of a kebab shop.

Nonsense, this is

"Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." Not very coherent, Master Philosopher. Ah but wait a minute could it be that Yoda is actually channelling, of all people, David Hume? This, from A Treatise of Human Nature (1739): 'Grief and disappointment give rise to anger, anger to envy, envy to malice, and malice to grief again, until the whole circle be completed.'

Inside

Inside every book is another book.  And inside that is another book.  It stops there though; that's as far as it goes.