Catch up: books, theatre, film and TV

Isn't it interesting that an awful lot of new children's books are reemphasising illustration (often by the author themselves)? I loved Quentin Blake's illustrations for Roald Dahl's stories - well, Quentin Blake's illustrations for anything, really. I know that there is a long-established tradition of illustrating children's stories in particular, but in recent years these pictures seem to have become an awful lot darker - perhaps to reflect the stories themselves (cf. Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, illustrated in the UK edition by Chris Riddell). Of course, children's stories are not all fairies and candy floss; think of the Tales of the Brothers Grimm, and Dickens' Christmas Stories. There does seem to have been, however, a hiatus between the late nineteenth century and the late twentieth century as far as 'plastic' children's stories goes (with the odd - often bizarre - exception, e.g. Russell Hoban's stories for children). I like the return to stories in which the dark and dangerous illustrations reflect the dramatic tension of the story!

Went to see Graham Norton in La Cage aux Folles last week. Let's be honest - he's not known for his singing and I have to admit, I was a little nervous about how he would manage a 2 1/2 hour production as one of the lead roles. However, he pulled it off spectacularly. The production as a whole was wonderful, eerily erotic dancing from the men-women and superb acting from all of the lead roles. I'm familiar with some of the songs from this show, so it was a great joy to see them performed live. More than anything, though, I loved the audience. This was a matinee performance and, as you might expect, leaned fairly heavily to the pensioner side of things. (There is something odd about 200 pensioners coming to watch a play about a transvestite caberet in France...). However, they responded marvellously and I ended up sitting next to an elderly gentleman who had the most spectacular baritone laugh I have ever heard!

'Good God...', I think to myself, as Christopher Biggins comes out dressed as Danny Zuko with the oddest quiff and the biggest middle-aged spread imaginable (stretched tightly across a clinging black T-shirt). What follows is the most unnatural (and campest) version of 'You're the One that I Want' that I've ever seen. Nothing will top that, I think to myself. And then out comes Robert Webb with an utterly unique interpretation of 'Flashdance' complete with what looks like a rubber leotard and a rather disturbing hairy chest (as well as ridiculously feminine legs)! Both performances defy description, so watch them here.

So, Kate Winslet finally won her Oscar. I have to admit, I haven't seen The Reader yet, but I feel that she deserved one, if only for waiting so long! I didn't get the opportunity to watch the show, but it looks as though it was better than it has been for the last few years. I have to admit, I'm going to miss the build up now for another 12 months...

I'm currently reading Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. This is book my brother lent me and I haven't got round to picking it up until now. I'm only half-way through, so I can't really comment on the plot/characters yet, but what I can say is that it made me laugh out loud on the tube, much to the disgust of the man sitting next to me...

Fairy tales

Just watching Jonathan Ross interviewing Glenn Close on the BBC. He's talking about her role in 101 Dalmatians and comments that you don't often see strong female characters in (especially Disney) cartoons. She replies, "I used to watch cartoons with my daughter and I noticed that you don't have any mothers in cartoons - you don't have any mothers in fairy tales - because mothers are fierce and if there were mothers in fairy tales, nothing would ever happen to the kids." I like that!

[*Although there is a mother in Stardust (Neil Gaiman's fairy tale. Or tale from Faerie.) Having said that, not wishing to give away too much of the plot, she can't do much for most of the story...]

Einstein, Dostoevsky and films

Watched the BBC's Einstein and Eddington last night. I was really looking forward to seeing how Andy Serkis played Enistein; somehow it feels like a role he was born to play! I'm also not knocking yet another opportunity to see David Tennant in - well - anything at all, really. I have to admit, I was somewhat gutted about the fact that much of the filming took place in and around Cambridge - at precisely the times when I was no longer there! Sod's law... The film (which, at an hour and a half, is what it was, I suppose) left me feeling a little bit empty. The performances were brilliant for the most part, and the script was very good. However, it felt as though it needed a little more time to develop the central characters. I suppose for that sort of running time, you're talking about a series, and I don't think the story warranted that, but I still felt as though something were missing. The references to faith and God were very interesting, but felt a bit out of place; I would have liked the writer to explore that side of things a little more. One of the most important things this programme did, however, was to remind you that science never takes place in a vacuum. So much of what happens is informed by the time and place in which it takes place. The speech given by Eddington at the very end of the programme highlighted this well: he said that, in the light of this new science (Einstein's General Relativity), the world felt brand new and a little bit more lonely. A relevant epithet for the post-WW1 society, too, I think. Boyfriend commented that the great leaps in science always seem to occur in times of historical unrest or military campaign. There is something disquieting about this: can progress only occur through the necessity of beating one's enemies (or competitors)? It also interestingly raised the issue of scientific discovery being used as much for propoganda as for military gain. Very good programme, all in all.

I think, if I were to be any scientist, I would like to be Einstein. I have a great deal of time for him. He had the ability to see the patterns in things, and prized imagination very highly. He did not entirely detach himself from living in the world either; he was acutely aware of the implications of his scientific research, particularly insofar as it led to the development of the A-bomb. It reminded me of the fact that he donated his brain to medical science when he died. Rather like the phrenologists of the Victorian age, medical researchers were keen to study his brain to see if there were any physiological location for his genius. They found nothing special. I like that! It is like Dostoevsky's Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov: an exceptionally holy monk whose body is expected to remain miraculously preserved after death, but actually decomposes at an unusual rate. Such groundedness gives me the hope that anyone can be anything - monk or genius - that the potential is there. (Although some years later another scientist obtained special permission to look again at Einstein's brain and found a certain section of the frontal lobe to be larger than normal...)

I've just watched Stardust for the nth time and still love it to bits. It's definitely the kind of film to watch when you're on your own for the evening and it's raining outside. I have to admit (as sacrilegious as this may sound to some) that I prefer the screenplay to Neil Gaiman's novel - it has more humour to it, and, I suppose filmically, it works better. Which is what it's meant to do, after all! Anyway, the soundtrack has now gone on my Amazon wishlist...

Good books, historical books, theological books...

I've just finished reading Walter Moers's The City of Dreaming Books. I picked it up in the local library, as an 'I need one more book for this week' book. It's the first of his 'Zamonian' books that I've read and I thorougly enjoyed it. It is set in the fantasy world of Zamonia and tells the story of a young Lindworm who travels to the big city to hunt down the greatest ever author. When he naively shows the manuscript he possesses to several publishers and literary agents, he is poisoned and locked away in the city's catacombs deep under ground. Lost and alone, he battles his way past various supposedly mythical creatures on his journey towards knowledge. The drawings in the book are fantastic, and are used really cleverly in several places as narrative tools. I have to admit, I was a little sceptical of reading a novel whose main protagonist is a dinasaur (sorry, a Lindworm), but it was a very funny and very insightful story. I'll now try and get hold of his other works published in English (and perhaps even have a go at the German!).

As far as research goes, I'm now ploughing on with the next chapter. This is to be based around the themes of authority and interpretation in reading Scripture as part of the liturgy. Funnily enough, there's not a book to be had on this subject, so I've come home from the university library with a tonne of books that will probably all turn out to be totally irrelevant! I think I might like to include something about the book of Job as part of this chapter, so I picked up Jung's Answer to Job. This is a fascinating book - it feels incredibly dated, with its misogynistic assumptions about women (par exemple, "this symbol lays bare the whole mystery of the 'woman': she contains in her darkness the sun of 'masculine' consciousness") and its reliance on astrology to explain features of psychology. It reminds me of the fact that just such psychologists treated women in the early 20th century who presented with the symptoms of 'hysteria' - turns out the women in question had all experienced orgasm for the first time. There is something incredibly tragic about that! It makes you feel as though you need to constantly remember exactly why feminism needed to happen in the first place, if only as a tribute to the women who were harmed by the prevailing 'scientific' and 'intellectual' views. Anyway, this book feels as though it belongs to that particular period of 'enlightenment' - but a quick glance at the publisher's details shows it was first published in 1954. Not so long ago.... Despite this, Jung has some interesting (if theolgically dubious) things to say about what God has to learn from Job; what he can gain for himself by reading Job, as it were.

I've also just finished reading Neil Gaiman's American Gods. I've started it several times, and never managed to get all the way through. I think it's one of those novels where you need to be in exactly the right frame of mind to get through it. I was determined to manage it, though, as I love everything else he has written. I find the main character difficult to sympathise with, and I know next to nothing about the geography of America, but this time round I found it really fascinating. From the perspective of my academic background, some of the images towards the end of the novel were really very interesting and may well make it into my chapter on a theology of reading non-religious texts (taking a great deal of liberty, I imagine, with the author's own personal views on religious belief!). We have something of a Neil Gaiman household at the moment - my partner is whizzing through Neverwhere. He's not a great reader (of fiction, at any rate), but he enjoyed The Graveyard Book and I persuaded him to give Neverwhere a go. He absolutely loves it! Good Omens next, I think.

Connections

As I continue to hit my head against the brick wall that is my PhD thesis, I find I am seeing connections everywhere. My research is on theology and literature; more specifically, it concerns the act of reading from both a literary and a theological point of view. I'm drawing primarily from the literary criticism of Mikhail Bakhtin (which leads down paths towards Kant, Dostoevsky, Buber, Proust....), but I'm also very interested in engaging with various novelists, including Russell Hoban, Neil Gaiman and Andrew Crumey. I'm currently trying to deal with Einstein, Heisenberg and Schrödinger, as well as Goethe, Fichte, Schopenhauer, Schumann, H. P. Lovecraft and Umberto Eco. Not that this is just a random string of names (although it may appear to be so); these are the names that seem to cross-reference each other as I read through various novels and academic books.

I've just finished reading Andrew Crumey's Sputnik Caledonia, hot on the heels of his Mobius Dick. They are both excellent novels, making complex scientific concepts accessible to the likes of me! Obviously, approaching a novel that deals with quantum physics/general relativity doesn't necessarily sound like it's going to be an exciting read, but I was hooked by both: the plots are finely tuned and the characters incredibly engaging - points I only noticed on finishing both books, as I was entirely sucked into their world for the duration.

I'm particularly interested in the nature of time and space in the act of reading (is it a different order of time/space that we experience when reading? As far as it is any activity, it obviously takes place in this space and time, but our experience of a good novel/poem/story can somehow feel timeless in the sense of being outside time...) and I stumbled across this blog written by Mr. (I should say Dr.) Crumey: http://www.panmacmillan.com/Picador/ManageBlog.aspx?BlogID=d853b604-23d4-48ae-beb0-a7c018d8a6b5&BlogPage=Permalink. In it he compares our experience of time in the universe to the experience of reading, although drawing slightly different conclusions to some of the ones I had been coming to. I shall have to sit down and have another think about it (especially as he has a doctorate in theoretical physics, and knows rather more about it than I do).

My copy of Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book arrived today. I'm keeping it as a treat - if I manage to do x amount of work, I can read a chapter! I'm definitely looking forward to reading it. I've enjoyed many of his other works, especially the short stories (why do short stories always get overlooked? Virginia Woolf's are some of the most moving pieces of literature I've ever read, yet hardly anyone knows about them). I realise The Graveyard Book is billed as a children's book - I think the publishers actually call it 'a story for children of all ages' - but my secret confession is that I love children's stories. They always seem to contain so much more possiblity than adults' novels. Adults' novels, whilst beautifully written and poignantly pitched, very often restrict themselves to observation or comment. Children's novels dream in a way that adult novels often do not, and it is this that made me fall in love with reading many years ago. So, I'll keep reading the adult novels, and enjoying them, but you'll never stop me reading the children's stories too! (On which note, I've just ordered a set of Roald Dahl novels...)