Fiddling About

I've just finished - I think - fiddling with the CSS code for this blog. There was something strange happening with the way the columns lined up, and some paragraph indenting was bugging me. I surfed bravely away from my normal comfort sites of W3schools and glish's CSS templates. I'd love to play with the CSS Zen garden but I do have other things to do, so I ended up at Floatutorial. I still had to fiddle to get the blogger content to sit in the right place, but at last this blog no longer looks half-cocked. At least in Firefox.

I've also changed the further readings links to a del.icio.us feed. Sara at storytelling is looking for links to authors who blog, so I'm going to get around to putting more into the further reading list. Suggestions always welcome.

Finally, the atom feed is running.

I don't think it has been syndicated to LJ yet, but if someone does that, could they let me know the syn URL? Ta.
The LJ syn is up (thanks, Trina!).


Updated to add:
Thanks to a smart person at the CSS forum, the thing is now behaving under the most common browsers and OSs. The one failing one is if you have a screen resolution of 800 x 600 and are running IE6 on a Windows OS. I'll try to fix it, but in the meantime, if you are being caught by that, may I suggest the joys of Firefox?

Murder in Baker Street

Murder in Baker Street
edited by Greenberg, Lellenberg & Stashower
(2003)

I've been having a bit of a Sherlockian craze over the last few months and, having reread the Canon, I've moved onto the non-Canon. (Some of this I can blame of Kelly Hale, whose non-Canon Holmes novel I read a couple of years ago and which is finally getting published.)

This is a collection of short stories featuring Holmes and Watson by modern crime writers. There's nothing very wrong, just the occassional jarring Americanism or a not-quite-right Watson voice, but they do seem to lack a certain something. It's not that I am wedded to the Canon - I thoroughly enjoyed the recent Rupert Everett non-Canon adventure on the BBC - but the devilish detail doesn't work in most of these. Some suffered from what we in the Doctor Who trade would call the HGWells effect: let's get our famous fictional character to meet a famous author/person of the time and the historical one will be inspired by him! Thus Holmes is brought into a case, involving mysterious marks on someone's neck and Mittel European servants getting all superstitious, by one Abraham Stoker.

The best was, I thought, A Hansom for Holmes which put aside Watson as a narrator in favour of a cabman who gets entangled in a case. This had the lively narration you want from Holmes, without trying to mimic ACD's style.

Ah well, it passed the time until the New Annotated... arrived.

Whatja readin' for?

Love All the People: Letters, Lyrics, Routines
Bill Hicks
(2004)

I went to a Waffle House. I'm not proud of it, I was hungry. And I'm alone, I'm eating and I'm reading a book, right? Waitress walks over to me: "Hey, whatja readin' for?"

Isn't that the weirdest fucking question you've ever heard? Not what am I reading, but what am I reading for? Well, godammit, ya stumped me! Why do I read? Well... hmmm... I dunno... I guess I read for a lot of reasons, and one of the main ones is so I don't end up being a fucking waffle waitress like you.

I know Bill Hicks's Dangerous and Relentless albums well. Really well. I can recite The Gulf War Distraction ("it's so pretty and it takes our minds offa domestic issues") more easily than a Monty Python sketch. It was the early 90s: Cobain had been blasting through our eardrums with his particular brand of nilhisism, Hicks and Leary were on constant play because all the British comedians had run out of anger after yet another Conservative election victory[*], and I was in tattoo parlours. That I know Hicks' material well cannot be a shock. I'm not really sure what I wanted from this book. New insight into someone whose career is one of the seminal influences on modern standup? Perhaps. To revel in his style? I can do that by putting the albums on.

This transcribes many of the recordings of material. After the fourth time you've read that Hicks, like UFOs, is appearing in small rural communities all over America I realised what this primarily does is a forensic autopsy of his comedy. You can see the slight changes he makes, the comments to hecklers, and the way, like all pro comedians, he hauls himself back onto his script and keeps on going. This is the body of his work lain out on a slab to be dissected.

It may be of interest to aspiring comedians, and it did still provoke the odd smirk from me, but it is step one on the road of deification. Cobain's diaries, every element of his life, is churned out for obsessive consumption by the eager fans. We've been saved from seeing either he or Hicks degenerate or sell out to the Man by their early deaths (one from suicide, the other from pancreatic cancer). So now their legacy is being packaged up and sold to us, their images becoming safe, unchanging icons. Just as I'd rather stick some Nirvana on the mp3player than read Cobain's diaries, I'd rather whack the Hicks tapes back into the machine and play them at 10 than read this book.

---

[*] this, I feel, is one reason for the return of British surrealism (Izzard, Hill etc) and music hall slapstick (Reeves & Mortimore). A decade of angry young comics hadn't changed a damn thing and we wanted something new.

unwinding the threads

My plans to make a neat little intergrated system for my books got a bit waylaid by the need to write a novel (see the main grouch blog) but now I have acres of free time staring at me I have got back on it.

So, this is what I've done:

1. Set up del.icio.us tags, as previously mentioned back in November


2. Used the lovely RSS Digest feed to create feeds from the del.icio.us tags to the left and right sidebars here, covering the tags for current reading, waiting to be read, recently read, etc.


3. Used and abused a nice layout from glish. My abuse of the code makes it look odd in Firefox, but nevermind...


4. Used a pretty font called New Kinder to make new banners and badges.

From now on the blog (i.e. this bit here) will be used for reviews of what I'm reading whilst the sidebars will reveal where I am in the never-ending pile of stuff.

I just bought Labyrinths by Borges, in case no-one guessed.

update: now tweaked again

Traitor's Purse

Traitor's Purse
Margary Allingham
( Penguin, 1941)
One of my favourite Campion novels, which I bought just to have it in the classic Penguin green and cream design. An amnesiac Campion wakes in a hospital, suspected of murder.

One of the reasons I like the Campion novels is that he goes through WW2 and emerges a different character. You can contrast the early novels like Mystery Mile in which he is a combination of Sherlock Holmes and Bertie Wooster with these later novels (Traitor's Purse, More Work for the Undertaker etc) in which he has ended up a government agent albeit one still with Woosterish mannerisms. Allingham writes war and post-War Britain with a staggering grinding sense of impoverishment so Campion's changing character reflects the changing eras.

Of the City of the Saved

Of the City of the Saved
Phil Pursar-Hallard

I can't realistically comment too much about this, given that not only had I read the draft but that this was a gift from PPH. And is published by my publisher.
However, for what it can be worth, I enjoyed this immensely. PPH is a world-shaper style of writer and produces an epic portrait of the City of the Saved, the City beyond the death of the universe into which all humans have been resurrected. There are sly jokes, textual trickery and unpleasant horror scenes. The grand reveal, which I already knew about before I read the draft, works and makes alarming sense. Plus, an entire room full of Sherlock Holmeses...(Holmesii?)

Carter Beats the Devil

Carter Beats the Devil
Glen David Gold
( sceptre, 2001)

I was utterly captivated by this novel, despite working out one of the mysteries quite early on. It tangles together stage magicians, childhood tramas, fate-dictated romances and the American Secret Service. The opening of the second section, dealing with Carter's childhood reminded me sharply of Citzen Kane, although doubtless the mentions of (William Randolph) Hearst were also responsible for that. In fact, the entire book reminds me of Welles and his fascination with magic and illusion. There are the occassional moments where Gold spells things out a little too hard, and one supporting character who really should work very well as a hard-boiled anti-hero has a curiously lacklustre storyline despite some excellent character pieces. Overall, though, a great read.

(Any Doctor Who novels fan reading this will be hopelessly reminded of Sabbath as well, I should warn you)

The Wee Free Men

The Wee Free Men
Terry Pratchett
( corgi, 2004)

Pratchett's Discworld books for children have the confident reliance on story which, I can't help but feel, has been mislaid or waylaid by the ongoing characters in the 'main' series. Like Maurice and his Educated Rodents, this plays with narrative unashamedly and is more entertaining for it. Strip away the continuity from the 'main' series and this is what you get: smart writing about the nature of reality and of story-telling.

The Jaguar Smile

The Jaguar Smile
Salman Rushdie
( picador, 1987 )

There's always something strange about reading of-the-moment political travel journalism after decades have elapsed. The one thing I wish The Jaguar Smile had contained was more contextualisation. True, I am a child of the 80s and remember the Sandinistas and Contras, the CIA aid and the now strange paranoia over communism. I ought to know this stuff, the book contained names I recall such as Daniel Ortega, and perhaps its a lot to ask to have clearer political delineations in a work from the time (although Orwell managed well enough in Homage to Catalonia) but I did occassionally feel an assumption of understanding had been taken by Rushdie. It can be argued that the mild bewilderment is meant to create the confusion and ambivilance Rushie himself feels in the face of a complex geopolitical war and certainly as a portrait of a country in revolution, The Jaguar Smile really works.

A Metropolitan Murder

A Metropolitan Murder
Lee Jackson
( heinemann, 2004)

Told in the present tense, this is a novel about a murder on the Metropolitan railway, the first underground railway in the world. A while back a friend did a checklist of 35 things you must including if writing a piece of Victoriana. I have marked in bold all the ones this novel ticks:

1. Whores.
2. Fenians.
3. Urchins.
4. Social deprivation.
5. Incompetent policemen.
6. Brutal murders on the darkened streets of the capital.
7. Cockney cut-throats who don't care about anything except money.
8. Comment on sexual inequality.
9. Comment on class division.
10. Comment on British imperialism.
11. Scene set in a music-hall.
12. Scene set on a period railway station.
13. At least one evil right-wing wife-beating aristocrat. (this has an evil left-wing middle-class type instead)
14. At least one handlebar moustache, often attached to evil right-wing wife-beating aristocrat.
15. At least one fascinating-but-true fact about Victorian life not previously used by a work of fiction set in the era.
16. At least one in-joke referring to another work of fiction set in the era. (can it be coincidence that the body is discovered at Baker Street station?)
17. Cameo appearance from man in deerstalker hat who's clearly not Sherlock Holmes. (see above)
18. Cameo appearance from random character who just happens to be called Moriarty.
19. Cameo appearance from well-known eighteenth-century artist/ writer/ inventor.
20. Closet homosexuality.
21. Bodies in the Thames. (actually, this one is undercut but the expectation is there)
22. Fog.
23. Various derogatory terms for "Jew" no longer in common usage.
24. A pocket watch, probably stolen and possibly inscribed with the initials of a murder victim.
25. Attempted rape or kidnapping of heroine by burly East-End thugs (if rape, then bound to be interrupted by policeman's whistle).
26. Someone who's spent time in Africa.
27. Someone who shoots tigers.
28. Good-natured but subserviant maid who can supply important information.
29. Drunken Irish navvies.
30. One brief reference to the current Prime Minister, in order to ground the story in actual historical events.
31. Several people modelled on British character actors
32. The line 'Queen Victoria, Gawd bless 'er'.
33. Gin.
34. Slang.
35. More whores.

I'm never convinced about present tense in crime fiction. The idea, one suspects, is to increase the tension but for me it does little because I am always immediately aware of it as a device. This novel also seems uncertain about narration, with multiple characters getting their moment of third person glory. I actually felt this distracted from the notion of the novel as a crime thriller. The reader is given too much infomation whilst at the same time the lack of focus allows the tension to drift away: it's very hard to care about any of these characters as none are given enough time to become emotionally engaging.

In terms of the use of the tube (hello, Annie!) it is enjoyable although I thought the first tube lines were cut and cover whilst this seems to suggest the first extension of the Metropolitan was dug out as if by miners*. It's possible they had already started using the shield method by then but I'd need to check. However, the description of the passengers and their behaviour will strike a cord with anyone familiar with the rules of tube travel. And the fact that, even in its first year of operation, the underground was subject to delays, poor lighting and cancellations raises a chuckle.

*tangently madly: in a flashback episode of Buffy with a caption "London, 1865", Dru has a vision of a 'cave in' down the 'mine' which causes much hilarity to British fans. I've long argued that she meant the tube, since there were collapses whilst the Metropolitan was being built in...1864/5.