work in progress

On Holidays

On Holidays

A voluntary exile. A purposeful disruption from the normal run of life. The desire to ‘go on holiday’, like the desire to have children, can only keep recurring by episodes of selective amnesia. Every year, people have awful, traumatic experiences in foreign countries, but yet they keep coming back for more - why?

I’ve recently been on holiday. As holidays go, it wasn’t too bad. It had several enjoyable moments. But already, I can feel that the bad bits, of which there were also several: the tedium of the flight, for example, and the frustration of having constant access to all my books and music, are fading into the background. The real holiday is being replaced in my mind by a fictional holiday, with all the bad bits cut out. Already, when people ask me if I had a good time, I feel the urge to lie to them and make it sound better than it was. I’m not sure why this is. I think I might feel ashamed of telling people that I didn’t have a good enough time.

When I think of holidays, I just think of the good bits. When I am considering planning a holiday,  the last thing I think about is the practicalities. This is the first trick that holidays pull on you. Because if you thought about the booking of holidays, the dilemmas of packing, the trauma of travel and the inevitable disappointment on arrival, then you would probably decide to stay at home. The holiday in its infancy, its foetal stage, much like the ultrasound scan of a 3-month-old dictator in the womb, does not resemble the tyrannical misery-inducing force it is going to become. The pre-natal holiday is a vague confluence of elements - blue skies, sun, food, ‘culture’ - that are barely thought about. They are just images in the mind’s eye: a beach in the afternoon; the turquoise blue sea; a meal with people one hasn’t ever met laughing across a table; a hotel balcony and exotic guitar music drifting up from the town square. That none of these events will materialise, or if they do, their specificity will annihilate the pleasure that the vagueness of anticipation allows, hardly crosses the mind. After all, when thinking of holiday, very little does. 

The actual experience of a holiday will vary, depending mainly on one factor: how much money you have. The old adage about money not buying happiness, but buying a first class ticket whilst you are looking for it, is most directly applicable to the holiday situation. Money allows you to smooth the rough edges off even the most unpleasant experiences. Money buys you a more exclusive, less crowded destination; expensive seats on flights at reasonable times of the day. Taxis - another expense - eliminate the effort at each end of the flight. Then there are the hotel suites, beaches, restaurants etc. In this sense, money makes for better holidays. The only thing to be said against having this kind of money is that it must be so insulating that the transit from one state of luxury to another must be about as fascinating as the transit from the living room to the bedroom. 

For some, only the random intrusion of unwanted interventions that relative poverty foists upon us can make for a successful holiday. This would accord with the theory that happiness is not something that can be planned, but rather always waits in ambush where you least expect it. By that token, a holiday that goes exactly as planned is, paradoxically, a disaster. In the worst of all possible disaster scenarios, when friends or colleagues ask you how your holiday went, you would simply be able to hand them the brochure and say, ‘that’. Not being able to do that is one of the luxuries of the budget holiday. A luxury the rich cannot afford.

The holiday brochure, along with the communist manifesto and the airline magazine, are the most mendacious works of literature yet published. The most obviously manifest falsehood is the complete lack of beggars and thieves in holiday brochures. Beggars are everywhere in the modern world, and we are all used to seeing them at home. They scarcely become more exotic in a foreign country, although we tend to feel less responsibility for them. They are not our beggars: we didn’t make them destitute, and we can safely ignore them. Thieves on the other hand, can’t be ignored. The herd of tourists, ignorant of local places, customs and prices represents, for the thief or swindler, the equivalent of the home shopping experience. Being robbed abroad is an integral part of a great number of people’s holiday experience. The ideal holiday brochure would offer you a portfolio of criminal experiences: pickpocketed on an escalator in Barcelona; robbed in a Warsaw hotel room; mugged on a Caribbean beach. Who hasn’t sat for hours in the dreary and frightening interior of a foreign police station, ready to be taken through a casting directory of local pimps and hoods? That is what a truthful brochure would include.

A holiday always disappoints, but we always come back. That’s because a holiday is metaphorical. What is a holiday, but the dramatic enactment of life’s eternal search for happiness? It is a fantasy, sustained in community, that happiness is an achievable finished state. How do we know we can be happy? Because we had it - for that afternoon, on a hillside in Kashmir, on a beach in Malaga. And once happiness has been achieved, our gut instinct tells us that since it has been achieved once, it can be repeated ad infinitum, and drawn out for ever. Of course this isn’t true. The thing that makes that afternoon, that evening so perfect is the very fact of the rupture from normal activity. To draw it out for several months would be pointless: that would become the new routine, and only something completely different would seem like paradise. Enjoying holiday then, the concept of holiday, depends not just on the involuntary amnesia of forgetting the peripheral agonies of travel, but also on willfully submitting to a collective fantasy that happiness is something other than a state of mind. In that dictatorship, happiness is a place, and that place is called Holiday.

Snowbound

Learn to Read Spanish in 6 Months

Up to a reasonable level of fluency isn't too difficult for an English speaker, and much easier if you have a bit of Latin or French behind you. I decided to use the Easy Reader series from European Schoolbooks Publishing. They do four languages: French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian. Wait- that's five. Anyway, they publish each language in 4 series: A (600 words), B (1200 words), C (2000 words) and D (2500 words). After finishing all four levels, you are more or less ready to set off on newspapers and, starting with fairly easy ones, proper novels. I already used this series when I was learning Russian, several years ago. I decided to work on my Spanish, of which I knew a few basics, at the beginning of this year. I have now read, let me see...13 of these books, although that's less than half the range available in the Spanish series. What's great about these readers, in my opinion, and what sets them apart from other graded readers, is the wealth of great literature that has been adapted from classic and contemporary authors. This means that whilst you are learning a language, you are also getting a great overview of foreign literature, so that you can carry on reading the authors you liked when you get to a better standard. Each of the books is illustrated, usually quite well, and helpful vocab is supplied, along with exercises at the end of each chapter.  Anyway, here are quick reviews of all the titles I read, just in case you want to try them out.


Level A


Las Tres de la Madrugada - Miguel Bunuel
Considering the limited vocabulary we have to work with here, Las Tres is a pretty gripping read. It all takes place on a train and the vocab is pretty essential for modern Spanish. 8/10
Los Carros Vacios - Francisco Garcia Pavon
Probably the most difficult in the A series that I read. A murder mystery introducing the character of Police chief Plinio, who pops up in a couple more books in the series. Recommended 9/10
Marcelino Pan y Vino - Jose Maria Sanchez Silva
A bizarre and probably touching religious story about a boy who keeps a statue of Jesus in the attic that he talks to. Bizarrely, it also talks to him. It's a bit boring, and my Spanish was so bad, I wasn't sure if I was reading it right or it was supernatural. 6/10


Level B


Lista de Locos y otros alfabetos - Bernardo Atxaga
A series of surreal stories based on letters of the alphabet by a Basque writer. I have to admit, I found this a grind. The language is a lot harder than the A books, and the subject is random. At one point, the author has a debate and watches a football match with the letters of the alphabet. At least I think that's what was happening. I certainly learned a lot from reading this, and it was probably the most difficult 'B', so you should read it last, not first. 6/10
Las inquietudes de Shanti Andia - Pio Baroja
This was probably my favourite book of the whole series. It is the story of a boy who grows up to be a ships captain, and the adventures he encounters on his travels, and back at home. Even in this easy reader, bowdlerised version, the writing was lyrical, impressionistic, and the story was very exciting. I fully intend to read the original one of these days. 10/10
Amnesia - Fernando Lalana
From the sublime to the ridiculous. After reading this I wish I had amnesia. For a start the language in this book is so simple it really ought to be in the A section. Secondly, the plot is so far-fetched, it makes most Hollywood blockbusters seem like a Ken Loach film. It's something about a secret agent losing his memory and then meeting a girl and then... oh, you can make up the rest yourself. 3/10
Lazarillo de Tormes - Anon
This is one of those really old Spanish classics that has been adapted for the series. It's the story of a young man and his apprenticeship to a succession of awful, awful masters, the things they do to him, and the tricks which young Lazarillo learns to cope with them. The stories are ironically written, and full of bawdy, cruel humour. Somewhat old fashioned vocab. Recommended 9/10
Raro - Benjamin Prado
Raro means 'strange', and this book is a bit. Another tough one - or maybe it's modern literature that I'm struggling with. To start with, the vocab notes were all exactly one page out of sequence, which became extremely irritating. The story is a melancholy and ironic perspective of a young man who has little faith in Spanish society or his parents generation. I didn't really take to it, although the language was satisfyingly difficult, and I learned a lot of vocab. 6/10


Level C


Cuentos - Ignacio Aldecoa
I get the impression that Aldecoa is a big name in Spanish fiction of the 20th century. These stories are acutely observed vignettes about life in the lower classes in Spain. They are slow and lyrical, and nothing much happens, but the poetic beauty of the language is evident, and the stories have a touching truthfulness about them. The one about the old man whose dog gets run over made my cry over my cappuccino. I've ruined that one for you. 8/10
El Conde Lucanor - Don Juan Manuel
Another highlight of the series, and another classic from the 14th Century, no less. The Count Lucanor asks his advisor, Patronio for advice to help him govern, and the wise advisor gives him guidance, in 10 stories, each of which points a moral. The stories are great in themselves - like Aesop or La Fontaine, but with a more human and humorous touch. You get hooked after two or three, and wish there were a lot more. Another to come back to 10/10.
Papel Mojado - Juan Jose Millais 
A detective story with a difference. A man's friend is murdered, so he decides to track down the killer in order to help himself finish the novel he always wanted to write. He finishes the novel, and finds the killer, but neither is what he, or the reader, expects. The tone of the book is deeply cynical, and darkly humorous, and the author likes to play tricks on you, but with your Spanish at level C, you can cope with that, can't you? 8/10
Las Hermanas Coloradas - Francisco Garcia Pavon
Hooray, it's the return of Plinio, everyone's favourite Spanish detective. Here, he comes to Madrid to investigate the disappearance of the crimson twins. It's standard police procedural stuff, but then I love standard police procedural. This is a bit like Maigret in Spain, but no worse for all that. 8/10


Level D


Tres Cuentos - Luis Mateo Diez
As I write, there are only three books available in the D echelons. Perhaps few venture this far, or maybe people just go on to newspapers or whatnot. The other books available are Don Quixote parts 1 and 2, which need no introduction, and which I didn't read, and one other. This is the only D I partook in. 3 short stories (10 pages or so each) but with a lot of new vocab. Tres Cuentos is one of only two in the series which are complete works, without any adaptation for easy reading. Not surprisingly, the level jump is a bit of a jolt, but after this, you can pretty much read anything.

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame

Another unreal policeman.

Must I summarise the plot? Well, people keep bursting into flames. Noone knows what is causing this, but foul play is suspected. Find Detective Dee, the omniscient chop-socky protagonist and the game of Gomoku is afoot. It’s important not to obfuscate the main issue, which is that Detective Dee is a couple of hours of solid, uncomplicated entertainment. It has a strong central character, a fun plot, with plenty of twists, lots of fighting, plus a sprinkling of magic. It also features a world record - surely the largest ever murder weapon. It is excellent fun.

One aspect of the film which I found puzzling, however, was that it had one foot in the rational scientific world, and another in the supernatural. Of course, it’s a staple element of detective literature for a supernatural explanation to be posited for a phenomenon (The Hound of the Baskervilles), only for the rational detective to demonstrate the all-too-human origin for the events in question.

In Detective Dee, supernatural events occur alright, but the ‘rational’ explanations are not rational at all: for example, the ability to ventriloquise over long distances - an obvious impossibility - is an explanation for one of the minor mysteries of the film. In another scene, the ability of a character to seemingly split into three parts is explained by... puppetry? Hm. Hardly believable either. 

It seems that the Chinese have misunderstood one of the key elements of the detective genre: part of the ludic quality of the western detective story is the idea that the reader, or viewer in this case, is able to piece together the available evidence, and come to the conclusion before the detective. Western detective writers are tightly constricted by the confines of the possible, or even the likely. To reveal, at the end of a Holmes story, that there really was  a phantom hound would be deeply unsatisfactory. In Detective Dee world, the supernatural is also debunked, but only for a physical world in which pretty much anything is possible. Dee occupies an alternate reality, one where modern natural science has not arrived, but in which primitive inventions, such as martial arts, homeopathy, mechanics, ventriloquism (to name a few examples) have been honed to a degree bordering on the supernatural. 

This state of affairs has plausibility-sapping properties. Characters are omniscient one moment, but lacking a fatal piece of information the next. One second they can sense a footstep from half a mile away, the next, they are snuck up on by thirty foot soldiers. And of course, when almost anything is possible, the actual becomes less interesting. 

I don’t actually think that the Chinese have misunderstood the detective genre. I think they have grafted it onto another genre: the fantasy kung fu genre. The resulting chimera is an odd-looking beast which wouldn’t be allowed in any classical detective club, but nevertheless entertains in its own way.

Metaphysical Policemen

There’s always a metaphysical element to detectives - an investigation going on behind the investigation. That’s true for TV cops as much as for fictional ones. You wouldn’t assume Columbo had a pretext, but then, is it a coincidence that Columbo villains are always part of an elite - an intellectual, financial or social elite? Colombo represents the working man - rough hewn, unintellectual, but underestimate him at your peril. Columbo represents the forces of democratisation in American society. The worst crime in the US is to believe that you are better than everybody else. Colombo proves that. The villains in Columbo demonstrate that if you go around thinking you’re better than everyone else, it’s only a matter of time before you actually commit a murder. It’s also no coincidence that it’s often British or European actors playing the villain. Europe is elitist, effete, decadent.: Ricardo Montalban; Patrick McGoohan. America is manly, pragmatic. In Columbo, you know who the killer is, because you see the Crime at the beginning of the show. It’s not so much a detective show, as a blood sport. It’s watching the ritual humiliation of a public monster. 

What is the metaphysical element of Inspector Montalbano (no relation to Ricardo), currently on BBC iPlayer? Inspector Montalbano demonstrates all the qualities of Italianicity that an Italian man should posess: boisterously heterosexual, a gastronome, yet cuts a bella figura despite all that pasta. To a British person, Montalbano seems to play fast and loose with the code of professional conduct which you would expect from an officer of the law. He is more interested in Justice, than law, and doesn’t believe in observing every little regulation, because he sees the bigger picture. He frequently exercises a worldly discretion in the course of his duty, as opposed to sticking to the letter of the law. Montalbano whines like a baby when his superiors threaten to promote him. A promotion would mean a desk job, and more responsibility. Montalbano isn’t interested in worldly position. He’s interested in staying proletarian, because authority is for buffoons. How can Montalbano buck authority if he is one? Despite resembling the love child of Karl Pilkington and Ross Kemp to a precise degree, Montalbano is a hit with the ladies, another Italian manly requisite. I’m learning Italian hand gestures. Two hands held in an inverted steeple at waist level seems to mean ‘you’re fucking joking’ or ‘give me a break’. The hands can be pulled apart then for an imploring gesture ‘have mercy’. Montalbano may be a good and honest cop, but the virtues he displays are arguably the biggest problem with Italy’s political and judicial system. If you believe that a cop should be allowed to exercise personal discretion (“you understand these things” says an aged mafia boss in one episode), then you are subordinating the law to another code: the code of mercy, the code of criminals, the code of ‘decency’. In practice, I would place little reliance on such codes to regulate society. Am I a conservative? I only ever saw Columbo let someone off once: she had alzheimers, and had forgotten she committed the crime. If I were a murderer, I would want Montalbano to arrest me. I think he’s quite bribable.

Safehouse with Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds

Even dumb Hollywood movies are noticeably smarter these days.

Whilst it is still true that a computer can’t create a piece of art, the current prevalence of scriptwriting programs  mean that, even if you are watching the worst kind of cinematic pabulum, in which the only object seems to be to create enough plausibility to move from one action set-piece to another, you can be certain that a spurious thematic depth lurks in the background: each character has their own backstory and motivation, however half-heartedly it is developed.


Welcome to the 90s

In Safehouse, a film in which the only unpredictable element is just how predictable it is, we are invited to a mid-nineties action-movie retro party. The plot is reminiscent of every straight-to-video action movie you’ve ever seen, from the 90s. It looks like it was directed by Tony Scott, in the 90s, but wasn’t, but has his penchant for shaky cameras and pointless captions like “11:43am, Washington”, which I thought Team America: World Police would have put a stop to. It even stars, alongside the charisma-free Ryan Reynolds, that old 90s action standby, Denzel Washington.


Who the hell is Ryan Reynolds anyway? I sure as hell didn't order him. He's another one of those pre-packaged stars that come up every couple of years, seemingly already famous before they have done a decent movie. Before long, you can't move without hearing about who they are dating, or how much they are making per movie, but you still, for the life of you, can't name one decent movie they have made. It's like Brad Pitt. He's a walking advertisement for Brad Pitt, but no good at anything else. 

The first 30 minutes or so of Safehouse are actually pretty good. Denzel Washington is one of the best actors on the action circuit. He actually reminds us that 'action' has the verb 'act' in it. He has 3 or 4 facial expressions to Ryan Reynolds 1.   Sadly, it is in these 30 minutes that the film runs through its entire premise and out the other side. That premise is that Ryan Reynolds (CIA, first job) finds himself guarding Denzel Washington (veteran, ex CIA) in a Safehouse in Johannesburg. But the safehouse is compromised, and soon they are under siege from armed hitmen. It’s no surprise that the heroes escape somehow, but, like Wile E. Coyote bursting through a door conveniently placed on the top of an Arizona mesa, the film finds itself running on thin air from that point, and, once it realises this, it takes a sharp plummet to a  foreseeable conclusion.

It's dire, it's cliched, but what annoyed me most was, as I suggested at the outset, the cynical attempt to bring depth into an otherwise shallow film, by implying there was more going on between the characters than there actually was. In Safehouse, Reynold’s character, “Matt” has an elder mentor in the CIA, Brendan Gleeson.

Now I like Brendan Gleeson. Good guy. But you’ve heard of good actors ‘phoning in’ a performance; when I say that here, I don’t just mean he’s hacking it. I also mean that Gleeson is literally on the phone for the whole of this movie, saying things like, “don’t worry, we’re coming to get you”. I'd really like to know what he got paid for this. Just out of interest.  

A piece of backstory about Matt is casually dropped early in the movie. You gotta love action films: they can just provide background for a character by a CIA boss shouting: “What have you got on X?” and then an underling, with a headset on, goes: “born 1981, raised by penguins in the wild, scored off the charts in blubbing like a baby and smashing up cars.” (So many people score ‘off the charts’ in CIA-themed action movies that you can’t help thinking, "Why don’t they have bigger charts?")

Matt’s father, we learn, died when he was young. Drink driving. Hmm, absent and irresponsible. Could Matt be in need of a father figure? What about Brendan Gleeson? or wait a minute, what about Denzel Washington? It was at this sort of quandary that the writers of Safehouse parked the script, deciding that was about enough depth to fool the audience into thinking this was somehow meaningful subtext. But, and this is just an idea, in order for Brendan Gleeson to have been a plausible father figure, he and Reynolds would probably have had to share a scene or two, perhaps even in the same room, rather than on the phone. Merely because of his physical proximity, there was distinctly more potential in Denzel Washington as father figure, and what an irony that would be, because he's supposed to be the one Matt is taking into custody. I think that this could have been the whole point of the movie, but the director missed it.

Sadly, Matt and Denzel are too busy being shot at and driving like crazy to take up the offer of a surrogate father/son relationship. Besides, that would kind of remind the audience that Denzel is Getting Too Old for this Shit. Despite the fact that neither of these relationships is implied in any meaningful way, in the end, it is annoying that, like a drunk absent father that tries to make up for the childhood he missed, the film tries in the end to cram the replacement father theme into the last two minutes, in some desperate bid for the audience's affection. But the audience instinctively rejects this late attempts to play on affections. Instead it laments: “Where were you when I needed you?” 

Writing comics

I recently met up with Oscar Zarate for coffee. Oscar is the author of several graphic novels, most famously , his collaboration with Alan Moore on A Small Killing, back in the early nineties. He's also illustrated a lot of stuff. Back in October last year, I did a workshop with Oscar at the French Institute. There were about 10 of us, and we were supposed to produce a 4 page comic about London over the weekend. I had no problem producing a story - I find coming up with any number of stories quite easy - it's the bit about refining them and making them any good that takes time, I find. Many authors leave this last stage out, which makes the whole process very economical, I imagine. Whenever I watch Doctor Who, it always seems to me like the first draft of a story that has accidentally been filmed, whilst the real script, in which characters are acting under proper motivation, is gathering dust under a photocopier somewhere. I digress. I did some drafts for a story, and showed my drawings to Oscar. He made some helpful suggestions, like, stop moralising so much. My tendency to moralise probably comes from reading 1950s EC comics, which are like 'war is bad, man', 'human life is precious, man'... For their time, they were quite advanced, for comics anyway. Most comics at that time had the message, "Take that, Mr Hitler!!" or "Eat some of this, dirty Koreans!". So Harvey Kurtzman's comics which actually had a message that maybe, at best, the war was a dirty job but somebody had to do it, was quite different. But hold on. This is the 1950s  - thirty years after Ulysses had been published. That means post Wasteland, post Faulkner, post Auden, post Steinbeck. In the context of fiction, or even movies, which were lagging behind fiction, EC comics look about as experimental as an Edwardian watercolour in a cubist exhibition. Comics in the 1950s were still mass produced articles for kids and servicemen, so they weren't going to push any real boundaries. The real advances for EC comics were in storytelling and cinematic use of pictures etc.

Back to my story, which was about a guy that trails around London picking up scraps of other people's lives because he doesn't have a life. In my first version of an ending, he breaks into a house, and encounters an older, sadder version of himself, and is so horrified by what he could become, that he throws out his collection, and attempts to reform himself. Oscar didn't like this, and suggested a much more elegant ending, where the protagonist breaks into an apartment, and realises, gradually, that it is his own apartment, which is so alien to him because he hardly ever goes there.