Gwyneth's personal blog

Monday 26th April, weather same as it was five minutes ago:

Shell-Shock Chic

Anyway, besides finishing Seeing Further over the weekend (definitely worth getting out of the library, if not buying), I finally watched The Hurt Locker, which had been the top of my high priority list on Love Film for about a year. Do they take any notice?, do they h**l. If you ever show the slightest preference for unorthodox titles, that's what you get until they have run out of other takers for the current hits. Or at least that's my impression. My verdict, it's certainly intense, every shot intense, and that's the director's art, and that's its Wow factor. But if anyone found out anything they didn't know about how "war brutalises young men and makes them psychotic" I am sorry for that person. Plus, for an anti-war movie, this is an awful lot like playing Counterstrike (which I cite because i happen to know, from years ago, substitute Call of Duty or whatever war-porn game you like best).

I was puzzled as to how a really great, hard-hitting Iraq war movie was an Oscar movie too, in this day & age. Now I get it. The fact is, if you want to make an anti-war movie, you have to ask the audience to admire the people would rather be doing something else. Whereas if you want to make an intense, rich, passionate portrait of men at war, and what heroically awful consequences their heroic exploits have for the psyche, that is not what you will choose to do.

Hm. To be fair, I have no idea if Bigelow was even intending an anti-war message. Being "against the Iraq War" doesn't necessarily mean being "against" the absolutely gorgeously strong images War affords, and you can't have the images without the real life version.

Things finished with. As of last Friday, that's the script of the US version of my career-spanning short story collection (interestingly different choice of stories from Grazing The Long Acre: and I had nothing to do with the line-up) done and dusted, cover image chosen and everything. Could be out in October from Aqueduct.

There's bread and cheese upon the shelf
If you want anymore you can sing it yourself

Monday 26th April, a change in the weather at last, a grey soft sky; feels cool

Something that didn't fit into the Masterworks intro I was writing: I'm not a fan of the multiverse* or "many worlds" proposal, because I must be missing something: I don't see that it gets us anywhere. Supposing it's true that every possible (ie not self-contradictory/ self-destructive) variant on the State of all States exists, and ours is one version in a stunningly huge sea of the possibilities, that still leaves us with the problem that "many worlds" was supposed to solve: ie the fact that we cannot make the laws of physics add up. Quantum mechanics won't reconcile with Newtonian mechanics here, and there's that 90% of "missing mass" issue, here, which nobody can resolve, though not for want of trying. Plus, saying we live here because this is the Goldilocks Universe where everything is just right, is just crypto-Intelligent Design by stealth.

I like Joanna Russ's version, the braided possibilities of The Female Man, because it offers what seems to me a really satisfying insight. 1. There is only one other "universe" or "cosmos" we can compare, for complexity, indefiniteness (is that a word?), multiplicity, with the one we perceive "out there" & that is the human self. Every time you lay down a memory, every time you recall a memory, a new neuronal self springs into being; each of us is a multiverse. And yet, unless clinically insane, each of these multiverses can resolve, a trick we manage all the time (like the four Js at the end of the story) into a coherent single whole.

*I like strings, because strings remind me that "Electrons are not things" (I think it was David Bohm said that, but might be remembering wrong). I don't like those extra dimensions. I think they are a joke. This is because I am old enough to have been taught c17th century history of ideas as an undergraduate at Sussex University. I remember the mad cat's cradle that was the pre-Copernican system, just before it went bust. Just the loops people were jumping through, trying to explain the retrograde motion of Mars, if Mars was orbiting the Earth, was a sight to behold. So I look at the struggle to make the appearences conform to our present ideas, I think epicycles, and I'm just convinced something's going to give, there's a gestalt flip hovering in the wings, that will blow all this scrabbing away


Seeing Further ed. Bill Bryson

Why so cosmological all of a sudden. Partly Russ, and partly Peter gave me this essay collection published for the Royal Society's 350th birthday, for my birthday this year. Just finished it. Inevitably I found it patchy, liked some essays, bounced off others, but it was very nostalgic, given my distant past. I liked Neal Stephenson's piece on Monads, because I thought Leibnitz was wonderful when I first met his work. I liked the chapter on bridges by Henry Petroski, because it was so concrete, and the great beasts in the pictures so brilliant. & I really liked Oliver Morton's Art/Science piece on Land Art (eg Andy Goldsworthy) & unravelling those weaselly expressions "saving the Planet", "saving the Environment". Cogent and unexpectedly poetic. Georgina Ferry was inspiring, and about the only entry (no, I checked, it WAS the only entry) that featured women doing science. And special mention to Gregory Benford, for the "Darwin-Wallace Theory". About time somebody started a movement in that direction

Wednesday 21st April, weather unchanged, still the same dry, brilliant, somewhat pitiless, high pressure blue skies, scool breezes and clear nights.

Last night we ate my last two little Gold Bunnies & that's the end of the holidays.

The tadpoles are thriving, having been left in Gabriel's tender care: some of the garden not so good, boy has mind like machine: he will do what you ask, faithfully, despite his huge committment to Ravel and Ligoti (sp?), but you have to give him specific instructions, he's never going to say to himself, hm, a drying breeze, no rain for days, bet the camellias and the pot chrysanths need a drench. . .

I gather the planes are back online today. Shame, says I, having been untouched by Icelandic Volcano Travel Chaos, because as you know, I don't fly. Nice to see the online muttering do we really need those d**n things, why don't we just save them for urgent need and special occasions?. C'mon, Gaia, please keep it on this benign scale, but do it again! Do it again!

My particular pet tadpoles, still being reared indoors, are so big and fat they're close to having back legs.

And as for Maytime, here's hoping for better suits, but I live in Brighton, Pavilion, so I'm sorted.

Friday 9th April, clear and bright, powder blue sky, sun like honey

You don't often see that heading on a Gwyneth Jones blogpost, do you? However, yesterday the Debt Relief (Developing Countries) Bill became UK law, and that's worth celebrating.

Plus, the infamous Clause 43 has been deleted from the Digital Economy Bill, and whether you're a photographer, a writer, or any kind of artist, you should be very, very grateful to the people, eg Gill Spraggs at author's rights who would not let that Clause get by them.

Tuesday 6th April, chilly sunshine, clear blue skies

Why am I not outdoors? Because I'm drafting the intro for The Female Man, Gollancz masterworks, (Nov 2010) and because I'm waiting for the pianotuner to finish!

(there's something weird about the synopsis etc of same on wikipedia. Can't quite put my finger on it, but the tone is odd)

In my break, something completely different: I got a letter from Catriona McColl of Ayrshire, reminding me that we'd met once, years ago (at school, when I was visiting as Ann Halam). She's doing fine, she's been working as a Carer, going to college and is buying her own house, but she's still writing sometimes and included this poem with her letter:

No Care

It was dark with only the flickering light from candles
It was quiet with only the sound from a ticking clock
As I sat, a sense of complete relaxation came across me
Like a soul leaving its body
No thoughts, no feelings, no noise

As I sat, calmness in my head and heart, a sly smile slithered across my face. . .
Happiness had found a confused and lonely heart, and pierced it like a dagger

As I sat, realisation hit me like a brick, this feeling was real. . .
this life had just begun

Catriona McColl

Mostly, when you meet kids in Creative Writing workshops, they do what they're supposed to do, well or badly. Or else they give you aggravation (because they're not volunteers). Or they just wait politely for the session to be over. Very, very occasionally, you meet someone with an unforced, original voice, & you may even hear from them again. I realised that what Cat needed was a forum, and more feedback than I could provide, so (I never write poetry myself) I checked out a few sites and settled on allpoetry.com No contraindications on robtex, this place seems to be the business.

I have never seen so many sweet violets in Sussex, never. Easter Monday, mild, weak sun through cloud. Tadpoles thriving, and gradually being moved to the wildlife pond, but sadly one of our fish, known only as Red One (we gave up naming them, due to rapid turnover, and then these two lived for years) has succumbed to the attentions of a fishing cat. It survived the attack, but died later in the emergency ward. . .

Deeply engrossed all last week in the grim interactive gothic novel my family is still enacting, but yes, with thanks to those who inquired, I have noticed that Spirit is shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke award. An unlikely candidate!, given various constraints, not least that it only got submitted by Gollancz after special pleading. Still, never mind. There are strong books on this short list, April 28th will come, and I'll be delighted for the winner.

Did you know, Escape Plans, the Ur-novel of this protracted sequence, was shortlisted for the very first Arthur C Clarke award, in 1987? Isn't that remarkable.

Hi Jesper, and thanks for your comment on the Dragon Tattoo. . .

I agree! In the first book Salander's computer-whizzness didn't worry me. This obviously isn't realist fiction, and I'm used to the same phenomenon in sf, where some applied technology (eg genetic engineering) works exactly like magic, but I'm supposed to suspend disbelief because the terms and language are "scientific". In the second book I thought Salander's "hacker" credentials really fell apart, and the third, even to my small knowledge of computers, was worse. Also left slightly feeling that if I winced at the computer stuff, real investigative journalists might be grimacing madly at flaws invisible to me. . . But this is still ace bestseller material. It's like a movie being Oscar material: a mystery when you look closely, instantly recognisable from the proper distance.