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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20918398
Excellent idea. Now
all I need is for someone to do the same thing for SF writers!!
Work is getting busier, which is no bad thing. On the good side, Great-British-winter-wise,
once or twice lately we have had some watery wintry sunshine. On the bad side, we’ve also had snow – and
not nice crisp snow that settles and makes kids happy, but the sloppy wet kind
that doesn’t settle but gets everywhere, and still makes going out miserable.
January is probably
my least-favourite month – there simply isn’t enough daylight. At least here, with all of Kew Gardens to
mooch in during my lunch break, I can smell the sweet scents of
winter-flowering plants, and watch for snowdrops and the rose-pink buds of
limes and maples, to remind me of spring.
What have I been up to?
Writing, quelle blague; what a
surprise. I’m relieving the work of
typing up and revising “Gold Hawk” by also indulging myself with a little fanfiction
on the side. It does feel a bit like
having something on the side, too; a really sinful indulgence, like a box of
good posh chocs (think Booja Booja quality) or a bottle of 20-year-old
Laphroaig. Or a fling, obviously (only I
get all screwed up over those, whereas with chocolate or liquor, or fanfic, I
can relax and enjoy myself). Not sure
what I’ll do with it, beyond using it for relaxation purposes (ooh, now that does sound dirty!), but it’s giving me
some much-needed light relief in this dark month.
I gather that some people consider writing fanfic to be a
dreadful and unforgiveable sin.
Obviously I’d be a stinking hypocrite if I pretended to agree with
them! I guess in their book I’m
hell-bound and that’s all there is to it.
From what I’ve read (not very
much, I should add) some of it is drivel and some of it is porn, or at least
porny. But plenty of mainstream
legitimate fiction is drivel and/or porny.
Surely anything that gets us consumers to wake up and doing something
creative, instead of just sitting on our backsides all day consuming, can’t be
all bad? Whether it’s taking a camera
out to photograph the texture of leaves, or taking a sketchbook when you go on
holiday, or keeping a journal, or singing in a choir, or going outdoors to
reconnect with nature and discover some natural history, or writing a short
story about your favourite fictional characters, just for fun; it’s creative,
it’s self-expression, and it’s engaging with the world and responding to it
instead of simply being spoon-fed the mental equivalent of junk food. It’s co-creating, in a small way; and that,
if you’ll forgive my going all religious on you for a sec, is blessed; it’s lending a hand in the
Goddess’ work.
However, to come back from these heights to my present
reality; the big problem at the moment with my writing, of all kinds (serious,
frivolous and even perhaps drivel) is that my laptop is sick, and getting steadily
sicker. It now gets conniptions every
time I try to save what I’m writing onto disk.
Since it’s far too old for me to be able to save onto a USB stick (they
may not even have existed when it was manufactured – at any rate it lacks the
necessary scart/port/whatever), floppies are my only option if I want something
saved in a portable format. And I can
only get my work onto ICW, or into a friend’s mailbox, if I can get it off the machine in the first place. Lately, I can have been peacefully typing all
evening, and then the laptop will suddenly turn up its toes and refuse to do
anything more. Instead, I get a frozen
screen, and it refuses to switch off, either, and sits buzzing for hours until
it runs its battery right down. By this
point it has generally kept me awake for several hours, which is not good. I feel about ninety this morning, after
having this happen again last night.
Around the edges of a lot of typing, I’m having a busy old
time of it culturally-speaking; a good dose of high culture, and a healthy
fillip of somewhat-lower-culture. A
Nutcracker, a triple bill and a Hobbit, to be precise.
I love the Royal ballet’s “Nutcracker”; it is very, very
traditional, with snowflakes and glittery costumes and wicked mice and a
gorgeous transformation scene. I’ve seen
it about six times, so this trip was a complete indulgence. Mainly I went to see Akane Takada in action
as the Sugar Plum Fairy. She’s one of
their up-and-comings, just starting to get some bigger roles. It’s one of the joys of going to see a particular
ballet company regularly; getting to spot young talent and see them progress
rapidly (or, frustratingly, not so rapidly) up the ranks and into the larger
parts. She wasn’t a flawless Sugar
Plum, but rather a lovely one nonetheless; she doesn’t over-extend, which loks
right to me in this kind of pure classical stuff; she has a delicious finish,
right down to her fingertips, and that trick of coming down off pointe very smoothly (which probably has
a technical name) so that every balance seems to flow into the next move
without the tiniest transition. She also
looks like a Japanese Googie Withers, which can’t hurt.
The triple bill was “The Firebird”, “In the Night”, and
“Raymonda Act 3”. Two utter marvels, and
a dollop of glittery idiocy and Mittel-european flouncing in character
shoes.
Mara Galeazzi’s Firebird was extraordinary. She is a dancer who is immensely good at
conveying powerful human emotions, but here she genuinely seemed to be touching
the non-human – instinctive, reactive, self-preserving, utterly wild – so that
the creature’s reappearance to honour her pledge with Ivan Tsarevich became not
just the working-out of the plot, but a moment of real awe and power. This is what fairy tales do, when you’re a
child and the stories are new; hit you in the eyes with their archetypal
potency. It’s good to see it can still
happen, and raise the hairs on the back of my neck. It’s also a joy to see Ms Galeazzi back in
action again, let alone in such blazing (almost literally!) good form.
The Jerome Robbins was utterly wonderful, too. Why don’t they do a Robbins triple bill? “In the Night”, “Afternoon of a Faun” and
“Dances at a Gathering” are all in the RB rep now; and wouldn’t that be a
simply dreamy evening? I suppose they fear that it wouldn’t put bums
on seats. It would get my bum there; but that’s only one bum on
one seat (or technically two if I went twice, which is always a temptation with
mixed bills as there’s usually more than one cast). “In the Night”, anyway, has grace and charm
and delicacy and romance and humour, and an indefinable overarching quality of
mystery; it is far more than the sum of its parts, as all the best short works
are. I saw Emma Maguire and Alexander
Campbell as Couple One, luxurious Zenaida Yanowsky and big Mr Kish as Couple
Two, and Roberta Marquez and the great Carlos Acosta as Couple Three. Gorgeous casting in a gorgeous, haunting
ballet.
“Raymonda” does nothing profound for me, but it was great
fun, and looked gorgeous, and everyone was dancing their socks off. ‘Nuff said.
“The Hobbit; An Unexpected Journey” is a muddle. I wish it weren’t. I loved Peter Jackson’s three “Lord of the
Rings” movies, although they aren’t perfect (the bits that grate with me, the
unnecessary tweaking of the plot in particular, grate more each time I see
them). This looks just as good and for a
change some of the tweaks actually work better.
If one is going to present the story of “The Hobbit” as part of the same
canon, and not as a lighter, more child-orientated work (which the book certainly
is), then one has got to stress the seriousness of what is going on, and set it
firmly in the same continuum. I can
accept that; much of it has been lifted and shoe-horned in from the appendices
of the “Lord of the Rings”, and I think from the “Silmarillion” too; and I
think in the main it’s fairly well done.
But there are also
some completely extraneous additions; notably a prolonged battle in the Orc
halls that looks as if it was lifted wholesale from a computer game. And all the way through, one is aware that
here, things could be taken with leisure, spreading the story over three films
when it fills one pretty short book.
Compared to the taut, compact story-telling in the three LOTR films,
this looks relaxed to a startling degree.
The dwarves get to do both
their musical numbers, for goodness’ sakes.
I didn’t really need either.
But what works, really works. The “Riddles in the Dark” section is like
something from a different movie altogether, tight and powerful and genuinely
scary. The designs are glorious (though
I’ve always felt the Peter Jackson Shire looked too untamed – it has the
appearance of a landscape that was first settled and farmed perhaps two or
three generations ago at most, not countless centuries. It should look like rural Kent or Devon). Little things like the moon-runes and the sword
Sting glowing are spot-on. Above all,
the cast is excellent, and I honestly don’t think that if they had instigated a
world-wide hunt for Bilbo Baggins, à la “the search for Scarlett O’Hara”, they
could have found a more perfect lead than Martin Freeman. He is simply wonderful.
Well, anyway; I’ve been writing this in my lunch breaks
since the end of last week, so now I am finally going to post it, and then try
to keep a bit more up-to-date. But here’s
to more cultural fun, both high and low, for the rest of this year. And here’s to the blinking laptop behaving
itself tonight. Please?
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