Tuesday 30 March 2021
Sunday 28 March 2021
Where is Kelvin Fletcher watching Vikings?
Soap actor Kelvin Fletcher, one of a plethora of reasonably famous people from Oldham, seems to have his streaming platforms mixed up.
It’s also possible he was watching Norsemen, a Viking-based comedy series, or Northmen, a dodgy Viking movie, both on Netflix. Other than a retweet of something else, Fletcher hasn’t tweeted or cleared the issue up. Was he watching The Last Kingdom on Netflix? Was he watching Vikings on Amazon Prime? I guess we’ll never get to the bottom of the viewing habits of the real-life Andy Sugden from Emmerdale.
In other news that is vital to your life, I got an Instagram comment from MMA fighter Demetrius ‘Mighty Mouse’Johnson. Flyweight DJ holds the record for most consecutive title defences in UFC history. He did an AMA through his current fight promotion, One Championship. With everything going on in the world, I had to ask the most pressing question.
We’ll see on Thursday whether celeb gossip email system Popbitch pick up on this.
Saturday 27 March 2021
Lockdown Reading: Take 8. Results.
Fully vaccinated. Vaccines are safe. #pfizer t-shirt: @LASTEXITshirts pic.twitter.com/FWj0VQqlTd
— Matt Tuckey (@matthewtuckey) March 27, 2021
Back in January, I blogged that I would keep reading until either the lockdown rules changed, or I got offered my top-up dose of Pfizer. I got the latter today. So, in the time passed, what did I read?
The Room Where it Happened
I found a PDF copy of US Ambassador / National Security Advisor John Bolton’s book touted on Twitter, after he proceeded with publication before the White House could clear it a second time.
Bolton held the latter role between April ‘18 and September ‘19, during which he represented Republican President Donald Trump on the world stage, visiting countries and meeting leaders of places like Venezuela, North and South Korea, China and Europe. (I suspect this will be one of the last books of its ilk- of politicians travelling the world- now that the pandemic has illustrated how efficient video calls can be.)
There’s opportunity for Bolton to call out his former boss, and several others. He hints to times he’d seen world leaders massaging Trump’s ego to get what they wanted, but doesn’t admit he recognised it, nor does he pass any judgement on it.
What he does pass judgment on is exactly what you’d expect from a staunch Republican: the book is awash with batshit mental cynicism regarding Obama and the Democrats (apparently ‘times change’ is a ‘liberal’ phrase). Bolton tries to pin the problems of Iraq on Obama, who only inherited those problems from Bush- a Republican like himself- who invaded in the first place. He fails to acknowledge that contradiction.
In Bolton’s world, Liberal individuals are portrayed as non-integrated foreigners- particularly when they are foreigners. French centrist-liberal president Macron is a ‘weasel,’ and Bolton’s snobbery and ignorance pervades the whole book. He paints Yemen as a ‘British obsession’- news to me, a Brit- and claims North Korea, during their summit, ‘never let him down’- just pages after discussing the plight of Otto Warmbier, the American tourist tortured into a coma in one of their gulags.
Bolton displays more pretentiousness in presuming we know what ‘China’s Belt’ and ‘Road Initiative’ are, skimming over them like they’re popular topics on news stations (not on the BBC or Sky, they aren’t. Can’t say I watch Breitbart or the like).
Bolton rages further on journalists- ‘these people were a piece of work’- and on the impeachment process, which he describes as ‘failed’ – despite it resulting in 27 indictments and 7 convictions, again, a subject he doesn’t bring up. He also skims over that this was ‘only the fourth serious attempt in American history to impeach a president.’ He doesn’t enlighten us on the others. (Bill Clinton jumps to mind- I was 16 and starting college at the time- it turns out Andrew Johnson was the other, in 1968.)
What would have cemented the book as a key document in the tale of Trump’s presidency was if Bolton had solidly turned against Trump. He occasionally paints his former boss as a short-tempered prick, complaining fiercely about everything, incapable of coherently sticking to an agenda without babbling on about one unconnected political issue after another. Trump mixes up Afghan current president Khalilzad and first post-9/11 democratically elected leader Karzi. Bolton shows Trump stressing to Turkey to avoid Russian casualties in Syria.
But what Bolton doesn’t do is completely denounce The President. But then, if he’d have had mind to do so, he’d have testified at Trump’s first impeachment anyway, making the argument moot. On that issue, Bolton reckons it would have made ‘no significant difference’ if he had. He’s probably right.
Despite somewhat standing by Trump, Bolton shows that The President’s inner circle- the ‘Axis of Adults,’ as The Ambassador puts it, is equally bemused by Trump’s nonsensical, ominous comments, proving he was truly a law unto himself as a president. There was no elite circle that understood him. Trump was a front.
And so, the book ends with a lengthy, tiresome epilogue that, combined with footnotes, make up the final quarter of the whole PDF. (It would have been helpful if the footnotes were at the bottom of each corresponding page, just for flow, not jammed in together at the back. Sliding back and forth through a 500-page PDF is a ballache.)
Bolton discusses his tenure as a right-hand man with a dry, meticulous approach. A serious US politics fan will stay focussed on the details, but it’s nowhere near as salacious, as pacey, as revealing as, say, Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff’s first expose on Trump’s presidency, or A Year at the Circus, with BBC’s Jon Sopel taking a British critical view.
Eyebrow raising, but a slog.
Fight Club 2
Chuck Palahniuk returns to his earliest and most renowned story of an unnamed narrator and his counterpart mayhem overlord, Tyler Durden. This time the cat’s out of the bag on their relationship, but there’s more trauma, chaos and acts of terror – this time in graphic novel form.
The Narrator now fairly consistently calls himself Sebastian, these days, ruining the mystique somewhat. He and Marla now have a child together, but Marla misses Tyler, and so takes steps to oversee his return…
Tyler isn’t the only character to reappear as the story twists and turns, and Project Mayhem undergoes a revival. Meanwhile, Palahniuk’s vanity gets in the way and he meta-writes himself into the story, offering weird ex-machinas and literary self-flagellation.
Palahniuk has written a shelf-full of novels since his debut, and a sequel to this was inevitable. Fight Club the novel, you may remember, ended with members of Project Mayhem whispering to Tyler, ‘we look forward to getting you back.’ Well, they did eventually. As did we.
Fight Club 2 is pacey, graphic and zany- as you’d expect- but gets so caught up in itself it falls down its own arsehole in places. Thankfully, artists Cameron and Dave Stewart eschew the movie’s portrayals of the main characters, bringing new life to their images and styles. A sequel to Palahniuk’s iconic book means filling some pretty big shoes, but those shoes feel roomy, the plot knotted up.
Still, a fascinating return to Tyler’s / The Narrator’s world.
The Elements of Style
A decade or so ago I was talking to another young budding writer who’d tried his hand at journalism and screenwriting. He passed over a whole zip file full of PDF books on the theme of writing. I’d heard other writers mentioning The Elements of Style, one of the books included.
First written in 1959, this updated version came out in 2000. I use the term ‘updated’ loosely: author William Strunk, writing with the tone of a near-dead college professor, dives straight in with assumptions of his reader’s pre-existing grammatical knowledge. Writing might be my personal strength, but he presumes (wrongly) that we all know what a ‘preposition’ is. (I didn’t.) At the turn of the century, the publishing house deemed it unnecessary to update the assertion that ’loan’ is only a noun, with ‘lend’ the verb version of this (regardless of any money changing hands or not).
Furthermore, Strunk has bizarre protestations against fairly normal words of today. ‘Prioritise’ and ‘finalise’ are ‘abominations,’ whereas ‘personalise’ is merely ‘pretentious.’ (Strunk, having died in 1946, never had the option to change the background on his MySpace page.)
The Elements of Style redeems itself with some clear explanations of still-standing grammar rules, and a healthily stocked glossary at the back. Essential reading for any budding writer.
Teach Yourself Get Started in Shorthand: Pitman 2000
A couple of years ago I spent a month tapping away at Teeline shorthand, a form of fast notetaking. I found a series of videos on Youtube, largely from Teeline Online. In a month, I learned a few basic strokes that have allowed me to make more notes each time I go to an event. It’s a condensation of letters of the English Alphabet, meaning words can be represented with certain strokes.
I found that Teeline made a lot of sense- a capital T is the top line of the T without the vertical one below it (hence the name). Other letters and words follow a certain logic based on how each letter would normally look, then erasing most of the character.
Pitman, another form of shorthand, features a very different system of writing. P is a diagonal stroke from top left to bottom right. B is the same, but thicker. There are many other small marks to represent letters, or frequently used combinations of letters, but they don’t seem to follow any logic. I read the first few pages of the book, but even the layout of teaching the alphabet didn’t seem to follow any pattern. Surely you’d show the full Pitman alphabet first, before diving into frequent letter combinations and their Pitman representations?
Pitman seems mind-meltingly complicated, regardless of the book’s questionable structure. I made it a few pages in.
Teeline Fast
I had a quick rummage on Amazon for Teeline guides, but what I found were horrifically expensive. Teeline Fast seemed to be the best-rated, so I did a quick Google and found a free PDF download.
Ann Dix’s guide is an explanatory workbook, with guides to writing popular words and phrases, and how to minimise strokes to put down more words per minute. I read it through without performing any of the exercises, so I can only review from an observational viewpoint.
Teeline, as mentioned, follows the English alphabet and minimises the letters to stokes, which are then conjoined, sometimes alongside, sometimes above, and sometimes inside other letters. It’s a little hard to describe without visual examples, but there is a methodology to it that I’m starting to pick up. I don’t know whether I would ever minimise words to the compact stokes as would be shown in proper Teeline. I feel that my memory difficulties would require more strokes per word, fewer letters missed out, and more differentiation between words that can be represented by the same stroke. Perhaps in time I’d minimise things to a professional standard.
It’s a really informative book, but something I’d have to come back to and dedicate myself to to properly reap a benefit. So, that’s another month-long project on this blog, once everyone gets their vaccine… eye-roll
Writing with Power
From the aforementioned zip file comes this investigation into the writing process. First published in 1981, Writing with Power is a concise guide to developing your writing abilities, whether for your first novel, or a business document, or any other requirement. It’s packed with agreeable, helpful advice, (I’ve spent a lot of time in the kind of feedback groups that he describes) but a lot of it felt familiar from the numerous other writing books I’ve read over the years.
The ready availability of today’s word processors and other technology make chunks of the book irrelevant, and author Peter Elbow has bold presumptions on our existing knowledge (who the fuck is ‘Billy Buds?’).
Again, a trudge of a read, but has worthy suggestions.
Writing from Start to Finish
A dull guide to writing with a hideous page layout. I made it about 15 pages in.
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck
Click for this psychology-themed book review.
We’re still in full lockdown until 12th April, when I understand the gyms will reopen.
Tuesday 23 March 2021
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