Blog Moved

Please note that this blog is no longer being updated because it has been moved here:

http://www.literatureandlatte.com/blog

We've moved everything over to Wordpress to be more integrated with the site, although all the old content from this blog should be intact over there with comments and all.

Thanks for reading!

Keith

Dollhouse / Sarah Connor

Okay, so I have now sat through nine episodes of Dollhouse with good grace, trying to trust in the usually brilliant Joss Whedon. After all, he created the generally superb Buffy, the fun Angel (which actually managed to make the hitherto dull character of Angel likeable and played off David Boreanz's comic strengths, now used well in Bones), and the sublime Firefly. (Ah, Firefly and Serenity; I share xkcd's obsession with thee, even though I believe you were derivative of my beloved Farscape.) And it stars Faith my favourite Vampire Slayer and Helo (okay, so I try not to think about BSG too much since the appalling - hock, spit! - finale, but I'll always have a soft spot for Helo and Athena regardless of Ron Moore's tripe ending).

And yet here I am, nine episodes in, and Dollhouse shows no signs of... well, being any good. I hear Alan Tudyk is to appear in the last episodes of the season, so I'm holding on for that, but really, what I don't understand is this: how the hell did this get picked up for a second season by Fox while the excellent Sarah Connor Chronicles was cancelled? The first season of Sarah Connor walked all over Dollhouse with size five Terminator-ballerina boots, and more than earned my patience when I had to put up with a bit of a mediocre middle to the second season (more than pulling it back again for the end of the season). Dollhouse hasn't earned such patience; I'm merely giving it an extended chance because it comes after Firefly.

Does it get any better? It's difficult to care about "actives" who are essentially call girls, especially when all of the cast seem to be turning out to be actives. And yet an emotionless robot played by Summer Glau... Oy, Fox! Bring back TSCC!

And that is my Tuesday lament.

Chasing the Pigeon

The catalyst that lead to my moving certain posts over to a non-Lit'n'Lat blog was my rant about the Battlestar Galactica finale. One reader of that rant has just contacted me to say that he is sorry to see it go, though, as he liked the term "chasing the pigeon". I will thus proffer and elaborate on the term here.

There are already two great terms with similar meanings that have become widespread:

• Jumping the shark (from Happy Days)
• Nuking the fridge (from Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull)

Both refer to the moment when a series completely loses the plot and the viewer suddenly realises that something he or she once loved, something once brilliant, has now, definitively, disappeared up its own backside. "Jumping the shark" refers to a TV series; "Nuking the fridge" refers to a film series.

I would like to propose another, a variation:

• Chasing the pigeon

For me, the moment I saw Lee Adama chasing a pigeon around his apartment in Battlestar Galactica, in a scene that was neither meaningful nor relevant (flashback scenes attempting to add depth of character in the final episode?), I knew that one of my favourite TV shows of all time had lost it. Not only was the scene irrelevant, it was also one of the most tired clichés ever... A bird representing someone or something (Kara) out of reach. It invited an unfavourable comparison to the dove at the end of Bladerunner (and also made me think back to Cavil's speech to Ellen about wanting to smell supernovas or whatever, and how that harked back to "teardrops in the rain" from Bladerunner too - not comparisons you want to invite).

Below is what Ron Moore, the show runner and writer of the finale, had to say about Lee Adama (and by extension the show itself) chasing a pigeon. This is following an explanation of how he was trying to tie up the plot, all the loose ends, and how he was finding breaking the plot "frustrating and annoying":

I went home and had an epiphany in the shower and said, "It's the characters, stupid!" And it really always has been, and I went back the next day and said, "Let's forget about the plot for a moment and just trust that it will work itself out, because it always does. What do we want the characters to deal with; let's talk about the individual stories and resolutions." I just had an image of someone in their house chasing a bird from the room, I didn't know what it meant but it's an image and let's put it on the board.

(Before going any further, yes, I know that writers often have images that come to them that they want to include; I know that writers make stuff up as they go along all the time. That is fine. What is not fine is if the writer includes the image for no reason other than that he likes it, or if the writer cannot tie up or explain within the rules he set up in his fictional universe the stuff he made up along the way. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, of course, and I know that as many viewers loved the finale as hated it. By anyone's definition, it was not good storytelling, though. Whether the finale as a whole was good or bad is subjective; the way it changed the rules at the last minute and frustrated expectations of explanations is, objectively, bad storytelling. And let me just say that I watched BSG for the characters, primarily. I would have been happy without any of the great mysteries, with just the characters developing and surviving while looking for a new home. But it wasn't me who decided to introduce a lot of mysterious elements and conundrums - I was invited to ponder those questions by the writers; it's a bit late to say "it's about the characters" after you made an active decision to lead viewers down a different path. Well. I could go on parenthetically all day. Let us move on...)

The pigeon thus actually becomes a symbol for a writer making stuff up without knowing where it fits - which is exactly what the writers of Battlestar Galactica did with the opera house scene, Kara's death and resurrection, and Head-Six and Head-Baltar (all of this is well documented, not my personal opinion - search for interviews with Ron Moore; he is very open about how he made it all up and "felt" his way through the story). There is nothing wrong with making stuff up on the fly and later working out how it all fits together later, of course, but the pigeon seemed egregious (the perfect word in the circumstances), and in the end Moore couldn't come up with satisfying solutions to most of what he made up and instead threw up his hands and said, "It's about the characters and God did all the stuff I couldn't think of an explanation for."

"Chasing the pigeon" is thus a nice variation on "jumping the shark": it is the point in a show at which the viewer becomes aware of the writer struggling with the plot to the extent that it becomes so clumsy it feels as though the writer has just given up. It is the point at which the viewer finally loses all faith in a writer who had previously gained his or her absolute trust. It is the point at which the viewer feels cheated by a cheap trick and starts shouting at the screen in disbelief at the hours of his or her life spent in awe at smoke and mirrors; hours that are never coming back.

As in:

Battlestar Galactica really chased the pigeon in its finale.

End of line.

Welcome to Machine Dreams

Much of what is on this blog so far was originally over on lit-n-lat.blogspot.com. I have moved all of the stuff that was not pertinent to Scrivener or Literature & Latte over here, to this new blog, because a few readers found it perturbing to see a developer talk about topics that had nothing to do with development. So this is me being all professional. It is a new and curious feeling.

Life without walls

Windows: Life without walls.

"Turning off Windows Firewall might make your computer (and your network, if you have one) more vulnerable to damage from hackers and malicious software (such as worms)."

Please bring Midway Still back...

Best blog I've discovered this year (possibly the best blog ever):

http://becausemidwaystillarentcomingback.blogspot.com/

I loved Midway Still. I had one of their cool T-shirts - bright orange, with the Converse All Star logo saying "Midway Still" instead of "Converse All Star".

*Sigh.*

In praise of another Ethan Hawke film...

Okay, a little while ago I raved about Gattaca, one of my all-time favourite sci-fi films. But there are, of course, two Ethan Hawke films that blow even that out of the water (and no, I'm not talking about Dead Poets' Society)... Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. You can call me an old romantic (although I'd rather you left out the "old"), but these two films are just superb. I just re-watched Before Sunrise, which, when I saw it in my early twenties, quickly became one of my favourite films... And it still stands up as a great romantic film about two people who meet and like each other, who spend a night wandering around in the way you do with someone you like when you're young, and who then part. It captures that feeling of spending a sleepless night just talking to someone you like beautifully. When I heard they were making a sequel to a film I liked so much, the sort of film that doesn't exactly cry out for a sequel, I thought Richard Linklater must be insane. But how wrong I was. Before Sunset is even better. It's one of the most poignant films I've ever seen, taking up the lives of two characters you cared about in a realistic way. They have separate lives, partners and (for one of them) children

I didn't save anything for the swim back...

There was an interesting discussion on the forums recently about Blade Runner: The Final Cut. I love Blade Runner. That whole Rutger Hauer speech at the end about teardrops in the rain? Brilliant. And from the Final Cut DVD documentary, I discovered that Rutger Hauer came up with that line himself - my favourite line in the film. Oh, and for the record, I am also a massive Philip K. Dick fan, too (though I was alarmed recently to find a speech by him in which he suggested that we are all really living in Judea 2000 years ago - although I'm not sure why I'm surprised by this). And actually, I quite like Total Recall, too, which may be pertinent information when you consider my next opinion...

So: yes, Blade Runner is brilliant. But I actually think there is another sci-fi film from the last decade that is on a par with Blade Runner both in depth and style. Okay, so it doesn't quite delve into what it is to be human, as Blade Runner and PKD do, but still... I love this film. And if you have seen it, you will have guessed what film I am talking about from the title of this post: Gattaca (for GTCA, the initials of the four DNA nucleotides, guanine, adenine, thymine and cytosine).

I just watched Gattaca for - what? The tenth time, maybe. And as always, I had tears in my eyes as the credits rolled. Jude Law manages not to be annoying (because the film was released just before he became annoying; actually, he's fantastic in it, reminiscent of Richard E. Grant in Withnail And I in the way he plays his role). And the ever-reliable Ethan Hawke is great (okay, so he only ever plays the same character, but I like the character he plays; and don't even start me off on the bit in Before Sunset where they're in the car towards the end, because I at least want to pretend I'm all manly and stuff and don't sob at just anything. And he has a decent future writing novels ahead of him after his looks give out, the talented bastard - The Hottest State is a damn good novel and by better half informs me the follow-up is good, too, which I have yet to read. Better get out of these parentheses now). The whole film is  - well, just perfect. Blade Runner uses replicants to ask: what is it to be human? Gattaca uses a very simple metaphor, which reminds me, in a way, of the beloved children's book, Dinosaurs and All That Rubbish: A man looked at a star. All he thought about, dreamed about, was that star. In Gattaca, rockets leave the earth for space and the main character just wants to be on one. It's a simple metaphor for something better. Everything from Vincent's swimming race with his brother leading to his poignant revelation that implies he will probably never be coming back, to the doctor's revelation about his own son... Gattaca is a masterpiece in structure and a true SF cinema classic. There's no real action - no shoot outs, laser guns, fights or anything like that. It's just about someone striving to go beyond their expected limitations, and the sci-fi setting provides the necessary metaphors.

To me, Gattaca - like Blade Runner - is what good sci-fi is all about: saying something about being human now, using a futuristic mythos to put into action what otherwise would have had to be put into words.

Gattaca: if you've never seen it, go watch it NOW. And if you don't like it, don't post here! (Because your opinion is in-valid.)

Whatever happened to...

Like most of the readers of this forum/blog, I read a lot. Duh. Obviously. That's what got us would-be writers (if you are actually a real writer please don't boast here) going in the first place. But in my twenties, I read voraciously. (These days I toss books aside if they don't grab me within a chapter or tell me anything new or interesting - I'm halfway to being a septuagenarian this year, after all!) In my early twenties, I had a temp job which had long periods of doing pretty much nothing, mainly because my employers were of an older generation and had no idea how long it took to do basic administrative tasks on MS Excel or Access. Thus they gave me jobs that they thought would take me weeks which in fact only took days and then kept me on regardless. For a whole year I was given the job of scanning in old engineering blueprints. Any normal person would have run a mile; me, I was the longest serving temporary worker there. The reason I stayed so long was that no one bothered me - and in all that empty time I usually managed to read sneakily. Whilst scanning in blueprints, I would feed paper, press a button and then return to my book as the paper whirred through the feeder.

I wonder at the state those scans must be in; but I doubt anyone has ever looked at them since.

I lived in a shared house near Ealing in West London and Ealing was brilliant - it had a Waterstone's and a big library (note to anybody who works at Ealing Library: I am a better person now; I am sincerely sorry that I never returned the Rachel Ingalls books, but honestly, according to the borrowing slip stuck in the cover, I was the only one who borrowed them in years, and they have a good home with me...). Even better, the local church had a book sale every two weeks in a portacabin around the back. It was absolutely brilliant; exciting. Every fortnight I would wander around the stalls of secondhand booksellers who travelled from different parts of London, and spend twenty (or about five hours of work) on ten books, carrying them out in old Sainsbury's and M&S bags that had been stashed by the booksellers. I bought whatever took my fancy, because it was cheap: classics, authors I'd never heard of but liked the first line, books with covers that took my fancy. And then I'd walk the three miles to work with my nose between the covers and sneakily read whenever I could during the day.

Brilliant.

At the same time, I'd pilgrim over to Waterstone's for anything that caught my eye in the Sunday Times Books section (now part of the Culture section, sob) or the Saturday Guardian Review.

This is going somewhere, trust me. Going there self-indulgently, yes, but somewhere nonetheless.

Anyway, my point is this:

During that time, I came across a number of books by new writers that I was convinced were going to be BIG. Books that I absolutely loved; writers with real style and something to say. Some of them were novels, others short story collections. Some were brilliant in and of themselves, some blew me away with their style but I felt sure there was better to come.

And then I never heard of them again.

So, I thought I'd put together a list of kind of "one-hit wonders" in literature. Except that term is too derogatory; the term, in its pop music sense, implies novelty without substance. These books aren't like that. These books are - in my opinion - good. Most of them are from that period in my twenties when I read about twice as many books in a year as I manage now. Some are more recent. So, I decided to put my internet addiction to good use and look up all of these authors on Amazon to see what they've done since, if anything. Here is my list.

Edit: Since composing this list, I've updated it as, it turns out, some of these authors didn't disappear at all (sorry for my ignorance!). Thank you to the posters who replied to put me right (and especial apologies to Susannah Waters, one of the authors in the list who was kind enough to reply). It is heartening to know that not all of these talented writers disappeared, though.

Jenny Offill - Last Things
Brilliant. The writing is touching without being mawkish. The narrator's mother - really the main character - is infuriating but fascinating. How could Offill not have written another novel since? How?

Thomas Beller - Seduction Theory
Hmm, he does have some other stuff out there, just nothing that seems to fit with what I expected from this superb collection.

Bo Fowler - Scepticism, Inc
A complete Vonnegut rip-off; he had one other novel published then disappeared. But despite his huge debt to Vonnegut, there was still something fresh here, and I thought he'd shake the influence and go onto some really cool stuff... Oh well.

Sandra Newman - The Only Good Thing That Anyone Has Ever Done
Actually, Amazon reveals she did write another book recently, Cake, so I'll have to order that.

Maria Amparo Escandon - Esperanza's Box of Saints
Amazon tells me that this was made into a film in Spain and that she did have one book published later, in 2005. I can only hope she has more waiting to be translated into English.

Tibor Fischer - The Thought Gang
Oh, wait. Scratch this one. I read this, the Collector Collector and, uh, something else by him, too, but he's had lots published since so I guess I just wasn't paying attention.

Brian McCabe - In a Dark Room with a Stranger
This was a short story collection published in the early 90s, which was brilliant. He had a novel published before that, but it was already impossible to find when the story collection came out. Since then, he has published two more short story collections. Why no more novels? Why isn't he better known?

Carsten Jensen - Earth in the Mouth
Beautiful, lyrical travel novel. Short, too, which I tend to like. Turns out he did write something else that was published in 2002, but that seems to be it. Why not more?

Kate Pullinger - Forcibly Betwitched
This was a very small short story collection that was published as a Penguin 60s edition a few years back. The Penguin 60s were fantastic - in the year that Penguin celebrated their 60th year of publishing, they produced these small, pared down special edition books that would fit in the palm of your hand and cost 60p each. They were generally excerpts of larger works - so, I bought Orpheus in the Underworld taken from a larger new translation of Ovid; a small collection of the Buddha's teachings and aphorisms; and among the others, Kate Pullinger's short stories, which I bought entirely on the basis of the attractive, thoughtful girl in the photograph on the front cover. The stories were very short, concise and beautiful, but I could never find the collection from which the Penguin 60s edition was culled. And now I see she has had quite a lot published (though I am alarmed to discover that she co-wrote the novelisation of The Piano), so I need to buy something by her soon. (My personal favourite story is The Wardrobe. I have re-read that dozens of times.)

Junot Diaz - Drown
This was a beautiful and brutal short story collection set in South America, and it was rightly critically acclaimed when it was published. I've looked for something else by him intermittently ever since. Bizarrely, now that I am writing this, I see that he has a new book being published in 2008 - the first since Drown was published 11 years ago. I hope it's as good.

Edited to add: Apparently Junot Diaz's new book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, is receiving rave reviews in America (it still isn't published here), so he has anything but disappeared. (Still, I wonder where he went for ten years!)

Alan Spence - Stone Garden and Other Stories
Huh. Seems he's had a fair bit published both before and since, too.

Christopher Kennedy - No Christmas, No Kafka / Susannah Waters - Funerals
These were two superb short stories that appeared in Stand magazine a few years ago. I always looked out for other works by these writers, but never found any, much to my regret.

Edited to add: I did indeed look out for these writers, but I guess in the wrong places. Susannah Waters has had two novels published since that short story, Long Gone Anybody and Cold Comfort, both of which are available via Amazon. Apologies! (And I look forward to reading them.)

There are more, but that's enough for now.

Actually, this has been quite heartening. A lot of the authors I thought had disappeared are actually still around, still writing and still getting published. Anyone who says the internet is killing reading or books should take stock: I haven't seen the some of the above authors in a bookshop in years, but I can get their books from Amazon or Amazon market place. I just wish I'd heard a bit more about them in the review pages in the interim.

I have no idea whether this says more about what happens to promising authors or about my own ignorance. Probably both. Or probably just the latter.

Edited to add: It seems that this does, partly, say something about my ignorance. It also, I think, says something about review space and the fact that a few big names get all of the attention whilst there is some other real talent out there getting published without much fuss. In the end I think this leaves me somewhat optimistic.

If anybody has ever wondered what happened to a writer they thought was going to be something special but who then disappeared, please share, either here or on the forums.

From MacBook woe to MacBook Pro

Well, the final straw came last week that broke the bond between me and my MacBook. Not that I ever felt very bonded to it in the first place. I bought my white 2.0Ghz MacBook in the first week they were released, and boy, was that a mistake. Everyone said, "Don't buy a first generation Mac product," but did I listen? I did not. Listen: "Don't ever buy a first generation Mac product." Will you listen? I doubt it. Anyway. I wanted an Intel replacement for my beloved iBook, given that I was developing Scrivener and wanted to ensure that it was fully "universal" (that is, ran properly on both PPC and Intel Macs). Or, at least, that was my excuse to my other half. Really, I just wanted a shiny new iBook replacement.

Digression: Aah, my iBook. Now there is a thing of beauty (which said other half now has to herself). Compact (it was the 12") and damned attractive, I never had a single problem with it - but then, it was one of the last generations of iBooks, and I know there were loads of problems with previous generations (such as the infamous logic board issue). The only problem I ever had with it, in fact, was my children. My children and their nasty little proclivity for grabbing at leads and tugging, which on two separate occasions caused the spike of the power thingy to snap off inside the port of the iBook and necessitate a repair at an Apple store. The first repair was at the horrible Church of Scientology-esque store in central London, where they kept it for weeks and then tried to charge me after telling me they didn't have to do anything and that the spikey bit must have just fallen out. The second repair was at Bluewater, which has much friendlier (less "computer says no"-esque) staff, but unfortunately they somehow left a loose screw inside the machine which shorted out the never-had-problems-with-it logic board, which then had to be replaced. Anyway, that really was a long digression. The main point is this: that iBook has lasted nearly three years without a single fault.

Digression over - back to the MacBook: The MacBook looked a thing of beauty, too. It really did. And one day, I am pretty sure that MacBooks will be just as beautiful as that iBook. But not yet, I guess. I've had that MacBook for eight months, and in that time I have had three faults, two of which are well-known:

• Discolouration - the palm-rests went horribly yellow. It took three repairs and a lot of morons on forums (if there are any bands reading, please feel free to use "Morons on Forums" as your moniker) telling me that I must have dirty hands before that got fixed.


• Random shutdown - after the discolouration issue finally got resolved (mainly because I wrote an angry ranting e-mail to sjobs@apple.com and had Corporate Relations sort it out for me), the notorious random shutdown issue raised its ugly head, necessitating a repair.


• This isn't very interesting, is it? Well, tough, I need to get it out of my system, and if you're bored enough to be reading this when I very much doubt you have read the entire Penguin Classics collection then you can't blame me.


• Most recently, the ethernet port just upped and stopped working, cutting off all access to the internet for me. Brilliant

In all, my eight-month old MacBook has been in for repair four times. The primary school teacher in me would just like to point out that that is an average of once every two months. Once every two months! So much for quality assurance; quality possibly maybe, more like. In eight months, my MacBook has been through:

• Three top cases.


• Two screen bezels.


• One bottom case (which they chipped during the first repair).


• One hard drive (which they found was about to fail during the first repair).


• Two logic boards.

I am reminded of the old philosophical conundrum about a ship that leaves harbour and changes every part on its journey, or, seeing as my son makes me read it to him nearly every bloody night, Thomas Comes to Breakfast, in which Thomas the Tank Engine moans that he has had so many parts changed that he doesn't know if he is really him anymore.

Anyway. Enough is enough. So I have decided to sell my MacBook as soon as it comes back for repair. Any takers?

I have thus bought myself a lovely new MacBook Pro. Given that the MBPros have been out for nearly a year now and this one is second generation, I am hoping for more luck. It is a beautiful machine, it has to be said. Its design feels more like my old iBook than my accursed MacBook, with the old fashioned keyboard and clasp, the silver makes me feel more important, and the large glossy screen looks beautiful with desktop pictures gleaned from Paxton Prints.

Wish me luck. And don't ever buy first generation Mac products.

Postcard from the West Country

See Cornwall? No, actually you can't - not on the weather map, anyway, as it's covered by cloud. It doesn't matter what time of year I come here, it's always clouds and rain interrupted by sunny spells. Not that I'm complaining. Or maybe I am.

It has been a good and bad week or two so far - mostly good. Good because I'm on my hols. Bad(ish) because my other half wrote an article for the Independent last week that was harldy, er, Apple-friendly. That wasn't the bad part. That bad part was that I couldn't resist the urge to flick through some Mac websites I frequent a couple of days afterwards; I wish I hadn't. To see the name of the mother of your children abused in such puerile ways is hideous. It didn't help that the Independent subs butchered her article so that it started with the words, "When I switch on my MacBook, the first thing I see is the happy Mac icon..." (or some such). She didn't write that, they did. As soon as we picked it up, I said, "You are going to be crucified for that. Every Mac user out there is going to read that first line and say, 'No, it isn't.'" And unsurprisingly, such was the case. Many assumed that the writer of the article didn't use a Mac, was an Apple-bashing liar, and so on. But the article made some very valid points about recent Apple QCA issues and their tendency to treat the press with disdain. She tried hard to give Apple the opportunity to respond to everything in the article, but they weren't interested in getting anyone to speak to her personally, other than to send her previously-published press-releases. So it goes, as old Kurt Vonnegut would say. Ho-hum.

Anyway, that's the defence of my better half done; not that she particularly cares - hell, she got paid decently for the article. It's just that I happen to care when I see her name slandered on websites that I, as rather keen Apple user (and actually, she is a Mac-fan herself, she just happens not to worship at the temple), frequent.

As for Scrivener: it really is going well. I just finished writing the Spotlight importer today. It was a pain, but it only took a day to do, so I'm not complaining. Services support is done and dusted, so is the search function, find and replace, and several features that I said would never make it into 1.0. Another month or two, and there should be a beta release... I'm looking forward to it. It's been over two-thirds of a year since the last beta was released, and I seriously think that this version is a downright good program, and holds its own against some very stiff competition.

Anyway, back to scouring the Cocoa forums for a tidbit I need.

Argh! I don't believe it! (As Victor Meldrew would say.) I'm on my third top case and trackpad for this ruddy MacBook, and now they are starting to discolour too - after less than a week. This is ridiculous. Will I have to send my MacBook back to Apple every fortnight forever just to make sure that it doesn't look like a dirty pancake? What was the point of them agreeing to repair it (twice) if they didn't have replacement parts that were immune to the same problems? Is it just me? Do I have corrosive, yellow sweat? I think not... My white T-shirts and work shirts don't turn yellow. My white iBook never turned yellow. But this MacBook... It would seem that there is a whole batch of faulty plastic still out there, and the Birmingham repair centre is still using them. Very frustrating. Anyway...

Another shot of Scrivener to cheer me up:

Buggy monitor...

I think this is the funniest post to the Apple support forums I have ever seen:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=562848&tstart=15

I feel sorry for the guy, I really do, but I couldn't help laughing my head off. Here's a direct link to the YouTube vid, in which you can see the guy try, but fail, to swat the insect living inside his monitor:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tu_yBEZ-is

I'm going to make no jokes about buggy machines... Oh, wait - I just did. And in the title too. Whoops.

When I was teaching at Harvard, darlings...

In today's Grauniad, Zadie Smith writes about the "genesis" of her recent Booker-prize winning novel, On Beauty. Some quotes:

"Public accounts [of how a book begins] tend to have a fictional texture - this is not to say they're untrue, but they are writerly explanations, fished from the sea that is the book itself."

"The clues to the more personal elements of that process are in the writer's private past, the subconscious family romances that return you to the same ideas over and over. I'm too superstitious to unpick those..."

"The larger clues are on the shelves and piled up on the desk. In the case of On Beauty, these books were old favourites, because I was teaching them at Harvad. Nabakov, Forster, Kafka, Zora Neale Hurston, Paula Fox, John Updike, WG Sebald..."

"With a brazen ahistoricism I can't intellecutally defend..."

"When I was writing, I thought the comic tautology and sheer metaphysical weirdness of..."

"My sympathy is with old-fashioned existentialism; it is the struggle to 'be' that interests me when I write; to 'be' without mediation or self-delusion."

Bollocks, more like.

She goes on to quote (predictably) David Foster Wallace (she is clearly proud that she has read his tomb stone of a book that normal people file away on their shelves next to Ulysses - that is, if they are strong enough to hawk it home from the bookshop).

Smith wrote half a good book - the first half of White Teeth. The second half was utter crap; I can only speculate that this may have been the result of her getting a lucrative and infamous publishing deal halfway through writing it. The Autograph Man was utter tosh and I could only bear to read the first three chapters. Perhaps I should give On Beauty a chance, but pretentious writing like this only alienates me even more. Anyone can throw in a clever-sounding quote, see:

Good writers have two things in common: they prefer to be understood rather than admired; and they do not write for knowing and over-acute readers.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Something of which Smith would do well to take heed. Until then, she should be locked in a room with A.S. Byatt, the other chief Grauniad-favoured prolix bag of wind, and have a camera pointed at them with a direct feed to the world's living rooms so that we can all learn how to say very little in a large number of incredibly lengthy words (apart from the most frequent word you would hear from their mouths, which would, of course, be "I").

The Mac is back... to Apple

Sigh... UPS just came around to take my MacBook back to Apple - again. I do hope they fix everything this time around - the discolouration, the poorly fitted replacement top-case, the chip they caused in the polycarbonate and so on. I don't have particularly high hopes, but at least they are trying to do something about the whole mess. It does mean that I am back on my beloved iBook for a few days, but I do miss the lovely keyboard of my MacBook, not to mention the glossy screen. (A lot of people were very upset that the MacBook had a glossy screen, but I actually prefer it.)

Edward Wheatley of Norfolk

Edward Wheatley of Norfolk, wherever you are, I salute you for your hilarious parody of antiquated and anachronistic attitudes in your letter to the Sunday Times of 9th July, 2006! It perfectly captures the sort of thing you might have expected a Daily Mail reader to have written twenty years ago. Ha! Oh, hold on a minute. You weren't being serious, were you?

"The problem with Saxondale (BBC2) is that it is simply not funny. But, of course, it's not meant to be. Like so much comedy, its purpose is not to amuse a mass audience but to impress the writers' friends, demonstrate their "right-on" credentials to students and win prizes from gullible judges. How much better it would be had these writers and their target audience done national service rather than gone to university."
- Edward Wheatley, Norfolk

Yes, because national service clearly did you the world of good, didn't it? Quite honestly, I think that anybody who can possibly suggest that the best strategy for sorting out the world's ills is to put guns in the hands of the younger generation and train them to think like sheep and shoot Johnny Foreigner is clearly pathological and should be locked up for everybody's sake.

That said, I often think of the inverted "Assylum" in So Long And Thanks For All The Fish. The number of toothpick-like triggers out there is accumulating exponentially on a daily basis (if this last part means nothing to you then your life is impoverished but you can fix it immediately: go out and read the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy collection - now).

M for Mac Junkies

I am a Mac-user. Obviously, or I wouldn't be developing an application in Cocoa for OS X. I like OS X. Actually, I love OS X. OS X is a wonderful operating system. And Apple machines look rather nice. THIS DOES NOT MAKE APPLE COMPUTER INFALLIBLE. It just means they have some good software engineers and designers. Okay. There, I said it. Now go ahead and flame me all you want.

Again and again I am baffled by the fanboy-ism of a certain breed of Mac user. This is, I know, only a sub-species of Mac user which just happens to be the most vocal. They no doubt emerged from the same shallows of the gene pool as did PlayStation and Xbox fanboys who have endless slanging matches about which console is "best". They do Apple no favours. Such fervent and inherently irrational devotion to a computer manufacturing corporation put me off buying a Mac for years. (I still feel queasy if I have to step into the Apple church of Scientology, sorry, I mean Regent Street store.) The quiet majority are a much better advertisement for Apple; I doubt you will ever find Phillip Pullman on a forum accusing anybody of being a Microsoft troll merely for stating that they have a problem with an Apple product, as did one poster to the Apple support forums today:

"Quite honestly I think a majority of the complaints are coming from non-Mac users who have infiltrated these newsgroups. As an OS/2 advocate for many years I was always under attack by Microsoft fanatics masquerading as OS/2 users. Their intent is to scare or drive people away from one OS and to their chosen product. Microsoft was actually found, at one time, to have paid employees to do such work... So don't pay much attention to them."

Paranoia, paranoia, everybody's coming to get me... Whenever I post on that forum, I feel that I have to balance any problems I have with my machine with praise for Apple, lest I am flamed for daring to imply that a single Apple machine out there might not be perfect. I confess that there are times when such users, and Apple's attitude to its users and the press, make me think about returning to a PC just to be away from such ugliness of attitude. Of course, such madness is only momentary: one look at OS X, or at the Cocoa support forums, where Apple software engineers such as Douglas Davidson, John Randolph and Ali Ozer all give support to programmers for free, reminds me that I could never return to Windows. But like I say, such users do Apple no favours.

Meanwhile, the new top case to my MacBook - which was replaced because the old one suffered from the discolouration problem - seems to be, er, suffering from some minor discolouration already. It was only replaced three days ago, and already, if I look at it from an angle, I can see a yellow-ish patch which I cannot clean off. It seems that Apple are aware of the problem and have taken a decision to replace affected top cases but still haven't tracked down the root cause. Great.

Apple "Repair"...

Well, after much moaning to AppleCare, they finally agreed to take my MacBook in and replace the top-casing, which has suffered from the infamous "discolouration" issue - it seems that Apple are finally starting to take this seriously. And I have to say that the AppleCare service was quite amazing. They agreed to take my machine in for repair on the Friday. A box arrived with TNT the following Tuesday, and TNT took it away there and then. Apple repaired the machine on the Wednesday and I received it back on the Thursday (today) - fantastic. Except...

Except that the "repair" seems a bit of a botch-job to me. I don't think it's being too fussy or anal to expect a near-perfect machine from the get-go for nearly £1,000. It looks like Apple may disagree, though... They have indeed replaced my top-casing with a lovely new, pristine white one. However, they have only replaced the plastic around the keyboard. I naively assumed that they would also replace the plastic around the screen while they were at it, given that they are made of the identical material. But no such luck. The plastic right around the iSight camera is starting to discolour where my thumb lifts up the lid. It's not very noticable as of yet, but then my thumb only comes into contact with it several times a day, whereas my palms were in contact with the palm-rests for several hours. It doesn't take a genius (or a Genius) to work out that within a couple of months the plastic around the screen is going to look pretty shabby, too.

On top of that, the top-casing doesn't even seem fitted properly to me. It's certainly not flush against the polycarbonate case as it used to be. There is a millimetre gap between the top-casing and the polycarbonate in front of the left palm-rest and the trackpad. I can fit a thumbnail under there. All it will take is to catch it on something, and the plastic is going to get damaged - not to mention that dust is going to get under there.

And on top of that, the Apple engineers who replaced the top-casing obviously weren't too careful. There is now a small nick in the polycarbonate on the left of the keyboard, right next to the top-casing - obviously where they have used a screwdriver or something to prise off the old top-casing.

And if all that wasn't enough to weep into my bank statement, when I booted up my machine I found that everything was gone. It turns out that they replaced my hard-drive, too, as when they did lots of diagnostic tests before returning the machine to me, they found the original hard-drive was dodgy. Great! So now I have to reinstall everything, and I am really annoyed because there was one picture of Thurston that I used for my user account picture that I forgot to back up. Grrr.

Obviously, I called AppleCare about all of these issues about ten minutes after checking out the returned machine. Again I spoke to someone very helpful, although he told me that because the repair centres check over the machines very carefully before returning them to customers to try to ensure that they won't need to be returned for repair for anything else anytime soon, the fact that my machine had been returned to me probably meant that all the problems I have are considered "within spec" (which to me sounds horribly close to "it'll do"). He said he only knew of problems with discolouration of the top-casing on MacBooks, and not with the area around the iSight, and he wasn't aware that they are made of the same plastic (which seemed odd to me, given that he was the laptops expert - hey, he said "laptop", surely he must have meant "notebook"; these things are too hot to be "laptops"! It made me wonder if he had ever actually seen a MacBook, as it only takes one glance to see that the area around the screen is made of the same plastic as the top-casing...). Anyway, like I say, he was very friendly and helpful, and asked me to send him some photos of all my issues so that he could discuss them with engineering. He promised to get back to me next week, so I will just have to wait and see what happens.

To be honest, I could probably live with all these minor imperfections - the machine works, I can use it to develop and then use Scrivener quite happily. But why should I just "live with" a brand-new machine? After all the discolouration fuss, I think I'm entitled to a little perfection.

Rant Ends.

Verbose

You know, I really am quite prolix.

Er...

Except in that last entry, of course.