tisdag 27 januari 2015

Here it comes, the January grump

I did manage to stave off my ordinary January blues for a while this year. Well, of course I was blue, but I had luck with my novel reading, which helped. The Winter Palace was great, and I followed it up self-indulgently with a feel-good Jenny Colgan (The Little Beach Street Bakery). On TV, I wallowed in costume drama rewatching. But now, grim reality asserts itself. I've run out of Downton to rewatch; the new Mr Selfridge series (fairly efficient methadone against Downton abstinence) has only just started in the UK and won't be out for ages here; and to top it all, I'm watching The Newsroom series two and reading Alias Grace, which turns out to be an unwise combination.

I'd forgotten how annoying The Newsroom can be. All the faults of the first series are present and correct in the second one (though in fairness, I've only watched three episodes so far). It is quite shamelessly biased and sometimes to the left even of right-on East Coast Democrats. Neal the internet expert is really into the Occupy Wall Street movement, and though his colleagues tease him about it ("look, they're wearing Salvador Dalí masks") you just know that the Quaker girl who's his personable contact within the movement (and possible love interest) will strike them all dumb in the end with a highly rhetorical speech on air. Meanwhile, there will be inspirational music in the background while the supposedly Republican news anchor Will McAvoy - far from "slaughtering" the Quaker girl - nods wisely. I may be wrong of course, but this is the kind of thing that usually happens in this series. In the last episode I saw, Jim (the producer who loves skittish Maggie but never gets together with her) holds a speech on a tour bus for journalists covering Mitt Romney's campaign in the Primary elections. First he bombards Romney's campaign organisers with questions to which the script does not allow them to give any satisfactory answers. Then he advocates a more honest and searching kind of journalism about political campaigns where candidates are properly put on trial. And there it is again, the political dishonesty that drives me mad. This series isn't about giving politicians generally a hard time. It is about giving Republican politicians a hard time, preferably Republican presidential candidates. It was exactly the same thing in series one: the Republican presidential candidates were attacked, not given any counter-arguments, and then we were told that it was all in the interest of improving political life, rather than a sneaky way of feeding the viewers anti-Republican arguments. The endless moralising is bad enough - the admirable Sloan has issues with drone warfare, and even Don gets caught up with idealistically fighting A Cause - but could we at least be spared the hypocrisy? Toby Ziegler, come back, all is forgiven!

It has to be said, though, that the series is still witty, as evidenced by the Salvador Dalí quip (the protester-trendy Guy Fawkes masks do look a lot like Dalí). But it is not as clever as it thinks it is - if it were, you wouldn't realise when it tries to manipulate you, and you do.

As for Alias Grace, well. So far, the plot reminds me a little of Affinity by Sarah Waters, a book I didn't much care for. There, a female visitor in Victorian London became fascinated by an imprisoned medium. Here, in mid-Victorian Toronto, a supercilious young doctor is interviewing Grace Marks, who's imprisoned for a double murder which she's said to have committed in league with a man called James McDermott. The doctor wants to find out if she's a) mad b) guilty. Was she in on the murders at all? Was McDermott her fancy man?

The case is not uninteresting, but so far (I'm on page 150 now) I haven't learned a lot about it. Not to be a ghoul or anything, but could we get to the actual murders soon, or the events leading up to them at least? What makes me think of Affinity is the relationship between the doctor Simon Jordan and Grace. He seems fairly easy to manipulate, and she is a lot more cunning than he gives her credit for. The problem is that neither of them is very likeable, so their complaints about the lives they lead are not particularly fascinating. Grace has just told Jordan in detail about the crossing of her family from Ireland to Canada. Jordan calls her story "the usual poverty and hardships etc." in a letter, and he has a point. Those who are fond of social history may enjoy this sort of thing: for my part, the sooner I get to the crime story, the more pleased I will be.  

onsdag 14 januari 2015

New Year's resolutions

I don't hold with New Year's resolutions generally. Isn't life difficult enough sometimes without adding unnecessary pressure? Still, when I look back on 2014, I admit it was a year where I played it incredibly safe where books, TV and films (were there any cinema outings at all? I think Frozen was it) were concerned. This had some effect on my blogging as well. True, most weeks when I didn't blog it was because I was too busy/tired from work/lazy (2014 was a tough working year), but I used the excuse "I've got nothing to write about this week, anyway" fairly frequently. So maybe it will help if I set myself some culture-consumption goals which can later be converted into blog posts. If I write them down, they'll be less easy to escape.

This year, I will try to do the following:

Test-watch at least one of the following series: The Wire or Mad Men. "I'm not sure it's the sort of thing you'll like", a friend informed me kindly when I proudly proclaimed that I'd bought the first series of The Wire. Even she, a much more ambitious TV viewer than myself, found it a little on the dark side. But it has been described as "Dickensian", and anyway, what's the alternative? I have to watch at least one of the series that everyone is praising, and the others - well - they sound awful. And the worst thing is, you've a feeling that they're meant to sound awful. Their pitch is a feel-bad one, and I'm not interested in that kind of pitch, thank you. I don't watch TV in order to be able to brag about how depressed but aware of this world's miseries I felt afterwards. The Wire's got cops, it's got robbers, and besides I've bought it now. It will have to do.

As for Mad Men, it's got mixed reviews from my closest circle, but once again I did buy the first series for testing. It can't stand gathering dust forever. Actually I did watch the first episode once on TV ages ago and wasn't that impressed - it seemed like one of those dramas which point a finger at the Fifties or Sixties and shudder "weren't they horrible? And it wasn't that long ago!" Nowadays, the Fifties and Sixties are almost depicted as more strange from our modern perspective than Victorian times or the Roaring Twenties. However, Mad Men is a costume drama of sorts, and I should give it another chance: few series are at their best in the first episode. I hope I don't fall for Don Draper, though - that would be too mainstream.

Read or try to read at least one of the following books: Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood, The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt or White Teeth by Zadie Smith. I do own all three of them. Alias Grace is a historical novel, plus I would then have read something by Margaret Atwood; The Goldfinch features a cameo from Foxy Francis, apparently, and I did like The Secret History although I thought it terribly sad; and White Teeth, well... I've read some articles by Zadie Smith, and they were well-written enough to make me curious. With hindsight, On Beauty would probably have been the place to start in my case, but there's something to be said about starting from the beginning, and the book was a bargain.

N.B. If I start reading one of these books and find I don't like it at all, I'm allowed not to finish it.

Finish watching The White Queen: Honestly, I can't give up after nine episodes. Besides, there can't be much more to go now. But I do wish it could be a little less solemn.

Go to the cinema at least once, perhaps to watch Cinderella with Lily James, Sophie McShera and some others. Well, I have to have one resolution I'll definitely be able to hold to, don't I?

tisdag 6 januari 2015

Middlebrow reading

OK then. I have to confess that for most of the time, in spite of my interest in Dickens and other Victorian novelists and a general willingness to watch Shakespeare plays, I'm a typical middlebrow culture consumer. TV-wise, I watch costume dramas slavishly, but have not got round to testing The Wire yet, and my Our Friends in The North box set that was going for a song is as yet untouched. I don't even feel tempted to try Breaking Bad or True Detective. As to books, this is what I've been reading the past month or so:

1) Havisham by Ronald Frame, a prequel/retelling of Great Expectations, giving Miss Havisham's story. This novel is good on Miss Havisham as a business woman, and you'll be pleased to hear that Frame's Miss H got to have some fun in society before being seduced. In other ways, though, she turns out to be a bit of a disappointment - less mad than in Dickens, true, but also more calculating and less a victim of blind passion. She only dons the wedding dress - which she regularly changes for a new, identical one - after having been betrayed by her best friend as well as by Compeyson. I felt more sympathy for Dickens's version. Frame sticks to the Shropshire doctor ending: a bit of a downer in itself, but this is the sort of serious-minded book where you're glad that the author hasn't come up with a new, even more depressing ending.

2) The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova. Kostova's The Historian was a big hit when it came out, while this, her second novel, received some slighting reviews from what I recall. Nevertheless, I plumped for The Swan Thieves as the Leda motif seemed more enticing than a vampire story. As it happens, there isn't much swan talk in the book, but I enjoyed it, and am inclined to think that the bad reviews were largely down to the well-known second-novel-phenomenon where critics punish an author whose first book was hyped (often by the self-same critics). Strangely enough, I liked the contemporary plot line best, where a psychiatrist who treats an artist who has fallen prey to an obsession interviews the artist's two plucky exes: his wife and his girlfriend. This was interesting relationship drama. I was less impressed by the parallel historical plot about a female Impressionist painter and her uncle-in-law (also a painter) who develop romantic feelings for each other. This plot assumed an interest and sympathy for the characters - the woman Béatrice especially - that I didn't feel. Still, a good holiday read.

3) Rereading of Agatha Christie's The Moving Finger, purely for fun. This must be one of her best. The latest TV adaptation of this book is one of the more faithful ones, and you can see why (though there was no lack of sex appeal on the part of Elsie Holland in the adaptation).

4) The Winter Palace by Eva Stachniak; this is the historical novel I'm reading at the moment. The protagonist is a girl spy at the Russian Court, who befriends the future Catherine the Great when she arrives as a poor German princess destined to marry the crown prince. Very promising so far, though books with historical spy plots depress me a bit as I'm forced to acknowledge that I would never in a million years have been a good spy myself. This is a drawback when fantasising about spy masters, whom I usually fall for (not so sure about Chancellor Bestuzhev though).

See what I mean? Not a trashy reading list by any means, but not full of future Booker Prize winners either. Quite simply, middlebrow.