2012 — 1 August: Wednesday — rabbits!
I deduced as soon as I heard a fragment of his distinctive gravelly voice on the radio a few minutes ago that Gore Vidal must have left the planet.1 I've not read all his books, but he was an interesting commentator. I wonder how long ago he realised his "United States of Amnesia" would never countenance him at the helm?
Is it nice to know...
... that the BBC Trust is god-fearing, or do you suppose this committee of the great and good is really just public-fearing? Being a good Pastafarian, I have no problem whatsoever with whatever lunacy and religious hogwash "stupid people" choose to believe inside their own heads. But I do start to worry when they operate their vocal chords/cords in line with their opinions.
If the news isn't giving rise to offence on occasion it's not very likely to be news, is it? Personally,2 I regret the "harm and offence" caused to many millions of people by, and in the name of, a long and sordid series of deranged gods and monsters — the latter invariably human — so I'm with Mr Paxman on this one (and to hell with the BBC Trust).
And the "complainant" :-)
Tell me it ain't so...
I've read my Huxley. I've talked to people who dropped LSD. Now I learn about Anne Fadiman's cousin James Fadiman:
In What the Dormouse Said, John Markoff reports that Fadiman had dosed and counseled numerous "heads" as they were attempting to amplify consciousness through silicon chips and virtual reality. The personal computer revolution, Markoff argues, flourished on the Left Coast precisely because of a peculiar confluence of scientists, dreamers, and drop-outs. And indeed, if you were to illustrate with a Venn diagram the relationships between those involved with Acid Test parties, the Homebrew Computer Club, the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center at Stanford University, Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, various backwoods communes, and, of course, the IFAS research center, you'd see an overlap of communities on the San Francisco Midpeninsula that just wasn't available to the average IBM computer scientist in Westchester.
Funnily enough, this theory gets no mention in the 450 pages of:
Indeed, the timeline graphic in the front omits 1966 entirely, bracketing it with the System/360 the year before and the floppy disk the year after — both coming from IBM. Conspiracy of silence, perhaps?
I think we should be told :-)
Having just got Mrs Hubbard (and the state of her damnable cupboard) off my back for another few days — and (being invisible, obviously) having just been neatly carved up by a Mercedes on the way out of the car park — I shall grab a quick cuppa before my lunchtime rendezvous for, erm, lunch.
Typical! You wait...
... ages for a DVD, and then along comes a clutch of the things, just in time for the end of "The Practice":
- Tanner Hall
I'm giving this a whirl to see how Rooney Mara was performing a couple of years before the American re-make of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo". - The skin I live in
Time to see what Almovodar has been up to lately. - Hunky Dory
Mike assured me I'd enjoy this, and I'm predisposed to enjoy Minnie Driver. - Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
I was hooked by the trailer, which was utterly enticing. - Eastern Promises
Cronenberg's 'take' on Russian mob activities in London. - Cat Run
Could be dreadful tosh, but I very much enjoyed Stockwell's "Crazy/Beautiful". - Impulse
Is almost certainly tosh, given its low price. - Lady Chatterley
Opinions vary, of course, on the merits of Lady Chatterley. I was unaware of the existence of a variant 1927 DH Lawrence novel "John Thomas and Lady Jane", from which this film was made.
A vaguely literary digression
Patrizia DeLucchio, editor of the excellent 'Sex' section of The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, writes amusingly of her own encounter with Lady Chatterley (spelled, for some reason, 'Chatterly' but let's not quibble):
As it happens, I'm a year older than Ms DeLucchio. I had two early exposures to this notorious book following its eventual legal publication here in the UK. The first occurred very briefly when I liberated it from the bookshelf in the bedroom of the sailor son of some friends we were staying with on the Welsh coast. It was promptly confiscated by my mother. Within a few months, however, I caught up with another copy, cunningly disguised by a home-made brown paper cover. It circulated via an informal lending library arrangement in my Junior school and I was able to alternate the tedium of several bus rides with the tedium of much of Mr Lawrence's prose.
Staying with elderly prose, I see (from the new Ansible) that William Asher died a couple of weeks ago. Who he? He's the chap who filmed John Mantley's really rather good 1956 SF novel The 27 th Day. I've had my copy for 33 years. Thinks: I really must get out more.