David Foster Wallace

One of the things that's different about reading on a Kindle is that you don't know how long the book is that you've downloaded. So I was puzzled, reading Infinite Jest, when the percentage numbers seemed to get stuck - puzzled until I saw it in a bookshop and discovered it's a thousand pages long. That's about three times as long as it should be. It contains brilliant ideas, and some completely convincing writing of a conventional sort - evocations of the early life of a tennis professional, descriptions of AA meetings etc. But it's in an American postmodernist tradition, Pynchon being the obvious model, eg in its group of paraplegic Quebequois terrorists, and it eschews conventional plot development. The clue there is in its core metaphor in the work of one of its more elusive characters, the film director James O. Incandenza, who is said to have an 'anti-confluential' theory of film structure, meaning that separate plot strands are not joined together. Infinite Jest  is also anti-confluential, - though the different strands sometimes infringe on each other, they never meet in any sort of resolution. Clearly you're meant to be frustrated by that, it's the major plot point, but it seems to me to lose one of the greatest resources of the novel as a form, and inflicts injury on a reader willing to commit themselves to a work of such length. However, it's certainly worth dipping into (maybe that's the reading model you're supposed to adopt?) because it contains brilliantly witty moments, as in this from its spoof Incandenza filmography:

Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell ... God and Satan play poker with Tarot cards for the soul of an alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman obsessed with Bernini's 'The Ecstasy of St.Teresa.'  

The Truman Show

I wonder if Truman Show moments might be as common for some people now as deja vu. I experienced one this morning as I turned from the Lloyds bank ATM in Bangor and looked towards the Big Issue saleswoman who always stands on the corner where JD Sports used to be. She always wears a headscarf, a check shirt, and a skirt which capaciously displays Islamic art; she always whistles on the 'sh' sound of Issue in a way that reminds you of the difficulty, now, of getting a National Health dentist. As I turned, I saw her pat her hair under the scarf as though she was conscious of being on camera, and that caused the Truman double-take (of course, given the ubiquity of cctv in town centres, we're all on camera there). But maybe it's also a small-town effect - in places like Bangor you constantly see the same faces even though they're strangers, and, if you see a number of them one after the other, it's like being surrounded by minor celebrities.

Asma al-Assad

The Channel 4 documentary The Real Mr and Mrs Assad was fascinating because of what it left as a central enigma - that is, what their marriage is 'really' like, which, of course, it could never answer - only novelists can go into those inner workings, and even in novels the reality remains moot. Asma Assad was blamed for lending legitimacy to the regime through her Englishness and her beauty, and there have been calls upon her by the wives of the German and British ambassadors to the United Nations, asking her to stand up for peace and urge her husband to end the bloodshed in her country. In the program there was a moment that struck me as misogynistic when she was said to have shopped online for Parisian fashion while a massacre was taking place. Very big questions are raised here about the role that individuals can play in a terrible situation like that currently in Syria, and what was damagingly lacking from the program was the terror that the Assad family must feel from its vulnerability in composing a regime out of minority factions (including Christians) in the face of the Sunni majority. The atrocities which Assad and his brother and his cousins are committing are clearly in response to that vulnerability, and so, when you imagine marital discussions by the Assads you have to imagine the husband describing that situation. On Channel 4 they interviewed an old schoolfriend who said that 'Emma' (as she was known at school) must surely now be appalled. Maybe she is - she, herself, is Sunni and her family came originally from Homs - and it's very puzzling to imagine a former London schoolgirl, then computer scientist then investment banker sitting in the midst of these horrors shopping online for Chanel.It's impossible to know what she might have said to her husband in private, but what you do know is that if she tried to act against him and his family of monsters she'd be in terrible danger. 

marmite

'It's like marmite - you either love it or hate it,' is a current cliche in the making. I don't think it will acquire the momentum of the 'rollercoaster' menace because it's not even accurate. I mean it's true that rollercoasters go up and down, but I, for one, neither love nor hate marmite - I just quite like it. Mind you, accuracy isn't stopping the momentum of the 'in their DNA' idiom currently used obsessively by sports commentators in contexts that have nothing to do with genetics:

producing bowlers who can deliver a ball which dips suddenly in its flight and then scoots straight and low across the ground, by generating topspin through squirting the ball off the middle finger...-

is in the Sri Lankan DNA

contemporary allegories

I’ve been writing a sequence of poems that explores what I’m convinced is the prevalence of allegorical forms in contemporary culture, especially in advertising, celebrity culture and, to some extent, sport. It’s the opposite of symbolism whose depth is about unearthing essential truths. This new allegory is about surfaces and the arbitrary, as in those meerkats on TV ads where small furry animals with Russian accents are arbitrarily made to represent insurance – gratuitousness and randomness are a major part of the point. These representations, like others now, resemble the Baroque in their elaborate self-consciousness and self-referentiality, but they now also reflect the loss of religion in their self-reflexive lack of depth. And certain celebrities, especially minor ones, have acquired the status of personifications – Jordan, for example, arouses interest because of the stark simplicity of what she represents, and the intense focus on her chest. Here's the start of 'The Breasts':

Her breasts had secretly acquired

an agent, knowing they were better

than their owner – when she tired

and sagged, they only perked up perter,

climbing above her.  She had made it

only because they stood up for her,

who always denied them credit

for parting the way before her.

Now they needed to expand

their contract:  they’d get bigger

only if they could command

a much more generous figure.

Oh my God I’m falling apart

she cried, awaking in the cold dawn:

Roy Hodgson

You have to feel sorry for Roy Hodgson who got stick at Liverpool for not being Kenny Dalglish, and will get stick as England manager for not being Harry Redknapp. He's got sound credentials, but it's hard not to see the overlooking as Rednap as another example of a stuffy organisation uneasy about a colourful character who speaks his mind. Maybe worst of all, for the FA, Redknapp is funny.

True Blood

Watching the fourth series of True Blood, I've been wondering about the influence of Twin Peaks, the David Lynch soap parody from the early 90s - that was also set in a small town where weirdness was progressively revealed. But the differences between them also show what's changed culturally in the two decades since then. The True Blood premise - that vampires have gone mainstream because the availability of the eponymous blood substitute means they needn't kill humans - looks at first like a straightforward metaphor for the mainstreaming of gayness, especially given the conspicuous presence of gay characters, combined, stylistically, with a reliance on camp parody and irony. What's more interesting is the way that such a wide range of other kinds of deviance is gradually developed so that a very high percentage of the population of the Louisiana town turn out to be shape-shifters, werewolves etc etc. The protagonist, Sookie Stackhouse, who gives her name to the books which the series is based on, looks like an author proxy because her telepathic abilities are also what novelists can do - she can read the thoughts of the other characters (well, except for vampires) but this also means she's endowed with unexpected power for a young waitress, and she's wish-fulfullingly the focus of great sexual interest for the most glamorous men in the series. But the series is crucially generous in its endowment of power; that's similar, maybe, to the banal Xmen moral - give freaks a chance - but goes beyond that because the proliferation of deviant and ambiguous powers (are they a blessing or a curse?) suggests a much more widespread tolerance - way beyond a straight/gay binary, and hinting at a celebration of human variousness in all its forms. And, like all those HBO series, it's brilliantly scripted, acted and filmed. Marvellous.