M. John Harrison recommends

fantasy
Published on 2 Comments on M. John Harrison recommends

Some good fantasy:

  • The House on the Borderland, 1908, William Hope Hodgson
  • The Wind in the Willows, 1908, Kenneth Grahame
  • The Great Return, 1915, Arthur Machen
  • From Ritual to Romance, 1920, Jessie L Weston
  • Nosferatu, 1922, dir FW Murnau
  • Mr Weston’s Good Wine, 1927, TF Powys
  • War in Heaven, 1930, Charles Williams
  • The Green Child, 1935, Herbert Read
  • At the Mountains of Madness, 1936, HP Lovecraft
  • At Swim-Two-Birds, 1939, Flann O’Brien
  • Fantasia, 1940, dir Walt Disney
  • The Journal of Albion Moonlight, 1941, Kenneth Patchen
  • That Hideous Strength, 1945, CS Lewis
  • The Martian Chronicles, 1950, Ray Bradbury
  • Mazirian the Magician, 1950, Jack Vance
  • E Pluribus Unicorn, 1953, Theodore Sturgeon
  • V, 1956, Thomas Pynchon
  • The Incredible Shrinking Man, 1957, dir Jack Arnold
  • The Vodi, 1959, John Braine
  • The Alexandria Quartet, 1957-1960, Lawrence Durrell
  • A Fine & Private Place, 1960, Peter Beagle
  • The Stealer of Souls, 1963, Michael Moorcock
  • The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, 1963, Joan Aiken
  • I Never Promised You A Rose Garden, 1964, Joanne Greenberg
  • The Magus, 1966, John Fowles
  • All Along the Watchtower, 1967, Bob Dylan
  • Mooncranker’s Gift, 1973, Barry Unsworth
  • The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, 1974, dir Werner Herzog
  • Diamond Dogs, 1974, David Bowie
  • Ritual Animal Disguise, 1977, EC Cawte
  • Stalker, 1979, dir Andrei Tarkovsky
  • The Bloody Chamber, 1979, Angela Carter
  • The Fall of the House of Usher, 1981, dir Jan Svankmajer
  • Mythago Wood, 1984, Robert Holdstock
  • Halo Jones, 1984, Alan Moore & Ian Gibson
  • Rain Dogs, 1985, Tom Waits
  • Blue Velvet, 1986, dir David Lynch
  • The Mortmere Stories, 1994, Edward Upward & Christopher Isherwood
  • Jumping Joan, 1994, dir Petra Freeman
  • Institute Benjamenta, 1995, dir The Brothers Quay
  • The Voice of the Fire, 1996, Alan Moore
  • Lost Highway, 1997, dir David Lynch
  • Simon Magus, 1999, dir Ben Hopkins
  • The Dream Archipelago, 1999, Christopher Priest
  • Under the Skin, 2000, Michel Faber
  • Ratchet & Clank, 2002, Insomniac Games
  • The Carpet Makers, 2006, Andreas Eschbach
  • Peter & the Wolf, 2006, dir Suzie Templetonv
  • The Night Buffalo, 2007, Guillermo Arriaga
  • Night Work, 2008, Thomas Glavinic

A great list and the best thing is that despite its variety and the hodgepodge of media represented here (books, comics, movies, even videogames) this still looks like a coherent whole, a list created from a (sub?)conscious aesthetic. If I could spot a theme here it’s of fantasy not as a creator of secondary worlds, independent of the real world, but of fantasy as a creative force playing with our own perceptions of reality. It’s also interesting to spot the omissions, partially deliberate as Harrison wanted to avoid ‘both the Tolkien-boomers and their Dark Other, the Peake “tradition”’.

Sometimes Eddie Mair is a sycophantic w*nker

Auntie Beeb, Ian Tomlinson, Policing
Published on 1 Comment on Sometimes Eddie Mair is a sycophantic w*nker

The filth hit an innocent woman and all Mairs can think off is have some “police expert” on to tell how justified it is sometimes to control crowds by hitting them with batons. It’s shocking to hear this violence being normalised when the video shows the casual backhander a cop gives a woman half his size, then take his baton out and hit her on the legs as her back is turned. In some ways it’s worse footage than what was showed of Ian Tomlinson, as there the situation had already kicked off while here you had a bogstandard peaceful political protest in which the police with no reason started attacking people trying to leave.

Eddie Mairs’ disgraceful performance fits in well though with the general BBC attitude of sucking up to the police and their silencing of police outrages. Ian Tomlinson only rate a one sentence mention and was thought of as “just a London story” until the Beeb was forced to report on it through blogs and the Guardian keeping the story alive. Further back of course there’s the infamous incident in which BBC newscasts showed footage of police attacking the miner strikes in reverse order, making it appear as if the police defended themselves against the miners rather than the other way around.

Amazonfail

IT is not magic pixiedust, LGBT
Published on

Just because it turned out that the delisting of thousands of gay and lesbian and feminist books as icky adult titles was an accident does not make Amazon innocent or what happened less bad. Richard Nash, ex-publisher of Soft Skull Press, explains why:

The onus is on us, as Tim Wise has taught so well on the topic of white privilege. We cannot be given the benefit of the doubt, because it is always us who get the benefit of the doubt in our society, and if we are to take the pink and lavender dollars, and if we are to say, you don’t need A Different Light, or Oscar Wilde Bookstore, we’ll hook you up just fine, then we can never let this happen. I learned this as a straight white male publisher of queer books, it was why I took care to try to find staff who are gay or trans, to catch my complacency, my temptation to think I deserved the benefit of the doubt.

I didn’t, nor does Amazon. The vigilance and outrage demonstrated on Twitter are necessary, not because the folks at Amazon are bad people, but because the books that were de-ranked were de-ranked because it is always the outsider whose books get de-ranked and “mainstream” society and the capitalist institutions that operate within it, whether my old company or Amazon, must self-police ruthlessly in order to guard against this kind of thing happening.

The Iron Wall – Avi Shlaim

books and books review, history, Israel/Palestine
Published on

Cover of The Iron Wall


The Iron Wall
Avi Shlaim
670 pages including index
published in 2000

Avi Shlaim is an Israeli/British historian, one of a generation of revisionist historians who from the 1980s started tearing down the foundation myths of the state of Israel. History always has political undertones and perhaps nowhere more so than in Israel, which after all justifies its existence with the historical claim of the Jewish people on the lands of Palestine, as developed through zionist ideology. With the succesful establishment of Israel as a Jewish state came a set of founding myths and in the first decades after independence Israeli historians by and large confirmed rather than challenged those myths. In the eighties this changed, as new historians started re-examining those core assumptions. Unlike the earlier generation, people like Avi Shlaim had not had the same personal experience and direct involvement in the foundation of Israel and its wars and could look more objectively on the facts rather than let ideology steer their interpretations.

In The Iron Wall – Israel and the Arab World Avi Shlaim takes aim at Israel’s foreign policy concerning its immediate neighbours. It’s a big book, tracing the evolution of Israel’s approach to the Arab countries from its struggle for independence up to 1998 and the failure of the Oslo peace process. The title of the book comes from two 1923 essays by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a Zionist leader and according to Shlaim, “spiritual father of the Israeli right”. In these essays Jabotinsky set out the possibilities for dealing with the socalled “Arab problem” and coming to the conclusion that the only way to deal with it is to continue the settlement efforts “under protection of a force that is not dependent on the local population, behind an iron wall which they will be powerless to break down”.

Read more…

How the Worldbank uses Wikipedia

Wikipedia
Published on
Using Wikipedia as contentmanagement

Via Edwin Mijnsbergen, enthusiast biblioblogger for my old hometown’s library, comes the news that the Worldbank has started to use Wikipedia as a contentmanagement tool, as explained in the presentation above. Basically a few of the researchers in their Latin-America section started looking at the best format to publish or keep their research in and as a pilot project started working on a lot of the socalled country overviews on Wikipedia. This instead of setting up their own branded Wikipedia, as they were geeky enough to realise that sharing the info and allowing others to acces it and update it would improve it quicker than keeping it in house.

The Socialtext site has an overview of the project.