Boom. Neurones fired. Brain asploded. Suddenly I understood that not only could I select words, but that through conscious choice I could organise them to better effect. What that simple comment told me was that it was not enough to understand the meaning of words (to have at my disposal a wide and precise vocabulary) or to know their history (to understand how words form and slip and slide and form again, to know about their texture and their patina), but that I could think about my own writing analytically. What I learned was not more words or more about words – but to think about my crafting of words. This considered organisation of words was where the real precision engineering happened, I realised. I stopped thinking in terms of words and I started thinking in terms of sentences.

Now, this comment of Miss M’s fell on particularly receptive ground. As well as my English Language A-level, I was studying/struggling with Latin A-level (through which I learned what grammar I know), and also history, with a strong emphasis on effective argument. I was obsessed with the idea of language (as distinct from a language or literature: I fumble around in anything not English, and I am badly read). And it’s been my observation over the years that something fascinating happens to the late- or immediately post-teenage brain. The sponge-like absorption of information shifts up a gear – as if the mind suddenly has a big enough bank of data to start making meaningful connections. It begins to analyse, to organise. It’s the most exciting moment to watch: the human being hovering between innocence and experience. Words, information about words: these are no longer enough for this new complexity. Sentences, at once bounded and supple, are the very least it requires.

All of which brings me to the Sister Fidelma mysteries by Peter Tremayne, and how they remind me why sentences matter so much to me, as reader and writer. These cosy historical detective novels, reminiscent of the Cadfael series by Ellis Peters, are set in seventh-century Europe, and revolve around an Irish nun and lawyer, Sister Fidelma, and her Saxon foil, Brother Eadulf. Together they fight crime rather than resolve the sexual tension between them. From the outside, then, there are plenty of pleasures on offer: there’s information about seventh-century Irish legal and social systems and the differences between Celtic and Roman Christianity; flame-haired Sister Fidelma is not only a scholar and proto-feminist but knows some handy martial arts; there’s some decent description here and there. But the sentences – the nuts and bolts – are driving me mad.

I’m going to pick for an example only one; rather harshly, it’s the opening sentence of the second Sister Fidelma mystery, Shroud for the Archbishop:

“The night was warm and fragrant; but as oppressively scented as only a Roman summer’s night can frequently be.”

And with that “frequently”, I am lost. Because that single word gives me a glimpse into the author’s mind as he writes, and I sense him second-guess himself (perhaps he has suddenly recalled a chilly August night once spent in Rome). He covers himself with “frequently”, and his sentence – already heavy with adverbs – collapses with the weight of yet another, and with the burden of the author’s moment of self-doubt. Instead of describing this particular summer night in Rome, the author’s thoughts stray to other nights; rather than dismiss them as extraneous to his sentence, he instead conjures them up in the reader’s mind too. But that means that this night, the night upon which murder will (presumably) occur, is displaced in our minds. Our thoughts also stray to those other rarer summer nights, when the heat and the scent were perhaps not so oppressive, and we wonder about them, and what made them cooler and sweeter, and whether we might prefer them to this one. The author, trying to capture within the bounds of his sentence one extra thought, over-reaches, and slips – and loses my faith in his ability to carry me. One stray adverb, one extraneous thought – that’s all it takes.

There are other problems on a nuts and bolts level with these books, mostly to do with the way that characters move within scenes, either across a setting, or in relation to each other. It’s a tricky one, and whenever I’ve struggled with this, it’s usually because I’m picturing the scene unfolding as film or television rather than imagining it happening to my protagonist (fundamentally, whatever the books may say, narrative prose is about story-telling, not story-showing). But I picked this particular example because I think it demonstrates how crafting a sentence is about the organisation of thought, the inclusion of relevant words, the excision of extraneous words, and the process of deciding which is which. That, I think, is a much trickier prospect than knowing stuff, and knowing stuff about stuff. Early-teenage me would have soaked up the detail in these books, revelled in it, loved the simple but well-pitched tension built into the relationships and backgrounds of the two main protagonists – and good for her. But late-teenage me had begun to wonder: Why is that adverb there? Why does my instinct tell me that it shouldn’t be? For which – thank you Miss M, and I’m sorry I was such a difficult student.

It’s a four day event with loads of stuff happening, and I barely scratched the surface. I didn’t visit the club tent, for example, where less well known and younger acts were performing. I bet that has a really good vibe. Mostly we stayed around the smaller of the two main stages: we found a shady spot under a big ash tree where we could hear everything but the banter, and from which we could dip into any set that took our fancy. The main stage had the bigger name acts, but unless you got right next to one of the speakers, it was pretty hard to hear what was going on. Also it was bloody hot out there in the open.

I got the feeling that someone roughly my age was responsible for the bookings because two of the acts took me right back to my undergraduate days: The Wonder Stuff did a fabulous set which reminded how much I liked them when I was nineteen, and completely surprised me by being terrific… I didn’t expect my younger self to have had such good taste! The other retrospective triumph was Natalie Merchant: I loved 10,000 Maniacs as a teenager/student, and played my tape (yes, tape) of In My Tribe into oblivion. I liked the serious intent, the unwieldy lyrics, the goofy dancing, and the guest appearances from Michael Stipe (REM also being very important to me at that time). I didn’t keep up with her solo albums, however, and I also worried she might turn out to be a disappointment live (like Suzanne Vega). But she was terrific. She’s picked up a puckish sense of humour along the way, and I wonder if this might be something to do with her now having a kid: her latest album, Leave Your Sleep, is a collection of twenty-odd songs based on children’s songs and poems. (I’m listening to a gorgeous one based on Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Spring and Fall: To A Young Child right now; a poem which has wandered in and out of my awareness all this year, what with Francine Prose’s novel Goldengrove.) Anyway, she was marvellous (and her website is well designed and enjoyable to poke around). I’ve bought the latest album and the retrospective.

Plenty of other terrific acts over the weekend: I didn’t hear as much of The Imagined Village or Seasick Steve as I would have liked because the rain came down sudden and fast, so we zipped home to change out of soaked clothes and to pick up a brolly. Over at stage 2 on Sunday we heard ancient Jamaican mento band The Jolly Boys (I never knew that New Order’s Blue Monday could sound so good), and Scottish Gaelic singer Julie Fowlis (just as it started raining, unfortunately, so the tent rapidly became packed and steamy). The best set of the weekend was from the Unthanks (that links to their MySpace page, for those who don’t like that site). I can’t say enough how beautiful this was. The marquee became an impromptu abbey, filled with sparse Northumbrian harmonies and chant. We were rapt. Really, go and listen to some of the songs on that MySpace page. Their most recent album, and the one that formed most of the set list, is Here’s the Tender Coming.

The big disappointment of the weekend for me was Show of Hands, who I’ve heard rave reviews about from all quarters. I’ve heard a couple of Steve Knightley’s songs before and quite liked their strong tunes and lyrics, but I have to say that this set was an extremely uncomfortable and unpleasant experience. The crowd obviously knew their band, joining in straight away with the first song, Santiago, with the fervour of a revivalist meeting. (M. leaned down and whispered, “Hey, the congregation know the responses!”). Which is fine, I have no problem with that, but it became steadily alienating across the next hour. The mood seemed to turn sour, and the group feeling seemed to be based on exclusion and dislike. One song, about how dumbed-down and ignorant the internet is, got a huge round of applause for a line about “Twittering twats”. Twitter isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I don’t think anyone should be ridiculed for using it. In fact, I’d thoroughly enjoyed reading people’s tweets from the festival all weekend, getting reports on acts that I hadn’t heard. This kind of contempt (which seems to be anxiety about new technology and is fear-based) strikes me as a sort of wilful illiteracy. It was depressing to hear people get behind it.

Not as depressing, however (or as disturbing), as finding myself in the midst of a thousand white people singing Knightley’s song Roots, which closed the set. (I’ve linked to the lyrics there, and you can see it for yourself on YouTube.) I understand that Knightley’s intent was to express his love of English culture and traditions, but the song does not do that, nor did it do that on the night. The chief emotions it expresses seem to be envy (of “Indians, Asians, Afro-Celts” – as if being a Celt (whatever the hell that means) implies I am not at the same time English!) and contempt (for “Australian soaps, American rap, Estuary English” – why yes, for what is worse than black music and common people?). Envy and contempt: prime sources of exclusion and hatred. It does not surprise me to learn that the BNP has co-opted this song. Listening to a crowd of white people (for the festival-going crowd was not the most diverse, and the tickets are not cheap) who had already been primed to scorn the Other yelling about an Englishness which had specifically excluded me on the grounds of that part of me that is Irish was vile. I walked out. If Steve Knightley doesn’t want his songs to be co-opted by the BNP, he shouldn’t write a hateful song, or create a space soaked in sourness, grievance, and distaste. These things have a tendency to backfire.

Simone Weil: “Patriotism. We must not have any love other than charity. A nation cannot be an object of charity. But a country can be one – as an environment bearing traditions which are eternal. Every country can be that.”

Edited by: Ross P. Garner, Melissa Beattie and Una McCormack

The successful regeneration of Doctor Who in the twenty-first century has sparked unprecedented popular success and renewed interest within the academy.

The ten essays assembled in this volume draw on a variety of critical approaches—from cultural theory to audience studies, to classical reception and musicology—to form a wide-ranging interdisciplinary discussion of Doctor Who, classic and new, and its spin-off series, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures.

With additional contributions from Andrew Pixley, Robert Shearman, Barnaby Edwards, and Matt Hills, the volume is intended to be accessible to everyone, from interested academics in relevant fields to the general public.

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You can find out more about the book here, and read a sample/TOC here [PDF file].

More info here.

Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban

Sunset at Wandlebury

With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks

Moonrise at Wandlebury

A bold and imaginative production that made real demands on the audience, and I’m glad I followed where it took us.

• How might we be using the term ‘literary’? One might be synonymous with ‘quality’: what makes ‘good’ television according to some general standard of ‘good’ culture?
• This could quite quickly get bogged down into a discussion of high vs. low culture which even now forms a background pulse to television studies, as an unspoken justification for studying these particular cultural products. [On the day we discussed the desire of SF readers and writers for 'respectability'.] As a result we could easily end up doing a kind of boundary work, in which we claim the cultural high ground for particular forms of television as high, as literary, as quality: for example, the one-off single-authored play (rooted in Play for Today, or The Wednesday Play) or the short high-profile serial (things like State of Play, Edge of Darkness). (Some people might point to Torchwood: Children of Earth here as a recent example; I personally wouldn’t.)
  
• I don’t much want to do that kind of boundary work, partly because I consume television pretty indiscriminately and don’t want to justify the habit.
  
• But also, because that kind of claim for ‘high cultural’ status misses a couple of important features about television for me: firstly, its mass and popular appeal; and also, because, when I think about the literary nature of television, in the sense of thinking about the nature of television writing, it seems to me that many of television’s chief treasures are tucked away in smaller and more ordinary moments, in smaller and more ordinary programmes. Television’s closest literary forms, for me, are the short story and the play, not the film or the novel. [On the day, IIRC, we discussed long-running, novel-like series such as Battlestar Galactica, Lost, The X-Files; discussing whether it was the sense of an unfolding storyline moving steadily towards resolution or the permanently unresolved narrative that gave them their appeal.]
  
• A successful example of television writing. The Doctor Who episode ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’: an emotional drama that – for me – contains credible individuals, whether they are the King of France, his mistress, her lover the time-travelling alien, and the time-travelling alien’s girlfriend. If I tried to say in a single word what I think makes this episode successful, that word would be intimacy. (I’m swiping that notion very inaccurately from Jason Jacobs’ book on 50s television drama, The Intimate Screen.) ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’ is about unrequited love, chances missed, paths not taken – a story that, obviously, you could tell in an realist fashion, but the fantastical elements of the story (space ship, time travel, magic door) aren’t accoutrements, I think, they’re essential to heightening the emotional stakes. Also, they’re kind of cool.
  
• And this idea of intimacy, for me, encapsulates a particular quality of television: the smallness of the screen – even in these widescreen days – which circumscribes the emotional space and intensifies the emotional stakes, and which works in combination with the character-focused nature of its writing. Even now that we can convincingly ‘do’ aliens, and planets that don’t look like Betchworth Quarry, for me they don’t matter if the characters are lacking truth. (An example of what I mean by ‘lack of truth’ might be the behaviour of the soldiers rounding up children in Torchwood: Children of Earth, or the treaty negotiations in the recent Doctor Who episode ‘Cold Blood’.)
  
• But I’ve now got myself to the point where I’m starting to wonder whether television is actually a good delivery mechanism for SF! I think television can do terrific action adventure/soap, which is basically what, say, Firefly and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine are; so are Chuck and Burn Notice, my current must-see shows. But I’ve now convinced myself that television doesn’t really do the numinous.
  
• I think if we’re looking to television to provide an outward-looking sense of wonder, then we’re probably always going to be disappointed, even as special effects improve. Because television’s space is intimate. It’s domestic. It’s about a small number of people gathered in a small space – whether that’s Central Perk, the Westminster Village, Albert Square, the Big Brother house, or the Liberator – and it’s about the plausible unfolding of the stories of these people.
  

The Women of WW II

As previously mentioned on this journal, I had an early morning panel in London on Saturday, at the BSFA/SFF AGM and minicon. We also had theatre tickets on the Friday night, so we decided to bunk off on Friday and do the tourist thing in Our Nation’s Capital. Our hotel was in Westminster, so we wandered along the river through Victoria Tower Gardens.

Emmeline Pankhurst

London has most often been a barrier to me, a place I have to pass through to get somewhere else, so it’s good to be able to stop and take the time to look. We dropped into the National Portrait Gallery, principally to laugh at the statue of Victoria and Albert in mediaeval Anglo-Saxon garb, that makes them look like Posh’n'Becks. (I wanted to link to an image of it, but sadly it’s not on the NPG site, for copyright reasons. Quite hard to miss if you’re in the museum, though.)

The Burghers of Calais

Friday evening, we went to see Alan Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce at the Duke of York’s Theatre. Wisely played as a period piece; thank God I didn’t have to be a grown woman during the 1970s. The play has a nice conceit – three marital bedrooms on stage all at once, with four married couples hopping between them – and is funny enough, although not side-splitting. It would have been funnier if the pay-off (a collapsing chest of drawers) hadn’t been ruined by some idiot’s phone going off for the second time that night. Completely undercut the last five minutes. One of the cast members looked absolutely livid, and I don’t blame him.

Next morning, we strolled from the hotel through St James’s Park to Piccadilly. What a beautiful day! The research body I once worked for used to hold seminars in one of the institutes along Birdcage Walk, but I was always so busy that I never had proper time to enjoy the surroundings (the chief reason I started doing something else). The minicon was happening at the Royal Astronomical Society in Burlington House. Another part of London which I don’t know well, and I was grateful for the con organiser’s map of the area – hand-drawn, showing all available coffee outlets, and with the legend: “Geography Is Approximate.”

Westminster Abbey

I’m bad at remembering what happens on panels when I’m a participant: I’m concentrating hard on listening to what other people are saying and thinking about my response. The theme was “How do we understand TV as a literary medium?” I think what I chiefly wanted to get across was that television’s strength, for me, lies in its domesticity – the small space inhabited by a handful of well-drawn characters – rather than in spectacle, and that, for me, shows such as NuBSG might deliver spectacle, but don’t deliver credibility in terms of plot or character. (NuBSG also commits the cardinal sin of being dull: disaster for television.) We also discussed the issue of the respectability of SF, a question which becomes more complex in the context of TV, a form that has often struggled to make a case for its credibility. (Tho’ I personally gave up striving for credibility w.r.t. my cultural pursuits years ago: “Sure I write fanfiction! Would you like to read it?” Brazen it out, brazen it out…) I’m sorry I can’t remember more. I thoroughly enjoyed myself; hope participants and audience did too.

I sadly had to dash off before the tour of the RAS library; I had a dinner date with M. at the Capital (ooh, get us, proper posh). It’s such a lovely place, relaxed and welcoming. For the record, my grub:

• White crab meat with a tomato salad
• Pan fried guinea fowl breast, glazed maccheroni, and pumpkin velouté
• Roast pineapple with star anise, crème brûlée, hibiscus sorbet

Oh yes.

Spoilers will follow for ‘The Pandorica Opens.’ Bail now.

St James's Park

Then back to the hotel, where we rounded off the evening with ‘The Pandorica Opens’ on iPlayer. The terrible gentleness with which all the other toys put the Doctor in the box. Boy oh boy.