The 47 Ronin

The Keanu Reeves movie, The 47 Ronin, opened this week to pretty mediocre business but it reminded me of this little blog post from 3 years ago about a visit I took to Japan. On arriving in Tokyo the first thing I did was get up early and take a trip out to the tombs of the 47 Ronin. I became aware of the Ronin initially through the Borges story "The Uncivil Teacher of Etiquette, Kotsuke no Suke," and then through the ukiyo-e, a remarkable series of woodblock prints on the subject of the Ronin. The shrine to the 47 Ronin is a surprisingly peaceful haven in the middle of Tokyo. I was the very first person there that morning and as such I got to light the first incense of the day to the memory of the Samurai...
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Like a total idiot I forgot to bring my camera to Japan but I did manage to take a couple of videos with the pinhole camera on my early model iPod nano.

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My Favourite Christmas Songs

After all these years these are still my favourites. Just dont play them at the same time. Merry Christmas everyone...

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My 10 Favourite Books Of 2013

I'll probably do a separate list for crime fiction, but in the meantime here are my favourite books of 2013, not all of which were actually published in 2013. If there's a theme here I think it might be walking or possibly the literary ascent of the extended Morrissey clan...
1. Autobiography - Morrissey. The Moz gets his revenge on anyone who's ever crossed him in this poisonously brilliant billet mal.
2. Red or Dead - David Peace. One of England's best writers uses the medium of Bill Shankly's tenure at Liverpool FC to reinvent what the novel can do. 
3. Edgelands - Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley. Two poets explore the edges of civilization in a walk throughout England's shittier and lesser known byways. 
4. Longbourn - Jo Baker. Pride and Prejudice from the servants perspective. The hard work and aspirations reminded me more of Jack London's Martin Eden than Austen but that's no bad thing. 
5. The Generals - Tom Ricks. Best history book of the year. An exploration of the decline in American generalship since the war. 
6. The Old Ways - Robert Macfarlane. Posh intellectual Robert Macfarlane goes for lots of walks in Britain and abroad and waxes lyrical about them. 
7. Parallax - Sinead Morrissey. Ireland's best young poet up to all her old tricks and some new ones too. 
8. The Luminaries - Eleanor Catton. A man walks into a bar and finds an Irishman, an Englishman and a Scotsman... and 9 other strangers. They've got a story to tell.
9. London Orbital - Iain Sinclair. Iain Sinclair and his hippy best friend decide to walk around the M25 motorway. Anti clockwise. JG Ballard gets invoked. A lot. This also is a very good thing. 
10. The Broken Road - Patrick Leigh Fermor. Part 3 of Paddy Fermor's journey a pied to Constantinople completed by sympathetic editors. 

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End Of The Year Quiz

probably helped that I was wearing
my lucky Dr Who t shirt

I took part in the ABC Radio National end of the year quiz here in Melbourne this morning. There were four of us there representing four of the arts: cinema, performing arts, visual arts and books. I, of course, was waving the flag for books. It was a fun quiz being broadcast across all of Australia and although my knowledge of Australian culture isn't perhaps up to the standard of the other competitors I did my best.  
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Joseph Campbell would have appreciated it because in many ways it was the classic hero's journey. By the fifteen minute mark, 1/4 of the way through the show, I was on zero points and languishing in last place. My fart gun buzzer (you had to be there) had barely sounded at all but then they started asking questions about Superman and if there's one thing I know about it's Superman, and after that, well things just started to fall into place. . .
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If you wanna know how it turned out you can listen to the programme over at the books and arts website. You'll need Real Player or Windows Media Player but they'll probably also have a podcast of the show too at some point. 

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George McFly Day!

What is George McFly Day? Well if you're a follower of this blog you'll already know and if you don't know it's that bit at the end of Back To The Future where's George's box of books arrives from his publisher and the family gathers around and George achieves a sort of redemption and a fulfillment of his childhood dreams of becoming a writer.
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We got a George McFly day in the McKinty household today as my box of books arrived from my publisher, Serpents Tail. It's the third book in my Sean Duffy series and it's called In The Morning I'll Be Gone (another Tom Waits title). This time Duffy has to solve an old school locked room mystery in the middle of a rather chaotic time in Northern Ireland's history. 
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You can read a couple of early reviews of Duffy #3 if you scroll down a little on this blog. 
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And, er, yes daughter #2 did have to be bribed with an ice cream to take this photo...

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The Most Interesting Man In The World's Final Journey

My review of Patrick Leigh Fermor's The Broken Road from yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age.
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In 1933 Patrick Leigh Fermor was 18 years old and washed up: he'd been expelled from school, couldn't get into university and had no idea what to do with his life. So, inspired by the likes of Peter Fleming, Robert Byron, and Alexander Kinglake, Fermor decided to walk from London to Constantinople with the vague idea of making a book out of his adventures. A Time of Gifts (1977) is the story of that trip, or at least the first third of it, being an account of his wanderings across a newly Nazified Germany and into Hungary. The forty years between the journey and the publication gave Fermor time to contemplate the meaning of all that he saw, and, rather like a fine single malt, four decades of maturation led to perfection. A Time of Gifts was hailed as a classic of travel writing: a bright, buoyant and learned book in which a young man's enthusiasm for the road was tempered by an older man's wisdom. Gifts is packed with beautiful descriptions, funny incidents and thoughtful commentary on the people and places he encounters.      

Nine years after A Time of Gifts, Fermor published Between The Woods And The Water the continuation of his travels along the Danube to the Iron Gates on the Romanian border. Fans eagerly awaited the promised conclusion to the journey but twenty six years passed after volume two and Fermor died in 2011 with, sadly, no sign of volume three.

            Paddy Fermor was born in London to a father who was both emotionally and physically distant (while the boy went to a series of boarding schools Sir Lewis Leigh Fermor continued his work with the geological survey of India) and a kind but rather stiff mother. After his epic Constantinople walk, with no career plan, Fermor moved permanently to Greece and he was there when World War 2 broke out. The British SOE recruited him as a secret agent operating behind enemy lines in Nazi occupied Crete, where, somewhat incredibly, his small band of partisans managed to capture the German general in charge of much of the island: a tale which was later told in the book and the film Ill Met by Moonlight.

            Fermor’s literary reputation was established by the books he wrote about his post-War travels in the Americas and his time spent in Greek monastic retreats. Gregarious, witty and ebullient, Fermor seems to have known everyone who was anyone – the great and the good all making the pilgrimage to his beautiful villa in Greece. He was rumoured to be one of the models for his friend Ian Fleming’s James Bond and even recently for the hilarious Dos Equis beer ads about “The Most Interesting Man In The World.”

            The Broken Road, begins with a sort of apology from the editors, Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper, who note in their introduction that this third volume of A Time of Gifts was not only unfinished at the time of Fermor’s death but in fact barely begun.  The Broken Road was “reconstructed” from a contemporary diary and a “hasty” unpublished account Fermor had written in 1963 which he had left unrevised until he was well into his nineties. Cooper and Thubron note that Fermor’s prose is what makes his writing so unique and it’s alarming to be told that The Broken Road is “unpolished” and raw.

            This worry somewhat dissipates however when you begin reading the actual book. If The Broken Road is the stream of consciousness, unvarnished Fermor then he was even more of a genius than we all thought. Read this description of an Orthodox religious rite in Bulgaria: “They evolved and chanted in aromatic clouds of smoke diagonally pierced by sun shafts. When all was over, a compact crocodile of votaries shuffled their way around the church to kiss St Ivan’s icon and his thaumaturgic hand, black now as a briar root, inside its jewelled reliquary.”

            Every chapter of The Broken Road gleams with delicious imagery and wonderful characters and Fermor is his customary romantic self, hooking up with attractive girls left and right. There are fairs and festivals and Fermor charms his way into castles and haylofts, but there is an air of melancholy too, for this was a land that was to be put to the sword by first, the Wehrmacht, and then the Soviets; as Fermor himself explains: “Nearly all the people [in these pages] were attached to trails of powder which were already invisibly burning.”

            The book ends in northern Greece and true to its title we never do quite make it to Constantinople itself. Still, as a record of an antebellum world, in a brief Golden Age before the apocalypse of World War 2, we are lucky to have had so careful and eloquent an observer as Patrick Leigh Fermor.     

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How I Used To Teach The Most Boring Subject In The Curriculum

...the real Supremes, the big diva is the 2nd from the left in the front row...

In my last post I talked a little about being a maths teacher. When I used to teach mathematics I always tried to incorporate some context into the subject, explaining what the stuff we were learning could actually be used for, where it came from and what problems it solved in the society where it was invented. (I stole this idea from Carl Sagan's Cosmos where in one memorable episode he talked about Newton's invention of the calculus.)
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I had a very unusual teaching career during the 7 years I worked as a high school and middle teacher in Colorado. I was trying to get my writing career off the ground, so I substitute taught for a while, I taught maths, I taught English, I taught drama, I was a soccer coach and as someone reminded me yesterday on twitter I also taught civics. 

1. Mr Patrick Reinhart ‏@MrPatch16h

   @adrianmckinty ....also, I remember your Civics class in high school well!

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2. Adrian McKinty ‏@adrianmckinty16h

   @MrPatch I loved teaching that class. Didnt we pretend that we were the Supreme Court or something?

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3. Mr Patrick Reinhart ‏@MrPatch2h

   @adrianmckinty I remember having to argue in favor of Miranda Rights against a Swiss girl I had a huge crush on, & I did much too well :o)

Now civics has a reputation for being the most boring subject in the school curriculum. Kids hate it and teachers hate to teach it but its a requirement in many if not most states in US. So I decided that I was going to teach it in an unusual way to make it fun and hopefully memorable. Every week I had 2 students prepare and argue a famous Supreme Court case Brown v Board of Education, Miranda v Arizona etc. and the rest of the class sat as the Supreme Court and judged the case based on the two "lawyers" arguments. Sometimes we agreed with the actual SC decision sometimes we didnt. The point wasn't to hammer facts and dates into the students heads but to get them thinking about legal and philosophical issues and get them (gasp!) excited about civics. 
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I ran that class for 2 or 3 years (in one year we managed to get black Supreme Court robes to wear) and I always thought that it went down pretty well, so it was nice to get that bit of feedback yesterday on twitter (above) confirming that my memories weren't just nostalgia.

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