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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In The Morning I'll Be Gone - The First Newspaper Review

The first newspaper review of In The Morning I'll Be Gone came out this week in Dublin's  Hot Press. The review is by Anne Sexton and is wonderfully spoiler free. For me this book was more of a traditional mystery than a thriller (most of it is taken up with an old school locked room problem) but Anne seems to have enjoyed the noir elements too. Anyway here's what she says in Hot Press: 
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In The Morning I'll Be Gone
by Adrian McKinty
Serpents Tail
Hot Press December 5 

Oh, a new Adrian McKinty book? Excellent! Featuring Sean Duffy? Even better! As a reviewer you should approach an album, film or book objectively, so the fact that I think McKinty is one of Ireland’s most interesting crime novelists might have been an issue. Luckily reviewers across the globe are equally enamoured. In The Morning I’ll Be Gone is the third Detective Sean Duffy novel and as with the previous two (The Cold Cold Ground & I Hear The Sirens In The Street) mixes fact and fiction. 

The actions begins in 1983 with a mass breakout of IRA prisoners from the Maze Prison. One of the escapees is Dermot McCann, a former schoolmate of Duffy’s. He’s sure that that “with the iron logic of a fairy story” their paths will cross again and this being fiction, they do. The grey, rain-soaked streets; the paramilitary tensions; the cultural and economic poverty of 1980’s Northern Ireland are all almost tangible and McKinty delivers a rollercoaster of a thriller that will keep you turning the pages until the very end. 

Anne Sexton
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The picture to the right is the latest cover art complete with Ian Rankin blurb. After I tweeted the cover I got a nice response from Mr Rankin himself:

Ian Rankin ‏@Beathhigh4 Dec

@adrianmckinty I read it while on tour in Canada. Really terrific, Adrian. Congrats - as is becoming usual!

Hopefully that sentiment will be shared by some part of the reading public. In The Morning I'll Be Gone will be available in the UK, Ireland, Australia & NZ on January 30 and in the US and Canada in March.

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The Philosophy Of Mind And Breaking Bad

In a throwaway scene from an episode of the final season of Breaking Bad, Badger and Skinny Peter (Jesse's two drug-dealing pals) are talking about the transporter on Star Trek; you know what the transporter is even if you've never seen Star Trek, the "beam me up Mr Scott" machine: a teleportation device for transporting people instantly from one place to another. It supposedly works like this: the ship's computer breaks down the person being transported into a digital scan of their atoms and sends this digital information to the surface of another planet or another ship where the computer then reforms the person, intact, atom by atom. Ah, what about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle I hear you ask? When they reassemble the atoms won't the humans all be messed up at the other end? There are 10^30 atoms in the human body and every single atom is subject to quantum uncertainty...Well, apparently everything will be fine; according to Wikipedia:  

Heisenberg compensators remove uncertainty from the subatomic measurements, making transporter travel feasible. Further technology involved in transportation include a computer pattern buffer to enable a degree of leeway in the process. When asked "How does the Heisenberg compensator work?" by Time magazine, Star Trek technical adviser Michael Okuda responded: "It works very well, thank you."^[3]

Anyway lets for the sake of argument assume that the transporter does work. What Skinny Pete was saying to Badger in Breaking Bad was not an argument about the physics but an argument from the philosophy of mind. Pete's contention was that every time Kirk gets transported somewhere it's not the original Captain Kirk but a recreation, a copy, a copy who has the same mind state and the same memories as the about-to-be transported individual but it's not the same man. The original Captain Kirk, Pete argues, is destroyed in the transporter room and a copy reassembled at the transport site. Consciousness, Pete is implying, cannot be transported because consciousness is a property that cannot be subject to measurement. The copy of Captain Kirk now on the alien planet only thinks he's the same man because he shares Kirk's memories and mindstate at the moment of transportation but unfortunately the real Captain Kirk was killed by the transporter. The copy goes on to live Kirk's life, Pete says, until he too must enter the transporter and he too dies. Throughout the course of the show, Pete argues, there are hundreds of Kirk copies that get created, while the real Kirk dies the very first time he gets transported. Pete just throws this idea out there and then Badger pitches his Star Trek pie eating contest script idea but its worth thinking about. If you want to know more about the concept there's a Star Trek wiki discussion on what happens when you transport, here. And there's a really nice philosophical analysis of the transporter concept by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, in their 1982 book The Mind’s I where they call the transporter a "murdering twinmaker." Hofstadter further explores consciousness in his fascinating book I Am A Strange Loop and Daniel Dennett examines in some depth the idea of materialism in his - rather misleadingly - titled book Consciousness Explained. Whether you believe in strict materialism or a Cartesian dualism I'm not sure I can see how the transporter could work without killing you and replacing you with a copy. 
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But what exactly is consciousness and how does it evolve from matter? It's a huge problem in philosophy, psychology and neurology. Antonio Damasio attempts to explain some of the elements of the problem here: 

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A Theory About Horror Movies

a blogpost from March of this year that got a lot of comments...
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My older daughter was at a sleep over party last week where they watched a horror movie. It was a whole bunch of girls together and none of them seemed to be particularly affected by the film, except for my daughter who was pretty disturbed by the experience. We don't watch horror movies in our house and I think this was the first one she had ever seen. She's had bad dreams for a week now and has vowed never to watch another horror film. I'm not surprised that the movie affected her like this. I've only ever seen two horror films in my life and both of them really disturbed me, and I think I have a theory why it is that I (and possibly my daughter too) get so upset by these kinds of movies. 
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Sociopaths (bear with me here, I know what I'm doing) have no capacity for empathy for other human beings. They can't put themselves into the shoes of other people and therefore have no problem using those people as means to their own ends. There are degrees of sociopathy, of course, and not at all sociopaths are violent, but some are, serial killers for example. Just as 1-2% of the population have sociopathic tendencies, it's my theory that on your standard bell curve there must be 1-2% of the population who have too much empathy for other humans. If I'm correct and one of those people is me we are simply not capable of watching a slasher or horror film because we have excessive empathy for the victims in the picture. The first horror film I saw was Friday The Thirteenth which involves teenagers getting serially murdered by a maniac. I did not enjoy the experience of watching that movie at all. All around me people were laughing, hiding behind their hands etc. but I was utterly aghast  at the poor kids who were being slaughtered. I thought about them for weeks afterwards, wondering how they could have escaped their fate and the emotional damage their murder must have inflicted on their siblings and parents. This, I gather, is not what is supposed to happen in a horror film...what I think is meant to happen is that you get a quick thrill from the murder and then you move on to the next shocking development carried along by the narrative. You are not supposed to be so traumatised that you want to stop the movie. But I reckon if you are one of the 1-2% of us on this theoretical empathy scale you have trouble separating fiction and reality - for people like us suspending our disbelief isn't the problem, for us the problem is remembering that all these individuals in the movie are only pretending to get hurt, the blood isn't real, the knives aren't real and no one actually died here at all. 
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I think this may also be why I have so much trouble liking supposedly frothy middle of the road murder mystery shows like Elementary, Monk, Sherlock, CSI etc. - in a lot of these dramas the show begins with a violent murder (on Elementary it's often incredibly violent) and after that I don't really care how the mystery gets solved or what's going on in the personal lives of the detectives because I'm still reeling from the emotional trauma of the pre title murder sequence. (I also find it very bizarre that on American TV you can show someone getting their throat cut but you are still not allowed to say the word shit, a word which is in Chaucer.) In fact now that I think about it, maybe I dont have the problem at all. Maybe the problem is you. I actually wonder how anybody can enjoy programmes or films which begin with an act of shocking, lurid violence (often against young women). Why do you read torture porn novels and watch tv programmes like this? Why don't you care about the victims? How can you compartmentalize? What the hell is the matter with all of you?

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