A Walk Up Mount Coot-tha

At the Brisbane Writer's Festival yesterday I had a free morning and afternoon so on the advice of Trip Advisor I decided to hike to the top of Mt Coot-tha from my hotel in the South Bank. Google Maps estimated that this was a 2 hour walk and the ever optimistic Apple Maps said it was a 1.5 hour walk. In fact there and back took me six hours but I do have a bad knee so I'm not blaming the map aps. The view at the top of the mountain was worth it. Looking east you can see all the way to the Pacific Ocean and twenty K back into the bush looking west. You climb up through suburbs and then mostly through rather lush and pretty Eucalyptus forest. I didn't see any animals but I did see several sulphur crested cockatoos which admittedly didn't wow me that much because they are exactly the same cockatoos which live in my backyard in St Kilda and begin screeching at 6-00am every morning. 
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After the hike I went to my last event at the writer's festival a rather fun "reading" at the Ipswich Library. (I always say reading in quotes because I never end up actually reading anything as I blabber on for so long...but to be honest no one ever seems to mind that much.) 
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At the festival I did do a lot of talking to other writers and a lot of thinking about my own writing in particular and crime fiction in general and I'll blog all about that later in the week. (Its more interesting than it sounds - trust me.)
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In the meantime here's a little bit about Mt Coot-tha from Wikipedia and some photographs I took on my ipod of the eucalypt forest and the view from the top of the mountain looking east towards the sea.
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Mount Coot-tha, which is 287 metres above sea level, has the highest peak in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Mount Coot-tha forms the eastern extent of the Taylor Range and is a prominent landmark approximately 6 km to the west of the Brisbane central business district. Visible from much of the city, Mount Coot-tha is a popular bushland tourist destination. Before the Moreton Bay penal settlement, Mount Coot-tha was the home of the Turrbal Aboriginal people. Early Brisbane people called it One Tree Hill when bush at the top of the hill was cleared except for one large eucalypt tree. The Aboriginal people of the area used to come to the area to collect ‘ku-ta’ (honey) that was produced by the native stingless bee. Mount Coot-tha (Place of Honey), a derivative of (the indigenous term), replaced the former title ‘One Tree Hill' in 1880 when the area was declared a Public Recreation Reserve.

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The City And The City

This book kept coming up yesterday at the Brisbane Writer's Festival (where I am at the moment) as a possible direction for the crime novel in the future. (Where crime and sci-fi and noir meet.) I loved it so I thought I'd reblog this little review from 2 years ago:
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China Mieville's The City And The City may be the most original crime novel I've read since Declan Burke's Absolute Zero Cool or possibly all the way back to James Ellroy's American Tabloid. It won the 2010 Hugo Award in a tie with Paolo Bacigalupi's excellent The Windup Girl. It also won the Arthur C. Clarke award and was nominated for the Nebula. It was ignored by the all mainstream crime awards, which is a bit odd (and embarrassing provincial of them) because at heart the book is basically a noir detective story. I was impressed by The City And The City's technical prowess and literary ambitions; Mieville has done a great job taking a new slant on a rather staid and somewhat moribund genre.  
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The book is set in Eastern Europe in the cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma, which are actually adjoining city states somewhere close to Romania and Hungary. A different language is spoken in each city and they are culturally and economically distinct. Fracture lines run through the cities and initially one thinks of East and West Berlin or possibly Buda and Pest; but what makes Beszel and Ul Qoma so interesting is that they actually share much of the same topography. Streets that exist Ul Qoma exist also in Beszel, but travel from one city to the other is utterly forbidden. From a very young age children are trained to "unsee" vehicles and people who are living in the other city. This sounds weird and it takes a while to completely buy into it, but Mieville does convince you that this bizarre state of affairs could work. Mieville has been inspired by the work of Kafka and especially Bruno Schulz and that's no bad thing in a noir. 
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The novel begins when Inspector Borlu is called upon to investigate the murder of a young woman in Beszel. He quickly discovers that her body has been transported to the crime scene from the neighbouring city of Ul Qoma and this raises all kinds of difficulties. Crossing the "border" from one city to city is the most serious crime of all in the two cities and once proof of an encroachment becomes manifest the mysterious entity Breach spirits the breachee away to God knows where. The investigation takes Borlu into the forbidden world of Ul Qoma and there the fun really begins as we begin to see conspiracies within conspiracies and the possibility of a mythical third hidden city know as Ocriny. Borlu remains a bit of a cipher throughout but this fits squarely into an old school noir trope and I didn't mind that at all. I loved the scenes with Borlu in Ul Qoma looking across to his home city of Beszel, trying to unsee familiar shops and people and realising just how strange this all was. I won't reveal any more of the plot, suffice to say that although there are no real surprises the third act of the novel is still satisfying within the predictable Kafkaesque conventions of such a narrative. 
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China Mieville is very much the new Iain Banks, comfortable writing in various genres but with a background in science fiction. Like Banks he is prolific. I've read four of his books and my other favourite is Perdido Street Station a very original fantasy novel set in another fascinating city of dreadful night. Check him out.  

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Funny Ha Ha

The other day a friend asked me to recommend some funny books to him because he was "feeling a bit down". I told him that it was probably better to watch a funny movie or a funny TV show instead but he said that he "really wanted to read a book" which is a rare enough emotion in humans these days that it ought to be cherished; off the top of my head then I came up with a little list of my favourite funny novels. These are in no particular order - certainly not in order of which is the funniest or best - just in the rank in which they popped into my brain. Some of them, obviously, are funnier than others but they're all good. I also decided to limit myself to one book per author so that if my friend found one author he liked there would be others he could latch onto like a comedic lifebelt in these troubled times...

hey remember back in the day
when Gwyneth Paltrow wasn't
the most hated woman in the world?

1. Decline and Fall - The first and possibly best of Evelyn Waugh's books. A young man is sent down from Oxford and tries to make his way in life.
2. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - while not as good as the Radio Series this is still some funny stuff from Douglas Adams. 
3. Summer Lightning - by PG Wodehouse. You realise I could have picked any of a dozen books here, but even the preface of this book had me in stitches.
4. Cooking With Fernet Branca: James Hamilton-Paterson's modern comedic classic of love and misunderstanding in Italy. 
5. Three Men In A Boat - Victorian humour hasn't aged well but this is the exception that proves the rule.    
6. Emma - Jane Austen: If this doesn't cheer you up you probably need medication. 
7. The Innocents Abroad - Mark Twain casts a jaundiced eye on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. 
8. Dog of the South - Charles Portis. Portis's funniest book? Well its certainly up there. A man goes to Mexico looking for his ex wife. Trouble ensues. 
9. Inherent Vice: Thomas Pynchon's wittiest and most accessible book. A mystery novel set in a Santa Monica hippy community.
10. The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis. Everyone seems to prefer Lucky Jim but I thought this was funnier and sharper. Old geezers celebrate the life of Dylan Thomas...
11. Hollywood - Charles Bukowski: The dreary old git could be a laugh riot when he wanted to be. More or less the true story of the making of "Barfly". 
12. Platform - Michel Houellebecq. Possibly the funniest Frenchman since Voltaire and one of the funniest books of the last 10 years. A French sex tourist goes to Thailand and gets up to no good. 
13.  Zuleika Dobson - Max Beerbohm. 100 years old but it still tickles the ribs. A beautiful girl arrives at Oxford and causes mayhem. 
14. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller. War and madness on Corsica in WW2. Heller's best book and one of the best WW2 novels. 
15. The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman - Angela Carter is not to everyone's taste but I loved this. 
16. Crash - JG Ballard. Again not everyone will see this as a comedy but it really is. 
17. Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas - Does this count as a novel? Its one of the funniest books of all time so I hope that it does. Hunter S Thompson goes to Vegas to cover a sports event....The scene with the bath, the radio and White Rabbit....
18. White Teeth - Its quite a serious book but there are some very funny set pieces. Zadie Smith's best I think. 
19. Mort - Terry Pratchett. This is Pratchett firing on all cylinders and when he was at his most inventive and hilarious. A rip off/homage to Death Takes a Holiday.
20. Into The Heart of Borneo - Redmond O'Hanlon. Ok this isnt a novel. Its a journey Redmond OHanlon took with his friend the poet James Fenton into the, er, heart of Borneo. Its smart and very funny. 

Anyway that was my top of the head list. I'd be happy to hear your suggestions below...

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Five New JD Salinger Novels

Really interesting story in The New York Times this weekend that apparently five new JD Salinger novels are on their way beginning in 2015. Why 2015? Well that'll be five years after Salinger's death so presumably that was a stipulation of the old boy's will, whose faithful executor is his son Matt...
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What are the five new Salinger novels about? Well the Times really has no idea but apparently two anonymous sources have revealed to Shane Salerno (the director of a new biographical film 

a rare photo of Staff Sergeant Salinger

about Salinger's life) some intriguing details. One of the books is going to be "a story-filled manual of Vedanta religious philosophy, with which Mr. Salinger was deeply involved with" which doesn't, admittedly, sound so terrific. Another book is going to contain several new stories about the Glass family who have already featured in Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey and Raise High The Roof Beams & Seymour An Introduction. For those of you who, like me, struggled to say awake through the latter book this will not be particularly welcome news either. But it's not all doom and gloom: apparently there's also a novel or a collection of stories set in Holden Caulfield's extended family which is quite exciting to me because they really are an interesting bunch: Holden, DB, Phoebe and even poor Allie were all smart, introspective and funny writers. Another Caulfield family book? Maybe even a sequel to Catcher in the Rye? Yes, please. 
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But the bit of the story that made me choke on my Cornflakes on Sunday morning was the news that Salinger has written not one but two World War 2 novels. JD Salinger, as I've blogged about before here, had a very interesting war...He was in the Counterintelligence Corps and participated in D Day, the Normandy campaign, the liberation of at least one concentration camp and he also fought in the notorious Battle of Hurtgen Forest. In another well known incident JD Salinger and Ernest Hemingway together "helped liberate" the bar of the Ritz Hotel in Paris. Even a mediocre writer could make a good book out of that material and Salinger, well...
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There's not much to look forward to in these troubled times but if despair is making you think about jumping in front of a train I'd say don't do it. At least not now. There will be a new Patrick Leigh Fermor book out in September, a new Coen Brothers film out in December, Paul Thomas Anderson's version of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice will be out in late 2014 and best of all the first of five new JD Salinger novels hits the shelves in 2015. That's got to be worth waiting around for, no?

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What Dungeons and Dragons Teaches You About 9/11, Conspiracy Theories And, Er, Real Life

A blogpost from October of last year...
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As Jesse Ventura might have said conspiracy theories - like religions - are for the weak. I was thinking about this after hearing the news that Martin Sheen and Woody Harrelson are to appear in a 9/11 truther movie in 2014. 9/11 truthers believe that the World Trade Center was taken down not by planes but by a controlled demolition done at the behest of the Bush administration so that they could have a pretext for invading Iraq. Truthers believe that there is a massive conspiracy at the heart of 9/11 just as JFK truthers believe that President Kennedy was shot by, well, take your pick: the mafia, LBJ, Nixon, pro Castro Cubans, anti Castro Cubans, the KGB, the CIA, a clumsy hung over secret service agent, the military industrial complex etc. etc. Truthers are frightened people and what they are afraid of more than anything is the randomness and chaos of the world we live in. Truthers hate the idea that a lone lunatic could have shot the president and changed the course of history (I'm surprised there aren't more Gavrilo Princip truthers) or that 19 religious fanatics could have found a way to kill 3000 Americans and provoke the country into a massive and predictable series of over reactions. Racial scapegoating conspiracy theorists hate the fact that their own shitty lives could be the result of bad decisions and bad luck: for them it's far more comforting to believe that an evil conspiracy is running the world instead of shit happening just because its happening. For 9/11 truthers like the dim witted Sheen family it is more soothing to believe that President Bush was an evil genius rather than a lazy incompetent who ignored the August 6th CIA briefing entitled "Bin Laden Determined To Strike US Targets". 
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Truthers of all stripes would have benefited from a childhood playing Dungeons and Dragons. In the D&D world you learn early that randomness can upset the best laid plans of mice and men; you also learn about organisational dynamics and why conspiracies are always self defeating in the end. Let me unpack that latter point a little. In D&D you can choose between six different alignments: chaotic good, chaotic neutral, chaotic evil or lawful good, lawful neutral, lawful evil. Chaotic characters tend to think only of themselves, lawful characters are more rule bound. Good characters tend to promote good ideals, evil characters evil ones. The Nazis were lawful evil, pirates chaotic evil. Robin Hood (if he existed) was chaotic good, King Arthur (if he existed) lawful good. Do you get the picture? I hope so because I'm done explaining and my point is that when you play a lot of campaigns you learn that chaos gradually seeps in everywhere. Regimes and campaigning parties are constantly buffeted by chaotic events and almost always fall apart in the end, but the most successful parties are the ones that have a balance of good and evil, chaotic and neutral. Lawful evil parties and lawful good parties collapse quickly because they just don't have the flexibility to cope with events. Also the more chaotic and evil characters you have with you on the campaign the more likely they are to betray you all at the end when their interest outweighs the group interest. Classic prisoner dilemma situations abound when D&D campaigns and conspiracies start to fray because every person added to the conspiracy increases the chaos already inherent in the system. I don't know if there's a law of conspiracy theories but if not I'm going to invent it now: McKinty's first law of conspiracies states that "Every individual added to a conspiracy doubles the likelihood that the conspiracy will collapse." 
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Luck is very important in the game and also in life. Luck rewards bad people and punishes good ones. When my pacifist 11th level cleric was killed by a Storm Giant on a 20 roll of a 20 sided die it was just plain old bad luck. It wasn't fair, but I didn't fly off the handle into madness. I mean what can you do?* When Prime Minister Macmillan was asked what might blow his government off course he is supposed to have said "events, dear boy, events." I don't think its a stretch to say pace Ventura that organised religion and conspiracy theories are both crutches for people who can't face the brutal exigencies, cruelties and randomness of our world. Maybe a good dose of D&D is what these people need instead. Or, then again, it could be that this entire blogpost is just an attempt to make up for a geekily misspent youth...
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*You can pray to Odin to resurrect your cleric. Our Dungeon Master used to give Odin a 1/100 chance of answering your prayer...

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Elysium

Neill Blomkamp's films are beginning to fall into a predictable pattern: 1. A fantastic opening act full of exciting philosophical and visual ideas. 2. A second act where the grinding story wheels begin to wear you down and stretch your patience. 3. A third act that's just as dull and tedious as every other Hollywood action movie from the last twenty five years. Why is it that every young director gets bullied or cajoled by movie executives and script doctors into having their lead goodie and the lead baddie get into a fist fight at the very end of the film? Don't they know that everyone over the age of 15 hates these final confrontations? They are beyond tedious and yet we see them again in every James Bond or Batman movie or any other actioner. We hate them. We all hate them. Only teenage boys with testosterone and sugar and Coke giving them the fist punching jitters are capable of liking these denouements. 
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Neill Blomkamp is an intelligent guy with a sharp sense of humour and an overdeveloped sense of allegory but his career in the movies is already heading down that path beat by Christopher Nolan. Now I know a lot of will think that that's a good thing but you're wrong. Christopher Nolan has become a hack. A stylish hack but a hack nonetheless. He's made two philosophically rich and intelligent films: The Prestige and Memento and a whole bunch of other hacky action films. Yeah I know a lot of you thought Inception was a smart film but it wasn't. Inception is a smart film for dummies. If Inception had been a clever film about dreams it wouldn't have been an action movie within an action movie within an action movie it would have been closer to what adults really dream about most of the time: sex. (A French  director should remake Inception as an erotic thriller within an erotic thriller within an erotic thriller.) 
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To make matters worse for Blomkamp both of his feature films so far have been hits so he's going to get surrounded by yes men and unctuous studio types who'll keep pushing him (like they pushed Nolan) to make films for bright 13 year olds who'll be able to tell their friends in the playground that District 9 was really about apartheid and Elysium was really about Obamacare. Success seems to destroy all artists in the end unless they have a very strong will. But it is possible to hold out against the man. Stewart Lee, Werner Herzog, Crispin Glover, David Lynch, and Louis CK prove that you can hit the big time in TV and the movies and still hold onto your artistic integrity. I hope for his sake that Neill Blomkamp's next film is either a total bomb or such a huge hit that he never has to worry about money again and can ignore the executives pushing him towards these bone crunchingly dull Hollywood endings. 

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Kill List

the two hit men about to get way out of their depth...
one of the few non spoiler pictures of Kill List available on the internet

If you're a sensitive soul like me you should not watch Ben Wheatley's Kill List. I watched it last night and I was pretty darn disturbed. So disturbed that I stayed up for hours watching the utter head pounding banality of the live stream of Mike and Mike on ESPN2 in an attempt to get some of the images out of my mind. It didn't work. Even when they replaced one of the Mikes with a different guy who wasn't called Mike and Alex Rodriguez's insane attorney called in to the show with a crackpot conspiracy theory about the New York Yankees. And speaking of conspiracies... 
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As I've explained here before I have an empathy problem which prevents me from liking horror films. I wasn't prepared for Kill List's third act because I thought that the movie was going to be a conventional thriller about hit men. It isn't. About two thirds of the way in it goes in an entirely different direction. The acting is great, it's beautifully shot and if I were giving out stars I'd probably give it four and a half out of five but I don't really know who to recommend Kill List to. Horror film fans will probably find it too tame whereas thriller fans might not quite buy into the denouement and the scenes leading up to the denouement. I don't want to tell you any plot spoilers because surprise is a key element here but it's defintely got a sort of a (I'm going to put the following sentence in white text on a white background that you can only read if you deliberately highlight it) Pulp Fiction meets The Wicker Man vibe. Ok? 
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Neil Maskell was a fantastic leading man and it was really nice to see Michael Smiley, the actor who played "Tyres" in Spaced, giving a brilliant, low-key, brooding performance but I hope he doesn't mind if I prefer to think of him in Spaced and never try to think of anything in this film ever again. 

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