All She Wanted Was To Do Her Best

Yesterday, a post about books about music, today a post about music about books. Or, more specifically, a book: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. 

The Bell Jar was Plath's only novel. It was published under the pen-name Victoria Lucas, partly because Sylvia didn't want her mother to read it but also because she thought it might be considered a bit of a pot-boiler and she was worried it might affect the more serious reputation she hoped to develop as a poet.

It came out in January 1963, while she was still alive, unlike most of her poetry, much of which didn't make it to hard covers until after she put her head in the oven a month later. She wrote the novel under the sponsorship of something called the Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship, whose representatives were not impressed. They called it "disappointing, juvenile and overwrought".

Hah! What did they know? 

I first read The Bell Jar at University, where I was studying for a degree in English Literature. Back then, it wasn't taught in schools, like it is now. It wasn't even on my course. 

As far as I can remember, neither was Plath, although to be fair to the Cambridge syllabus of the late seventies and early eighties, there was a great deal of choice involved. Maybe I opted to do something else the week other people were doing Plath. Or maybe she just didn't have the rep then she does now.

My introduction to the tragic icon was much more personal. I was roaming around the upper levels of the faculty library, where no-one ever seemed to go, pulling random books off shelves and trying them out for size. One of the books I pulled was Plath's Journals, which I sat and read for what might have been hours. It was certainly much of an afternoon. 

From there, I went on to read a whole lot more of her work and several of the many biographies that kept getting commissioned because Plath scholarship has been an industry for decades now. I even read her poetry and I've never been a great poetry fan. Not of reading it, anyway. Writing it, sure, when I wasn't old enough to know better, but reading it? Not so much.

All or some of that may be true. Hard to be sure. But then, truth has little to do with loving Sylvia Plath. Never did.

Either way, The Bell Jar became one of my very favorite novels and remains so, although again you have to temper such judgments with a flick of reality when you think of how long ago it was you actually read the damn books. 

For decades I maintained an extremely consistent top three favorite novels of all time: Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar and Tender is the Night. 

I've read Catcher at least half a dozen times, the most recent being in the last five years and it holds up. Is it still my #1 of all time? Maybe, maybe not. It wouldn't be far off, though. 

Tender, I've read four or five times, in both the original published version and the "as Fitzgerald intended" reprint. It gets better every time and I can't decide which structure I prefer.

The Bell Jar, though, I'm not even sure I've read twice. I think I have. But even if I'm right, it's still only twice. Which is weird. 

I certainly haven't read it for decades although I have, several times, tried to listen to the audio version read by Maggie Gyllenhaall. The problem with that is that I always listen to it in bed and the rhythm of her voice sends me to sleep. I listened to it again last night and I got as far as the part where Esther leaves the apartment as Lenny the DJ is trying to seduce Esther's friend Doreen. I think that'd be about twenty pages in, at most.

The whole audiobook is on YouTube if you fancy giving it a go. Not the most convenient platform, granted, but you can't beat the price. It's an absolutely stellar performance by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who sounds exactly like Esther ought to sound. She also makes no attempt to "do" any of the voices, a practice all readers of audiobooks would do well to follow. I highly recommend it although I can only speak from experience about the first half-hour or so. I'm going to have to burn the thing onto CD and play it in the car if I'm ever going to get to the end of it.

 

That's all by way of an introduction to the following selection of songs, either just called "The Bell Jar" or with some variation of the words in the title. Plus a few bonuses at the end.

I have a real thing for songs that use the names of famous people or books or movies in the title and there are a lot of them. Sometimes, when I get the notion, I pick a name and YouTube it to see if anyone's written a song. I did that a few weeks ago with Catcher in the Rye and the pickings were slim. I had it in mind to do a post like this about the Salinger classic but I couldn't find enough good examples so it occurred to me to try The Bell Jar instead.

That went a lot better, except that the phrase is in common usage outside the context of the novel so not all of the songs have anything to do with the book. In fact, I'm not sure the next one does. It's really good, though, and it has the right feel, so I'm allowing it. 

The Bell Jar - Chrissy Brennan

Isn't that just gorgeous? So many famous singers and songs. So many almost no-one ever hears. Doing my bit to spread the word. No need to thank me.

The Bell Jar - Honey Gentry

This one's definitely on message although it's using the conceit of one legend to reflect light on another. The resonances are powerful. Someone's probably written a whole PhD thesis on the similarities.

Bell Jar - Louise and the Pins

Another where the mood is unmistakably in keeping with the supposed inspiration but the lyrics don't easily reveal a specific connection. Too good to leave out, though, just because the provenance is unproven.

The Bell Jar - Nervous Young Men

The lyrics of this one make it pretty clear where they got the idea. Also, there's corroborative evidence. Nervous Young Men was an early project of Will Toledo, best known for his work in Car Seat Headrest. More from them later. Clearly, Will has read the book. Probably more times than I have.

Inside The Jar - The Silver Bayonettes

Enough with the ambiguity! "Based on the Sylvia Plath novel "The Bell Jar" and the poem "My Mother" written by her daughter Frieda Hughes". Clear enough for you? Not my favorite of the selection by a long measure but I can't fault the intent.

Bell Jar - The Bangles

By far the best-known track based on the book, I think. Written by lead guitarist Vicki Peterson, who gives it a rockin' tune and an elliptical, elusive lyric that evokes the spirit of the novel without making it obvious. Great song. 

Inside The Bell Jar - Car Seat Headrest

"I turned on the gas
And rested my head upon the racks of the oven"

I think that's all the proof we need here.

My favorite of them all. I have never paid the slightest attention to Car Seat Headrest until now, despite their name cropping up over and over again in links and articles. It's a terrible name. Why would you click on anything to hear a band called that? I imagined they'd sound like Coldplay or Muse, about the worst thing you could imagine of any band. 

Well, they clearly don't, do they? I'll have to pay more attention when their name comes up in future.  

Sylvia - The Antlers

And now, to finish, a couple of palette cleansers. There are some longer, live versions of this on YouTube (One's over thirteen minutes!) but they don't have any of the sonic backlash, which is what appeals to me. Without that it sounds a bit like what I imagined Car Seat Headrest were going to sound like and no-one wants that. Also, more lyrics about heads in ovens. She did do other things, you know...

i was all over her - salvia palth

You can't really do a whole post about Plath-related songs and leave this one out, can you? Well, I can't, anyway. Any excuse to hear it again.

Well, that was fun. I hope we all learned something. 

I do like a themed music post. Maybe I'll do another, and soon. 

Read It In Books

Even though I've been a compulsive reader almost all my life (I wasn't born knowing how to read, sadly, so I had to wait a few years before I could get started.) I have never been one of those people who keeps a record of my reading. Why would I? I don't keep records of anything I do - or not in any kind of organized fashion, anyway.

I do write this blog, of course, and before that I used to produce an apazine every two months for about a decade and a half, so there's plenty of written evidence to support my cultural experience but it's a sporadic trail at best. About the only time I ever tried to keep any kind of strict account of my reading habits was that one time in the 'eighties, when I hand-wrote a review of every book I read for a year.

Actually, I didn't even make it to the end of the year. I think I gave up in about October. That journal must be somewhere in the house. I wonder if I could find it...

The answer to that turns out to be "No", which is just as well. Otherwise, this would have derailed into a post about all the books I read in 1986 or whenever it was instead of what it's supposed to be, which is a review of Girl To City by Amy Rigby.

As I've said before, I tend not to write much about books here, even though I probably read at least forty or fifty every year. I don't know exactly how many since I'm not kwriting down the titles or using one of those websites or apps that collects and collates the details (Something even the thought of which gives me the shivers...) but it's pretty easy to tell just by looking at the discard pile. 

I tend to put each book I've read in a stack on the floor and keep adding more until the tower threatens to fall over. Then I start another one next to it. Eventually, when the whole thing becomes unstable, I'm forced to sort through them and find somewhere more permanent, generally another stack in another room. The perils of having a large house- there's always somewhere to put things, until one day there isn't...

The main reason I don't write as much about books as I do music or games or TV is that I work in a bookshop and I get a lot of my books for free, most of them as proofs which, as a training course I had to do this week reminded me, cannot be reviewed anywhere. Well, not legally.

I could review the published titles I read, many of which I also get for nothing, but I always feel a moral obligation to give my employer first refusal. It's not compulsory but it is strongly suggested that we place reviews of books we've read on our website, something I have never done. I don't want to put my reviews on any commercial website, whether or not its owned by someone who pays my bills, so the compromise is not to write any reviews at all. 

When I finally retire, I imagine I'll start reviewing books I've read here although chances are they'll be old ones. Once I stop getting my books for free, I plan to start an extensive re-reading program. 

I used to consider re-reading to be considerably more important than reading. My mantra used to be that the third time was the charm. I had a rationale all worked out, too. 

• Read One is for pleasure. You're enjoying the book so much you let it all wash over you. After you finish you're left with a strong emotional impression but it's most likely weak on detail. 

• Read Two is for comparison. As you progress through the book, things come back to you and you inevitably frame your new experience in terms of your old. You end up knowing how well the book has stood up to your memory of it and whether it meets your expectations but once again you probably haven't paid all that much attention to the technicalities.

• Read Three is for appraisal. By now, you probably know what to expect and the immediacy of your reactions should be muted. This is when all those details you never noticed before start to make themselves known and when you begin to understand the finer points of the structure and the architectonics. 

Any reads after that are either indulgence, obsession or you're an academic of some sort. God help you.

That was how I used to see it. I've loosened my views a little. There are many ways to approach a text. Still, the Three-Read Method seems pretty reliable to me.

With all that in mind, I'm happy to review Girl To City here for a couple or three reasons. 

Firstly, I paid for it myself. Granted, I only paid half price because that's a perk of my job but the training course I just did made no mention of the discount we get implying any responsibility beyond not abusing it by selling the books on EBay. 

I will not be selling Girl To City on EBay or anywhere else. I will be keeping it and one day re-reading it because it's very good. And then, no doubt, reading it a third time to discover what I really think about it. The older I get, the worse that plan begins to look.

Secondly, I have no intention of reviewing it properly. Mostly I just wanted to mention it so as to give it what little publicity I can, in the hope someone else might decide to get hold of a copy and read it, thereby giving themselves the pleasure and also putting a very small remittance into Amy's pocket.

Thirdly, in March the sequel, Girl To Country, will be published in the U.K. (It's out in the U.S. already, I believe.) I'll be getting a copy as soon as it's available and chances are I'll post about that one, too. If I was really patient, I suppose I'd wait until then and review the pair of them together but although I am quite patient I'm not a fucking stone.

Fourthly, though, and the real reason I wanted to post about it, was to embed this excellent promo video, which Amy made herself. 

You won't really know if you haven't read the book but that's truly excellent visual summary of the whole thing, coupled with a lyric that also stands as an extremely concentrated record of the core of the story. Quite brilliantly conceived, in fact. Pretty much a work of art in its own right, that video.

The only reason I know abut Amy Rigby at all is because she's been Wreckless Eric's musical and romantic partner for a good, long while now. I'm going to apologize for that right now. It's a crappy way to come to anyone's work but it can't be helped. That is what happened.

I've always been something of a Wreckless fan, although I can't claim to have kept up with his career the way I have, say, Lloyd Cole or Lana. A few years back, probably around the time of the pandemic, I thought to check what Wreckless was up to and I ended up buying a couple of CDs and subscribing to his excellent, if too-infrequently updated blog. Since he now both records and performs alongside his partner, I was introduced osmotically to Amy Rigby, who also happens to be a first-rate blogger. (I find the fact that he's on Blogger while she's on WordPress oddly amusing. I wonder if it means anything?)

It was the quality of Amy's blogging that made me want to read her memoir. Having read it, I can say she's not just a great blogger, she's a top-flight memoirist.

Memoir is a dangerous genre. There's a lot of... I guess the current buzzword would be slop. It's not like we ever needed AI for that. Ghost writers have been pumping it out by the barrel-load for decades. Good memoirs, though, are thrilling. This is a very good memoir.

It's good because it's extremely well-written. Amy Rigby has a strong and immediately recognizable prose style, lyrical, personal, warm and occasionally self-deprecating. In common with other songwriters whose books I've read, her prose has a musicality that lifts it off the page. It's a sensual pleasure similar to listening to her sing.

It's also good because she's had a ridiculously rich and interesting life, even though she barely seems to realize just how rich and interesting it's been. Some memoirs drop names on every page. Amy doesn't drop names, she scatters them like someone kicking through autumn leaves, scarcely noticing as they fly up all around. 

She lived in New York from the late '70s through to the '90s, arriving as an art student in her late teens, with a stint in London for good measure, leaving as a feted singer-songwriter with a rapturously-reviewed album. In-between, she met and hung out with just about everyone in the NY punk and no-wave scenes, sang, recorded and performed with everyone from Robert Quine to Warren Zevon and pretty much lived the fantasy life almost everyone I knew in the 'eighties would have killed to have had.

None of it made her any money. None of it made her famous enough that anyone reading this will ever have heard of her. (Prove me wrong in the comments, I dare you.) She was in  several bands, none of whose names you will recognize. I was fairly cognizant of the scenes she was a part of, or thought I was, and I'd never even seen the names so much as mentioned in passing until I read her book. 

Even her incredibly well-received and reviewed mid-nineties album, the magnificently-named Diary of a Mod Housewife, apparently famous enough to rate its own Wikipedia entry, rang absolutely no bells with me. I've listened to it online now and I can recommend it most highly. The song that backtracks the promo, Summer of My Wasted Youth, is from another album, the equally well-named Middlescence. I need to get CDs of all her albums...

Girl To Country is one of the least-glamorous music memoirs I've read, although that's a competitive field. In many cases, though, the lack of glamor is in itself glamorous, as in James Young's memoir Songs They Never Play On The Radio, about the time he spent with touring with a heroin-addicted Nico or Nina Antonia's The One and Only about heroin addict Peter Perrett. 

Unlike the subjects of those books, Amy Rigby isn't a tragic romantic with a fashionable habit. She's a girl from Pittsburgh who doesn't really know what she wants to do other than that she wants to do something. That something turns out to be music and she's good at it, which surprises her more than it surprises anyone. 

But all the time she's making music she's also holding down an endless series of temp jobs. She's so good at it they make her Temp of the Month. Playing guitar is cool and all but it don't pay the bills.

Half a century on, she's still out there, trucking her guitar and amp around small clubs in backwater towns, playing her songs to the handful of people who care. It's the rock and roll reality not the rock and roll dream and yet somehow it's the dream all the same. At least she doesn't have to temp any more.

I could go on but better I stop and let you go read the book for yourself. Or if you don't feel up to that level of commitment, at least go read her blog. 

I mean, we're all bloggers here, aren't we? You know it's the right thing to do.

The Horror! The Horror!

What would it take to get me to resubscribe to Netflix, which I put on pause two months ago? 

Yeah, that'll do it.

That's the first six minutes of the second season, apparently, which makes it one heck of an in media res opening, if true. Also hooky as hell. It's like a series of riffs on the character but then that's what the entire Addams Family franchise is built on, so give the people what they want I guess.

It's certainly what I want although I was very suspicious at the start. I'm not a big fan of plotlines involving serial killers and it seemed a bit off-brand for Wednesday. The six minute clip sold it, though. Now I'm wondering if the plan is to transition Wednesday into some kind of crime show: Wednesday Addams - Psychic P.I. That would be a swerve.

 

Nah. I think we're good. Back to school we go. Wednesday Season 2 starts tomorrow.  

Of course, the other thing that would have gotten me to re-sub would have been the final series of Stranger Things, now due in the autumn, I believe. I came very late to that one. It had been going for a couple of seasons before I started watching (Didn't have Netflix before then.) and it turned out to be nothing like I expected. 

 Stranger Things has such a long, convoluted narrative arc I really ought to do some kind of a rewatch before it starts up again. But who has the time? Even this super-condensed catch-up compilation for just one season of Wednesday is twenty minutes long!

That's the thing about TV series - they take soooo loooong to re-watch. Which is one reason I'm becoming increasingly fond of novelizations. It's a form so disrespected it barely merits contempt in literary quarters, where its very existence is seldom acknowledged. It's something the authors who work in the field appear to find exhillaratingly liberating. 

The more adaptations and spin-off novels I read, the more I come to realize how much I've been missing by ignoring them all these years. As I said back in February, I recently read the three adaptations of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, a show I very much wished had lasted longer than the four seasons Netflix allowed it, and they were excellent. So were most of the Buffy novels I read. 

I have just acquired a Stranger Things novel - Rebel Robin - which I haven't started yet. If that's good I'll see if I can find the rest of those and then after that I might start on Roswell and/or Roswell: New Mexico. It's amazing how many shows do get longish runs of throwaway paperbacks dedicated to them.

Curiously, all of the shows I've named so far, with the possible exception of the Roswell twins, are more than arguably part of the broader horror genre. Although I have always said - and believed - that I don't like "horror". I'm slowly coming to realise that doesn't seem to be a position well-supported by the evidence.  

Indeed, it was only in the last couple of weeks, as I was digitizing and editing one of the two novel-length pieces of fiction I wrote in the 'nineties, that it occured to me both of those could quite reasonably be described as at the very least horror-adjacent, if not straight-up genre horror. There's certainly a lot of ritual and blood magic, demonic possession and vampirism going on, anyway. Weird I never noticed it at the time. I think I thought I was writing urban fantasy.

SciFi, horror and super-hero TV shows often end up being adapted into video games too, although I would suspect with considerably less artistic success than most novelizations. The stakes there must be many orders of magnitude higher - it costs a lot to make a video game, a lot of people are involved and visibility is very high. Spin-off novels, by contrast, cost next to nothing to produce, have only a couple of people making the decisions on what goes into them and release to a deadening critical silence, even if they sell really well. 

With that in mind, I wouldn't put a great deal of confidence in the quality of the proposed video games Netflix is reportedly planning to spin up out of some of its most successful properties, Stranger Things among them. I'm sure we'd all love a Secret World style game set in the Stranger Things universe but I somehow don't think that'll be what we get.

All the same, best to never write anything off until you've had a good look at it. That's a lesson I'm learning all the time. 

Apparently I like horror now. Who knew? 

Certainly not me.

Blurring The Boundaries

Friday. Traditional day of the Grab Bag. I have a few ideas. Mostly game-related, too. Let's see what's in there...

First up, a couple of news stories about the positive influence of gaming. I know, right? We ought to be past that by now. But are we? 

Video Games Are Bad Good For You 

The new trend seems to be people who are already famous for something, testifying about how gaming in general, or a specific game in particular, helped them to do what they do and/or become who they are, by which, of course, I mean who we know them as. Who they actually are is and will always remain a mystery.

The two celebrities, if I may use that catch-all, are Bella Ramsey and Taylor Fritz. I vaguely knew Bella Ramsey's name but I couldn't have told you where from. Taylor Fritz I'd never heard of, although I bet my 92 year-old mother has. 

In case you're as clueless as me, Ramsey is an actor who's appeared in Game of Thrones and The Last of Us, among other things. Two shows I probably should have watched but haven't and most likely never will. Fritz is a tennis player, good enough to have made the semi-finals at Wimbledon this summer, hence my mother's undoubted knowledge of his existence. In fact, according to the article, he's ranked #5 in the world.

Pirate Penguins. Possibly.

Their gaming-related... I nearly said "confessions" there, which would have been telling, but I guess they're more like affirmations.... their gaming-related stories - let's go with that - involve exploring gender identity in Bella's case and... erm... being about as good at League of Legends as he is at tennis in Taylor's.

Honestly, neither of those revelations should be remotely surprising and they really aren't presented that way, either. We do seem to be past the time when famous people playing video games was, in itself, worthy of comment. At least now it has to be relevant in some way to what we hear about them in other contexts, to provide supporting evidence of their journey in some way.

The interesting parts of both stories for me were the specifics not the generalities. I thought it felt quite significant that Bella Ramsey explored her gender identity while playing Club Penguin. Not so much because she had one that she felt needed exploring but because of the venue she chose for her explorations. 

I'm fairly confident that wasn't what Disney had in mind when they bought the game for $350m in 2007. They also owned Toon Town, another child-focused MMORPG at that time and I'm almost certain I've read another account of someone famous exploring their gender identity there, although I can't remember who that might have been. Please append notes and sources in the comments if you do.

It does make a very good case for the anonymity and fluidity of these games for children and young teens. Free Realms is another one where stories like this come up quite not infrequently. Maybe John "Smed" Smedley should have thought a bit more about the social and cultural benefits before shuttering the much-loved MMORPG, rather than complaining how hard it was to wring money out of kids.

The part of Taylor Fritz's tale that caught my attention wasn't that he was really, really good at LoL. He's a world-class sportsman. You could predict that. No, it was that he made a point of explaining he didn't, as you might imagine, play League of Legends to relax or wind down or get away from the challenges and tensions of international tennis. 

On the contrary, he pointed out that playing LoL at the level he does (Emerald.) is "very mentally taxing and mentally draining" and requires his full attention and engagement. It makes a convincing case for eSports being taken seriously, when one of the world's top sportspeople says playing a video game requires as much from him as his real-world sport. Okay, as much mentally. But still...

I Am, But What Am I?

Following on from Bella Ramsey's gender explorations in Club Penguin, I thought I'd link to one of last year's Blaugust newcomers, Cynni of Cynni's Blog. We had a lot of new bloggers join last year and I put most of them either in my Feedly or on the blog roll but over the months since then I gradually unsubscribed from nearly all of them. I already spend altogether too long every day reading blog posts. It just wasn't feasible to keep up with all of them.

The ones on the blog roll, though, I didn't remove and I still actively keep up with a few, even if I don't read every post. Cynni, in common with a disturbing number of bloggers I follow, seems to have been having a pretty bad time of things lately but she always has a good perspective on life and I found her post on gender identity very informative and thought-provoking. 

I also just finished a very good book by Griffin Hansbury that made me think even more. The book is called Some Strange Music Draws Me In, a lyric from Patti Smith's Dancing Barefoot, and it's a coming-of-age novel about a trans man. Er... boy... er... well, it's complicated, isn't it? Language, I mean. And gender. 

Read the book, that's all I'm saying. I learned some things.

I find myself thinking about this stuff a lot nowadays. Partly that's because it's in the culture in a big way now but mostly it's because I keep wondering what it would have been like to have grown up in a culture where those concepts were more fluid than they were when I was doing it. 

Tenses are complicated, too, aren't they? Yes, I do wonder what it's like for people who are growing up in that social and cultural environment today but mostly I find myself idly transposing the times, imagining how things would have been, had it been that way then, when I was in school and college, not how it would be for me if I was in school or college now. There is a difference.

I am old and I'm not about to change who I've always been or perhaps more accurately who I've always thought I've always been, although the sheer range of descriptive genders I encountered, many for the first time (Well, the first time in print. I'm sure I've met many inhabiters of said genders in life without realizing.) both the post and the book do offer plenty of options, smoe of which do resonate with me, at least to some degree. For now, though, my pronouns remain he/him and I don't foresee making a shift from the gender identity I've always accepted. 

But of course it's a lot more complicated than that. Again. Isn't it always? As I think about it, there have been  so many times I haven't conformed all that closely to the labels I've been wearing, so many behaviors I've exhibited and choices I've made that don't exactly fit the shape those labels describe. It's very apparent that we're not all just one thing even if some of us definitely are.

And it's not like I didn't recognize and talk about it back then, either. What we now call gender identity was a fairly common topic of discussion in some of my social groups in the eighties and nineties. We just didn't have the language to express the shades and nuances that are all up in the culture now. Mostly we used to get drunk and speculate about our friends, who speculated about us, when we weren't around. Pretty sure that's not well-thought of these days.

I wish we had talked more about our own identities rather than trying to figure out other peoples'. I'm not saying it would have led to different choices but it might have. It would almost certainly have affected my understanding of who I was and who I could be. Probably, I would have ended up much the same but I wouldn't claim it as a certainty. 

It would have been better to have had the language to talk about it, anyway. In the end, it's always about the language, isn't it? Everything is.

I have a few more solid discussion topics along these lines stashed away but I'm saving them for Blaugust so instead I'll just slide into a couple of snippets that kinda-sorta relate to things I've mentioned earlier in the post.

Now That's A Weird Name

Reaper Actual, I mean. It is, though, isn't it?  Is it a quote? A reference? A pun? Does it mean something or is just supposed to sound cool? And if so, does it?

Whatever it's doing, it's the latest attempt by the aforementioned John Smed Smedly to get back into the gaming industry. As a player, that is. 

No, wait, that's not helping... I don't mean he wants to play some video games. I'm sure he does that in the evenings and on weekends already. I wonder what his League of Legends rank is?

No, I meant get into it as a player like in the Robert Altman movie, The Player, by which I don't mean to suggest Smed's going to start producing movies or ending up killing anyone... well, not anyone real. He's certainly going to end up killing a lot of virtual people because he's all about the PvP and his new project is... 

... well, I'm not sure what it is, other than it's called Reaper Actual, which not only tells you nothing but doesn't even really suggest anything, other than perhaps some kind of homicidal accountant. No, hang on... I'm thinking of an actuary there, aren't I?

MassivelyOP, the only place I've seen it reported so far, don't seem to know what sort of game it is, either. They stop short of labeling it an extraction shooter, merely noting it has "extraction shooter gameplay".  They aren't really all that interested in speculating about what other sort of gameplay it might have because they're far too busy boiling the tar and plucking the chickens. 

Reaper Actual is going to be on the blockchain. Wave the red flags. I must say I thought we were over the blockhain now. And Web 3.0. And Crypto (Although not Krypto. We're definitely all over Krypto, not over him. See? Language again...) I thought AI had eaten all of their lunches and now we were consolidating all our techno-fears in one, handy package.

Anyway, I'd say I'll be interested to see what Smed comes up with this time but I'd just be lying. I'm not interested in anything he does except out of habit. Blockchain or not, I won't be playing it. I just wish he'd retire, really, although as I'm finding out, that's not aways the choice you make, even when it's an option.

And finally...

Google Blinks, Meta Casts Shade

Ye gods, that's a convoluted sub-heading. Let me unpack it. 

Remember Google Glass? It was a long time ago, wasn't it? Just as a quick refresh, it was a project Google was big on for five minutes that involved a pair of glasses with built-in video cameras and internet connectivity. 

It got the same treatment every other new tech gets these days, namely scorn, derision, fear and hatred and Google limply caved to popular pressure (Or internet bullying, to give it its other name.) almost immediately, dropping plans to develop it for the mass market in 2015 and pretending it had never happened. 

They didn't actually stop development, though. They re-marketed it as a specialist product and it was quietly adopted for certain market sectors. There were still versions available commercially as recently as two years ago, although the project is now officially and finally dead.

Since then, other companies have produced similar devices and no-one seems to have noticed or cared. Privacy doesn't seem to be quite the buzzword it was back in the twenty-teens, does it? And now Mark Zuckerberg is getting in on the act. 

I found out about this in a very odd way. My mother is officially registered as partially-sighted, meaning gets information sent to her from various sources, telling her about services and prodcts that may be helpful. She got a flyer in the mail from one of the government-sponsored organizations that handles visual impairment, inviting her to go to the local library for a hands-on with some new glasses you could get that would read things like bus timetable or bottle labels out loud for you when you looked at them.

We've had stuff about these things before but they usually run to several thousand pounds a pair and you can't just walk in and try them on anywhere, so it seemed like a good opportunity to see if they'd justify that kind of investment. 

My mother went to the library, gave them a go, didn't think she'd get on with them, and that would have been the end of it, except she brought back the leaflet she's been given and it had the actual name of the device, which hadn't been on the original flyer, so I googled it. Ironically, as it turned out. 

The Meta Wayfarer Sunglasses are made, as the name suggests, by Meta in co-operation with RayBan, (Hence "shade" in the sub-heading. I know. Painful, isn't it?). The concept looks a lot like Google Glass to me. 

It has a built-in video camera and uses AI for instant translation, among other things. You can livestream from your glasses to Facebook and Instagram. It uses your smartphone for the internet connectivity but apart from that it seems to do everything everyone said would mean the end of civilization if Google Glass caught on. It's also about a tenth of the price I was expecting so I imagine take-up could be high. 

Of course, they have the advantage of looking exactly like RayBans, which means instead of throwing rocks at you in the street if they see you wearing them, they're more likely to be calling out "Cool shades, bro!". By comparison, Google Glass made you look about as obvious as if you'd hung a sign around your neck saying "Caution: Filming In Progress". 

Ten years too early and wearing the wrong clothes. Poor old Google, eh? Probably should get out of the lab more. Still, maybe it's time Zuckerberg caught a break. That VR thing didn't go so well, did it? 

And that's all I have today although not all I have. More when there's a free slot.

Final thought... just imagine how much better this post would have looked if I'd used AI illustrations. Didn't even think of it until I was about to hit publish. That tells a story all its own... 

We Can Remember It For You Piecemeal

I do feel as though I might be playing more games again soon. I'm feeling that itch. Today, though, I don't have anything to report on that front so here's something on ephemerality instead. 

It's something I'm always aware of. Keeping a blog that records your momentary interests and holds them in stasis is altogether too similar to keeping a diary to avoid it. I used to think and sometimes said out loud that one of the blessings of a blog is that it allows you to revisit your past but, like Monk considering his idiosyncracies, I now wonder if that's not both a blessing and a curse.

I certainly find it uncomfortable to see just how wonderful I once thought things I now don't consider all that great at all. The overwhelming power of novelty is all too clear in the back pages of this blog. Contrapuntally, it's concerning to observe just how many times I say the same thing without seeming to realize it's not just not a new idea, it's not even a new idea to me.

The same, only more so, applies to all that writing I did back in the 'eighties and 'nineties. Not the fiction which, apart from a handful of contemporary references, feels moderately timeless now I revisit it, but the endless lists of favorite things and all those cultural opinions I couldn't keep to myself. 

I was brought to thinking about all this when I came across a file on an old floppy disk yesterday, the full text of a review of the year I did for the APA back in 1998. The year before online gaming swallowed me whole.

The first thing I noticed with discomfort was how much more I'd been doing then in terms of going out and participating. Cinema, live music, visting friends, foreign travel, rummaging through the detritus of other peoples' lives at all kinds of sales and in all kinds of stores. Of all those activities, I think the only one to survive the onset of live gaming was the travel. It took a pandemic to put an end to that.

Still, as much of that drifting down can be laid at the grave of youth as blamed on gaming. I was turning forty then and after that watershed many people, maybe most people, experience a sharp decline in interest in anything that takes them out after dark. Or out of the house at all.

It's later, when retirement arrives, that filling up the time requires the taking up of hobbies and activities. Or so I've heard. Personally, I have more to do than I can find the hours for and that's just here at home. Still, old people do go out more, I believe. Until they can't, of course.

So, shelve the angsting over age and lost engagement. That's not what really set me back when I heard myself speaking across a gap of more than a decade and a half. What surprised, maybe slightly shocked me was the intensity with which then-me recommended books and music and movies I now couldn't remember at all.

And these weren't just passing fancies like the tunes I share here every couple of weeks. I already know plenty of those barely ring any bells with me even a few months on, much less that they'll last seventeen years. No, remember this was my Pick of the Year round-up. These were supposedly the works of art that had had the most impact on me over the preceding twelve months. You'd think I might at least remember the names...

Here's an example. Talking about all the books I'd read that year

"Best of the lot, though, was Jean Thesman's The Last April Dancers, a novel so bleak it could almost be called Plathian."

Anyone heard of it? Anyone? Bueller?

I had to look it up. It was apparently my favorite novel of 1998 but I didn't recognize the name of the author or the title of the book. And guess what? After now I've looked it up I still don't.

Here's the entry on Goodreads. It comes with a handy thumbnail biography of Jean Thesman, who died in 2016 at the age of 86, " leaving behind a significant legacy in young adult literature." She wrote around 40 novels and was known for her "lyrical style, emotional depth, and strong female characters".

I can see why I rated the book so highly. I just don't get why I can't remember anything about it, not even that it existed, not least since I apparently found the experience of reading it "so harrowing I twice had to stop reading it to build up courage to carry on" . You'd think something like that would leave a lasting impression but it seems you'd be wrong.

I do read a lot of books and I do find most of them very hard to recall in detail but in most cases a glimpse of the cover or at most a glance at the blurb will quickly bring a flurry of images and incidents rushing back, even after many years. This one? Not a damn thing. 

Now I feel I need to go look for more of Jean Thesman's work but despite her success it seems there's not much left in print, even in her homeland USA. Used copies, if you can find them, are already acquiring collector's price-tags, especially in hardback. Missed my chance there, it seems.

Of course, it may be that I already have a copy of The Last April Dancers, somewhere in the house. I certainly have most of the other "juveniles" I praised in that 1998 round-up. I'd been going through a phase of scooping them up whenever I saw them, mainly in charity shops where, at the time they were ubiquitous. You never, ever see them now. There's little as ephemeral as a popular YA novel.

Still on my shelves from that 1998 list:  M.E. Kerr (If I Love You, Am I Trapped Forever?  and The Son of Someone Famous) and Barbara Wersba (Tunes For A Small Harmonica  and  Crazy Vanilla). I was only thinking about re-reading Barbara Wersba last week, as it happens. As for "the left field Waltons -go- Survivalist ethos of Cynthia Voigt and her epic Tillerman family saga", I have re-read at least a couple of those since 1998. I can remember all of that lot, vaguely, and yet in the year I first read them all, The Last April Dancers supposedly made the greatest impression. Now it's the one I might as well never have read at all.

From books to music. It's a truism that music's far easier to revisit than fiction. It's all in the length. Three minutes for a pop song; three days for a novel.

And surely to god you'd expect anyone to remember their favorite song of an entire year! I mean, okay, maybe they might not have it in mind but if they saw the name of the band or the title of the song, they'd at least recognize and presumably remember they liked it, right?

Guess what my favorite song of 1998 was, according to my 1998 yearly review? I mean, I took the trouble to put it in print so it has to be true...

I say that because I'm seriously questioning it now. According to what I wrote at the time,  "If I had to choose a favourite-of-favourites for '98, I guess it would be the Slacker tune". 

The what now? Is that a style? A genre?

No, it's a band. Here's "the Slacker tune" I was talking about.

It's called "Scared". It got to #36 in the UK in 1997, so it didn't even come out in the year I was writing about. That's what happens when you buy all your CDs from bargain bins. 

Slacker are at least a step ahead of poor old Jean Thesman in that once I'd gone to YouTube and listened to Scared I did vaguely remember it. And I do like it, even now. Even if Ihaven't thought about it in seventeen years. 

I find it very hard to believe it was the best thing I heard in the whole of 1998, though. Hard as in completely freakin' impossible. It's progressive house ffs!

Here's the full list of my favorite singles of 1998: 

"On CD, my favourite singles were Scared (Slacker); Song 2 (Blur); Glorious (Goya Dress); Kowalski (Primal Scream); Lazy (Suede) Rhino Rays E.P. (Dawn of the Replicants); Ginger  (David Devant and his Spirit Wife);  Pussycat  (Mulu) and  On the Soft (Magicdrive). If I had to choose a favourite-of-favourites for '98, I guess it would be the Slacker tune, but the third track on the Goya Dress  single, 20th Century Box, is pretty dam' magnificent."

Can you believe I rated that Slacker tune more highly than Song 2? Had I been hit in the head?

Not only can I can remember six of those eight songs very clearly (More, actually, since the Dawn of the Replicants CD is an EP.) but I've listened to all of them fairly consistently ever since and several have had their charms exposed here on the blog. How the heck did I think Slacker was the best of them if I then never listened to the damn thing again?

And here's the weirdest part: my runner-up is one of the others I have no memory of at all!  When I read that yesterday, I had no clue who Goya Dress were (Still don't, in fact.) and no memory of any track on their CD single, let alone the third, which presumably was the equivalent of a second B-side.

I listened to that one yesterday as well. It's good. I certainly wouldn't pick it now over On The Soft or Song 2, though.

What am I supposed to read into all that? that my tastes have changed even though my tastes haven't changed? That back then I had good range but poor focus? That my memory is terrible except when it's completely fine?

Dunno. I'll finish with something a bit more encouraging, for my mental state, anyway: movies. It seems in 1998 I was still going to the cinema often enough to have opinions based on experience. And what's more I can remember the movies I wrote about and going to see them at the cinema. Maybe it's that that sticks them in the mind.

"Films, then.  The one I remember most clearly is When We Were Kings, which I found to be a magical recreation of fragmentary memories and images."

I went to see that one, a documentary on Muhammed Ali's infamous Rumble in the Jungle, with my mother, who's always been a fan. I saw it at The Arnolfini, a gallery and arthouse cinema in Bristol. I remember the seats being very uncomfortable. The movie was great, though.

And finally, because I laughed when I read it and to show how much more snarky I used to be back then, my mini-review of the film I liked least in 1998:

"Most disappointing film, by far, was L.A. Confidential, which was pot-boiler twonk; the performances were ordinary, except for Kim Basinger's, which was too artificial and stilted to rise that far, (and would have been insulting to the memory of Victoria Lake, had Basinger actually resembled the Girl With the Peekaboo Bangs in any way whatsoever, which she patently did not); the photography was dull, not even a hint of the Technicolor sheen the reviews lauded; the direction was functional and uninvolving; the script was a mish-mash of incoherent cliche, simultaneously simple to follow and confusing (almost as if it had been very badly cobbled together from the plots of two or three complicated novels, in fact); worst of all was the ludicrous, prolonged shoot-out ending which actually made me feel angry for having paid money and wasted two hours of my life just to get to that climax of banality. All in all, I didn't much like it." 

Even now, I remember it as being two of the most tedious hours I've ever spent in a cinema. My opinion on the film has never shifted although I've had a few quite heated arguments with people about it, the most recent being this year at work. Nothing remotely ephemeral about it 

My opinion, that is. The movie's ephemeral as hell.

Truth, Time And A Third Word Begining With "T" I Can't Think Of Just Now...

You ever have one of those weeks where everything happens at once? This blog's having one of those right now. 

There's Next Fest, for which I have seven demos to cover, four of which I've already played and one of which I've already reviewed, so that's going about as well as could be expected. Better, really. 

There was also that new, hot game that no-one's talking about that I downloaded the demo for before Next Fest even began. I've played (Some of) that one and posted about it already too, so ditto.

Then there's the launch of a brand-new, highly-anticipated open world RPG that's definitely not an MMO, which has been out for three years now and that millions of people have played, many hundreds or even thousands of them on the same servers at the same time, actually (Oh, stop it!). New World Aeternum, it's called. 

I downloaded that one, with considerable difficulty, yesterday and last night I made a character. She's Level 8 so that's a work in progress, pretty much the same as the game itself, which has been re-envisioned at least three times now to my certain knowledge. Will this be the version that sticks? We'll see soon enough, although whether anyone still cares might be a more appropriate question.

After that comes the second full PvE season in Once Human which, unlike the last two seasons that don't really count because they were just revamped versions of the first season with some bits moved around and some difficulty settings tweaked, brings a huge amount of genuinely new content to the game. 

There's a whole new region with four zones, as we would have called them in the olden days, before everything went seamless. That's an expansion by some people's reckoning. I can think of marketing departments that would be hanging the expansion label on an update like that and charging for it, too.

I read the latest press release for the update yesterday (Version 1.3 - The Way of Winter - that's what it's called.) and it does sound really interesting. Exciting, even. I've had had a really great time playing Once Human for (Checks Steam...) eighty hours so far so I'm looking forward to getting in and seeing all the new stuff. The update went live today and I have it downloading as I write. Now I just have to play it for a while and then post about it. 

I could get right on that today, only late yesterday evening, just as I was about to switch my PC off for the night, I got an email inviting me into a "playtest" for another MMO. I downloaded the client but as yet I haven't checked whether there's an NDA or anything. The email didn't mention one and I haven't signed anything but I probably should double-check before I start rambling on about it in public.

By a conservative estimate, I make that nine posts pending at least, assuming I give all the demos a post of their own, which I'm hoping I won't have to but which experience tells me I probably will. To make it a nice, round ten, I just finished watching two TV shows I want to talk about. At least I can usually portmanteau several of those into one post so I shouldn't have to go to eleven.

I realize I have now spent eight paragraphs basically doing one of those posts about blogging that no-one wants to read but I blame that on Stuart Lee. Mrs Bhagpuss put one of his books on the bathroom book pile and I've been reading the bit where he goes through one of his touring shows as broadcast on the BBC, line by line, with extensive footnotes, talking through his process. I have always had an unfortunate tendency towards unconscious imitation. I think this might be one of those times.

And now I have to go take Beryl for a long walk in the countryside. It's been raining for two days straight and she's barely been outside but today the sun has come out and supposedly it's not going to rain all day so she's more than due. I'll have to pick this up again later. 

At least Once Human has updated now, so that's something off the list, at least.

And now I'm back. 

Is there any point to these "stepping away from the keyboard" sidebars, I'm wondering? It's like when Joanne says she has to go pee in Nobody Wants This. Or, rather, when she does it in the fictional podcast of the same name she co-hosts with her sister, in the hit TV show, also called Nobody Wants This. 

That, what I did there, besides being confusing, thanks to the embedded metafiction, for which I'm not to be held responsible, is called tele-parabalizing. 

Okay, it's not but it kind of is all the same. Douglas Coupland coined the term in his seminal novel Generation X, where he also came up with a whole slew of descriptive terms and labels for quasi-cultural activities that I'm sure he hoped would catch on, making him his generation's answer to Shakespeare. That didn't happen, as the Observer's Christine Smallwood somewhat unkindly pointed out in 2006, fifteen years after the publication of the book itself, but I have a bunch of those definitions in tiny frames on my kitchen wall so I haven't been able to forget them as easily as everyone else.

That's an interesting article, by the way, the one I linked then, although I only skimmed it so I can't vouch for the accuracy of the detail. Still, it is curious how GenX seems to have slipped through the cracks between Boomers and Millennials. Also, what was Generation Y, described in the piece as "the kids who were teenagers when Mr. Coupland was making it big"? Anyone remember them?

My feeling has long been that all generations need to be subdivided at least once. The life experiences of children growing up a decade apart are frequently too different to be tidily conflated. We probably should talk about Early and Late for all generations, which I guess would make Gen Y early Millennials. 

I didn't come here to talk about any of that, though. I seem to have gotten myself side-tracked. Again.

While I'm down this byway I might as well mention that, if you google "tele-parabalizing" to check if indeed it might have caught on more than you thought it had, as I just did, (It hasn't.) you'll find one of my posts, the frankly wonderfully-named Sad Goth Girl And The Treehouse Pajamas, at #4 in Google's list. Now I've mentioned it again I wonder if this post will also appear in future searches for the phrase? 

Probably not because the only reason the other one ranks that high to begin with is because I misspelled "parablizing". Coupland spells it without the second "a" and since he made it up, I guess he knows.

This is the sort of thing that makes me suspicious about the imminent "Death of the Internet" we're all supposed to be worrying about. I mean, just how reliable was the information we were all lapping up before the rise of the AIs anyway?

I mentioned earlier that I'm reading a Stewart Lee book (It's March of the Lemmings in fact, although that's not the cover of the edition currently lying on the floor of our bathroom.) In it, he occasionally refers in considerable detail, often with dates and names, to cultural artefacts that don't exist. Sometimes he then tells the reader he's made them up but mostly he doesn't.

For example, when he mentions "an Essex folk song collected by the archivist Shirley Collins in the '50s",  he's referring to a real person but when the sentence carries "from the old traveller singer Gonad Bushell" he's making stuff up. Specifically, what he's doing is collating the name of Gary Bushell, a right-wing music journalist and cultural commentator no-one likes with the name of Bushell's old band, The Gonads.

That one's a very obvious joke but "The Turkish Psychedelic Music Explosion: Anadolu Psych 1965-1980" by Daniel Spicer, which I assumed he'd also invented, turns out to be entirely bona fide, as does Julian Cope's band Brain Donor, a Cope project I was completely unaware of until I read about it in Lee's book. 

At one point, Stewart also quotes a lengthy post by someone purporting to be a stage manager, accusing Lee, in an unsettlingly calm, world-weary tone, of all kinds of behaviors and actions that turn out to be provably untrue. But that's what truth is: anything someone tells you until someone more convincing tells you otherwise.

I was reminded of that when I was in the launderette a couple of hours ago (I took a load of washing round after we got back from walking Beryl. If I was a comedian I guess I might say something like "This is what my life has become" but it's pretty much what my life already was, except now we have a dog...). As the load was in the drier, I was reading a novel called Starling House by Alix E Harrow and I was struck by just how many precise, specific references the author makes to books and songs which I was pretty sure didn't exist, at least not in the form she said they did.

For example, on page 44 the protagonist, Opal, makes a passing reference to "that one Prine song that everybody still hates", which would be largely meaningless and pass mostly unnoticed if it wasn't for a footnote on the same page, in which an unnamed annotater (Definitely another character, not the author.) explains "Opal is referring to John Prine's 1971 song "Paradise" on his debut album".

This is an actual song and that is an actual album and the lyrics do concern the mining industry in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, which is where the novel is set - in a small town called Eden. Prine's father grew up in Paradise, a small mining town in the same county and the song is about his experiences there.

Prine's song does not, however, include the line "Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking/Old Gravely's coal train has hauled it away", as stated in the footnote because Gravely Power is a fictional company invented by the author. What John Prine actually wrote and sang was "Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking/Mister Peabody's coal train has hauled it away.", which is admittedly very similar but not the same.

According to Wikipedia, the real mining company that strip-mined the real Paradise was called the Peabody Coal Company. The fictional founder of the fictional Gravely Power that did the same to the fictional Eden was John Peabody Gravely. 

This seems to me to be getting extremely close to the kinds of "hallucinations" seen in AI-produced text, albeit here intentional rather than accidental. And being set down in print, it's now in the cultural record as much as anything on the internet. Maybe it even has more authority that way, even though its in a novel. Books have gravitas.

There's more, too. Across the next four pages, Alix E Harrow incorporates the full text of a supposed Wikipedia article on fictional author Eleanor Starling. There's nothing very unusual about writers creating other writers who never existed and filling out their bibliographies as though they did but backfilling fake internet data into a printed book adds a level or two of complexity, not to say confusion. 

Here, once again, the author includes a number of direct and specific references from our non-fictional timeline. They're extrmeley well-done and wholly convincing.

For example, there's a quote attributed to Guillermo del Toro: "the purpose of fantasy is not to make the world prettier but to lay it bare". It sounds like something the director might have said, although clearly he couldn't have said it, as the fictional Wikipedia article suggests, about the equally fictional author Eleanor Starling. I did wonder if it was an actual quote, re-purposed but in fact it's wholly made up. De Toro never said it at all.

Better yet, there's a reference to Josh Witter's third studio album, "Hello Starling", which supposedly includes a song called "Nora Lee and Me" as a hidden track, Nora Lee being the name of the girl in The Underland, the one and only book Eleanor Starling ever wrote. 

Josh Ritter's third album really is called Hello Starling, although presumably for entirely different reasons. Having the song be a "hidden track" on it is a master-stroke because, of course, hidden tracks do exist but are never listed anywhere, so even if an internet search brings up no trace of any song of that name you can never be absolutely sure it doesn't exist. All we need now is for Ritter to read the book and decide to write the song and include it as a hidden track on future editions of the album and reality will have fractured into shards.

All of this suggests that humans are and always have been perfectly capable of muddying the factual waters all on their own, without the help of soi-disant artificial intelligences and lumbering LLMs. The internet, which was always awash with nonsense, may yet become so sodden with falsehood it will sink to the bottom of the data sea and lie there, a rotting wreck filled with misinformation, fantasy and lies but whether that makes it materially different from the recorded corpus of human thought and expression from the previous several millennia is questionable at best.

Did I have a point? If I did, I think I made it. Let's move on.

Actually, let's stop. That took most of the day and now I'm one post further behind where I wanted to be. Result!

I suppose I'd better get on and play another of those demos. Or take a look at that game I'm supposed to be playtesting and see if it has an NDA.

Off I go. Wish me luck. And here's hoping I make a better job of this tomorrow.

Notes on AI used in this post.

Just the final image, which was generated at NightCafe using Real Cartoon XL v4 from the prompt "Nora Lee and Me starling house the underland line drawing color dark gothic scary". It was the second attempt. the first, where the prompt didn't have the "dark gothic scary" part, turned out way too bright and cheerful, as you'd expect.

And Your Little Dog Too

Even though I work in a bookshop I almost never buy new books. Okay, sometimes. I did buy the new Rainbow Rowell last week but only because it was signed and she has such a nice signature. And I didn't pay actual money for it. Just magic money I got for free because I have some of that.

In fact, thinking about it, I doubt I've spent real, out of my pocket, in cash or by card, out of my bank account money on a book for a decade. Maybe two decades. And even before I worked in a bookshop I very, very rarely went into one and if I did even more rarely came out with a book.

All my life, most of my book-buying has been done on the cheap or for free. I've tended to avoid used book stores, or second-hand bookshops as they were called when I was growing up, almost as much as shops selling new books because the owners are often unpredictable and the prices wildly inflated.

I've always preferred to get my books from charity shops (Thrift stores for the American reader.) or car boot sales (Yard sales I guess is the US equivalent although it's not quite the same thing.) Remaindered bookstores used to be an option, too, but you don't see those so much any more. 

On the other hand, quite a few churches seem to have set aside an area where books donated by parishioners are sold for very small sums, so that's a relatively new source for me. Go in for the architecture, come out with a book. Churches don't have to be all about God. Or about God at all, apparently.

Those are all good sources of cheap books but why pay even that much when you could pay nothing at all? I'm drowning in free books at work but even if I wasn't a surprising number of the old, red telephone boxes have been re-purposed into repositories for given-away books looking to be re-homed. You're supposed to leave a book and take one although I don't think anyone's keeping track.

Even before I worked in the trade and when phone boxes still had phones in them, I used to get books for nothing. It's surprisingly easy to do. In the 'eighties, a friend of mine took over the editing of a small semi-pro comiczine. Either it already had a column reviewing Sci Fi and Fantasy books or he instituted one, I can't remember which, but he started getting review copies from publishers and pretty soon he had far more than he could cope with so he farmed them out to anyone willing to write reviews. If you contact publishers even now and tell them you write for some website or book blog they'll most likely send you stuff. They seem almost desperate to give the things away, sometimes.

I read a lot of books that way, books I would never have read otherwise and that's the big benefit of buying books the way I do. If you buy new you'll most likely get the latest by authors you like or those who've been recommended to you, either by friends or reviewers or - if they're doing their job properly - booksellers in the stores where you shop.

You can browse, of course, but because so very, very many books are published, even when they're still in print, outside of the obvious, you'll be lucky to run into a copy of any particular one on the shelves of your local bookstore Even in a big bookshop the range is limited to What's New, What Still Sells and Classics. Books are an iceberg. Most of them are invisible, forgotten, out of print, gone. 

Anyone who's hung around here for a while will likely know I choose chance over certainty. I prefer random drops in games to points systems where you save up and buy what you want. By and large, I'm less bothered about missing out on things I know I'd enjoy than I am about missing out on things I don't know about. 

If you look up to the right, you'll see the Inventory Full Mission Statement, which I'll wager many regular readers have never noticed. After all, it's barely readable in lilac on deep seagreen blue because I also cherish obfuscation.

I came up with it all the way back in 2011, when I named the blog Inventory Full and it sums up what I believe to be the Explorer's raison d'etre: Opening boxes, looking inside. I meant it almost literally back then but over the years it's expanded to become a mantra. 

It's why this blog has come to focus more on endless First Impressions of games I'll never stick with and long reviews of demos for games I'll never play in full. It's why the music posts are scattershot collections of apparently unrelated genres and artists. It's why so many posts start out seeming to be about one thing then end up being about something else entirely.

This is one of those posts. It starts off looking like it's going to be about books then it turns towards blogging before finally heading to where it was always meant to end up: Marilyn Monroe, her dog and Chappell Roan.

Marilyn Monroe is eternal. I was four years old when she died and by the time I was at college she'd been dead for almost twenty years but she was still on my wall along with Che Guevara and Humphrey Bogart, who were dead as well. Forty more years and I don't know if students still put up posters of Che and Bogie but I doubt it. Marilyn, though, shines ever on.

Because she's never far from my mind, when I saw a book in a charity shop last week with the entrancing title "The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe" I bought it immediately. The dog, who is real, was called Maf as shorthand for Mafia Honey, which is what Marilyn named him after Frank Sinatra gave him to her and you may read into that what you will.

I recommend the book, which is still in print. The author is Andrew O'Hagan and here's an interview he gave about it to The Paris Review in in 2011  which I also recommend. It's a lot shorter so there's no excuse for skipping it.

At this point you might imagine I would be about to review the book but I'm not. I will say it's funny, smart and over-written to the point of hilarity. I very much enjoyed it for what it is but even more for what it told me.

The author very clearly did a lot of research, something I often find off-putting but which, in this case, I found fascinating, Maf, like all dogs, reads minds and therefore knows all that everyone he's spent time with knows, meaning the book is stuffed full as a sausage with quotes, anecdotes and facts, many of which I did not already know.

Of all the new stories, the most fascinating to me was the tale of the Monroe Six. These were half a dozen adolescents in New York in the mid 'fifties, who took to following Marilyn everywhere she went. Rather than calling the police or going to the courts for a restraining order, Marilyn, perceiving they were different from the ordinary order of celebrity seeker, welcomed their attention. 

At the time, Marilyn was working on her stagecraft and also attending numerous celebrity events that had her traveling about the city, providing the Six with numerous opportunities to meet her. According to an excellent post at The Marilyn Report, referencing another piece in the French edition of Vanity Fair (Issue #105 if you want the original. In French, naturally.) she "called them by their first names whenever she met them, asked about their lives, and always agreed to pose with them". 

Not only was she gracious, she was unguarded to a degree that's hard to imagine now. Marilyn already knew from experience how grasping and greedy for attention fans could be and yet she not only made time to chat to the six teenagers and pose with them for pictures, she even "invited them upstairs for a soda in the apartment she had just rented with her new boyfriend, the novelist Arthur Miller."

If you need any proof that the world was very different then, there it is. I was struck most forcibly by the way things have changed since then by reports I was seeing on my news feeds at the same time I was reading about the Monroe Six concerning some things this summer's blow-up star, Chappel Roan, was saying on Tik Tok about "creepy behavior" by so-called fans.

It's worth reading - or better yet listening to - Chappell's rant in full. It's not even a rant. It's a considered, thoughtful, argument. She is clearly both right in calling out the kind of intrusive behavior she's concerned about and justified in highlighting the extent to which it has become - or at least is becoming - normalised.

Whether she'll be able to hold back that tide is another question. It'd be nice to think people would listen and maybe re-assess their attitude but then if they could do that they'd probably not be a problem in the first place. 

Chappel later expanded on her reasoning, saying "I want to love my life, be outside, giggle with my friends, go to the movie theater, feel safe, and do all the things every single person deserves to do."

It's hard to argue that's not a valid ambition. The chances of her being able to achieve it in a world where millions of people know her name and her face seem slim but I hope she can.

Marilyn Monroe in 1955 was both more famous than Chappell Roan and more recognizeable. It's quite amazing she was able to go about with such freedom even then although it's probably fair to say that New Yorkers might have been too cool to freak over a movie star. 

One advantage she had was that everyone who knew her knew her from how she appeared on film. When she would go out and about she'd wear a headscarf to cover her famous blonde hair and apparently that way she could walk right on by without being spotted. 

Marilyn was finessing the rift between public and private to her advantage. Chappell Roan only wishes she could: "When I’m on stage, when I’m performing, when I’m in drag, when I’m at a work event, when I’m doing press…I am at work. Any other circumstance, I am not in work mode. I am clocked out." She looks as different - more different - in her regular make-up and clothes from her stage persona than Marilyn did in her headscarf but it's not helping. 

If it was the 1950s, Chappell could walk down your street and you'd never know it. But it isn't the 1950s. Her off-stage look is as well-documented as her on. She's in her street clothes in the videos she's made saying the things she's said. If you saw her, you'd know her.

Fame isn't a light you can switch on and off but then neither is recognizing a famous person in the street a license to behave like an ass, let alone like a sex-criminal. The Monroe Six figured that out and they were just fans in their teens. So should anyone else who isn't a sociopath. 

 

*** Some Notes On AI Used In This Post ***

The only AI here is the image at the head of the post. It was produced at NightCafe using Starlight XL. The prompt was "Marilyn Monroe's (small, white, fluffy dog 1.5), Mafia Honey, with Marilyn beside a swimming pool. (1950s line drawing 1.5)". All sliders were pushed right back to try and maximize adherence to the prompt. The numbers in brackets are supposed to give added importance to those elements although I may not have parsed that part properly.

Having obtained the result I wanted after several less than successful attempts with other image genearators and settings, I then ran it through the upscaler at NightCafe to increase the resolution. The original image had a second, weird-looking dog on the tiles behind Marilyn so, before I upscaled it, I used NightCafe's Selective Edit function to remove it. 

I was under the impression that all the upscaler did was enhance the definition but apparently it also makes improvements of its own choosing because it put the second dog back, only this time much better rendered and looking like an actual dog. Still, I didn't want Marilyn to have two Mafs so I downloaded the upscaled image and took it to SnapEdit, where I removed the excess canine. Image enhancement there also uses AI, by the way, so this is one AI correcting another AI's mistakes.

While I was looking at the enlarged image there, I realised Marilyn had grown an extra knee. It's easy to miss these things. I used the AI image remover to clean that up and then I noticed another flesh-toned patch behind her actual knee. That could have been her hand - it would have been a natural position for it to be in - only it might have meant her arm was a bit longer than you'd expect so for safety's sake I took that out as well.

Two dogs and three knees.

With all that done, I was reasonably happy with the outcome. It's not really a 1950s line drawing as I imagined it, more like a magazine illustration, but that's close enough. The woman doesn't look exactly like Marilyn either but I'm pretty sure if you asked ten people who it was supposed to be, eight or nine of them would say Marilyn Monroe.

At this point you might well be wondering why I bothered with AI at all. Couldn't I just have used an actual photograph of Marilyn and/or her dog? There are enough of them online after all. The reason for that is a slight nervousness over copyright. I usually don't worry about it  because the kind of images I tend to use are mostly of things or people who I wouldn't expect to draw much attention or for the owners to be much interested if they knew.

Photos of Marilyn Monroe are a different prospect altogether, though. People get very touchy about that sort of thing. I did at one point have a couple of photos taken from the session shown in the YouTube video but I took them out for that reason and put the video in instead because as I understand it, Google have arrangements in place to cover copyright issues on YouTube, provided all of their protocols are followed correctly. Since I use Blogger's internal Add Video From YouTube function I think I should be good there. They are both owned by Google after all.

The advantage of using an AI image is that, as Wilhelm pointed out in a reply to my comment on his excellent rant about AI yesterday, (Hi, Wilhelm and congrats for making this far down the post if you did! Perseverance rewarded!) is that under current law, at least in the USA, AI images aren't copyrightable and in most jurisdictions the whole legal position is utterly unclear and likely to remain so for a very long time. At the very least, it's safer to use an AI image than to "borrow" an existing one off the internet.

I would also say at this point that a good deal of the criticism about the generic look and feel of AI images, something I've been guilty of endorsing more than once, does tend to reflect a lack of interest in doing the necessary work to improve those images and make them better. AI is just another creative tool. You still have to do the real work. 

I'm not saying the picture at the top is anything special but it is pretty much what I was imagining when I thought of the idea and it's only good enough for me to be reasonably satisfied with it because I spent half an hour working on it. We are very much not yet at the "Press a button and get what you asked for" stage and maybe we never will be but to write the whole thing off as a failure because of that is like throwing away your brushes because you can't be bothered to mix the paint.

Or something.