Moneyball

Nope not even Brad Pitt can pull off the AARP Visor look

The film Moneyball is the true-ish story of Billy Bean, the general manager of the Oakland A's and his conversion to the Bill James school of baseball statistics. Bill James has long held that getting on base is the most important thing a player can do and it doesn't matter how he does it. Ruth and Bonds to name but two were just as valuable for their walks as their hits. Moneyball takes us back to the 2002 season when Oakland lost Jason Giambi to the Yankees and Johnny Damon to the Red Sox. To replace these stars Bean (Brad Pitt) and a statistician played by Jonah Hill decide to ignore their scouts and dive into the Bill James world. The film follows the sacred arc of baseball movies: 1) a bunch of misfits is assembled by a general manager who wants to give them all a second chance 2) they dont gel and initially they lose a lot of games 3) the manager/general manager yells at them 4) they start to turn the season around 5) they win a lot of games 6) there is a climactic final game which they win (The Natural, Major League) or lose (Eight Men Out, The Bad News Bears). 
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Despite strictly following this sacred arc or iron law of baseball films I really enjoyed Moneyball. Brad Pitt has decided to age like Robert Redford, that is, rapidly and all at once but its added character to his face and as in The Tree Of Life he turns in a first rate, thoughtful performance here. Jonah Hill is great as the soft spoken geek, Philip Seymour Hoffman is his usual fantastic self, Kerris Dorsey the girl playing Pitt's daughter, is charming and does a nice job with the song over the end credits. Spike Joynze shows up in a funny cameo as Robin Wright's new husband and as a little nod to Bull Durham they even cast Arliss Howard as John Henry at the end. 
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Fine acting, a tight script, both Giambi brothers as villains, lots of baseball, what more do you want in a movie? 

IQ84 Redux

Haruki Murakami's IQ84 is a lush, sensual novel that uses the canyons of central of Tokyo as its canvass for a dreamy, escapist fairy tale about two childhood friends who shared a brief platonic romantic moment before separating forever. It's a book heavily informed by the films of Hayao Miyazaki and Jung's notion of the collective unconscious and it has a fantasy element straight from the pages of the brothers Grimm. 
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The story of the two central protagonists, a hack writer and a yoga teacher/assassin (!) are told in successive chapters and it takes most of the book for them finally to collide. Fortunately the leads and their voyages of discovery are both equally compelling. However, as in many Murakami novels the characters in IQ84 behave in maddeningly passive, inconsistent and illogical ways and as the fantasy/fairy tale elements get more pronounced I found myself increasingly irritated by their behaviour. Although I enjoyed this book a great deal I think the critics are wrong to say that this is Murakami's masterpiece. He's clearly a very talented writer but I believe he can do better. There is a lack of discipline to Murakami's writing and if he reined in his tics and compulsions he could say something really interesting about modern Japan and the human condition. I blame the translators/editors for the laborious explanations of Western pop culture that should have been cut from the English edition of the book, but I blame Murakami for his creepy obsession with the breasts of young women and young girls; indeed although the sexualisation of prepubescent girls may be a popular trope in Japan (?) you don't have to be a bug eyed Congresswoman running for President to find it icky and unpleasantly disturbing. 
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Don't get me wrong IQ84 is a beautiful, strange, interesting novel that raises a lot of questions but it's not as beautiful or as deep as it thinks it is and if its answers you're after, well, you best read something else. 

This Aint Lite FM: The Cold Cold Ground - Page 1

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The riot had taken on a beauty of its own now. Arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon. Crimson tracer in mystical parabolas. Phosphorescence from the barrels of plastic bullet guns. A distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship. The scarlet whoosh of Molotovs intersecting with exacting surfaces. Helicopters everywhere: their spotlights finding one another like lovers in the Afterlife.
        I watched with the others by the Land Rover on Knockagh Mountain. No one spoke. Words were inadequate. You needed a Picasso for this scene, not a poet.
        The police and the rioters were arranged in two ragged fronts that ran across a dozen streets, the opposing sides illuminated by the flash of newsmen’s cameras and the burning, petrol-filled milk bottles sent tumbling across the no man’s land like votive offerings to the god of curves.
        Sometimes one side charged and the two lines touched for a time before decoupling and returning to their original positions.
        The smell was the stench of civilization: gunpowder, cordite, slow match, kerosene.
        It was perfect.
        It was Giselle.
        It was Swan Lake.
        And yet. . .
        And yet we had the feeling that we had seen better.
        In fact we had seen better only last week when, in the hospital wing of The Maze Prison, IRA commander Bobby Sands had finally popped his clogs.
        Bobby was a local lad from Newtownabbey and a poster boy for the movement having never killed anyone and coming from a mixed Protestant-Catholic background. And bearded, he was a good Jesus, which didn’t hurt either.
        Bobby Sands was the maitreya, the world teacher, the martyr who would redeem mankind through his suffering.
        When Bobby finally died on the sixty sixth day of his hunger strike the Catholic portions of the city had erupted with spontaneous anger and frustration.
        But that was a week ago and Frankie Hughes, the second hunger striker to die, had none of Bobby’s advantages. No one thought Frankie was Jesus. Frankie enjoyed killing and was very good at it. Frankie shed no tears over dead children. Not even for the cameras.
        And the riots for his death felt somewhat. . .orchestrated.
        Perhaps on the ground it seemed like the same chaos and maybe that’s what they would print tomorrow in newspapers from Boston to Beijing. . .But up here on the Knockagh it was obvious that the peelers had the upper hand. The rioters had been cornered into a small western portion of the city between the hills and the Protestant estates. They faced a thousand full time peelers, plus two or three hundred police reserve, another two hundred UDR and a battalion strength unit of British Army regulars in close support. There were hundreds of rioters - not the thousands that had been predicted: this hardly represented a general uprising of even the Catholic population and as for the promised “revolution” . . . well, not tonight.

Irish Poem Of The Month

Dr Flynn not quite pulling off the Flashdance look

The Floppy Disk

Leontia Flynn

Prince among misnomers, the floppy disk
lies stranded, in drifts of dust, in the top desk drawer.
A castaway on shingly paper clips
or under an old bank statement – the small withdrawals
dwindling to little, then less, then nothing at all.

o

How young it is to be so obsolete.
The stainless-steel clip shines.  The neat black case
still sleek as a woman’s suit or evening purse.
I will take it between my finger and my thumb
and post it with a click through the squarish slot

o

Of the oh-so-recent, stunningly useless past;
the moment before the moment before now
whose code is lost.  The words that tapped and flashed
like a frantic bird against a window pane,
translate back to the gesture of the hand

0

stalled on the keys, like the spirit on the water.
Like the shouts and groans that issue from the mine
after the prop has snapped, the floppy disk
is the love-note still sealed in its envelope.
It’s the marker – blank – above its own strange grave.

IQ84

I'm about half way through Haruki Murakami's IQ84 which is set in an alternative 1984 Japan. Murakami has always rubbed me the wrong way and I think he's been a bit overpraised in the past, especially by American critics. In one of the two Murakami novels I read prior to this one the Johnnie Walker walking man logo came alive and in another one there was a talking cat. This taxed my patience. I suppose it is magical realism or Kafkaesque surrealism or something. I found it intensely irritating and not at all cute. I haven't liked a talking cat since Alice in Wonderland and that kitty isn't so cute either.

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Murakami began to turn for me when I read his non fiction book about running What I Talk About When I Talk About Running which I enjoyed very much. And I have to say that I'm liking this book quite a bit too. There are magical realism elements in IQ84 but so far they have been held in check. The plot is pacy and the characters interesting. One of the leads is a hack novelist who ghost writes a novel for a damaged young woman. The other lead is an assassin who kills husbands who beat up their wives (alas she doesn't get Sean Penn even in an alternate 84). This is all to the good. The down side is that Murakami sometimes has the tendency to over explain obvious things and when the dreaded magic element appeared it was a bit sillier than I had been expecting. Silly but also, impressively, a bit scary. The book has peculiar similarities with the other Japanese novel I read this year The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet: both have dual protagonists who tell their stories in alternate sections and who are strangely connected; and at the heart of both novels is a weird Japanese religious cult. Actually if you were to take Jacob De Zoet and mash it with the Iain Banks novel Transitions (which I also read this year) you'd pretty much get IQ84. 

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More when I eventually finish this very long book. 

Synth Britannia

As I said in the post below I've just finished a novel set in 1981 called The Cold Cold Ground and throughout the book the protagonist of the story, a Detective Sergeant in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, has a few little laments about the state of contemporary music. For him and for me the golden age of pop music was the period from about 1964 - 1980 when rock and roll was diverse and interesting and the great bands were firing on all cylinders. The death of John Bonham and the break up of Led Zeppelin brought to an end the amazing period of heavy metal, John Lennon's murder closed the book on the Beatles and the implosion of the Sex Pistols took much of the momentum from punk rock. 1981 saw the rise of synth pop and this was a music that I hated. Perhaps taking my cue from Britain's vicious music press, the NME, Melody Maker etc. in my 13 year old brain these bands were 'inauthentic' upper class art school boys playing poncy songs on poncy machines. Real men played guitars, basses and drums not synths. In fact as this BBC 4 documentary attempts to show the synth bands were the real outsiders: geeky working class kids heavily into JG Ballard, computers and dystopian sci-fi movies. In other words they were quite a bit like me. "Tout comprendre rend très-indulgent," as Madame de Stael said. Indeed.

Let's Set Fire To Tears: Early Word On The Cold Cold Ground

Coming in January 2012...Hey, do me a big favour, tell a friend about this book. And then tell two more friends...

It's undoubtedly McKinty's finest novel: a visceral journey to the heart of darkness that was 1980's Northern Ireland. Written with intelligence, insight and wit, McKinty exposes the cancer of corruption at all levels of society at that time. Sean Duffy is a compelling detective, the evocation of the period is breathtaking and the atmosphere authentically menacing. A brilliant piece of work which does for the North what Peace's Red Riding Quartet did for Yorkshire.

---Brian McGilloway

THE COLD, COLD GROUND is a razor sharp thriller set against the backdrop of a country in chaos, told with style, courage and dark-as-night wit.  Adrian McKinty channels Dennis Lehane, David Peace and Joseph Wambaugh to create a brilliant novel with its own unique voice.

---Stuart Neville

The hunger strikes mark the bleakest period of Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’, and it’s entirely fitting that Adrian McKinty should be the writer to plunge into that darkest of hearts. It’s a rare author who can write so beautifully about such a poisonous atmosphere, but McKinty’s prose is a master-class in vicious poise as he explores the apparent contradictions that underpin Ulster’s self-loathing. Be in no doubt that this novel is a masterpiece: had David Peace, Eoin McNamee and Brian Moore sat down to brew up the great ‘Troubles’ novel, they would have been very pleased indeed to have written The Cold, Cold Ground.

---Declan Burke

The Cold Cold Ground is a fearless trip into Northern Ireland in the 1980’s:  riots, hunger strikes, murders -- a time when every action from the mundane to the extreme is a political statement, yet Adrian McKinty tells a very personal story of an ordinary cop trying to hunt down a serial killer.

---John McFetridge

Adrian McKinty's The Cold Cold Ground has got to on my five best of the year [list] as it is riveting, brilliant and just about the best book yet on Northern Ireland.

---Ken Bruen

Adrian McKinty is the voice of the new Northern Irish generation but he’s not afraid to examine the past. Through Sean Duffy, his latest protagonist, he applies his unique writing skills to our troubled history expertly. This writer is a legend in the making and Cold, Cold Ground is the latest proof of this.

---Gerard Brennan

Micksploitation - The 25 Most Condescending Irish Films

"My God your Irish accent is worse than Gerard Butler's"

No Irish American films here. Just ones set actually in Ireland...Many of these were very popular and some of them are good but they rubbed me the wrong way. 


25. Widows Peak
24. The Van
23. Dancing At Lughnasa
22. Ryan's Daughter
21. Da
20. The Quiet Man

19. The Commitments
18. Waking Ned Devine
17. Michael Collins
16. The Wind That Shakes The Barley
15. Cal
14. The Crying Game
13. Holy Water
12. High Spirits
11. The Devils Own
10. PS I Love You
9. The Snapper
8. Irish Jam
7. Angela's Ashes
6. Darby O'Gill And The Little People
5. Far And Away
4. Hidden Agenda
3. The Match Maker
2. Leap Year
1. A Prayer For The Dying


Some good Irish films? 
Bloody Sunday, My Left Foot, Hunger, The Secret of Roan Inish, December Bride among others...

Arguably - Christopher Hitchens

Writing is a craft and like all crafts it takes practice to become a master. Christopher Hitchens has been writing short form essays for 40 years now and he's gotten very good at it. So good that he may be the finest polemicist working in the English language today. In the crazy circus of contemporary letters it's nice to read someone whose prose uses the right word at the right time and whose cup foameth over with intellect.  Arguably, is his latest collection of reviews and longer pieces for Slate and Vanity Fair. Sometimes reading Hitch is like watching a skilled juggler wow an audience and other times we're definitely in the realm of the high wire walker. The latter comes to mind when reading Hitch's attempt to square his advocacy for the invasion of Iraq with his acerbic and angry opposition to the first Gulf War in 1991. Hitch's logic is, at best, strained: 1991 had a clear casus belli, a clear UN mandate and a very clear mission and Hitch's pitch that the case for invasion was stronger under George W. Bush is somewhat acrobatic. But that's the lowlight of the collection. As several reviewers have pointed out, the finest parts of Arguably are the sections on literature where Hitchens shines a fresh light on some familiar texts. Hitchens's enthusiasms are mostly infectious: WH Auden, George Orwell, PG Wodehouse, Gore Vidal's fictions, Philip Larkin's poetry. Hitchens is largely batting on his home field here and I wish he'd chanced his arm a bit by venturing into the rougher American terrain of Pynchon, DeLillo, McCarthy etc. But perhaps that's something that's just a bit beyond him. Although Hitchens took out American citizenship and knows the Constitution backwards no one will ever mistake the old chap for anything but an Englishman abroad. 
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Apart from the stuff on Iraq the weakest essays in Arguably are where Hitchens dips his toes into the world of science and mathematics, here he is especially credulous and even a little naive. Hitch seems to believe everything the Astronomer Royal or Stephen Hawking or Richard Dawkins has told him and hasn't the intellectual background to wonder whether these men are as significant as they think they are within their own fields. (Hawking and Dawkins have never even come close to winning a Nobel Prize). Hitchens seems to think that science just exists "out there" without further need for interpretation and the work of Kurt Godel, Werner Heisenberg and Paul Feyerabend seems to have passed him by. Hitch is a little bit wide eyed when discussing people like Dawkins who aren't really scientists at all, merely science writers. 
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But ultimately these are minor quibbles which irritated me but might not irritate other people. Hitch has stage IV cancer of the oesophagus and has been fading recently. I hope he's around for a long time because I sure will miss him when he's gone. I'll miss his intelligence, his humour, his honesty, his insights and most of all the fact that even when you disagree with him you are usually too bowled over by his prose to complain very loudly.

Crime Factory The First Shift

Crime Factory: The First Shift is an excellent collection of noir short stories. And I say this not because of but in spite of the fact that I'm in it. My tale was an attempt to write a noir in the most unlikely setting that I could possibly think of. No not a cozy English vicarage, that's Dame Agatha's territory but that yuppie Thunderdome known as a squash court. Whether I pulled it off or not you'll have to judge for yourself.
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There are lots of great stories in The First Shift which has been brilliantly assembled and put together by the bright young things of Crime Factory Magazine. You can read a review of TFS here and another one here and you can get it on Amazon or at all quality book shops. How do you know if its a quality bookshop? Ask them if they have TFS and if they don't they're not.  

An Interview With The Coolest Man In The World

Having just listened to Tom Waits's excellent new album I thought I'd supply this link to an interview with Waits who, for me, is coolest man in the world. Much of the album gets played here and if you like Waits then you'll probably like this a lot. Unfortunately the interview is on NPR with Terry Gross who very much speaks with that awful, contrived, NPR voice but Waits is his usual charming self: when Gross tries to throw him with an obscure Dada reference he quotes an entire Dada poem back at her. Check and mate.

The New York Times Books Of The Year

Goddamned hipsters (and no I dont get some of these labels either)

The New York Times has picked its 10 best books of the year, here. The five best fiction books are The Art Of Fielding (a baseball novel), 11/22/63 (Stephen King's time travel romp), Swamplandia (a comic first novel), Ten Thousand Saints (another first novel, this time about AIDS), The Tigers Wife (a novel about the Balkans wars). I haven't read any of these books but the baseball one seemed sort of good until I found out that it was written by a goddamned hipster from Brooklyn who went to Harvard, runs a zine and was the subject of a bidding war. Strangely though I have read 4 out of their 5 non fiction choices which I've cut and pasted below (the exception is the Malcolm X book). 
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A World On Fire is a massive history book by Amanda Foreman whose father is the director and screenwriter Carl Foreman (and who wrote the classic film High Noon). I went to college with Amanda and remember several discussions with her about the Civil War and the trans Atlantic slave trade which she was obsessing about even then. Arguably is Hitch's essay collection which I loved (the Times primly avoids mentioning the best essay in the book which is about the history of the blow job). The Boy In The Moon came out in Australia last year and is a heart wrenching and very hard to take memoir about being the father of a disabled son. Thinking Fast and Slow is a terrific book about memory and perception. Missing from the Times's non fiction list is Stephen Pinker's game changing new book about violence. Anyway here's the ones I've read and the NYT take:

NONFICTION

ARGUABLY

Essays.

By Christopher Hitchens. Twelve, $30.

Our intellectual omnivore’s latest collection could be his last (he’s dying of esophageal cancer). The book is almost 800 pages, contains more than 100 essays and addresses a ridiculously wide range of topics, including Afghanistan, Harry Potter, Thomas Jefferson, waterboarding, Henry VIII, Saul Bellow and the Ten Commandments, which Hitchens helpfully revises.

THE BOY IN THE MOON

A Father’s Journey to Understand His Extraordinary Son.

By Ian Brown. St. Martin’s Press, $24.99.

A feature writer at The Globe and Mail in Toronto, Brown combines a reporter’s curiosity with a novelist’s instinctive feel for the unknowable in this exquisite book, an account — at once tender, pained and unexpectedly funny — of his son, Walker, who was born with a rare genetic mutation that has deprived him of even the most rudimentary capacities.

THINKING, FAST AND SLOW

By Daniel Kahneman. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.

We overestimate the importance of whatever it is we’re thinking about. We misremember the past and misjudge what will make us happy. In this comprehensive presentation of a life’s work, the world’s most influential psychologist demonstrates that irrationality is in our bones, and we are not necessarily the worse for it.

A WORLD ON FIRE

Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War.

By Amanda Foreman. Random House, $35.

Which side would Great Britain support during the Civil War? Foreman gives us an enormous cast of characters and a wealth of vivid description in her lavish examination of a second battle between North and South, the trans-Atlantic one waged for British hearts and minds.

The New Boring

Saw an article in the Guardian last week about The New Boring. My attention span is not what it was so I forget who wrote it and what it was about exactly (something about Downton Abbey and Adele I think) but I did remember the phrase and hated it for its condescension. But then I thought better of that. Here are my nominations for The New Boring: 
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1. Brooklyn. People from Brooklyn, hipsters who live in Brooklyn, stories about hipsters who live in Brooklyn, TV shows about people who write stories about hipsters who live in Brooklyn. 
2. Ricky Gervais. (For his unfunny TV shows and movies not for his 'ironic' attacks on people with Downs Syndrome.) 
3. Comic books: great when you're 13. Unless we're talking about 2000AD which, er, I still read. 
4. Reality: Geordie Shore, Jersey Shore, The Only Way is Essex. I know we're doomed, you don't need to shove it in my face. 
5. The Huffington Post: vague fake-lefty new age poorly written schlock for eejits. 
6. God: both pro and anti.
7. Australian Sport: especially Netball and Aussie Rules. Netball is basketball for tall Edwardian ladies. Aussie Rules is Gaelic football with all the fun taken out of it. And since half (!) the teams in the league qualify for the post season the regular season games are meaningless as well as dull. (I except St Kilda from this rant, obviously).  
8. Blogging: What the hell am I doing coming up with drivel like this when I should be off writing The Brothers Karamazov or something.  
9. Zombies: Really? Come on, enough already. 
10. Vampires: See #9 above. 

Five Days in London

Over the weekend I read a theatre review in The Daily Telegraph about a new play called Three Days In May which is about the extraordinary 72 hours in May 1940 when, after the defeat of France, the British War Cabinet debated doing a deal with Hitler. The villain of the piece is Lord Halifax representing the Nazi-loving English aristocracy who thought an arrangement could be made with the Fuhrer. The hero of the piece is Churchill who saw exactly what kind of a man Hitler was and knew that if Britain capitulated or surrendered it would become a slave state. 
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The play is largely based on an amazing history book I read a few years ago called Five Days In London by John Lukacs. As Publishers Weekly explains in its summary: 
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Lukacs posits that it was during those five days in London "that Western civilization, not to mention the Allied cause in WWII, was saved from Hitler's tyranny...Had Britain stopped fighting in May 1940, Hitler would have won his war...Thus he was never closer to victory than during those five days in May 1940." A quarter-million British troops were trapped by the Germans at Dunkirk. The British public, ill-informed about this reality, remained apathetic, and the War Cabinet was divided over what action to take. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union had yet entered the war, but Churchill resolved to fight "till Hitler is beat or we cease to be a state."


I don't know what the play is like but the book is absolutely riveting. You don't need to be a big fan of alternative history to posit a scenario whereby Britain makes peace with Hitler; Germany attacks Russia with the full Wehrmacht (unbogged down in Africa or anywhere else) and easily wins. In Lukacs's book the tension between Halifax and Churchill all boils down to one cabinet meeting where Churchill told his cheering colleagues that he would rather die in the last ditch than make a separate peace. The cabinet refused to make a deal, somehow a quarter of a million men got evacuated from Dunkirk and the British won the Battle of Britain. By October 1940 Britain was still alone but feeling a lot more sure of itself and any deal with the Nazis was off the cards. By June 1941 Hitler invaded Russia and by December 1941 the war was effectively lost because Zhukov beat the Germans at the gates of Moscow and Hitler foolishly declared war on the USA. I find Lukacs's view pretty compelling...if Churchill had wobbled or been less than convincing in that climactic cabinet meeting in May 1940 then perhaps the thousand year Reich would have become a horrifying reality.