Yesterday was my twenty-third birthday. It was very nice that loads of people remembered and wished me ‘Happy Birthday’.
Thank you, all.
But 23 feels awfully old (relatively speaking). 21 is still young, 22 is not really of note. But at 23, surely there is some expectation of maturity and sense, and proper adult-ness?
Had our youth weekend away at Garelochhead Parish Church, which is just around a wee bit from Faslane naval base. Eleven of us in all got the train through to Helensburgh, where we were met by the minister from the church.
It was a good time to get to know some of the guys a get better and have a laugh, with new experiences (mountainboarding rocks, but every muscle hurt for the next couple of days) and plenty of chat.
I feel I am just about recovered by now!
Cabin Fever was crap.
Plain and simple: crap.
Got to go see this last week. An experience :-)
It is known that I like Tarantino’s movies – with the exception of the insomnia-curing Jackie Brown – and I’ve been looking forward to Kill Bill Vol. 1. And was not disappointed.
I haven’t really as much to say about this film as I usually do. Violent certainly – got to be among the bloodiest movies I’ve ever seen, but in a slightly silly, comic-book sort of way. Slight let-down at the end, as I’d rather see Vol. 2 now, thank you very much. All in all, extremely entertaining, if not for the faint of heart or those bothered flying limbs.
What a week! Let the posting catch-up commence…
You may have noticed over to the right that I’ve signed on for NaNoWriMo 2003: the challenge to write a novel in the month of November.
Yes, I am a fool.
The target is 50000 words. To write every day in November, that would be an average of around about 1700 words a day. But I won’t be writing every day, because we are moving house on the 7th of November. Rule out a day before and a day after, as well. And we’re going to visit family in NI at the end of the month. Scratch another couple of days. Add in my general lazyness and my general busyness, and you have to seriously question my ability to complete the challenge.
Still, it’s worth a laugh, don’t you think?
Turns out some nice, kind person [arsehole] has decided to make a rather fetching alteration to the bodywork of our (two months new) car [sit on the bonnet and leave a bloody great big dent in it]. I feel so grateful.
Grrrrr.
Contemplating how quickly I munch through novels. In the last couple of weeks: the previously mentioned Adam Williams, an old Terry Pratchett I must have read a couple of dozen times (anyone else do that?), the new Terry Pratchett (this one not really very good), some girly thing of my wife’s that I happened to pick and just kept going with, and a chunk of the latest Neal Stephenson.
I reckon I must average between 80 and 100 novels a year. That gets expensive. And it may say something about my life, although I’m not sure what.
The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure by Adam Williams
BEWARE: Here be spoilers!
Adam Williams’ first novel (written during weekends and holidays over the last five years) is a sweeping, lengthy – 700 pages almost exactly – story telling of the experiences of a group of European missionaries and businessmen in a fictional town in north China immediately before, during and after the Boxer uprising in 1900.
One of the most affecting, and certainly thought-provoking, books I’ve read in some time, Palace powerfully portrays the consequences of cultural superiority at the uncomfortable interface of ancient Chinese culture and the ‘modern’ European ways of technology, as each group openly views the other as ‘barbarian’. Williams says much about tradional approaches to Christian mission (not all bad, by the way), and about suffering and sacrifice: his scenes of mass execution as missionaries are martyred are humbling and moving.
The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure of the title is the town brothel, run by a vicious madam and her sadistic son, where the rich and the powerful meet to play and do business. Here, as well, is where one of the central themes of the book dealt with most openly: the medical missionary’s black and white Christian morality comes up against the local Mandarin’s honourable but ultimately self-serving pragmatism as the price the Mandarin demands for conveying the remaining small group to safety is an hour alone with a certain pregnant young Englishwoman. The clash of cultures is brought down from academic consideration to an issue of life and death for the doctor, his wife and children, and the unborn baby.
Williams’ prose is not always the most skillful, and he occasionally gets bogged down in unnecessarily lengthy descriptive passages, but as a man whose family has been in China for generations (his great-grandfather having been a medical missionary in China at the time this story is set) and who lives and works there himself, he displays the country and life there in vivid colour and clarity.
His characters are intriguing mix: most of the ‘baddies’ are quite two-dimensional, but almost all of the ‘goodies’ are much more complex. For example, the Mandarin himself is primarily self-serving, concerned with himself and his position, yet risks both to save the lives of his philosophical sparring partner and his family. Henry Manners, the semi-hero of the piece is anything but virtuous, yet still a sympathetic character. And even though the Boxers are drafted as villains, Williams’ makes clear their motivation in a way that leaves plenty of room for sympathy.
It’s not all high-brow philosophising, though. Palace is also a gripping story of action and romance and good old-fashioned swashbuckling that should translate very well to the rumoured film and/or mini-series. Apparently he’s even writing a sequel, although how well the surviving characters will stand up without the dramatic historical backdrop is open to question. I’ll wait and see.
(BTW, the post title hasn’t really got anything to do with the book. It’s just the first quote that came to mind that had to do with a brothel!)
From the LICC mailing:
“David Blaine is now over halfway through his 44-day isolation in a perspex box suspended above the river Thames. He has consumed nothing but water since 5th September. According to his website he is ‘motivated by the possibility of pushing our perceived boundaries.’ ‘It’ll be triumphant for a human being to survive this,’ he has said.
But human beings already have. The effects of starvation and isolation are well-documented. Nothing Blaine endures will advance medical knowledge. He is not fasting to listen to God or protesting against injustice. His ‘performance’ seems without a purpose, art for art’s sake.
The various advertisements on his official, Channel 4-hosted website –McDonalds, Ford, BT, Mastercard, O2, Hyundai – suggest there might, perhaps, be some other motivation.
If and when Blaine completes his ordeal he will be thinner, weaker and richer. The media circus will dismantle and the crowds will drift away. We can only hope that some seed of interest in the loneliness and hunger millions endure every day will have been planted in their minds, if not by the showman, then by the person beneath him parading the placard which read, ‘A fool chooses to starve himself and we choose to watch. One billion people have no choice and we ignore them.’”