This pattern is amazing.

This entry was written by Pete Hindle, posted on June 30, 2009 at 11:18 am, filed under Regular and tagged bed, photo, picture, textile, texture. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

Confederacy of Dunces is a book from the late 1960’s, set in New Orleans. I first heard of it from the writer/speaker/internet guy Merlin Mann, who uses a line from it as his Twitter ‘handle’, differentiating his presence on the mighty microblogging service from his more professional website, 43folders.com.

As I said in my last post, I’m trying to read my way out of the sci-fi genre. More accurately, I’m trying to expand my knowledge of literature, and as I consistently find Merlin Mann’s web writing approachable and interesting, I wanted to see what sort of book he find inspiring. I came across my copy by accident in Black Flame Books – after guiltily buying another SF book to add to my collection, I turned to the non-genre piles, grabbed the first book at random, and it happened to be Confederacy. Score!

Confederacy is a book that belongs wholly to a subsection of American literature, the humorous look at American society. Other authors working in that subsection might be Pynchon, Dave Eggers, and David Foster Wallace, all of whom have written books that use wry humour to reflect on contemporary American life. I have to say “might be” because I’m just not an expert, and I don’t have a lot of literary knowledge about American writers.

I was prepared to not enjoy this book. I’d brought it on a whim, and I have plenty of other books that I could have switched to if I had found it tedious. But much to my surprise, I enjoyed it and found myself reading it quicker than I thought I would. It’s main strength is the way the author, John Kennedy Toole, manages to create a wide range of interesting characters, and yet keeps them as separate individuals. There is no sense in this book of the individual characters merging into one, as can happen with some novels.

Not one of the incidental characters seems to drop in to serve a plot function, unlike, say Paul Coelho or other Magical Realism authors. By using New Orleans as a backdrop, perhaps Toole has a easier time of it – the city is famously strange – but instead of the shorthand “N’awlins” that you see in films such as Easy Rider, it is the strangeness of any small community. Everybody knows each other, and the interconnected actions of the characters drive the plot in an understandable manner that actually makes sense.

Despite the tone of the book, it does have a happy ending – not that I’m against sad or sorrowful books, I just don’t want to wade through a few hundred pages of misery to find that all the characters die in the end. In fact, the ending is almost setting the book up for a sequel, but one of the saddest things about this book is that it was published posthumously, eleven years after the death by suicide of the author.

The fact that the book is so good, is commonly regarded as so good, and yet the author never saw any acclaim for his work is very thought provoking. Like Infinite Jest, it’s a book that today’s leading internet writers and commentators are really keen on. Are these long-form texts the product of the same drive to making jokes that we see in the writing of Gruber and Mann? As extremely short-form texts start to dominate – shorter even than blogging – will we lose the future novelists who would make us laugh in a way that questions our short-termist society?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but reading Confederacy of Dunces made me want to both read and write more. That’s surely a sign of a good book, right? I’d advise you to pick it up if you were looking for something new to read, because in it’s dense text we see the sort of authorship that might be dying out now.

This entry was written by Pete Hindle, posted on June 29, 2009 at 1:02 pm, filed under review, writing and tagged american literature, blogging, book, confederacy of dunces, literature, long form, merlin mann, review, short form, toole, twitter. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

Now that the scary ‘100th post’ is out of the way, this seems like a good time to talk about the program of reading I’m undertaking this summer. For my coursework, I’m slogging through what seems to be an unending amount of PDF’s and websites which suck all the joy out of reading. I even have a automatic folder of PDF’s that I’ve collected over the course of the year that refer to things that are Worthy and To Be Read.

Thanks, but no thanks

To counter-act this, I’m reading a lot of different stuff. Stuff that is out of place from the usual stuff I read. I’ve just finished Confederacy of Dunces, and have a small pile of interesting fiction to follow it up with. Part of that involves doing the Infinite Summer challenge, where I’ll be reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace over the course of the summer.

This all stems from last year, when I realised that I’d pretty much read all of the SF that I was interested in. That’s not to say that I’m no longer interested in SF, it’s just that I read so darn fast that I’m going to have to wait for more books to be written. I was also stymied in conversation when talking about books – I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve got blank looks after making reference to classics of science fiction literature.

(It’s not my fault you’ve not read your Bester)

In an effort to both better myself and have more conversations about books then, I’m now announcing my summer reading list:

1. Confederacy of Dunces (completed!)
2. Child 44 (lent to me by the lovely and kind Colleen)
3. Palimpsest
4. Infinte Jest
5. Hell’s Cartographers
6. Douglas Coupland (no, it’s a book about Douglas Coupland, I’m not being stupid)
7. Queen of Candesce
8. McSweeney’s 29

As you can see from clicking those links, a lot of those books are still quite SF in nature, so I’d be grateful for any suggestions as to other stuff I could read. I’m not sure that I’m up to reading any Bronte quite yet, but anything more intermediate than straight-up regency would be interesting… (just not Georgette Heyer, okay?)

This entry was written by Pete Hindle, posted on June 26, 2009 at 1:16 pm, filed under Regular and tagged amazon, book, reading, review. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

This is my one hundredth post. I’d like to say that I’ve got something either deep or meaningful to say, but I’ve just been staring at the blank pages of a word processor today for so long that I’m without anything interesting to share.

This entry was written by Pete Hindle, posted on June 25, 2009 at 4:56 pm, filed under Regular and tagged 100, meta, website. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

I’ve just brought a new bag.

I should explain; I ‘m only really excited by the prospect of buying bags and notebooks. After all, anything could go into them. This means that I own a lot of notebooks (they’re cheap) and some really swanky bags. I tend to pay at least £40 for a bag and look for features like being waterproof, having lots of pockets, and making me look more manly.

My last bag had all those in spades; A North Face messenger bag. Made of the same kind of material that lorry tarpaulin is made from, it’s waterproof and pretty indestructable. I know this because KLM tried to destruct it on my trip to Finland earlier this year, but left it looking cooler by virtual of battlescars. Thanks KLM!

Bag with externalised cruft

It is a messenger bag, which means that it’s great for bombing around town in, and I’ve mainly been using it around town. However, now that my knee and the weather are better I’ve picked up a new bag for long-distance cycling, so it’s time to see what cruft is knocking around in the bottom of my bag. That is:

•    One AAA battery, from when I was best man for Brian’s wedding. I had around £20 of batteries in my bag for other people’s digital cameras.
•    One Staedler blue pen, which truthfully belongs to an ex-girlfriend.
•    One wodge of pink post-it notes.
•    One uni-ball fineliner, which I brought before getting a space pen
•    My passport
•    One paperclip (not red)
•    A plastic bag from Micro Anvika (where?)
•    A leaflet from the Newcastle Philosophy Society
•    One discount voucher from KLM, who lost my bags in France
•    Two unused toothbrushes and packaging
•    Small crumpler bag which I use for carrying tools in, as I am a nerd and like tools
•    One softback notebook, brought whilst doing a residency in Liverpool with really nice people
•    A large hex nut and matching washer
•    A black nylon cord
•    Notes on green post-it notes about the Royal Society
•    Various receipts, averaging a value of £10.38
•    The bag for my sunglasses, which I thought I’d lost

I’d love to hear what others have in their bag – what tech does Alistair carry around in the bottom of his bag? What’s knocking around in trans-european Pippa’s bag? Does Yvette habitually have writing tools in hers, and does Brian have any electronics in his? Does David have some climbing equipment, or just a power bar? And is Oli carrying around some fancy cooking oil? Please post your cruft for other to see!

This entry was written by Pete Hindle, posted on June 6, 2009 at 12:53 pm, filed under irregular, review and tagged bag, cruft, riding, stuff. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

Crows are the color of anarchy
and close up they’re a little scary.
An eye as bright as anything.
Having a pet crow would be
like having Voltaire on a string.

This entry was written by Pete Hindle, posted on May 28, 2009 at 6:05 pm, filed under Regular and tagged crows, poem, poetry, Ursula K. Le Guin, writer. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

As you might know, I’ve moved house. This new house I live in has a cat, which I’m looking after tonight.

So, the first chance it gets, the cat does a runner and I’m left shaking the box of cat kibbles in the back garden and feeling like an idiot. Ten minutes go by, then twenty, and then an hour, until I’m left thinking shit, the cat’s disappeared, the landlord’s going to come back and freak, and I’ll have to move out because it’ll be horribly awkward living with people who think I killed their cat. Well, it would, right?

I decided to go out and search for the cat. Turning round the front street, past the mosque, I go and check out the garages round the back. It’s dark, and I’ve got my grandfathers maglite in my hand. Oh, and the streets on fire.

That’s it, I think, I let the cat out and vandals obviously set it on fire. It’s not a great excuse, but at least it’s not my fault this time. Anyway, being a conscientious citizen I call the fire brigade, who come and put the fire out (everything else was just smoldering by this point, like the skip two doors down). I head back, and Masie the cat is finally ready to come in.

This entry was written by Pete Hindle, posted on May 26, 2009 at 1:26 am, filed under irregular, processing and tagged cat, fire, heaton, newcastle. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

I’m putting this up because my mum told me she liked it. Thanks! It’s a video made with the programming language Processing, inspired by the work of Douglas Coupland.

This entry was written by Pete Hindle, posted on May 25, 2009 at 12:00 am, filed under Regular, processing and tagged everything's gone green, mum, processing, video. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

According to wikipedia, the US Forces dropped 2.4 million pop-tarts on Afghanistan in 2001. Currently, you can only buy two out of the total of forty-three flavours of pop tarts in the UK, those being Chocolate and Strawberry. There is no information on wikipedia as to what flavours native Afghan’s received in 2001.

This entry was written by Pete Hindle, posted on May 22, 2009 at 10:51 am, filed under Regular and tagged fact, food, pop tart, war, wikipedia. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

This is a piece written for Kino Bambino, a local zine run by film fans in Newcastle. You’ll be able to pick up a copy from the Star and Shadow, amongst other places, from 14/05/2009 onwards.

Have you noticed a trend with summer blockbusters? I have. They like to take a well-known nerdy book, film, or TV show, and make a new, shiny version of it. Currently, we can see this happening to the Star Trek universe, which has been operating since the sixties as a sort of Rosetta Stone of sci-fi TV.

The earliest forms of Star Trek were glorious technicolor slices of cheese; later versions of the show have a sort of po-faced seriousness that scared off sane people from watching anything like it. In a sort of no-man’s land there were an increasingly cheap series of films that never got any better than Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, despite going all the way up to Star Trek X. I’ve seen all of them, and I can hardly remember what happens in Star Trek X (‘Data dies’ is all I can remember from that 90 minutes of my life.)

And this summer, we get what they are calling a ‘reboot’ of the franchise. Why? Well, Star Trek is just too big a money-spinner for Hollywood to ignore. The last TV version of Star Trek was so dull that nobody watched it, so a big-screen re-imagining lets the suits play merry hell with the existing universe of Trek – which is no bad thing.

Star Trek’s universe was reliant upon the idea of evil aliens being bastards to us poor benighted citizens of the universe. This is dumb, and ignores practically 90% of plot-lines. Where are the evil humans trying to take things over? As a race, we practically live for taking things over, and we’ve thrown up some of the most evil bastards ever. When you combine the two (Jeffery Archer, I’m looking at you here) you get great plotlines, which make for great movies.

The new Star Trek is about making the original series sexy again, the same way that Planet of the Apes got made over, the same way that GI Joe is getting a tummy-tuck and boob job later this summer, and the same way that Star Wars got botoxed to within an inch of it’s life in 2004. But the sad part is, it doesn’t make any difference.

Star Trek doesn’t need any new fans; people dress up like Klingons at the weekend anyway, so it’s a fair bet that they’ll spend a fortune on anything with the prefix ‘Star Trek’. The reason that the franchise got rebooted is so that your mum knows what’s on at the cinema, and that’s because the economics of modern Hollywood means crushing as many people into the stalls as possible. And everybody has a slight fondness for Trek, somewhere, even if it’s just Spock and his neck pinching.

But it’s not your mum that’s going to watch the film four times and then go home and Facebook his mates about how great it was; it’s your average nerd who’ll be proletising this new Star Trek. Anything with an inbuilt fan-base that loves it already is going to get picked up by Hollywood over the next half-decade, and then flogged to within an inch of it’s life as the moguls seek to earn some money.

So stand by for a flood of films that have your less sociable friends grabbing their coats and heading out: later this year, Maurice Sendak’s ten-sentence children’s book “Where the Wild Things Are” will make a splash. We’ll also see more Harry Potter and Transformers, and a sequel to horny-but-celibate vampire movie Twilight. As long as you’re not looking for something original, there’s plenty of geeking out that can be done at the cinema.

This entry was written by Pete Hindle, posted on May 13, 2009 at 12:07 am, filed under review and tagged film, review, star trek, writing. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.