Kit Whitfield's Blog

Scary dolphins

2010-02-24T10:42:00.003Z

My second novel, In Great Waters, treats of the subject of mermaids (as many of you know, and if you don't, oh boy are you missing a treat. Really. Go buy the book. Go on, I'll wait.)

As this rather nice review points out*, I take an unsentimental view of them, seeing them as, well, creatures who live in the sea. And if you've seen The Blue Planet, you'll know that the sea is not a sentimental place. I decided to present them as closer to cetaceans than to fish: if mermaids, or 'deepsmen', as I called them, are social enough to be in any way related to humans, it makes sense to assume that mammals. Which means no underwater cities of pearl or anything like that: for one thing, it's highly unlikely that settling in a particular place would mean anything other than starvation for a large predator, for another you build buildings to keep the weather out and it's a fair bet that somebody who spends their time below the sea surface isn't that bothered about getting rained on, but the main reason was simple: if you're basically cetacean, you need to surface for air regularly. Nomadic, tribal and survival-minded creatures seemed the likeliest. Deepsmen, I reckoned, would be something between chimps and dolphins.

And are dolphins gentle beasties? Well, as this article I just got sent points out, no. If anything, I drew it pretty mild. My deepsman protagonist doesn't get beaten to death in his infancy.

It's an interesting thing: when I was writing Bareback I studied up on the legends a great deal. Partly this was just to check if anyone else was doing what I was doing, which nobody seemed to be, but it also turned up some interesting facts about the historical origins of the werewolf story: in days gone by, people were actually executed for 'being werewolves' as part of the broader moral panic that grew up around witchcraft. Werewolf stories tend to be correspondingly harsh. Mermaid stories, on the other hand, were not something I researched that much; the ones I saw seemed to be rather on the pretty side, which is fine in itself but not the way I write. It's only reading the article on dolphins that it occurs to me where this disparity may come from.

Wolves are land predators; if you were a farmer in 1600, they were land predators that might grab your sheep or your children. We see them close enough to be clear that even if there were magic about them, it wouldn't necessarily be a beneficient, human-serving magic. Wolves have their own priorities, and getting food is at the top of the list, and if serving that interest conflicts with our interests then that's somebody's hard luck, and you just have to hope it'll be the wolf's.

Dolphins, on the other hand, have for most of history only been seen in glimpses, a magical flash of silver at the ship's prow. What happened beneath the sea in the days before scuba and cameras was obscure - and crucially, very few sea animals prey upon humans. A shark may take you, and indeed Jaws made fine fiction out of that possibility, but cetaceans don't have humans on their list of edibles. They may hunt the fish that humans want to eat, but fish aren't like herds: you don't buy and guard them, you just take your boat out and hope to find some, so if a dolphin is competing with you for food it's harder to notice. The result of all this is that the ways in which a dolphin can be aggressive, wanton, violent - the ways, in fact, it can be similar to our worst qualities - were very hard to spot. We could see that they moved in groups and that they liked to play - again, qualities that we share, but among our best qualities - but the darker points of correspondence were, for centuries, below the water-line.

The upshot of new discoveries is that mermaids seem, in many ways, a less fantastical idea than they might once have. Sea mammals, it turns out, aren't really very different from land mammals: all are capable of intelligence, loyalty, play, curiosity and murder. The legend of mermaid as beautiful mystery isn't a bad one, but it comes from an era of limited opportunities to observe; if we'd been snorkelling for our food back in the Middle Ages, it might be very different nowadays.

Will the new research on dolphin behaviour, with its hunting for sport and infanticide, affect mermaid legends of the future? If so, well, remember you heard it here first...

*I've mentioned previously that I try to avoid my reviews, as they mess with my head and are not the best source of feedback, but a cyber-friend pointed me to that one.

First charity Mikalogue

2010-02-23T15:01:00.004Z

The request from Jarred L. Harris: I'd love to see a Mikalogue in which she reflects on humans. I'd love to see more of how she perceives human behavior, possibly that of the humans she behaves.

The result:

Treatise on Human Behaviour by Mika The Scientific

Observation: Humans behaviour is sometimes feedin Mika and sometimes ignorin.

Hypothesis: Feedin behaviour can be encouraged and ignorin behaviour discouraged.

Experiments to date:

1. Singing the Feed Me Song on its own.

Observation: Sometimes Kit feeds when hearing the Feed Me Song.

Experiment: Sing the Feed Me Song at regular intervals.

Outcome: Kit does not invariably feed.

Conclusion: Ineffective method without backup.

2. Scratching sofa.

Observation: When scratch sofa, Kit looks round, then sometimes feeds.

Experiment: Scratch sofa more.

Outcome: Initially Kit fed. After a few days, moved to ignoring. Then moved to the Squirter, resulting in wet fur.

Conclusion: Ineffective method with negative consequences.

3. Observing the dinner bell, which comes from little box Kit talks into.

Observation: Often Kit hears dinner bell, picks up box and says, 'Hi honey, are you on your lunch break?' Then feeds Mika.

Experiment: Tried singing the Feed Me Song whenever dinner bell box rings.

Outcome: Sometimes Kit says 'Okay honey' and feeds, sometimes says 'Honey, it's not lunchtime' and doesn't feed.

Conclusion: Method bears further investigation.

4. Improving paper and card on the table.

Observation: When Mika plays with paper and conquers (Mika the Mighty), Kit hears noise and looks round.

Experiment: Chew up paper when hungry then sang the Feed Me Song when Kit looked round.

Result: Initially Kit ignored, then moved to the Squirter, resulting in wet fur.

Conclusion: Inadvisable method when Squirter to hand.

Overall conclusion: Humans prove responsive to stimuli, but in limited ways, either due to failings of intelligence or moral character. Strong conditioning may be necessary to shape behaviour for maximum efficiency. Mika The Scientific's Excellent Research Centre open to all offers of funding to pursue further study; will accept cash or kibble.

With thanks to Jarred from his generosity.

I've been away from blogging for a while..

2010-02-15T12:12:00.001Z

...This is why.

Charity Mikalogue

2010-01-15T12:22:00.005Z

Almost all of us have heard by now of the terrible earthquake in Haiti and the urgent need for charitable donations. I am therefore proposing the following:

You donate money, and I will write a Mikalogue in your honour. (Or possibly Mika will, depending on your suspension of disbelief.) I'd recommending the charity Medicins San Frontiers / Doctors Without Borders, who are already setting up hospitals and need a lot more money.

So here's how it's going to work. Send me a 'thank you for donating' e-mail that's dated and timed after this post went up (kitwhitfield at hotmail.com) and records a donation of ten pounds or more, and with it a request for a situation or subject you'd like to see Mika deal with. I will, some time later, put up a post identifying the donors, and will then over the next few weeks compose and post the Mikalogues. They will be interspersed with other posts so as not to overdose, but I will get round to all of them eventually.

(Standard legal disclaimer, which is hopefully unnecessary but I've been trained to err on the side of caution: all Mikalogues including any in the future remain entirely my copyright and intellectual property. I retain the sole right to use suggestions as I judge best, and to sell, license, adapt or otherwise use and control any Mikalogues past, present or future unless otherwise stipulated.)

I'm anticipating a manageable number of donations and requests here. If it turns out I get a deluge, I may have to adapt a bit to be practical - combining several people's situations for comic effect, perhaps. We'll see when we get there.

In any case, let's raise some money for Haiti and have some fun at the same time.

When horror films are sadder than weepies

2010-01-07T12:43:00.001Z

A while ago my husband rented a horror movie called Hatchet from the library, almost entirely because of its strapline: 'It's not a remake, it's not a sequel, and it's not based on a Japanese one.' Sharing his sense that good copywriting deserved some kind of reward, I settled down with him to watch it.

After about forty-five minutes, I turned to him and said, 'This is making me sad. I don't want to see all these people die. Can we turn it off?'

'Yeah,' he said, 'I think I agree with you.' So we ejected the DVD with most of the characters still surviving, put it back in the box and returned it to the library. I believe everyone dies in the end, but I refused to witness it.

Hatchet is a fairly traditional slasher movie, neither particularly good nor particularly bad, and in itself not necessarily worth making a big fuss over. Its characters were broadly drawn and based on various traditional types, but mostly pretty likeable; while they were the fictional equivalent of skittles, set up to be knocked down, both of us found ourselvess surprisingly reluctant to sit through their various bloody fates.

Which points towards an interesting trend in recent horror films: there's something awfully sad about seeing all those people die.

My husband, for instance, has yet to recover from Wolf Creek, a rather well-scripted gorno in which three extremely nice young travellers meet a terrible fate at the hands of an evil bushranger; the point where the first girl was getting hacked up, he tells me, any sense of horror, fear, shock, dread or any of the other emotions the genre is supposed to evoke were entirely swallowed up in sorrow. Not tragic, cathartic sorrow, but just grisly, miserable unhappiness at seeing such awful things happen to someone.

I don't think this is how horror movies are supposed to make you feel.

Having seen old-time slashers like Halloween and Friday the 13th, they don't have quite the same effect. They, too, involve rather nice people meeting undeservedly ghastly fates, but the effect isn't quite so saddening, for several reasons.

The first has to do with character writing. Partly because of the cheap sound equipment and, shall we say, variable skills of the actors, old-style slasher characters exist in a somewhat dreamlike world. They seem like nice people, but nice people we never get to know that well: there's a kind of distance between them and us. We care for them as disinterested strangers rather than as acquaintances: their personalities are sketched in only roughly, their voices come from far off, and they inhabit the world of nightmare where death is to be expected.

The second has to do with build-up. Old slashers hit the ground running and don't stop to rest: if I remember right, we begin both Halloween and Friday 13th with a killer's-eye view murder. Tension is established quickly with the dispatch of characters we haven't had time to get fond of, and from there, the film stalks. Time without violence isn't hanging-out time, the creation of little story arcs to be cut short unfairly or of hopes and dreams never to be fulfilled: it's time in which death lurks behind every bush, and while the characters may be ignorant enough to be relaxed, we, the audience, are no such thing. Our attention is always forced towards the next outburst of violence: after the horrified start when the bad guy leaps out of the closet there's actually a degree of relief as he plunges his knife home: at least the terrible waiting is temporarily abated. The stretched, nightmarish anticipation of an old slasher pulls us to and fro, making us wait for the next murder almost as tautly as the killer does. Dying characters betray no hopes, because we are never allowed to cherish such illusions: the end is coming and we know it, not just because the poster promised horror but because the film has, and has never promised anything else.

In the 2000 documentary Scream And Scream Again, Mark Kermode points out that later 80s slashers put as much emphasis on the slashings as the stalkings; since then the slashings have been ever more graphic and the stalkings have been ever more edged out by something that's neither: time with the characters where death isn't imminent. Even if we know intellectually that they probably won't last the hour, such scenes viscerally feel as if we're in a film where people's lives might actually be going somewhere. It's a sharp slap to be plunged back into the slashings, like being jerked from one kind of film to another. Older slashers don't have this problem: they're almost all stalk, so the shocks are the clean shock of dread fulfilled, not the shock of genre dysmorphia as well.

The third has to do with death scenes. Old-style victims gasp when the knife comes out and scream when the knife goes in, and that's about it. They don't weep, plead, howl and flail and shudder for their lives. The deaths are quick and stylised, and as such generally evoke shock and fear more than anguish. Even the infamous meat-hook scene of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, (you can watch it here; be advised it's one of the most gruelling scenes of one of the most gruelling movies from the heyday of slashers, so don't say I didn't warn you, and if you're at work you might want to consider what your boss would think) features far more screams than sobs. A scream carries less emotional expression than a sob: it's a generalised distress call, carrying and sharp, but whether it conveys fear, pain or simple shock - or even excitement - is hard to determine; it's weeping that's the really harrowing sound. Recent horror movies tend to run a greater gamut of wails, and that takes it out of you.

So recent horror movies, through their greater vocal range, calmer down times, better sound quality and more thoroughly established characters, make me sad. I was discussing this with a friend, and she raised an interesting question: what about films that are supposed to be sad? Do I avoid them?

The answer is no. And curiously, I don't find them as upsetting either. Now, on the face of it this makes little sense. Why should a film that goes all-out to make me sad sadden me less than a film that's just trying to scare me?

The answer, I think, is that weepies, unlike slashers, respect your grief.

We discussed Fried Green Tomatoes, one of her favourites, which kicks off with the sudden and pointless death of the nicest person you could ever hope to meet and goes right on from there. But here's the thing: it doesn't bounce on to the next scene with a shake of its head. It takes his death seriously. He's a terrible loss, and the film explores that - focuses, in fact, around his little sister, unable for years to come to terms with her adored brother's absence, and his girlfriend, left without him to marry a man who beats her. His absence reverberates, paying his presence its due. Other people die and suffer, and the same thing happens: the characters mourn, making space for us to mourn with them, acknowledging that it's right to grieve for death.

Weepies, in fact, are as much about coping with disaster as they are about the occurence of disaster. Death is absorbed and processed; even the concept of weeping at a film suggests that we're being encouraged to some kind of catharsis.

A sad death in horror, on the other hand, happens fast and sudden and that's the end of it. We're given no space to work through the emotions it provokes. If we've been given no space to build up any emotions about the deceased except the expectation of their death then that's fine; the death itself is the moment of catharsis. But if the character has been shown as a real person, there's nowhere for those emotions to go. The result is unsatisfied grief and frustration.

You might argue that showing the victims as real people and emphasising the unfairness of murder is more true to life, less objectifying. But the problem is, a slasher film is inherently objectifying. If the entertainment on offer is watching people die, however naturalistically you portray them, however tenderly you evoke their lives, what are they ultimately except objects to be consumed? They're there to get killed: that's the function they serve in the plot. It's why they're in the story in the first place. Not objectifying slasher characters is like being expected to bond with a jelly bean before you eat it.

Fundamentally I think that the older slasher films are less hypocritical about death and sorrow. The addled teens are there to get it in the neck, and there's no point pretending otherwise; if you wanted to watch a film that cared deeply about its protagonists you're in the wrong auditorium. You don't like Halloween's attitude to violence, they're playing The Deer Hunter down the street; go there. A film that tries to show the humanity of victims and the unfairness of death, but makes no room for grief, gets the worst of both, and ultimately comes across as more callous. It isn't any less callous about the characters - they're just as dead, in fact they may well die harder, and they aren't given any more mourning time - but it's also callous about the audience.

There are times when I get the whiff of a judgmental spirit in some contemporary horror directors, a desire to punish the audience. You want a slasher? Fine, but I'm going to make you like the characters and then kill them horribly. You want a spook house? Fine, but there will be real corpses. Old horror morality was crude and simplistic, mostly a cautionary-tale affair of sex and drugs (though I've argued before that the only-a-virgin-survives convention of old horror may be less a matter of morality and more a matter of identification, and that at least some recent horror films are actually more Puritanical rather than less), but recent slasher films, existing in a brave new world where misogyny is unacceptable and teen sex is perfectly normal, seem to have cast around for someone to disapprove of and settled on their viewers.

This isn't the inevitable consequence of a more liberal view of sex; the cautionary tale is still a functional trope in our swinging era. Though it regrettably succumbs to the traditional need for a last man standing with some rather contrived catastrophes in the last few minutes, I'd point to Donkey Punch as a rather neat little morality play, in which three girls unwisely go to party on a floating yacht crewed by four boys, getting enmeshed in a drama where the roles of lover and killer become interlinked. The gruesome events point clearly to the more sex-positive but unarguable moral: don't have sex with someone you don't trust. Despite a laddish tone Donkey Punch delivers some good practical advice: girls, don't go somewhere isolated with unfamiliar boys only after one thing; boys, don't listen to your bigmouth mate. The consequences of ignoring these rules are grisly yet plausible: the girls find themselves suddenly changed from guests to captives, at the mercy of young men who, it turns out, actually weren't joking when they joked about not respecting women. The boys find themselves rife with internal division, pre-existing rivalries blooming into full-blown enmities and cooler heads overruled by the panic of the selfish. All of this plays out a set of morals as consistent as you could find in any teen magazine's advice page, and until the need for punitive mayhem overturns the logic of the story the deaths are grim but not exactly sad: their appropriateness to the story means that, as with the long stalk of early slashers, the audience is well prepared for them.

It's all these deaths that set out to prove that death is unfair and strikes at random that create that effect of unassuaged grief that has been so putting me off recent horror. Death often does strike by unjust chance, but if that's the point you're going to make you need to show how people deal with that, because creating some sense of continuum is how people respond to unpredictable tragedy, and just as much a part of life as the randomness itself. You want realism, that includes showing grieving. And if your story is about a serial killer, random is exactly what death isn't, especially when you're following the traditional formula of a hermetic circle of victims picked off one at a time. That's a contrived scenario, highly structured, created for a story in which death occurs in a semi-guessable sequence rather than entirely at random. Like cobbling together the high body count of old slashers and the sadness of other styles, cobbling together the Agatha-Christie-like closed cast with the randomness of death in the real world is a patch job, leading to an unsatisfying result.

It's the old problem of adapting something internally consistent: if you adapt only some elements without working through the whole thing, you wind up with something inconsistent. Something has to give, and in my case it's audience enjoyment. Maybe I'm not supposed to enjoy these new horrors, but that comes back to the issue of hypocrisy: if the directors think I deserve to suffer for renting a horror movie, what do they deserve for making it in the first place?

So I'm wondering what's going on, and at this point I move into political speculation. It's been remarked, as I'll discuss in a moment, that horror films very often channel contemporary anxieties and pick up on the political crises of the day. Slashers are a distinctively American form, which, added to America's political dominance, makes American politics the likely epicentre from which horror shocks will reverberate. Is there any connection?

Cited in Wikipedia - that's how erudite I am, aren't you impressed? - the critic Vera Dika argues that the satisfaction of watching a slasher is threefold:

Catharsis—Through a release of fears about bodily injury or from political or social tensions of the day.
Recreation—An intense, thrill seeking, physical experience akin to a roller coaster ride.
Displacement—Audiences sexual desires are displaced onto the characters in the film

Catharsis, I think, doesn't work unless it's been properly built up. A sad event is just sad without the structured inevitability of tragic form. Displacement, too, I think is problematic: the desire to have sex is less of a problem nowadays than it once was, and the masked-boy-penetrates-pretty-girl-with-knife formula is no longer the staple - the genders and styles of killing are far more mixed and matched nowadays than of yore. Recreation, maybe. But what about political and social tensions?

Reading over what I said about Hostel, which was, after all, a Bush-era film, dark thoughts about neocons started roiling in my brain. The documentary American Nightmare discusses the psychological effects of the Vietnam war on the makers of early slasher films, the anger and horror that boiled over into angry, horrified movies. Hostel struck me as something of an Iraq film, but from less sensitive respresentatives of its country. (Standard disclaimer: I'm talking about America's erstwhile leaders, not every American. If every American thought like that we'd still be under the neoconservative heel, perish the thought, plus the early slashers I've been praising are just as American as the more recent crop.) As a story it doesn't work very well, but I started to wonder if that's because it comes out of a worldview that doesn't work either. It doesn't function because it came out of a psychological place that is profoundly dysfunctional: rather than protesting against the nightmares of its nation, it's been contaminated by them.

Consider Hostel's plot. Our heroes bumble off abroad, stomping around and doing whatever they please, blithely unaware of any reason why the world might be more than their playground; foreignness seizes upon them with a horrifying and, to them, inexplicable violence (the film itself seems to feel unable to explain the hostel; it just is), and suddenly bad things are happening for no apparent reason.

I commented in my earlier post that the hero has to escape by a really remarkable cascade of deus ex machina devices largely because the film hasn't bothered to establish him as possessing any survival qualities other than his extroversion and his nationality (of the other two victims, one is extroverted but foreign, the other American but introverted, so only Paxton, the survivor, has the magic combination), but if we consider it as a political film, perhaps that's part of the point. If Hostel portrays anything political, it can only be the entitled bewilderment that Bush and his ilk seemed to feel at not being universally loved and deferred to, and the fact that the film had to muddle through an escape is part of that: if Paxton had been required to have anything other than his American frat-boy energy to merit survival, that would have interferred with the entitlement. The whole point is that he shouldn't have had to be anything other than an American jock; Hostel isn't exactly clear on how this is going to save him, but it feels that it ought to somehow. It just wades in and assumes things will probably work out. The plot makes no sense because it's the child of a worldview that feels under no obligation to see sense.

And the randomness of who survives and why is by no means exclusive to Hostel. Cause and effect tend to come uncoupled in recent horror: there's a bloodbath, but no one can explain what comes from where. There's a kind of confused aggression about such films, a desire to see torture done and to feel oneself the victim at the same time (it wouldn't be the first time America's films dealt with its sins by switching sides; consider Rambo), a fear that the world is a bad place where unaccountable things happen to you the moment you step outside your safe space coupled with a surprising uninterest in why that might be - the villains become more and more motiveless, lacking even the demonic sexual twist of the slashers' early monsters - and an undirected punitiveness, judgementalism flapping loose and logic mishmashed, that might well be Bush's legacy. Honi soit qui mal y pense, we're having violence and never mind processing the consequences.

A side-note: Not all the recent sad slashers may have this sense of entitlement - non-American ones are sometimes equally dislocated, as with Wolf Creek - but the sense of dislocation persists. Given that they're equally Bush-era, I think some of them might speak less of brashly misdirected aggression and more of confused despair: cause and effect slip their moorings because Bush created a world where meaningless violence carried on whatever anybody said about it. Some slashers seem contaminated by Bushism and some disoriented by it, but they all speak of a world where fairness is completely inconceivable.

This is pure speculation on my part; if there's anything in it we should expect to see some refreshing new departures in horror as the presidency of Obama starts to sink in. If Clinton's 90s gave us the performance-artist serial killer and the knowing self-parody, which is to say an era in which sophistication and smarts were riding high, and Bush gave us gruesome deaths, confused hypocrisy and a resolute rejection of thought, I'd like to see what's coming next. I'm certainly tired of this fashion; it's long overstayed its welcome.

Why I can't be having with 3D

2010-01-04T12:22:00.005Z

So, happy new year one and all, and welcome to a new decade. The noughties were the decade that published my books so I can't be entirely ungrateful, but as they were also the decade that gave us celebrity reality TV and George W. Bush, I for one am happy to see the back of them and here's hoping for better in the whatever-they're-going-to-be-calleds.

Which brings me tangentially to a subject I've been thinking about for a while: the new technology supposedly sweeping our cinemas - or rather, the phenomenon that attempts to sweep our cinemas every other decade or so then goes away for a while when people decide it really isn't worth wearing those stupid-looking glasses: to wit, 3D cinema.

3-D technology may be new, but the concept isn't. My big brother cherished for months his souvenir glasses on which he proudly inscribed 'I have been through Jaws 3D'; this, if Wikipedia informs me right about release dates, was in 1983, which would make him about nine years old, an age where little boys can reasonably be expected to be excited about the prospect of seeing severed limbs and big teeth in multiple dimensions - and even more, as his note on the glasses showed, to be excited about the boasting rights of having seen them afterwards. Little boys love to feel brave and to have trophies that prove their courage, and the three-dimensional shocks of the shark served my brother's purpose admirably.

Being six at the time and not invited to that birthday party, I never saw Jaws 3D in the cinema, a fact that caused me no sorrow, but among my favourite toys was my red plastic View Master (a toy probably familiar to many growing up in the eighties), which true to the era included a set of ET stills I could examine in three glowing dimensions through the lenses. I personally preferred my nature photography disks in which I could see foxes in their fields and a particularly fine shot of a mouse on a cornstalk silhouetted against the moon, but the fact remained that three dimensional cinema of some kind was available to children in my generation. It was around for a while, then more or less passed quietly away.

Nor was it the first outing; over the Christmas period the 1953 film Kiss Me Kate was on television where, in deference to the 3D it was shot in, characters had a rather disconcerting habit of chucking things at the camera which didn't sit very well with the restrictions of 2D - a point worth bearing in mind for later.

None of which proves very much except that 3D is an idea that seems to crop up at regular intervals, and has yet to actually take hold.

I'm inclined to doubt that it ever will. I'm certainly inclined to hope it never will.

A few months ago I went on an excursion to see Up at the London Imax, one of the biggest 3D screens. While the movie itself was a laugh-and-cry marvel of storytelling, it was also my first encounter with 3D on its current cycle, and I would very much have preferred, it transpired, to be watching in 2D.

Part of the reasons for this were technical: on a big screen, you need to be positioned exactly right for the 3D to work, and from where we were sitting the images kept drifting in and out of alignment. Paying full concentration to the film became somewhat difficult when I had to divert attention into trying to keep my eyes straight or searching the screen for the magic point from which all might coalesce.

That might be a problem that better seating or a smaller screen would resolve, but I don't think it's negligible. Inclusivity is a real issue, and if I was having problems it seems like a serious one because I have, with my glasses on, perfectly good eyesight. That's far from universal. I'm informed that a lazy eye, a pretty common thing to have, makes it almost impossible to keep the images clear. I watched as an adult; those enormous glasses handed out looked pretty hard to wear on a child-sized face. None of these problems seems small. If you're going to all the extra trouble of adding a third dimension and paying over the odds for it, it seems a fundamental requirement that it should actually work, and work for everybody who paid for their tickets.

Even if it could be made to work - and it seems vulnerable to all kinds of failures - there still remains the real problem, which in my opinion is this: it really doesn't seem worth it.

3D isn't actually a three-dimensional image. What you see, for those of you who haven't been to such a screening, is a series of two-dimensional planes layered one in front of the other rather like a toy theatre. Depth is managed crudely: there appear to be spaces between each layer, but perspective, curvature, connection between foreground and background, are flattened out. Rather than leading to the background, the foreground just sort of floats in front of it. An image coming straight at you can be dramatic because the screen can manage direct forward motion fine, but there's a limited amount of that you can do in the middle of telling a story, and for the most part things just sort of hover around.

This leads to the sense that we may indeed be watching a technological marvel, but that we'd be watching something more immersive if we only had two dimensions to cope with. Part of this is just the marvellousness itself: I actually found myself distracted from the story. Cinema is a big, boisterous, overwhelming form and always has been, but 3D ramps that up: unlike looking at a picture, you're looking at something that you'd never, ever see in the ordinary world, a fantastical optical illusion, one that aims squarely for the 'Oooohh!' part of the brain. Which is fine in its way, but sometimes 'Oooohh!' is not the emotion the movie is trying to evoke. Up! had moments of grand spectacle, but it also had small, domestic moments, moments of pathos and tender mundanity - that was the whole point of the story, really, that the everyday ordinary stuff is actually the most important part of your life - and that's hard to square with the sense of big, overwhelming spectacle. Possibly this might change if we became used to 3D, but I'm not so sure: like I said, 3D is never going to look entirely mundane because it's an optical illusion we need special glasses to perceive. We don't live in a world that will let us get used to that: I think it's always going to feel slightly surreal. If you want a big visual splash that's great, but cinema isn't just a visual medium, and with the visuals distracting from the dialogue and the music the other elements are overbalanced and the gentler downstrokes of narrative (and where would we be without them?) are going to struggle.

More than that, I really don't think we need technology to get a 3D experience, because here's the thing: two dimensions is all we ever see anyway.

The human eye is, like a movie screen, relatively flat. Close one of them and everything flattens out: we don't actually see in three dimensions. What we have instead of 3D eyes are sophisticated brains that are extremely good at intuiting the presence of a third dimension based on the appearance of the visible two.

Which is why, if you show us a flat image like a photograph, our eyes will immediately clock it as possessing depth, even if we know perfectly well it has no such thing. That's what our eyes do; it's what they're evolved to do. When an ability is crucial to your species's survival the species tends to become rather good at it, and there are few things less beneficial to your survival than continually walking into trees you thought were further away and off the edges of cliffs onto ground you didn't realise was a thousand feet below you. If we couldn't 'see' a third dimension out of two we'd all be strawberry jam smeared over the pages of history.

Which is why, when I look at a cinema screen, the thought, 'My goodness, how flat this looks' never passes through my mind. It doesn't look flat. It looks not unlike the world does: two dimension that my brain automatically cooks into three, maybe not quite as fully as with reality but fully enough that it passes without question.

Seeing it in 3D, on the other hand, calls attention to the limitations of the medium. If my brain is assembling a sense of depth it does a deceptively good job; creating a third dimension without distracting me is part of its vocation. If it couldn't do it while all my conscious thought was focused on other things, my ancestors would have been too busy going 'Ooohh!' to notice the approaching tiger: brain-created 3D is both convincing and ignorable in a way that works perfectly for storytelling. If, on the other hand, the cinema screen is waving a set of layers at me, the whole thing looks less three-dimensional, not more, because my brain can't put them together. It's an entertaining spectacle when it works, and would lend itself well to scenes especially shot to show off the device - there was a trailer for the latest Christmas Carol, for instance, featuring a series of icicles that 'you' smack into one after another, and even to someone as curmudgeonly about 3D as me it was quite impressive. But the trouble is, that's not storytelling, which is what most films do. It's what happens in the moments when you're racing from one part of the story to the next. It's narrative bridging rather than narrative. If the audience is going to follow what's going on between the characters, you need a fair proportion of shots where the camera is taking a fairly steady view of what's happening side-to-side instead of back-to-front, which is where 3D is at its weakest. Movies generally view things from the side, because that's the easiest way to see what's happening, but from the side is the shot most vulnerable to the toy-theatre effect. Spectacle can support storytelling, of course, but in the case of 3D, the spectacle is at its most dramatic when it's doing things that make little room for the plot.

Which puts another problem in front of us: unless we all go over to all-3D, and I really hope we don't, the requirements of 3D are going to fight the requirements of 2D. If you watch the Christmas Carol trailer, you'll see an example of a film that's working hard to take advantage of what 3D does best, and what 3D does best is have things looming towards you or racing away. The result is many, many shots where things are flying at full speed to or fro; it's probably fun in 3D, but in 2D it starts to get a bit obtrusive. That was a problem in Kiss Me Kate: the flying objects continually being tossed camerawards looked, on a television screen, messy and ill-judged rather than astounding and impressive. Contrariwise, what 2D does well is vistas, horizons, composition on the horizontal, and in 3D that looks kind of boring.

The two different methods, in short, require different kinds of shot to look nice - and since they both fall into the same art form, that's a problem. It's as if you had to write a book for two different audiences, one that wanted to read the page from left to right and the other from right to left. It would be a clever writer indeed who could reconcile the wishes of those two audiences, and any work they could produce under those demands would no doubt be very impressive - but it would be a kind of formal experiment, a work produced to meet a difficult set of constraints, and things like emotion, drama and expression tend to struggle under such formal conditions. Call me cynical, but a book where every line had to be a palindrome would probably not be the most moving story in the world.

3D versus 2D is nothing like as extreme a conflict, of course, but it faces the same basic problem: if you're going to make a work of art that works as both, it will be so difficult that other priorities - priorities that are probably, at the end of the day, more important - will be jostling for space. The simplest solution would be to have some scenes that worked best in 3D and some in 2D, but that means everyone who watches it in any form is going to have to absorb some bad shots, which hardly seems a good idea. My hat goes off to any director or cinematographer who can put together a film composed of shots that work perfectly in both forms, but I fear my money isn't on their likelihood of success.

It's for this reason, I suspect, that 3D tends not to last each time someone tries it. It puts a whole load of extra pressures on the cinematography that make it really hard to avoid bad shots one way or another, and the result at the end is a spectacle that's impressive as a novelty but doesn't add to the storytelling, looks flatter than 2D and is harder on the audience members with bad seats or eye problems. Faced with all that, a director may just throw up their hands and say, 'You know what people always go and see and have done for the past century? Good 2D films.'

Which is what I myself would prefer. Maybe someday 3D technology might improve to the point where it looks like more than a series of overlaid slides, but I don't think we're at that place yet, or anywhere near. I know we're living in the future and all, but some of our inventions are still a bit ropey, and till they're better I'd rather watch 2D movies that aren't ashamed of leaving the work of finding that always-illusionary third dimension to the device that does it best: the viewer's brain.

Christmas Mikalogue

2009-12-23T18:29:00.001Z

Oh here we have a Christmas tree with branches to the ground,

Is not as good as Mika who is nowhere to be found,

For Mika sits beneath the tree, ensconced all safe and sound,

And is hidin in comfort and joy

Comfort and joy

And is hidin in comfort and joy...

Merry Christmas, all!

The difference between a mental illness sufferer and a jackass

2009-12-17T16:11:00.009Z

When I get into online conversations, something happens about once a month. Either in an attempt to be compassionate or to condemn, somebody will declare that this corrupt politician, that creep, this annoying person or that wrong-headed one, is probably suffering from a mental illness. Inevitably the person making the comparison doesn't actually have much experience of mental illness, and consequently knows as much about it as anyone who hasn't studied it as a professional or encountered it in their personal lives does - which, in this society so appallingly under-educated when it comes to mental illnesses, is to say: very little.

Their understanding of terms like 'psychotic', 'paranoid', 'schizophrenic' or 'mentally ill', therefore, tends to be colloquial, and they're usually doing what everyone does, which is assume a word means pretty much what you were told it means. In cases where a word has two meanings, though, a colloquial and a clinical one, there are two distinct meanings, and it's not uncommon for someone to conflate the two.

I always end up saying the same thing, so I think I'll write a blog post explaining why you shouldn't do this. It's important.

Mental illness is not a behaviour or a character trait. It's an illness. People who suffer from a mental illness are physically ill. Depression involves damage to the hippocampus, for example, which is to say organic brain damage not unlike with Alzheimer's. Many mental illnesses involve some kind of chemical imbalance. Much treatment is currently what a doctor friend of mine refers to as a 'black box': you go in the black box, something happens, you come out the other side feeling better and no one's sure exactly what went on in the box. Which is to say that even doctors are still just chipping away at the edges of mental illness: while great strides are being made, it's still poorly understood. What's not in dispute is that mental illness is like diabetes or AIDS, an actual illness that the sufferer is not undergoing voluntarily. In many cases they're in agony and seriously considering killing themselves to get away from it.

One of the worst things about mental illness in this society is that it's deeply stigmatised. People sneer at the 'happy pills' that help people in anguish struggle back to health. No one wants to hire the schizophrenia sufferer. Admit you have a mental illness and you run the serious risk that the person you tell may decide you're weird and creepy or weak and self-indulgent and they want nothing more to do with you, even if you're bravely fighting every day and successfully beating it back and holding down a job, a family and a social life just like everyone else.

The stigma comes from the fact that we're ignorant. And I want to stress this: saying that someone's ignorant about mental illness isn't insulting them. Everybody's ignorant about it until their son or their best friend or they themselves go under. Personally I believe schools ought to put classes on mental illness at the same high priority that they should put sex education, because your chances of encountering mental illness are roughly equal to your chances of having sex, and both can be killers if you don't know what's what. But till that day, we none of us necessarily know very much about it.

But these are our brothers and sisters suffering from it, this is us. I've heard it estimated that three out of four people will get a mental illness at some point. We may start out not knowing enough about it, but we need to inform ourselves. People are dying, people are weeping in pain, people are losing their homes and their families and their friends. And they're good, normal, decent, ordinary people, no different from anyone else. They just got sick. It can happen to the best of us.

The problem with calling someone mentally ill because they're acting unreasonably is that it perpetuates false ideas about mental illness, and false ideas are what keeps the stigma going.

Often when I see someone call this person or that mentally ill, they're trying to be charitable. Saying that maybe this or that hateful demagogue is suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, for instance, sounds kinder than saying that they're either a liar or a fantasist. But it isn't, not when you remember that we're all connected. Calling someone clinically paranoid because they're hateful is conflating hatefulness with clinical paranoia. Calling a fantasist clinically paranoid is trivialising genuine involuntary delusions by implying they're mere daydreams. Calling someone wilfully ignorant clinically paranoid increases the stigma against sufferers by suggesting it's mere laziness or self-indulgence rather than real sickness that's troubling them - and the world is plenty full of people who are already saying that. It's a tremendous implied insult to the people struggling to keep paranoid schizophrenia from ruining their lives and the lives of everyone they love, and the people too sick to know how sick they are who are sleeping rough for fear their neighbours will kill them in the night, and the people who've been through that hell and fought their way out.

And that's just an example, but it holds true in other cases. There is a difference between a stupid belief and a clinical delusion, an unreasonable attitude or a nasty personality or a wilful disregard for the truth and a mental illness. People are prone to imply someone's mentally ill (however they vaguely understand the term) when that someone is actually just being a jackass. And if you conflate 'jackass' with 'mentally ill', you're insulting millions of people in pain. You are also factually incorrect.

Yes, a lot of us don't actually know what the words precisely mean. So if you want to use the word, go away and look it up. There is plenty of information out there. If you don't know what a word means you have no business using it, especially when it refers to a real medical problem. Mental illness is often depicted in fiction, often inaccurately, but it's not a fictional condition. It's a common, ordinary kind of disease that destroys people every year, every month, every day.

Saying that someone's mentally ill because they're being stupid or weird perpetuates the stereotypes that ostracise and isolate and hurt all the good people who happened to be unlucky enough to have a disease. It isn't charitable, it isn't funny, it isn't accurate. It kicks people who are down.

We all of us need to be better informed about mental illness, because one way or another it's going to affect all of us. Using such words casually and ignorantly spreads misinformation and makes things worse. Please don't do it.

Private Christmas traditions

2009-12-16T14:09:00.003Z

Most families have Christmas traditions of some sort, but what about personal ones? Do you have those?

I tend to set aside a few hours to wrap the gifts I'm giving - I actually love wrapping - while watching Little Women with candles and a lit Christmas tree. It's very cosy and I always look forward to it.

What habits do you enjoy at Christmas?

Mikalogues In Session

2009-12-09T21:16:00.004Z

Okay, I admit it: I have been remiss in keeping the blog up to date recently and my last post was about cookies. I'm sorry; I've been going through an intellectual dry spell with nothing particularly fascinating to say.

Mika: Never has fascinating things to say unless about kibble anyway.

Kit: Mika, hush. I'm trying to write a blog post.

Anyway, it's now the season of good cheer and I was...

Mika: Is Mika the fascinating. Mika has blog fans. You just filler between episodes.

Kit: Mika, that hurts my feelings. I'm a professional novelist. I write good blog posts.

Mika: Are they about kibble?

Kit: Not usually, but...

Mika: Mika rests case.

... excuse me. I was thinking that it might be a festive thing to try and ...

Mika: But Mika is festive. Is attractively patterned gold and white and brings cheer whereever goes!

Kit: Yes, darling, that is true, you are a lovely puss.

Mika: So why ignoring?

Kit: Do cats celebrate Christmas?

Mika: Cats celebrate anything that has fish treats in it.

Kit: That's very ecumenical of you, honey.

Mika: Will there be fish treats?

Kit: If you like, pet. Now will you excuse me?

... to try and mark the progress of advent by ...

Mika: How bout some more supper?

Kit: Mika. One, you've had your supper. Two, I'm trying to talk to my public.

Mika: But Mika wants attention! Waaants! WAAAANTSSS!

You know what? I'm going to have to give this up.

-----

The management regret to announce that we have been unable to bring you your regularly scheduled program due to kitty interference. We are therefore providing this substitute:

The Mikalogues In Session

Any reader who wishes to converse with, ask a question of, or make a comment to Mika is invited to do so on this thread. Mika may deign to reply.

Mika: Or not if doesn't feel like.

Chocolate chocolate cookies

2009-11-23T11:01:00.003Z

The festive season will soon be upon us. With this in mind, I'd like to share my recipe for chocolate cookies with chocolate.

A note: as it's a recipe I made up myself (to support a friend who was getting married in one week's time and had to work nights up until the big day, if I recall correctly), the quantities are approximate. The main point is this: you want a fairly stiff dough, otherwise they start to melt a bit in the oven. If you find them spreading into little lacy bits at the side, you need more flour.

Chocolate Cookies With Chocolate

-1 and a half cups butter

-1 and a half cups sugar (fine if you want a smooth texture, Demerara for a bit more crunch)

-200g good quality dark chocolate

-2 and a half cups plain flour

-Minstrels. Lots of Minstrels. Like, two large bags.

(For those of you who don't live in the UK, Minstrels are large chocolate buttons with a brown candy shell, like M&Ms but much bigger. You'll need to seek out your own equivalents, though I'd counsel against Smarties because they're produced by Nestle who are nasty people. Something big is best.)

Cream together the butter and sugar. Gently melt the chocolate and add, mixing in. When the mixture has cooled a little bit, add the Minstrels.

Gently fold in the flour; the less you stir, the less tough the cookies will be. You want a good stiff dough.

Wet your hands to prevent the dough sticking, then start making the cookies. Scoop out a piece of dough about the size of a golf ball, roll it into a sphere and then flatten it into a little patty. Lay on a baking tray lined with baking parchment (if you have to use greaseproof paper, prepare it first: brush with oil then shake sugar over it). The cookies spread a bit in the over, so leave some space between them.

Bake at 175 C, Gas Mark 4, 350 F.

The cookies are done when they've spread out to cookie size; some of them will have little cracks in them. Take them out and let them cool on the tray for a bit before trying to move them, or they'll fall apart.

This recipe makes really quite a lot of cookies.

Watching the same movie

2009-11-19T17:53:00.003Z

The other day, I had a most intriguing experience.

My husband and I were hanging around the house discussing our musical tastes. He's a fan of movie music, a genre I've never been that keen on, but he was playing me some of his favourite clips and talking about how and why he liked them, and, as John Williams was on the program and Williams pastiches themes from a lot of classical composers, we had some fun for a while playing spot-the-influence. Well, I won a point for spotting Stravinsky, which made me feel very good about myself (and never mind it was a piece of Stravinsky I knew from Fantasia), and in my little flush of triumph I found my brain attuning itself more than usual to the themes and movements of music - probably in the hopes of spotting something else and getting another little ego-boost.

In this cheerful mood, my husband decided to show me one of his favourite sequences in a movie: the airport chase sequence in Casino Royale. Now, this is a movie that we both like, and I had assumed it was for similar reasons: the acting is good, the characterisation is decent, the timing is precise and expert. But, taking down the DVD, my husband explained that he really liked how the music sucks you in and builds over the course of the scene, and how everything cuts around it.

To me, this was something of a new thought: when I watch a movie, I barely notice the soundtrack unless someone's singing. I pick it up subliminally, but there have been plenty of occasions where my husband has said something along the lines of, 'See, there's that leitmotif again?' and I've responded, 'Huh? There was music?' But the conversation had done something to my consciousness, rearranging it along more musical lines, and I was interested in trying to see what my husband had been talking about all these years, so I settled down to watch the scene, saying to my brain: 'Okay. For the next quarter hour, you're Gareth.'

And you know what? It was a completely different movie. I was watching a movie I'd never seen before.

The music flexed and swelled and drove down its own path; the faces of the actors blurred into a general swirl of movement that accompanied the music like a conductor's baton. Things I'd never noticed took centre stage; things that had previously been the focus of my attention disappeared to make room for them. After ten minutes, I turned to my husband and said in astonishment, 'You watch movies like you're at a concert, don't you?'

And suddenly a lot of our differences in taste, which we'd been rubbing along with amiably for years, made perfect, absolute sense.

There are movies he loves that bore me - but they have good scores. There are movies I love that he can't be having with - they're all talk. We've sat through each others' favourites many a time, but I suddenly realised something: we weren't watching the same films at all.

For me, language is crucial. I watch for dialogue, and for the performances that make the dialogue real and imply further dialogue taking place in the characters' heads. I've been known to rewind so I can hear that sentence again and remember precisely how it balanced, to watch this scene against that one in random order so I can check the consonances of statement and speech between the two. Rhythm and harmony and echo and flow: these parts of my brain are filled up with words, and it leaves very little room for the music. Sometimes my husband's tried to show me a particular piece of music and the conversation has gone thus:

G: Okay, it's coming up now...
K: ... Sorry, I missed it. I was listening to the dialogue. Can we try again?
G: Sure. Here we go.
K: ... Sorry, I got distracted by the dialogue again. Another go?
G: Really? Okay... Get it that time?
K: Um - almost. One more time?

When there's speech, I almost literally can't hear music. Almost all the music on my iPod is songs of one kind or another: instrumental music is something I can very seldom sit still for as anything more than background. I need lyrics to anchor my attention in place. Once there are lyrics the accompaniment and harmonies snap into focus, but without them, my brain starts looking around for the words and stops paying attention to the notes.

It turns out that not everybody is like this. My husband's iPod is full of movie and classical music; with the exception of Melody Gardot - just about the only artist we love equally - almost the only music with lyrics he owns is hip-hop, a form where words have taken over to the point where music voluntarily takes a back seat.

So when we watch a form that combines words and music, my verbal brain and his musical one screen for totally different experiences. It's rather astonishing to discover we've been living in different worlds all along, but it explains an awful lot. I'd known in theory that different brains prioritise different things, of course, but this was the first time I'd come close to experiencing what it was like to have a different brain.

And it turns out everyone's like that. Just this weekend I was staying with friends, and one of them - my oldest friend, who I've known for over twenty years - mentioned the movie Stranger Than Fiction. I hadn't seen it, so she described her favourite scene, in which the hero enters a bathroom and we see things from his perspective. Being an orderly-minded man, he sees things in terms of grids: neat, straight lines along the tiles, little percentages indicating how full each of the soap dispensers was, a flashing light over the one broken tile. This, she said, rearranging her chopsticks to make them pleasingly parallel on the plate, was exactly how she saw the world: in terms of lines.

This, again, was a startling thought. This friend has long been dear to me and I'd say I know her pretty well by now, but I wouldn't have believed she saw the world that way; I wouldn't have believed anyone saw the world that way. It struck me forcibly that we have distinctive ways of looking at things. How did I see the world, I wondered? Two things came to the forefront: straight or crooked lines don't bother me, but aesthetically unpleasing proportions do - for instance, when we moved into our new house, I called in a builder the next morning to get rid of the built-in wardrobe in the bedroom because it completely ruined the proportions of an otherwise charming Edwardian space.

More than that, what I see can be best expressed by the phrase Could you grow a plant here? I clock natural light and start to stress out if I'm away from it for too long. I clock the colour green, I remarked, looking at the dinner table and noticing that I'd chosen the green glass rather than one of the blue ones - in fact, now I thought about it I'd actually picked a glass slightly further away from me because of its colour. In streets with no plants in sight, I start to stress out again; it was the main reason I felt I had to move out of Stratford at no small upheaval and expense. Almost every room in my house has plants in it; my front window is dominated by an enormous weeping fig two feet taller than me, and while it's not the most efficient use of space I'd be unhappy without it. My friend sees the world filtered through a grid; I seem to live in a perpetual forest that either is or isn't up to snuff. (You can see evidence of this in Bareback/Benighted: the designers for the US edition decorated the opening pages with tree silhouettes, and going through the proofs I had to agree they'd picked up on something. Trees loom from every corner of the book once you start looking.)

What do you see the world through? What movies are you watching?

The Mikalogues encounter mouse-kind again

2009-11-16T19:09:00.006Z

Mouse: ...THROBBING AGONY THAT SUFFERS STILL AND NOS NOT WHY...

Kit: Oh bugger. Mika, is that you with a mouse again?

Mika: Look what Mika caught in garden!

Kit: Mika, I wish you'd stop bringing those poor little things in.

Mika: Mika the mighty!

Kit: Sigh. Okay, guess I'd better rescue the little polluter.

Mouse: ...she was mute fm transport, I from agony...

Mika: Ha ha, got you again!

Kit: Okay Mika, drop. Drop!

Mika: Fno. Gerroff, interferer in righteous conquest!

Kit: Drop it!

Mika: You drags Mika! Shame upon!

Mouse: ...anguish has no eye fr grace...

Kit: Okay, I need to put a glass down on you ... Man, I wish Gareth was here to do it ...

Mouse: ... now we see fru a glas darkly ...

Kit: Gotcha! Okay, Mika, I'm shutting you out of the kitchen while I deal with this.

Mika: No! No! Give baaaaack! Haaaates you!

Kit: Right, let's just slide this paper under the glass and see if I can pick you up. Hm. Are you in there?

Mouse: ...such eagerness of speed!

Kit: Bugger. Come back!

Mouse: ...perl-doored sanctuary...

Kit: Oh, not under the fridge! Mouse, come out, I'm trying to help you.

Mouse: ...com silence, thou sweet reesoner...

Kit: Mouse, I'm afraid you leave no option. I'm going to have to get Mika back in to chase you out and just hope she doesn't hurt you before I can get to you. Mika, in you come.

Mika: Meet your doom, mousie! Mousie? Mousieeee....?

Kit: Mika, the mouse isn't under the mat. It's gone under the fridge. See, under here, where I'm pointing?

Mika: Chase the pointer!

Kit: No, Mika, you're supposed to be looking for the mouse.

Mika: Fear the claws of doom, pointer!

Kit: Good grief. Okay, I'm just going to have to hope the mouse found a way to squeeze out through the wall. I despair. But I blame you for this, Mika. The idea is to reduce the number of mice in the house, not increase it.

Mika: Feed Mika.

Kit: Do you really think you deserve dinner?

Mika: Mika wants dinner. Wants dinner. WANTS dinner!

Kit: Justice compels me to admit it's dinner time. But this is one of those occasions where I'm holding to the idea that principle isn't principle unless you stick to when you don't feel like it, you little pest.

Mika: DINNER!

Writing Mika

2009-11-11T10:04:00.002Z

Well happy birthday puss! It is Mika's second birthday.

Rather than write a Mikalogue, I thought I'd write instead about the Mikalogues. They're an interesting writing exercise, because they are, in miniature, an experiment in character and voice.

The Mikalogues began as a one-off. I'd already put up a couple of posts to the effect that I was getting a cat, saying not very much about her except that she was new, plus a slightly joky post about her walking on my keyboard which was mostly an excuse to use a photograph I liked to talk about a writing issue, but in which I pretended she was trying to write my novel for me. Such posts were mostly filler, a blog being the literary equivalent of a baby bird's beak, plus an excuse to show off my cute little kitten.

The first Mikalogue, then, was along these lines. It was a newsy post written largely to fill in when I didn't have anything very deep to say about life or literature, in which I complained that the new cat, which we had acquired partly in the hopes she would catch mice, had not in fact caught any - yet was a lively chaser of anything that wasn't a mouse. This being a fairly interesting thing to observe but a dull thing to describe, I decided to liven it up by putting it in dialogue form. Mika at that time was a zany kitten, bounding with energy and highly distractible, so I wrote her voice to sound child-like. I had her refer to herself by name because I'd heard toddlers do the same thing, and gave her a simplified grammar partly to suggest her youth and partly because, well, she was an animal. The Mikalogue personality wasn't particularly worked out. You can see it in embryo form - the grandiosity is not so strong, but the self-absorption and basic friendliness are there; I was trying to express the ridiculousness of a human being expecting an animal to take their concerns at all seriously when the animal has interests of its own.

I didn't plan to follow it up; it was just a comedy rendering of a piece of news. But then Mika actually did catch a couple of mice, and I started feeling a bit guilty that I had represented my pet for the world to see as a hopeless mouser. Since the first post had been amusing to write, I decided to write my update in the same style. Again, it wasn't planned as more than a one-off.

You can see in these first two posts that Mika's voice still wasn't quite settled yet. In the first, she uses the word 'wuv', a rather cutesy contraction that I wouldn't use nowadays since I've established her as grandiose. In the second, crucially, she uses the word 'I', a word I have since excised from her lexicon. In trying to convey a cat's point of view, I came to the conclusion that an animal would have far less self-awareness than a human, and that using the first person would imply too much perspective, too much separation between herself and the world. The modern Mika uses neither 'I' nor 'she' when referring to herself; I find both too human-sounding. She either refers to herself by name or there's simply a blank where a pronoun would otherwise be; as her sentences are somewhat telegraphic anyway - despatches from the Mika-front or headlines on Mika Today - the missing pronouns don't cause a problem. Having her refer to herself constantly by name suggests that she sees herself as a category rather than one individual among many, which seemed to fit with the degree of socialisation a cat displays.

So, I'd written two posts without many plans to write more. Mika's grandiosity was starting to emerge in the second - her habit of referring to herself as 'Mika the mighty' was initially written as a passing mood, the satisfaction of a cat with a mouse in her claws, combined with a desire to apologise to her for what I said about the mice. But the idea of this vainglorious little consciousness rather entertained me. The actual Mika isn't especially vainglorious; she's a creature of impulse like all cats and capable of getting excited, but the giddy self-aggrandisement of her fictional alter ego is mostly projection, an expression of the adoration my husband and I lavish upon her.

Animal consciousness, though, is a subject I found interesting - I researched it a fair bit for In Great Waters - and it seemed to me that a consciousness wired to action rather than reflection was a consciousness with a lot of potential for drama. The idea of carrying on writing Mika tempted me. Especially as character creation is one of the big challenges of writing, but the joky opening posts already seemed to have established the basics of a personality for her.

So I carried on. Being still a kitten and full of antics, Mika was providing plenty of material, even as I was working out her voice. The next post still featured Mika using the first person - 'me' in this case - but I was already drifting away from it, and was only using it as onomatapoeia, as in 'Me out!'

Excited at the game, I ran off a number of posts - including some I never got around to actually posting, largely because I'd committed myself to accompanying each post with a picture and Mika didn't always do whatever it was I was blogging about when I had a camera handy. Some time I'll get around to posting them, probably, but there was enough to go on. The next post featured the first mention of the word 'Mikalogue', and remains one of my favourites: her slightly loopy assumption that rain is a sign the universe is throwing things at her felt like a pleasing expression of a cat's limited ability to form abstract opinions about her place in the scheme of things.

By this time, I was getting confident that people liked them, largely because they were kind enough to say so on the comments. I'd begun wondering whether it would test people's patience, like making them look at three hundred pictures of my baby, but I smoothed it over with comedy and popularity seemed to be coming Mika's way.

(For everyone's convenience, here is the archive before I say more:

The first Mikalogue

The second Mikalogue

A cat-flap Mikalogue

The Mikalogues continue - the first to actually be called a Mikalogue, featuring rain

The Mikalogues meet literature

A weekend Mikalogue

Gardening Mikalogue

Mikalogue: a new business idea - the first point at which I started anthropomorphising Mika past the daily round of animal activities

Mikalogue at home

An epic Mikalogue - of which more later

Mikalogue meets exercise

Proofing Mikalogue

Happy birthday Mikalogue

Poor Mikalogue

Mikalogue: the fighties (the first point at which she refers to herself as Ghenghis Cat, a term I've used since)

Mikalogue: landscape gardening

A Mikalogue that takes place several times a day

Easter Mikalogue

A Mikalogue we hear every weekend morning

Mikalogue of horror

Mikalogue - Kit contemplates evil plans

Rainy day Mikalogue)

The biggest variation, of course, is when I bring in another character. Once, in Mikalogue at home, it was a guest - which is to say a human being - but the other occasions, which remain among my favourites, have involved animals.

All are based on actual events. Two feature a neighbour's cat who, because he has similar markings to Mika but is much sturdier in build, my husband dubbed 'The Tub', an uncharitable name that stuck. (These are they.) Writing another cat was an interesting challenge. I didn't want him to simply be another Mika because that would be dull; however, I didn't want his voice to sound human. The Tub in real life is a somewhat aggressive, alpha-male-ish cat who occasionally hassles Mika but seems less of an issue since she's grown to nearly his size, but as I only encountered him when he picked on my pet, it was difficult to get much of a sense of him. Mika's zooming distractibility is based on reality, but the reality was I didn't like this cat because he bullied my darling, but that it hardly seemed mature to take such resentments out on an innocent cat, never mind a fictional one. He needed a perspective of his own.

Looking at what I knew of him, I knew that he broke into our house to steal food. What kind of person would do that and still consider themselves virtuous - which most people do? I thought about old action movies, Thief-of-Baghdad type stuff, and decided that The Tub would consider himself a kind of swaggering, charming rogue - but a rogue still perfectly capable of getting frightened when approached by a strange human, because he remained, after all, a cat. Everyone is the hero of their own story, so I decided to exaggerate that in the case of The Tub. As Mika refers to herself in the third person, I thought The Tub should too - but I didn't know his name and anyway he wouldn't call himself The Tub. Hence was born a fictional cat who refers to himself as 'our hero' - 'You not gonna hurt our hero?' is still one of my favourite lines, mixing diction as it does - but who also uses complete sentences, as Mika's shorthand was ill-suited to his more mock-heroic style. The Tub will say 'he' where Mika won't say 'she', but like Mika, the word 'I' is too abstract for his vocabulary.

The latest character to enter Mika's fictional life is the wee mouse she dragged in alive, always a grim spectacle. Cats are established in the Mikalogues as grandiose one way or another, but how to write a mouse? The poor little beastie was so utterly dwarfed by every other player in the scene that it seemed wrong to use the same kind of visuals for it; I tried putting its words in a smaller font but Blogger refused to oblige, but I was able to keep the other elements: the absence of capital letters and the sentences that neither begin nor end but drift itallically in and out of the little brain's cloudy consciousness. It seemed to me that, given a brain so small a human could dry-swallow it, mice cannot live in a world of coherent thought; the experience of a mouse must be instead a series of impressions. For this reason, I decided that poetry would be the best way to convey a mouse. I'd already established quotations - in Proofing Mikalogue, Mika quoted 'Burning is no argument', which I'd thought was Rousseau but the Internet suggests is John Reuchlin, so it was already an option. But more than that, poetry is as close as people come to impressionistic writing, and the fact that the mouse thinks in quotations creates a kind of disconnect between its experience, bounded by quotations, and ours, referring more directly to what's happening.

It also seemed appropriate in the light of Mika's established solipsism. The limits of Mika's consciousness made it feel wrong to have her use the self-aware 'I', but in the even more limited scope of the mouse, any identification of self or other felt wrong. Hence, again, the references back to poetry. Because it thinks in poems, the mouse in a sense thinks in abstractions - but abstractions which are always a direct expression of its experience. Fitting the quotations to the event, the mouse experiences every moment as if it were a universal principle: when your brain is too small to sustain more than one idea at a time, I thought perhaps everything seemed equally universal. The mis-spellings and mispronounciations were added to make the mouse suitably small and grubby, and it remains, I think, one of my best Mikalogues.

Writing from the perspective of my cat has been an interesting lesson. One of the commonest things people tend to say is, 'Oh, you must need a lot of discipline to be a writer!', and it's one of the most disheartening as well. Some writing flows easier than others, but the writing that's always flowed best has been from the characters I've enjoyed.

Creating the fictional Mika was in some ways easier than creating a character from scratch; I had the antics of a real cat to provide me with plot and my task was close enough to biography that writing her personality is as much embroidery as invention. But the real reason why she flows, I think, is that she's simply a joy to write. Her giddy self-glorification, her confused mixture of affection and threats, her unshakeable confidence in her own importance, are all tremendous fun - and writing a fun character is easy. Writing is hard to do well when it's a discipline, but easy to do well when it's a game.

It's always easiest to write a character when I feel I've got a handle on how they'd behave in unlikely situations; it means I've got the feel for them, and Mika's one of those. But as well, my husband recently pointed out to me that she's actually not untypical of my writing as a whole, surprising though this may be.

My novels tend towards the melancholic; often my characters inhabit traps of one kind or another, and they tend to struggle with their own identities in a dangerous world. Sunny, impulsive little Mika isn't one of those. But what all my writing seems to be interested in is alternative states of mind. Lola lives in a world where other people go into an unknowable state every month, and her own state of mind is so bent under circumstances that she edges into unreliable narrator territory; from the distance of a few years, I'd say you could argue that she's a character struggling with undiagnosed depression, though this wasn't a conscious character note. Henry, another of my favourites, inhabits a semi-animal consciousness; Anne struggles to balance a sense of kinship with such animality against her intense spiritual longing. The third book, which I'm still locked in a death-match with, starts to look more interesting the more I introduce alternative states. I like writing about characters who see things off-kilter. Mika, gloriously solipsistic and imperviously bossy, is another such; she's just a comic rendering rather than a serious one.

So, writing the Mikalogues - which I fully intend to keep doing, don't panic - has turned out to be a surprisingly interesting set of lessons. They've taught me that writing the fun stuff can produce work that people like, that off-kilter perspectives interest me in any form, that considering animal consciousness is fascinating even if the results look improvised, and that MIKA IS BEST AND KIT SHOULD NOT PRESUME TO ANALYSE. GIVE KIBBLE AT ONCE OR BITES.

If you live in Maine, my condolences

2009-11-05T17:12:00.002Z

Because once again, a state has voted against allowing same-sex marriages.

This is sad and discouraging and frustrating as all get-out.

On the same subject, a while ago I wrote to my MP asking her to support changing civil unions to same-sex marriage. Courteously enough, she replied to me, passing on a letter from the office of Jack Straw. For everyone's interest, here is what it said (typoes and punctuation reproduced verbatim, because I'm not feeling charitable):

Civil Partnership was especially designed to meet the needs of same sex
couples - offering a very similar range of rights and responsibilities to
married couples. The Civil Partnership Act was introduced as part of the
Government's wider commitment to ending discrimination against lesbian, gay and
bisexual people. It was especially designed to meet the needs of same sex
couples - offering a very similar range of rights and responsibilities to
married couples.

It directly addressed many of the injustices same-sex couples faced in
their daily lievs, because of a lack of legal recognition - for example, the
denial of survivor pension rights, the inability to register the death of a
partner, being refused the right to visit a their partner in hospital.

There is legal recourse in discrimination law if lesbian and gay copules
are treated differently from married couples either in the workplace or when
accessing goods, facilities or services, for example, couples' discounts for gym
membership.

The Government does not believe there is need to introduce same sex
marriage, because couples who form a civil partnership get a very similar range
of rights and responsibilities to married couples.

Well. Despite the defensive pride of authorship that rings through the letter - 'We thought about this before we did it, so it's impossible that there might be anything wrong with it' - if the put as much thought into the Civil Partnership Act as they did into this letter, that might explain a lot.

This was my reply:

Thank you very much for your letter of October 12 which I have just
received, passing on Michael Foster's response about the Government policy in
regard to same-sex marriage. I appreciate the communication.

However, I must state that I find Mr Foster's response on behalf of the Rt
Hon Jack Straw inadequate and unjust.

The letter rests on the phrase 'very similar range of rights and
responsibilities' when comparing civil partnerships and marriages - indeed, it
repeats the phrase three times. 'Very similar' is not the same. Unless
Mr Straw can find some extremely compelling reasons to the contrary, we should,
as a nation that considers itself fair, recognise gay citizens as not 'very
similar' to straight ones in their entitlements to rights and freedoms, but
exactly identical.

Marriage is not merely an issue of rights and responsibilities. It is also
an issue of community and recognition. By providing the right to marry, the
government is acknowledging a couple's status as full members of society whose
relationship deserves to be seen as part of the mainstream. A separate but
nominally equal alternative by its very nature excludes a same-sex couple
from the mainstream.

Exclusion from the mainstream, even with an alternative, is not and can
never be fair. Two separate states is divisive and undemocratic. I love my
country, but I love my fellow-citizens more, and it saddens and angers me to see
bigotry compromised with in this manner. I must ask that, as a representative of
Britain's gay citizens as well as its heterosexual ones, you do not accept this
shoddy half-measure and instead press for full and equal acceptance of same-sex
relationships as the legitimate marriages they are.

Thank you for your time and your courtesy in replying to me.

My MP offered to pass this on to Jack Straw, an offer I've accepted; I wait with limited hope to see what will happen next.

Two things really bleak me out about the letter I received. The first is the apparent pride the Government feels in ending abominations like the denial of survivor pension rights, a pride more or less analagous to to Volkswagen being proud their engines don't detonate after five miles.

The second is the apparent blindness to what marriage means. When my husband proposed to me, he didn't ask me to 'Enter into a range of rights and responsibilities of a legal contract, my darling.' He asked me to marry him. And I didn't say yes because I wanted rights and responsibilities. I wasn't particularly interested in his pension scheme or in the ability to register his death; when you're of marrying age, those things are, you hope, a long way off. I wasn't anticipating visiting him in hospital being a regular part of our relationship, and if I considered gym discounts worth the expense of a wedding I would have needed some serious lessons in remedial economy.

I got married for one very simple reason. I got married so I could call myself married. Not for tax breaks, not for access to records, not for legal rights and responsibilities. I got married so I could be that man's wife and so he could be my husband. I got married for a word. We went through the ceremony and said the words, and as the guests filed out we turned and said to each other, 'We're married!' No question over the word, no need to say, 'Well, we're married in the eyes of sensible people at least.' We could just delight in the word. Six months later, it's a word that still gives me a warm, happy glow every time I say it. If the Government had declared that, say, marriage was only for the religious and all secular people were allowed was civil partnerships, saying 'We're civilly partnered' would not feel nearly as nice.

And on the working assumption that I'm a fairly normal person and that most gay people are likewise fairly normal people, I find it hard to believe that it would be different for anybody just because they happen to be attracted to their own sex.

This, I think, is the main reason people oppose same-sex marriage: the word has tremendous symbolic meaning. That's why we all want it, and why some people think it'll be contaminated if those dirty gay people with their not-really-real relationships get their lavender hands on it. But wanting to deny it to other people so you can keep them all to yourself is unbelievably mean-spirited, and it saddens me terribly that so many people still think this way.

So, if you live in England, this is Jack Straw's current position, and I'd encourage everyone who can to send him an e-mail telling him why this is no good. We have a limited window here: distressingly, the Tories are probably going to win the next election, and the chances of them extending marriage to same-sex couples are even worse than Labour's. Let's keep reminding Jack Straw that he's supposed to represent the people, and that includes the people who happen to be gay.

Peter Morgan!

2009-11-03T09:33:00.003Z

Ooh, ooh, look! There's been a new Peter Morgan script filmed! It's called The Special Relationship and it's about Tony Blair and Bill Clinton!

Peter Morgan, for those unfamiliar with the work of the man I'd consider the best scriptwriter in England, specialises in biopics, looking at big personalities during turning-points of history. The Last King of Scotland, which deservedly won many awards, is a portrait of Idi Amin; Frost/Nixon follows David Frost's extraordinary achievement in getting Richard Nixon to confess on television; The Damned United follows legendary football manager Brian Clough's short and disastrous stint at Leeds United; Longford is about the idealistic Lord Longford's controversial attempts to get murderer Myra Hindley paroled. He's also the author of the 'Blair trilogy', beginning with The Deal, about how leadership of Labour went to Blair instead of Brown, then The Queen, a sympathetic look at Elizabeth II in the week following Diana's death and Blair's attempts to get her to address the public. The Special Relationship is going to be the third in this.

I can't wait.

I like biopics, or at least I like good ones, and Peter Morgan's scripts vary from excellent to superb. He fictionalises to varying degrees, but he has an amazing ability to capture the feel of a whole moment in history as well as a distinct and fascinating psyche. If you haven't seen his work, you really owe it to yourself to check it out.

Halloween

2009-10-31T10:14:00.004Z

BOO!

This concludes our Halloween broadcast.

It's not very scary, but I'm ill, so leave me alone.

*Later addition: someone said elsewhere that they were afraid to comment on this, because of, well, the 'leave me alone' thing. This is merely me grumping because I am ill, not an actual demand that everyone leaves me alone. If anyone has any scary stories to share, scary movies to recommend, recipes, pictures of their pumpkins or other Halloween-related stuff, I'd actually really like to hear about it. The pumpkin picture above is one that I carved based on a design by my husband, from a few years back; this year's pumpkin is a cat face in honour of Mika, but I haven't had the energy to put my picture of it on the computer yet. Maybe I'll put it up next Halloween...

Rainy day Mikalogue

2009-10-28T09:34:00.001Z

Mika: Kit! Kiiiiit! Kiiiiiiiit!

Kit: Mika, what? It's hours until supper time.

Mika: Play with Mika! Plaaaay!

Kit: Baby, I have things to do. Lots of things.

Mika: But is boooorrred!

Kit: Can't you go play outside?

Mika: Is raaaaining!

Kit: Oh, I see. Okay, how about this string on a stick? Wanna catch it? Wanna catch it?

Mika: Ha ha! Submit to Genghis Cat!

Kit: Oops, there it goes!

Mika: GOTCHA!

Kit: ... Okay Mika, if you want me to twirl it around for you to chase, you have to let go of the string.

Mika: Fno. Is Fmika's.

Kit: You gonna let me take the string back?

Mika: Fno! Won fair and fsquare!

Kit: Okay, fine. But that means I'm going to let you keep it and get on with stuff.

Mika: You fno fun. Fboo.

Odd limericks

2009-10-23T07:49:00.003Z

In reading John Julius Norwich's 1990-1999 Still More Christmas Crackers (a series of highly entertaining commonplace books), I came across some interesting verses. They were written by the Reverend Patrick Bronte, father of Charlotte, Emily, Anne and Branwell, and quite rightly described by Norwich as 'what must be the most irritating verse form ever devised.'

Basically, the form is serious limericks - but limericks in which the last line deliberately doesn't rhyme. Here are two examples:

To novels and plays not inclined,
Nor aught that can sully her mind;
Temptations may shower,
Unmoved as a tower
She quenches the fiery arrows.

Religion makes beauty enchanting;
And even where beauty is wanting
The temper and mind
Religion-refined
Will shine through the veil with sweet lustre.

Really, it's poetic equivalent of having your teeth drilled. I think what makes it particularly annoying, apart from the moralising - if you're going to moralise, you need to make deeper observations than that - is that the final line may not rhyme, but it does scan. You can break with the form completely and have a quite pleasing effect, for instance (borrowed from this site):

The limerick, peculiar to English,
Is a verse that's hard to extinguish.
Once Congress in session
Decreed its suppression
But people got around it by writing the last line without any rhyme or meter.

That isn't annoying, because once the line runs on past the last syllable the ear relaxes, knowing that the form is being properly broken with. It's as if we were running a race and came in second: we don't get the satisfaction of the tape breaking across our chests, but we run a few paces and cool off. But when the unrhymed last line scans, it's as if we were running a race and the judges sneakily replaced the tape with a brick wall. Thud.

I remember an interesting lecturer at college talking about how the limerick is so inherently comic in its sound that it's difficult to contrive one that isn't funny (or at least, doesn't feel like it's trying to be.) His best example was on Sir Walter Raleigh:

Sir Walter was handy with cloaks,
And tobacco, and packets of smokes.
Such a mighty romancer
Of insomniac cancer -
I thank him, and hope that he chokes.

But I wouldn't say that was successfully serious either. A limerick might well lend itself to anger, but it comes out feeling like an epigram, and epigrams are another form with comic overtones.

I can't think of other non-comic limericks either. There are some that aren't funny if you take them seriously, so to speak, such as Edward Gorey's:

To his clubfooted child said Lord Stipple,
As he poured his postprandial tipple,
'Your mother's behaviour
Gave pain to Our Saviour
And that's why he made you a cripple.'

- which is very upsetting if you think about it, but animated by Gorey's dark humour; it tends to produce an appalled laugh. Edward Lear could do something similar, made less funny by his outmoded tendency to repeat his first line:

There was an Old Man on some rocks,
Who shut his Wife up in a box:
When she said, 'Let me out,'
He exclaimed, 'Without doubt
You will pass all your life in that box.'

Which is pretty creepy, really, and has that uncomfortable diminuendo that Lear's repeated last lines tend to have, but it still feels comic in its form. A lot of Lear's comic poetry is minor-key and curiously sad, and this is no exception, but you wouldn't call it a serious poem.

So the Reverend Patrick Bronte seems to carry the laurel for unfunny limericks, and he does it by - with the best of intentions, I'm sure - using the last line to thump you hard enough that you aren't amused. Unless anyone can think of another contender, I think it's Bronte in the lead.

Here's my take on the subject:

Rev. Bronte, a worthy old cleric,
Whose children wrote books atmospheric,
Tried verse for a time,
But his endings lacked rhyme -
An effect that is oddly frustrating.

Anyone else got one?

We don't need fascists

2009-10-21T11:02:00.003Z

So if you have a moment, can I ask all British citizens to please contact the BBC and tell them that.

This Thursday, the BBC plan to invite members of the British National Party, the openly white supremacist party of Britain, to appear on Question Time. Which is to say, they're planning to treat them like a legitimate political party rather than the bunch of anti-democratic racist thugs that they are.

As I've been saying quite a lot lately, the BBC is a terrific institution with a deserved reputation for political credibility. Even this latest decision, with which I completely disagree, proves that James Murdoch was talking out of what I shall charitably refer to as his wallet when he suggested that the BBC's publicly-funded status meant that it was an organ of the ruling party: inviting the BNP, who everybody hates including the people they lionise, is a pretty serious nod to free speech.

But you don't need to go on the BBC to have free speech. Nobody is trying to shut the BNP up, and saying that they shouldn't get a respectable slot on the BBC is not taking away their right to talk whatever fascist shit they want under their own initiative.

The BNP are best treated as a joke. They are a tiny and wicked gang of extremists who simply don't belong on political prime time, and putting them on the BBC is giving a stamp of legitimacy and a whole lot of attention to people who don't merit it any more than any other nasty crank. Please take a moment to contact the BBC and tell them that.

And, as it's very possible the BBC will do it anyway, let's also agree not to watch. If we reward them with ratings, we're supporting them. We don't need to see this. Until they say the phrase 'We've all changed our minds and we're very, very sorry,' there's nothing any BNP rep can possibly say that's worth hearing.

Real Life Mary Sues

2009-10-20T07:59:00.006Z

[Credit where it's due, this post is an expansion of something sparked off by a comment on Slacktivist...]

Many of us are familiar with the term 'Mary Sue', but for those who aren't, a brief explanation. Mary Sue is a character type generally written by incompetent authors, who, rather than being a three-dimensional person in a world of other three-dimensional people, is an overly perfect paragon to whom all other characters show improbable devotion. Bad characters may hate her, but they hate her with a passion and find themselves equally unable to stop thinking about her: nobody can be indifferent. Someone quoted a Mary Sue character as being one who 'commands love' from all, a person whose very self overshadows everyone else and places them in the background.

It's commonly remarked that such a character is completely implausible. And indeed, this may be the case to some extent. But lately, I've been starting to wonder - because I and other people I know have encountered people who are, in some ways, real life Mary Sues. They're just not quite the way they appear in fiction.

I've blogged previously about a famous literary character, Jimmy Porter of Look Back In Anger, who fulfils a lot of the criteria for a Mary Sue; a Mary Sue rendered with above-average literary skill, but a Mary Sue nonetheless. He's generally acknowledged as a portrait of his creator, John Osborne. And here's the thing: Osborne was a pretty nasty piece of work, but he was, based on the evidence, undeniably attractive. He married five times, for instance; while burning through that many marriages does not speak well to your qualities as a husband, it does indicate a degree of magnetism. Osborne had friends, lovers, admirers aplenty. He had charisma.

Charisma is a curious quality, more easily recognised than defined and quite separate from likeability. Many of us have met charismatic people, and they are, by their nature, fascinating. They can also be complicated.

At the simplest level, charisma can be a kind of grace. I once met a woman who had saved several Jewish people from a concentration camp at great risk to herself, and she had - there's no other phrase for it - an inner light. I don't think it was just the knowledge of her heroism that made me see this: she glowed, she was tranquil and joyous and at ease. Perhaps the knowledge she had been tested and proved righteous put her at ease; perhaps to take such a risk required an exceptional person to begin with. Either way, had she given me a piece of advice, I believe I would have accepted it without question.

I've known other people like that to a greater or lesser extent. I recently attended the funeral of a great-aunt who died at the age of a hundred, whose love and interest in others and deep-down niceness shone out of her. She wasn't possessed of magical powers, but she was rather remarkable, had had an adventurous life, and struck everyone with her charm and sense of fun. I wasn't particularly close to her - she was the mother of an aunt by marriage and lived far away, so I only saw her at family gatherings - but even so, when I heard of her death I felt the world a little poorer for her absence. She was that uncommon thing: a person everybody loved.

So people who are generally loved do exist. They tend to be sparky rather than bland - my great-aunt was kind, but she was also a tough old thing and had a wicked sense of humour - and writing one such would take considerable skill. This, though, is slightly different from the idea of a person who 'commands love', and even draws the devoted fascination of those who, for reasons of personal disturbance, hate them.

The thing is, I think the other kind of person, the compelling personality, is a real thing too. I and people I know have met some. It's just that the quality of commanding love is, in reality, rather a complicated one.

There's no one kind of person when it comes to charisma like this. I can think of one individual who's a hugely powerful and wealthy businessman; another who was in her way something of a mystic. On the face of it they had nothing in common, but they and others like them did have a family resemblance.

These were people who liked to tell stories about themselves and who never feared they were boring their listeners. The stories could be anecdotal or they could be epic, but they were almost always stories of philosophy. You could categorise them: the story of How I Reached My Present State of Understanding, the story of How My Worldview Was Proved Right, the story of How I Have Yet To Show Others The Way. All tend to revolve around the fundamental story of What Makes Me Me. These categories sound derogatory, but the stories themselves tend to be interesting: a charismatic person is, in some ways, the novelist of their own life. If most of us live in a soap opera, charismatic people live in a bildungsroman.

We all are the stars of our own stories, of course, but some people magnify this effect. They may be highly aware of how others react to them, but they are less prone to wondering whether a negative reaction calls their values into question. Most of us have a basic set of principles by which we live, but charismatic people tend to have a quest: something is the ultimate goal, be it power, insight, glory, spiritual experience, fun, justice or anything else - and such a goal is considered not just the best way for this particular person to live, but the ultimate aim of all life. Someone who disagrees is seen as missing the point, as naive or corrupt or bewilderingly dull.

Such an attitude tends to provoke love-or-hate responses. The reaction may partly depend on the chosen ideal and how well it overlaps with your own personality: someone for whom success is everything will get a more positive response from an aspirational friend than from a believer in altruism and humility, for instance. It's not entirely a question of agreement and disagreement, of course; both the aspirer and the altruist may be fond of the success-guru in their different ways. Charisma isn't the whole of a person, it's a quality they possess, and you can relate to the person inside the charisma - or at least try to, depending on how hard they push for their particular goal to dominate the conversation.

Which is where the issue of 'commanding love' comes in. A person who's the star of their own narrative may not expect you to love them, but they do expect you to be interested in them; after all, they have insights that should be useful to everyone. There is an expectation that you will respond to them on their terms, in their own framework.

If you do, then love has been successfully commanded. But it's a command that can be disobeyed. The difference is that disobeying the command takes greater energy than indifference would.

Have you ever known a person who you don't like but end up spending a lot of time talking or thinking about why you dislike them even if they haven't really done anything wrong? A person with a strong charismatic ideal driving them can have this effect. In essence, the force of their worldview is powerful enough that it exerts some gravitational pull: when you are around them, so compelling is their narrative that it's easy to fall into it, to start seeing things their way. To avoid this happening, you have to lean back, to remind yourself that you see things differently and that this doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. It takes effort. Dismissing their opinions occupies your thoughts. Psychology Today remarks: "Synchrony is a marker of rapport; if two people click, they unconsciously adjust their posture and speech rate to each other. Bernieri strongly suspects that charismatic people are natural "attractors" who get others to synchronize to them." If you don't want to fall into synchrony with someone like that, you have to pay some attention to avoiding it.

This, I think, is the real-life equivalent to the Mary Sue who is either loved by nice people or hated by people with issues. The 'issues' in real life may be actual neuroses or they may simply be a different worldview - but for at least some charismatic people, a different worldview is in itself something of a neurotic thing to possess.

Hence, if you want to hold on to your different worldview, you do to some extent have to fight, at least in your own mind - not necessarily because you hate the person but simply because the force of their personality is such that if you want space for your own way of seeing you have to push for it because they won't automatically make room. Most of us constantly measure our own judgement against that of others, and if somebody seems to think we're naive or materialistic we do a quick cross-check of them-versus-us to see if they have a point. Charismatic people tend to do that less, which, through no deliberate intention, puts more pressure on our own cross-checking system. Two cross-checkers, averaging out against each other, will end up somewhere in the middle, but if you average with someone charismatic you'll wind up closer to their way of thinking without them moving any closer to yours. If you don't want to end up thinking like them, you can end up feeling threatened even when the charismatic person hasn't done anything except be themselves.

(None of which is any excuse to be unpleasant to the person, of course, and neither does it mean that if somebody vigorously disagrees with or dislikes you it must mean you're charismatic; you could just be a pain in the butt.)

However, when it comes to writing, there's an interesting angle here. Nobody is good at everything in the way a Mary Sue is traditionally written, but the idea of having a personality that by its nature tends to exert a strong influence and that provokes fascination even in those who dislike you is not confined to fiction. You might say a Mary Sue story, which casts the haters as driven by their own personal failures, is a rendering of charisma from inside the charismatic viewpoint. In daily life, after all, most of us have to get by with manners because we're too aware that we don't control reality and that other people's viewpoints are just as likely to be correct as our own, but writing a story means you do get control of a fictional reality and your say on what is and isn't correct is final. Mary Sue may be a written rendering of the inner charismatic that most of us lack the social skills and confidence to pull off in our regular existence.

The real problem with such Mary Sues comes, I think, from the fact that charisma and greatness don't inevitably go together. Charismatic people are very often damaged.

My great-aunt was a sturdy-minded sort and had a talent for creating her own happiness, but I wouldn't class her as charismatic in the sense of being the star of her own story. She was simply a charming person who was widely loved; it was, in fact, difficult to get her to talk about herself because she was more interested in other people. The other people were more complicated: the business mogul was feared as much as he was liked, the mystic was in a cult. People famous for their charisma are often famous for being problematic. Winston Churchill managed to drag Britain through a hideous war and retain the nation's loyalty even when promising it 'blood, toil, tears and sweat,' for instance; he also suffered from lifelong depression. So did Abraham Lincoln, come to that. Life knocks us about, and building up a fierce ideal can be a way of trying to repair the damage, of putting a self back together. Damage can hang about, though, however bravely we cope with it, and the damage we carry ourselves affects those around us as well - and developing a personal ideology is not necessarily the best way of dealing with our problems. It can be a healing strategy, even a heroic resolution never to let others suffer as you have, but it can also be a compensatory strategy, a quest as distraction - and people compensating aren't always the easiest to get along with, because they can be unreasonably attached to their ideas even when it isn't appropriate.

A charismatic person may command love, but actually loving them may mean you're going to have to brace yourself. This is where the divergence from fictional Mary Sues comes: rather than being the perfect solution to all your problems, a charismatic person is, like anybody else, a mixture of good and bad - and the bigger the personality, the bigger both the virtues and the problems. A charismatic person can be a hero, or they can be a Jim Jones, or they can just be a lot to cope with.

That said, I do think it's worth pointing out that, while an incompetently written character is never plausible, Mary Sue or not, it simply isn't true to assume that there's no such thing as a person who has an unusual influence, whether deliberate or not, over the emotions of others. Such people are rare, but you do come across them. Perhaps a problem with them is that while charisma can be a compelling force when encountered in person it very seldom survives translation into print: reading Helter Skelter does not really let you know what it was like to know Charles Manson.

A charismatic person can do with their own life what a skilled writer can do with a fictional life: translate it into a compelling story with highs, lows, revelations and lessons to be learned. To create a convincing portrait of someone like that, you need to tell a story about a storyteller - and that's an extremely difficult thing to do. You can't write a better writer than yourself; issues of ego, wish-fulfilment and personal gripes tend to creep in, and so do structural problems if they're telling a story at the same time as you. To portray a genuinely charismatic person means portraying a self-mythologiser, and to do that you need to balance their charm and force with a writer's perspective that nobody's more than human; you have to be able to show them overshadowing other viewpoints without letting them overshadow other characters. It's a horribly difficult task to set yourself.

Of course, writing a Mary Sue isn't likely to be a deliberate attempt to write about the complexities of charisma. As I said, it's more likely to be an attempt to experience the benefits of charisma from within. In real life, charisma is a difficult trick to pull off and requires intense self-belief; in fiction, the easiest method is not solely to dial up the power of your Mary Sue but - which is easier - to reduce the power of everyone else. (As I point out in the essay on Jimmy Porter, you can see Osborne doing it.) This, of course, tends to lead to a weaker story, which is one of the reasons why Mary Sue is an unpopular character: her presence renders those around her boring.

As, of course, is any story that isn't well done. The more I think of it, the more I incline to the view that Mary Sue is less a problem because there's nobody like that, and more a problem because she's an inaccurate portrait of people like that.

A few odds and ends

2009-10-19T09:52:00.003Z

1. A reminder to all American friends that the votes are starting in Maine on Proposition 1, the homophobic amendment that would outlaw same-sex marriage. Blogger Greta Christina (possibly not work-safe, as she also blogs about sex), who I've cited before, has an article here going into the reasons why Maine is important - political momentum - and why it's important to get campaigning now rather than at the last minute. Protect Maine Equality is the place to go; let's all strike a blow for freedom and justice.

2. It's my pleasure to point out another fine offering from the BBC: their Sunday-evenings adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma, which is turning out to be the best Emma I've seen. Romola Garai manages to give the most intelligent turn as Emma I've seen an actress do, and is thoroughly charming; the drama is carried well, the cast and script are all excellent. The nature documentary Life is also on again tonight, and as last week's episode kicked ass, I fully expect great things. Two highly recommended reminders that attacking the BBC is attacking something great.

3. I just saw The Damned United and it was brilliant. If anyone isn't familiar with Peter Morgan's scripts - which also include The Queen, Frost/Nixon and The Last King of Scotland -

you're in for a treat. They're fantastic. All except the last also star the amazing Michael Sheen, whose ability to portray real people as diverse as Tony Blair and Kenneth Williams makes me think we need a new phrase for what he does. I'm going with 'performance biography'. Peter Morgan, Michael Sheen, these are ornaments to the contemporary film scene and I can't overpraise them.

4. An explanation I seem to owe about Facebook. A few weeks ago I signed myself up, and I didn't mention it but people seem to be finding their way to me anyway. When they do, I don't sign them on as friends, which is unfriendly of me. So, explanation.

Like a lot of people, as the years go by I find a lot of my friends moving to places where I can't easily get at them, like New York and Bristol and Reading and other places where you can't just pop by. Living in London, even my Londoner friends tend to be a fair old hike away. Lots of them are having babies, at whose pictures I like to coo but whose presence limits their visiting energy. Joining Facebook means that I can keep in touch with these people on a day-to-day basis, which is all very nice.

However, since I'm also a writer who hangs around on discussion threads, this also means I'm fortunate enough to get goodwill from people I haven't met. After some reflection, I've regretfully decided that if I sign these nice people up as Facebook friends, I'll be getting all their Facebook messages too - which means that I'll find it harder to spot the messages from my long-lost personal friends in the crowd. This is especially the case as the kind of people who friend writers on Facebook tend to be lively and frequent Facebook users, which is an excellent thing in itself but liable to swamp my long-lost friends, who tend to post only one message every few days. I have therefore sadly decided that if I want to use Facebook for the reason I signed up, I'm going to have to friend only people that I know socially.

This is one of those awkward etiquette situations that new technology somethings throws up. All I can say is, if I don't friend you, please don't think this means anything personal. I'm very happy to chat on my blog or reply to e-mails; I'm just trying to keep Facebook for a specific purpose.

At some point, if somebody can explain how, I might try to set up a separate Facebook account where readers can sign up as fans, because I know that this is possible to do. Anyone who wants me to do this, please give me some pointers and I'll see what I can manage. But in the meantime, I fear I'm going to be using my Facebook page as a kind of semi-private line, not because I don't like to meet new people online but just because I miss my friends and want a place where I can hang with them.

5. A big thank you to everyone who joined in the conversation on the last post, making for a most interesting discussion which I thoroughly enjoyed. I'll be preparing new posts, but as well, does anyone have any questions or topics they'd like to hear me talk about?

So do I think there's a problem with the readership?

2009-10-12T08:49:00.014Z

After a weekend away, I have managed to catch myself up and view the Newsnight Review section in which I featured as a talking head. (A somewhat nervous talking head, by the standards of my own conversation; I'm only that jittery when someone's pointing a camera at me. Just saying.) But, for those of you who didn't see it, here's what happened:

Voice-over: Science fiction was nowhere near the Booker list, to the anger of sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson, who insisted that Yellow Blue Tiba should have won the whole thing. Is sci fi literature really, as Booker judge John Mullan claimed, a self-enclosed world with work bought by a special kind of person, with special weird things they go to? Novelist Kit Whitfield thinks there is a problem with the readership.

Novelist Kit Whitfield: I think that there's a lot of people outside science fiction who think that they don't want to touch something just because it's science fiction. And I think within science fiction, you have some people - though by no means all the science fiction fans - who will read something because it's science fiction and be more forgiving of its faults than they would be if it wasn't science fiction. So I think if you add the two together, you can get a degree of ghettoisation.

First thing to say: I haven't read Yellow Blue Tiba, so I have no opinion on whether it should have won the Booker or not, but it is worth pointing out that one of the books shortlisted was Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger, which, if not science fiction, is definitely a ghost story. A ghost story in the same way that Turn of the Screw is, perhaps, or the movie The Haunting (the Shirley Jackson book may be, too, but I haven't read it yet), in that it's a haunted-people story in which the ghostliness or otherwise of the haunting is presented in a deliberately ambiguous way - but whatever else it is (a very good book, among other things), it's a ghost story. So in fairness to the Booker judges, evidence suggests they aren't excluding everything with the slightest non-realist element.

Second thing to say: if you read what John Mullan said in its proper context, he wasn't saying 'Nobody but a weirdo would ever read science fiction.' He was saying two things: one, they can't choose books that weren't submitted and not much science fiction got submitted, which isn't the judges' fault, and two, he thinks that science fiction is getting more ghettoised than it used to be and he thinks that's a bad thing. Which isn't antagonism to the genre; he's expressing the view that the genre's capable of more than it's currently doing. And why not? I personally see nothing wrong with aspiring.

Third thing to say: time limits being what they are on television, I'd like to clarify my statement, because 'there's a problem with the readership' isn't exactly what I was trying to say. Here's a fuller version:

I think that there's a lot of people outside science fiction who think that they don't want to touch something just because it's science fiction. And I think within science fiction, you have some people - though by no means all the science fiction fans - who will read something because it's science fiction and be more forgiving of its faults than they would be if it wasn't science fiction. So I think if you add the two together, you can get a degree of ghettoisation ...

... because the law of supply and demand means that if there's a proportion of the market that will consume badly-executed stuff, poor execution won't be as big a barrier to publication as it should be. So there will be bad stuff out there that really doesn't deserve a ticket out of the ghetto.

Which means that some of the ghettoisation will be for unfair reasons: people refusing to touch anything science fiction at all no matter how good it is. And some of it will be for fair reasons: if you get a big enough proportion of bad things in any genre, it will drag down the average quality and increase the chances of newcomers ploughing down in bad examples. As Raymond Chandler said about detective fiction when it was riding high: 'The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn't get published.' Anybody approaching that section of the bookshop for the first time is thus statistically more likely to put their hand on a bad book than a good one and retreat discouraged.

On the whole, the panellist I most agreed with on the Newsnight discussion was Jeanette Winterson, whose first major remark on the subject caused me to point at the screen and shout 'Yes! Exactly!', to the resignation of my husband, who hears me make the same point regularly. Now, I understand that readers outside the UK can't get hold of the discussion, so for your amusement, I'm transcribing the relevant portions, interspersed with my heckling.

Jeanette Winterson: You have to rip the labels off. It's time we did this with everything. Labels are for packaged food in supermarkets, they're not for books.

[Kit applauds offscreen, yelling, 'That's right! Genre is a bookseller's convenience, not an artistic category!']

JW: And you know, we've had Aldous Huxley, we've had H.G. Wells, Margaret Atwood, there's so many good writers who play with it, now the whole thing is up for grabs.

[Kit applauds again, yelling, 'Yes! Tropes don't belong to any one genre or a subculture, they belong to everyone! Anyone should feel free to use them!']

JW: We shouldn't be saying, 'This is sci fi. This is history. You know, this is literature, this is realism. We should be saying, 'Is this a good book? Let's read it!'

[Kit applauds, and her husband pauses the broadcast so he can hear what's being said.]

Kirsty Wark (presenter): Yet Kit Whitfield says that actually the bar is set much lower, because what she seems to be saying is that sci fi nuts will read any sci fi whether it's good or bad, and they're not as discerning as it were other readers.

[Is that what I meant? I don't think that's it precisely. Some 'sci fi nuts' will read any old tosh; I've known some. That doesn't mean everyone who's a science fiction enthusiast. If you want to draw a line between 'sci fi nuts' and 'science fiction enthusiasts' you could, I suppose, but people tend to be a sliding scale rather than clearly defined camps and individuals often defy categorisation.

You get undiscerning readers in any genre, or else undemanding ones. That's one reason why genre is such a problem: any genre publisher whose income depends at least in part on people who will consume anything that has the right label on it is under a market pressure to lower its bar. (And you can get a vicious circle going there: if you get too dependent on a specific market, you can't afford to alienate them with products that might attract new markets for fear of losing what limited custom you have.) I have nothing against Mills and Boon, for instance, but there's a reason why you never see their publications on the Booker shortlist, and it's not prejudice against romance. Nothing against Mills and Boon authors either - writing a saleable Mills and Boon book is much harder than it looks and deserves respect - but no such author would call their work fine art. If someone wants to argue that all romance is as pulpy as Mills and Boon they're liable to make an idjit of themselves, but so is anyone who wants to argue that romance as a whole doesn't adapt itself to market demands and produce a whole lot of books that aren't very sophisticated.

So if you're talking about a genre as a whole, you have to factor in the badly-executed stuff at the bottom. Expecting to be judged only by the best works won't do. You can't have it both ways: either you decide there's something exceptional about really good books, in which case we're talking about good books and that's a quality thing, not a genre one, or you decide you're talking about the genre, and that means everything in it, including the stuff that doesn't make the genre look very good.]

Natalie Haynes: Yeah, well, perhaps that is true. But I, for example, like Pride and Prejudice, I don't read Mills and Boon. You can't dismiss all of fiction where a boy meets a girl and they get together by saying, 'Oh yeah, but that Mills and Boon book is rubbish.' And that's absolutely the same thing with sci fi.

[Kit: Yes, I agree. But that's a reason to read books individually. If someone's talking about romance as a genre, those Mills and Boon books are going to come up. People don't admire Jane Austen because she's a romance author, they admire her because she's Jane Austen, and there was only ever one of those. She doesn't prove anything much about romantic stories except that it's possible to make fine art out of them, and you can make fine art out of any subject if you're a fine artist.]

NH: If you only read really, really low rent TV fan fiction spin-offs, then you would be depriving yourself of George Orwell, John Wyndham, H.G. Wells. Why would you do that?

[Kit: Ooh, nice choice of writers there. All good stuff. But if we're talking about contemporary science fiction, which was was the subject the discussion seemed to be about, I can't help noticing that all of them are, well, dead. And have been since before either of us were born. Wells was writing at the turn of the previous century, Wyndham and Orwell in the middle of it. Wells was writing at a time when 'science fiction' as a category barely existed; he was just a writer trying something. Orwell was a political writer who occasionally used allegory or dystopia to make his point. Wyndham was writing in the Golden Age - an age when, as with Wells, things were still in a phase of newness and experimentation. If you want a discussion of science fiction nowadays when it's become so much associated with a particular subculture and acquired specific imprints and all the rest of it, you need other examples.]

NH: It's one of the hopeful joys of the rise of places like Amazon, surely, is that books will stop being sold on a case with a title on the top, and instead you'll get somebody going, 'Oh, did you like this book? Somebody over here liked this other book.' And you're going, 'Oh, okay.' And let's all be more interesting.

[Kit: Well, you say that. But every time I've ever seen 'you might also like this' recommends on Amazon next to my books, they've been next to books that I don't want to read. The recommends tend to have only only the most superificial thing in common with my books: that there's some kind of supernatural element in them somewhere, generally a werewolf or a vampire knocking around. That's no reason to buy a book.

Amazon isn't a literary analyst; it goes on a mechanical calculation of sales. As long as people are buying conservatively within genres, it will be making recommendations conservatively within genres. That means clumping and stereotyping in exactly the same way bookshop sections do. Come the revolution it might work in a hopefully joyous way, but at the moment, in my experience at least, Amazon's recommends run on exactly the same principle as the bookshop's title-on-the-top case system, only worse.]

Kirsty Wark (presenter): With science being so mind-blowing at the moment, should there be more science in fiction, Jeanette?

[Kit: There should be in fiction whatever a fiction writer can make work. Always. If that includes science, so be it, if not, so be it.]

JW: You have to leave that to writers. There'll be as much as we think we have to put in at any one time.

[Kit: Yep. Thank you.]

JW: But, you know, this is a place where the whole world is opening up right now, so it's absolutely right for a fusion of imaginative capacity and scientific endeavour. Now it's time for everything to merge, not for things to be separate in little boxes. We don't live in a world of little boxes any more.

[Kit: I don't think we ever lived in a world of little boxes. Boxes are only there when people put them there, and those were never the people worth listening to.]

So was I saying what the voice-over seemed to think I was saying? I'm far from saying that every science fiction reader in the world is a weirdo, because that would be stupid. But I do think there is a problem that seems to affect writers in a distinctive way.

One of the issues discussed on Newsnight was the idea that 'boys in bedrooms' had, since the rise of the Internet, managed to organise into a visible subculture with power of its own. Kevin Smith, who was also on the panel, made the very reasonable point that the prevalence of science fiction movies calculated to appeal to that demographic was probably down to the simple fact that a few of those boys in bedrooms grew up and got jobs which allowed them to make commissioning decisions, a common-sense observation if ever there was one. But what if you weren't a boy in a bedroom reading science fiction but grew up to write it nonetheless? That was a question that seemed to occur to no one; the assumption seemed more or less to be that the kind of person who produces science fiction is inevitably someone who spent their adolescence wrapped up in it. And that's not necessarily true.

The ghetto is a problem for writers for a specific reason. If you're a reader and you don't like the ghetto, you don't have to go in; you can go read something else. When I say 'like the ghetto', I don't of course mean 'like being ghettoised', because nobody likes that. But science fiction, more than most other genres, isn't just a set of literary tropes and categorisations. It's also a large subculture. Someone who's a detective-story fan is much less likely to use that as a major element of their identity than someone saying 'I'm a science fiction fan' or 'I'm a geek.' There isn't even a word equivalent for 'geek' with detective stories; you might conceivably call someone an 'armchair detective', but I've certainly never heard it done. I know people who love science fiction, I know people who love romance, I know people who love whodunnits, and the geeks are the only ones who have a word for themselves. Science fiction fandom has, over the past few decades, built up to the point where it is a bona fide subculture rather than just a taste: being a geek nowadays is like being a punk or a hippy, part of an identifiable club with its own ways.

The thing is, clubs have positive and negative sides. If the entrance criterion is 'liking a certain kind of book' and you want to join the club, that's marvellous: the doors are open and you can go right in and start partying. But if the entrance criterion is liking the books and you don't want to join the club - whether because you don't like it or simply because it doesn't feel like your kind of place - then the logical step is to avoid the books. Once the books get too firmly associated with the club, many people will find it hard to judge them as separate from it, and their disinclination to join the one will put them off trying the other.

The Newsnight special was more or less explicitly addressing the question 'Will the geek inherit the earth?' as a means of talking about science fiction - but therein lies the problem. No genre belongs to any one subculture: every trope, every story structure, every fictional conceit belongs to the people. Geeks may be all about science fiction - or some of them, anyway, some of the time - but science fiction isn't all about geeks. As long as it's perceived that way, of course it's going to be ghettoised, or at least seen as somehow separate, because it's associated with one particular subculture that not everyone belongs to. If biographies of Tudor monarchs were a major criterion for describing yourself as a mod, people who didn't fancy ska and scooters would think twice before picking up a David Starkey book.

Readers have some freedom of movement when a genre is the badge of a club. They can join in, stay out, or read at home considering their tastes of their lives a thing apart: they can engage with the club on their own terms. But if you're a writer, you can only write what you can write, and if it's your living you can't do it quietly at home. You have to get out there. If your natural bent is towards a club genre and you don't particularly want to join the club, you do at least have to cope with the expectations created by its existence - both from within and from without. It doesn't have to be your spiritual home to end up being at least a proportion of your workplace.

It's interesting, therefore, to find myself so much in agreement with Jeanette Winterson. Not entirely surprising, given that I admire her writing, but it's not the only case of a writer trying hard to make the same basic point. In the essay by Raymond Chandler quoted above, The Simple Art of Murder, Chandler remarks '...some very dull books have been written about God, and some very fine ones about how to make a living and stay fairly honest. It is always a matter of who writes the stuff, and what he has in him to write it with' - insisting, again, that execution matters more than subject, and with a note of frustration that sounds familiar both from Winterson's vehemence on Newsnight and from my own experiences of being assumed to be a certain kind of writer purely because of the subjects I choose. My husband remarked that the champion of such frustration was probably the comics writer Warren Ellis - someone I haven't personally read, but who, husband informs me, found the demand for superhero books of the kind he wrote to support his original work a source of frustration so extreme he became famous for his colourful invective on the subject and his tendency to ban any visitor to his website who pushed his buttons on a first-offence basis.

This is the kind of thing, in short, that drives writers crazy: a good book is a good book, you can write a good book about anything, labels only get in the way, and assuming any kind of book is the property of a particular subculture or conventional genre rather than the broader culture is only going to make the labels harder to shift.

Nobody's really to blame for this. Writers write what they can. Publishers publish what they think they can sell. Readers buy what they want to read. TV features have to find some kind of angle. But if we're going to discuss any genre as a literary question, for goodness' sake let's not confuse the subculture that most heavily reads it with the genre itself. One is a literary form, the other is a group of people: those are two very different things.

I keep coming back to the same point, in the end. Discussing whither science fiction is precisely the wrong question if you actually want good art. The question should always be 'Is this book any good?' or 'What shall I write?' 'Science fiction' is a term applied from the outside that has nothing whatever to do with the issues that are actually important, like whether the book is well written or perceptive or engaging, and anybody who gets too preoccupied with the definition, which means anyone from a stereotyping outsider to a tub-thumping insider, is perpetuating the problem. We need to get everyone to drop the categorisation game if we want to get anything done.

So do I think there's a problem with the readership? No. The readership of anything is made up of people, and most people are pretty nice. But I think there's a definite problem when anyone, no matter who, starts conflating the readership with the books.

If ever I commit a serious crime, you don't have to defend me

2009-10-09T09:40:00.005Z

Even if you liked my books.

There's been a lot of discussion about the Roman Polanski case recently, including the fact that a lot of his friends - including some artists I, like millions of others, admire - have signed a petition asking for his release after he raped a thirteen-year-old girl in 1977. Probably other people will have said anything I can say and better - the ever-reliable Jay Smooth being my top recommend (check out the links he references as well as what he says) - but it's still throwing up some interesting conversations. Be advised, this blog post is not exclusively about the Polanski case; much of it is about questions of how we relate to art and artists, considered in a much more general context. This is not meant as an act of disrespect to any of the people involved: there's been so much discussion that I feel there isn't much more I can add, and as I'm not someone who's going to influence the outcome of the case one way or another I don't feel that authoritative statements about it from me are either necessary or appropriate. But if you feel it's too soon to be talking about the case as an example rather than as an issue in itself, or if you're feeling raw about Polanski right now and not in the mood for someone to spin into digressions, heads up; watch Jay Smooth instead.

I've read the transcript of the victim's statement, and it's heartbreaking. The case of rape is completely clear: not only was she thirteen years old, not only did he ply her with alcohol and Quaaludes, but she kept on saying no and he chose to ignore that. With a little girl so young she described his performing cunnilingus on her as performing 'cuddliness.' That mishearing tells you pretty much everything you need to know about her vulnerability, and it's enough to make you sit down and cry.

I can understand the desire not to go to prison, but nobody wants to go to prison and we don't usually take that as a reason not to send them. If Polanski feared being assaulted and sexually abused in prison that's understandable and that shouldn't happen: a society that doesn't make a serious effort to prevent its prisoners from assaulting each other is failing. Committing a crime shouldn't put you outside the body politic or revoke your citizenship: prisoners are members of society, and if they get assaulted in prison, we are failing to protect society from crime. Some people seem to enjoy the idea of prisoners punishing other prisoners, but apart from being sadistic, the attitude is also fundamentally unlawful. If we outsource our punishment of criminals to other criminals, we're handing over execution of the law to people who, by the very nature of their situation, have conclusively proved they don't have much respect for the law. And when we do that, it's time to hand in our civilization certificate and pick up a change-to-barbarism form on the way out.

So I don't relish the idea of anyone in prison, and I certainly don't think prison should be a place of unbearable trauma. But here's the thing: if you commit a horrible crime you ought to be sorry, and if you're sorry, that includes acknowledging that you are not the person who gets to decide when you've been punished enough. (Including deciding that a couple of months under psychiatric observation is adequate penance for rape.) A rapist who insists on freedom from consequences is a rapist who feels sufficiently justified that he sees no need to make reparation, either to his victim or to society.

There's something ugly in the idea of an old man going to prison. Less ugly than the idea of a little girl getting anally raped, mark you, but putting him in prison won't turn back time and the victim herself has stated that she'd rather let the issue drop and get on with her life. This may well be an act of moral heroism and admirable recovery on her part, and it feels ugly to override the wishes of someone whose wishes were so hideously overridden all those years ago. It's a complicated and painful case, and the law's failure to hand Polanski the long sentence he deserved at the time has created a mess. But bottom line, fleeing justice should not be rewarded with a free pardon. Polanski has to face the music, and the best thing to hope for would be a media that respects her privacy and a judge who can hand down a sensible sentence.

But what about all the people who signed the petition to free him or who think he should be let off? Where do they stand in this?

One argument is to say that they're rape ennablers, protecting one of their own whatever the cost, blinded by celebrity or by the belief that an artist should be immune from the law, or uncaring of what happens to little girls. I don't think we can know what's in people's minds, and as there's enough hate and anger in the world I for one would prefer to disagree with the signatories and supporters while giving them the benefit of the doubt. Possibly the fact that he pled guilty to a lesser charge is leading them to believe he should be assumed innocent of the greater charge until proven guilty. Possibly the fact that there was some supposed breaches of ethics by the judge means they think the case should have been dismissed on legal grounds. Possibly in the wake of the Bush administration people are uncomfortable with American pressure on other nations. Possibly they feel they have to stick up for a friend or for someone they admire. I don't think there should be a petition and I don't think people should be supporting Polanski's right to escape justice, but I'd rather not assume evil motivations of anyone without better proof.

But there is, of course, the fact that I love Roman Polanski's movies, and saying I think he ought to go to jail, or at least face some kind of punishment, is an uncomfortable position. It feels ungrateful somehow, inconsistent, as if I should either burn my DVDs or take his side. And I think this take us into an interesting question. Leaving aside people who may have petitioned for Polanki's freedom because they're defending a friend, what of the discomfort those of us who are Polanski fans feel in loving his work but wanting him to face justice? Who owes who what? This is a question that goes beyond a specific case and into the heart of the relationship between artist and consumer. (And this is the point where I'm going to stop talking about the Polanski case as a criminal issue and talk about audience emotion as a cultural phenomenon and go into personal reminisciences, so if you don't want to hear me going on about that, here's the place to stop.)

*****

When I was in my teens, my father liked to recommend movies for me to watch. An intellectual man who loves good stuff, he put a lot of classics on the list, whether drama, thriller or comedy, and a lot of his recommendations became favourite movies of mine, movies that I watched repeatedly, absorbing their rhythms and beats and immersing myself in the work of really good directors. Besides the enjoyment of these films, what I most remember is the feeling of expectation and compliment: the sense that my dad thought I was old enough and smart enough to appreciate this stuff. I felt excited, nascent, on the edge of something great, a whole world of fine experience ready for me to reach out into it.

This, of course, was an expression of love on my father's part, the desire to share favourite things with a family member and to nurture the brain of a kid who looked like she might turn out bright. It was good parenting, the artistic equivalent of taking care to put nutritious meals in front of me, and like a well-nourished child I thrived on it.

One of the directors he put before me was Polanski.

I still remember the day we went to the Chinatown-Knife In The Water double bill. I remember the movies, my earnest concentration to expand my mind around these new challenges, the sense of occasion, like I was being shown some entirely new secret. I remember the Italian meal afterwards, the way my dad talked to me about the movies and asked me what I thought, the feeling of interest and approval from him all through the day. I was in my mid-teens, I think, very young really. Young enough that the movies definitely were a challenge I had to rise to and felt proud of meeting. I was older than the girl Polanski raped. Had raped when I was a baby, in fact, but I didn't know anything about that. I was safe with my dad, the man who a few years later would read my first short story and say, 'You could be a proper writer,' and he was taking me out to dinner.

None of this means anything when we talk about Polanski the man. But when I think of Polanski, I remember that dark old cinema. I remember being curled up on the sofa watching Rosemary's Baby. I remember being so well protected that I could run into the wilds of art and thought and play wherever I chose.

So I love Polanski's films. I love them because they're great films, and I love them because when I watch them, I remember people who loved me.

And I think that if justice had been done, he would have been in jail the day my dad took me to that cinema.

And when I try to reconcile those opposites, even though intellectually I believe they're compatible, the emotional part of my brain wants to know what on earth is wrong with me.

*****

What happens between artist and consumer when you consume the work they've created?

On the most basic level, you usually make some kind of financial transaction. You pay the price of a ticket, a DVD, a book, a CD, or some other sum that gives you access to whatever physical form the work of art has been rendered in. The amount you pay is almost always way less than it cost the artist or artists to create it, whether in actual expenses or in man-hours. Trust me, it cost more than £12.99's worth of groceries to keep me alive long enough to write In Great Waters. The thing you buy is usually not the work of art itself, unless it's a painting or a sculpture; usually you buy either a mass-produced reproduction or recording of the stuff that goes to make it up, words, images, sounds or whatever, or you buy permission from the owners of a cinema to go into a room where you will be able to see a mass-produced reproduction of a recording of the images and sounds.

As an interaction, it's fairly straightforward. But it's also intangible. When my dad bought me dinner the day of the Polanski outing, the food arrived on plates, we ate it until it was gone, and that was the end of it. But when he bought us tickets, it wasn't two little pieces of paper he wanted. If that was what we'd been looking for, he could have bought a whole roll of them from a supply shop and saved himself some money. What we wanted was the experience of the films - and once we'd seen them, we could carry on remembering them. When I later bought a DVD of Rosemary's Baby, it wasn't the disc I wanted, it was the ability to watch the movie - and in theory I could have the same experience every single day without paying an extra penny. I can think about any of those movies without being charged for it, and thinking about them is an essential part of the consumption process.

Similarly for the artist, the object I bought was not the object they created. My DVD box doesn't contain the streets of New York and a youthful Mia Farrow, after all, nor even a roll of film. The recent Hollywood writer's strike included the protest that writers, ridiculously, earned less per DVD than the guy who made the box - but why does this strike us as ridiculous? Because it's the content rather than the physical object that we want to consume, and the content comes from somewhere else.

The purchase of any item is a closed transaction. If you want a copy of my latest book (and you do, I assure you), you pay Amazon £9.09 at the time of writing, and assuming they deliver the book to you in the time frame and condition promised, that's it. They can't threaten to take it away unless you give them more money; you can't expect them to send you anything else unless you give them more money; if you change your mind and return it, all you get back is £9.09. If you choose, you need never deal with Amazon again: you haven't created a relationship with them. You paid, they delivered, you can both walk away. No hard feelings. No strong feelings at all.

But when it comes to works of art, sometimes we find it hard to stick to the closed-exchange model.

In his book about football consumption, Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby reflects on the fans' comparable tendency to feel betrayed when they find their beloved clubs raising prices beyond the fans' means:

It is interesting and revealing that opposition to these bond schemes has taken on the tone of a crusade, as if the clubs had a moral obligation to their supporters. What do the clubs owe us, any of us, really? I have stumped up thousands of pounds to watch Arsenal over the last twenty years; but each time money has changed hands, I have received something in return: admission to a game, a train ticket, a programme. Why is football any different from the cinema, say, or a record shop? The difference is that all of us feel these astonishing deep allegiances ... Over the years we have come to confuse football with something else, something more necessary, which is why these cries of outrage are so heartfelt and so indignant.

Hornby perceptively observes that every financial investment he has made in his beloved product has been a closed transaction: you pay your money, you get exactly what you paid for, and if you believe your money purchased more than was advertised, reality will prove you wrong - or at least powerless to enforce your view. But somehow it's hard to see the money as just money. To a greater or lesser extent, we can see the money as buying something more.

Does the money you spent buy you any expectations of, or indeed duty to, the people whose work you've spent it on? In most cases the answer is an obvious no, but when it comes to matters of real passion like sport or art, our instincts get confused.

My last birthday a friend of mine gave me a book by psychologist Dan Ariely called Predictably Irrational. In it, the good professor - himself motivated to study psychology less for abstract reasons and more from the experience of terrible pain when nurses peeled the bandages too fast (for what reason, asks the study?) off the wounds inflicted by severe burns - considers two different kinds of interaction. These he refers to as 'social norms' and 'market norms':

Social norms include the friendly requests that people make of each other. Could you help me move this couch? Could you help me change this tire? ... Instant paybacks are not required: you may help move your neighbour's couch, but this doesn't mean he has to come right over and move yours. It's like opening a door for someone: it provides pleasure for both of you, and reciprocity is not immediately required.

The second world, the one governed by market norms, is very different ... Such market relationships are not necessarily evil or mean - in fact, they also include self-reliance, inventiveness, and individualism - but they do imply comparable benefits and prompt payments. When you are in the domain of market norms, you get what you pay for - that's just the way it is.

Ariely points out that such norms can coexist peacefully when kept separate, but cause tremendous social friction if you try to play one by the other. A man who expects sex because he bought his date dinner, for instance, has shifted from a social to a market norm and is liable to get neither sex nor his money back. If I tried to pay my father for his time in taking me to the movies, I'd be insulting him.

Social norms can actually increase profits. Companies that encourage a social-norm atmosphere with employee benefits and free take-aways once in a while are more likely to have employees who repay in social kind by working late and committing more creative energy. But once you've moved from a social to a market norm, especially if you do it suddenly, not only do often create a sense of betrayal but you shift the other person into market norm mode in response (your employees' efforts drop down to exactly what you pay them for, say, so no more staying late to finish a job, no more double-checking, no more taking work home). And, too, once you've moved into a market relationship, the social relationship is extremely difficult to get back. Now it's about money, and appeals to social instincts fall on cost-benefit analysing ears.

Now, when it comes to art, on the face of it it's a financial transaction, a market norm. As Nick Hornby would say, every time you spend money you get what was promised: a ticket, a DVD, a book. But the thing is, you have to use the things you buy - and to do that, you need to invest emotion. You could buy a ticket and then throw it away; you could buy a DVD and never play it. To actually consume the work of art - encoded on the film or screened in the cinema or printed on the pages - you have to do something beyond just putting your money down. You have to invest time, and you have to invest feeling. You have to pay attention.

The same applies to anyone who creates a work of art. An artist who invests no emotion at all in their work is going to produce a work of art nobody wants. It's not just a question of billable man-hours. I've worked a variety of jobs besides writing, and compared with schedule-juggling or till-checking, writing is exhausting. It demands a concentration of feeling so intense that some days you can't get it working properly at all. Art is not something you can make absent-mindedly.

In a market relationship, we exchange goods for money. But investment of emotion is for social relationships. Because of that, it can be hard not to feel as if some kind of relationship has been struck up between artist and consumer. You don't know each other personally, but the artist has enriched your emotional life, and generally that's the job of your friends, family and loved ones. When a stranger does it without ever being in your actual presence, the brain gets confused. Rationally you know you don't know them, but some corner of your mind can end up whispering, 'Friends don't demand friends go to jail.'

Having seen the exchange from both the artist and the consumer point of view, though, I don't think this is the way to go.

Looking at things on a social plane can cause curious complications. A couple of examples spring to mind, one more serious than the other. Margaret Atwood caused a lot of annoyance, if I remember right, by suggesting that she could use a remote machine to sign her novels rather than doing it in person, which involved more travel than she felt she could take. Personally I wasn't bothered by this, and remembering my explanation, I said something along the lines of, 'She's already enriched my life with her writing more than I had any right to expect; if she doesn't want to sign my book in person she doesn't have to, she doesn't owe me anything else.' I was talking in social-transaction terms, it seems, but at the same time I was used closed-exchange market logic: she's done her job, done it superbly, and if I want more I ought to give more. Those who were angered by the idea, I suspect, were seeing the relationship between writer and reader more in social terms: they felt that as readers they had invested the same good will in wanting an autograph that they would in paying a visit, and that a remote visit did not reciprocate that good will.

Of more political import, the science fiction writer Orson Scott Card caused a lot of anguish amongst his fans by arguing passionately and not very coherently against same-sex marriage: the gist of the anguish was that Card's books argued for tolerance (a contested claim, actually) and that consequently it was a painful shock to hear him espousing such intolerant views. There's an interesting essay by one science fiction fan discussing the essay of another here, the two of them taking different viewpoints about whether Card's pronouncements should mean an end to loving his work. Though they differ in their conclusions, what unites them is passion. The fan renouncing Card lamented: 'It was as if that kind, gentle and understanding father figure had casually mentioned over breakfast that today he was going to skin a couple dozen squirrels alive and watch them twitch helplessly on the ground ... I cried, because this person that taught me that understanding was everything, this person that taught me to accept people, to embrace life, to understand - this person was not a person who understood, or accepted, or embraced anything wholeheartedly and without judgement.' The person who felt renouncing Card's works unnecessary replies, 'Sometimes you have to let your heroes turn human, which is a stage of maturation, and then you have to find a way to forgive them for it,' recalling how he wept at the death of his favourite author, Robert Heinlein, knowing he would never get to 'meet' or 'thank' him. The depth of emotion in both essays knows nothing of the closed exchange: the interaction between consumer and artist didn't end in the minds of these consumers, and would never end, because the effect of the art had influenced them so much that it was a permanent part of their identities.

Obviously deciding you've dragged your tail through enough airports is not as bad as opposing basic civil rights for your fellow citizens - I have every sympathy for the former, myself - and neither is as bad as raping a child. But the fact that people get so distressed when a favourite artist does something they don't like - more so than they would if a stranger did the same thing - shows us in an odd light. If we've loved an artist's work, we can end up wanting the artist to be worthy of that love; in a sense, we feel that by being the kind of person we want them to be, the artist is coming as close as a stranger can to loving us back. They might not be bringing us the paper in bed, but when the paper comes it tells us good things about them. They're doing what a loved one does: being the person we need them to be when we need them to be it. As journalist Donna Minkowitz says of interviewing Card, a literary hero she found impossible to like in person: 'When he says provocative things I agree with, he's my brother.' The language is once again intimate, familial, struggling to find some way to hold on to the sense of kinship she felt when reading the book, to escape the feeling that the emotion she poured into the work wasn't being thrown back in her face by the behaviour of the writer.

What to make of this from the artist's side? Because while I feel for the pained fans, as a writer I'd be unnerved at such a weight of expectation being placed on me.

Some people who consume my art turn up here or e-mail me. That's socialising, and it's nice to do: I get to hear from pleasant people who want to pay me compliments, and who doesn't like that? So I enjoy socialising with the people who consume my art. But do I feel socially connected, really, with the artists whose work I've consumed? No. Because I know from experience that I don't know the people who consume mine - or if I do, only through the distant contact of e-mail or letters. I experience my relationship with artists, on the whole, as a hopefully cordial business transaction; I hesitate to assume they owe me anything - or at least, owe me more than any citizen of the world owes any other citizen of the world, like the duty to be a reasonable human being.

Those are, after all, the explicit terms of the contract. The sticker on my latest hardback says '£12.99', not '£12.99 and a FREE! promise that Kit won't say or do anything you hate,' and I've never seen such a sticker on anyone else's book either. I'd rather not do hateful things, but that's not because people buy my books. If I need sales to motivate me not to be hateful, I'm kind of a jerk. And to be honest the idea of total strangers expecting me to be their sister or mother would be a bit threatening, and I suspect I'm not alone in feeling that.

But since emotion is a necessary part of the artistic process, what to do with it?

There is, to begin with, a practical issue: social relationships are reciprocal, and the relationship between the artist and the consumer is not, or not in the same way. However social I felt with my dad that day, it didn't make Polanski any kind of father figure to me. The father-feelings I have about his films are about my actual father. Showing me stuff to draw out my tastes was his way of connecting with and praising me. Not the only way - it's not as if we had one of those awkward relationships where you can only communicate obliquely by talking about shared interests - but watching a Polanski movie, or a Kurosawa or a Woody Allen movie, I was not only listening to what the director was trying to say but to what my dad was trying to say too. I was trying to learn what my dad was trying to teach me with his suggestion that I watch these movies, and underlying this was a sense of being deeply complimented he thought it was a lesson I could understand.

In the irrational parts of my mind it's possible to get the two mixed up; to feel that one of the messages Polanski put in his films was, 'Kit, your father loves you and respects your mind.' When an artist is heavily associated with a particular relationship, we can conflate the two - and conversely, an artist we discover on our own can be associated with the message, 'You're an independent person who makes their own decisions.' Or 'You're not alone; other people think like you.' Or whatever message we most desperately wish somebody would come along and give us.

This is fine: it's a way of taking care of ourselves. It's just that it's a message we're telling ourselves through watching the movie, not a message the artist put there for us. We can parent ourselves with art, seeing a father or mother figure delivering to us the messages we want to hear, when in fact it's our own act of seeking out these messages, finding confirmation of what we most deeply want to believe, that's the act of nurture. On an interpersonal level, the credit, or indeed the blame, lies with the person who introduces or chooses the art rather than with the artist. The artist wasn't there.

However much emotion I invested in watching Polanski's movies, he doesn't know about it any more than I know exactly what emotions my stuff provokes in the people who read it. Faces may be familiar from photographs, but we're all strangers to one another. Conceiving and consuming a work of art are both essentially self-contained experiences, and the sheer weight of numbers and anonymity means that whatever emotion flows from the consumers to the art never actually reaches the artist. It simply carries on circulating within the consumer. Likewise, whatever emotion the artist invested was not addressed directly to the consumer, not personally, and social relationships are personal.

Rather than encountering each other as members of society, the artist and the consumer relate to each other only incidentally. In both cases, their ultimate relationship is with the work. The artist pours their energy into the work; the consumer pours their energy into the work, but the work is not a permeable membrane. It absorbs energy and bounces it back. Inanimate objects based on abstract conceptions are not very good communicators of what the other guy said about you: the work of art acts not only as a connector between artist and audience but as a breakwall.

I invested emotion in watching Polanski's movies, but does that mean he owes me anything? No. Does it mean I owe him anything? I think it depends what market we're looking at.

I don't think I'm morally obliged to support anything any artist does, no matter how much they enrich my life. I think I owe an artist-as-human-being exactly as much as I owe any other member of society: the benefit of the doubt, and the expectation, should they commit a crime, that they be judged appropriately. To expect an artist to be held to a higher standard of ethics than anyone else is unrealistic, but to hold them to a lower standard of ethics is not only irresponsible but insulting, a failure to judge them as an adult.

But the art does give me something, and something I didn't pay for. A DVD of a good movie costs the same as a terrible one: the money didn't buy the experience. That was the artist's gift.

I don't think I'm obliged to pay it back. I think I need to pay it forward. If my dad took me to the movies, I should be nice to him, but if Polanski's work influenced me either as a person or an artist, I learn from that and put it into what I write and what I do. That, at least, is reciprocating in the same coin: creating beautiful works of art was not a personal favour to me, and while there would be no reason not to pay it back in a personal favour if appropriate, there isn't an obligation. The obligation is to make good use of what you were given.

What about market retaliation? If an artist does something you object to, by this logic, does that mean we can't boycott their work? No. Refusing to put money into the coffers of someone you disapprove of is a basic social as well as market tactic. While I agree with almost everything Jay Smooth ever says, I don't think buying bootleg copies of an artist's work is a good way to express your disapproval: that's kind of stealing, and stealing from someone you don't approve of is not a good tactic in most societies. I think if you want to vote with your wallet to express your disapproval, that doesn't entitle you to break the law to save yourself inconvenience; no one ever died of waiting for a movie to come out on television, or not watching it at all.

Polanski is more talented than me and so I may not be the yardstick by which to judge. But as a small artist judging a big one, I don't think art makes you an exceptional citizen - by which I mean it doesn't make you an exception to the rules of civilisation. The ability to create something doesn't make you anything other than a human being. If I did something wrong and found a fan of my books arguing that I should be let off the hook because of what a great writer I was, I think I'd be kind of insulted. It would be objectifying, a reduction of complex humanity to a mere cypher who could only be judged as a producer of stuff, not as a person and a citizen. If it was a choice between being objectified and being imprisoned I'd probably go with the latter - but if I commit a terrible crime, that's no longer my decision, and if I didn't know that when I committed the crime, I should have.

So I'm just saying here and now: if at some point in the future I commit a serious crime and there's no question that I did it, you don't have to take my side even if you liked my books. The financial deal is simple and closed, and unless you actually introduce yourself, any social relationship we have is with the work. You don't owe me any more than I owe you.

I don't know what's going to happen with Polanski. Mostly I hope the girl, now woman, he raped is left alone in privacy, and that we as a society can get a whole lot better at dealing with rape.
But when it comes to judging criminal behaviour, the basic rule is very simple: art has nothing at all to do with it. Those feelings about the artist? We put them there ourselves, and it's to ourselves, ultimately, that they have to return.

I'm gonna be ON the BBC!

2009-10-08T08:20:00.002Z

Yes, with no apparent connection to my praising the BBC, I am going to be on television this Friday!

Specifically, I'm going to be a talking head in a little film insert for Newsnight Review. Two very nice and charming people came round my house last night with a camera and some surprisingly bright lights and filmed me saying stuff.

This Friday, Newsnight. Which you can download for a week after from BBC iPlayer if you don't get the BBC. Tell everyone you know.