Caitlin through the Looking Glass
I’m still in Italy on holiday and having a wonderful time. We were in Rome last week and are spending this week in Florence. We saw Michelangelo’s David today, which was simply beautiful. We have a few more days here and are planning a night away in Pisa as well. On Sunday we fly back to the UK – sigh! I will write more soon. Ciao.
Television is not something that really features in my life but sometimes I try to catch up on particular shows on DVD. For some time I’ve been meaning to watch the revival of Doctor Who. Last night I did and I have to say it was quite a disappointment. The first episode with the shop dummies was quite good, the next show with the aliens on the viewing platform for the end of the Earth was so-so and the third episode with the zombies and Charles Dickens was, to borrow an English phrase, utter shite. I’m not going to bother with the rest of the series or indeed the new series, which is screening now.
Whatever happened to the classic Doctor Who scripting techniques? I loved Doctor Who as a child and used to hide behind the couch during the scary bits and play Daleks in the playground in primary school. Yet this is not a matter of me viewing the past with rose-tinted glasses, as one of the things we did when we first arrived in Britain (and couldn’t afford to go out much and didn’t know many people anyway), was to join DVD rental service Lovefilm and rent most of the classic Doctor Who available on DVD. So I’ve seen quite a bit in the last two years and not all of it was good but a lot of it was very good indeed. The new series rated its pants off but judging from the first three episodes is not a patch on the original.
One of the biggest differences is that the classic Doctor Who had a story arc, usually four half-hour shows where every episode is a cliffhanger but progresses perfectly to the next episode. The plotting was very tight and very good. The new Doctor Who, from what I’ve seen so far, consists of self-contained half-hour episodes. I don’t really think you can build suspense over that time – two hours (four half-hour blocks) is far better.
There is obviously a lot more you can do these days in terms of special effects than you could in the 1960s when the franchise started or in the 1970s and 1980s, which to me is classic era Doctor Who (ie. Tom Baker and then the blond guy Peter Davison – whose name I had to look up on Google). To some extent that’s not needed – the charm of the Cybermen is that they are obviously men in suits and some are fatter than others and they have different accents despite their e-ffic-i-enc-y. But there’s really no excuse for bad special effects. The moving shop dummies were pretty impressive and pretty scary but the gaseous spirits in the Victoriana episode were pathetic and really detracted from the action.
It’s a shame because Doctor Who has some classic Victoriana – there was one story arc we watched with shadowy Chinese cult figures in London. It was great!
I don’t mind Christopher Eccleston as the doctor although I believe he only stayed the one series and there’s a new guy now. He’s a bit hard-arsed though – you don’t warm to him like the lovable Tom Baker doctor. I find Billie Piper as the chavtastic doctor’s assistant, Rose Tyler, a bit much though. Hopefully she grows less chavvy as the series goes on but I don’t think I’ll be watching it to see.
Book publisher Random House has pledged to increase the amount of recycled paper in its books from 3 per cent now to 30 per cent by 2010, while coffee table books are to contain 10 per cent recycled material. At the moment they have only announced plans to do this for their US books but hopefully their international businesses will follow suit. Hopefully too they won’t stop once they get to 30 per cent but will then set a new goal. We need more initiatives like this from the corporate world.
I went to the TKTS ticket booth for half-price theatre tickets on Saturday and ended up buying tickets to Blackbird for myself, my boyfriend and our friend from New York. The play by David Harrower debuted at the Edinburgh Festival last year and this was the final night of its run at the Albery Theatre in the West End.
The play tackles the subject of child abuse and whether it is possible for a girl of twelve and a man of forty to have a ‘relationship’ or anything that’s slightly more complex that abuse. It’s certainly not pro-child abuse but it doesn’t shy away from presenting truth and raising thorny questions.
The acting was very good – Jodhi May’s voice annoyed me to begin with but I soon grew used to it. Roger Allam was very convincing as the older man. It was basically the two of them for most of the play and they carried it very well.
The setting – a rubbish-strewn locker room on an industrial estate somewhere in England – was perfect. Despite the simplicity of the set, it was very versatile with the chairs and garbage providing great props for particular points in the dramatic action.
I thought the play was going to end once or twice before it actually did and I’m not sure what the point was of the final scene in the carpark but overall it was a great theatrical experience. It kept me entertained and it made me think and you can’t ask for more than that.
Over seventy per cent of the authors on my list are male and I think this is a flaw in the list. I don’t believe in quotas and I am not going to deliberately make the list fifty-fifty as the books have to make it on their own merits. However, there is the counter argument that my list is based largely on The Canon – mainly American men writing literary fiction in mid twentieth century. It’s hard to say whether the lack of female authors is because of a lack of great output or because they do not get the recognition that the male writers do – in the same way that genre or children’s writing is often marginalised even when it’s great.
I am trying to think whether I have missed out anyone essential and so far I have come up with Carol Shields with The Stone Diaries and Anne Tyler with Breathing Lessons (which both won the Pulitzer prize). I would be interested to know what my readers think – should these two be added and if so who would we remove? And are there any other glaring omissions from the list?
Keep in mind the boundaries of the list – the books must be published between 1900 and 1999, must be written originally in English (no translations) and only novels are eligible.
There’s been plenty going on. I’m still pretty busy with work, clearing deadlines and I have a few shifts this week as well. We have friends from New York in town so spending time with them has been a priority. Plus we leave for Italy on Sunday so we’ve got to book accommodation and so on.
My junk internet diet lasted until Sunday when I finally gave into temptation and had a poke around to see what I’d been missing (not much it turns out). But I do need to lie low for a couple more days and get stuff done.
I’m the procrastination queen, which I guess is a bit of an occupational hazard when you’re a freelance journalist but a fatal one if you’re trying to keep food on the table and a roof over your head.
I really need to finish writing my piece on Uganda while it’s fresh in my mind and so that I keep in with the folks at the magazine (it would be nice if they thought of me for future trips!).
Plus I have two other commissioned pieces due next Monday and I’m producing two sessions at a conference tomorrow. It’s great that I have all this work but I can’t afford to waste time so I’m going to go on a no blog diet for a couple of days.
That’s no blogging, no looking at other blogs, no BookCrossing and no 43 Things until I’ve finished my Uganda piece and I’m on track with the other two. Hold me to it.
In less than two weeks time, my boyfriend and I are off to Italy for a holiday. I can hardly wait! It will be our first time in Italy but if it’s as good as everyone says it is, it surely won’t be our last.
We have two weeks (slightly less when you exclude the travel days) and the original plan was Rome to Venice via Florence. We have modified that because when we looked at all the things we wanted to do and the places we wanted to see along the way, the minimum itinerary was about three weeks. We are now just going to Rome and Florence, stopping in Umbria where I have a family friend and Tuscany along the way. It seemed that it would be nicer to take our time and see what we want to see and save Venice and Verona for another trip.
Future trips could be Milan to Venice via the lakes, or the Amalfi Coast and Sicily. It all sounds wonderful. I just wish I spoke Italian – I know I won’t need it but it would be lovely if I could.
We are flying – I looked into train travel but unfortunately it wasn’t practical with the times and prices. We will be using trains within Italy however. I am yet to book our accommodation or museums in Florence, which you can apparently organise in advance and thus skip most of the queue.
It looks like I will be away for my thirtieth birthday, which is no bad thing. I can’t think of many things I would rather be doing.
It fined up Sunday afternoon so I did the first half of the street skate, up past Regent’s Park to Maida Vale (route and photos). The first part seemed really cruisy but it was much harder once we hit a long straight stretch past Regent’s Park and had to hightail it so we didn’t block traffic and then had to skate down quite a steep hill. Fun, fun!
I really enjoyed myself and I’m definitely getting better. I only did half of it this time as I was also planning to go to the kayaking session run by my local canoe club at the pool in the evening and I didn’t want to be too knackered.
The kayaking session was quite good. I can see it would be a nice place – clean and warm – to learn how to do things like an Arctic roll (where you right yourself from a capsize by flicking your hips). I still need to get out there and get some practice paddling though and I can’t be going down to the Isle of Wight every weekend! Apparently there are some clubs in London that paddle on the Thames or in the canals (I wouldn’t want to fall in!) so I need to look into that.
It was good to go for a beer with people from the canoe club after the session. They organise trips away and seem like a nice bunch of people.
All this physical activity! I barely recognise myself! I’ve never been a sporty type and I’m still pretty crap at ball sports, despite a couple of years of playing basketball for fitness. Exercise is not my favourite thing and I have to drag myself to do it for its own sake – a gym session or running for example is just not my scene. But if it’s something fun as well then I’m up for it. I do seem to have a bit of a taste for expensive sports that needs lots of gear – skiing, snowboarding, rollerblading (though actually that’s free once you have the skates), ice-skating, horse riding, kayaking, and I’m thinking about learning kite-boarding. I do like swimming but not in the poky little 20-25 metre pools they have in Britain – give me an Olympic pool or the ocean any day! And I guess I like walking and cycling too but I don’t get around to it all that often. Oh and yoga’s lovely.
We saw The Squid and the Whale at the cinema last night. It’s an indie movie about the break-up of a family in 1986 Brooklyn and its effect on Walt, who’s sixteeen, and Frank, who’s twelve. The father, Bernard, is a pompous English professor and writer past his prime and the mother, Joan, is an up and coming writer with her own failings (they emerge later so I won’t to spoil the the movie).
The movie is very good – very funny, very sad, very poignant, very emotionally true. I squirmed through most of it because it was so close to home – it could have been Balmain in Sydney in 1986 rather than Brooklyn. The story could very easily have been about one or more of my schoolmates in Sydney’s Inner West in the 1980s. I don’t recognise myself or my family in any of the characters but I do recognise the characters as being true to life.
It was interesting to see Brooklyn with families living in all those brownstones. These days, from what I’ve heard, the buildings are all subdivided and it’s mostly young professionals.
The cast is very strong: Jeff Daniels as the father was a real anchor of the movie; Laura Linney as the mother was very convincing; and the two young actors Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline were great. I didn’t realise it at the time but one of the supporting characters (the student) is played by Anna Paquin, the little Kiwi girl in The Piano and also Rogue in X-Men. She’s very versatile – I reckon she’ll go far.
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