From The Morgue

The Kite Runner, a bestselling first novel by Khaled Hosseini. It is now a film that has made headlines for the treatment of its young actors in their native Afghanistan.
What I find most remarkable is how Hosseini crafted some engaging and credible children for the first half of the book, and yet laboured the second half with a magical redemption child of the most cloying and unbelievable type. The contrast is amazing.

“Astuteness” is a very clumsy word, isn’t it? It should be something different, something that delights you when you say it, like “perspicacity”. Ah, perspicacity, now there’s a word that knows how to say what it’s trying to say.
Wgtn journo-blog Poneke has delivered some news that the mainstream media, er, printed shortly afterwards – the evidence against Peter Ellis is very dubious indeed.
Ellis is the man at the centre of one of NZ’s most discussed criminal cases. He was convicted in 1993 of sexual abuse of children, and served six years, maintaining his innocence the whole time. As well he should have done – the whole affair was a textbook example of the type of Satanic Panic that turned up occasionally throughout the 80s and early 90s, where suggestive children are led into describing wild tales of ritual abuse. The prosecution excised all the wild bits of the stories and just left in the more conventional evidence, and Ellis went down for the crime. Many who were involved in the prosecution fiercely maintain his guilt, but public opinion was always iffy and came down firmly on the side of his innocence with the publication of Lynley Hood’s incredible account of the case, A City Possessed.
The source of this news is the Innocence Project, which grew out of the Psyc department at Victoria University, principally driven by Prof Maryanne Garry, who is passionate about how misconceptions about psychology can damage the course of justice. Her principal interest is memory, and particularly the fallibility of eyewitness testimony and the suggestibility of witnesses. Maryanne taught me for several years, and I unashamedly admit that she has convinced me about these matters. Ellis should have his name cleared. It is an appalling state of affairs that the merits of his case are still being argued.
The Innocence Project (led by Dr Matthew Gerrie) means to draw attention to cases where wrongful conviction is a distinct possibility. The Scott Watson case, another prominent conviction about which New Zealand has become uneasy, has also received attention.
I applaud the Innocence Project, and look forward to the day when our collective wisdom about ourselves has grown to the point that it will no longer be necessary.
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Also on the wires: in Colombia, the government has mounted a big campaign to stop people from involving themselves with the drug trade. The premise of the campaign: what would your mother say? As Bob Harris notes at the link, I can’t quite see that working over here…

The miracle is that I actually went, of my own volition, to a medical service provider in the past week. It’s a plural, actually, because I went twice over.
First to a physiotherapist about my back; she gave me some exercises and said it’ll be better in a couple weeks. Which I hope and expect it shall be. Today I even larked about in a field with a frisbee and didn’t end up in agony, so that’s a very good sign. (Although I admit being perturbed early on – after the injury, I noticed the warmth of the shower made me feel much less painful. So I applied a hot water bottle to my back and felt much better. Then a physiotherapist mate of mine asked me, upon learning of the injury, “are you icing it regularly?” “Er, yes,” I ventured, while the roasting heat of the hot water bottle gave my spinal column a thorough toasting.)
Second to a General Practitioner, to inspect a mole that had become Supicious TM. I’d been suspecting it of perfidy for some time, and after I caught it whispering in a foreign language the other day, I figured that was quite enough. So I popped into a GP and had the whole thing chopped out with a scalpel and sent off to the Guantanamo Bay for skin features, where they will test it to see if it was cancerous or if it was just suspicion-inducing. (In the War on Skin Cancer, moles are innocent until proven guilty.)
Good lord, Christmas is just around the corner. 2007 is almost done for!

Another Friday has rolled around, and Christmas is around the corner. Few responses to my anti-Fables vitriol; I expect all the Fables lovers are making friends-locked LJ posts to talk about me behind my back. Well, when my X-Ray Specs arrive in the mail I will read all of those hidden posts, so you all better just watch out! (Also I will see through walls. Maybe YOUR walls!)
First review of Unearthly: Cosmic Heroes has come in, and it’s a nice 4-star thumbs up! Calls the book “very well written”, which made me very happy. It’s easily the most successful thing I’ve written RPG-wise, having reached the heady heights of being a “Copper Pick” and briefly making it into the Top 10 of the RPGNow Top Sellers chart. Hurray, etc.
Remember early-80s Indiana Jones rip-off Tales of the Gold Monkey? I sure do, with its seaplane and its gold monkey! Refresh your memory with this little-seen comic set in the GoldMonkeyVerse! I can only presume that the dude who scanned this in is the same one who enhanced the TotGM wikipedia page with a detailed chronology for the show’s fictional backstory, beginning a thousand years before the first episode.
I like that I got to say “GoldMonkeyVerse”.
Catching up on Stephen Fry’s blog got me to this post in which he talks about a dinner-table conversation that got a bit out of hand, and springboards into his view of the climate change situation – which, I was pleased to note, is somewhat familiar. Check it out..
And speaking of blogging, especially in light of Doris Lessing’s lecture discussed earlier this week (and in which I messed up the link to the lecture, thanks Karen): the other moose pointed me at the blog of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (Had to check the spelling on that. Got two of the vowels the wrong way around.) The President’s blog does seem to originate from his office – his pledge to spend “15 minutes a month” on the blog sounds reasonable for a very busy head of state whose main problem is PR. And speaking of that main problem, take a look at the site. It shows reader comments on the right of the screen, apparently unedited, tagged only with the flag of the poster. It’s flabbergasting. Keep an eye out for the American flags, and you’ll see such gems as: “die slow …” “You are a nigger” “Shut up please, would you? I get headache reading your nonsense stuff.” and “You are a terrible, despicable human being. You WILL be attacked by the US or Israel and will be destroyed!”. These comments are turning up on the webpage of the Iranian President! I am astonished. Now, if there’s one thing all Iranian leaders know, it is how to exercise the power of censorship. And I can’t imagine the decision being made to allow this stuff without it being cleared with him first. That means it must be deliberate on his part – he’s canny enough to see the merit in letting everyone see the internet sewer as it comes crawling out. But, really. Can you imagine a Western leader who’d let that kind of stuff stand?
Meanwhile, at home, the office of the NZ Prime Minister comments, on the record, to a blog discussion. I’m sure it was meant to say “pwned” at the end.
Or perhaps Merriam-Webster’s Word of 07, “woot”. (Has anyone else realised that the abbreviation of Word of 2007 is Wo07? That’s right – woot acronymises its own award!)
I downloaded ZoneAlarm earlier, to get my firewall situation under control. Install went very smoothly, but right afterwards it tried to use my browser to open up an intro tutorial. Which would be fine, except that it hadn’t given the browser permission to access the net yet. Someone didn’t quite think that through. It reminded me of the charity collection can we used to have at the Todman St flat, the one that said “Opening Instructions Inside”.
Also, I’m trying out Google Analytics on my Apocalypse site to keep track of traffic. Go on, click through and give me some stats to look at why don’t you…
Enough of this madness. Time for different madness. Such as those guys from Knocked Up in a zombie apocalypse film trailer.

Right, I’m feeling a bit cranky and unreasonable so it’s time to say something negative. And right now I’m about to dis on something beloved by many: the comic series Fables, by Bill Willingham.
Now, I was predisposed to like this when it first appeared. I heard good things, and some of my friends liked it a lot. The premise was neat: fairy tale characters hide in the modern world from a mysterious Adversary. The creator, Bill Willingham, had been involved with seminal supers RPG Villains & Vigilantes, to boot. And, of course, the Vertigo comic stable was looking a bit thin after the conclusion of Sandman, Preacher and Transmetropolitan.
Did I mention this comic was widely praised? Per Wikipedia, it has won four Eisner awards, including Best New Series and (three times) Best Serialized Story. It won’t take you much Googling to find enthusiasm for the title throughout the comics blogosphere.
(Also, I didn’t have to pay anything to read it, because my brother bought it.)
So, with all signs pointing to a favorable response, I sat down to read the first trade. And I was surprised to mind myself not particularly impressed. Figuring this was when Willingham was still settling in, I stuck with it, and read the next few trades. And I was still not impressed.
I have since read almost the entire series. You can’t say I haven’t given it a solid go. Even so, it fails to impress me to this day. In fact, I’ve reached my ultimate conclusion on the matter of Fables: It just isn’t very good.
It isn’t very good because Bill Willingham can’t structure his stories. They are uniformly badly paced, from the movement through the page to the movement through a multi-issue arc. There are many wonderful ideas in this series, and characters change and grow in pleasing ways, but the way the stories are told is so hamfisted and frustrating that I just can’t ignore it. It’s like hearing someone tell a joke who isn’t very good at joke-telling, and they can’t get the rhythm of it right, and they keep leaving bits out or spending too long on bits that don’t turn out to mean anything, and they hammer the punchline really hard and do it slightly wrong as well.
The stories aren’t well-told, and sometimes they aren’t even good stories. Often they are indulgent and clumsy. The gender politics have caused uproar, and the fictional world isn’t remotely plausible even on its own terms.
I suppose this is me going all Emperor’s New Clothes on Fables. Despite the massive popular acclaim, it is Not Good Comics. The amassed internets disagree with me, so all I can do is hope that the passage of time will prove me entirely correct. I have complete confidence that it will.
(If you like Fables more than I do, feel free to comment and say why Willingham’s storytelling is worth your hardearned money. You’ll be completely wrong, of course, but do feel free.)

The media’s obsession with “Web 2.0” continues. Facebook, Bebo and MySpace all feature prominently in news reports where they have only the most tangential relevance, hand-wringing features are written about the impact of these new internet fads on life as we know it, etc etc. This media obsession arises mostly out of their own fear and confusion, because print journalism is staring down an oncoming wave of significant change.
One side-effect of this, and of the media’s traditional belief that contriving a conflict makes for good journalism, is the periodic celebration of a voice that says the internet is destroying our souls. This turns up in different forms at different times; Andrew Keen’s book The Cult of the Amateur was breathlessly reported all over the world and hardly held up to the least bit of scrutiny. (I haven’t read it, and don’t intend to, because his claims are silly on their face.)
The latest incident was yesterday, discussing Doris Lessing’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Under the headline “The Net Dumbs Us Down”, the lede in the Sydney Morning Herald version (that turned up in NZ papers) ran:

New Nobel laureate Doris Lessing has used her acceptance speech to rail against the internet, saying it has “seduced a whole generation into its inanities” and created a world where people know nothing.

Hmm. If you take a look at the speech itself you come away with quite a different picture of what Lessing was saying. The internet gets the barest mention at the start; most of it is a celebration of libraries and a restatement of the crucial role played by books and literature. It draws pointed comparisons between the desire for books and schooling in the poorest parts of Zimbabwe, and the lack of interest in books in the most prestigious schools in the UK. (It gets some vicious digs into Mugabe along the way.)
So no, she didn’t rail against the internet. The internet was used as an example of how modern life in its entirety is filling peoples lives with matters of less worth than books.
It’s well worth a read. I’m not sure how much I agree with her. I think that there are different kinds of literacy at work on the net and with books; the net is really nothing more than a giant conversation, and it follows the social rules of a conversation, and produces content of the value and depth of a conversation. Books are emphatically not conversation, and lend themselves differently. In my cod-pomo way, I’m not going to say one form is better than the other, but they definitely have different strengths, and a decline in books would be a huge loss.
One thing I do know for sure is that we could be much better served by our media than we are being currently; and that every time a story like this turns up in our media, devoid of hyperlinks to its source material and dubious on its face, my interest in preserving the media status quo diminishes still further.
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I’ve been needing lots of sleep this week. This back injury must be taking more out of me than I think it is. Either that, or I’m just suddenly lazy. Hmm.

Ten years ago, or thereabouts, I was treading the boards. That was the last time I did such a thing – incredible! Ten years since I’ve done any Actoring in front of a live audience! And I enjoyed it, too, and while I know that I wasn’t any good, I have it on good authority that neither was I completely rubbish.
That show was the wonderfully bad ‘Tomb With A View’, with the Hutt Repertory, and it was a good laugh. My character was an anxious chap, and I vividly remember one of the rare bits of directorial advice I received about my actoring. I was, the director told me, giving a performance devoid of rhythm. There was this one note, “anxious”, and I was hitting it over and over again. Hitting it well, he said, but – the same. There needed to be some more up and down, some variation, peaks and valleys of intensity and feeling and so forth.
The fact that the character spends the entire play fearing that his life will end at any moment notwithstanding, this was sound advice, and it was something to which I’d been blind before he said it. Instantly it became obvious what I had to do and how I should approach the task. My performance duly acquired some variation, and was much better for it.
I mention this because I’ve been working on the (hopefully, cross fingers touch wood, final) draft of Ron the Body. Feedback from the second draft pointed out to me that my main character hits the same note over and over again. I realised that I needed to put in more up and down, some variance in her mood and tone. I needed to ensure that she was invigorating company for the reader, not a tediously predictable bore. And, again, this only became obvious to me after it had been pointed out a sufficient number of times.
Anyway, I’m satisfied with my reworking of part one of the revision. I think it is, spellcheck apart, the version that will be read by The Publishing Industry. I’ve just spent ninety minutes post-Conchords working on structural changes to the remainder of the book – there are a few fairly significant changes that must be made, but most of what is there will stay (if in shuffled-around form).
(Anyone who gave me feedback on an earlier draft of Ron is welcome to shout out for the revised part one, if they truly are a glutton for punishment at least…)
Hmm. Maybe I should think about doing some acting thing sometime in 2008…
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Welcome, Helen to the blogosphere! Helen is a poet and publisher and will be writing with an eye on the literary aspects of the Wellington scene…

Envelopes were sent to two NZ media outlets today containing a white substance and a single piece of paper with the word “anthrax” helpfully written on it. The outlets were TVNZ, our state broadcasting provider and the most dominant force in our media, and, er, Greenstone Pictures, a who make a reality programme about Auckland zoo and popular Maori TV staple “Ask Your Auntie”.
This country is very weird sometimes.
(Hypothesis: someone got pinged for bad driving on Motorway Patrol and decided to send fake anthrax to the broadcasters AND the production company!)

The injury was a back-sprainy thing. Still waiting on a physio appointment to say more. It is ow.
Word suggestions have been made. Choose your own favourites. I think mine is still “impershonation”.
Thanks to flatlander I read recently the book ‘The Death And Life Of Great American Cities’ by Jane Jacobs. This book was the very definition of an unexpected pleasure. It was incredible.
In this book, from 1961, Jacobs systematically explains how cities function on many different levels – economically, politically, in neighbourhoods, street behaviour, and more aspects – and knits all these levels of explanation together to argue convincingly that city-planning assumptions of the era were completely back-to-front. It was a hugely influential book, and I believe it is still influential today. It was one of the keystones of the New Urbanism, for example. (I think I comprehend a lot more of what Tom at WellUrban writes about, for example.)
Reading this book has helped me see Wellington in a new light, as I see all the phenomena Jacobs mentions in their various manifestations here. But Jacobs is explicitly writing about really big cities, and really big American cities at that – and sure enough, it has made me reassess my engagement with London, with Paris, with New York and Chicago and Houston. (Just one example of many: so *that* is where project housing came from, and why it’s such a disaster!)
The greatest pleasure of this book is having something so complex explained with such clarity and insight. It isn’t often that you get this kind of explanation. It’s satisfying, wildly satisfying, to have so many moments of “a-ha!”. Not only that, but the complex subject is easy to relate to – human existence in cities. Even those who live in small cities like Wellington will gain a huge amount from it.
I’m not going to try and summarise it here. Go see Wikipedia for more. And if you ever get a chance to read this, do it. Best book on town planning you’ll ever read.
A little bit of Friday linky: Wil Wheaton watches and reviews the Star Trek episodes in which he once starred as uber-annoying child hero Wesley Crusher. Wil is always worth reading, and if you know what TNG stands for, you probably should check these out.
Also: Musical Weeping Santa.

“Gosh, today has been splendid! I’ve achieved a great deal and had a wonderful time and now I’ve come home to a lovely meal! As long as I can play through my netball game without injuring myself, this will be the best day in a long while!”
The above comment had the predictable result.