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About a month ago, I finished Susanna Clarke’s “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell”, though I didn’t really put the book to rest for three weeks after. It’s a massive tome; I wasn’t about to re-read it from the start, but the book demanded immediate re-visits, first a page here, then a passage there. And so it stayed atop my nightstand, getting better and better.

It’s a hard book to describe: the 19th-century atmosphere feels as cold as a lake in winter, and a gothic kind of melancholy hangs on every page. The tangled plot grows like a vine, not a flower; the story doesn’t discretely blossom before the reader, so much as it entwines itself around one’s ankles. And then, of course, there’s the magic – this is a book about magic – which feels inarguably historic, resolutely English, and dangerously fey.

Whatever it is, this book is not your run-of-the-mill fantasy.

There’s joy in it, too, but that’s mostly found in Clarke’s language, not the story itself. Her publisher has been aggressively hawking this book as ‘Harry Potter for Adults’, but where J.K. Rowling channels the warm and infectious spirit of Roald Dahl, Clarke delivers a piercing, Victorian wit and humor that’s better compared to Austen or Dickens. And while her book deals with the dire, fantastical and otherworldly, the needling jokes are usually sourced closer to home – like the following, where Stephen Black is unwillingly whisked to a chilling setting by a malevolent fairy king:

The light was watery, dim and imcomparably sad. Vast, grey, gloomy hills rose up all around them and in between the hills there was a wide expanse of black bog. Stephen had never seen a landscape so calculated to reduce the onlooker to utter despair in an instant.

“This is one of your kingdoms, I suppose, sir?” he said.

“My kingdoms?” exclaimed the gentleman in surprise. “Oh, no! This is Scotland!”

And so forth. Anyhow, the book gets a big thumbs-up, from me and Az both. (And we’re not just saying that because the author lives here in Cambridge, too.)

Punting is tougher than it looks. It’s certainly harder than the guides ferrying tourists up and down The Backs make it seem.

Arrive in Cambridge on a warm, sunny weekend (happens every few years, I hear) and you’ll see punting’s gnarlier side: the ‘self-hire’ crowd. Once these all-too-literal boatloads of amateurs take to the water, the whole British notion of a ‘jolly riverboat jaunt’ is replaced by a tourist blood-sport that’s more akin to log-rolling or demolition derby. It’s best to watch from the shores of The Backs, I think - you might wince occasionally, but between the crashing, splashing, and multi-lingual shouting, you’ll at least remain dry.

My own punting skills are no better, likely worse. But last weekend, I managed to elude the rent-a-boat crowd, at least, by punting away from Cambridge, towards Grantchester. (Actually, I rode down, then punted the way back.) It’s a 90-minute push either way - plenty long enough to leave me cold, soaked, and pretty well tired. I lost the pole twice (the river bottom is like clay, in parts), and then got rained upon, to boot. Happy I went, of course, but I’m done punting ‘til summer returns.

I completed another journey this week, and one which took me far longer - sixteen years, if I count correctly: I finished Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, the very week the last installment was published.

Can’t complain about the time - after all, it’s taken King 30 years to write those books, and he’s said this final volume heralds the end of his massive writing career. I can believe that - almost every book he’s written ties, somehow, into the nexus of The Dark Tower, and now that it’s done… where can he go?

So how good was it, at the end? Tough to say - his yarn was obviously good enough for me to read one after the other, and year after year; I’d also agree with the author’s own conclusion that the tale was ‘not entirely successful’. The big concern, of course, was the ending, including the author’s sudden, interjectory warning not to read it. (I’ve read a lot of books, and never have I seen an author pop into the narrative and lecture me against turning the page.)

King was right, of course. I should’ve closed the book. The journey is the reward, etc. - and any ending would have to be more bitter than sweet. This ending, though - man, after thousands of pages, a decade and a half… it just left me crushed. King says endings are heartless, and so this was. Almost.

No spoilers, here. All I can say is that choice facing the reader and Roland were one and the same - dare you enter the Tower, to finally see and know what lies inside? Or would you sit on the doorstep, deep in that field of roses, knowing there that the quest is good and true, and already complete?

I steeled myself for my upcoming capitalist indoctrination (B-school starts next week) by watching ‘Battleship Potemkin’ on Sunday. The movie, in true socialist form, was free for the masses - it played in a drizzly Trafalgar Square, and featured a thumpin’ new soundtrack composed and performed live by the Pet Shop Boys.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t so much a big spectacle, as a good show. I’d expected a double-dose of high camp; that the synthetic techno bombast of Mssrs. Tenant and Lowe would serve only to make Potemkin seem anachronistic and crude by comparison, probably send the whole thing up as a terribly naļve work — technologically, artistically, politically, historically, whatever.

Instead, it was engaging. The music was surprisingly complementary, at times almost natural, and if anything, made the film seem more contemporary, not less. Given, I actually like the music of the Pet Shop Boys (hence my trek from Cambridge to London), so my opinion is undoubtedly suspect to some, but I’d call it a success, and an artistic one at that.

No, it wasn’t perfect: some passages veered too far to the club sound (IMO, the words “Da!” and “Nyet” do not a natural bass line make), some slower strains went on just a bit (like Phillip Glass pumped full of Red Bull). But pacing, I suppose, is something the revisionist soundtrack composer can’t completely control, and one of the more obvious aspects where early cinema shows its age.

Standing in the rain surrounded by umbrellas wasn’t the best screening venue, but it was memorable. The best seats in the house, alas, were on a red double-decker bus snarled in Trafalgar’s traffic - we watched passengers wind their way to the top deck, sitting high and dry, until a traffic cop finally cleared ‘em out.

Came across a truly strange artifact on TV last night, while taking a breather from war coverage on RAI: the ‘Whacketts’ episode of Max Headroom, a now-quaint cyberpunk TV series from ‘87 which lasted a whole 12 episodes.

In retrospect, while Max Headroom’s dystopian production design may have been a ripoff of Blade Runner (hell, what isn’t, these days?), I think it’s still safe to say the series was way ahead of its time.

Yet as for why it’s still in rotation, in a somewhat decent timelsot (11ish), on a terrestrial broadcast network some 16 years after its cancellation in the U.S., I can’t say. Though the syn on the Italian dub is remarkably well done — as always.

Rob Swigart’s ‘Portal: A Dataspace Retrieval’, originally published as an ‘interactive novel’ back in ‘86, has been migrated to the web, complete with Commodore-era graphics.

I’m also fond of the (subsequent) hardback novelization. Not that the book or hyper-book are likely to be hailed as classics, but still: they imagine a networked world that, over time, seems increasingly familiar…

“I dreamt music” : Yamaha CS80’s and late ‘70’s analog / voltage-controlled synths, to be precise…

While Vangelis’ textured soundscape to Blade Runner has long been recognized as a groundbreaking electronic score, obtaining the actual music from the film has been nearly impossible. The morass of ‘legal and artistic’ issues holding back a definitive commercial CD spawned an entire phylum of bootlegs, which now have their own definitive history.

Ursula K. LeGuin, who I’ve always loved for her Earthsea series, also wrote a fine rendition of the Tao Te Cheng. I say ‘rendition’, as it’s more loosely interpreted than most translations, but she’s wielded her poetic license with wisdom and flair, methinks. To wit, some simple advice regarding greed:

to know enough’s enough
is enough to know.

So I’ve been playing another old-school text adventure — this time, one called ‘Christminster’ — which you can grab on this page, along with plenty of other Infocom-style games. Christminster is remarkably fun, with a depth and quality to its quasi-Oxford world that’s surprising to find in a freeware game.

Also, there is a nice cat in it.