Chattering about Holmes

For a long I have wanted to write about Sherlock Holmes and have stumbled over and over again due to the sheer immensity of the task. Sherlock Holmes is an immense character, an immortal work of fiction who appeared in sixty written stories by Arthur Conan Doyle and who then has spent the last one hundred and twenty years being constantly reinvented and translated across to radio shows, feature films, television series, comic books, interactive fiction games, board games and anything else you can possibly imagine. Holmes and his good friend Watson have lived through dozens of pairs of actors, been transplanted to the present day, moved to New York, and in one double-part adventure of Bravestarr shifted hundreds of years into the future. It is an amazingly vast subject, too big to ever even think about. As a result, talking about Sherlock Holmes is impossible in general.

I was introduced to Sherlock Holmes via two big hardback collections of his stories, one comprising the novellas and the other the short stories, that my parents bought for me from a then good service station nearby. This was the same place where we got giant anthologies of Famous Five and Secret Seven stories, and even a mammoth hardback five-novel James Bond collection. At least I think that was my first introduction as the BBC Radio 4 dramatisations may have been in full swing at about that time. On second though I'm reasonably sure that they were later but it's hard to tell with such childhood events. The Radio 4 shows were utterly enchanting, so much so that the sixty-four CD set was one of the first things I ever bought with my doctoral stipend when I was studying for the seemingly unending PhD. The radio shows really blur together with the written stories in my mind in the most idyllic way, where the voices of Clive Merrison and Michael Williams radiate off the pages as they're read. Those two actors, Merrison and Williams, were unique in that they were the only pair to complete the canon in dramatised form. I don't think anyone else has ever came close.

Many, many people will say that Jeremy Brett was the ideal Holmes, or Basil Rathbone. In the heat of the moment, a lot of people would currently espouse Benedict Cumberbatch but we'll have to wait until he and Martin Freeman finish their show and go through the long-time correction before that can really ring true. For me, Merrison and Williams were the ideal casting for the Great Detective and Stalwart Companion, and it is actually down to Michael Williams, who played by far the best version of Doctor John Watson to ever feature on the airwaves. In those Radio 4 plays Watson was a well-rounded, warm and sincere human being who couldn't be called anything even close to stupid. He was the character who wrote the stories, yes, but in those stories it is always implicit that Watson is playing himself down and Holmes up to make the tales more dramatic and exciting. Williams' John Watson was a full protagonist and foil to Holmes, who was more than capably played by Merrison but never to the detriment of his friend. It was a phenomenon. I suspect that Cumberbatch and Freeman will fare well under the fury of time's criticism but they won't approach the number of performances of my favourites and nor should they.

The modern 'Sherlock' is a fascinating beast of a television show, an adaptation and updating of the spirit of the original stories which cherry picks the best from those tales and meshes the results into compelling television movies but we'll be lucky to reach a grand total of fifteen segments before it collapses due to the busy-ness of its leads, its super-dependence on the mighty scribe Steven Moffat, and the danger in proceeding without sufficient remaining source material. No Sherlock Holmes has ever succeeded fully without being in contact with the source material in some way, which leads us into the show I haven't seen: 'Elementary'. I shall see it soon, and hope to be surprised, and if anything I've read is to be believed then the core to 'Elementary' is that Sherlock's back story is very connected to some version of updated canon and that it happened in London before he left for New York. If so, that's very smart to establish canon and also be in America, but we shall see.

O.

PS I hope my PhD ended. It's becoming very hard to say.

The upward trajectory

The bottom of the emotional barrel is not somewhere to stay for long. Tempting though it may be to mope and cower in self-pity most people bounce back to normality or otherwise take the dark path of seeking solace in dangerous addictions and harmful behaviours. Several times in the past I've been at the bottom of the barrel, one barrel being far deeper than the others, and it felt on every occasion as if the world would never take that turn to feeling good again. But, of course, it eventually does.

As mentioned elsewhere, the key to escaping the doldrums is simply to get going and do something. Overly simplistic? Yes, but it works. The doldrums is a state that can only survive in a vacuum, and is vanquished in many simple ways. Why not go the public library and start to get to grips with Swahili or plant morphology? Or learn about Taoism or Jung?

For me, the main obstacle to escaping the doldrums at the moment is of course joblessness. For weeks it seemed hopeless but this week applications have gone out and things don't feel so bad. Of course they're somewhat forced applications but they still exist and count toward the mental well being tally. Another thing counting towards that vague feeling of happiness is Coursera, where I'm currently chugging through three different Stats courses in a bid to recover all my lost and long forgotten Statistical knowledge. It's hard to fit it all in, but time is so far yielding to the task. On top of that there's the Quirky Muffin, keeping me sane despite all the odds, freelance research (aka doing mathematics for myself), and swimming and cycling in the great outside.

We're into October now, and the days are pretty short already. It's really important to compensate for those shortening days by spending time outside and doing a little bit of what people call 'exercise'. Bleuch, exercise for the sake of it is anathema, but it is necessary and I do fortunately like going for random walks and cycles down a path or two. An hour of being outside at midday in the depths of winter is probably the most important thing for mood control that you can possibly do. Those mid-winter barrels can be pretty deep.

So, the weeks wind on, and progress is being made. A paper is being written and arguments are raging about boundary conditions and quality in my mind, but at least things are happening. It's far worse if they're not. And if they weren't then at least I have a book by Jung, shelves full of novels, and Stats courses to keep me going.

Life's quite good, really.

O.

Story: Oneiromancy, II

(Part O , I , III)

Dreams are an important part of our lives. We all dream, even if we don't remember them, or our brains suffer as a result. We can learn from our dreams and our dreams can learn from us, that is if we happen to exist in a world connected to the Dreamline.

The Dreamline is simple in concept, in that certain sensitive beings can tap into it and communicate abstractly to other sensitives who are spatially and temporally 'close' enough. How this works we have yet to discover but the number of examples of such sensitives has been waning for more than fifty years. We had thought that the genetics causing the sensitivity had been slowly mutated out of the species, but could such a rapid change be credible?

Finally, as we worried about the last known sensitive in the Western world moving on into the next life, someone invented a new theory as to the slow of withdrawals of sensitives from the population. The hypothesis was that they remained as abundant as ever, diet and pollution not withstanding, and that the problem was a lack of transmissions further up the Timeline. The sensitives had nothing to receive, and without those messages how could they know they had the capacity? There was an interruption in the chain of Dreamers, an Event Horizon that nothing could apparently cross.

The last known Dreamliner in our country, a woman called Dorena Spratt, hadn't received dream conundrums from anywhen but the past or present for more than five years, although she was maintaining a bizarre string of barely intelligible exchanges with someone apparently in Japan who kept trying to convey something about a loaf of bread and the President of the World Bank. Dorena really had no idea what it was all about. That was true until the penultimate day of her life, when she had a dream from someone new, someone who dreamed with new gadgets and bizarrely imbalanced clothes. Long having given up on the Dreamline she was jubilant and passed on contentedly the next evening.

The new dream changed everything. The Event Horizon was finite. There were new dreamers out there in the future. But what was going to happen to almost break the chain? And for those people in the future, what had happened already?

To be continued...

Story: The Disappearance (X)

(Part IX , XI)

There was a duality about the time I'd spent talking to the owners and managers of McGonagle biscuits over my tenure on the force. Personally I had gotten on with every single one, and had planned to do that or better with Agnes. At the same time, we treated the whole crooked business with the greatest of suspicion and no-one was above our gaze. That was why the appearance of the spectre of Rolf McGonagle, supposedly dead for six months, didn't surprise me all that much.

Never turn away from a bull. "For someone who was electrocuted and then fell through a floor, you look surprisingly lifelike." I had never liked Rolf McGonagle on a deep gut level.

"Ha ha. You're looking for a face full of dough." Rolf looked beyond me after this gem of articulacy and presumably was examining his niece. "Agnes. You staying there? It'll be easier on you if you join the family instead."

"No, Uncle, it seems that my family is not what I thought it was. I'll stay here and take it like a stupid honest person."

Rolf scowled his little tough man smile and I realised that this man looked no different to how he had appeared at his last meeting with us in the factory. He was unchanged. The three tough guys standing outside the door were standard issue muscle that I didn't pay much attention to. This dead millionaire pushed further into the room, like a ninny, so I grabbed him as a shield and kicked the door closed.

I used a few words, just for novelty. "Controls, Agnes."

Agnes looked confused and then realised that the one way out was not going to be through the door. Rolf was struggling so I bopped him on the head, nice payback for some few things, and then dumped him on the teleporter bed. The date and time indicator showed us as being fifty years into the future.

"Well, well, well. It was time travel after all, or at least a more organised hoax."

"You know, you're not telling me a thing!" Agnes was not pleased.

"Hey, kid, you know something? I'll tell you everything I know, on the other side." The controls were pretty self-explanatory and I set the space-time coordinates to what I'd written in my phone that morning. Previous bursts of time and space travel had left me with an acute sense of how important it was to always have a place to go back to. Planets do travel through space after all. "Ready?"

"Not really."

"Bad choice. Get on. I have no plan, no ideas, and an acute knowledge of having fallen into a trap. Let's get out while we can. We'll test it on Rolfie first." I pushed the activation key and 'Rolfie' faded out in a sparkle. A moment later the verification light flashed green. "It's now or never. Ten seconds."

Agnes mounted the platform, and I joined her. We avoided the space where Rolf had been. Who needs a mess?

And then the world glittered and changed. And Rolf had of course vanished. Some times I hated the world of stupid events.


More will follow...

Building Blocks

Retraining is always useful thing to have in the background, as the more skills you have the more versatile you can be. This is something that I really wish I had come through strongly in the course of my PhD but instead it was a relentless and repetitive struggle with the same problems over and over and over. 'Could have, should have, but didn't'. Alas, dwelling on past difficulties is really not the way to go.

Diversification of skills is a great way to spend a spell of unemployment. It's difficult to get started, but once begun it is halfway done. I am choosing to spend this period becoming reacquainted with Statistics and learning how to data analyses in the language R. While in its early stages, it is clear that a proficiency in R, as well as the previously adopted Python and odd thing we call FreeFEM++ provides quite an impressive portfolio of computational tools. Bring on the Statistics.

It feels stupid to be talking about disadvantages or disenfranchisement, but there are things that happen in the course of a spell in the Wilderness. Mostly they are things that you do to yourself. Confidence problems can be such a pain. There was a time when my lack of confidence was so ingrained and embedded into the DNA that I tried to do nothing at all, and just hide in the hole of safety. It's always a tempting option, and when you're stuck in job hunting mode it gets very easy to dismiss so many jobs as being unlikely or impossible...

So, in the final analysis we're faced with two kinds of blocks: Building blocks and mental blocks. The building blocks are helpful tools like learning R, or reading articles that are interesting as well as (or even instead of) useful, being proactive, and taking online courses. The mental blocks are far harder to shake, but that's mainly because they're distracting in their very presence. You feel the giant oppressive block sitting there, forcing you into stillness, and forming the focus for what can only be obsession. The word 'stillness' is the key here, as the best thing to do is to do. Make progress in something, anything, and then the energy will bleed over into everything else. Activity is what eliminates inactivity.

There's a lesson there somewhere. Perhaps it's the old one about macaroni being the key to a truer conception of reality.

O.

Cosmos

The Cosmos, that great order that represents reality which we also refer to mostly equivalently as the Universe, is a tough thing to look at. It's also beautiful with a hard grace. If it were still dark enough we could look out the window now and see the stars in the sky, gleaming with that light from the distant past. People used to look up at the cosmos, at the skies, and wonder what could happen out there. Now it's only possible far from the things of Man.

There's too much illumination to see the stars clearly at night now, and the universe is seen as a much harder place. It is not really, but life has turned into something far more pressured. We've made a trade-off, swapping disease and hardship for comfort and pressure, and as a result we have lost the sky. In losing the sky we have also lost our link to the world, even though it sits beneath our feet as it ever has. Or perhaps I'm talking total pretentious nonsense.

Let's pause to regroup.

As technology has progressed and we have multiplied uncontrollably on this precious world, the sheer number of people has made life more stressful. I hold that to be an indisputable fact. As we grow in numbers and multiply the stresses out of hand, there is a growing demand for entertainment and diversion. In a sense that is entirely understandable, as we need more assistance in relaxing; Not everyone is as easily relaxed as me, when I remember I need to be. But is there something else at play here?

As an example, I watch lots of television DVDs and read lots of novels. I also read Mathematics and languages, but that's another topic entirely. Could it be that these fragments of entertainment, these fictional realities are what are binding us to the Earth now, to our world and the wider cosmos? We certainly don't see much of the world anymore, unless we're lucky enough to travel widely, and even then we connect more to the people than the planet and for only a few instants in our lives. The more aware people go to a stream or the sea and soak in the world and reconnect in a myriad of other ways, but it's not a common thing at all.

If what we're looking for is connection to the world and to a certain constant of domesticity, it seems we look to fiction for a stable and constant reflection of that universe at large, for the inspirations and patterns that don't really get passed on any more, and the cautionary tales that get lost in the cracks. And then we learn everything ourselves anyway by trial and error, as that is how it has always been.

Does that mean that my DVD diet of 'The Mentalist', 'Community', 'Star Trek' and 'Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea' is teaching me how to be a wonderful human? Or the wonderful novels of David Eddings, Terry Pratchett, and the wonderful expanded universes of Star Trek and Doctor Who? Maybe they are, and maybe they aren't, but when the stars are hidden from view you seek them out in worlds where they are still clear to see.

O.

Film: 'Joe Versus The Volcano' (1990)

This is a hard film to write about. It was a huge flop upon its release and is disliked by very many people still, but I rather like its eccentricities and effectiveness in conveying a message. 'Joe Versus The Volcano' is nominally a romantic comedy, one which paired Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan for the first time, and one which has things to share if you're only listening. Perhaps that last part is the problem; People are so habitually expecting narrative experiences that they really have no use for other types of film. There is no intention of saying that 'Joe' has no narrative, but it is in equal part a metaphorical narrative and one with a very bizarre ending. One can only wonder at the ending, but there will be time for that later.

Joe is a veteran who went on to become a firefighter, but he risked his life once too many times and became scared and weary, and then sold out to a terrible job. His weariness and soul sickness manifest themselves as hypochondria, and one day a doctor tells him the terrible truth: He has a brain cloud and will die in six months despite otherwise perfect health. While that may not sound like the basis for a comedy the film is not really about the brain cloud and death but instead about living. Joe, subjected to the catalysis of his diagnosis goes forth, accepts an unusual job with incredibly ludicrous benefits, and emerges from his cocoon for one more adventure.

Staged in three distinct phases Joe goes from his drab and grey initial experience, to a transitional phase in the electricity of Los Angeles, and finally to liberation during a long sea voyage to an island populated by savages where his job is to jump into a volcano as a hired sacrifice. Each of those phases features Meg Ryan in a different role, where her characters reflect Joe's state and journey, and each of which begins her own journey thanks to touching Joe's life. Ryan does very well in this film, in fact she's far more accomplished than Tom Hanks as Joe. She manages to pull off three distinct characters, all of whom are confused with life and looking for direction, and conveys that things have changed for each one by knowing Joe as he goes on his way. Of course he marries the last version, Patricia, but that's another story.

It would be easy to jump deep into analysis of 'Joe Versus The Volcano' but that's available elsewhere. It's a famous film for analysis. The important thing is the journey. Of course Joe turns out to probably not be dying at the end, and unfortunately of course he survives the volcano with his incredibly new bride, and of course the islanders are a bizarre racial mix who are obsessed with orange soda, but the journey is worth it.

If you can detach from the supposed story, which is in essence a myth or archetype, there is a beauty to 'Joe Versus The Volcano'. A lyrical quality underlines most of the movie, only replaced by a crudeness in the initial segment at Joe's old job, and a bizarreness in the ending on the island. The beginning and the ending are the parts which will really derail people looking for a smooth narrative, and indeed the start does sometimes push even me out of the film a little. The islanders are similarly problematic in that they are so bizarre as to be offputting, but the volcano does add enough scale to make the natives inconsequential in the end. The ultimate end is... a cheat. It would be so much a better movie if they did jump in the volcano and the film ended, but as it is it is a cheat. I shall say no more.

This is turning into quite a ramble, isn't it? Doubtlessly it shall be revised a few times. The lyrical/surreal quality of the film is backed up magnificently by the score and songs, partly composed by the director John Patrick Shanley, and is exactly what's needed. Shanley didn't really do much in film after this movie bombed but he didn't deserve blame. 'Joe' has become a cult classic over time and one day will be rehabilitated completely, when people realise it's a parable or a fable or an allegory or whatever instead of a simple narrative. Someday it will happen. This is the movie that introduced the word 'soulsick' to me, and it's one I shall relish forever more. It's just a shame about the orange soda and being spat out of the volcano.

Yes, revisions will be necessary. 'Joe Versus The Volcano' is a nice movie, one which is ultimately flawed but entertaining and illuminating anyway. I love it. Meg Ryan is wonderful, Tom Hanks is solid, Lloyd Bridges steals the show and Ossie Davis is as great as ever. It really should be watched, because it is special. Yes, you might hate it but you could just as well love it. Oh, and you have to watch it to get the message.

O.

PS Took another shot at this review, which can be found far far in the future.