The Arrow of Gold, by Joseph Conrad

I finished The Arrow of Gold the other night, which probably makes me one of the elite in Conrad appreciation.  because if you manage to read that book ... Look, it isn't bad.  In places.

Unfortunately, the places where it isn't bad are the places where the tiresome love interest is not to be seen.  And there are not many of them, and the whole purpose of the novel was to record the romantic tensions between the narrator and the allegedly captivating Dona Rita.  I desperately wanted her to be captivating.  For moments - when the narrator was not directly involved in the story - she was tolerable.  But that is not easy to do.  So swathes of the novel are tedious and pointless and frequently bordering on the incomprehensible.

These sections are thrown into relief by the scenes which don't feature Rita, or where Rita is narrating her own personal history, with the narrator dumbly standing about twiddling his thumbs.

There are moment when the ladies withdraw and the men get on with manly stuff, and that is always where Conrad is at his best.  It is no wonder that his greatest novels are often the ones which are set on ships or other places where women are generally not a concern.  Conrad seemed to find them profoundly puzzling and - as one of my correspondents in the recent guardian discussion pointed out - this rather damages his standing as a great novelist.

After all, if you find fully half the species profoundly incomprehensible, and intercourse (careful now!) with them deeply confusing, then you are rather limiting yourself.

I'm not so harsh, as there are many things that chaps can get up to without having to dally with girls.  But it does count against Conrad that he wasn't smart enough to realise what a dreadful dead end the romantic aspects of his later novels would be. To try and fail once might have been commendable.

To try and fail repeatedly suggests either he was so arrogantly convinced of his brilliant, or he had stopped really caring and was trying to milk the formaula that had - inexplicably - made the equally muddled Chance a best seller.

No Stars

A list of some films I particularly admire

I can't call it a bloody Top Ten because there are more than ten of them, and I couldn't ever settle on a definitive Top Ten if I tried.  So here's a random list of films I really admire.  Tonight.

I used to be able to reel lists like this off off so easily. See, I used to be pretentious. I used to be able to do Top 10s of nouvelle vague directors ... and now I'm not sure if I even managed to spell nouvelle vague correctly.

How times have changed. I used to be somebody ... I coulda been a contenduh ... now all I got is vintage wine and memories. And the sad thing is, I'm so out of touch with cinema my top 10 would probably looks pretty much the same as it did two decades ago. I stopped caring, you see, about new Scorcese films sometime between Brining Out The Dead and The Aviator.

Back then, it all seemed so important. I understood Jean Luc godard. Not his impossible movies, no-one, not even Jean Luc, understands them. But I understood the man. The urge to go and see half a dozen films in a day and argue endlessly about them with your equally intelligent and fixated friends in some cafe. Cinema seemed vital when I was in my 20s

But now ... I can barely find the time to watch a DVD and when I do, suddenly the desire to be challenged and puzzled by it seems so indulgent.

In no particular order ...

1. Touch of Evil. D: Orson Welles. Gargantuan film from the gargantuan Welles. Charleton Heston - cheekily blacked up as a Mexican drugs cop - investigates a murder while Janet Leigh lounges about in a bra that would make Madonna blush. Berserk, but brilliant. Or is it the other way round?
2. Sånger från andra våningen / Songs From The Second Floor. D: Roy Andersson. Brilliantly puzzling non-;inear story (sort of) about The End Of The World. Moments of unsurpassed beauty.
3. Simple Men. D: Hal Hartley. Wonderfully dry comedy about two brothers searching for their father and the meaning of life on Long Island. It's a terminal moraine, you know.
4. Raging Bull. D: Martin Scorcese. A grim tale of an athlete's attempt to escape the lower class drudgery and enjoy a brief stab at success. Peerless example of what cinema can be. Absolutely perfect in every regard.
5. Week-End. D: Jean Luc Godard. Simply because this changed my conceptions of what cinema meant. A middle class couple set off with murder in mind get caught up in the collapse of western soiety, and cannibal pig killing Maoists.
6. Mulholland Drive. D: David Lynch. Convuluted tale of desire, murder, corruption, revenge and some guy in a big cowboy hat. Horribly, perhaps the last truly remarkable film I saw in a cinema.
7. The Sporting Life. D: Lidsay Anderson. A grim tale of an athlete's attempt to escape the lower class drudgery and enjoy a brief stab at success. Another one.
8. Lone Star. D: John Sayles. A clever, low key film about a intergenerational murder mystery in small town Texas, from a director who liked to keep things simple so you could appreciate how complicated they really were.
9. Withnail & I. D: Bruce Robinson. Oh, come on. It's fantastic. I'm a trained actor, reduced to the status of a bum! An essential part of my student days, and still a fine meditation on growing up too late, unrequited love and oh, everything. My boys, my boys!
10. The Third Man. D: Carol Reed. I used to call this my favourite film, though it is currently out of favour. An inimitable setting, fine set pieces and performances. But would the police really not looked at Harry Lime's body before he was buried?
11. Fat City. D: John Huston. A grim tale of an athlete's attempt to ... Late, low key boxing drama from the great director. A washed up might-have-been gets a sniff of a second chance.
12. La Chinoise / The Chinese. D: Jean luc Godard. Godard renounces radical leftism in charactertistically off beat tale of student terrorists. Characteristically baffling and defiantly unhelpful, but contains many moments of Godardian genius.
13. Nackt Unter Wolfen / Naked Among Wolves. D: Frank Beyer. Concentration camp cat and mouse as prisoners conceal a Jewish child. A distant ancestor of the slushier Life is Beautiful, this film is stark, brilliant drama.
14. Oldboy. D: Park Chan-wook. Sick, brutal, nasty film about long delayed revenge. Redeemed only by the fact that it is brilliant in almost every way.
15. Darwin's Nightmare. D: Hubert Sauper. Jarring documentary about poverty, exploitation and pending ecological collapse around Lake Tanzania, where locals fish for invasive Nile Perch which are freighted to European restaurants while the fishermen subsist on rotting fish remains.
16. The Sweet Smell of Success. D: Alexander MacKendrick. Uber-louse Tony Curtis oils and weasels his way about the screen in a stupendous film about how vile people can be to each other.
17. A Night To Remember. D: Roy Ward Baker. The sinking of Titanic, the way it should have been told.

So, yeah. A top Seventeen. How stupid is that?

Something Happened! But do I really care?

I don't usually give up on books, but I hereby publicly announce that I am giving up on Something Happened, by Joseph Heller.

This is odd as a) Joseph Heller is a proper author who wrote at least one undeniable classic novel, Catch-22, and b) people sometimes say Something Happened is better.

It isn't.  It's very dull, with slab like pages of unparagraphed text dully reporting nothing happening.  It's about an advertising executive, right, and his troubled marriage and ... and I can tell you just had to stifle a yawn there.  Reading that sentence.  Now imagine the whole sense of "Who really cares about this?" stretched out over a 400+ page novel.

Though I am in no position to judge the novel fairly.  I didn't even make it to the halfway point.  Maybe the second half is astonishing.  Maybe the protagonist stops ruminating and gets a really big gun, a really hot and sexually voracious girlfriend, a fast car and zooms off to blow up Las Vegas.  Or maybe it builds to some astonishingly acute psychological or philosophical insight that would have forced me to re-evaluate every aspect of my own sad, petty life.

Or perhaps the dullness was the point, in which case, Joe, we didn't really need it spelled out for us at quite such length or in such banal detail.  Perhaps a short story would have done just as well.

Or maybe the whole thing was a joke and the point was that, in the whole novel, nothing happened.  In which case I hope Joe Heller was cremated as I may dig up his corpse just to punch it in the face.

Re-read Catch-22.  Don't bother with Something Happened.  Or, if you have read it, tell me when it gets good so I know what page to start from.

Because the first couple of hundred pages made me really, really wonder why I was living (not in a good way) and - more pertinently - why I ever bothered to learn to read.

Player of Games

A surprisingly good article - though with a rubbish headline - about the way video games have developed over the decades, to the point where they challenge more traditional literary forms in terms of plot, characterisation and philosophical content.

You might sniff, but while video games might not yet be Tolstoy, they are certainly beating Wilbur Smith ...

Cart Life is an equally effective study of contemporary life in America on the poverty line. As you scrape a living, selling coffee or newspapers, you begin to feel the grim pain of systemic unfairness and economic failure. The sense of injustice when one character is evicted from his motel room for keeping a cat is devastating.

Cart Life is a game, of course.  Though from the synopsis above, you might think it was a novel or a TV series - or an article from an unusually socially aware newspaper or magazine.

That's how debased our culture has become - where games can seem closer to capturing the grim reality of the times than the supposed established arts and media.