More ideas from receipt paper

Strange events at a beach in Brighton hit the headlines. It is Christmas, there is cold wind blowing. A father and child walk their dog. The father is lecturer in physics in a local college. He explains to his son how time travel might work. They pick up something odd and see a lot of odd anemones and fossils on the beach.

The next day, local papers report the washing up of abnormal amounts of seaweed and fossils. This all immediately attracts the attention of fossil and pre-historic enthusiasts. The fossils themselves are curious but experts do not attach much value to the flotsam.

Story focuses on child who starts school who takes the piece of fossil to school for a “show and tell”. But at the end of the day, he pockets it – it’s a private item after all.

For the next seven years, the small beach in Brighton continues to be a site of some commotion. Year after year, there is more seaweed, more curious objects being washed ashore. First come the depressions in the sand, then the fog and then the stones.

The piece of fossil is named Luke and Luke talks to the boy over the years. It (for it has no gender despite the name) tells the boy of the wonders and horrors of a far off world where sea creatures drift the universe like cells in primordial soup. It tells of crazy clusters of black holes and how sometimes these creatures become so depressed, they disappear into one. It tells the boy of how the creatures are dying out because a strange disease which is inherited. The boy wants to meet the parent-creature which Luke is a part of. Segments are scattered all over the UK and even over the globe, collected and pocketed by people who visit the beach.

Then one day, it all gathers pace, bones, flesh and mucus start to appear in the air on the beach. The place is cordoned off. Investigation teams are called in. All manner of people assemble and camp out at the beach. There are the classic "doomsday" lot, the odd hippies. The child stays away from the beach, from all of it.

Christmas day, seven years on, the creature finally materializes. It is a victim of time-travel gone wrong. It is dead when it arrives and has been so for a millenia. Luke's voice grows weaker and weaker as that date approaches and on Christmas eve, says goodbye to the boy forever. That small alcove is now overgrown with seaweed. The boy's father has landed a post at a university in London, the boy has broken up with his first girlfriend and started a job at a small cafe.

Life goes on.

Thoughts on “The Master and Margarita”

The thing about Bulgakov was that he worked on this novel for so long, probably knowing that the chances of it ever being read or published in the Soviet population at large were despairingly slim. And still he wrote it.

There are many references in the novel to other Russian writers, including a brilliant joke about what makes one qualify as a writer. I won’t wax about the symbolism and the huge Judo-Christianity themes in The Master and Margarita.

For my course, the relevant areas lie in the satirical aspects of this novel. Soviet bureaucracy in the 1930s was not yet at its height but it was already stifling. It would have been difficult to make a living and having to choose between writing for a living or writing and being ostracized (or worse) for it. In the novel, the protagonist, known simply as “the Master” meets the same problem as Bulgakov, except that he is altogether saved from it all by the Devil himself. At the end, the Master rides off towards the moon and the stars or whatever it is, on a chariot with Satan’s retinue and with his lover, the beautiful Margarita at his side. How cool is that? Bulgakov’s fate could not be more different – and is a cold reminder about the conditions of being a writer. It is a precarious title to hold. He died in 1940 of kidney failure, having still not completed the revisions of “The Master and Margarita”, unable to emigrate from the Soviet Union and only really remembered at the time for one play he wrote in 1924.

Depressing, no?

Thoughts on "American History X"

From Wikipedia:

The film tells the story of two brothers, Derek Vinyard (Norton) and Daniel "Danny" Vinyard (Furlong) of Venice Beach in Los Angeles, California. Both are intelligent and charismatic students. Their father, a firefighter, is murdered by a black drug dealer while trying to extinguish a fire in a South Central neighborhood of Los Angeles, and Derek is drawn into the neo-Nazi movement. Derek brutally kills two black gang members whom he catches in the act of breaking into the truck left to him by his father, and is sentenced to three years in prison for voluntary manslaughter. The story shows how Danny is influenced by his older brother's actions and ideology and how Derek, now radically changed by his experience in incarceration, which includes violent rape by white neo-nazi inmates (because of a friendly relationship with a black inmate)*, tries to prevent his brother from going down the same path as he did.

Easily the most powerful film I have watched this year. The last film which made me this morose would have been Incendies. American History X has an overarching message about racism - not just about neo-nazis or white power or black gangs or youth unemployment or hopeless governments or what is constitutional. At the end (spoilers!), Danny is shot to death the day after Derek is released from prison, as revenge for the two men Derek murdered three years ago. Derek leaves prison a changed man - completely changed and already moved on from his days of being "pissed off" - but his old "enemies" cannot accept it, as do the members of the neo-Nazi movement.

And so Danny's death appears like an ambiguous mark on a neatly finished typed script - without "the end". The violence and retribution goes on and on etc. I wonder if the movie was just another 5 minutes longer - would it show Danny being lowered into the ground? Who would be at that funeral? Derek might not rejoin the movement but he might ignore Sweeney and move out of that area, cut off all ties to Venice Beach.

* Wikipedia is inaccurate. Derek is raped because he chooses to disassociate himself with the neo-Nazis in prison, not because of his relationship with the black inmate. His friendship with black inmate is private and happens in totally different scenes to the scenes in the canteen. Derek's friendship is the one thing that saves his life during the three year prison sentence. 

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It's odd to think that this violence still exists in the first world, especially when I have grown up in Hong Kong and London, gone to decent schools and benefited from the British constitution and the British education system. I guess I became interested in this after I saw a neo-Nazi on the bus last week. He had a Nazi cross tattooed on the nape of his neck and was sitting next to an old lady near the front, reading a dog-eared copy of "War is Hell" - no idea who it was authored by. My point is that it's probably closer to home that what people normally think. It took decades to build up the laws of the constitution, to have a liberal tradition in the UK and I take it for granted every day.

And Edward Norton has nice body. lol.

Review: The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss

So what was the Wise Man's Fear? What should ever wise man travelling on the roads of the Commonwealth do their best to avoid?

Rothfuss does not give a straight answer but 993 pages which make up this book suggest a variety of things which would make this a very instructional book about what to fear: folly, devious women, prejudice, secrets, having true-red hair, being of the Edema Ruh, arrogance, ignorance etc. etc.

The magic lasted only until the pages ran out themselves. I was not left feeling exhausted. Actually, reading this has been a chore and feeling slightly annoyed that I had spent time reading this. What have I gained?

Kvothe's story shows how easily reputation gained can be just as easily discarded by others, that being poor sucks and requires uncommon intelligence and audacity to make up for it, that learning languages and cultures are useful, that some women can be frustrating to get into bed with etc.

How can a book so difficult to put down be frustrating? It goes nowhere. Stripped of all the wonderful peoples, places and twists and turns of the road less travelled (all the way to the Stormwal Moutains, which reminded me of Brisingr and Chris Paolini's books), there is barely any plot. But books without any apparent plot make up with depth of character, feeling (Mrs Dalloway etc).

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I'll give it a day before I finish this.