Ignore Me While I Talk About the Weather

All day, it's been pouring with rain, reducing the view to fuzzy shapes and grey outlines. Suddenly, at sunset, the rain stopped, the view returned and there was the weirdest lighting effect. Every single building somehow ultra-real, in pin-sharp focus. Overhead, heavy unbroken slate-grey clouds. On the horizon, a long line of puffy, billowing clouds, starting out small on the right in Westminster, growing bigger towards the left as they moved behind St Paul's, and all of them lit sodium-lamp yellow by the setting sun (out of sight, over my right shoulder). It looked, I swear to god, exactly as though Parliament was on fire. And, for the finishing touch, there was even a vertical chunk of rainbow rising out of the Barbican on the left.

I don't know why I'm telling you this. Probably because I felt I should record it somehow, but failed miserably to get it on film (auto-exposure and auto-white-balance are not good for this sort of thing, and there's only so much horizon will fit in the frame).

Down the Rabbit Hole

Worldcon got me interested in SF again. I mean, I never stopped being interested in SF, but I had pretty much stopped trying out new SF authors. The only one of the Hugo nominees I'd read was The Algebraist. Suddenly I'm back into it again, partly thanks to having read several volumes of Dave Langford's reviews that I bought at the con, partly through being back in fandom and hearing people enthuse about things again. A half-dozen paperbacks arrived today from Amazon, and for a change I'm going to read something other than computer books.

While I'm setting about fixing my reading habits, I thought I'd also try to learn something about Literary Theory. Up to now, I've worked on the assumption that the whole field is mostly obfuscatory nonsense -- I read Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's book Intellectual Impostures, and Sokal's ludicrous and hilarious Social Text hoax, which would certainly give you that impression. Anyway, there was a panel at Worldcon -- "Knit Your Own John Clute", or some such -- where the panellists were mostly academics with backgrounds in Theory, and the question was raised: is there a Magic Decoder Ring? How can a layman begin to make sense of this stuff? The panel unanimously recommended Peter Barry's Beginning Theory.

I've just started reading Beginning Theory, and I think I'm going to like Prof. Barry. By page 7, he's already reassuring us that "the whole body of work known collectively as 'theory' is based upon some dozen or so ideas, none of which are in themselves difficult ... we must not assume that the difficulty of theoretical writing is always the dress of profound ideas, only that it might sometimes be ... challenges are fine, but they have to amount to something in the end." Heh. He then proceeds to reduce these dozen ideas to a bulleted list, before setting off on a tour of the field, one chapter per -ism.

So: cover me, I'm going in. Oh, and if I start bibbling on at parties about jouissance and différance, please slap me until I return to sanity. Ta.