Weeknote 13/2024
No matter that we may mount on stilts, we still must walk on our own legs. And on the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own buttocks.
Verbs
Watching: 3 Body Problem, Netflix
It’s worth saying, upfront, that I’ve been a long-time fan of Liu Cixin’s science fiction series of books, known as the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, for a long time. Ken Liu’s brilliant English translation of the first book, The Three-Body Problem, was released in 2014 followed by The Dark Forest in 2015 and Death’s End in 2016. This trilogy was my first introduction to Chinese science fiction and I’m now a devoted follower of this literary movement, which includes extraordinary writers such as Liu Cixin, Ken Liu, Hao Jingfang, and Ted Chiang.
I would have said, hand on heart, that I thought that The Three-Body Problem was unfilmable. Despite an attempt by Tencent for Chinese TV and now this Netflix adaptation, I think I’m probably still right. It might be better to think, certainly in the case of the Netflix adaptation, of this as a being a TV show made from the books rather than of the books. Benioff and Weiss, the showrunners of this series, along with Alexander Woo their co-creator, have done a possibly ‘controversial’ thing but, I think, a wise thing, in that they’ve taken all 3 books and found a way to use them all together to build a story that follows all the major lines and beats of the original books without trying to film every moment as written. The first season is pretty good, and for someone who’s never read the books, I think it’d make for a great show with some fantastic high-concept sci-fi and really interesting and provocative ideas. If you’ve read the books then it’s probably best (as it almost always is) to just think of this as a version of that same story. I think the books are better (when are they not?) but I still think that this is a great piece of TV. I’m hoping they manage to up the budget for Season 2 - although I read that it’s already circling $20m an episode. They’ll need every red cent for what’s to come though.
Reading: Shades of Grey and Red Side Story by Jasper Fforde.
Sometime when I was in my mid-teens I was getting a train and - as this was in the before times - I had nothing to read on the journey. I’d gotten to the station a little early so I went into my favourite used book shop (Baggins’ Book Bazaar - which was, and maybe still is, the biggest second-hand bookshop in England) and I bought a copy of a book called Lost in a Good Book by an author named Jasper Fforde. At the time I didn’t know that this book was number two in a series, which made it a little odd to get into, but I loved it. I then got hold of number one, re-read number two, and then found out number three was coming out quite soon. I even went to a tiny, little launch event in a theatre at the back of a pub in London when it was released.
I’ve now read the whole of Fforde’s incredible Thursday Next series, along with most of the rest of his books, and one of my very favourites of his happens to be Shades of Grey. When it came out in 2010 it wasn’t connected to any of his other books and stood alone as some of the most wonderful, beguiling, and funny world-building I’d ever come across in a book. The book finished, primed and poised, ready for a sequel. But that sequel didn’t come. Not until this year, in fact, could I find out what happened next for Eddie Russett, Jane Grey, and the fine folks of East Carmine. When we were in the UK earlier this year we picked up the hardback of the the sequel, Red Side Story, and before getting into that this week I re-read Shades of Grey which is just as brilliant as I remember. The sequel is exceptional and I swallowed the thing whole in less than two days, sad to leave it behind when I finished. There’s a rumoured third, and final, part yet to come, The Gordini Protocols. I just hope it won’t be another 14 years before it arrives. If you like Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett there’s a pretty good chance you’ll love this, too.
Listening: Distraction Pieces Podcast
The very first year I had a show going to the Edinburgh Festival a friend of mine, and the brains behind the whole Edinburgh endeavour (hello Chris!), took me to a weird, little show above a bar by a guy called Scroobius Pip. I did not know who this guy was, or what his deal was, but I went along with some other folks from our shows. We were *crammed* into this space, and there was a real buzz of excitement for Pip, who started his set by launching into a rendition of the Duck Tales theme. Scroobius Pip, it turns out, is an incredible performance poet, rapper, and vocal raconteur and his set was blisteringly good. I’m not sure I even remember any of the other shows I saw that year, but more than a decade on I remember his.
Pip has since become something of a cult figure and major mover-and-shaker in the podcast world and his own podcast, Distraction Pieces, is solid gold every single time. He has big-name guests and small-name guests, but whoever he is with the talk is always funny, humane, open, and inspiring. Pip’s recent episode with Gareth Edwards (director of The Creator) was one I especially loved but even if you’ve never heard of the guest on the billing it’s always worth a listen.
Following: Cross-Check, John Horgan
John Horgan is a sharp-tongued, razor-brained writer with a particular fascination, expertise, and knowledge of the world of science and philosophy - especially the intersection of the two. I came to Horgan’s writing recently because of his interviews with 3 of the absolute monumental figures of the philosophy of science of the last hundred years - Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, and Paul Feyerabend. I had no idea someone had ever interviewed all three of them. Horgan’s interviews with them are remarkable but the rest of his writing is just as complex, rich, and idiosyncratic. He has a brilliant, funny, and subversive “day in the life” piece, a really absorbing essay about a potential cancer diagnosis and the way in which he worries he is over and/or under-worrying about things, and a great post called “Stuff I love Making Students Read” which I will be entirely ripping off for a post of my own.
Words
Yamandú Canosa, Europa, 2013
The focus this week has been paperwork. It’s now time for me to renew my residency papers here in Serbia and, thanks to the amount of time I’ve been living here now, I am eligible to apply for permanent residency. This means that I am totally allowed to be here thank you very much, and I’ll have the stamps, documents, cards, and hours spent waiting in anonymous corridors to prove it. It requires that a lot of various bureaucratic hoops are jumped through but I am extraordinarily fortunate that, for the most part, Anja and my father-in-law have been doing all of the leg work for me. It is much, much easier to have a native speaker (and someone who knows the ways of the administration) to navigate all of this for you. I remember the Kafka-esque torture of these labyrinthine processes from when we lived in Italy all too well.
Now that all of this is submitted there will be some kind of ‘processing’ time which presumably involves “…orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.” Once that is all done, I can submit my various biometrically significant appendages for recording and then I should be issued a lovely Serbian Identity Card. After that, I can even think about citizenship and a Serbian passport! Sadly, not an EU passport - though it’s now a race between Serbia attempting to enter the EU and the UK re-entering it. I think both are running along a similar timeline.
Fans of my usual nonsense may remember in my last Weeknote that the big talk was around trying to figure out where, on God’s green Earth, we would be going for a little holiday in May. You’ll be able to breathe easy now, as we whittled it down to a shortlist of choices, crunched the numbers, drew up a spreadsheet (I am entirely serious) and finally settled on… Valetta in Malta. We’ve never been, the weather looks good, flights are decent, and hotels are cheap so win, win, win. If you had Valetta in the sweepstakes please let me know via email and I will send you your winnings - £13.40 and an unworn Size S Mr Motivator t-shirt.
- Mitch.