I recently read Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in a single day, firstly because it’s short, and secondly because it was really good. It had a wonderful immediacy that very few novels do, certainly not the long, slow novels I’ve been reading lately, like Crime and Punishment and Night and Day. Particularly surprising was the accessibility of the work, for something that was written two-and-a-half centuries ago, a little after Shakespeare was alive.

What I liked most was that it was nearly all action, with only the most economic descriptions in between. On the third page of the novella, for example, after being briefly appraised of the primary protagonists, the son of the prince of Otranto, upon the day of his arranged wedding, is crushed beneath a giant helmet that appears from apparently nowhere. While the origin of this impossibly large item of head-wear is unaccountable, it is not with this mystery that the prince concerns himself, nor even with the loss of his only son: his concern is that the marriage of his son to a girl named Isabella would have cemented his claim to the throne of Otranto by uniting two families. He is then forced to desperate measures to secure this alliance, as he is aware of an old prophecy warning that his family would eventually lose the castle and the true heir would return.

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Oh, this is cool and creepy. I have only recently been made aware of the existence of ‘The Slender Man’ and it is one of the creepiest things I have seen in ages. I watched all the videos last night in the dark, and even though I was talking with my housemate as I watched them, they still rather unnerved me in a way nothing has done in a while.

An explanation of what The Slender Man is can be found here, but if you can’t be bothered to read that, it’s just an urban myth that was fabricated on the internet. Some guy came up with it on this fake paranormal photos thread and attached a little story to it. The story is that there is this being who stalks and kidnaps children, who has no discernible face, wears a business suit and is able to extend its limbs and even increase their number. On the face of it, it sounds somewhat ridiculous and generic, but some of the fake photos of it are pretty good.

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I’ve had this theory for a while about why we would choose to read a particular work of fiction. I was discussing it last night with someone I work with, and he seemed to not disagree, so I shall expand on that theory here: I believe that there’s two reasons we read what we read: either it’s i) a well-written work or ii) it has an interesting story. Obviously these aren’t mutually exclusive criteria and a work can be both or neither, but I think that, to an extent, one can compensate for the other, although there’s a minimum level of each anyone would be willing to accept.

Here’s a bar chart I made illustrating the point, although the y-scale is comprised of competely meaningless arbitrary numbers:

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One of my favourite genres of videogame is the ’survival horror’, which is a fairly odd choice considering that the protagonists of these games are frequently awkward to control, underpowered and die a lot, slowing the games to a crawl, and yet these often have some of the best stories in videogames, Silent Hill 2 showcasing one of the pinnacles of videogame narrative. Ironically, despite the necessarily fantastic horror-elements, survival horror games tend to be among the more realistic videogames, often featuring ordinary people as their main protagonists rather than super-human soldiers, world-class racing drivers or magic-wielding warriors. Being ordinary people, or, at the least, people unprepared for the horrors that await them (as in the Resident Evil series) they are never far from a potential death, and are forced either to make do with what they find lying around (a stick with nails in it and a large iron pipe in Silent Hill, an inordinate amount of progressively more damaging guns, beginning with a pistol and shotgun, all with very limited ammunition in Resident Evil) or run from anything and everything. Consequently, these games are all about caution and pedantic resource management.

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You may have heard of Twitter, apparently it’s quite popular, and yet almost no one I know uses it. Almost everyone I talk to about it asks something along the lines of “it’s just facebook status updates on their own, isn’t it?” Kind of, with about 92% more Stephen Fry, but kind of not. Facebook is more focused around you and your circle of friends and is a communication tool, while Twitter is not about you, but about people you’re interested in, and is therefore more of a personally tailored information tool.

Here’s why I think Twitter is cool:

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I just watched Away from Her, a movie about an old couple where the wife has Alzheimer’s disease and the husband has to cope with her slipping away from him as she begins to forget things and eventually who he is. It was decent, but not a lot more. The whole time I was just aching for it to be somehow more beautiful, by which I mean I thought about The Place Promised in Our Early Days while I was watching Away from Her and wished Away from Her could be even half as beautiful as the representation of separation in that film.

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American Beauty is, as you might expect from the title, a beautiful film, full of beautiful imagery, the most prominent of which is the image of a paper bag blowing around in the wind. That this should be the most memorable of the film’s images is unsurprising, as it was just such a discarded bag blowing around the plaza of the World Trade Center that was that inspired writer Alan Ball to create the script for the film. (more…)

“Repetitions and lack of grammatical complexity both help to make Homer a swift, lively, vivid and easy read” – that is from Peter Jones’ introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Odyssey and I completely agree with that statement. I am often given the impression that The Odyssey is some long and arcane ancient text occupying a level well beyond the difficult language of Shakespeare, and just a little beyond Joyce’s Ulysses and Tolstoy’s War and Peace in terms of insurmountability: “You read the Odyssey?!” (with awed gasping). But really, it’s no more complex than, say, Philip Pullman’s excellent His Dark Materials trilogy; books primarily written for young teenagers. (more…)

I hardly consider myself an expert on the movement, but I am certainly a fan, if only for the wonderful writing of Virginia Woolf. So what is modernism?

Well, to put it into a historical context, it was a movement in literature and the other arts, beginning just before the turn of the twentieth century and lasting until the start of the second world war. It came after the literature of the Victorian age, which generally featured idealised versions of life in which the good people were good, worked hard and got their reward at the end, and the bad people were bad, and got their just-desserts. (more…)