Not so bildungsroman

on the fairer sex

It’s been a while, and the first thing I’d like to talk about is Girls. Yeah, capital G. HBO are currently showing the first season in the US, and from what I’ve seen of it this is a seriously fresh take on what it is like to live, in your early twenties, in New York (or in any major city). It’s also been derided by some critics as being overly concerned with ‘white-girl-problems’ - focussing to the point of racial exclusivity upon the lives of its four white, college-educated female stars. 

Girls: SATC it ain’t

To get one thing straight, it is a series about young, white college graduates created by a young white college graduate (Lena Dunham, who also stars). There are moments of extreme awkwardness where all you can want to do is squirm or turn the whole thing off. But it parallels the awkwardness of being in your early twenties, not quite knowing what you want to do or who you want to be; hurting people, disappointing people; hurting yourself and disappointing yourself. You can’t turn your life off, so watching Hannah, Marnie, Jessa and Shoshanna make all the mistakes that you or your friends have made comes halfway between cringeworthy and cathartic. 

Hannah’s new eyebrows: ‘You look like a mexican teenager’

It’s like the antidote to SATC - there is no promise of success, no date-a-minute for these girls. They are not constantly groomed, nor constantly supportive of one another. They live in tiny apartments and have intensely weird relationships with men. They feel embarrassingly real. It’s also interesting to note that one of the executive producers of this series is Judd Apatow, whose track record would indicate a good eye for comedy that will resonate with a female audience (Bridesmaids, anyone?)

Jessa’s ‘dreamy’ look

The male characters in this (sliding along what will possibly be come to known as the Adam - ‘I don’t know what it is about me but girls never ask me to use condoms’ - to Charlie - ‘smothering love’) oscillate between seeming crudely drawn and entirely realistic. I’m not yet sure how I feel about them yet, but they’re definitely not 2D sounding boards for the neuroses of the female characters.

Charlie and best friend Ray perform their song ‘Hannah’s Diary’

‘Thought-provoking’ and ‘realistic’ are not adjectives readily applied to most comedy these days. Just saying. Also, even if you don’t like the series itself, the soundtrack is absolutely killer.

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on how sharing is caring

They say that a problem shared is a problem halved, and perhaps this is true, but I have also found there to be something of an inverse rule. That is to say, if you share something lovely, it’s twice as good.

I’ve been proving this to myself over the last couple of weeks, which have included a lot of quality time with friends beginning with a lovely trip around St Bartholomew the Great church in Smithfield, shared with a pal who was somewhat press-ganged into attending but also ended up having lots of fun, and now knows that he has the requisite key-turning abilities to have been a good monk.

After this marvellousness (which I just. would. not. stop. talking about, but will now) there was the day spent with a little gang meandering along the Thames path from Westminster to Hammersmith. I say meandering, as we managed to deviate quite a bit and a large portion of the excursion was spent on some sort of house-porn jaunt through Chelsea. But that was still lovely. And then there was a very amusing attempt to buy dinner for nine people when all the shops within a mile of your location are closed…

Except for Sainsburys.

Wonderful.

There have also been evenings in pubs, trips to the shops, an hour and a half spent perusing the many items of beauty in Liberty, a weird incident of being paid to share our umbrellas, and a particularly delicious couple of home-cooked meals this weekend.

And the sharing fun will continue later today, when I’m going to be one of the many literature-fans giving away special edition copies of a select list of books to the unsuspecting public as part of World Book Night. There are so many events going on for WBN, I really urge you to participate if you get the chance! And if you’re not one of the lucky 24 people who gets one of my copies of Good Omens then try and get your hands on it anyway, because it is simply brilliant.

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on living in a dreamworld

Oh dear, I’d normally say I hadn’t written anything because I’ve been too busy but that’s not strictly true. I have been up to anything much in a constructive sense but what I have been doing is working on a number of little creative writing pieces that have been sitting around on my computer or in my overactive brain for a while now…

Rather than confusing everything on here by posting a creative piece (far too left of field for my liking) I’ve set up a little wordpress page with, usefully, a similar masthead and THE SAME NAME as this. Same author, different style, different forum. Have a look here, and let me know what you think.

In other news, I saw and loved The Hunger Games but I nevertheless think that this is one of the funniest and (unfortunately) most accurate film reviews I’ve ever come across. It certainly made me review my own critical faculties. I’ve also been watching lots of Sex & the City, for no reason other than I identify to a worrying degree with people struggling with writerly neuroses. Except that Carrie is more successful than I am, which is an unfortunate truth, although she does have ten years on me so there’s light somewhere at the end of a tunnel somewhere…hopefully…

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on feeling guilty for no reason

I finished reading Middlemarch a couple of days ago. For months it has been sitting ominously on my bookshelf, judging my reading choices, whispering to me in the depths of night that I really should have read it years ago. It’s a classic, don’t you know?

Finally, I broke my detente with poor George Eliot. And I realised that I had been unfair. Middlemarch was not judging me for reading The Hunger Games, just for thinking that reading The Hunger Games was more fun than reading Middlemarch. Which it wasn’t. 

Classics are problematic because styles of writing change. The style that fitted with current parlance in the latter part of the nineteenth century does not quite chime with twenty-first century ideas of narrative. I notice more and more that popular fiction contains a lot of dialogue, whereas Eliot or Austen or Dickens can go for pages and pages of narrative exegesis without so much as a single speech mark. When you do get into the swing, however, you realise that much of what they have to say is still relevant. But if classics just don’t do it for you, there’s no need to feel guilty. Read what you want; unless it’s a set text for study, there is no book that you should read.

On the other side of the coin, I am trying to ignore pangs of guilt that I get when reading Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, or indeed Lauren Oliver’s Delirium, or Veronica Roth’s Divergent. These are all ‘young adult’ dramas (despite Delirium, and its sequel, Pandemonium, being marketed as adult ficiton) focussing on female heroines battling adversity in dystopic future societies. They’re a bit like The Road meets Twilight meets The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. And whilst the premise of each is remarkably similar, the executions are very different (although Rooney Mara would be a shoo-in to play any of the heroines).

Right now, the film world waits with bated breath for The Hunger Games, which comes out on the 23rd of this month. Jennifer Lawrence, the magnificent young star of Winter’s Bone (I cannot express how good this film is. Or how depressing) takes on the role of Katniss Everdeen. It looks violent. It looks melodramatic. It looks awesome. It looks like everything that members of the Twilight generation who are sick of the wet-flannel-romance that is Edward and Bella have been waiting for.

Until it drops, however, I’m watching Andrew Davies’ Pride and Prejudice (yeah, the wet-shirt one) on Lovefilm.com. Because kids today (and er…nearly twenty-two year olds today) may be in thrall to heroines in a dystopic future, but there should always be a place in all our hearts for the heroines of a bucolic past. Especially ones called Elizabeth Bennett. Or indeed Dorothea Brooke.

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on what it means to be human

I went to an interesting panel discussion at the very gorgeous Royal Society on Thursday evening, looking at what it meant, from a neurological/anthropological/biological/sciencey point of view, to be human. I have very little neurological/anthropological/biological/sciencey knowledge, but I found it intriguing that what emerged from the discussion was that the principal thing that marks us apart from other animals, and from earlier homo-species and neanderthals, is cooperative community and an amazing phenomenon known as Fifth-order-intentionality, which one of the speakers (Professor Robin Dunbar) was kind enough to describe.

It goes roughly: 1 thinks that 2 wants 3 to suppose that 4 intends 5 to think x. Apparently, this is about as far as human logic can follow (so for example if you were to add in that y believes that 1 thinks…etc then most people would be unable to keep everything straight). Being able to think at this level sets us apart from other creatures. It seems to me to be a sort of logic of empathy and desire - our ability to empathise allows us to extrapolate likelihoods up to this degree and therefore engineer situations to our advantage, be they commercial, social or whatever, and therefore by using our brains (apparently almost disadvantageously large at the time of homo sapiens first evolving, mused Professor Colin Blakemore) we were able to survive better. Not only this, but we evolved cultural systems and a complex, syntactic language to sustain them.

This was another brilliant point made (this time by Professor Mark Pagel). Language, as humans have developed it, is not merely communication. What we in fact have is a digital system into which pieces of discrete data (words) can be arranged to give an infinite variety of results. We possess the ability to not only imagine what is not there (due to our ability to reason to Fifth-level) but to describe it. 

I like that this was pretty much what the panel seemed to agree set humans apart from other animals: not actual brain size, not opposable thumbs, but culture, community, and (as Professor Ruth Mace pointed out) gossip. We care about what others think of us and about what we think of others, and we are able to communicate that care in intricate and subtle ways to those around us. Human beings are not just social animals, we are hypersocial: every innovation is for understanding, communication, and communal benefit. 

Like I say, I’m not very good at the intricacies of the science, but I found it refreshing to see what is often treated as a complex metaphysical question instead as a complex scientific one - and in this case the dispassionate lucidity of scientific enquiry was able to come up with some quite believable answers.

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