As a committed Indophile, I was excited to see the trailers and posters for the new Channel 4 drama series, Indian Summers. I was also a bit suspicious though: I mean, I’m really interested in that period of history, and I’ve love to see a quality TV series made about it (Jeremy Paxman presenting The Raj, a documentary series covering British-Indian history as comprehensively as The World At War, would be my pitch). But I was surprised that anyone else was.
Here’s some of my favourite stuff from 2014.
In case anyone was wondering why I list the books, films and music (or recently, podcasts) that I’m interested in at the moment down the right hand side of this blog, it’s not to show off my excellent taste or anything like that. It’s to encourage anyone who’s also interested in any of those things to discuss them with me. So far, this has happened precisely zero times. But I live in hope.
You may have noticed that The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse was my current read for quite a long time, recently. I’ve finally finished it, so now I’m going to post some thoughts on it.
*** WARNING: SPOILERS ***
It’s an open secret that Inversions, the SF novel by the late Iain M Banks, is set in the universe of the Culture. The book itself disguises this: the cover omits the “A Culture Novel” strapline of the other books such as Consider Phlebas, the narrative is solely about events on a late medieval world, and there is no explicit mention of Culture society or technology. However, there are enough subtle hints in the narrative for anyone familiar with Banks’s other works to deduce that the two main characters are agents from the Culture, who have infiltrated the pre-industrial society in order to influence it. At one point, one of them tells a child a fairytale about a land where people can fly betweens suns using “ships with invisible sails”; in the Epilogue, the other excuses herself from a dinner citing “special circumstances” (the name of the Culture’s black ops department).
I’m a huge David Lynch fan. Mulholland Drive‘s one of my favourite films. Lost Highway, Twin Peaks and The Straight Story are up there too. I even love Dune, despite it being regarded as sacrilege by most fans of the book, of which I’m also one: I just treat them as two totally separate works of art, each with their own merits. And Eraserhead, oh god, Eraserhead. I’ve been hooked ever since I saw it as a teenager, and had my mind permanently blown. Which, while I’m on the subject, should be a forced experience for everyone at that impressionable age. Even if they don’t enjoy it, and most wouldn’t, it would at least set the bar for weird, unconventional storytelling high enough in their minds that it might inoculate them from a dependence on cosy, banal, mainstream entertainment for the rest of their lives.
I’d therefore eagerly anticipated Lynch’s latest film, Inland Empire… and then failed to get around to watching it for six years. I even had a naughty copy on my computer, but watching it on a little laptop screen isn’t really appropriate for the sort of immersive experience Lynch’s films usually are, and somehow it never seemed quite the right time to commit three hours of my life to its promised hallucinatory mindscrew.