Categories
comics writers

Remembering Vincent

There’s a friend of mine that I’ve blogged about before, Christian Pattison, who writes as Christian David. He’s been stomping around Summertown lately in his leather jacket, putting together his latest scripts and the novel and also The Vincent Fund.

It’s a memorial to the man he worked with for twenty years, good as: Vincent John McKeown, an incredible project that deserves wide support: a fund to help disabled people and their carers to enjoy the arts.

Christian is telling stories inspired by Vincent’s life, which ended abruptly last year after a long struggle with multiple sclerosis. Christian has spent most of life since graduating as a carer for the disabled, whilst also producing an amazing variety of artistic works (novels, plays, musicals, poems, as well as literary underground art/poetry/pop magazine, The Illustrated Ape.)

The web comic (gorgeously illustrated by Charles Cutting) is a series that begins with Vincent eschewing the afterlife (upstairs it’s Sunday every day and there’s a lot of Kum-bye-ahh; downstairs it’s always Monday morning and full of venial misery, as well as horned-ones in suits). Instead, Vincent chooses another, purely poetic route…

Vincent was a poet and a lecturer before the MS made work impossible. Christian used to accompany Vincent to as many arts events as possible. (They became experts on all the churches of Oxford too…) But it often took effort – try using the London Underground if you’re disabled…

So now the idea is to raise money so that other disabled people and carers can enjoy something that they don’t get as much chance to do as they might like. You can give money via the website to help for transport, or donate tickets. (Hint – putting on a show? Know any theatre producers? Tell them about The Vincent Fund!)

Categories
movies writing

Character Motivation and The Social Network

I hugely enjoyed the movie of the story behind the founding of FaceBook. It reminded me of the heady days before 2001, when the dotcom bomb exploded. Good on all those guys for plugging exciting new life into the Internet, long after investors in the UK had pretty much stopped being excited about the potential of the Web.

In the movie, which is based on the non-fiction book “The Accidental Billionaires”, we watch 19-year old Mark Zuckerman (played by Jesse Eisenberg) take an idea for a Harvard U based social networking site, and run off with it, building a site that would extend far beyond Harvard; first to other Ivy League Colleges, then to Stanford in California, then to Oxbridge, then all Unis, then the World.

Which is when you and me and most of our friends started using FaceBook.

Did Zuckerman steal the idea? Yes, insofar as someone told him about a great chair they’d imagined, and then he went off and built a chair himself. The blueblood Winklevoss twins and their partner made the mistake of telling a smart geek about their flashy idea, without tying him in to a contract, etc. Well that’s a tad naive. Back in the day when we started our IT company, we didn’t even talk about an idea we were serious about without getting someone to sign a confidentiality agreement.

Anyway, technicalities of the plot aside, what interested me was how screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing) chose to tell the story.

He chose to start the movie with an incident that Zuckerman claims is fictional – the dumping of arrogant, pushy Mark by a lovely young WASP girlfriend. In his jilted rage, allegedly, Zuckerman sets up Facemash, a Harvard-based site for comparing the hotness of girls from a bank of photos pulled from the Harvard online ‘facebooks’ (books of photos of all undergrads). The site crashes Harvard’s server and lands Zuckerman in hot water with the administration and outraged ladies of the campus. Facemash is a fail, but brings Zuckerman to the attention of the Winklevoss twins, who need a bright young programmer to build their site, Harvard Connection.

Sadly these gentlemen underestimate Zuckerman’s own drive to control his efforts, his desire to build something awesome (he admits he doesn’t know what he’s building but he knows it is cool), and they overestimate the importance of a verbal agreement between Gentlemen of Harvard.

But as a motivation, by Hollywood standards that is a bit thin.

So Sorkin adds something else – a subplot designed to suggest that Zuckerman is driven mainly by an urge to be in the Posh Boys Club. Now the kid seems plenty posh enough to me – he went to Philips Exeter Academy and Harvard, for goodness sakes. (OK, that might be presuming; maybe he was on a scholarship, who knows.) When Zuckerman doesn’t get into the Posh Boys Club (it had a name but I’ve forgotten it. It’s something far less exclusive than the infamous Bullingdon Club at Oxford Uni of which David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson were members) – he is so consumed with a desire to Prove Himself that he steals the social networking site idea, creates FaceBook, and eventually even fiddles his own business partner out of the 30% of the multi-billion concern that is rightfully his for lending penniless Zuckerman the princely sum of $19,000.

Now there’s a motivation that we can all get behind! Muaha ha ha, evil young entrepreneur driven by pride and jealousy.

Zuckerman, who of course few ordinary people really care about, what with him being super-rich, has objected to the portrayal. At an address to Startup School in Stanford he concluded that Hollywood writers, “can’t wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things.”

Well, I bet they can. Even, maybe especially, Aaron Sorkin. Hollywood is the planet’s most effective mass-communicator. If Hollywood doesn’t make movies about geniuses who want to build something terminally Cool, it’s because they know that in reality most ordinary people, who are the majority of film goers, cannot identify with such a motive.

Entrepreneurs cannot ever expect to get a fair hearing from Hollywood, because they do something that by definition is exceptional. They do what they do for reasons that are not always easy to fathom. Their success involves so much luck and factors that were beyond their control, that it’s impossible to map the clear route to success that others might emulate.

Complicated motives and the hand of fortune don’t make a good screenplay. The truth about almost any business success would leave 95% of filmgoers baffled.

So Sorkin did his job – he found an ordinary human motivation – sexual jealousy and societal envy – in a complicated tale.

It’s probably nothing to do with the truth, but the truth rarely makes a good, clean story.

Categories
appearances fangirling raves writers youtube

Festivals and Prizes (part 2 of 2)

With Duncan Wright and Kevin Sheehan, winners of the School Librarian of the Year Award 2010

From festivals – to prizes!

Last week was off to a cracking start when I was lucky enough to be the guest speaker at the School Librarian of the Year Awards for 2010.

If you watch this video from Teacher’s TV you’ll see my shock and delight that I was able to announce TWO winners. And that’s from a very strong shortlist! It was a joy to be able to see the work that all the honour list of librarians has put into the ‘Learning Resource Centres’ in their schools. I quite envied the kids at Kevin Sheehan’s school in Offerton, Stockport, who got to enjoy, amongst many other activities, a Doctor Who theme day.

Then it was on to St. Gregory the Great School, Oxford, where a House competition was run to find the best school poet for National Poetry Day. Four talented young poets stood up to represent their houses before a packed hall at lunchtime. The brilliant Raymond Pelakamoyo won for Benedict House with a poem about Home that brough the house down. (You can watch the video of Raymond Pelakamoyo below or on Youtube)

Then…back home to hear two exciting announcements – the fabulous news that fellow Redhammer client, author Michelle Paver had won the Guardian Children’s Book Prize. And that one of my favourite authors, Mario Vargas Llosa, novelist and former Peruvian presidential candidate had finally won the greatest prize in Literature, the Nobel Prize.

Huzzah and thank goodness! For those of us who carry resentment that Jorge Luis Borges and Graham Greene were never given their due recognition by the Nobel Committee, Mario Vargas Llosa was another thorn in our side. Now he’s won! Now he is officially the literary equal of his former friend and subject of his doctoral thesis (until he punched him in the face in Mexico City), Gabriel Garcia Marquez!

MG fangirls Mario Vargas Llosa at Oxford Literary Festival 2009

I’ll confess that I have yet to finish the two books that are considered to be Vargas Llosa’s greatest contributions to the American Novel.

  • The Green House
  • The Feast of the Goat

And I haven’t yet read Conversations in the Cathedral, which Vargas Llosa told an audience at the 2009 Oxford Literary festival, was his own favourite. Or The War at the End of the World.

But! I have read and loved The Time of the Hero, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, Who Killed Palomino Molero, The Storyteller, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta and The Bad Girl.

Readers who know their onions are now nodding and thinking, yes, she’s a lightweight, only read the shorter, more entertaining novels. That’s what makes Vargas Llosa such a genius and such a worthy winner! Unlike most Nobel winners he can write dense politico historical epics, comedy, thrillers and murder mysteries. As the guy who announced the Nobel said, Vargas Llosa is a STORYTELLER.

He can write ANYTHING and make it awesome.

If you haven’t read anything by him, start with Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. And yet again, thanks to Alan Hoyle, former boyfriend of my mother’s for giving me this book for honeymoon reading over 20 years ago and introducing me to your literary hero and now mine.

Three cheers for Vargitas and Peru!


Categories
appearances fangirling

I talk about mobile phones vs book for kids, and swoon at Avon from Blake’s 7

MG Harris at Sky News radio

Some book publicity events are planned months in advance…and some spring up on you all surprising, like.

Last Thursday I’d planned to be in London to renew my Mexican passport at the embassy, after a bit of a saga as you might know if you follow me on Twitter. Suddenly a little new story broke, about some research collated on behalf of Scholastic Children’s Books UK, that in the UK more under 16s own a mobile phone than own a book.

The research was based on a survey of 17,000 under-16s in the UK. Apparently almost 9 in 10 young people in the UK own a mobile, whilst fewer than 3/4 (73%) own a book. 80% of children who read above the expected level for the age have books of their own. This drops by 22% for those that read below the expected reading level (58%).

It was the last day of term for most maintained schools in the UK, so what better chance to stir up some interest in summer reading for kids?

Scholastic wanted one of their authors to be available for comment, so I was invited to stay over until Friday and do some radio interviews. Sixteen, actually, some live, some pre-recorded.

One interview was at my local radio station, JackFM of Oxford. It’s just down the road from me actually, so Sophie Bruce had a bit of fun teasing me about being in London in a recording studio, when I could have just popped in. And guess who does the in-betweeny-voice bits for JackFM? It’s Paul Darrow, aka Avon, the sexy heart-throb star of BBC TV’s Blake’s 7.

Paul Darrow sent all the girls in my class this photo. *swoon*

Now if you’ve read my bio, you know that I heart Blake’s 7 but I specially heart Avon, spent most of my teenage years (ahem and a bit longer too) dreaming about being a crew member on the Liberator and having my wicked way becoming really good chums with Avon.

Paul Darrow, a charming and very lovely guy, was always most kind to his fans. Once for his 40th birthday I got all my school friends to sign a card to Paul. He replied with a signed photo for every girl in the class, how cool is that? And a letter addressed to the Ladies of Fallowfield.

Sophie of JackFM asked me if I’d like her to get Paul to record a message for me, and I said that I’d like to know that he remembered the Ladies of Fallowfield. Who are now the dowagers of Fallowfield, but never mind.

Paul, being full of awesome and everything, did just that. Ladies, listen to this without swooning, if you can.

Click to listen: Ladies of Fallowfield

Thank you Sophie and Paul for making this recording! I love it!

BIG HINT about Ultra Secret New Project. The guy in it is a teeny bit inspired by Avon. He is a Bad Boy. Kind of a lot worse than Avon, if I’m honest. But Avon, I suspect, would have understood him only too well.

Categories
raves

Anyone else get lost in LOST?

On Monday morning we set the alarm and woke early to watch the LOST finale live from the USA. I made berry smoothies and marmalade toast and coffee, it was well worth the effort!

When it was over, we weren’t happy. We didn’t understand. It was all very fulfilling on an emotional level; all those lovers reunited in the Sideways world. But what did it mean?

Not since X-Files have I actually had to resort to programme notes to understand a TV show. My instinct is that TV entertainment should be simple enough not to require you to RTFM (read the ahem manual).

But actually why not? Why can’t a mainstream TV show be pitched at a deep enough level that you need to discuss it afterwards?

So I’ve spent some time looking for the best articles about the finale, which might help me to explain what happened, what was going on all along, because really, we weren’t trying hard enough. We had just been watching it an assuming that every t would be crossed and i dotted.

Well, it ain’t!

Last night at dinner I sat down with husband and 17-year old and explained the show/finale based on the various theories I’ve read. 17-year old in particular was delighted and is going to spread the word at her school, where the overall reaction to the finale was negative. Like mine initially. They were all dead? It was all a dream? Dammit, give me back my time!

If you were a keen Lostie who lost it a bit with the finale, maybe like me these articles will help you find your LOST love again.

LOST finale recap: And In The End

Lost Finale Explained Well – allegedly written by a writer who worked on the show

But first here’s a little glossary to Lostie terminology:

  • MIB – Man In Black aka the Smoke Monster, Smokey
  • FLocke – False Locke aka MIB
  • Sideways world – the world that seemed to be ‘created’ when the nuclear bomb went off and the Oceanic flight never crashed.
  • Lostaways – the passengers who crashed in the same part of the island as Jack, Sawyer etc.
  • Island Magic – anything at all that is a bit weird/magical
  • Holy Wormhole – the source of light at the centre of the island.

Just like with X-Files, we’re left with many questions. For example:

  1. Why is Aaron a baby in the church at the end? We know he was at least three in Real Life. I don’t want to be a baby in the afterlife! Fair enough if you died as a baby but if not…
  2. Desmond became some kind of super-being immune to EM powers and Island Magic, who didn’t get smoked when he went into the Holy Wormhole, OK. So how come Jack didn’t get smoked?
  3. How did Jacob manage to leave the island to fetch up all the Candidates?

Not that I have a problem with threads being left untied! The glimpses of backstory that we did see about the island’s long, mysterious past were tantalising; the temple, the statue etc, Mother, only make me enjoy it more.

It’s good to have this to share with the Teenager. I think we’ll be talking about it for a few evenings to come.

So – if you have any answers, theories, etc, let me know!