This time next week, I’ll no doubt be sound-checking in preparation for this:

Yup, Aeroplane Attack‘s first appearance at The Wedgewood Rooms, a former place of employment for three members of the band and the premier live music venue in Velcro City. And it’s a free gig on a Friday night – so if you’ve got no plans, head on down! Promises to be a night of goud loud tuneage, and I’m really looking forward to it… especially as I’ve borrowed a new echo box and am itching to deploy it over a large PA.

So, likely no FPB next week, much like last week (although my excuse last week was a train journey up to Manchester). It’s all go in my universe, as I do keep mentioning… so I’d best get on with it, eh?

Album of the week

Actually from last week, but easily good enough to carry over… it is, of course, The Eternal by Sonic Youth. If you’re a Sonic Youth fan already, you’ll be wanting to pick this up. If you’re not yet a fan, it’s accessible enough to be a good contemporary introduction to an utterly original band who’ve been gigging and recording almost as long as I’ve been alive. Go listen to ‘em.

Stuff

Yeah, look at me compressing a number of sections into one. Such is the manner of my life at the moment, and – during the scant seconds I get to sit and consider it – I’m quite enjoying it that way, thank you very much!

No review writing has been committed for a while, but I’ve been getting a decent amount of reading packed into the schedule; currently about a third of the way through China Mieville’s The City & The City, which is a good story whose premise is handled with subtlety, though I’m finding the narrative voice a bit odd at times – often enough, in fact, that I may shift to reading the published version rather than the ARC in case what I’m seeing is a pre-copyedit state.

Still plenty on my freelance plate, though the light is visible at the end of a few tunnels (even as another seems to stretch itself out further). Futurismic is rolling along nicely; we got linked to at MetaFilter the other day, and while it didn’t bring an avalanche of traffic I’m really chuffed to see us there, because I’ve been following the MeFi feed for almost as long as I’ve had an internet presence – and hence appearing there is a little like getting to have a drink in the Cheers bar would be for television fans of a certain age.

What else has been happening? Well, adventures Northward, band practices and meetings (and plain old hang-outs), live shows (like the mighty Clutch), hunting down cardboard boxes so as to ship seventy-odd kilos (SRSLY) of unwanted books to a buyer… from the sublime to the mundane, it’s all go, basically.

So there’s just time to trumpet happily about the arrival of Charlie Stross‘s new short fiction collection, Wireless, which arrived in the mail this week (and will be shouldering its way up the TBR array in the days to come).

Lovely!

Now, I’ve got stuff to be doing, so I’ll bid you all a good weekend. Take care!

[ Note for regular readers and other webizens - this is the first in a string of what I hope will be fairly regular entries wherein I write my thoughts about books and stories I have recently read.

They're not going to be reviews - indeed, in some cases (like this one) they will be books which I cannot review without justifiable claims of bias, but more often they'll be titles I don't have the time or will to review fully. Furthermore, they'll contain a certain amount of discussion about the mechanics of the writing or plotting; think of it as me workshopping the pieces in a group of one in a glass box on the interwebs. With SP01l3RZ!!!!1OMG.

This being the interwebs, you are of course more than welcome to join in the conversation. ]

TEMPLATE by Matthew Hughes

PS Publishing, Aug 2008 – ISBN: 978-1905834617

First things first: I loved Template to bits. I’d read one Hughes title before (Black Brillion) which I remember liking, but I didn’t fall for it in the same way… maybe a revisit is required.

Every reviewer of Hughes seems to say that he writes like Jack Vance; it’s such a common claim I have to give it credence. I can’t speak with authority because (to my shame) Vance is among that ever-growing list of Writers I Really Need To Discover Properly; for me Hughes writes like Iain M Banks trying on a Michael Moorcock mask, or maybe the other way round. If that’s a bit like like Vance, then score one for genre fiction consensus.

The pseudo-archaic language is well chosen and perfectly controlled, never once strained, never becoming a chore (or a calculated obstruction, viz. Wolfe’s New Sun books). Also notable is Hughes’ handling of detail; rather than deploy a Gormenghastian mass of description Hughes sets the mood, provides a few pointed (and frequently baroque) close details, and then lets your brain do the set dressing all on its own. It certainly worked for me; I was struck by how vividly I had visualised the characters, which never seems to happen as much with writers who describe at length. Less really is more, eh? Even as Conn’s heritage was in the process of being revealed, I was so caught up in the telling-of-the-tale that I felt exactly the same shocked comprehension as the character himself. That’s good engagement, right there.

Template is also a very philosophical novel, and very of-its-time. Laced in with the classic sf theme of the clone/gen-eng’d being and its place as a free agent in the universe (throw in some transcendence of creator’s purpose and the redemption of said creator for good measure) Hughes takes a long deep look at the cultural assumptions that underlie our economic systems… and I’m not talking Blue or Red here so much as completely different cultural shapes for the terms ‘price’, ‘trade’, ‘value’ and ‘worth’. Oh, and ‘good’, of course.

Careful choices make for a good balance of sympathy and that essential lead-character ignorance-of-the-world in Conn Labro, an iteration of the ‘orphan outsider in a society of outsiders’. His games-trained analytical mind suits his his home-world, but makes him prone to question the very different systems he encounters beyond it, not to mention his reactions to such. (It has literally just occurred to me that in that respect he’s like an echo bounced from Banks’ Gurgeh, the Player of Games.) In some respects Conn is also an amplified version of our (economic and cultural) selves as 21st Century humans; this metaphor could be seen as being made a little more concrete in the revelations about his origins late in the novel.

And to close with a reiteration – what a great read! It might be partly due to not having sat down and read a book that I wasn’t on a deadline for, but I’ve not enjoyed a book viscerally quite so much in some time, as both reader-for-pleasure and student-of-craft. It’s a template for a great story, you might even say…

Yeah, OK, I’ll get my coat.

I’m running pretty short of Berlin photos that I’ve not shared already (cue sighs of relief all round), but having done little or no photography in the last few weeks I am obliged to rummage in the crates once again. So, how’s about some Moorish retro architecture in the form of Berlin’s Neue Synagoge?

It will probably come as no surprise that it’s not the original, but a close reproduction of the 19th Century building which was battered during the war and subsequently razed to the ground. If you walk along Oranienburgerstrasse after dark^[1], you’ll notice a quiet policeman on the street in front, in a little roped-off region.

If only my native country were so careful to dissuade people from remaking the mistakes of the past.

Writing about music

The Dreaded Press chunters along quite smoothly now thanks to my volunteer reviewers. As mentioned before, things are winding down for the season – only one album came in the post this week, where I would normally receive four or five – so I’ve got a chance to consolidate some headway over the holidays and think about new strategies for the site.

And maybe finally do that redesign which I’ve been meaning to do since I installed the current hackabout of a theme over a year ago…

Album of the week

I’m going to cheat by picking two albums, but as they’re from the same band and have just been reissued simultaneously, I figure that’s fair enough. The albums in question are Heaven’s End and Fade Out by proto-shoegaze noiseniks Loop; if you like raucous fuzz and saturated soundscapes, grab yourself a missing link from the history of the style.

Writing about books

Despite last week’s triumphant completion of the epic Steampunk review, I managed to crank out a review of Lou Anders‘ Fast Forward 2 anthology for Futurismic. It was quite an easy review to write in some respects, because there was something positive to say about almost every story. Apparently I’m the only person who ‘read’ Picacio’s cover art correctly… though I suspect a number of other people did, but simply decided not to mention it in their review.

There’s still a hefty backlog of books that I read months ago but still haven’t reviewed, and new titles in the queue, some with deadlines. Plus I’ve almost finished Nick Harkaways‘ The Gone-Away World, which I think will have to be written about simply by dint of being such a unique and interesting book (not to mention one I wish I’d gotten round to sooner). Thank goodness for upcoming holidays, eh?

Freelance

The basic engine and visual framework of The Pretty Big Project have been installed, and the client likes it very much. But they want me to do something with one of the subsections that I’m not entirely sure how to go about achieving… I think I have a solution, but it’s not going to be particularly elegant from the back-end. That’s Saturday’s job – some “suck it and see” code testing^[2].

Other freelance stuff is business as usual; lovely.

Futurismic

A new month means a new story at Futurismic – in this case the return of Jason Stoddard, putting his fiction where his mouth is and following his own Positive SF manifesto in “Willpower“. I really enjoyed it, and the comments so far (both on the page itself and at io9) seem to concur. I’d be interested in hearing any further opinions from VCTB regulars. Because you have all read it, right?

Books and magazines seen

A quiet week again – seems like the publishing industry is slowing down for the season, too. Then again, there could be a lot more reasons; my sympathies go out to anyone working in publishing at the moment, because I’ve experienced what it’s like to work in an industry where the axe is hovering over everyone. Here’s hoping things perk up sooner rather than later – for everyone, not just the publishers^[3].

So, this week’s only input is a long-awaited BSFA care package. Lots of good stuff in Vector this time, and a bumper reviews section (including my review of David Levy‘s Love and Sex with Robots). Some of the articles (not to mention the Elastic Press sampler) have already provoked some vigorous debate over at the BSFA forums; if you’re a member, be sure to drop in and share your thoughts.

Coda

I suppose it’s high time I gave some thought to what I’ll be doing over the Allegedly Festive Period, but I doubt it’ll be anything special. My mother’s visiting the south coast this year, so I’ll not be trekking to Yorkshire in the mobile purgatory of the National Express network again… *shudder*

Still, there’s time remaining for planning^[4]. In the meantime, the weekend has arrived, so I’d better make myself some food and get cracking with the free fiction round-up at Futurismic, hadn’t I? Have a great weekend yourselves, as best you’re able. Auf weidersehn!

[ ¹ - There are many good reasons to do this; great bars and restaurants, for example, in addition to many architectural marvels like the above. You might initially be as confused as I was by the preponderance of young ladies whose fashion sense seems to be grounded in the props department of a studio that made eighties hair-metal videos. It wasn't until one of them engaged me in conversation that I realised she wasn't waiting for a friend at all. Not a *specific* friend, anyway. ]

[ ² - Based on prior experience, that's about six hours of the day accounted for... ]

[ ³ - That said, I'm pretty alarmed by this slew of interest rate drops and tax breaks that are being announced over here in the UK. Are the Government postponing the inevitable, or simply spreading it out thinner over a longer period? Or are they making like Jack Bauer with a pair of wirecutters inside a device they don't fully understand? Guess we'll find out eventually, but I would feel a lot more secure had we buried our facile national nostalgia for the days of empire and joined the bloody Euro when we had the chance. ]

[ ⁴ - He said, with a confidence that might prove not to be borne out by events. ]

For a man who claims not to be very keen on blog memes, Andrew Wheeler tends to pass a lot of them through his own fiefdom. Anyway, other cool and interesting people are doing it, and it’s been bloody ages since I did anything more here than links and FPB, so:

What ten books do you own that you think no one else on your friends list does?

I don’t have a flist (because I don’t LJ, yo), so let’s assume that if you read VCTB, you’re my friend^[1].

1. Virtual and Other Realities by Edwin Morgan – poetry collection from the Scots Poet Laureate. (If I stuck with poetry titles I could probably run off ten obscure books easily, but I feel it would be cheating.)
2. He Died With A Falafel In His Hand by John Birmingham – a sort of gonzo collection of horrible shared-housing tales from Australia, most of which are just unbelievable enough to be true
3. Emanuelle by Emanuelle Arsan – The novel a million bad soft-porn films were named after. Oh, you may sneer, but there’s some very interesting philosophical diversions about personal freedom amongst the raunch. Plus it seems you can’t find a copy on Amazon UK, so pretty obscure AMIRITE?
4. The Oxford Illustrated History of the Royal Navy – day-jobs can really rub off on you, can’t they?
5. The Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche – yeah, you never saw that one coming.
6. Raj: the Making and Unmaking of British India by Lawrence James – does what it says on the tin.
7. The View Over Atlantis by John Michell – one of the jewels of my ‘crank collection’; seriously wacky but very compelling. You’ll never think of ley-lines the same way again…
8. Altered State by Matthew Collin – a counter-cultural social history of the rise and commercialisation of rave culture in the UK.
9. Media Virus! by Douglas Rushkoff – arguably the book that codified the notion of viral marketing and accidentally tipped off big brand business to the tools of the trade.
10. Food Of The Gods by Terence McKenna – the thesis here is that, essentially, hallucinogenic mushrooms gave rise to the first matriarchal human societies, and our departure from that culture is due to the different sorts of recreational substances that are considered acceptable in our societies. Bill Hicks used to riff on this idea, though I have no idea if he read this book, and McKenna has a lot of big ideas and heavy research to add to the mix, including a hippie-style interpretation of the singularity that happens to intersect with the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012. Drugs, ancient races, cultural shifts… this one has everything, and is well worth a read even if you totally disagree with everything it contains.

That should do it. Though knowing how pride comes before a fall, I expect some of you will chip in and admit to owning at least half of these. But hey, it’s just a meme, and I had half an hour’s fun roaming my bookshelves. So if you feel the urge, pick it up and pass it on.

[ 1 - Can we assume that? Please? Go on... I promise to walk away when your other friends turn up. And I'll give you my lunch money. ]

Jeff Vandermeer lists ten reasons why he doesn’t read ‘YA’ fiction. Not sure how serious these are supposed to be, but this one rings very true to me at least:

2 – Never read YA even when I was YA.

Personally, by the time I’d hit my teens, if you’d tried to pitch me a book by telling me it had specifically been written for my age-group, I’d have turned my nose up and said “er, whatever“. When you’re that age, the last thing you want is people treating you as something other than a grown-up (even though you are, in fact, anything other than a grown-up).

I’d go so far as to suggest that ‘YA’ fiction may in some ways be contributing to the decline in teen reading. How many teenagers do you know who like being patronised and bracketed by their age?

Plus, when I was still working at the public library, I know I issued the Harry Potter books to far more grown-ups than kids …

Just logged in to SL and found a notecard in my inbox that I thought I should share with the science fiction community. Joe Haldeman is doing a book reading in Second Life this Sunday coming:

I’d like to invite you … to a meetup with science-ficiton writer Joe Haldeman [on] Sunday [August] 12th at 9 am SLT [that's 1pm GMT BST, UK people]. Joe will give a reading from his upcoming novel, “The Accidental Time Machine,” if the voice client is feeling like working Sunday.

If the voice client is not working, we’ll just do the meetup as a text chat.

Either way, Joe will be talking about his novel, science fiction, writing, science, art and more, and answering questions from me and from the audience.

I hope to see you, and your group, there.

– Ziggy Figaro

Landmark to the event location – the Amphitheater at Dr. Dobb’s Island:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Dr%20Dobbs%20Island/204/118/25

I think I’m going to be at a family gathering on Sunday, but if not I shall certainly be logging in. If anyone wants to tag along but is new to SL, drop me an email and we’ll arrange to meet up, or I’ll put you on to someone else who can chaperone you.

I used to hear it all the time as a public library employee: “People just don’t read as many books these days.”

It’s almost a common-knowledge truism – certainly something that anyone with a love of literature is certain to have heard if not repeated. But a recent study by the University of Manchester suggests that British people actually read more than they did in 1975. [Hat-tip to Ariel]

The research seems to be pretty wide reaching (10-15,000 people surveyed in each country), but as with all statistics we can’t be sure exactly how this all pans out, and what factors are at work.

For example, the statement “in 2000, Brits read on average for five more minutes each day than they did in 1975″ comes with a freight of ambiguity; it’s an average. It may be the case that demographics who were heavy readers in 1975 now have more time on their hands (and cheaper access to books), and have increased their reading as a result. But what of the demographics that traditionally read less in 1975? Are they reading more, or less, or the same amount? Has the flux in their reading time been absorbed by the increase of the time- and money-affluent?

And what about age spreads? The Print is Dead blog reports on a survey which suggests that, in the US, kids are actually reading far less than they used to – despite the alleged success of [multi-part YA book franchise I'm already sick of hearing about] as a ‘honey trap’ for the previously book-shy.

The same may well be the case here in the UK; I’m not even sure how one could go about getting figures that will actuially tell the whole story. The explosion of the ‘YA’ fiction bracket (a marketing term that I personally find cynical and degrading to authors and readers alike) suggests that there is plenty of reading going on at the younger end of the age scale. But sales figures aren’t the whole story – they don’t tell us who is buying these books, or who is reading them.

The fact that, overall, more books seem to be sold each year would suggest that reading as a pastime is far from dead. But who are those readers? Can we even find out? And what could we do with that knowledge – as a genre, as authors, as reviewers and critics and bloggers, as an industry - if we found it?

Digging in the vaults for Mexico photos again, because I’ve not been out with the camera. This is the view eastwards over Mexico City*, as taken from the observation deck of El Torre Latinoamericana, right in the heart of the city. When it was first built it was the tallest building in the Latin Americas, but it lost that title some time ago. It’s still pretty damned tall though.

And Mexico City (more correctly referred to as ‘El Distrito Federale’, or ‘El D.F.’) is vast**. You get up in that tower, and whichever direction you look in, it’s just city … all the way to the horizon. Mindbending stuff – especially to someone who’s still reeling from altitude adjustment and culture shock, as I was on the first day of my travels when this was taken. Possibly the most intense place I’ve ever been in my entire life.

[* If you recognised it as being the image from which VCTB's header is cropped, well done. Have a tequila on me.]

[** Population according to official census in 2005 was near nine million, but it is claimed by various charities and other organisations that the black economy of unregistered economic migrants may add anything up to half that number again.]

***

Well. Today I am damp, and in less than the best of moods – had you caught me at 12:30 when I got to work, however, you’d have seen me at high-peak rage. Suffice to say that Portsmouth received a week’s worth of rainfall within the space of about twenty minutes today … with the twenty minutes in question falling within the timeframe of me leaving my home and me arriving at work. I’m still trying to figure out a way to make my shoes dry effectively without making them stink.

But hey, things could be worse. It’s not been a bad week, all told, although very little has occurred that’s worth reporting. In other words: no one has decided to offer me money for writing for them yet. Hmph. Gotta keep hustlin’.

However, I have received a cheque for my Strange Horizons review of Extended Play, and while it may not be for very much money, it’s symbolically heartening nonetheless. Only thing is I don’t think I can pay it into my account directly, because it’s in US dollars … which is ironic, because it arrived about a week after I got a PayPal account set up for business purposes. It’s all fun and games, this freelance lark!

Oh yeah – I went to see Electric Six at short notice on Wednesday night for reviewing purposes. Put it this way: if you’ve heard the well-known singles, you’ve already heard the best they have to offer. Selah.

***

Incoming materials for the week are as follows:

• Postsingular by Rudy Rucker (Tor US ARC) – the privileges of being part of the reviews editorial team at Interzone include being able to cherrypick anything I especially want to cover myself, and I love Rucker’s writing to bits. This new novel has been described as ‘especially weird’; when you consider how odd Rucker’s material is usually, this should be quite something.
• Electric Velocipede #12 – the extra-nice thing about the small press quarterlies is that you tend to forget about them until the new one arrives in the letterbox. I have fond memories of the last EV, so I’m looking forward to reading this one … when I can find the time.

***

Of course, next week sees me up in Liverpool for the SF Foundation Criticism Masterclass … and seeing that (as far as I can tell) I’m not going to have internet access on tap, I should get a lot of reading done. The twelve hours of train travel alone should see to that! I’ll need to spend most of it going through the reading list for the course, though – most of which has been very kindly emailed to me in PDF form by one of the course administrators, who also took the however-many hours necessary to scan them. Thanks, Fatima, if you’re reading!

A week off work – wow. Doesn’t happen often. Doesn’t happen often enough, for that matter! I’m looking forward to it – it’ll be nice to get out of town for a while, meet some new people and learn some new things. I’m just trying not to think of the state of my bank balance, which has already suffered unexpected damage through having had to replace my broken cooker … oh well. You can’t take it with you, as the saying goes. And worrying about it won’t do any good either, so I’m determined to ignore it as much as possible and have a good time.

As mentioned above, I have no idea how easy it will be for me to get online while I’m away, so blogging here may be thin to non-existant. I may try to set up the reposting of some gems from the archives just to tide you over, and there’s probably a few reviews that I could shove up as well … we’ll see what happens.

***

Well, that’s your lot for FPB this week. Time for me to engage in The Culinary Ritual Of Friday Curry Justice before hacking out the daily bloggage for Futurismic, and then I can settle down to the weekend. I hope you all have a good weekend, too, whatever it is you end up doing. Adios, amigos!

Some booky gubbins from over the weekend … a sad bit of news that caught my eye on the SFBC blog is that Perseus Book Group is axing a few subsidiary houses in their acquisition of Avalon, one of which is Thunder’s Mouth Press.

In my fortunate position of getting sent more books than I have time to realistically read, it’s a rare occasion that I lash out my own cash on one, but two of the books I bought in the last year were Thunder’s Mouth titles: Sterling’s Visionary in Residence collection and Rucker’s Mad Professor. There’s a lot of these amalgamations happening in publishing at the moment, and I wonder how this will pan out over time - the Long Tail hasn’t yet kicked into the book market the way it has music.

***

Some bibliophile at The Guardian got given a demo unit of iRex’s forthcoming Iliad ebook reader to try out for a month, and seems to be fairly impressed by it – although he reckons it’ll be a long time before they kill of the print book business, which is something I’ve always conceded and which has been stated by minds far greater (and more versed in the technology and economic ramifications) than mine. But as reflects the item above, the following statement is interesting:

“It won’t destroy bookshops, any more than the much more advanced music-download business has destroyed albums.”

I can only assume the gentleman hasn’t seen the sales figures for the music industry recently – the album is indeed dying as a format, as is the bricks-and-mortar music outlet. The effects will take longer in an industry like literature, where pace of change is by necessity that much slower (books take time to write and edit after all), but if there is a truism in media these days, it is that “technology disrupts markets – inevitably and irreperably”.

***

Finally, we have the one and only Bill Gates proclaiming that reading will eventually go entirely online. There’s no timeframe mentioned, of course, and it’s probably a tautology to all but the most agressively technophobic. But Gates has scored well as a futurist prediction machine in the past – his book The Road Ahead, published in 1995, was stunningly accurate as far as such documents go – though not without some prophecies that look remarkably silly in hindsight.

We’ve got a long future of paper books to come – with POD technology making short runs more practical and affordable, there’s little reason that science fiction should suffer the effects of change any more than the greater market as a whole. But as the Guardian fellow says, we will start to see ebook readers in the hands of the ubergeeks – Stross’s “Slashdot Generation” - very soon, and the first increments of change will begin to unfold.

If I had £500 spare, I’d happily be one of those technology pioneers – indeed, should anyone from Sony or iRex be reading, I’d be more than willing to evaluate and critique their product for them over a lengthy time period …

[Edit 10/05/07 - Mr. Wright has been good enough to apologise in reply to my response on his LJ, which makes the following look astonishingly childish and petulant with hindsight. I leave it here as a lesson for myself, and consider this matter closed.]

 ***

Oh dear. It looks like my rapidly written little rant from yesterday has upset John C. Wright:

“I cannot join Mr. Raven in the idea that it is mean or wrong-headed to have standards, or that it is somehow cruel to have high standards. I can admire things I cannot appreciate.”

Whoa!

As I mentioned in my comment left in reply, I never said that. Or at least I never meant to; I know I wrote that piece rather quickly (and not in the best of tempers), but a few re-readings fails to show me the point where I said that it was wrong to have standards. I did (and still do) say that projecting your personal standards onto others is an act of elitism, and (as was the entire point of my original post) that elitism very effectively puts people off reading classic literature.

But it appears the problem is that I have entirely misunderstood the nature of elitism. Let’s allow Mr. Wright to explain:

“The sixth reason is that it takes humility to be an elitist, whereas being a populist is the soul of arrogance. An elitist, someone who likes great books because they are great, not because he likes them, is as humble as a mountaineer standing before a titanic, mysterious, unclimbed peak. To climb that mountain is work, at least at first, we all agree. But once you have achieved the summit, and all the world is under your heel, how far you can see! What things those content with lower perspectives will not view! The humility of a mountaineer is this: he does not think of himself as he climbs, he thinks of the rock under this fingers and toes. He did not make the mountain, he is not the one who piled it up. That is the work of former years, previous generations, so to speak.

The populist, on the other hand, looks in the mirror, and seeing only his own little self dressed in his own little circles’ little fashion, preens and says he is as large as the mountain. Who can actually prove he is taller than me? (says the populist) “By my measuring rod I have invented for myself this day, I say I am taller! My taste is just as good as his. He likes the Venus de Milo, and I like Charlie’s Angels It’s the same. He reads HAMLET, I read GREEN EGGS AND HAM. To each his own!” “

Hmmm. Well, that’s me set straight. I regularly use the phrase “to each their own”, never knowing that I was actually being sweepingly arrogant to others by doing so – evidently I should have been ramming my own opinions down their throats as gospel. I wondered why my career as a reviewer and critic was moving so slowly …

Luckily, most of Mr. Wright’s supporters have had the humility to lambaste me in the privacy of his Livejournal; how shameful it would have been to be bearded in my populist’s den by such bold mountain climbers, here, in front of all those who know my populism and shelter beneath it in shame at their own lack of humility!

The one bit I still don’t get is why he called his post ‘The Judgement of Paris’. I mean, how can one be judged by a city?