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Inception Review

Inception If you like your films smart, action-packed and completely original, look no further than Inception, Christopher Nolan’s latest epic since his career defining Batman sequel The Dark Knight (2008). It has been getting rave reviews from prominent film critics and extremely vocal online fans and for good reason – it is perhaps one of the most riveting and visually original films I have seen in a long, long time. In a single stroke it has reassured the film-going public that ‘blockbusters’ don’t have to be dumb, mindless star vehicles full of action and no heart. As a result, Nolan is quickly making a name for himself as one of the most exciting writer-directors of a new generation of filmmakers creating psychological thrillers on smart drugs. His first major film, Memento (2000), was the most original film I had seen for some time and has fast become a template for later films such as The Prestige (2006). Playing around with ideas of memory, dreams, perceived reality, and grief, Memento laid the foundations on a far less grand scale for Nolan’s latest release.


The story follows Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), an ‘Extractor’ who can enter people’s dreams and steal information or plant ideas in their subconscious. He does this with the help of a team of dream architects, builders of entire worlds in the subconscious in which Cobb can then lure his target and take the information he needs. He hooks both himself and the target up to a strange device in a briefcase, both intravenously taking a ‘compound’ that allows Cobb to access the other person’s dreams. Cobb is offered one ‘last job’ that could allow him to return to America and be reunited with his children. He puts together a team – an architect (Ellen Page), a researcher (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), an identity forger (Tom Hardy), and a chemist (Dillep Rao), to infiltrate the dreams of Robert Fischer Jr. (Cillian Murphy) who is to inherit a large company from his dying father. From this point on, the plot becomes as complex as Matryoshka doll as a sequence of dreams within dreams lead the audience deeper into a strange world.



In addition to this, Cobb is dealing with his own demons which become manifest in these false dream worlds. His dead wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) keeps appearing unannounced and attempts to sabotage his plans. It is this narrative of Cobb dealing with repressed guilt and grief which provides the emotional drive of the film. As much as Inception is a heist scenario, it is also a film about how grief affects us and how much we will do in order to keep the memory of a loved one alive. The scenes between Cobb and Mal are genuinely believable and emotionally wrought, and it was wise of Nolan to conceive of this story to give it more pathos. Visually Inception is beyond anything I have seen before. Despite obvious references to films like The Matrix (1999), The Cell (2000), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), there are many moments of great originality – hotel corridors turning vertically in which Gordon-Hewitt conducts a stunning fight sequence, Escher-like staircases, visions of a completely imagined world Cobb and Mal have created, the streets of Paris folding like a pop-up book.



Inception is one of the must-see films of the year, if for no other reason than to see a brilliant filmmaker working at the height of his creative powers. That a film as complex and original as this can find funding in cash-strapped Hollywood is reassuring, so is the idea that not every studio executive believes audiences are stupid and need to be spoon-fed their entertainment. This is a brave, mad, epic film, which is begging not only to be viewed over and over but it also leaves scope for a sequel. Let’s hope the latter is a dream fully realised.


Official Website of Inception

Stephen King – Bag of Bones | From a Buick 8, Review

Bag of Bones
From a Buick 8 During the hot summer months I like to put down the serious, dense literature and snuggle into some genre-fiction that doesn’t require quite as much battery power from the brain cells. Stephen King is one of my favourite genre writers and his books are a guilty pleasure – great page-turners by a formidable storyteller and in King’s case, one who is himself devoted to ‘literature’. It seems unfair how his books tend to be marginalised from ‘the canon’, but I guess this is largely due to the fact his books sell in their millions and also because he writes within the ‘horror genre’ – something serious writers would find limiting. Despite this, I do enjoy reading his books and I tend to devour them quickly, though in the case of Bag of Bones (1998) and From a Buick 8 (2002) one of my motivations for reading them was also research for a book. I wanted to learn more about writing in the horror genre and how to write a page turner and there is no one better in both respects.


Both books are mature works from a prolific writer. Most would agree King’s best books are far behind him – Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, Pet Sematary, It, and Misery are all brilliant, original books from a writer at the height of his literary powers. That’s not to say I haven’t enjoyed some of his other books – I especially liked Dolores Claiborne and Four Past Midnight – but for sheer creepiness and horror, the aforementioned books are unrivalled. King’s later books tend to suffer from a certain narrative sloppiness and bloated length, something which could be said of Bag of Bones and From a Buick 8. In my mind both books are far too long – at almost seven hundred pages Bag of Bones could have been vastly condensed, same with From a Buick 8 which might have benefited from being far shorter. I guess the longer a writer has been writing and the more successful he gets, the harder it becomes for people to tell him to edit out the peripherals.



Bag of Bones is an effective ‘haunted house’ story and for the most part it is well written.  It tells the story of Mike Noonan, a writer who is recently widowed, as he starts to unravel various mysteries regarding his dead wife, leading him to return to their lakeside retreat, Sara Laughs. He meets Mattie Devore there and becomes involved in a custody battle while trying to cope with the haunted residue of his old home. There are some genuinely creepy moments, especially when Mike Noonan is at home on his own, but all too often King asks us to swallow the supernatural activity in the house as if we naturally believe in all things supernatural as readers. I have always maintained the best horror is written with ambiguity and left wide open – is it Mike or is the house? King doesn’t allow us to make this choice as a reader, and I felt irritated by that.



When Mike starts to have premonitions and can seemingly see things, for instance what someone is wearing when he is on the phone with them, we are asked to just believe that it is so. When he explains this to another character, she reacts as though telepathy were an everyday occurrence. I found that completely implausible and showed a real lack of judgement in reader gullibility. I know it is fiction, but at least have the characters behave like they are in something representing the reality the reader lives in. I also felt the custody storyline was soap-operatic at times and rather distracting. If I want to watch bad tv, I would simply watch bad tv. These criticisms put aside, Bag of Bones is at times a chilling book, with a gripping thunderstorm denouement and an unravelling of mystery only a master like King could pull off.



From a Buick 8 is probably the better book of the two and is by far the most original. The premise is very simple – a man drives a Buick into a garage one day, goes to the toilet and disappears. The Pennsylvanian Police Department impound the car, only to find out that it is some kind of gateway into an unimaginable world. They become custodians of a dangerous and mysterious porthole which has devastating consequences for them all. The unique aspect of this book is in its telling – a group of state troopers impart the story of the car’s history to a young boy whose father has been killed in the line of duty, and the narration is picked up by different members of the group. It illustrates King’s desire to experiment in form even though he has nothing to prove this late in his career. It is a great read and there are some gruesome scenes which left a shiver down my back. However, at almost five hundred pages I think the story would have been better suited to a short novel, intensifying the power of the story but also ridding the repetition which bogs the narrative down.



Both books are an enjoyable read and King can be safe in the knowledge that the ‘king of horror’ accolade remains his. Reading his books always reminds me how important it is to tell the story rather than focus on stylistic concerns and lofty themes imposed by the writer which hinder the telling of the story. Those things should always come second, and this is a lesson many of us would be apt to learn.


Official Website of Stephen King

The Ghost

The Ghost

For five laborious years it has been thus,
caught in the cool steel of his office lights,
fluorescent tubes in a pretence of daytime
that never quite seems to arrive, the date
ticking over as a manic clock speeded up.

Before him the terminal, the unreal glare
makes his pale face paler, that bluish-grey
of dust settled over centuries. He operates
the machine with fingers, limbs, and eyes,
producing nought but electronic actions.

The rattle of its keys under his fingertips
amounts to his voice, deftly spelling out
strings of sentences never spoken aloud.
Only the phone punctuates this silence –
giving out its hollow scream infrequently.

About him the tongues of his colleagues –
that braying and cawing, the whinnying
and squawking, the hissing, the shrieking.
Theirs is a dialogue that goes unanswered,
a pettiness of committees and meetings.

Here is a task, here is another, how their
momentum could cause an avalanche of
paper to bury him. He has a photograph
of his heart on the glass of a photocopier,
pressing infinity he Xeroxes it to nothing.

Thus he becomes as faint as the magnolia
paint on the walls of his quotidian prison,
wiling away the long hours on trivia, seen
and unseen, heard and unheard, the slow
drip of boredom marking off his one life.

He is but a title bearing no resemblance
to his person, a description of objectives,
a set of rules which constrict him, a box on
a flowchart, less than the sum of his parts.
He is strange, quiet, thin as a document.

He gets thinner, and thinner, and thinner,
his pallid face will disappear in the bright
hot bars of sun at a window, as he watches
the planes and sycamores waving gently in
verdant celebration, waving only to him.

Cloth

Shroud

What do we pull between us –

a thread, an artefact, a belief?



Does one unravel the truth of

another by an absence of proof?



Here is a man, he is unknown,

his Jewish face is the negative



Of a negative. Here is a cloth,

perhaps once a shroud, a twill



Of flax fibrils, sepia photograph

of a mortal, long dead and buried.



The name of the man is hidden,

but he maybe fits a description.



But it probably is him, they said,

as if probability was itself certain.



Probably is not good enough –

probably causes war and death,



Probably relies heavily on faith,

on not permitting the evidence.



What do we pull between us?

A thread, an artefact, a belief.

Richard Dawkins – The God Delusion, Review

Richard Dawkins - The God Delusion

I bought The God Delusion in hardback when it was first released back in 2006 but I have to admit it has languished on my shelf for four years. I started to read it when I was studying psychology but in truth I had to put it back down after about fifty pages because I couldn’t devote the time necessary to reading it (there were huge psychology textbooks looking at me making me feel guilty whenever my nose wasn’t in one of them) and it just isn’t one of those books you can pick up and put down at irregular intervals. Since readjusting my priorities this year I have suddenly freed up a lot of time to start reading seriously again so it was only a matter of time before I picked it up. I was inspired to do so mainly because I have been thinking a lot about what my own atheism means to me and also because I had the chance to see Dawkins giving a talk at the Oxford Union recently. It was the second time I had heard him speak (the first was after dinner at formal hall in Exeter College many years ago) and he was as lucid and compelling as ever as he read from his latest tome, The Greatest Show on Earth.

The God Delusion, and consequently Richard Dawkins, have faced a great deal of criticism over the intervening years and I have to say it is rather nice to read the book after the brouhaha surrounding it has quietened down. The dust has settled and one can concentrate solely on the arguments presented in the book. Many object to Dawkins’ perceived arrogance, his conviction, his ‘stridence’ (as he is often described) but I am one of those people who actually admires these qualities in him. If a person believes something to be true I would rather they have the conviction to say it out loud and say it fervently, passionately, and with full belief in what they are saying. Rather that than an apologist determined not to offend anyone and who puts their arguments over rather weakly. And why shouldn’t Dawkins be arrogant in his conviction that there ‘almost certainly is no god’ when over the centuries many have been killed for holding this belief because the church could not countenance ‘heresy’. We have had two centuries of religion rammed down our throats, so I rather think it is his job to come out fighting.



Dawkin’s book is very different to Julian Baggini’s book Atheism which I read and reviewed recently as a preliminary text to this. Baggini’s book is a celebration of ‘Atheism’ which argues that god does not exist through naturalism and reason. Rather than being anti-religious, the book focuses on how atheists can live happy, moral, fulfilled lives. The God Delusion is quite the opposite. Dawkins is proudly anti-religious (often in the most mocking way) and his book sets about not only attempting to explain god away but also attacking religion for its marginalisation of science, the stupidity of creationism, the abuses of children on religious grounds and the content of the bible. He uses Darwinism as the driving force of his book and grounds much of his theory in biology, zoology and natural selection (not surprisingly considering his background) peppered with plenty of psychology and philosophy. Although this helps to provide a strong theoretical framework for his arguments I do often feel it can be quite limiting in places and the passages on Memes (the cultural equivalent of genes) in relation to religion is something of a stretch.



As an atheist this book is a crucial read as it clearly sets out with scientific evidence, reason, and theoretical elegance why god almost certainly (scientists, unlike theologians, never deal in absolutes) does not exist in a compelling and rational way. Dawkins brings all his scientific knowledge and outstanding ability to argue to bear on his case in the three main chapters of the book – The God Hypothesis, Arguments for God’s existence, and Why there almost certainly is no god. Although at times these chapters can be incredibly dense and science-heavy, ploughing through them is an edifying experience as Dawkins articulates atheist’s own less well-honed theories in a dazzling way. The remainder of the book is dedicated to subjects such as the roots of religion, the roots of morality, the bible, hostility towards religion, and the abuse of children by religious indoctrination. The material here finds Dawkins on shakier ground and he puts forward many anecdotal theories which do not always stand up to his earlier demands for strong evidence and scientific rigour. However, they are interesting additions to his main thesis and much more readable than the denser science sections.



As I mentioned earlier, this is a crucial read for atheists though I think The God Delusion is aimed at those individuals who do believe in god but have had short-term or long-term doubts of god’s existence and are seeking ways of helping them decide either way. Many readers may find his ’strident’ tone off-putting, but it is worth trying to get to grips with Dawkin’s arguments rather than paying too much attention to the way he writes. Having read this book I do feel like I have the tools to argue with anyone who finds my atheism hard to understand as well as spreading the word that god almost certainly does not exist.


Official Website of Richard Dawkins

The Out Campaign

Why I Like Carrie Bradshaw

Carrie Bradshaw

I have to say I have been rather surprised at the very negative response to Sex and the City 2, negativity which seems to me to stem from an endemic chauvinism within the critical film press. I concur, the film is indeed flawed, but rather than making personal attacks about the female characters or the actresses playing them I thought the majority of the blame was with the ‘male’ writer and director Michael Patrick King. It is flawed due to its rather desperate search for a plot-line which we have not, as a long-standing audience, seen before over the course of the very successful television series (the plot starts with Carrie and Mr Big, sags in the middle as she gets a bit moon-faced over Aidan, before going back to Big, which is essentially the entire plot of the series only not as interesting second time round). Taking the girls out of New York City was also something of a mistake, but on a completely aesthetic level a rather loved all the plush interiors and fashion of Abu Dhabi (or rather Morroco, where it was filmed).

Many critics have bemoaned what they see as four women who are vacuous and completely detached from ‘normal life’ (I didn’t know films, which deal mostly in fantasy, had to subscribe to such a thing), but to me they are just four characters who have been allowed to get stale at the pen of their creator/director when in all honesty their lives had been neatly wrapped up in the first film (again much-maligned, but at least this movie had a genuine emotional thrust – the marriage of our favourite New York couple). But the accusation that Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda have become four hysterical women with no professional or domestic concerns is absolute rubbish. The film centres on them taking a vacation from the pressures of their lives – and what’s so bad about that? At best the film is just two hours of amusing but at times rambling light entertainment which could have done with a little more ’sex’ and a little more ‘city’.

I’ve been a fan of the show really since the beginning. Although it pains me to say, I remember watching the very first series with my housemates during my first degree in English Lit ten years ago (is it really that long ago?) I’ve followed it faithfully throughout all six seasons and then two years ago I dipped into my wallet and bought the entire boxset (which comes in a rather amusing ’shoe box’ though cost the fraction of Manolo Blahniks) and it has been a wise investment with excellent returns (the episodes never grow old and there is nothing better, when ill and/or hungover, than a SATC marathon). For a long time I always strongly identified with Miranda – smart, funny, loud, wise cracking, successful, red headed – I often cited her as my favourite character and the one, on those useless internet quizzes (with my deliberately skewed answers) I always came out as.


The fact is, I am nothing like Miranda at all – this was just wishful thinking. She is the type of person I would like to be – grown up, frank, ambitious, forthright – but I guess as I have grown older I have accepted that we are nothing alike. As much as Carrie’s obsessive, neurotic, borderline romantic-psychotic, self-involved, manipulative, vacillating self irritates me, I have come to accept that I am much more like her in temperament, as much as I initially cringe to admit it. The above are perhaps the worst excesses of her character but there is much to like about her (and much I identify with). She’s a writer, which as anyone who writes knows, already marks her out as a person who is self-involved and melodramatic and provokes drama in her life for material (a weekly column is no mean feat).



But this also means she is interested in literature (she is often seen reading in her apartment, and not just fashion magazines for those currently scoffing), she’s a patron of the arts and a doyenne of pop culture often seen at the latest gallery opening, book signing, and movie première. Despite her apparent lack of ambition at the beginning of the series, writing one column a week for the fictional New York Star (how could anyone afford rent in New York based on such infrequent employment?), throughout the course of the show her column is turned into a very successful book in a life-imitating art moment (Candace Bushnell’s original column and subsequent book were the inspiration for the series) which turns her into a literary celebrity. She becomes a freelancer for Vogue and by the most recent film has four titles to her name. That’s not bad for someone who has always dreamed of being a writer. She becomes a fixture on the New York literary circuit and even dates a writer for a while, the ill-fated union with Burger.



Another key trait I identify with, and one of great overlap with her literary nature, is her romanticism. She believes in a Big (literally) crashing love whereby she will be swept off her feet and will end up ‘happy ever after’. This is often were her character is much maligned, but I celebrate this fact in her in the way I celebrate it in myself. The world needs a few more romantics. Indeed, Bradshaw’s romantic nature often plays against her, which is why she began an illicit affair with Big when she was with Aidan, why she was terrified of marrying Aidan for fear of not being true to herself, and why her relationships with Burger and Aleksandr Petrovsky were doomed because they just didn’t measure up to Big. But who cares? If we were to string together all our good and bad relationships publicly (with the benefit of hindsight) surely we would also be equally appalled and embarrassed or regretful of some of our decisions.



I also appreciate how she is always her own person. She says exactly what she feels, she is honest and forthright in her relationships, she has her own fearless sense of style (all the more commendable when she gets its spectacularly wrong), she never attempts to define herself by others, and she always tries to be true to what it is she wants, even when that can cause pain to others and to herself. For me however, what I like most about Carrie is that she is a person in her mid-thirties who rents an apartment (only becoming a house owner once her hands are absolutely tied), hasn’t felt the need to commit to one person for fear of an imaginary clock ticking, who doesn’t want children, whose financial situation can often be precarious (she never saves), who likes to be glamorous and have fun, and does not subscribe to age-specific landmarks which many feel obliged to tick off as they go through their twenties/thirties.

How many times have you heard people describe her character as pathetic and self-centred? These people are usually married in their twenties, have joint saving accounts within months of meeting each other, managed to get on the property ladder early on despite the crippling financial burden (better to be on any rung of the ladder than off they say), have or are planning children, are in ‘traditional professions’, don’t ‘waste’ their time reading books or patronising the arts because that’s what people do at school and there are now kids to provide for, and who rarely (if ever) put themselves first. This is perhaps why I like Carrie Bradshaw the most, because as I have come to realise now I am in my thirties, there are certain pressures and expectations to achieve certain things which seem adult and grown up but which frankly I don’t care for. She is a pioneer for those who won’t settle for second best. Yes, she finally marries Big (in her forties), but it is on the understanding that very little will change between them – no kids, no end to her professional writing life, no end to the glamour and parties, and no sale on her old apartment.


In the same way as Bridget Jones (the UK’s very own Carrie Bradshaw) we have a character who feminists declare anti-feminist simply because they give due consideration to relationships and happen to like a little retail-therapy and who enjoy sex with more than one long term partner (I don’t know a single female for which, in varying degrees, this isn’t true). If anything Carrie Bradshaw allows women AND men to make their own paths through adulthood without reverting to stereotypes, and who shouldn’t be castigated just because at the end they have it all and they have it on their own terms. For those people who feel inadequate because they aren’t married or do not have huge life savings or who prefer to rent their apartments or are still pursuing some nebulous dream of being a writer or finding great love, or even just shirk the traditional ideas of what it is to be ‘in your thirties’, Carrie Bradshaw is a beacon who says enjoy your life in nice heals with a few cocktails and forget the rest.


Official Website of Sex and the City Two

Why I Like Carrie Bradshaw

Carrie Bradshaw

I have to say I have been rather surprised at the very negative response to Sex and the City 2, negativity which seems to me to stem from an endemic chauvinism within the critical film press. I concur, the film is indeed flawed, but rather than making personal attacks about the female characters or the actresses playing them I thought the majority of the blame was with the ‘male’ writer and director Michael Patrick King. It is flawed due to its rather desperate search for a plot-line which we have not, as a long-standing audience, seen before over the course of the very successful television series (the plot starts with Carrie and Mr Big, sags in the middle as she gets a bit moon-faced over Aidan, before going back to Big, which is essentially the entire plot of the series only not as interesting second time round). Taking the girls out of New York City was also something of a mistake, but on a completely aesthetic level a rather loved all the plush interiors and fashion of Abu Dhabi (or rather Morroco, where it was filmed).

Many critics have bemoaned what they see as four women who are vacuous and completely detached from ‘normal life’ (I didn’t know films, which deal mostly in fantasy, had to subscribe to such a thing), but to me they are just four characters who have been allowed to get stale at the pen of their creator/director when in all honesty their lives had been neatly wrapped up in the first film (again much-maligned, but at least this movie had a genuine emotional thrust – the marriage of our favourite New York couple). But the accusation that Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda have become four hysterical women with no professional or domestic concerns is absolute rubbish. The film centres on them taking a vacation from the pressures of their lives – and what’s so bad about that? At best the film is just two hours of amusing but at times rambling light entertainment which could have done with a little more ’sex’ and a little more ‘city’.

I’ve been a fan of the show really since the beginning. Although it pains me to say, I remember watching the very first series with my housemates during my first degree in English Lit ten years ago (is it really that long ago?) I’ve followed it faithfully throughout all six seasons and then two years ago I dipped into my wallet and bought the entire boxset (which comes in a rather amusing ’shoe box’ though cost the fraction of Manolo Blahniks) and it has been a wise investment with excellent returns (the episodes never grow old and there is nothing better, when ill and/or hungover, than a SATC marathon). For a long time I always strongly identified with Miranda – smart, funny, loud, wise cracking, successful, red headed – I often cited her as my favourite character and the one, on those useless internet quizzes (with my deliberately skewed answers) I always came out as.


The fact is, I am nothing like Miranda at all – this was just wishful thinking. She is the type of person I would like to be – grown up, frank, ambitious, forthright – but I guess as I have grown older I have accepted that we are nothing alike. As much as Carrie’s obsessive, neurotic, borderline romantic-psychotic, self-involved, manipulative, vacillating self irritates me, I have come to accept that I am much more like her in temperament, as much as I initially cringe to admit it. The above are perhaps the worst excesses of her character but there is much to like about her (and much I identify with). She’s a writer, which as anyone who writes knows, already marks her out as a person who is self-involved and melodramatic and provokes drama in her life for material (a weekly column is no mean feat).



But this also means she is interested in literature (she is often seen reading in her apartment, and not just fashion magazines for those currently scoffing), she’s a patron of the arts and a doyenne of pop culture often seen at the latest gallery opening, book signing, and movie première. Despite her apparent lack of ambition at the beginning of the series, writing one column a week for the fictional New York Star (how could anyone afford rent in New York based on such infrequent employment?), throughout the course of the show her column is turned into a very successful book in a life-imitating art moment (Candace Bushnell’s original column and subsequent book were the inspiration for the series) which turns her into a literary celebrity. She becomes a freelancer for Vogue and by the most recent film has four titles to her name. That’s not bad for someone who has always dreamed of being a writer. She becomes a fixture on the New York literary circuit and even dates a writer for a while, the ill-fated union with Burger.



Another key trait I identify with, and one of great overlap with her literary nature, is her romanticism. She believes in a Big (literally) crashing love whereby she will be swept off her feet and will end up ‘happy ever after’. This is often were her character is much maligned, but I celebrate this fact in her in the way I celebrate it in myself. The world needs a few more romantics. Indeed, Bradshaw’s romantic nature often plays against her, which is why she began an illicit affair with Big when she was with Aidan, why she was terrified of marrying Aidan for fear of not being true to herself, and why her relationships with Burger and Aleksandr Petrovsky were doomed because they just didn’t measure up to Big. But who cares? If we were to string together all our good and bad relationships publicly (with the benefit of hindsight) surely we would also be equally appalled and embarrassed or regretful of some of our decisions.



I also appreciate how she is always her own person. She says exactly what she feels, she is honest and forthright in her relationships, she has her own fearless sense of style (all the more commendable when she gets its spectacularly wrong), she never attempts to define herself by others, and she always tries to be true to what it is she wants, even when that can cause pain to others and to herself. For me however, what I like most about Carrie is that she is a person in her mid-thirties who rents an apartment (only becoming a house owner once her hands are absolutely tied), hasn’t felt the need to commit to one person for fear of an imaginary clock ticking, who doesn’t want children, whose financial situation can often be precarious (she never saves), who likes to be glamorous and have fun, and does not subscribe to age-specific landmarks which many feel obliged to tick off as they go through their twenties/thirties.

How many times have you heard people describe her character as pathetic and self-centred? These people are usually married in their twenties, have joint saving accounts within months of meeting each other, managed to get on the property ladder early on despite the crippling financial burden (better to be on any rung of the ladder than off they say), have or are planning children, are in ‘traditional professions’, don’t ‘waste’ their time reading books or patronising the arts because that’s what people do at school and there are now kids to provide for, and who rarely (if ever) put themselves first. This is perhaps why I like Carrie Bradshaw the most, because as I have come to realise now I am in my thirties, there are certain pressures and expectations to achieve certain things which seem adult and grown up but which frankly I don’t care for. She is a pioneer for those who won’t settle for second best. Yes, she finally marries Big (in her forties), but it is on the understanding that very little will change between them – no kids, no end to her professional writing life, no end to the glamour and parties, and no sale on her old apartment.


In the same way as Bridget Jones (the UK’s very own Carrie Bradshaw) we have a character who feminists declare anti-feminist simply because they give due consideration to relationships and happen to like a little retail-therapy and who enjoy sex with more than one long term partner (I don’t know a single female for which, in varying degrees, this isn’t true). If anything Carrie Bradshaw allows women AND men to make their own paths through adulthood without reverting to stereotypes, and who shouldn’t be castigated just because at the end they have it all and they have it on their own terms. For those people who feel inadequate because they aren’t married or do not have huge life savings or who prefer to rent their apartments or are still pursuing some nebulous dream of being a writer or finding great love, or even just shirk the traditional ideas of what it is to be ‘in your thirties’, Carrie Bradshaw is a beacon who says enjoy your life in nice heals with a few cocktails and forget the rest.


Official Website of Sex and the City Two

The Sea

The Sea At Fecamp

This crook of land shoulders me, a great protector

of hills plush with luminescent ferns, hardy shrubs,

and lined by ancient sheep paths. And beneath me

a lip of rock, prehistoric forms looking to a horizon.



The infinite sheet before me is glaucous and white,

ever-moving as lunar light, the oily spread of years

crashing against the coast, endless and unceasing.

It is a tide marking off a life, the din of time passing.



As I sit upon this wooden bench, salted and rotten,

overlooked by the stunted lighthouse at Bull Point,

I find all decision is buffeted, the sea a great anvil

hammering out a future not ready to be quenched.



It is an unsatisfactory mirror, its broken reflections

require every viewer to piece together their own

answers. Here is mine; hold the pen, write with it,

for yours must be the unhappy life of the intellect.



When there is no other employment then a life is

as restless as the sea, rocking between two shores,

and each word written is a wave striking another,

blue and fleeting, always erased by a tide incoming.

Change Your RSS Feed

The domain for this website has recently changed from www.pviktor.com to www.pviktor.co.uk which means the RSS feed you subscribe to may no longer show updated posts in your designated reader. Please make sure you update your subscriptions with the new address. (Note: for those who may be slightly confused about this, I have always had both domains mapped to this site, but the .co.uk domain took precedence over the site’s  post and page urls whereas the .com domain often only pointed to the home page, in which case you may not need to change the feed at all).

Simplifying Things

Admittedly things have gone a little quiet over the last few weeks so it is time for an update on what has been happening. I have been doing a lot of thinking about my life recently and asking many questions about my long term goals. Over the last eighteen months / two years I have devoted an extraordinary amount of time to this website, writing for it constantly and building and maintaining a readership with people who have enjoyed the content I have been posting. However, about a month ago I suddenly had one of those moments when I looked at my to-do list and saw how much time I was spending writing for this site and others, as well as maintaining a social media presence on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, and Myspace. I had somehow inadvertently made a full time job of blogging, on top of working a normal nine to five job (albeit part-time), and the realisation brought things to a head for me. I love to write about books and pop culture, but I think I have been expending far too much effort writing blog posts and not devoting enough time doing what I really want to do – writing fiction. I also found I had little time to read and do other things I enjoy. It’s not great waking up on a Saturday morning and feeling obliged to write reviews and posts when you all you want to do is see friends, sit in the garden reading, or get on with that second novel you have been promising to start for the past three years.

As a result I am scaling back and making positive changes in my life. To start with I have deleted my Twitter account, Facebook profile and page, Myspace profile, Digg account and all other social media platforms. These have all served their purpose, namely to increase readership, but the fact is a readership has to be built on and maintained and this takes a huge amount of time and effort (which I don’t have). I didn’t make any kind of announcements about deleting these accounts as I didn’t want to be dramatic about it. I have met some great people and I will maintain those friendships independently. I have also simplified this website in the following ways; I have stripped the home page and made this site specifically about blog content (which is how it was in the old days), I have taken away all of the social media plugins (which began to slow the ‘page loading time’ down), and I have removed the www.pviktor.com domain name so the site now only operates under www.pviktor.co.uk (be sure to update your blog feeds as a result). Regular readers will also notice that blog posts have dramatically decreased to a few posts a week rather than every day. This will remain the case, and I shall be reviewing less music in the future too (who needs yet another blogger writing their opinions on the latest album?) From now on I will be writing mostly about books and posting my own poetry. 

So what about the future? Well, I will continue to scale things back over the course of this year and ultimately when the current domain name expires at the end of December I will be shutting this site down for good. By that point I will have been blogging for six years and even though I have really enjoyed it and learned so much I think it is time to stop and breath and think about the next project. I don’t think it will mark the end of blogging for me but in the future it will be in a new guise and will be something completely different (I have some ideas already but they won’t see the light of day until earliest summer next year and even then only after I have had sufficient breathing space). I also want to start to write under my own name and while P.Viktor has served as a useful pseudonym it is time to kill him off. I need a completely new start and I also want to concentrate on writing a second novel and placing this with an agent and a good publisher. Self-publishing has been a great learning curve but I just don’t think it is an adequate alternative to traditional publishing at the moment (especially for writers yet to establish themselves). I am now in a place where my sole writing efforts are back on poetry and fiction writing which is what I want to do. Making these changes now is important – it is always good to mix things up, even though the terror of ending something you have put so much work into over so many years is horrible to deal with. It is time to re-establish my goals and start pursuing them again.