steepholm

In the comments on my catch-up-and-apology post the other day, aerodrome1 was kind enough to ask for more details of my latest Japan trip. This will be a very edited account, but here and in a few later entries you'll find some highlights from that tour, which took place in late March and early April, and involved 16 days in Tokyo, Hakone, Kyoto and Matsuyama (the last just to shake things up a bit), with side-quests to Osaka and Kobe (the latter very much for the beef). It was the first time I'd been travelled in Japan with anyone else, which made for a new kind of experience in which I was forced (albeit not unwillingly) to don the mantle of the Old Japan Hand, leading my daughter and her boyfriend trepidatiously into Looking-Glass Land.

This was actually our third attempt at the trip. It was scuppered four years ago by COVID and last year by BF's loss of his passport - but this time we made it to Japan. It almost didn't happen, even so - a motorway crash meant that our coach from Bristol to Heathrow was diverted (along with all the other motorway traffic) along many a busky backlane, and I was apparently overheard saying sepulchrally "We're doomed, doomed," or words to that effect, but in fact we weren't doomed after all, and landed at Haneda quite handily and on time - even though we were the last to board.

D & BF are big Pokemon fans, and a noticeable Pokemon bias characterised what was, in many ways, a standard "first time in Japan" Golden Route tour. That's why we stayed in Ikebukuro's Sunshine City to begin with, home of the Ikebukuro Pokemon Centre - but we also got a lot of use from the Observation Deck at the top, and the not-so-micro-pig cafe below. [Note: I normally import my photos via Flickr, but am having trouble doing so right now, so apologies for the weird appearance of some of these, which have come via indirect crook'd ways.] D&BF were both rather awestruck by the horizonless extent of the biggest city on Earth - as well they might be.





It was a family holiday, but that didn't mean we neglected to see old friends, and even give a little lecture - in this case at Taisho University (by way of the Shibuya Pokemon Centre), followed by a gathering of children's lit friends at a Sugamo izakaya. The Ghibli Museum with Satomi and Akira also featured in this part, as well as a cat cafe and a rather splendid lunch in Nakano with Miho and Hiroshi (to say nothing of Chubby the Shiba inu), before heading off to Hakone - which will wait for next time.

I was talking to a Wiccan recently, and fervently recommending (as I often do) Margaret Mahy's The Changeover to her, a book I love for itself, but also regard - unless you know different? - as the very first YA supernatural romance. I would like to say, "Without The Changeover, no Buffy, Twilight, etc.", but in fact, despite its chronological priority, it doesn't seem to have been that influential, or even widely read outside the world of children's lit - where it did, however, win the Carnegie Medal. My Wiccan friend had never heard of it, for example, despite being (like Mahy herself) a former librarian (a connection I explored in this article back in 2015). Nor is she unusual in this - Wiccans in general seem weirdly unaware of it, at least in my experience.

So, of course, I bought a copy to send her as a present, and of course took the opportunity to reread the book first. I'm glad to report that it's as awesome as ever. This particular edition came with a short introduction by Elizabeth Knox. I thought it very well judged, and particularly appreciated the fact that she picked out the line "Sorry Carlisle is a witch!" for comment, because I've always privately felt that that line was extremely important to my own development as a writer. It crops up in the first chapter, in the course of a conversation between the protagonist, Laura, and her mother, Kate, as they're hurriedly doing the school run. The revelation is assessed, its likelihood or otherwise discussed, and then it subsides beneath the tide of the day's events.

Knox comments, correctly, that this is the kind of revelation that most supernatural romance protagonists would keep to themselves. I'd add that it would probably eventually be used as a climactic last line of a chapter - being far too precious a titbit to be just tossed into the middle of a hurried school-run conversation. When I first read the book, on a long train journey from Aberdeen in 1990, that was what impressed me. Here was an author who had such confidence in the fecundity of her imagination that she could afford to be generous: "realms and islands were / As plates dropped from her pocket."

There's a useful Japanese word, 余裕 (yoyuu), which can be translated variously as leeway, scope, spare capacity, with a side order of sprezzatura. I think that gets across what I mean about Mahy: she gives you a lot, but you feel there's always more where that came from. She doesn't need to hoard or ration, nor does she wish to. The rest of the book lived up to that promise, and reading it, back then, was a key to my loosening up my own style, which had grown sclerotic under the severe influence of Garneresque minimalism.

Sorry Carlisle broke that spell.

I'm as worried about AI as the next person, if not on my behalf then on that of my children's generation - but the discussions I see on social media, particularly among writers, artists and other creative people, often miss a couple of things that I think important, so I'm writing them here.


First they came for the Luddites
One is fairly local to the discussions themselves rather than the general issue - they're drenched in classism. AI in the broadest sense has been taking people's jobs since punch-carded Jacquard looms stole jobs from individual craftsmen and drove them to become exploited employees in the mills of the industrial revolution, but somehow it only becomes a "problem" when it threatens the jobs of middle-class novelists? Please.

There was a good example of this on a programme I heard on Radio 4 the other day (which partly prompted this post), where the discussion turned to AI-generated film actors and whether they might make real actors redundant. As an example of ways in which AI could actually be helpful in that profession, someone cited the example of elaborate or prosthetic make-up, where the AI could be trained on the actor's face just once, making it unnecessary to apply the make-up every day of the shoot. Nice for the actor and for the studio's bank account - but no one stopped to mention that the saving comes out of the pockets of the make-up artists and technicians. I see this a lot.

The God of the Gaps Redux
Also evident in that programme (but also my Facebook page, etc.) is the trope of setting red lines, which then get crossed, only to be replaced with other red lines, ad infinitum. For example: 'A computer will never be able to master English grammar. Oh, now it can? Then a computer will never be able to invent a funny joke. Oh, now it can? Then a computer will never be able to writing a moving short story. Oh, now it can? Then a computer will never be able to, etc. etc."

This reminds me very strongly of the so-called God of the Gaps of the late nineteenth century, the rearguard action fought by some Christians to find something that could not be explained by science. The trouble is and was, of course, that science often found ways to explain the supposedly inexplicable - e.g. the evolution of eyes - resulting in the search for the ever-smaller gaps in explicability where God might possibly be found. Doesn't that sound like a lot of AI debates to you, too?

Of course, it's asking the wrong question. We should care, not about what computers can or can't create, but how we relate to their creations. If I showed you two poems, and told you that one was written by a human, the other by a computer, how would you read them? My guess is that many people would scour them for "clues" betraying their origin, lines or phrases of which they can declare: "No computer could have written that" or "No human would have written that."

Why? Is it because they're attempting to show the technical limits of AI? Not really - it's because they want to make a connection (intellectual, emotional) with another human consciousness. As I wrote in another place: "The idea of a text that lacks intentionality is troubling to them; a piece of music generated by a computer, however beautiful 'in itself', will be less satisfying than an identical piece of music written by a human composer" (Literary Studies Deconstructed, 114). In other words, it's not the music (or poem) itself that's important, but the consciousness assumed to lie (or not lie) behind it.

If computers achieved consciousness as humans understand it, and humans accepted that fact. then the problem I set with the two poems would lose much of its point. Then, however, we would have the much bigger problem of sharing the planet with a superior intelligence. Hopefully they'll find us cute, and keep us as pets.

I tossed this into the Facebook oubliette yesterday, but on reflection I'm putting it here too, partly so that I can find it later if necessary, partly for those who don't follow me there.

It’s always better to ignore your critics, they say, and generally speaking that’s good advice, though I’ve not always followed it. I’ve often seen my words quoted in ways that slightly misunderstand what I was getting at or that omit important context. Almost always an honest misunderstanding is to blame, or the exigencies of space, or an understandable reluctance to make an awkward explanatory detour. No doubt I’ve done the same to others. As long as it stops short of reckless or deliberate misrepresentation, it's generally better to leave it alone.

On the other hand, when the person misrepresenting my views is a regular contributor to the hate site Transgender Trend, and she’s doing it under the banner of fighting gender ideology, I make an exception. Also, I don’t think I’ve ever read a page of published criticism that got so many things wrong in such a short space, and, since I’m currently in the middle of marking, it was almost instinctive to festoon it with Turnitin-style marginalia.

The writer is Susan Matthews,* contributing to a book published last year by a respectable academic press that should really have better quality control. (I’m not going to link it, but you can find it if you try.) The page in question takes issue with an article I published 15 years ago, two years before I publicly transitioned. It’s my first - and almost only - foray into gender theory.

The article sketches a historical moment around the beginning of the 1990s, when various brands of feminist and transgender theory were in wary conversation. It uses two children’s texts of the era (Anne Fine’s Bill’s New Frock and Louis Sachar’s Marvin Redpost: Is He a Girl?) to examine the areas in which these discourses agreed or disagreed, and especially where and how they talked past each other's concerns. Some of the language I would not use today, and I certainly wouldn’t give it such a hopeful conclusion, but I stand by its historical and literary analysis.



Either way, it’s not what Matthews needed for her chapter. She clearly wanted it to be an article in which I bash Fine’s feminist fable and embrace Sachar’s book as a trans story avant la lettre. So she pretended, or persuaded herself, that that’s what she’d found. She did this principally by attributing to me numerous views I never held or expressed. It’s pretty crude stuff, but if you don’t have the article to check it against you might assume it was true, so, here it is. Feel free to look for yourself. Oh, and here's the Susan Griffin poem referred to.

(By the way, despite my "missing the point" of her book, Anne Fine liked the article a lot and wrote to me to say so. Odd, that.)

* A little light Googling reveals that Matthews has form: I'm not the first person to be provoked into listing the errors and untruths in one of her articles. Here's Dr Stuart Lorimer doing the same thing.

How did I spend yesterday afternoon, judging by the above picture?

a) Enjoying conversation and cocaine at my local drug parlour?
b) Watching Fantasia Eroticopious with the curtains drawn for the umpteenth time?
c) Waiting to be seen at Bristol Eye Hospital, with pupils dilated by a stinging liquid administered on arrival?

Those who know me well will know that c) is correct. (Thursday is of course my Fantasia Eroticopious day - what's yours?)

It all started brightly, with a routine contact lens and eye check at my local Specsavers. The lens test was excellent - no deterioration at all over the last two years. I remember the optician asked me how I was feeling, and I replied breezily, "Oh, just coasting gently towards the grave, you know," and we both chuckled at what seemed a very distant prospect.

[I was also inspired to ask - a random bit of research - how many people reading eye tests pronounced 'Z' the American way these days. She said that a surprising number did so, though not yet quite 50%. I thought this interesting information, as mostly we hear the letter in the context of set phrases (JayZ, Gen Z, etc.) rather than in the splendid isolation of an optician's chart.]

The eye test was to have been done by a different optician, but we never got as far as looking at charts, because he found something sufficiently alarming in the initial retinal exam that he packed me off to the hospital for a same-day emergency referral.

The hospital is, luckily, an easy walk from my house, so I went in after a hasty lunch, and was ushered into the A&E ward, where I was fully braced to see every other eyeball hanging cartoonishly from its socket, but actually everyone looked perfectly normal. A sign noted that people were seen on the basis of urgency rather than order of arrival, so I was as alarmed as I was relieved to be taken off almost immediately by a nurse - but this was just to have the dilating liquid, it turned out. That was the first of several medical encounters over the course of the afternooon, each with a member of staff of greater seniority than the last.

Finally I was told that my optician was right. There's a tear in my retina, which could cause liquid to escape and build up pressure, putting the retina in danger of becoming entirely detached. I also had lattice deterioration (yes, I had to look it up, too).

That was the bad news. The good news was that my body was falling apart in ways that more or less cancelled each other out. The deteriorating lattice had formed a kind of seal, preventing the liquid from the torn retina from causing any serious issue. The doctor explained this while performing kirigami with a tissue that was standing in for my eyeball. It seemed a rather fragile defence against blindness.

For a while, they debated whether to laser me that very day or to book me in for actual surgery down the line, but as it was almost time for Pointless they ended up labelling it a chronic condition and sent me home, with an admonition to expect an Outpatient appointment shortly.

If it's broke in two equal and opposite ways, don't fix it.

I spent a very pleaseant Halloween with my daughter, her boyfriend and my lodger, which ended with my reading them 'Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad'. It was the first time any of them had heard it, and I think I can say that it produced the desired effect (despite my halting performance in the Latin sections). I've promised another M. R. James classic for Christmas.

Which should I choose? 'Count Magnus' is the one that freaked me out the most when I first read it, but I'm not sure it's his best. 'The Mezzotint' and 'The Ash Tree' are justly celebrated, but if it's not too long (which I suspect it may be) I'm leaning towards 'Casting the Runes', which has one of my favourite final lines in literature.

Pondering that story as it might be seen by people in their 20s and 30s, it occurred to me that it may remind them of The Ring - with its time-delayed curse. Are there other examples of the phenomenon, especially pre-James? Plenty of curses only 'take' when certain conditions are met, but I can't think of any others that are on a simple time delay.

Today I passed a sign near a primary school, warning drivers to watch out for children. It looked like this, as such signs have for as long as I can remember (perhaps with a couple of minor tweaks):



I suddenly realised that all my life I'd read this sign as showing a little brother being taken to school by his elder sister. Now, I was suddenly filled with doubt. Could the female figure be the mother? I suppose my instinctive reasoning was that she doesn't seem that much bigger than the child. If it's her son, he'd be a bit too big to need his hand held, perhaps. But how do you read it?

This of course got me looking at the international picture. My hasty Google search showed that the UK was an exception: in most countries, it's the male in charge - either leading or guiding a smaller female from behind in the general direction of learning, sometimes at pace, sometimes slowly, occasionally through the medium of jazz dance:



In a few countries, though, there are no females at all. Indeed, the person ar the school-adjacent crossing in France may not even be a child:



Feel free to add your own images to this little gallery - and, even more welcome, your sententious conclusions!

If you're like me, the only things you know about the Sargasso Sea are that it lends its name to a Jean Rhys novel and has something to do with the life-cycle of the eel. You may have wondered whether there was any connection between the two facts.

Almost certainly there isn't. However, I've never understood why the novel is called that (explanations I've read seem weak at best), so I was intrigued to learn that it was only in in 1959 that Denys Tucker discovered that European eels, having spent maybe a decade or two living it up in the sophisticated lakes and waterways of that debauched continent, all die without ever being able to make it back to the Sargasso Sea to spawn, leaving the work of creating the next generation to their American cousins. What an apt metaphor for the post-WWII view of intercontinental relations!

More to the point, what an apt metaphor for the sterility of Antoinette's life with Rochester, living as (in Tucker's description of the evolutionary position of European eels) a "useless waste product."

Now, I don't say that Rhys was abreast of developments in eel biology, but I do say that five years after Tucker's paper, she'd finished the first draft of WSS. Make of it what you will.

Having bemoaned the fate of my book Literary Studies Deconstructed (aka The LITMUS Papers: Or, Lies I Tell My Undergraduate Students) in a recent post, I'm happy to report that it's currently on sale as an ebook for a very reasonable £12.99. So, as part of my new campaign to become a monster of self-publicisation, here's the link.

My brother came down to Bristol for the weekend so that he could join me in St Paul's for the first carnival since I moved here in 2020. It didn't disappoint. Although it got unfeasibly crowded later, wandering the local streets just before things really got going was a lot of fun.

What I like best about the carnival is that, as well as professional food stalls, half the people in the area get out their oil drum smokers and cook ridiculous amounts of jerk chicken, curry goat, rice and peas, dumplings, etc., from their gardens, along with rum, Red Stripe, etc. (Special temporary licences are available for carnival.) It's truly a community thing, even if later on 100,000 people zoom in on the place:



My house happened to be on the procession route, so later on I was able to step outside and see this, literally outside my front door. (See if you can spot Yurika, my current tenant, sitting in seiza on the bin shed.)



I momentarily thought the last picture might be something to do with celebrating the year of my birth - then I remembered the Bristol Bus Boycott...