Author Archives: James - Page 93
Review – The Lego Movie
I went to see the Lego Movie this morning with my eight year old son. We both laughed out loud at it. A lot! It was seriously funny for most of the movie, some of it was slapstick and some of it was pretty geeky side jokes. Either way we had a whole lot of fun watching it. As the theme song goes, 'Everything is Totally Awesome!' The premise of the movie is a pastiche on the ancient prophecy tale where a hapless youth discovers he is the chosen one a little earlier than he's ready to deal with it. A mentor sees him through it and good triumphs over evil in the end. In the case of the Lego movie this sees a standard construction worker (Emmett) become the master builder who will save the Lego universe from the…
Chaos Monkeys
I spent a chunk of Friday in an alpha training session on clouds. Much of it wasn't new, but there were some insights into designing stuff for clouds as opposed to fixed infrastructure. The netflix chaos monkeys came up, and it made me think. It isn't the first time I've come across the chaos monkeys, but it put an image in my mind of a chimp in an old fashioned data centre pulling cables out of a patch room and the unplugging servers from the network. Add in a bit of the cliche cleaner who pulls the plug out of the critical system to power the vacuum cleaner and you're away with the mental image. In the cloud no-one has to hear you scream. If you spaghetti cable all the boxes together and make them all redundant by synchronising data…
Book Review – The Summer Isles by Ian R MacLeod
The Summer Isles by Ian R. MacLeod My rating: 4 of 5 stars An alternative history through the eyes of a gay Oxford don. The premise is that the Germans won the First World War, their March 1918 offensive succeeded and the war ended in the August with the defeat of France and Britain. The Peace Treaty strips Britain of a number of colonies and overseas territories in much the same way that the Germans were in our own history. Britain has a violent period in the 1920s and a former corporal, John Arthur, becomes the leader of a Modernist movement. The story starts in the early part of 1940 when the Empire Alliance has been in power for at least a decade. A number of short victorious wars has restored much of the Imperial prestige lost at the end…
A215 What They Teach you at Creative Writing School
I read this article about Hanif Kureishi's views on what is missing from the teaching of creative writing to people. I'm not sure that I entirely agree with Hanif Kureishi. Perhaps if he'd studied with the OU he would have had plenty of practice in recognising the plentiful supply of good ideas that we have. He might also have been taught some techniques to fire up his imagination and to harness it to produce material. On the other hand I do agree that there is (rightly) a lot of focus in text books on the 'hard' skills that writers need. On use of language, structure and the practicalities of how to produce good prose, poetry etc. This is not just down to creative writing schools though, all disciplines have a mixture of 'hard' and 'soft' skills. The masters of the discipline can…
A215 – Meta Poetry
The third online tutorial is now on the go, following a poetry day school last weekend (where I read out some Burns since it was the 25th). Anyway the exercise is to write a poem based on the model of Amanda Dalton's How to Disappear. So this is the second draft of my meta poem, a further draft (poetry as a process) will be posted later on when I've had some feedback and had time to let it rest a wee bit. How to write poetry How can an ordinary person like me possibly do it? How am I supposed to get all those words arranged on the page? How do I learn to write beautiful poetry? Recognise that poetry doesn't appear ready to read. Like a block of stone, it needs careful chiselling, chip by chip, into shape. What goes…