Another busy, busy week

I wish I could get back to posting more often here, but many distractions continue.

I am dropping in to make a couple of not very important comments:

*    I am finding the situation in the US so obviously dangerously dire that I am starting to have a bit of a  problem with satire and comedy based on it.   I still watch clips of the Daily Show, and some of Colbert, but it is starting to make me uncomfortable that the use of comedy underplays the seriousness in an inappropriate way.

I also feel this about Planet America, which is primarily serious commentary and criticism, but the side comedy bits now feel too trite for what was just discussed.  (I did criticise them in the lead up to the election too, for not emphasising how nuts and ridiculous Trump's campaign claims were - pretty much "normalising" that a politician could now say anything regardless of connection to reality and not be called out for it.  Of course, the whole MSM had the same issue.)   

Maybe you could argue that late night comedy, and even ridiculous shows like Laugh In,  survived the turbulent 60's and 70's, so I shouldn't expect comedy TV to stop now.   But I think the show of those decades got through by largely ignoring the national politics and dire situations as the Vietnam War.  That is, of course, not what topical comedy in the US does any more.

*   Even though I think 1984 was a well intentioned but poorly executed book, and would love to find an online connection with someone I consider smart who shares this opinion, I continue to have a vague interest in George Orwell because he was a pretty odd character, and (who knows?) his essays and other books of reportage might convince he could write well, if ever I get around to reading them.

Hence I was interested to read an interview with his adopted son, now 80, who is happy to say plenty of nice things about his late Dad, yet it takes quite a long way into the article to get to the somewhat significant point that Richard (the son) was only 5 years old when his Dad passed away.

I mean - really - how seriously am I meant to take his memories of the period on the remote island of Jura where he Dad went to write 1984?    

And on a happier note - I see that Reddit does have threads by people arguing that 1984 is not a good book.  I wonder if I had looked there before?

*  Speaking of books - here's a decent article at The Guardian about the way self publishing has allowed for a ridiculous number of books to be available each year:

The complaint that there are too many books is not a new one. “My son, be warned by them: of making many books there is no end,” reads one line in Ecclesiastes, written at least 2,000 years before the invention of the printing press.

Now the bestselling author Bill Bryson has added his voice to the millennia-old chorus. There are 200,000 books published annually in the UK alone, “more books than you could possibly read,” the writer of Notes from a Small Island told the Times. He is not sure that the growth in self-publishing, in particular, is “a healthy development”. He said he gets sent “a lot of self-published books, and most of the time it is just some anonymous person’s life, and it is of no interest.”

Bryson is not wrong that self-publishing has contributed significantly to book slop mountain. More than 2.6 million books were self-published in 2023 – many of which are uploaded to the dominant platform, Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing – and they can’t all be masterpieces.

The article goes on to explain that self publishing has worked for some - but the success rate is extremely small, of course.   Still, I am not immune from the idea that I might have one story in me that could work as a novel - or more likely, film - it's just that I don't have the confidence that I could execute it.