Narrative

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Never Let Me Go On and On

[Many spoilers ahead, so caveat lector.] Among many other factors — financial, emotional, psychological — the theoretical factor that drove my work towards a PhD (in automatic story generation) off that Thelma and Louise cliff was the growing realisation not just that meta-level processing by readers/viewers of a story is, ...

The Wrong Tree

[An augmented version of a comment posted on Boing Boing concerning the public release of Chris Crawford’s ‘Storytron’ interactive storytelling engine. I should write something longer and more thoughtful about this endeavour, because I’ve never believed that there was anything to be gained from the ...

Rape and Raspberries

A trip to Westwood Village to see Eastern Promises sparked a conversation — over Pinkberry frozen yogurt (with strawberries and raspberries) — during which I tried to describe to A. the viscerally unpleasant reaction I have to films which portray the unrelentingly grim realities of life. The connection is a little unfair to ...

Resolving without ending

Some thoughts about Children of Men (and some spoilers, so caveat lector), which I eventually saw today – though the lateness of things didn’t seem to hurt: the cinema was virtually empty and the print was more than fine. I came out – after listening to Jarvis Cocker singing about cunts still running the ...

“That lot over there in Santa Monica”

Of which, I suppose, I’m now one, but Peter Preston’s funny and perceptive piece in the Guardian about the transatlantic miscommunication inherent in Match Point gets my vote, at least for the first half of the film — which is really the whole of his thesis. Up to somewhere around its mid-point, Match Point is ...

Building a world without holes

The accepted wisdom with Rowling is that her world-building skills trump her thin characterisation and flat prose and make them irrelevant, but I think that’s a myth. She’s actually not all that good at world-building. What she’s good at is ideas, but in practice they don’t really fit together to ...

About XIII and about twenty

In another life, I did some structural analysis of stories. For the sake of practicality, some were as simple as Grimms’ Fairy Tales (various publications insist that they’re “Grimm’s Fairy Tales”, but, dammit, there were two of them). For the sake of seeing how scalable my analysis was, I also ...

A World Without Grice

I’d like the DVD right now, thanks very much, because until I can watch Were-Rabbit, oh, maybe several hundred times more, I won’t be able to compare it meaningfully with A Close Shave and (especially) The Wrong Trousers. In the meantime, I’ll just mention in passing that I had a great time, and giggled ...