moosifer jones's lair & grouch – online home & blog of Mags L Halliday

The Hitting Women fan site was removed.

Curiously, and I’m sure co-incidentally, it finally vanished just as a journo I know asked them for a comment on the story he had put together.

This is a call to action to the people who follow my blog: either directly or via the livejournal syndication.

Nearly 1 in 3 UK women have experienced domestic violence (source). Domestic violence is defined as:

Violence against women is any violence that targets a woman because she is a woman. It is also violence that disproportionately affects women.

It includes physical, sexual or psychological harm such as domestic violence, sexual assault, forced marriage, stalking, ‘honour’ attacks, human trafficking and female genital mutilation. It also includes threats of violence and kidnapping.

(source: Home Office)

Facebook currently has 500+ ‘fans’ of hitting women. The group has been reported by various people but still exists. The discussion topic ‘best place to hit them’ includes suggestions to “punch them in the ovaries”. The picture shows a blond man punching a woman with braiding, which can be read as rascist.

If you are on facebook, even if you only log in once a month to see what that kid you hated at school is up to now, please take a moment to report the group and have it removed. It promotes violence against women.

I don’t care if they say it is ‘just for fun’ or ‘just a laugh’. Violence against women is a hate crime. Joking about violence against women helps validate the people who assault women and encourages them to think what they are doing is okay.

And please post about this through your status update, or your twitter, or on livejournal. Please raise awareness that facebook have yet to remove a group inciting violence and hatred, despite it breaking their terms and conditions.

(I’d like to point out I’m against violence towards people based on gender, sexuality, religion or race. This one is just really bugging me.)

I’m trying to keep up this year with the 365 challenge. Last year’s failed sometime around March. I foresee June being the crunch point this year. We’ll see.

2010 slideshow – in progress

2009 slideshow – abandoned

The Bird Room
Chris Killen
Canongate, 2009

Don’t you hate blurbs that deceive you? The Bird Room promises to be “a candid, funny and joyous portrait of love and desire in the modern age”. Only one of those adjectives actually applies, and then only if you assume the candid refers to the sex and don’t expect it to equally apply to love and desire (neither of which are the same thing).

The prose limps along, never enabling you to engage with the characters or care about them. Alice, the “smart, sexy” love interest, doesn’t get to narrate and her words and actions, as relayed by Will (the putative protagonist), make her seem as broken and emotionally blank as the other characters. There’s certainly no joy in the book, and pitifully few laughs.

You can see the glimmerings of themes, lurking behind the facile plot. William, Will’s friend, is his more cool double: the one who left Manchester for Glasgow, the one who travels, the one who gets girls despite not being a looker, the one who isn’t paranoid about things. Clair puts on the identity of Helen so she can be all the things she isn’t: she leaves home (although not Manchester); she wears contacts; she leaves her old job to be an actress in online porn.

The problem is any potential themes are drowned by a deadened prose style and minimalist plot. It feels like reading a book where someone has mistaken ‘graphic’ for ‘adult’, and thus splattered references to sex on every page. To be honest, I read far better sex scenes in fanfic, and at least there the characters tend to be engaging and have a complexity of emotions. Each character in The Bird Room has one state: paranoid; shallow; narcissistic; confused.

It’s taken me a week to read it. Not because it’s long (a mere 200 or so pages in B-format paperback) but because after an initial session with it, I put off reading the rest of it until this morning.

The Revenge of Moriarty
John Gardner
Pan, 1975

There are many ways to write Sherlockian fiction, as my shelves groaning with non-ACD books attest (and I have barely made a dent in the full array). Some stick with Watson’s voice. Some go for Holmes’ view on events. Some narrate it from the point of view of another character (e.g. the cabman in A Hansom for Holmes, or a housemaid in Erasing Sherlock). Gardner’s conceit is that the story is constructed from a combination of the decoded diaries of Professor Moriarty and accounts by the non-canonical Inspector Crow. Revenge is actually the sequel to The Return of Moriarty but as this was a charity shop find I wasn’t overly worried about reading it first.

There are also several ways to review non-ACD Holmes stories. If purporting to be by Watson, you tend to look at the plausibility of the narrator’s voice. You might read it with an eye to how the puzzle reveal fits with ACD’s. You might just look at how in or out of character the canonical characters are.

Or you might just read it and think “but this is a bit rubbish, and sexist to boot”.

The plot is not overly bad, and certainly no more slight than a lot of novels. Moriarty is a character I think of as a cipher anyway. Unlike Colonal Moran or Irene Adler, I’ve never seen Moriarty as more than a plot device, there to be Holmes’ foil. He’s more interesting in his absence. Gardner twists and squeezes and generally contorts Moriarty until he fits better with the idea of a, well, a Bond villain. His Moriarty is no thin but terrifying Professor of mathematics turned to crime, but a virile man of action who disguises himself as his older, dead, brother.

I mention Bond because Gardner also wrote various Bond novels after Fleming’s death. I can see why. Gardner’s characters see women as Fleming’s did: good for sex, or for ensnaring enemies using sex, for having babies and not a lot else. That’s what you expect in Bond. It’s not what you expect in Sherlockian fiction. Holmes’s marital advice to Crow – and who would go to Holmes for advice on women? – is to put his foot down, put his wife in her place and get her to start putting out again.

Of course, women aren’t a strong feature in ACD’s Sherlock Holmes stories. They are housekeepers, or ladies with problems that need solving. Even when Watson is married, his wife (or wives) is secondary to the batchelor life of Holmes. However, the women that appear – including Irene Adler – are not treated with contempt. Watson, the normal narrator, is a gentleman. Holmes may be dismissive, but he is not disparaging. In the Revenge of Moriarty, the narration seems to have an even lower view of women than the characters do.

That made this novel unpleasant enough in tone that, even if I thought the plot was cracking and the characters entertaining, I’d not recommend it to anyone.

So, the reason I’ve been reading a lot more and avoiding the PC in the evenings is out. It’s not the fault of my precious iPhone.

No, it’s that I’m expecting a baby and it turns out the first trimester is quite tiring and headache-inducing. And reading on paper is so much softer on the eyes (see my theory on e-readers).

I’ve also just stared in amazement at the very same model of pram we were all wheeled around in as kiddies in the 60s and 70s. I learnt most of my childcare skills in the late 70s, and keep discovering there are things you don’t do any more. Like putting you baby in a giant pram and leaving it in the garden for the afternoon. Damnit.