Seán O’Heigeartaigh, geneticist, voices concerns about the real world implications of scientific curiosity.

In terms of risks from biology, he worries about misguided good intentions, as experiments carry out genetic modifications, dismantling and rebuilding genetic structures.

“It’s very unlikely they would want to make something harmful,” he says.

Very unlikely.

“What we know as reality is only a fragile membrane…”

The story on the BBC is that its original Terry Nation series is to be revived by SyFy channel, according to a press release that seems more a call-for-funding announcement from FremantleMedia. Meanwhile, on a website that looks like it’s maintained with the same sporadic effort as The Mortal Bath, SyFy’s blog is a bit reticent on the matter, with the most recent entry about Blake’s 7 being an also entirely speculative piece from, I think, 2010, wisting at Sky and suggesting that maybe the Beeb might like to pony up for the series.

Moving on from that thicket of clickable links… Given the quality of the Nu-Battlestar Galactica and J.J. Abram’s Star Trekking, the potential for a redoing of Blake’s 7 is quite exciting. Of course, among my concerns, quibbles, cavils, as a fan: it might get done and be completely rubbish… or indeed it might never get done.

In the case of the latter, it could be argued, what would we have lost? It was a good (retro-futuristic period) piece, best leave it untainted. Yet you wouldn’t not touch great ideas like the Fox and the Crow… an effective reinterpretation would be able to say something pertinent about all sorts of things.

With regard to a BBC remake, if, say, ‘They’ did decide to reinvest in their own back catalogue – in a ‘doing it for Terry’ Blakeish heroic rescuing of creative control from the Federation Mutoids, I mean, puppets of the former Nazi propagandist empire Bertelsmann, I mean Fremantle – would it be Sherlock levels of good, or would it be as scrotum-tweakingly overdone as the Doctor Who franchise has become?

Oh, come on, though – I love Matt Smith orders of magnitude more than David Tennant, but I can’t watch it any more. Over-scored, climactic moments every ten minutes. It’s sad. Is it in case an itchy finger hits the remote, or buffering, or whatever concerns are preoccupying the producers and getting in the way of LETTING A GOOD STORY TELL ITSELF? Nostalgia be damned: if the old ways of taking four episodes to recount a single narrative thread are an indulgence, a throwback to the days when the Byzantine, nay, Gilliam-Orwellian hierarchies and production processes of the now lamented BBC TV Centre ruled the airwaves, then indulge us, throw us back. My concentration span will tolerate it, and balls to anyone whose attention span cannot.

Sorry, getting lost in space(balls) there. Regarding Blake’s 7… well, we shall see, or perhaps we won’t. Perhaps we shall be rewarded as I was every time I heard this:

Eh? EH? Awesome. Here’s hoping!

We got there just after 11.00am and it was rammed with browsing bibliophiles, many heaping teetering piles of tomes into cardboard boxes. Librarians with belted satchels marshalled a brisk trade. What we might have missed, I groaned inwardly, although without much vehemence. There were still some great volumes on offer.

One shelf unit catching a number of bargain hunters’ eyes held an extensive collection of Loeb Classical Library editions of your big name Greeks and Latins, at an astonishing 50p each. I started chatting in a jocular manner with one guy about needing some sort of wheelbarrow, and we both had a mutter about the mark-up applied by second-hand booksellers to items in the same condition. The jocularity was partly a function of me having mistaken his ‘mine’ pile for still-available books, eagerly snatching the Juvenal out of it. He saw my crestfallen expression and offered me a choice if there was anything I really particularly wanted, magnanimously, which I wasn’t about to start disputing. He staggered off eventually with as much of a cheery wave as he could manage under the weight of 14 volumes of Livy plus the same again of assorted others.

I managed to restrain myself to the Juvenal and another of my favourite dirty dog Latins, Petronius, plus an Herodotus:

…and an entertaining history of the British beat pop groups of 1962-67, which I was tickled to pick up having spent the morning reading about Robbie Williams’ intemperate musings on the Britpop beat-ish groups of 1990-1999. Ride indeed, Williams, you fanny. The set is made up with two “Oh, looky here!” last-minute Huxley spots. I do like a bit of Aldous…

An appealing little selection, I am sure you will concede. £4.00 the lot – you can’t say fairer than that.

I am a bit sad that no room in the library can be made to keep the books, when it is clear there is plenty of room for a cafe selling giant milky coffees and burning cheese toasties, but, yeah, at least it’s still open. Many localities are not so fortunate.

Here’s the York Library bookplate from the front of the Juvenal:

…which is kind of completely sexy.

The Giant Booksale continues Saturday and Sunday, finishing on Monday 25th.

‘Running from the room with my nerves jangling, all my senses in appalled revolt, I had but one phrase worming through the synapses of my shattered mind. That thing… IT HAD NO EARS.’

and so on. It’s ok, it’s ok. I’m over it. It does disturb me, but I’ll rise above it. Actually, between changing CDs this morning (Outgoing: Purple Rain) I was partly pleased to note that Grimly commences his ‘Wakey wakey People of Britain’ 7am segment with a spoiled Pharaohe Monch jingle (“G-G-Get Up!”). ‘Partly pleased’ and ‘spoiled’ in that although reminding me of a great tune it was a radio Bowdlerisation, a coy approximation of a daring choice, and in that it was about to be followed by Kelly Clarkson, which is kind of semi-proof of something, I ah-ha’d at the radio, as if proof or indeed semis are needed at such a time in the morning on one’s way to work in the car.

Look, I have to put up with this stream of bollocks all the time. Listen to the babble, bobbing pink and playful across the pebbles.

– a more subtle flow of musical consequence insinuates itself today. As I wound the car through Ryedale, I was listening to the CD I’d changed to: MC Solaar, the Prose Combat album.

Prose Combat was one of my lost Golden Age collection, part of a batch of CDs stolen from a flat in Partick, Glasgow late last century, along with everything else from L to Z, a consequence of partly-shelved alphabetisation and hurried thieves. About a couple of months ago I found a copy, incongruously, among the Kelly Clarkson and Steps albums in the ‘three for a pound’ CD section at the St. Leonard’s Hospice shop in Acomb. Le result! Delighted.

Solaar, Claude M’Barali, is a Senegalese/French rapper, born in Dakar, brought up in France and a Francophone rapper. He’s still recording, according to the online, so I shall be pleased to chasse down some of his later works, of which I have been ignorant.

Prose Combat is nearly 20 years old but it still sounds very fresh, some era-specific early ’90s soul jazz warbling on quelques tracks notwithstanding. The rapping in particular is funny and articulate, offering a welcome contrast to some contemporary commercial rap – such as the new 50 Cent single, My Life, which I have observed on radio and video a charmless three times this week. Fiddy’s tune also features Eminem, who is in typically vituperative form, and quite cheesily, Adam Levine, the singer from Maroon 5, who in his refrain adds unwelcome notes of Jamiroquai where you were already hoping for less as more.

I mean, not to get too sidetracked here – and I do not pretend to any kind of authority in matters rapular, incidentally, it’s just mes pensées, in’tit? – but, as an aside, the appeal of 50 Cent kind of baffles me. With regard to this particular record, you have self-consciously stagey ‘like a movie’ references indicating a degree of sophistication, distance, and the ‘who hunts the hunted?’ helicopter chase motif in the video adds some sort of sense of a commentary on fame/artistic drive paranoia. Yet these jostle for attention with a humourless and aggressive street “sewer entrepreneur” persona, literally a peddler of shit, that spends its time bullying the listener into ‘accepting and respecting’ the unpleasant content. A kind of witless and insistent hustling. In fact, if this IS a persona, added to the knowing asides about ‘confusion’ and ‘illusion’, the whole is actually quite contemptuous of its audience.

My Life, as well as sounding like the score to a movie that would just make you sigh with despair at the protagonist’s relentless will to consume (as distinct from hunger), with a video that does everything possible to amplify this, has lyrics that are resoundingly, epically angry, the sound of their fury as a consequence signifying nothing. They seem to be offering a glimpse into the mood of a colossally wealthy writer, rapper and producer, who, as he drives around in a big, expensive car, contemplates how, since he became successful a decade ago, is now, mysteriously, being snubbed by former protégés and overlooked by the public, despite – perhaps, paradoxically, because of! – having sold 40million records, furthermore threatening to flip out and go ‘Michael Myers’ on those opposing, as if all this doesn’t make him sound like a sort of irate attention-seeking Ronald McDonald of rap, armed and up a water tower on the brink of psychotic carnage because someone said his burgers taste awful.

This response is not intended to be ‘full of hate’, per the lyrics, and I am certainly not threatening to kill anyone because they might disagree, but seeing as 50 Cent seems to be addressing by extension all critics in My Life, I think it pertinent to enquire by return why one might be expected to, never mind respect, actually give a fuck about such monotone posturing.

More bollocks! Bob-bob-bobollocking along, pink and floaty, clacking in the foam, shining in the sun.

Anyway, back in the car, the sun, mais oui, was shining off the snow in the valleys and warming my face as I drove along the long and winding road, motoring through the villages of Yorkshire en route to work, digging the beats. MC Solaar juggles his themes mellifluously, with wit and dexterity. At one point I was actually giggling at the facility, the lightness of touch with which MC Solaar delivers lines like these:

Oh! Belle, elle est belle, elle est bonne, elle a du bol la demoiselle,
Elle se trouvait des défauts, je trouvais qu’elle était belle.
J’en garde des séquelles mais je sais qu’elle sait
Que le silence est d’or, et dort, alors, je me tais.

–From the song Séquelles

(My cack-handed translation:
Oh, she is beautiful, she is fine, she’s lucky, this girl,
she finds faults with me, I find her beautiful.
I keep the aftermath in mind, but I know that she knows that
silence is golden, and she’s sleeping, so I just shut it.)

Something like that? It’s also all in the delivery. In fact, here’s a nifty video from the YouTubes, with further traduction of the paroles, Ms Gainsbourg playing the Belle, and MC Solaar’s voice, all of which are a far better use of your temps.

MC Solaar, Séquelles:

He was doing the usual Breakfast Show DJ nonsense, this was all fine. Couple of not bad tunes in there. Then he introduced a segment about sport, using Soul Limbo by Booker T. and the MGs. He said, during it, that he loved it from growing up and had been disappointed to learn that it wasn’t an actual pop record. He only knew it, as generations of British kids who watched any kind of sport on telly ever would also be familiar, as the music from Test Match Special. The “cricket theme”. Oh, you KNOW:

“Grimmers” then starts having a five-minute discussion with the studio extra, who pointed out that it was, in fact, quite well known as a separate entity, “back in the day”. He sounded a bit embarrassed, to be fair. The piece about sport ensued. Meanwhile I am having an increasingly shrill imaginary conversational Q&A with “Grimmers”. It is one of those rhetorical rounds where a series of statements of fact are ended with an interrogative because you CANNOT BELIEVE that the person with whom you are speaking is unaware of this information:

‘It’s called Soul Limbo. By Booker T. and the MGs? Booker T. and the MGs, you know?’

‘They were the house band at Stax? Responsible for most of those classic soul/R&B sounds?’

‘They did a really famous song called Green Onions?‘

‘They were the backing band in The Blues Brothers?’

‘You are telling me that you got to be nearly 30 YEARS OLD, and a DJ on national radio, and you DO NOT KNOW the name or performing artist of one of the most iconic pieces of music in recent British media history?’

In my fever’d mind, Grimshaw, who has been nodding at me open-mouthed, responds:
‘We be, uh, jammin?’

GAH!

Last week I had a day off, and spent some of the afternoon reacquainting myself with the booksellers of York. I was looking for some volumes (copies of Paradise Lost, War Music and All My Sons) to help with a teaching placement what I’m doing, but really it was just an excuse to go and run my fingers along the spines.

It’s pleasing to see bookshops still functioning as the economic climate continues to be wintry. I was pulled up short in mid-march by the now defunct Army and Navy Stores at the top end of Fossgate, standing in need of attention and likely to get it only from international coffee vendors or bookmakers… or it’ll become one of York’s many gift shops selling extraneous London tat to geographically-confused tourists, such as those littering the Shambles.

Fortunately, the book vendors in our city remain in rude health. At the first stop, I picked up this leaflet with a map showing the booksellers of York:

The other side has notes and contact details for each shop. The design was by Amy McKay in 2012. The watercolour cover illustration, by Ron Wilson, appears to be a view of the public toilets at Bootham Bar.

That first stop was Ken Spelman Books. Ken Spelman has a nicely creaking feel and polished old wood – and his shop is delightfully appointed as well, boom boom. Antiquarian and modern volumes jostle on the shelves. Lots of quality fine arts and ephemera. The leaflet claims they have four floors, which is intriguing: a vertiginous – and pram-thwarting – staircase to an upper floor and more books, and a slight ramp into the downstairs back section only gives them three, if I squint a bit, as far as I can see. I shall ask next time I’m in.

Ken Spelman was followed by Oxfam, on Micklegate. Oxfam, about which I have kvetched previously regarding its pricing, does still have a pretty good stock, including a bookcase of classic orange Penguins (“I am Klassic Oranj”) and a leafable discarded comic section. Well-stocked as they were, they were yet unable to furnish me with that which I sought, so, onwards.

Waterstones came next. Miller and Milton were in evidence, but no Logue. I did, however, get The Universe Versus Alex Woods by Gavin Extence, which had presented itself to me twice previously and would not be denied thrice. I know nothing of the author, but the bits I browsed tickled me Extencively. I shall provide a review when I have read the rest.

I ended up on Fossgate. Realising I was in a rush slightly, the clocks striking 17, I was going to hurry straight on up to Stone Trough Books on Walmgate, but I was stopped in mid-step by the clean lines and delicious looking volumes of Lucius Books, right next door to Fossgate Books. They are a new, to me, emporium, although they told me they have just moved down the road a few doors. The store looks spanky and clean and heartbreakingly chockful of delucius-looking books. Selling mostly modern first editions, many of them signed, it’s the sort of place one might easily spunk one’s family’s inheritance in an orgy of shame-faced indulgence. A slim, hard-to-get hardback volume of B.S. Johnson’s poetry for £250, that sort of thing. Inscribed James Bonds, Aldous Huxleys, delicious kids’ lit – see, the infants have not been forgotten. Resorting to my usual technique, I took a Get Out of Shop card from the proprietor, muttering something about coming back when I’d remortgaged the house, which, as it would mean first getting a mortgage, means 12th Never. Or 11th March, whichever’s nearest.

I stuck my head in the door and had a quick natter with the proprietor at Fossgate Books. We circled round a few titles, including a BS Johnson book, the title of which I failed to remember. He knew the one I meant, though, the one published in a box with no binding so the reader can put it together their own way, which I had seen in a shop in West London for £75 about five years ago. He said he had a cheaper copy in the stock room he could look out, which gave me an excuse to return after a quick trip up Walmgate.

Stone Trough Books has a front door with an traditional shoppe bell that clangs loudly just above ear level on entry, presumably to disorient potential thieves and alert the owner, who is to be found upstairs. It looks like a house that has over the years become a shop. The front room downstairs sets the scene. It is like walking into someone’s home moments after a massive box of books has exploded in the lounge. Ace. However, despite moving a series of piles of books to get at other piles of books, we were unable to find any of my literary requisites. Prop. was particularly miffed about the Logue not being in evidence, as he had worked on a bibliography for him at one point and ‘had a couple back at home…’ Fortunately, in the front room I had seen there was a copy of Areopagitica and other writings in a nice little hardback Everyman version. I was so taken by the fact that it used to belong to the Eastern Command Education Library, I was unable to prevent myself spending £2 on it.

Back up to Fossgate Books, then, where I peeked through a much-better-value-than-£75 (but-not-so-much-that-I-could-justify-buying-it) reprinted version of The Unfortunates – “THAT was it!” – and where I went for a copy of Paradise Lost, an illustrated one with Philip Pullman introductions. Virtually brand new too, although someone had got as far as starting to annotate the first 11 lines, writing OREB, SINAI, SION and SILOA in v e r y heavy lettering:

Seriously, though, that SILOA is on the next page! It looks like they were using a heated lance… but it was in otherwise pretty good (old) nick.

I got All My Sons at Waterstones on the way back through town. War Music remains to be ordered. It was a moderate success as a shopping expedition, then, and a soothing reminder of why I love yer actual texts-in-books. There’s something about the gravity or the waveform, or something, of books. It is a particular niche – tomes flogged by foxed but still slightly desirable vendors – yet it continues to be one in which I am happy to place pennies.

So, hurrah! for books. And hurrah for World Book Day, whenever you have it.

We are partial to a bit of Statham, or Stath. Having seen Crank and thought it preposterous but enjoyable, we seem to have been waiting for ages for this one, bumped repeatedly for various reasons, but last week, finally, a welcome LoveFilm arrival in the mails.

If you haven’t seen either, or can’t be bothered, the Cranks are like a reduction of the Statham Transporter franchise vehicle, a daft compote of overtly cartoonish video game capering about by an indestructible hit man who keeps on going with a grimace and a quip no matter how much shit he has to contend with.

It is a obvious metaphor for Stath’s career.

In Crank, Stath’s character Chev Chelios wakes up full of a slow-acting poison (potential slow acting joke gloss), meaning he has to keep boosting his adrenaline rate to stay alive. He does this with fights, drugs, chasing cars on a BMX, all sorts. He falls hundreds of feet out of a helicopter at the end, bounces off the road and survives, so powerful is his ‘Strawberry Tart’.

Crank 2: High Voltage begins where the first one leaves off, with an artificial heart Macguffin device, requiring frequent electrical charging, implanted in Chelios by Triad bosses because… oh, forget because. The film has a fight scene in an electricity substation, performed by stuntmen dressed up to look like giant Godzillabeast versions of Chelios and the bad guy, with little models of workmen watching it agog. Fantastic.

What with that and a worryingly plausible cameo from Geri Halliwell – I know, I KNOW – as Chelios’s mum, there was much that was disturbing about Crank 2. It’s preposterously preposterously violent. Yet there’s all this well-read comic strip framing, snappily-scripted asides… Massively enjoyable.

Stath/Chelios concludes the movie proper actually on fire, proffering a blazing middle finger direct to camera and snarling. It could only have been improved with him actually saying “Yeah yeah yeah YEAHHH!!!”, the final yeah turning into a manic blaahhh, tongue waggling in abandon, because he does not give two toasted fucks.

All that zap and fizz of electricity brought to mind one of my favourite fast food experiences, perhaps the only thing comparable to the deep fried, so bad for you it’s good for you, crispy insanity of the film, in fact, which was the KFC Zinger Tower Burger Meal.

We didn’t have KFC, not on a Sunday, good lord, no. We made do with massive beef sarnies. And I last had a Zinger Tower Burger in the KFC in Brixton about 5 years ago. My arteries have only just stopped clucking. Very tasty fried goodness though. It’s a spicy (“Zingy!”) chicken burger that just has to have a hash brown put on top of it, for some spurious reasons.

“Our Zinger experts are all in total agreement that if you’re going to add anything to this unique combination of savoury, spicy tastes, then it just has to be a hash brown. After all, you don’t want to add more spice.”

Tufnelesque. “But… this one’s got a hash brown in it.”

Yet Crank 2 DOES want to add more spice. Crank is a Double Zinger Tower Meal with Extra Spicy Hash Browns and Reggae Reggae Sauce on the fries. It has the same disdain for cardiac science. It is, like, well fackin’ tasty. And I understand that Crank 3 begins production this year. Yeah yeah yeah YEAHHH!!!

With that little expensive buffet of mixed rail metaphors, let us crack on.

Works in progress:
* A magazine. An actual hard format item. It will also be made available in eBook formats, and will be splendid. It is much closer to completion than this time last year when it was mooted first. That’s what I’ve been doing of an evening. It will have short stories in it, and pictures and conversation.

* Illustrations, actually, that’s been the main thing. Comics. I’ve never drawed, sir, no I ain’t [assuming deprecatory yokel tone] but I been trying, and it’s liberating and frustrating thegither, like simultaneous reproduction in sea slugs, perhaps. Fun! Though.

* About five articles for here, which will burst into the Bath like a fragrant bombe deluxe, or a sock full of custard, more likely.

That is my ten minutes up.

Someone had received a text from a builder, regarding a job of work. It concluded “[name of builder] X” We all agreed that this was perhaps de trop, an over-familiarity in a business relationship.
(Having said that, I think it appropriate to add that the world needs more affection in it, and if the casual use of letters as a kind of punctuation substitute is the start of a slippery slope to lovin’ all god’s creatures, it’s the sort of behaviour to be encouraged.)

But with regard to yer everyday texting, basically, context is everything, of course, as usual. So, no kisses from tradesfolk setting up an appointment for an actual job of work. With friends, lovers, even, there is perhaps no need to end every text with an ‘x’ as it devalues the exchange.
“You wouldn’t end every sentence with a kiss if you were just conversing.”
“Ah, well, that depends on where and to whom you’re talking.”

An interesting point. A simple “x” or “x-space-x” was seen as acceptable as a conclusion for text chats with partners or those you love. More than five is perhaps a bit keen. The discussion ranged further afield, with considerations of the use of upper case included. The same colleague with the workman issue offered by contrast the example of their partner, who was anti ‘kiss’ in all circumstances. This set the banter in the predominantly female space of the lunch room veering into quite raucous territory.

“What about XXXX? You could be taken to be really saying something appalling. Is that just me?”
“XXX has different connotations. Even worse – or better!” 
“XXXX just makes me think of beer. My partner’s an alcoholic. I send him an XB… That was a joke… I don’t text him…”

And so on for happy minutes until it was time once more for work.
x x

Searching for that phrase using a Search Engine of Repute, I discovered the existence of an interesting-sounding play called <a href=’http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words,_Words,_Words‘><em>Words, Words, Words</em></a>, by David Ives. I also found quoted numerous writers, politicians and others who had used some variant on ‘words, words, empty words’. Yet I could not find any origin for this ‘words, words, empty words’ phrase rattling round the synapses.

Then I noticed the word empty, and it loomed larger, and larger, intruding on the empty spaces between it and the other words, empty words, EMPTY WORDS, EMPTY, EMPTY, until it looked ridiculous and was drained of all meaning. Something having the quality of EMP, words, in fact, having this empness, whatever it is.

I should have just left this post blank.