Anything But Settled

On property searches, Meta's theft, viruses, small annoyances, writer's pay, and three bloody good films

The property bug

James blames what he calls my ‘gypsy blood’ for my always looking to live somewhere else.

I’m in denial of this claim, of course. I see myself as a homemaker. It’s just that maybe it’s THAT home rather than THIS one. So in the States I look at the website Zillow, and in the UK at Rightmove. I imagine our life inside one of these homes, enjoy it for a while, get dissatisfied, then move on to find another.

Spurred by the Palisades Fire and the concurrent remodelling of our new apartment in Santa Monica, James has been the true nomad this year. I was hardly hanging around at home – various launches for MY HEAD FOR A TREE took me to the UK and India – but he has already stayed in ten places around California this year.

And now we’re selling up, our California dream life set to be marked as achieved and placed in a memory bank. James’s job here has ended, he’s just been awarded a professorship at Oxford, so he’s finally completing his emigration to the UK.

He came to Britain twenty-five years ago, so we could live together. The US government in those days cast a mean eye on gay relationships. The current US administration shows no sign of welcoming immigrants. Me included.

Happily there’s no need for me to look for a new home in England. We have a perfectly good one in London. And have been settled in it for thirteen years. When I find myself clicking on rightmove I must remember to shut down the computer and go for a walk.

Living in a viral era

The Covid-19 pandemic strikes me as having been a trumpet-blast arrival into a new viral era.

This last year or two I never seem to go long without some viral infection. It has meant cancelled holidays and events. I suspect climate change is a cause, a warming planet meaning that bugs that winters in the northern hemisphere used to freeze out of existence now prosper.

Is that fanciful thinking? I do view climate change as the supreme challenge of our age and see its devastating effects daily and everywhere. A quick internet check backs me up though. This article was posted three hours ago: Scientists blame climate change for spread of infectious diseases and unleashing of ice-locked microbes in Arctic

Spelling Bee

The article uses the word ‘zoonotic’ – for pathogens that leap between species. My daily spurt of play comes courtesy of the New York Times’s Spelling Bee, forming words from the day’s given letters. Every day I am angered by perfectly good words that the games does not recognize—largely because they are British English. The other day it rejected ‘zoonotic’ and I abandoned the game in disgust.

Today they refused to accept ‘nappy’. They’re wrong. Americans read English writers. Not everything has to be a diaper.

The Writer’s Life

I just checked for payment of the publication advance on royalties for the UK edition of MY HEAD FOR A TREE.

There’s to be none … the cost of the book’s photos (my responsibility) and the author share of the index (authors pay half of that) came to £1145, which is more than I was due.

My agent’s not getting rich on the book either – just rich in spirit. It’s a beautiful book, on sale in North America from tomorrow (April 8th). It woud do you good to read it.

Meta and Me

Author friends are up in arms about Meta’s scraping their books for data with which to feed their AI. I’ve just checked for mine using the Atlantic’s tool: Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI - The Atlantic Most of my books are there, obscure journal articles of mine too, and stories from tiny magazines.

I should be outraged. This is theft. It’s also totally expected. Everybody has been stealing my data for decades now.

I’d trade all my writing if people would only care for their planet.

What I’ve been viewing

Three cinema-going experiences to fully recommend.

First up, Misericordia . The opening already opened my heart, with its view from a car window of a drive down a valley into a village in southern France. We’ve known one such village for thirty years and so know some of the secrets from when nights grow cold and dark, and characters slip through shadows from house to house. This film was very noir, but ultimately about queer love finding outlets. I saw the movie in its last performance. Otherwise I would happily have slipped back and watched it again.

Instead I saw Black Bag. I expected little but loved it – a cerebral thriller, its chase sequences being taut conversations around a dinner table. Terrific acting from the whole cast, led by Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchette. And a blisteringly fine script from David Koepp, who talks about the process here.

And then to a widescreen 70mm showing of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, which was launched into the wake of the Kennedy assassination in 1963 and played to sold out audiences for two years. It’s striking to watch such a movie in Los Angeles, for the movie crowd is so knowing. The cast is an assembly of the comedic TV greats of the era, plus Spencer Tracy, and the first appearance of each brought ripples of applause.

And there was applause, too, for Terry Thomas in his regular uber-English persona heading out on an anti-America diatribe, finding the USA to be a mad country. The movie is great fun – but it’s sad that Americans have been brought to applauding criticism of their own country.

Several Americans said to me lately that they fear going to Europe, thinking they will be hated there. I say no you won’t, you’re good Americans, we’ll sympathize, but then I am prone to taking a rosy view.