Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!

Quite an evening of diversions yesterday with teenybuffalo  :  an Indian dinner; a reading by China Miéville; a turn round a garden with the irises in flower; a screening of Jan Švankmajer's astonishing Alice (Něco z Alenky); and tea in the Algiers' maze of mirrors.

Miéville was rather fiercely brilliant and witty, with talk ranging from the joy of stage dives to Professorenromane, from Cairo ("ZOMG!  It's a conflict between Stuff and Space!") to taboo (one of his teacher's Amazonian informants admitting, "Well, you can, but you really shouldn't"), and lots of muscular ferocious leftiness.  He defines bolshie.

April asked him about this and brought the house down.

Švankmajer's Alice is brilliantly weird.  It's like my childhood nightmares, but wittier.  Like the Jonathan Miller version, it works as dream logic; but that earlier film is psychological:  polite, well-buttoned, absolute madness.  It's about society, however crazed.  This is purely surreal.  The White Rabbit bleeds sawdust from a gash, and eats it up again, to flesh himself out; chittering bone-creatures hatch from eggs; the Caterpillar is a sock who darns his eyes shut when he wants to sleep.  Table drawers spit keys and scissors; eat children.  It all seems to take place in the ruins of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, the rag-and-bone shop of the brain.

Nine