Lara Croft and me

On Facebook the past can become the present with alarming ease.

An old friend (or rather a young friend whom I have known for a long time:thanks Ed) has posted a reminder of my afternoon a decade ago with the virtual explorer, video-game icon and 'spokesmodel' Lara Croft.

It is one of those reminders that in darker moments one may think will alone survive when every other record of  one's existence has vanished.

I am certain that when my esteemed Times colleague, Keith Blackmore, first suggested that I be interviewed by Lara, I had no idea of whom he was talking.

I may have affected some knowledge. It was wise for newspaper editors in those early electronic days to pretend familiarity with computer games which one's children, while playing them with enthusiasm, were unlikely to share with their parents.

 But I am sure I knew nothing of the character whose creators had decided to write a King Tut scene into her script.

So her script became my script. Yes my script - unless anyone watching now might think that the Editor of The Times ever spoke to anyone, even the most renowned female Indiana Jones in cyberspace, as he now appears to have done.  

 

Comments

[Clayton Burns]

IF THIS IS NOT ON TOPIC, PLEASE LET ME BE SHOT AT DAWN.

I do not have much use for video games, but this below looks to me very much like a candidate. (From a depictuous review at the Guardian):

[Ever since it first worked out how to assemble pixels so that they resembled something more recognisable than aliens, the games industry has dreamed of creating one thing above all else–a game that is indistinguishable from a film, except that you can control the lead character. With LA Noire, it just might, finally, have found the embodiment of that particular holy grail.

From start to finish, LA Noire feels like a film–LA Confidential, in fact, along with any similarly hard-boiled example of film noir adapted from stories by the likes of Chandler and Hammett. Set in a gloriously convincing depiction of Los Angeles in 1947 (which is much more attractive than today's LA), it casts you as Cole Phelps, returning war hero turned cop.]

Sir Peter is just the one to review it, with his prehensile aesthetic mind.

Enough of that. Sir Peter, I suggest that you read Harold Bloom's swan song, "The Anatomy of Influence." The first book by Bloom that has made me eager to see his next. 55 years of teaching he put into it, producing his first book (worth reading). Having examined the feeble review in the National Post, I think that the world can do far better.

I hesitate--since it is the habit of the youth not to do the text--to point out that Bloom's (implicit?) analysis of Shakespeare's sonnet 87 is suspect. If anyone can tell me why, I will be eternally ungrateful.