Log of Smallship One - Passionate and Confused

Footnote to the aforegoing

2009-11-24T09:26:34Z

It should be noted, when I describe a book as "not bad," that I am glossing over a multitude of "onto"'s, and "may"'s instead of "might"'s, and repeated words as described in a recent post, among other things I was taught to regard as scriptorial, or editorial, sins. This is presumably par for the course these days, so there's no point in going on about it.

smallship1 @ 2009-11-24T09:11:00

2009-11-24T09:11:48Z

So, having come to the end of the Torchwood books (or "the Snot Collection" as we call it round here), I'm now reading Angie Sage's Septimus Heap books to the Countess. This is indeed the YA series in which perfectly ordinary words are deliberately misspelled to make them more witchy or something, and yes, it is irritating, especially when reading aloud. "Dark" and "Darke" sound very much alike, unless you start going on about "Darkie Magic" which conveys quite the wrong idea and makes you sound about a hundred and three and racist to boot.

However, once you get past that, if you can, they're not bad books so far. Post-Potter generic fantasy, with maps and lists of what happened to the minor characters after the story ended (or before it began) but quite well done for all that. The writer has a feel for her landscape and her characters.

We tried this new-fangled "broadcast television" last night, because the Countess complained that she could be missing all manner of fun stuff while we go through the DVDs. So we found, in short order, a programme that infuriated me, a programme that irritated her, and a programme that we both wanted to see, but it was bedtime and I was too zonked to sort out a blank disc and record it. It'll never catch on, I tell you.

In other news, if you spend ten pounds on a new pair of shoes, do not expect them to be comfortable. Sam Vimes would be proud of me.

Ah

2009-11-23T08:29:04Z

I now have more music on my computer than will fit on my iPod. Woe.

Conversational snippet from this evening (somewhat paraphrased)

2009-11-23T03:16:00Z

(The Countess has been telling Chris about a foreign film she once saw as I come into the room)

Me: There's a film I once saw on telly years ago that I'd love to get hold of, but it's never been out on DVD. I keep looking for it every now and then, but no luck. (Brief description of film)

The Countess: Oh, did it have (mentions plot element from her film)?

Me: Actually, yes. Could be the same one.

Chris (who has been tapping away at his laptop, looking at Amazon.fr): Number of discs two, running time such and such...(boggles a bit) it came out just over a week ago.

(Collapse of entire company)

In fact, looking at the site, it's either not out yet despite the publication date, or has been and gone. I have put my name down to be emailed should it reappear. Still, it's obviously one of those coincidences...

The reason why

2009-11-23T01:22:15Z

We watched The Da Vinci Code, which the_magician had not seen, after valydiarosada had left.

Let me be clear about this. It does not matter one jot how bad a writer Dan Brown may be, how unoriginal or indeed demented the theories on which he bases his work of fiction may be, or indeed whether there is any truth in Christianity or not. None of that is relevant. It was quite simply necessary that Mr Brown exist, that he write this book, that it sell as many copies as it did so that Hollywood would make a film of it, and that the producers commission Mr Hans Zimmer, who would then take a deceptively simple pattern of repeated chords and create the piece of living transcendence that is the track entitled "Chevaliers de Sangreal" on the soundtrack. Without that writer, that book and that film, that piece of music would not exist as it does, and that is simply out of the question.

This has been willed where what is willed must be. Seriously.

smallship1 @ 2009-11-22T00:06:00

2009-11-22T00:06:40Z

Just for a laugh, I published an album today.

Here it is. All instrumentals, so you don't have to worry about being afflicted by my voice, and I'm fairly sure there's at least one that hasn't been available anywhere before. Maybe even two.

If you know anyone who might be interested, maybe you'd pass the word...

More elective telly

2009-11-21T09:54:21Z

If I say we enjoyed watching Bonekickers again, all my credibility's going to go goggle goggle, uggle oof, down the drain, isn't it?

Oh well, so be it. We did. I know they're not proper archaeologists, but then again the True Cross isn't buried under Bath either (as far as I know), so there are obviously some fictional elements here. it was fun. Plus, being localish, we got to spot locations. I could have happily watched another series, if not more.

I could also have done with more of Jekyll, though I realise that's hardly on the cards now, and it's arguable that the story's been locked off in a way that doesn't allow much in the way of continuation. Shame.

And now I am about to submerge myself in water, in preparation for fun and music with V and C. Yay.

Bugs me is all

2009-11-19T09:13:19Z

It's become a commonplace for anti-creationists to remark that such and such a characteristic of civilised man (loyalty to a group, submission to authority, building elaborate nests out of reeds and trapping passing small animals in one's sticky fronds) is merely a development of an impulse that has been observed in several species of animal and therefore was not a gift of any kind of deity. (catsittingstill did it most recently to my knowledge, here.)

Not to register any serious disagreement, but two points occur to me. One is that this seems somewhat reductionist. There seems to me to be a difference of kind, not merely of degree, between, say, an anthill and the palace at Versailles, even though both may have been products of the same animal impulse to get out of the wet; between the standardised mating calls of the blue tit and Beethoven's seventh symphony, even though both may be roughly translatable as "Aaaargh! I want sex! NOW!!!" In other words, if one wants to postulate a divine gift of inspiration, or intelligence, or imagination, that separates man from the animals, it seems to me that there is ample justification, and to claim that there isn't, that everything we do can be accounted for in terms of what animals do, seems to me perhaps a touch disingenuous.

The other is...who is supposed to have created all the animals?

(Please note all the "seems to me"'s up there. I've been very careful not actually to say anything. I Am Not A Creationist Nor Do I Support Creationism In Any Way. Void where there is no matter. Please do not strike matches on the piano player.)

smallship1 @ 2009-11-18T23:46:00

2009-11-18T23:46:29Z

Turns out a lot of my further thoughts on the godsense came out in comments, and the rest I've forgotten. So, back to the telly-watching, and last night and today's treat was the Reeves and Mortimer remake of Randall and Hopkirk Deceased. Great fun. I loved the original series, and this was in every way a fitting successor to it. Vic and Bob played it mostly straight and were therefore the funniest I've ever seen them, Emilia Fox was a true Jeannie for the modern age, Tom was divine as he always is, and the effects technology was used sparingly and sensitively. The scripts were more reminiscent of The Avengers than the original R & H (D), but as such they succeeded in recapturing, for me at least, a sense of innocent fun that was characteristic of that kind of telly in those days and that I thought long lost.

Would that all remakes were as good, or as faithful.

We've now moved on to RTD's Casanova, in which Tennant's portrayal of the lad himself is only distinguishable from his Doctor by virtue of the fact that he has plausibly to turn into Peter O'Toole at some point. But then, since I have no investment in any previous depiction of the character of Casanova, I don't much care and can enjoy the show for what it is.

A question of faith

2009-11-18T12:19:00Z

Following a series of links from a Tom Tomorrow cartoon, I came across this question in an article:

"Is faith a matter of choice? Is it an act of will? Are we therefore to be held accountable for the presence or absence of faith in our lives?"

The article was based on a letter (whether genuine or not I couldn't tell; I don't know the writer of the article) from an atheist feeling alone and alienated in a strongly Catholic (and conservative) family, and the article writer answered the letter to the effect that if the family truly believed that faith was a miraculous gift of God, they should accept the letter writer's lack of faith as just as much a "miracle" as their own faith.

This is, of course, based on the principle that anyone who can believe in a god must automatically be so credulous that they will believe absolutely anything no matter how inane, which I find somewhat problematic. (You believe in a God whose son died on a cross? Why won't you believe that the rain is caused by little goblins with buckets standing on the clouds? Oh, you're just being awkward.)

My own belief on this is that faith is a thing of two parts. On the one hand, there is, I think, a sense that some people possess and some don't. I don't think this sense conveys any actual detailed information, just a feeling of something vast and omnipresent that those who feel it identify with the deity of their choice. I don't have it myself, so I'm speculating in a vacuum, but people who I think do have it have told me that they do, and I don't see any compelling reason to disbelieve them. The other part of faith is indeed a matter of choice and an act of will, and it's whether or not you choose to acknowledge this sense. It's entirely possible that some have it and prefer to believe that it's a delusion, or just part of the normal background noise of their brain.

Thus we have four possible stances:

1. I have the godsense, and believe it gives me contact with my God.
2. I have the godsense, and believe it is of no significance.
3. I do not have the godsense, and do not believe in any God.
4. I do not have the godsense, but believe in a God anyway.

More on this when I come back from Richmond Fellowship appointment.

Oh well

2009-11-16T03:17:44Z

The Countess wants to watch the nuWho, but I got the time wrong (not intentionally) so we will be catching the repeat on Wednesday. pbristow predicts that I will hate it with a fiery passion; I do hope not. From what I've read it sounds like more of the same stuff we've had since 2003, so hopefully it will leave me just as cold as I am now.

In the meantime, we finished the run of Lexx, which made a good end all things considered, and watched Zatoichi which had some nice music at the end.

Did you see what I did there? I can't remember who taught me, if indeed anyone did, that it's incredibly stylistically inept to have the same word* two or more times in a sentence unless you're creating a deliberate effect with it. Whoever it was, they obviously didn't teach Peter Anghelides, because he does it over and over again in his Torchwood books, and it jars, my friends, I'm here to tell you it jars.

And so to bed.

*Significant word, obviously. "The" and "and" and so on don't count.

smallship1 @ 2009-11-15T10:43:00

2009-11-15T10:43:29Z

matociquala links to this. I've heard the argument before--when CDs came in there was an outcry to the effect that they were Teh Death Uv Rock Un Roll because they weren't scratchy enough, or something like that--and I'm not convinced.

There's a snobbishness and a mystique here that grates on me. I'm a craftsperson when I do music, as when I write or draw--not a good one, by any means, but that's my aspiration. As with the singing cobbler, whose song I have never consciously heard all the way through, I believe work can only be done one way. If someone, under a somewhat bizarre set of circumstances, were to hand-make me a car, I would feel somewhat miffed if that person were to say something like "well, the wing mirrors are on backwards, the headlights don't work and the exhaust vents into the heater--but that makes it a rrreal car (with optional air-clenching and teeth-gritting à la mode Kirk Douglas or Rod Steiger)." I would, in short, ask for a replacement or my money back. Recordings are different from cars, of course, in that you're catching a moment to some extent, but it's still nonsensical not to do the best you can with what you've got. As the Beatles did. They didn't sit around saying "Orright, wack, so we'll bung a bum note in here..." and so on. At least I hope they didn't.

To make mistakes is human. To make the occasional happy mistake is wonderful. To glorify mistakes is idiotic. It leads to the blind alley of punk, in which the most "honest" musician is one who can't play and doesn't care. Or if you take it another way, the best recording ever was Thomas Edison's celebrated rendition of "Mary Had A Little Lamb" and if you want to hear real honesty, try a 78. What the article is documenting is the quest for perfection, and while it's certainly possible to take the wrong path on that quest (as possibly with the over-compression issue) it can only be stupid to decry the quest itself on the grounds that it's wrong to try to make it good.

I feel very strongly about this. There's an entire Cosmic Trifle album stalled up in Peterborough partly because I know my performances as they stand are not good enough, and cannot be made good enough despite all Mike's technical trickery, to be put on a recording for sale. If I were a "real" rock musician, according to this, I should let my out-of-tune croakings and off-beat playing be inflicted on people because that's more "honest." I can't do that. I'm not Tom Waits or Bob Dylan, and that kind of "honesty" isn't my stock in trade. I hope, at some point, to be able to get over there and do better (or find someone else to do it instead) at which point the album will become the work of two distinct groups at two different points in time, apparently playing together. It will become a lie. But it will be a lie composed of good, listenable performances (please gods) and people will enjoy listening to it. And when we play live, which we hope to do soon, I will do my best as always, and hope that people will forgive my mistakes. Forgive them. Not glorify them. Not say my performance wouldn't be better without them. Because art is also craft, and if you aren't doing the best you can with what you've got, you aren't serving either.

The Waters Of Mars

2009-11-14T13:53:08Z

I'm not planning to watch it--I missed "Planet Of The Dead" and the sky didn't fall, so I think I'm clear--but I'm intrigued by the fact that the cover of Total TV Guide features, along with the boy David and Ms Duncan, a rather obvious Dalek.

This could be a colossal spoiler, hence the cut. I don't think it is, though. I think possibly the art department of that magazine might have been concerned that nobody would know, after all this time, who these peculiar people were, and thought they'd better bung in a Dalek because everybody knows them. It was either that or the TARDIS, after all.

This amuses me on a number of levels.

Lexx

2009-11-14T10:09:11Z

Weird show. Weird weird show. Kind of like Red Dwarf if it had been imagined by someone who'd met H R Giger and Jean-Paul Sartre at a party once and couldn't decide which of them was more inspiring.

There's a lot to like in Lexx. The writers have certainly taken on board the idea that flawed characters are more interesting. The narrative world they start out with is marvellously textured and has lots of implied depths to explore. The look recalls European comics and cartoon films in the same way that The Fifth Element does, though on a somewhat cheaper level, obviously. The dialogue occasionally has that touch of strangeness that suggests to me (rightly or wrongly, and if I'm wrong it's very well imitated) that it's been written by someone for whom, though utterly fluent, English is not the first language. (This is not a criticism: I find it fascinating and magical to hear my native tongue from a different angle.)

There is, also, much in Lexx that drives me crazy. A lot of the humour, and all the obsession with sex, is at the same level of sniggering adolescence as that in Torchwood. A minor character in one of the later episodes is named Cardinal Meinpo Duftet, which if I have the translation right shows you what kind of territory we're in. ("Po" in German is something like "bum" I think.) All the main characters are annoyingly one-note, with the chief offender being the robot head 790, accidentally programmed to think it is a love slave and to love one of the other characters. After half an episode of its annoying, obsessive whining, you start to wonder what these people wanted from their love slaves. Kai is not much better, though prettier as played by Michael McManus; he can generally be relied upon for several comments beginning "The dead do not [fill in blank here]" (he thinks he's dead, you see; long story) while he stumps around making the plot work. Zev, later Xev, played by Eva Habermann and Xenia Seeberg in that order, has some potential for depth, but as usual with female characters the writers have no idea what to do with her and she ends up being something which looks pretty, gets into distress fairly often, and thus causes a great deal of the trouble Kai has to sort out. And finally we have Stanley Tweedle, a name which stops being funny fairly early on, played by Brian Downey as a sort of Doctor Smith for grown-ups, or at least sniggering adolescents. There are some half-hearted attempts to give him a third dimension, but the fact that he never seems to learn from the horrific experiences he undergoes on his endless quest to sate his primitive lusts, and always resets to zero in time to get into trouble again next week, is a bit sad. Especially when his default position is to blow up planets unless they provide him with women.

But having said all that, one thing that shines through and makes the show special is the sheer sense of fun; the glee with which actors from previous episodes are brought back playing slightly different versions of characters long dead, the sparkle of inventiveness that runs through each new season. There's also one main character I haven't mentioned, the Lexx itself, voiced by Tom Gallant in a note-perfect performance of complete sincerity. The Lexx is very powerful, very simple, and completely under the control of whoever holds its "key", and with the sorry bunch occupying its bridge that doesn't give it much of a choice. As they rush around trying to find food, shelter and sex, not necessarily in that order, the Lexx waits with inhuman patience to be allowed to eat something, anything, so that it can continue to serve its "captain." It's a new experience, feeling sympathy for a mile-long alien battleship in the shape of a bug.

Weird show. Weird weird show. But always worth it. Oh, and the President of America and his most trusted advisor in the fourth season (when Lexx comes to Earth) are eerily familiar in so many ways...

More on war

2009-11-13T10:26:57Z

So, mixed responses to my previous post. A couple of iterations of the "remembrance" idea, whereby the fact that war is wholesale murder of innocents without point or purpose is supposed to be something that can slip the mind. "Wait a moment...there was something I was supposed to remember about war...tip of my tongue...no, it's no good, it's gone. Oh well, probably wasn't important anyway. CHAAAAAARGE!!!"

I'm sorry, I should not make fun, but really, I don't believe that anyone in possession of senses and reason, living in the developed world today, can be unaware that war is an abomination. I'm not willing to offer the makers of war that excuse. We know, they know, and yet Britain could go to war with another country tomorrow, and ordinary people would have no choice in the matter. Whether we remember or not would make no difference. (The idea of "suppose they gave a war and nobody came?" is an alluring one, but after Korea, Vietnam and the Falklands, if it were going to happen it would have by now.)

Also the idea came up that people who get shot or blown to pieces or gassed to death in a war are more or less worthy of honour depending which side they were on. Quite apart from the fact that this perpetuates the idea of the division between those "sides" long after the particular war is over, I don't see that this is fair. Every participant in a war drees his own weird, and each "side" will have its share of heroes, cowards, scoundrels and idiots, and ordinary people just trying to survive. Their virtues and their vices are common currency across the battlefield, and if we choose to see only the virtues of our own "side" and only the vices of the other, we do a disservice to all the dead and to ourselves.

There is no us. There is no them. If we remember, then we must remember all. If we honour, then we must honour all. And if we do this in order that warfare shall cease, then there needs to be, as there is not now, an actual workable way that we can make it cease, that we can deny to any individual or group, no matter how powerful, no matter how murderous, the ability to propel us into war. Otherwise all that I have said will remain true, and Remembrance Sunday/Armistice Day/whatever will remain an empty gesture against the encroaching dark.

Make no mistake. To refuse to be forced to make war, whatever the circumstances, is not an easy path. Even if you allow certain exceptions (say, if a lunatic gains power in a country, puts its entire economy on a war footing and invades all his neighbours: there are sadly times when war is inescapable) it's not going to be easy. It means taking acts of provocation squarely on the chin and not responding. It means developing an effective supra-national body of law so that such acts can be dealt with by peaceful means, and submitting to that body of law oneself, losing that degree of sovereignty (and thus precluding the aforementioned lunatic). It means global surveillance, so that nobody can, say, organise a terrorist attack on another country and then run and hide in a cave somewhere and not get caught. It means doing a lot of things that people will not like, and not doing a lot of things that people do like. It means concrete action, now. The end of war won't just happen, it won't just come on us like the sun emerging from the clouds if we simply have faith. It has to be done, and done by us, before another soldier dies. (Okay, too late. Soonish, though. Whenever we have a moment.)

But, and this is the bit that gets me every time, if we are not prepared to take these steps, if we are not prepared as a planet to take these actions and give up war (and we obviously aren't), then what the hell is all this stuff for? Is it all just words? Hypocrisy? A sop to the bleeding hearts before the battle resumes? How would the dead feel about that if they were here? How would the men who perished in agony in the trenches of WWI feel to know that there is nothing in the world now that is capable of preventing it all from happening again?

Is a pious wish and a wreath of poppies really enough?

My annual anti-Remembrance rant

2009-11-12T10:58:34Z

dickgloucester posted a Siegfried Sassoon poem, and added below it:

The last World War One veterans are dead. In their honour, could we please stop doing this?

And my answer got too big for a comment:

If by "this" you mean fighting each other, I'm afraid the chances are slim to none. I can imagine a world in which no-one is allowed to fight, or to be angry, or to rally round a cause or seek a better life or try to avenge a perceived wrong, but I can see people raising all sorts of footling objections if I or anyone else tried to make it happen. Freedom, which we seem to value, includes the freedom to fight and all the rest of it, and war, suffering and death are among the consequences of our having that freedom. Let's face it, we tried stopping other nations fighting amongst themselves a while back. So did the Russians, and the Americans, and the French and the Germans and all the way back to the Romans. (We may have had other intentions, but it worked just the same, at the time.) And funnily enough, nobody ever thanked us.

On the other hand, if by "this" you mean holding ceremonies and reliving old wars and telling ourselves in the teeth of the evidence that it's making the world an atom more peaceful, then yes, absolutely. Honouring the dead, yearning for peace, is something we each decide to do, or not to do, for ourselves. Like prayer. Like choosing not to fight today, or mastering our anger, or seeking a reasoned compromise or allowing yourself to forgive. It doesn't matter that Armistice Day is now Veterans Day in America. You choose what to celebrate in your own heart, and that's what matters. The fact that we need a day to remind ourselves of the horrific human cost of our freedom, to remind ourselves that we would really like to be seen as the sort of people who believe that killing other people is wrong...just illustrates my first point.

Yes, I said "to be seen as." It's all show. I'm sure that on this day in America, if you want to, you can watch President Bush laying a wreath somewhere, bowing his head with a solemn and prayerful expression, and mouthing all the clichés about "never again" and "our boys" and "the good fight." And if you think it's anything more than an empty gesture for him, then welcome back to Earth and how was the last eight years for you on Pluto? Anyone can lay a wreath. It takes more than that to choose not to fight. That he, and those like him, can do that, can pretend to care about peace just by dumping some foliage on a lump of marble, cheapens and soils the whole thing, and makes it meaningless to me.

I do honour those who fought and died to protect my freedom. It's more than I would ever do: well, the fighting part that is, the dying I can do all right. But I also honour those who fought and died to take it from me, because they were just as brave and true and honourable, and they all died because other people chose to be stupid and greedy and mad. That's not going to change any time soon. And till it does, "a world without war" is a dream we'll never get close to achieving, and there will never be a shortage of dead people to honour.

Dicky, I see your Siegfried Sassoon and raise you Chris de Burgh:

Up here in heaven
We stand together
Both the enemy and the friend
Till the end of time.

Up here in heaven
We are forever
There is only one God up here
The God of the world.

And that works whether you believe in one God or none, whether you believe in Heaven or not. In the end, we all go to the same wherever, and what we fought for presumably ceases to matter to us. (Unless it's something like Valhalla, of course. That's a thought.)

And that's probably enough.

Blood Heat In Cardiff

2009-11-11T10:22:14Z

"Anyone alive in here?" Gwen calls cheerily from the cog door.

"No," Owen calls back, the resentment--I'm the one who makes the dead-guy jokes around here, all right?--numbed by now to a dull ache. Maybe after a while you lose the knack of emotions the way you lose all other feeling.

"Give us a hand then," Gwen says, and now Owen sees that she and Toshiko are wrestling with a body on a gurney. He goes to help, and they negotiate the thing down the ramp while Tosh brings Owen up to speed.

"Terrence Daniels," she says. "He was attacked by a Weevil out on that new estate, but as you can see he's totally unmarked, just comatose. The Weevil apparently started in on him and then backed off."

"So we thought you might be interested," Gwen puts in. "Weevils being your special area of expertise now."

"All right," Owen says, holding down another dull, rusty spike of anger. I do have other interests, thanks. Even now I'm an inconvenient corpse. Despite his efforts, he knows Tosh gets it; she looks at him, eyebrows raised. He shrugs. "I'll run some tests."

"Okay." Gwen is already heading for the open air again. Bother you, does it, girlie? Being in the same room as the walking dead? "We'd better get back out there. Jack said--"

"No worries." Owen is already busying himself about the unconscious man. He barely hears the door close. Respiration is slow but steady, heartbeat is strong, pupils normal. Right, let's have some blood for starters.

His mouth is dry as he looks for the vein, swabs the area. But then it's always dry these days. He imagines his internal organs, gradually mummifying as he walks around, only the protective cage of bone around them stopping them crumbling to black dust. Cheerful as ever, Doctor Harper. The needle glides in, and he draws out a tiny amount of blood and readies a glass slide.

The drop of blood sits on the sterile glass, quivering slightly with the normal tremors of his hand. He looks at it, marvelling at the redness, at the perfection of its shape.

Then, without any volition on his part, he wipes the slide across his tongue.

Something hits him with the force of a piledriver. For a moment he feels as if he's bruised every molecule in his body, but somehow it isn't a bad feeling. No, not a bad feeling at all.

What the hell was that all about?

Owen Harper gathers his scattered wits. What was he doing? Oh yeah, getting some blood from this guy. He preps a fresh needle, pushes it in again and takes out a larger amount this time. No sense in being mingy.

It doesn't even get as far as the slide. His brain completely empty of thought, Owen raises the syringe to his open mouth and sprays the blood on his tongue.

Again the sweet, sweet jolt, again the pain that isn't, and now he gets the taste. Better than food, better than booze, better than sex. Why has this never happened before? He's been in rooms drenched in blood, blood all over the walls, the floor, the ceiling. He's waded in it.

Dead blood. Cold blood. No use to him. Not like this.

Owen finds to his bemusement that he's on the floor. How did I get down here? He comes to his feet, feelings he hasn't had for so long flowing back into his body, those mummified organs all coming back to life, renewed--repurposed--made better. Now he understands. Why hadn't anyone told him? All that anguish, all that fear, just because no-one told him the truth. He was simply waiting for the kick-start.

He looks at his bandaged hand, the broken finger healing as he watches; he pulls open his shirt, and the bullet wound that killed him is already gone without trace. And finally, he puts his finger into his mouth, and feels around his upper teeth. Yes. And now he understands the darkness, the nothingness after death. It makes sense of everything. No God, no heaven, and therefore no hell. Not for everyone. Just for him.

He smiles down at the unconscious man.

I'm sorry, Mister Daniels, I'm going to need a little more blood.

What I'm reading to the Countess

2009-11-10T09:02:58Z

Good grief. We seem to have found a Torchwood novel that doesn't contain the word "snot." We were beginning to think it was a condition of the contract.

We're also nearly through with the Wardstone books by Joseph Delaney (The Spook's Apprentice et al), which are good to read aloud and have impelled me to try to distinguish an actual Lancashire accent rather than do my usual cod Northern. This page from the BBC is very interesting in this connection.

What's somewhat bothered us is that there appears to be a deep and unacknowledged vein of misogyny flowing through the series. Nearly every significant female character turns out to be a witch and therefore Evil in the eyes of the mentor character, the Spook, and the one who isn't (the hero's sister-in-law) is a wet. The male characters have a far fairer moral spread (the Devil is male), but even the hero's mother has a history of "serving the dark." The hero unquestioningly obeys the Spook even when it doesn't feel right, and so far nothing has proved him less than absolutely reliable. We have one book to go, with at least one more on the way, and I'd like to think we were building up to a major scales-from-eyes turnaround, but it's all looking a bit Granny Weatherwax at the moment (in the sense that the Spook has a big metaphorical sign over his head saying THE AUTHOR AGREES WITH ME).

It's a shame, because in one respect I actually agree with the Spook, when he says that "using the dark to defeat the dark" is ultimately self-defeating. I've never believed that the end can justify the means, or that it's all right to do a bad thing for a good end (it may sometimes be necessary, but never all right, and a victory thus won is always hollow). I just think his definition of "the dark" is a bit too much like "having anything to do with women". When he catches a witch he puts her in a pit in his garden and leaves her to eat worms or starve for the rest of her life, because he's too soft-hearted to kill them. I rest my case.

If you don't agree with me on the above, though, you may enjoy these books. The Countess does.

On trusting stories

2009-11-08T14:23:45Z

nancylebov linked to this. Fair warning: I haven't experienced it directly, for a couple of reasons*, so if you're interested please do.

She summarises the central idea as follows:

you need to leave out a lot (mostly the messiness of the real world) in order to make a compelling story, and that while you can't give up stories (they're built into human nature), it's worth developing dubiousness about getting engaged in them.

It's certainly true that stories, like statues, are to some extent subtractive: once you know what your story's going to be, it's a case of chipping away everything that isn't the story. It's also true that you can't give up stories. If Mr Cowan is actually saying that you should treat stories with respect, then I agree with that too. If he's saying that stories can't be trusted, then I absolutely and totally disagree.

I would like anyone reading this who was not brought up on stories to put up their metaphorical hand. Given the generally wonderful nature of my readers, I could rest my case right there, but perhaps the argument deserves a tad more development.

Stories do not tell us what the world is like. That's a given. We have other things for that. Stories can contain facts, which are always useful, but that isn't what they're for. Stories are supposed to tell us (or, perhaps, lead us to discover what we believe about) what the world should (or should not) be like. That's if they tell us anything and don't simply beguile an hour or more in an entertaining fashion, which is also a perfectly valid justification for stories.

We live in a world where the news is lies, the food is poisoned, the air and water are polluted and anyone we meet on the street could be a mugger or a drunk driver or something. We have plenty and plenty to be cautious about. I would say that, within the bounds of reason, stories are one of the few things we can rely on not to betray us. As long as we play fair with them, they will always play fair with us. Destroying that bond of trust doesn't strike me as a good thing to do, in a time when it's a vanishingly rare resource and one we depend on more and more. In fact, the idea makes me quite angry. Plus, of course, stories are what I do, and readers getting engaged with them (enjoying them, finding them worthwhile) is about the only good that can come of what I do, and someone telling people not to do that is directly threatening the only purpose I've found for my life. Hence the heightened hackles.

If I have misunderstood based on the summary, I am sure someone will be swift to correct me.

*Oh, all right. One is that I know from the summary that I'm not going to be persuaded, and the other is that I'd rather keep my ears uncanned in case I get called or the phone rings or something. I've been doing music most of the morning and have used up my headphone time.

smallship1 @ 2009-11-05T11:46:00

2009-11-05T12:01:32Z

Hygienist visit today. Rather more painful than the filling, but worth it.

It's remarkable how many people who support gay marriage seem to want to change what marriage is rather than let the people who want it have it as it stands. It's a tired old truism that no human institution can be perfect, but there is, I think, a preference among people in general for the things that have grown up along with us, as opposed to the new plasticky alternatives that individuals come up with. This is why we're not all speaking Esperanto or having our food in pill form.

It would certainly be possible to remove marriage from state control, or strip it of what religious connections remain...but there would still be people who would want the state to register their marriage as valid, or would want to go the whole dearly-beloved-we-are-gathered-here route, and it seems to me they would feel a little as though they'd asked for a pony for their birthday and got a Sinclair C5 Because It's Better. Also, of course, this would be a huge concession to the people who are trying by any revolting means necessary to prevent gay couples getting their hands on "their" concept of marriage, and I don't think any concessions are due to those people. Not one.

smallship1 @ 2009-11-05T08:40:00

2009-11-05T09:22:43Z

Give the car some pet-er-i-ol (edited: can't remember when I last had enough to fill it),
Pay a bill or two-oo,
Buy a bag of grocer-eyes,
Pop goes the weasel.

It's a good thing I don't have any particular urge to drink, isn't it?

Back from the dentist

2009-11-03T11:50:23Z

I've had a filling. My gods it didn't hurt at all.

It's going to take me a while to stop clenching up when that chair goes back, but I think I could be on the way.

Further thoughts on Twelfth Night

2009-11-03T10:48:08Z

I didn't make myself clear in the previous post: obviously it's a question of balance between laughs and seriousness in all Shakespeare's comedies, and I wouldn't suggest that Malvolio's treatment at the end should be entirely laughed off as negligible. The text doesn't support that kind of interpretation.

However, I think this production strayed too far away from the root of that plot, the whole Lord of Misrule trading-places thing that (I believe) used to be traditional on Twelfth Night. The audience would be familiar with the idea of masters being temporarily dislodged from their ascendancy, and while to do that to Orsino or Olivia would have got in the way of the other plot, Malvolio (as I remember it) comes across in the early part of the play as very much the master of Olivia's house, both in fact (since she is too busy indulging in her grief, as Orsino wallows in his romantic languishment) and, as we see later, in his own mind. In fact, thinking about it, the play begins with the "masters" already self-displaced, and Malvolio's ordeal serves to jolt them both back into an awareness of their proper roles.

That said...I still think too much was made of Malvolio's sufferings under what an Elizabethan audience might surely have seen as simply a prank, and his final utterances, while given superb emotional intensity by Richard Briers (who was for a long time one of the most underrated actors we have, I think), could have been played as simply a childish tantrum by someone likewise rudely jolted out of his own self-absorption and arrogance; a servant, like Maria, who has been allowed to drift out of his proper sphere and become too accustomed to the perquisites of power. It seems unlikely, on the face of it, that anyone, even the Duke, would be able to "entreat" this man "to a peace."

I can see the phrase "proper sphere" raising hackles among my more egalitarian friends, but what I mean by it is the sphere in which we all must live. There was no way Shakespeare, living when he did, was going to suggest the dethronement of Dukes and the setting up of an anarcho-syndicalist commune along Bakuninist lines, but all his audience would have been familiar with the concept of the jumped-up bugger giving himself airs because he gets to wear a fancy chain, and would, I think, have been prepared to laugh whole-heartedly at such a one being put in a darkened room for a little while. And this is the point that didn't come across, to us at least, in this production of Twelfth Night.

Twelfth Night

2009-11-03T03:48:37Z

Or "What? You, Will?"

We watched the Branagh telly production of this, with Richard Briers as Malvolio. I vaguely remember seeing other versions in my youth, and still others of about the same vintage as this, and it seems to me, based on these rather tenuous recollections, that a sea-change has come over our perspective on this play. Not so much with the forgettable cross-dressing lovers and mistaken identity business (pirated from the Italian, of course), but with the subplot involving Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, Maria and the aforementioned Malvolio.

I remember Malvolio, you see, as far more of a bully and a tyrant, as befits his name ("ill-will"), and far more deserving of his come-uppance; Sir Toby as far more of a sympathetic roisterer, and far less deserving of Malvolio's contempt. These days M seems to be portrayed more often as a somewhat serious-minded but conscientious servant, who is led on by Sir T's gang of sadistic (and largely aristocratic) villains and then heinously tortured for no reason at all. Leaving aside the vexed and irresoluble question of what Shakespeare may or may not have intended, it's really hard to see how this new attitude serves the comedy. Indeed, the Branagh production in particular seems designed to be as unfunny as possible, which given that the play contains some of the Bard's most obscure jokes ("I did impeticos thy gratillity; for Malvolio's nose is no whipstock...") verges on the perverse.

While I accept that comedy means something different now from what it used to mean in Will's day, I do incline to the view that he meant them to be laughed at. If anyone knows of a funny production of Twelfth Night available on shiny disc, do let me know.

smallship1 @ 2009-10-31T09:47:00

2009-11-01T03:27:46Z

So, American Gothic. The series, that is, not the painting or the Bloch novel or any of the other things that bear that name.

I remember watching it when it came on TV, and being perplexed towards the end of the run, because the story arc came to its climax over three powerful episodes, and then suddenly the series seemed to slip backwards into standard story-of-the-weekishness, with a lot of the arc changes reset, and petered out after another four episodes leaving me at least confused and unhappy with it.

We've just watched it on disc, and having looked it up on the net I discover that the order the episodes were shown in was (possibly deliberately) messed up: two episodes weren't shown at all in America, and two others were shown out of sequence after the arc had finished. Given that they contained elements which were essential to said arc (e.g. one character had seemed to go instantly from hating another to being in lust with hir, another had undergone a complete moral turnaround) it's hard to see what purpose this messing around could possibly have served, other than to disorient and confuse the audience so that ratings would drop and a cancellation could be justified. (This is probably me being paranoid again and attributing to malice what is perfectly well explained by sheer indifference. The fact that when it comes to telly studios and networks I don't distinguish between indifference and malice is doubtless grossly unfair of me.)

It was a good series, well acted and on the whole well written*, with some funny moments and some shocking ones, and it would have made so much more sense and been so much more satisfying if they had shown the damn episodes in the right order. It might even have made it to a second season.

*Even without the arc disruption, there are moments when some of the characters seem to be acting strangely out of, erm, character, but subsequent seasons might have revealed reasons for that.