Log of Smallship One - Passionate and Confused

Bonekickers

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 10:56:31 GMT

Much scorn being poured on this first episode by Serious Scientific People. Personally, I liked it and will be watching.

I never really thought they were going to do a serious dramatic version of one of those "oh look, we've found a small brown lump of something, this is tremendously significant since it proves there were people living in Cheltenham in the Middle Ages" programmes that the Countess loves to shout at so much. There are, after all, plenty of real ones, and even those have resorted to making wilder and wilder assumptions in a desperate attempt to make themselves sound interesting to the average pleb like me. "Was the Amesbury Archer the King Of Stonehenge?!?!!" So I was primed for something that was not entirely plausible in the real world, and since that's what I look for in fiction I wasn't disappointed.

There was mysticism, but no magic, unless you count the fact that it took the cross with the broken arm significantly longer to catch fire than the others. (I was a little let down by the reset button, even though I was expecting it. Some day I'd like to see one of these things where the sacred relic isn't destroyed/buried/flooded/taken to another dimension at the end, and the world has to get used to the fact that something strange does exist. And I'd like it written by someone who has neither a specifically religious nor an atheist agenda, please.) There was a neat little reference when First Loony, with sword and long billowy coat, lopped off someone's head and staggered back against a wall and for a split second I *almost* expected lightning and smashing windows. And there are interesting characters, at least on first viewing. It will remain to be seen whether they can keep it from getting too samey.

And, of course, it also had the huge advantage of not being nuWho. :)

Song meme

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 01:28:31 GMT

I asked pbristow to give me a letter for the song meme, which goes:

1. Reply to this post and I'll assign you a letter.
2. List 5 songs you like that start with that letter.
3. Post them to your journal with these instructions.

My songs are all about the letter I, apparently. In fact, I'm going to limit it even further, to songs that begin with the pronoun I.

1. I'll Find My Way Home by Jon Anderson and Vangelis Papathanassiou. There's very little that these two can do that I won't go for, but sometimes they do stray into the weird a little further than I feel like following. This is not one of those times. A deceptively simple but subtle song with lyrics that (mostly) make sense.

2. I'll Never Tell from "Once More With Feeling," performed by Nicholas Brendon and Emma Caulfield. When I start to feel like being able to write songs is maybe some kind of big deal, along comes Joss Whedon and effortlessly knocks out a dozen or so complete gems for a pet project before returning to his proper job at which he is also brilliant, curse him. This one effortlessly transcends the limitations of the performers and plays to their strengths, and is damned funny to boot.

3. I'm Just A Singer In A Rock And Roll Band, by the Moody Blues. There's a specific moment in this song that puts it on this list, right at the end. All the lyrics have been sung, and the music is hurtling along at breakneck pace, firing on all cylinders, and then the lead guitar decides to slam on the brakes, and for a moment you can't help but think that it won't work, something will snap and the whole thing will just keep on going...and then the brakes bite, and the wheels lock, and it's still going forward but it's only momentum now, and oh so gradually it slides to a halt...and then backfires. it's a good song overall, but it's that bit that does it for me.

4. I'm Bored by the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. I was going to put I'm The Urban Spaceman, but everyone knows that one. "I'm! Bored! To Death! (Like mort-ar bored.)"

5. I Want Tomorrow by Enya. A lot of the appeal for this one is the memory of the video they made as part of the programme she was doing the music for (The Celts), but it is a good creepy song in its own right, and the string arrangements are nice, if a bit obviously Kate Bush-y.

So there you have it. (Oh yes, and I'm Going Slightly Mad by Queen...and I See Red by Clannad...and I Wanna Go Back To Dixie by Tom Lehrer...and...)

babylon 5 ficlet

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 19:49:21 GMT

I went to the grave today.

They didn't like it. But then they never do. They prefer me to sit still, not exert myself, eat my greens, stay calm, think about puppies or something. But I had to. I made a promise.

Sheridan didn't live to see it, of course. Michael almost made it--his heart gave out two years ago. But he knew. Hell, he knew before anyone. He was the one who told me.

I don't know if it was a Russian who said that the best revenge you can take on your enemies is to outlive them. If it wasn't, it should have been. But you can do better, if you're lucky.

The amazing thing is that no-one realised. Well, almost no-one. The Vorlons created telepaths on a hundred worlds, including Earth, by tinkering with the genetic code. It was an ongoing process, requiring constant monitoring and adjustment. The Corps thought they were improving the breed with their eugenic marriages and experimental drugs. They weren't even close. It was the Vorlons all the way.

And once they were gone...

Lyta found out, god knows how. She told Michael, and he told me. I don't think I'd seen that man so happy in all the years I'd known him. We didn't have to do anything. We just had to watch, as year on year the realisation dawned on them, oh so slowly. Human beings were reverting to type. Telepaths were not being born. Five years after Sheridan's death, there were no more new stable P10s. Ten years after, no more P8s.

It was about now I started to take a particular interest in our friend's health. I had the Rangers watch out for him, protect him from dangers. I wanted him to live to see the end of it. And I made sure that he did. Last year was the year the birth rate for P1 and over finally went flatline. I made sure he knew it. And then I finally allowed him to take his own life.

And today I went to the grave. I forced myself out of the damn chair and I let them help me on to the slab of stone that was holding him down, and I managed a few faltering steps before I ran out of breath. For my mother. For Talia. For Michael. For Lyta. And for me.

The best revenge of all is to outlive your enemy's dreams.

Come on, you knew this was coming...

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 01:20:53 GMT

Where to begin? How to count the ways that this completely failed to surprise me or make me feel any better about this four-year experiment in the defilement of icons?

Okay, let's start with the memory rape. Regular readers will know how I feel about this particular little writer's convenience. I didn't like it when Anderson did it in UFO, I didn't like it when Straczynski did it in B5, I didn't like it when Carter did it in X-Files, and I definitely won't stand for it from RTD. Oh, and sure, there was a justification. There's always a justification. Does not make it right.

And then there's the unstated (unconsidered?) implication. Donna had to have her memory raped, or else die, because she was a Time Lord consciousness in a human body. What else is Rose's Doctor? So right now, either Rose is looking at a dead body (since she can't do mindwipes), or this Doctor lied and there was some other reason for stripping Donna of her most treasured memories. About the best you can say for that is that it saves Rose and Number Two a human lifetime of her looking at him and thinking "no, it's not him, it's the other one," and him knowing it. And this by RTD is perhaps supposed to be a happy ending. It's either deliberate sadism or unbelievable stupidity. Either way, it's not good enough.

I won't go into the science of towing a planet across at least one galaxy, through real space, at what must have been many powers of the speed of light, and the result being a few bits of broken china and a rainstorm. Science has never been Who's strong point, though in the old days it used at least to make a pretence at rationalism (and I know you disagree, lil_shepherd). And what happened to it being a second ahead in time? Did that get fixed, or just forgotten about?

I will mention the technobabble. I seem to remember that nuWho was not going to be about technobabble, reversing the polarity of the neutron flow and all that stuff. nuWho was supposed to be above all that stuff. I expect if asked Russell will say that the use of it in this episode was "ironic." It was also completely incomprehensible, not just because the words didn't mean anything, but because Catherine Tate has not learned that there is an art to speaking quickly and being understood. The fact that the defeat of the Daleks and the thwarting of Davros was accomplished by means of pressing random controls which do whatever you want them to and chanting magic words...well, it's not as bad as "clap hands if you believe in Time Lords" but it's close. When the Doctor used technobabble in the old days, there was an attempt to help us to understand it by laying groundwork in the early part of the episode; if a transplutonic baryon randomiser was cross-connected to the verteron particle array in act three, it would be visible on the wall in act one, and we'd be told something about what it did.

The reality bomb. What an impressive name for a basic disintegrator. But wait, there's more. The reason the walls between the universes were breaking down is because the reality bomb went off. Except that the good guys stopped it. Thus changing history in a big way. And where were the Reapers, may I harsk? And how come, if the breaking of the walls was a result of the bomb effect rippling back through time, there was a time when they were permeable at all? And did all the stars that went out come back again? And did anyone actually think about any element of this plot at all?

The Osterhagen key. Again, how dull. I will admit to liking the fact that Daleks in Germany spoke German (and were very polite--I'd have expected them to use "ihr" rather than "Sie"). But threatening to blow up the earth and/or the Crucible? Come on, we all know that isn't going to happen. And even if the weight of my disbelief in nuWho weren't currently causing a measurable deformation in local space-time, two lots of companions queueing up to blow themselves heroically to kingdom come is just pathetically silly.

And finally, the regeneration. Or whatever that was supposed to be. Presumably the Doctor is now the Eleventh Doctor, having used up a regeneration to heal himself rather than change bodies (and why has no other Doctor in the entire history of the man ever thought of doing that? Because, as I said last week, regeneration is a Last Resort for when healing is simply not possible. Or it used to be) and sent the rest of the energy into his spare hand, which used it to grow an almost-complete new Doctor and also give Donna the Doctor's mind. So, that's the same Doctor wholly or partially regenerated three times, then. Maybe that was all his remaining lives, Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen. (See my vapourings on RTD's Hidden Agenda.) This is a degree of control over the forces of regeneration that no Time Lord has ever displayed or spoken about. Or, to put it another way, it's a cheap trick to keep people watching who have now grown jaded with the same tropes endlessly repeated.

Oh, one more thing. The entire Donna business has been engineered by Dalek Caan, who saw "the truth about the Daleks" while he was experiencing the whole of time passing through his brain, and didn't, surprisingly enough, think "Hey, ain't we cool?" This raises the interesting question, what do Daleks think they are? Do they imagine themselves to be quite nice guys underneath it all? Just doing their jobs? We'd like them if we knew them personally? Why would a Dalek suddenly start to think there was something wrong with being a Dalek?

But the reason Donna is "special" turns out to be that she has been brought there by Dalek Caan because it saw her there. In other words, she's there because she's there because she's there because she's there. Until the hand tops her up with Doctorness, she could be anybody. So the "ordinary humans rock especially if they're female and come from present-day London" message is unaltered, and we've basically been cynically conned for thirteen weeks into thinking that it might be different.

I did entertain the possibility that this finale might turn everything around for me, might help me learn to love nuWho in spite of all that had gone before. I also entertained the possibility that it might be the end of nuWho, which to be honest wouldn't have saddened me nearly as much as the end of realWho did. Alas, it did neither. It just left me with a foul taste in my mouth and a certain relief that there are only going to be four more episodes to deal with, and then--if the PR is accurate--it might be worth hoping for something better. I say it might. I am the eternal optimist.

Over at Lawrence Miles' place, meanwhile, he presents a checklist of twenty-five ways to make Doctor Who interesting again. I agree with just about all of them. As long as I'm included in point eighteen as well.

That Donna Noble fan letter in full

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:02:26 GMT

I keep seeing it, and I'm sure it's the same letter every time. "breath of fresh air...relief to have a companion who isn't in love with the Doctor...stands up to him as an equal...won't take any bullshit..." and so on, and on. The latest version even praises Donna for not being "perfect" and "heroic." Apparently she screams when she's frightened. What a refreshing innovation.

I remember when it wasn't expected that a companion would fall in love with the Doctor. (All right, whose stupid idea was that?) I remember when the Doctor wasn't seen as someone you had to be "equal" to, because he was the Doctor. And yes, occasionally he bullshitted, and his companions knew it and didn't stand for it, and that was the norm, not something to exclaim over as if RTD had suddenly invented the wheel.

How low hast thou sunk, O Doctor, when a return to something approaching sea level is seen as a peak.

More on this week's hot story...

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 08:36:25 GMT

The word from Cyan.

Good news

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 11:54:49 GMT

Right here, and thanks to eleri for the link. There's obviously a lot still to sort out, but Cyan's intentions have been proved to be what we knew they were all along.

I should like to point out, in view of the predictions of certain persistently negative posters on the Uru forums (and I am not talking about you here, jahura, just in case you were thinking that), that the version of me currently doing the Snoopy dance with added V-signs while singing "Ha Ha Said The Clown" is from a parallel universe over which I have no control. We Nyronds are big enough, in victory as in defeat, to comport ourselves at all times with quiet dignity and grace.

ner ner na-ner ner.

Here's a thought...

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:32:35 GMT

I wonder if the Sontarans will somehow be involved in next week's episode?

Reasoning. In year one, we had a Dalek in "Dalek" and the finale was all about the Daleks. Year two, we had the Cybermen in the two-parter and the finale was all about Cybermen and Daleks. Year three, okay, was different: we had a mysterious pocket watch in the two-parter and the finale was about the consequences of another mysterious pocket watch. But year four...we had the Sontarans in the two-parter. They spent a lot of money on costumes and props for the little beggars, and this lot are not Straczynski who could demand a horde of Markab prosthetics from Optic Nerve and then kill off the entire race, rendering all those prosthetics useless, in the same episode, because the story demanded it. (I don't actually think "because the story demanded it" is in RTD's vocab. The story does what he tells it. And it shows.) Also, a big point was made that the Sontarans didn't get to take part in the Time War, so didn't get a swipe at the Daleks (or the Time Lords, but they're not here and look who is).

I wonder...

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 15:10:11 GMT

We've been watching Arthur Of The Britons on DVD. I missed this the first time round, because they made a big thing about eschewing the whole Merlin and Excalibur and magic business, and back then if it wasn't fantasy, sf or comedy I really wasn't interested. I'm actually quite glad about that, because I think I'm enjoying seeing it for the first time now much more than I would have then.

I'm impressed by the depth of the characterisation, especially in the semi-regular parts. Mark of Cornwall is far from the simple bellowing musclebrain that Brian Blessed's detractors seem to assume is all he can do. Rolf the Penitent, as played by Clive Revill, seems to be genuinely caught up in an internal struggle between the faith he wants to espouse and his all too human nature. There's a lot here, and if I'd seen it in the seventies I'd have missed most of it. So, well done, narrow-minded intolerant child me.

nuWho (implicit spoilers, be warned)

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 21:35:39 GMT

And they are:

1. The Doctor dies. nuWho limps to an end, RTD, Moffat and the Beeb say "guess what, we lied, haha" which should come as no surprise given the number of times they've lied before, and we can all get some rest. The four specials next year turn out to be, like the four Babylon 5 TV movies, stories from the series' "past."

2. The Doctor changes into somebody else. Next year we have four episodes, months apart, featuring a new lead actor (who, given RTD's known casting preferences, will probably have been famous for playing a different role in the last twelve months, and will play the Doctor as that character) who is still finding his way into the part. The year after that, Moffat has to start from scratch building up the programme's credibility with an audience who's forgotten it ever existed.

3. The Doctor doesn't change into somebody else. The regeneration goes wrong in some amusing way which is resolved by episode's end, and Tennant remains as the Doctor. Which means that the last remaining extreme resort, the one final do-not-push-this-button-unless-you-bloody-well-mean-it dramatic turn, has been devalued, just like major character death and global destruction, into something you pretend to do when you think the audience is getting bored. The last dregs of dramatic tension have dribbled, phphwbbbttt, out of the balloon that is nuWho, and nothing they do from now on is worth believing in.

If anyone can think of a number four, feel free to jump right in. (EDIT: Thank you, Lawrence. I'd forgotten the Dallas option. Link now updated to the full entry. Lots of good stuff there, for the moment.)

Positive things about this episode, just for Paul's sake: Davros was faithfully recreated and well played. Also the Confidential reminded me that if nuWho had done nothing else good in the world, it has made Nick Briggs a very happy man. It's impossible to begrudge him that happiness. If I could have been the man who made his living doing Dalek voices, I'd be happy too.

But till I know how much of what we've seen is actually going to have happened and how much they're going to go "nyeh nyeh, made you look" and take back, that's about it.

EDIT: Oh, and a proclamation is a document that is read out in public, i.e. proclaimed. Using the word as a name for an organisation is so far from making sense that to say "it makes no sense" is giving it too much credit. For all I know, RTD might live in a reconsideration and type his copper sticks out on a slight head cold, but if language is going to be of any use to us at all, words have to have specific meanings. When he used the word first of all, in "Rose," it was at least potentially right; proclamations have articles, so "according to Article Fifteen of the Shadow Proclamation" worked. Using the same phrase to mean something it could not possibly mean and make sense...just shows that, after all, he does not care about what he is writing. Otherwise he would have taken the three seconds it needed to think up a name for a space-time police force.

Bad days, no biscuit

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 09:00:40 GMT

The consultant at the RUH that I'm going to about the chronic fatigue suggested I try pacing myself and using a schedule to make sure I don't overdo things and that I have periodic rests. This works fine...as long as the Countess is asleep. Once she's up, I'm on the clock and rest is out of the window. She's been more awake of late, which is fine and a Good Thing tee em...

...but I've finally taken steps to sort out some of the lapsed benefits I should have kept going these past months. Hopefully this will make a difference to our domestic economy, which is ailing again, as it will when one does not go to work but continues to pay bills and buy stuff...

...and the ear is still doing the fifties radio impression, and I'm getting the nose and the chest which may be pollen or may be bugs or who knows, and sometimes it all gets a little on top of me. So yesterday I didn't even try the scheduling thing, let alone do anything constructive. I wish I could say I felt better for it today.

Sorry about this. Normal service will be, and all that.

QotD

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:08:48 GMT

From the Department of Health website:

"A volunteering strategy for health and social care will articulate the key actions needed to address the perceived obstacles to making a refreshed vision for volunteering in health and social care a reality."

I used to pride myself on my ability to make up meaningless but high-sounding doubletalk. I've obviously been overtaken and far outstripped by the real world. Now I know why Tom Lehrer retired.

And a slightly depressing Avenue Q-related thought: pennies from the year I was born are now neither legal tender nor old enough to be collectible.

Oh dear

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 09:42:32 GMT

Every once in a while I read an article which reminds me that it's basically all over as far as humanity is concerned. The oil will run out within our lifetimes, and at that point, absent some kind of miracle, society as we know it will come to an absolutely final end. Vast tracts of the planet will be rendered uninhabitable by the knock-on effects of what we've already done to the biosphere, and the people living in those areas will be driven to descend on those areas that have temporarily been spared, either for revenge or simply for survival. The eco-warriors and frugal-livers and other such crusaders are valiantly adding planks to the door of an empty stable. Those who are seeking to be healthier and live longer are simply ensuring that they will still be around when it starts to get worse and worse and worse and does not stop. The deluge is coming, and nothing that can be done at this stage is going to avert it, and no-one now alive will see its end. The only rational choices for someone like me are to (a) hope like hell for that miracle, or (b) savour the moments we have, party like it's 1973, and arrange to die before it all goes down the drain.

So most of the time I go with choice (a) and block out anything that tells me that miracles on that scale don't happen, that no-one who has the power cares and no-one who cares has the power, that after all we-as-a-species knew what was happening forty years ago* and so it really serves us-as-a-species right. Except I can't keep that up all the time. And every once in a while I read an article...

NOTE: of course this is completely opposite to my previous post. Quite possibly by the time you read this I will be safely back behind my shields and clinging to choice (a) again, and the world will once again be a wondrous place full of possibilities. The mind is a marvellous thing sometimes.

*The Countess remembers reading in New Scientist when she was at school about pollution, the greenhouse effect, global warming and the need to take action to stop what was happening. I guess those writers might be entitled to feel a little self-satisfied at having been right. Only I don't think they would.

Heaven and hell

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 18:17:00 GMT

trollprincess posted about the recently late George Carlin, imagining him in the afterlife indulging himself with sex and drugs and fast cars without anyone around to tell him not to or piss him off.

And I thought "yes, but wouldn't that get dull after the first few decades or so?"

And then I thought "hell is anything, any one thing, for eternity."

And then I realised that my Nyronds are absolutely right. There is only one place really worth spending eternity in. And that is right here. Where you can be pissed off as well as happy, frustrated as well as content, even, I suppose, depressed or bored, as long as there is an end to both. And there always is, down here.

I wonder if Mr Carlin would agree. (I'm not very familiar with his work, so I don't know if he's ever said.)

Craving your indulgence to express myself briefly but forcefully...

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 21:45:51 GMT

THE WICKER MAN. IS NOT. A B MOVIE.

(and neither is Plague Of The Zombies)

Cretins.

(I should perhaps explain that this refers to the documentary "Truly, Madly, Cheaply" screened on BBC4 tonight, in which some wonk went to great pains to tell us how rubbish British B movies were and then insisted that we ought to enjoy them in all their crapness as a valuable part of our island heritage of cheap tat, or something. I have little patience with this kind of artistic doublethink at the best of times, and bunging a clip from The Wicker Man in among the grot as if it belonged there really got my goat. Sorry.)

I suppose it was about time...

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 18:59:25 GMT

...that nuWho did a Standard Time Plot Number Three, as practised by almost every sf series since original Trek. You know, the one where the world goes to hell and everybody dies but it's all right really because it never actually happened. I mean, it's been a year since they did it last, so they can be forgiven for assuming we'd have forgotten.

Watching Heroes, where the drama is derived from the relationships that have been built up between the characters and painstakingly developed over the previous episodes, brings into sharp relief the futile, repetitive and increasingly hilarious attempts on the part of the nuWho company to produce the same level of emotional involvement in twenty minutes of flailing about. Poor old Bernard Cribbins was acting his heart out when whatever that man's name was (didn't hear it over the noise, couldn't read it when the credits whizzed past, probably never know now) got bundled on to a lorry, and I'm sorry (I'm so sorry) but it just looked silly. There are things you can do in the course of one forty-five-minute episode and things you can't, and people who have been asked to sob into their hankies at the same time every week (cos it's Soooooo Saaaaaad) for three months may, I think, be forgiven for getting a little jaded. That's if they're paying attention at all.

But they're really pulling out all the stops this year, aren't they? Almost as if this was going to be the last full season of nuWho.

We'll see.

EDIT: not too many reactions so far. One vote for "good," one "disappointing" and one "unwatchable muddle."

Song

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 17:14:14 GMT

TTTO "Drink To The Health Of The Dorsai" (EDIT: as performed) by Dandelion Wine

You're all here together to drink and to fight
But you'll never see me, I'm floating out of sight
I'd like to fill your tankards up with liquid kryptonite
As you drink to the health of the Dorsai.

CHORUS
If it wasnae for the Dorsai, I'd not be dead
I'd never have taken a blaster to the head
When I thought I heard a burglar and got out of bed
And stumbled on the work of the Dorsai.

You've weapons by the score here, of every shape and size
And every time you use 'em some defenceless sucker dies
I'd like to use 'em all on you and see your surprise
When I threatened the health of the Dorsai.

CHORUS
If it wasnae for the Dorsai, I'd be alive
My wife and my family could prosper then and thrive
Now they'll have to beg and steal simply to survive
And it's thanks to the work of the Dorsai.

Some politician pays you to come and make a war
Against another politician and who knows what for
But one thing is certain, the weak and the poor
Never gain from the work of the Dorsai.

CHORUS
If it wasnae for the Dorsai, our world would still be green
Now it's stripped and blasted by your bloody war machine.
But don't you care about us, go ahead and leave the scene
And continue the work of the Dorsai.

Yes, if it wasnae for the Dorsai, we'd not be dead
We'd still be living the lives that late we led
But retribution's coming with its talons dripping red
For the mercenary scum of the Dorsai.

Well now

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 19:35:32 GMT

Anyone who thinks I'm being paranoid and alarmist when I say that RTD wants to be the one who finally brings Doctor Who to an end...

...well. I've seen some possible spoilers for the last three episodes, which I will not go into nor link to here in case they turn out to be rubbish, but if they're true, they may lend some weight to my vapourings.

I guess we'll see.

Thoughts arising

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 19:06:37 GMT

dglenn's quotes of the day are presumably intended, among other things, to provoke thought. The problem I have is that sometimes they do. This is the latest.

Several thoughts arise from this. One is that, well, I cried as a child. I cry now, come to that. And for a lot less reason, given the givens, than Alice had. I am of course aware that this shows me up as a complete wimp and it would be so much more manly and comfortable to say "hell yeah, some dude in a big hat and a rabbit with straw in its hair start talking funny at me, I'm-a get a little Rambo on their ass, know what I'm sayin'?" But it wouldn't be true. Sense of wonder aside, if I find myself suddenly and forcibly taken from the world I know to a strange and threatening place with no immediately obvious way to get home, at some point I'm going to cry like a little g--that is, like an unempowered person. I'm not suggesting here that the speaker wasn't stating the truth as he or she saw it. Just that it's not a truth universally acknowledged.

Which is of course another point. Alice, for most of the Alice books, is an unempowered person. Which is how little children were viewed at the time the books were written. We may not be able to imagine ourselves into the head of someone in that position, even if we wanted to. An age before feminism existed is for most of us another country, and they do things very differently there. Even when I was a child, back in the Age of Steam, I'm fairly sure I had more power, more agency as they say, than a child of Lewis Carroll's era. It's telling that as soon as Alice claims any kind of power in the stories, she wakes up back in her place, in more than one sense.

Finally...would these books have been better stories if Alice had started "taking hostages" sooner than she did? Would it have added anything to them?

Hmmmm about schools and learning stuff...

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:22:04 GMT

eleri provided a link to this piece, which is an ironic depiction of the way in which American school, in the poster's opinion, "is such a spirit-crushing experience." (Note: the poster is not the original writer.) The poster advises us before reading to "set our irony detectors to the on position."

Disclaimer: I am against spirits being crushed. I have heard the Harry Chapin song "Flowers Are Red," which covers some of the same ground as this piece, and been horrified by it. The Countess has told me about a teacher she had in her early schooldays who, for various reasons, made it her business to keep Jan "in her place," and that was horrifying too. So I am generally in agreement that if the things described in this piece are indeed conducive to the crushing of spirits, then they are bad.

With that firmly in mind, let's look at the six "lessons" with which this teacher crushes the spirits of his students.

1. "Stay in the class where you belong." As the writer sees this, it leads to regimentation and discrimination. Okay, but what's the alternative? The purpose of a school, if it has one at all, is to teach, to impart information in one form or another. The first prerequisite for imparting information to anyone is to have their physical body in the place where the information is being imparted, for as long as it takes to impart it. I know it's an intolerable infraction of one's basic human rights to demand that one sits still for an hour, but if one does not sit still for an hour, one does not learn what is being taught. Not regimentation, but discipline. And "the class where you belong"--I think the writer is doing a sneaky here, equating "class" in the school sense with "class" in the social sense. And yes, there has been some confusion between the two. But again, what's the alternative? The ideal form of education is one teacher, one student, with the lessons individually tailored to the student's interests and abilities, because we are all different. The worst possible form of education is all the students in one ginormous classroom with one teacher trying to teach them all the same things. "The class where you belong" is a desperate attempt to compromise between the unattainable and the intolerable. Not discrimination, but adaptation.

2. "To turn on and off like a light switch"; in other words, to be totally focussed on the lesson in progress till the bell rings and then to go to the next lesson and be totally focussed on that. The writer sees this as cultivating indifference, because "no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything?" I see it as cultivating mental agility. If the lesson is not finished when the bell rings, then the lesson was badly planned. It is the goal of schools to teach lots of different things. At some point this is going to involve ceasing to teach one thing and starting to teach another. If this happens at set times, it is (a) easier to plan lessons around those time slots and allocate teachers and rooms, and (b) good training for adult working life which is similarly regimented. Indifference is indeed a problem, but it grows just fine without need of cultivation. On the other hand, I learned in a system run by bells, and I've never had any trouble caring too deeply about lots of things.

3. "Surrender your will to a predestined chain of command." This is fundamental to 1 and 2 above, and if I had been writing the piece I would have put it first. Again, the writer makes it sound like a bad thing, ignoring the fact that this is precisely what will be required of the student in adult life, whatever employment he or she ends up in, and is therefore a valuable and necessary lesson to learn. Whether that is a bad thing I leave to the conscience of the individual churchgoer. Individuality is a fine and wondrous quality, and we are all individuals ("I'm not" "Ssssh"), but if the postman, or the guy who repairs your boiler, or the accountant who works out your taxes, or the civil servant who pays your benefit, decides to express his or her individuality rather than doing the job he or she is supposed to do, you may feel justified in registering some form of complaint. Again, it's teaching mental agility, the ability to be an individual and still follow a chain of command.

4. "Only I determine what curriculum you will study. (Rather, I enforce decisions transmitted by the people who pay me)." This is later rephrased as "Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do." The writer here indulges in a complete flight of fantasy, imagining that people who have been through the school system emerge unable to entertain themselves, cook for themselves, and so on. This is a palpable straw man, and all the worse because it conceals a genuine problem, the first unqualified problem I've found in this piece, which is that the stuff being taught is not determined in the best interests of the student, but rather in the best interests of the government in power.

I completely agree that this is a bad thing, though allowing the student to determine what he or she wants to learn is I think a fast downhill road to chaos. Most learning is accomplished against the steadfast and determined resistance of the student, who has five hundred and seventy-four more pleasant things he or she could be doing. That's why we have schools, and lessons 1 to 3 above. If we didn't, kids would either goof off all day or be sent down t'pit or up t'chimney to earn their keep. The educational value of these alternatives is I think dubious at best.

So who should decide what's taught? I don't know. Ideally, again, every student should be given a solid grounding in everything, and go on to be taught more about things they are good at and/or interested in. Education is, or should be, about creating fully rounded human beings, "Bildung" as the Germans say, completing the picture. It's a sad fact, though, that no body of people (government, teachers, parents) can be relied upon to ensure that this happens.

5. "Your self-respect should depend on an observer's measure of your worth." This is the one eleri jibbed at in particular, and again there's more to think about here, because self-respect is a tricky thing, and "worth" is even trickier. I'm surprised that an American school doesn't teach that "all [men] are created equal," but there you go. The fact is that a difference in "worth" between someone who has learned what is being taught and someone who has not is implicit in the act of teaching, but only in the context of the subject being taught. Someone who has learned how to drive a car is "worth" more as a driver than someone who has not. Someone who has learned how to speak French (or a French person who has learned how to speak English) is "worth" more when you're stuck in Montmartre and looking for the American Embassy than someone who has not. Self-respect is, or at least I think it should be, independent of these contexts. In any case it is not something that can be taught. If it were, I'd have it.

The writer goes on to say that "self-evaluation -- the staple of every major philosophical system that ever appeared on the planet -- is never a factor in these things." I can't actually see how self-evaluation would be helpful in this situation. One can evaluate oneself as a brilliant driver, and many do. One can evaluate oneself as having an adequate knowledge of French, but the only reliable test is to go among French people and speak it.

Sidebar: G K Chesterton (it's been a while since I mentioned him) wrote in Chapter 2 of his Orthodoxy of a publisher acquaintance who said to him of a third party, "that man will get on: he believes in himself." Chesterton replied, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums." There's more. It's a fascinating book, whether you agree with it or not.

6. "I teach children that they are being watched." I don't see what the problem is here. Everyone is being watched, and it's going to get worse. To teach otherwise would be to teach a lie. And I'm not only talking about official surveillance, or even "sousveillance." The fact is that we live in society, and in society we watch each other. Privacy is a fairly recent invention, and if some things I've read lately are right it may go the way of the Spinning Jenny any day now. It will become more and more important to teach children that they are being watched. It might stop the little buggers expressing their individuality by throwing stones at our car.

So. Crushing spirits? I'm not so sure. Or, if it is, it's only in the same sense that making a statue involves chopping bits off the lump of living stone. There are problems with our educational systems, no-one with any sense denies that. I'm just not convinced that this piece has nailed them.

Honest comment on nuWho (now with added spoilers in the entry)

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 19:44:14 GMT

Well.

Er.

They certainly saved a lot of money on the visual effects this week, didn't they?

First off, this was a good story as far as it went, and in Journey To The Unknown or The Outer Limits or some such it would have worked fine. As an episode of nuWho, it actually plays right into my hands, because it illustrates in truly graphic manner the qualitative difference, over and above look and sound, that separates the first eight (real) Doctors and these last two.

This story would never have been written as it was written, could never have been made as written, if the Doctor had still been the same character he was throughout the original series.

In "Midnight," Non-Doing Doctor Syndrome reaches its peak. The Doctor achieves precisely nothing in this episode. (He doesn't even cause the trouble, as far as we are told.) A creature of some kind reaches into the vehicle where he is and overpowers him effortlessly, without even trying, and if it were not for a sudden and inexplicable change of heart on the part of one of the supporting cast he would be dead right now.

The Doctor has been overpowered before, true. But if this had been Hartnell, Troughton, Pertwee, either Baker, Davison, McCoy or McGann, we would then have pushed in through the Doctor's eyeball and seen the struggle taking place in some fantastic limbo landscape of the mind, and we would have found out what the creature was and why it was doing what it was doing, and the Doctor would have narrowly beaten it and returned to consciousness in time to save the day. Because that's what the Doctor does. That's why this series is about the Doctor.

But not in nuWho. In nuWho we see a Doctor who is either useless without a human companion, or a force of evil who has to be "stopped" by a human companion. We see a Doctor who, confronted with the choice of "killer or coward" by a Dalek, chooses "coward" rather than invalidating the choice. We see a Doctor who shamelessly trades on his reputation, as in "Forests Of The Dead" (a scene tellingly described by Lawrence Miles as "a cop-out disguised as an Iconic Moment," and no-one has yet explained to me how or why the "piranhas of the air" should choose that particular moment to develop intelligence and language skills, except that the writer had written himself into a corner). We see a Doctor whose characteristic catchphrases are "I'm sorry...I'm so sorry" and "No, don't...don't do that." We see a Doctor who, for all his manic bounding about and gabbling, is underneath it all a spent force, a powerless relic of a Time Lord that was, ready to die and looking for something or someone to do it for, and only frustrated in this aim by the number of spear carriers who for some reason insist on doing it for him.

And this is, I maintain, a deliberate decision on the part of Russell T Davies, that great Doctor Who fan who threw out ninety per cent of the body of lore that made the series what it was. He, quite intentionally and with malice aforethought, has reduced the Doctor to this posturing shadow of his former self, and here glories in the success of his scheme. "Here's the Doctor you love so much, paralysed and about to be killed with nothing but words, by something I didn't even have to explain or describe. Shall I do it, boys and girls? Shall I let him die?"

I continue to believe that this is preparatory to disposing of the Doctor for good. That this is what Davies has wanted to do for years, for some reason lost in the recesses of his psyche. And that this is what will happen. If not now, then next year. If not next year, then the year after, when Steven Moffat inherits whatever's left. And I do not believe that this should have been allowed to happen.

But then, real history is the one you definitely can't rewrite. Not one line.

Lawrence Miles on nuWho

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 11:03:47 GMT

This link will probably only work for a short time, if that, because Miles's posts tend to self-destruct, but there are some points here I wanted to think about out loud, and rather than just quote them out of context I thought I'd provide said context while it exists. So. Onward.

"Was Doctor Who ever scary?" Miles says, in short, "yes, but only by mistake," meaning that the scariness was a by-product of showing us the strange and unexpected. Well, I can remember the "hiding behind the sofa" thing cropping up much earlier than Miles can, but then I'm so much older than he is. My memory's less clear on whether it ever scared me, but I'd say on balance probably not...but then, I don't intentionally watch things that will scare me. I watch horror films of a very specific type (clue: cadhla's list of Horror Films You Must See includes none of them) not to be scared but because I find the stories fascinating. And certainly realWho ticked a lot of the same boxes, so if anyone was ever scared by (say) Frankenstein, Dracula or the Mummy, they may well have been scared by Doctor Who.

"Libraries are not creepy." Absolutely true...but if significant numbers of people under the age of forty was (EDIT: were, illiterate oaf) still willingly going to libraries, the nuWho team would never have got away with making out they were. I remember when I was little, our local library used to be crowded, and with people of all ages, shapes and sizes. Miles adduces from this an "ongoing war against literacy" on the part of nuWho, but I think it's a symptom rather than a cause--RTD & Co are simply expressing the Zeitgeist, which by its nature is a passing thing. Literacy is in eclipse at the moment, partly because our current leaders prefer an unenlightened and unthinking populace who will believe what they're told, and teaching people to love reading buggers that up every single time. There was a time when Doctor Who would have swum against that particular tide, rather than with it, but I think that putting the responsibility for the wave machine on them is giving them too much credit. They're just going with the flow.

Finally, Miles mentions that it was RTD who dubbed Steven Moffat the King of Terror, and opines that Moffat has been trying to live up (or down) to this title ever since, possibly to the detriment of his work. As you know, I have this fixed idea that Russell wants to be the one who puts Who to bed for good and all. I think he both loves and hates it, and resents that he loves it because it makes him uncool, and the only resolution he can see is to take charge of it and then kill it. Unfortunately, the Beeb might not let him do that personally...but what better way to fulfil his evil scheme than to pick his successor and then hand him a poisoned chalice like this? If Moffat makes nuWho 2.0 (assuming it happens) unrelentingly scary because he thinks that's what he does best, he'll lose audience, because whether Doctor Who has ever actually been scary or not, that was never the be-all and end-all of its raison d'être. If he doesn't, then those who believe everything RTD says will think the King of Terror has gone soft, and again, the figures will drop. I may, of course, be overthinking this...

Anyway, just some thoughts sparked off by an occasionally irritating but always thought-provoking writer. And written by one who is occasionally thought-provoking but always...well, you get the idea.

Further news

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 09:51:22 GMT

Okay, it looks as though the ear is part of an ongoing thing which also includes the amazing marathon nose, because today I have both. Oh joy. I thought it was clearing yesterday so did not call the surgery. Obviously a tactical error.

However, today we also have an eight-foot circle of stone slabs in the garden, mounted on a solid concrete base so the damned bindweed and briars and twitch oh my can't get through it, and with our rotary clothes line waving proudly in the breeze at the centre. (I must wash some rotary clothes.) The Countess was so impressed with the speed and workmanship that she's talking about getting the front garden done similarly, which will considerably reduce the need to keep chopping the plants down. (We trimmed the hedge yesterday. We have two hedge trimmers. One doesn't work at all, and the other one works up to a point and then has to be coaxed. Trimming the hedge is not the doddle one instinctively feels it should be.) This is one of a series of Important Things That Have Needed Doing, and thus represents Progress. So yay.

The Countess had lots of energy yesterday, which almost never happens, and right now we're unsure whether it was excitement at getting the slabs down or because she accidentally took two of her thyroid pills. Whichever, she did too much as she always does and is currently feeling the effects.

More later.

GIP

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:33:00 GMT

This one is for dickgloucester. Because I am mean and evil and sometimes remember ideas.

Miscellany

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 23:57:38 GMT

The night before last, we had a Peter O'Toole double bill here at Chez Nyrond. The first feature was Rogue Male, a telly dramatisation of a novel by Geoffrey Household (one writer whose name really is a Household word, ba-boom) starring O'Toole at his peak. I could have done without what happened to the cat, but it was necessary to the plot, I suppose. The "cartoon" was an episode of a frankly boggleworthy American live-action series about Fu Manchu, which was included on the Rogue Male disc as a "bonus," presumably because the manufacturers hate us and want to make us crazy. It featured Glen Gordon playing Fu Manchu rather in the style of the late Ronnie Barker, plus an American Sir Denis Nayland Smith, and it frankly made Lost In Space at its wackiest look thoughtful and deep. I don't think we'll be watching that one again.

We followed this with The Manor, which was even stranger. A spoof country-house murder mystery, in which the detective (played by one of the producers) was for some reason Bohemian (as in the country), O'Toole's part was far briefer, consisting mostly of flashbacks. I'm not going to give away any of the plot--for one thing, you wouldn't believe me--but it was most enjoyable, and a welcome counterpoint to the drama of Rogue Male.

In other news, I seem to have listened to the soundtrack of Avenue Q five or six times in succession. Presumably this means I like it. :)

Today I shifted fifty-two concrete slabs of varying shape and size from the alley at the end of our row to the concrete bit outside the back door. Two or three at a time. Ouch. My ear is now popping at irregular intervals, and I will be returning to the surgery tomorrow, hopefully to get it sorted.

And so to bed.