1. Go here.
2. Pass it on.
1.~How did you meet hawkida? At PicoCon in February.
2.~What would you do if you had never met bonsaii? I would not know the true splendour of her PVC party trousers.
3.~What do you honestly think of fluffcthulhu? The truth is too terrible to relate here.
4.~Would or did ceemage and deborah_c go out? They have similar interests, but I don’t think either is available right now.
5.~Have you ever liked akicif? Oh yeah, based on a long conversation over real ale in Glasgow!
6.~If wwhyte died tomorrow, what is one thing that you would need him/her to know? I’ll tell him later.
7.~Would natural20 and purplepooka make a good couple? Yes, I rather think they would!
8.~Describe autopope in 3 words: Lovecraft / Le Carre
9.~Do you think habseligkeit is hot? She’s very nice!
10.~Would wwhyte and swisstone make a lovely couple? They’d get on well, but not I think as an item.
11.~What do you think of when you see deborah_c? Haven’t seen her for a long time!
12.~Tell me something humiliating about purplepooka: No.
13.~Do you know any of ianmcdonald‘s family members?
14.~What’s pickwick‘s favorite color? Hmm. Pink?
15.~On a scale of 1-10 how cute is applez? Oh, he’s a good 8 or 9.
16.~What would you do if artw just professed their undying love for you? She just did! (Fortunately we have been married since 1993)
17.~What language does ceemage speak? English, and I have a vague memory of him being competent in French.
18.~Who is aynathie going out with? Nobody as far as I know
19.~Is leedy a boy or a girl? A girl
20.~Would ephiriel and artw make a good couple? No; both seem to prefer blokes.
21.~Who do you think stellanova would be great with from this list?
22.~When was the last time you talked to habseligkeit? At our party.
23.~What is akicif‘s favorite band? No idea.
24.~Does natural20 have any siblings? No idea.
25.~Would you ever date ianmcdonald? No, much though I like him and enjoy his writing.
26.~Would you ever date autopope? Ditto.
27.~Is stellanova single? No.
28.~What is pickwick‘s last name? Black.
29.~What is ephiriel‘s middle name? Not sure if she has one.
30~What is fluffcthulhu‘s fantasy? Waking up and eating everyone’s brains.
31.~Where does leedy live? Dublin.
32.~Would you make out with hawkida? Depends on who else was around!
33.~Are bonsaii and ianmcdonald best friends? I’m not sure if they know each other – vague memories of seeing them in the same room at the same time in Glasgow. I think they would get on.
34.~Does autopope like pickwick? He’s on her friends list; she isn’t on his; draw your own conclusions…
35.~How did you meet ephiriel? At MeCon in Belfast, followed by the embarrassing incident in the Botanic Gardens.
36.~Is habseligkeit older than you? No.
37.~Is swisstone the sexiest person alive? Not according to my tastes!
Monthly Archives: August 2005
Irish readers with access to the radio –
I just remembered – should have posted this earlier – that I had a call earlier this week from the producers of the Tubridy Show on RTE doing some research – apparently they plan to do a spot on the history of science fiction this morning between 10 and 11. So tune in, if you can.
[Edited to add: Other things obviously intervened; no sf on Tubridy today.]
25 questions meme
Whether my hair is tidy.
£25.06. Also 56 Georgian lari which is not quite as useful, and 20 defunct Belgian francs which are no use at all.
Chest.
Mint.
Notg quite sure – it’s a Podgorica number so I assume it’s a Montenegrin journalist.
Beep, beep.
A Kerry/Edwards t-shirt
No.
Dilapidated bedroom slippers.
Dark.
Just coffee, this morning.
Brunello di Montalcino.
Reading The Orientalist
From my mother describing her holiday in Cambodia.
Never. And I’m actively considering a campaign of writing to the people who advertise that way to tell them I’ll never buy anything I see advertised that way.
“Take care”.
My wife.
The neighbours’ dogs.
An awful lot (but I’m on holiday right now).
None. I’m all digital now.
30 – the year I was in Bosnia, when our first child was born, and I got my Ph D.
Procrastination.
Some system-provided pastoral scene.
That baking smells nice!
Fix mistakes, for sure!
Happy birthday to…
…Brian Aldiss, eighty years old today.
August Books 14) The Orientalist
14) The Orientalist: In Search of a Man Caught Between East and West, by Tom Reiss
This is a biography of the author of Ali and Nino, the insufficiently famous great romantic novel of the South Caucasus. Although Ali and Nino was published under the pseudonym of “Kurban Said”, the author was born Lev Nussimbaum, apparently on a train in 1905, and grew up in Baku where his father, a minor oil magnate, was doing good business with the Swedish Nobel brothers (of dynamite, and the Nobel Prizes); his mother may well have invited Stalin round for tea occasionally; when the revolution came they fled to Constantinople, then Paris, and finally Berlin where he was in the same class at the school for the children of Russian exiles as the sisters of Boris Pasternak and Vladimir Nabokov; he later converted from Judaism to Islam and was best known as a writer on history and contemporary politics under the name of Essad Bey (his biography of the Prophet Mohammed has never been out of print). He died an early death, in Italian exile, caused by a horrifying medical condition in which bits of his feet gradually dropped off, aged just 37, Ezra Pound’s last-minute efforts to help him being all in vain; and his grave became the butt of a comic anecdote told by John Steinbeck.
I’m afraid the summary above does not do justice to this fascinating book. Reiss has obviously been in the grip of an obsession with his subject, and understandably so. His portrayal of the religious, cultural, political and social background of Baku and the Russian Empire in the early twentieth century is utterly convincing, and he does decent vignettes of 1920s Turkey and inter-war Berlin as well. His central argument is that Nussimbaum was a late representative of a strand of Jewish thinking which saw alliance with Islam and the Arabs and Turks as the way forward, a strand which Reiss traces back to Benjamin Disraeli; obviously with the rise (and indeed political victory) of Zionism, one doesn’t hear much of this side of the story, and Edward Said’s account of Orientalism omits the Jewish orientalists (at least, according to Reiss, but I’m not very surprised). Nussimbaum obviously went just a little bit farther than most in a) converting to Islam and b) fervent admiration for Fascism and the Nazis, ever so slightly unusual for a writer who was originally himself Jewish.
Reiss’ story of his own research permeates the biographical account, and includes nonagenarian Azeri exiles, fading central European aristocrats and the pretender to the throne of the Ottoman Empire. I felt the last part of the book was not quite as well structured – there’s no account of Vienna, for instance, to match his superb descriptions of Berlin and Baku – but the strength of the material carried me through it. I’m sure that those who believe that the true author of Ali and Nino was not Nussimbaum, but really Baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels von Bodmershof, or the Azeri nationalist poet Josef Vezir, will feel more than a little short-changed by the narrative, but I’m basically convinced. Read Ali and Nino, and then read this; or vice versa, if you like, but be warned that the biography has spoilers for the novel. Both are superb.
Ulster Scots
By the way, there is a special prize for anyone who correctly identifies the building where I took the pictures of the signs in my previous entry.
Political Correctness gone mad
Some of you may have been treated to
For those of you unfamiliar with the ways of our wee island, the bottom language in each case is Irish; and while I have my problems with the unnecessary promotion of that language, it is at least a real language which real people speak (using, so I’m told, genuinely naughty words) and whose speakers would be able to recognise the words written here with no difficulty. I flatly refuse to believe that anyone has ever used the words “darg-bann” or “innin” in the senses they are used here, outside the circles of the fantasists who have invented the linguistic excrescence that is Ulster Scots.
Further reflections on epistemic communities
First of all, I think this will be my new user icon for posts relating to international politics. (Though I should probably get hold of a more cuddly one for more purely EU stuff.)
I just need to vent a bit in a locked entry about the two types of people I mentioned in my previous entry.
This culminated a few months back in my being pulled into their international headquarters, along with a representative from their field mission, to give a “friendly” lunchtime briefing to their senior headquarters policy staff. And if I say so myself, I think I aced it; their guy coming in from the field gave a tremendously complacent presentation, included a few digs at me which went down rather badly (since I was effectively their guest, the headquarters staff felt bad for me being insulted by one of their own), and anyway he had a virus of some kind and was not at his best. I put forward a reasoned and (I hope) fluent presentation, and it seemed to go down OK: more important, I soon started hearing from policy-makers all around the place that the international organisation’s mission in the field was not to be trusted in its assessment of the security situation.
There have been some negative spin-offs from this – in particular, I’m always myself keenly aware that tensions between field and headquarters in this sort of situation can be very destructive, and am always reluctant to do anything that would increase those tensions even for organisations with which I have problems; and also one particular country, who supplied most of the key officials in the field mission in question, is now very pissed off with me personally. But you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, and the net result has been that our assessment of the security situation there is now treated with greater seriousness than that of the international officials who are paid to do it; and if we’re right and they’re wrong I think that’s a good thing.
The other case on my mind is that of Jan Øberg, the bitter and twisted peacenik of Lund, who published a critique of my employers a few months back which kindly named me. (On the specific point about me, I have to report that the Macedonian politician mentioned took a diametrically opposite position from me in the course of last year’s referendum campaign.)
Øberg has many gripes, but the two biggest are a) that we don’t follow the academic path that he believes is essential for anyone involved in conflict resolution and b) that we are too close to governments. This amounts to a) an admission that his attempts at gate-keeping based on the courses he teaches have empirically failed, in that anyone with sufficient energy and given the right opportunities can get involved in international peace-making; and b) an admission that we are actually successful in shaping international policy, unlike him – a distinction I can probably live with.
The epistemic community is quite a helpful concept for explaining the difference betwen our two approaches. Øberg is determined to tell the truth as he sees it and makes a point of not honing his recommendations to suit the policy requirements of governments; he will therefore never be part of the epistemic community influencing policy on the areas that interest him. We are also determined to tell the truth as we see it, but always through the filter of coming to policy recommendations which governments can (and sometimes do) then adopt. We co-opt various current and former government officials to that end, in order to bolster our leading status within the epistemic community. Which way works better? Well, Øberg knows the answer; that’s why he’s so pissed off.
[Edited to add: Erk! Locked now.]
August Books 13) Knowledge, Power and International Policy Coordination
13) Knowledge, Power and International Policy Coordination, ed. Peter M. Haas
Originally published as a single issue of the academic journal International Organisation (of which I had not previously heard) this is a very lightly edited repackaging of the papers from that journal by the University of South Carolina Press (of which I had also not previously heard). I got it because it puts forward the concept of an “epistemic community”, a body of experts with shared goals and values who attempt to influence international policy by deploying the fruits of their scientific research, and suggests that this is a useful analytical tool in understanding why decisions are made the way they are in international politics.
When I was a little boy of, say, 23 or 24, I always assumed that big political decisions were made after finely-judged statesmanlike weighing up of all the available options, having ensured that as much information as possible is available to the decision-makers, and the “Yes, Minister” and “Yes, Prime Minister” were satires with little basis in real life. I have come to realise that if “Yes, Minister” and “Yes, Prime Minister” erred, it was in portraying the decision-making process as being much more rational than it often is. My own particular interest, both professional and personal, is in the role of knowledge in all of this – not only access to good information, but the inclination to use it, and that’s what this collection of essays looks at.
The more convincing case studies examined here are mostly on the technical side – nuclear arms control, whaling, CFC’s; on the more economic side, a good case is made for epistemic communities affecting international policy on trade in services and on food aid, less so on central banking and the establishment of the Bretton Woods institutions (though actually I think the last of these understates the case). For myself, of course, I’ve witnessed at close quarters the effect of non-government experts on international policy; and if there is such a thing as an epistemic community dealing with Balkan politics, I’m certainly in it. So I’ve found this book helpful in understanding how I do what I do, and also in fortifying myself against criticism from a) those on the official side who want to keep pesky NGO’s out and b) other commentators who resent the fact that governments actually listen to us. I admit I skimmed some of it but there’s plenty to come back to.
More from Worldcon
August Books 12) Cultural Breaks
12) Cultural Breaks, by Brian Aldiss
I gloated a bit when I got hold of one of 52 limited edition copies of this book at Worldcon, autographed by Aldiss himself, Andy Duncan who wrote the foreword, and John Picacio who did the cover illustration. I’ve always liked Aldiss’ work, especially his short stories; we’re told that three of these are brand-new, but not which ones, and anyway I don’t think I’d read any of them.
There are a dozen pieces here, seven of them less than ten pages, and if I was to ever to try writing myself, I think I’d want to write short vignettes of life like Aldiss does – not all of them sfnal, some of them just glimpses of other cultures (I still rate his Cities and Stones as one of the best books about Yugoslavia I’ve read). The book ends with two much longer pieces, “Total Environment” and “A Chinese Perspective” at 50 and 80 pages each. The latter returns to the Zodiacal Planets environment of his collection “Last Orders”, and features Anna Kavan as a character, but also features a love story between a woman of Chinese background and a man of European background (shades of Horatio Stubbs, perhaps, as well). But I particularly enjoyed “Total Environment”, which features a UN project in which hundreds hundreds of people are sealed into a building for decades as part of an experiment; the central character is charged with investigating the project to provide evidence for it to be shut down, and duly does so, but we readers are left firmly with the impression that it is the wrong decision. I thought the story was a fascinating update of Aldiss’ own classic Non-Stop, with a dose of TV’s Big Brother and a setting in India which I took to be both literal and allegorical – though I’ll have to defer to It will be on my Hugo nominations for Best Novella. It would certainly have been on my 2006 Hugo nominations for Best Novella, except it appears to have been first published in 1968 and made both Hugo and Nebula shortlists in 1969. I don’t think the book is actually published yet, so if you weren’t one of the other lucky 51 people who got it at Worldcon, you’ll have to wait a few weeks.
The Intuition Test
More Scientific
77% SCIENTIFIC INTUITION and 62% EMOTIONAL INTUITION |
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My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
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Link: The 2-Variable Intuition Test written by jason_bateman on OkCupid Free Online Dating |
I like being Unusually Smart.
Food and Charlie
Whoever would have guessed that Banbridge had a decent Italian restaurant? But there is one – called “Simply Italian” and part of the Iveagh cinema complex. That was handy, as Anne and I decided to break out of our hermit-like existence last night to go see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Jolly decent food, with the inevitable Ulster twist of very small cubed deep-fried potatoes, whcih I don’t think I’ve ever encountered in Italy, and served speedily enough for us to get to the film on time.
Well, at last I’ve caught up with one film that most of my f-list appears to have seen (see
The Not-So-Glorious Revolution
This is a rarity from me – a serious political entry questioning statements by a writer I admire, and also worrying that I might not have got the joke, if there is one.
The laws against Roman catholicism, as they developed after 1689, excluded catholics as a group from political power and attempted to undermine their wealth and consequent patronage by allowing protestant relatives to claim their land. These laws did not require a system of imprisonment without trial or a secret state which reached into the whole of political life. Though the country was a monarchy and far from democratic republicanism, its political life tended to be increasingly open.
The ‘English path’ was not a total absence of repression against those whose religious commitments led them to seek to overthrow the state. Rather it was the choice of forms of repression which were consistent with political liberty for those who were loyal to the regime: open laws against specific ideological positions, and an attack primarily on the political and property rights of religious opponents.
…The penal laws of the 17th century punished ‘seminary priests’ trained overseas with death; we would not need such extreme measures. Attendance at madrasas which teach the doctrine of jihad as a literal duty could be made a crime. Preaching the doctrine of jihad as a literal duty and the virtues of the ghazis is an act which it is not difficult to establish and could be readily tried by jury.
Ken goes on to say:
[This writer] reminds us how the anti-Catholic Penal Laws successfully defended Britain’s bourgeois revolution against an international conspiracy of religious and feudal reaction for centuries… he might be onto something. The Penal Laws worked against the Jesuits, but will something like them work against jihadists? It’s an interesting suggestion. Not Mill or Milton would have rejected it out of hand.
I’m going to detach this completely from the context of present day argument because I think Ken’s history is wrong (or, perhaps, I have failed to see the joke). I’m frankly surprised by his blithe acceptance of a) the 1688-92 revolution being a Good Thing and b) the “international conspiracy of religious and feudal reaction” which lasted “for centuries”. I realise that this is because I come at this from an Irish Catholic perspective, from which the Penal Laws appear as a crucial instrument of suppression of the rights and powers of the majority of Ireland’s inhabitants in order to entrench the power of a minority, with assistance from England. (And that’s the moderate version; the more hard-line version would deny that there was any “real” Irish person who benefited from the Penal Laws at all.) I don’t know much about Scotland at this period, so it may just be that Ken and I are talking past each other. But I’ve met enough otherwise sensible people from across the water who don’t, for example, realise that Cromwell was a Bad Thing, that I think it’s worth expanding on why I think Ken’s history is wrong.
Let’s indulge in a little counterfactual speculation. What if James II had not been overthrown? I carry no particular brief for him; he was obviously not the greatest king England (or Scotland, or Ireland) ever had, and was largely the architect of his own downfall; but before you start to rejoice at his overthrow, just bear in mind that the straw that broke the camel’s back was his enactment of the Declaration of Indulgence – ie that Catholics and Dissenters should have the same civil rights as Anglicans. Shocking, eh? The argument at the time was that this was part of the slippery slope to a Catholic absolute monarchy, but really, any leftist should find this about as convincing as Pinochet’s justification for overthrowing Allende in Chile in 1973. In fact, it’s difficult to believe that a continuing Jacobite regime would have done anything other than summon a new Parliament, which would this time have had significant Catholic and Dissenter membership, ie been more representative of the people, and come to a modus vivendi between the three groups based on rights rather than repression. (See for a supporting argument the Catholic Encyclopedia’s interesting nuances on the Revolution.)
Sure, under my scenario James would probably have continued to mismanage his politics, and may very well have ended up forced to abdicate later rather than sooner, if he didn’t die first. But it is absurd to argue that that he could have reversed the Reformation, and I don’t believe that was ever his plan. (if it had been, he certainly could not have kept the loyalty of invaluable aides like Samuel Pepys, who was a conforming Anglican and whose wife was a Huguenot refugee.)
I realise that part of the reason I don’t see much worth celebrating in the events of 1689-92 is that the people who I did see celebrating it as I grew up gave me every reason to believe that I personally had lost rather than gained as a result. I think my views have now moderated, to the point where I can relatively calmly argue that it didn’t make much difference, rather than that it was an actively Bad Thing. (My views on Cromwell, however, have not moderated.)
As for the “international conspiracy” lasting for centuries – well, when James lost the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, a Te Deum in thanks for William’s victory was sung in Vienna and the Vatican was lit up in celebration, so it looks to me as if the agents of the international Catholic conspiracy won rather than lost the war! Especially since the French recognised James’ overthrow as early as 1697; and I’ll bow to any Scot’s superior knowledge of the events of 1715 and 1745, but would be surprised to learn that an international conspiracy of feudal and religious reaction was the sole cause of conflict in either case. Certainly the British government doesn’t seem to have thought so; the Penal Laws as applied – especially in England – were clearly designed more to entrench the monopoly on legitimacy of the Church of England than to root out loyalists of foreign powers.
The final way in which the history is wrong is that the main period of religious repression in the British Isles was not the post-1690 period, but the events of the previous 160 years, following Henry VIII’s breach with Rome in 1534. Between the repression of Mary I and that of Elizabeth I and James I, there isn’t much to choose in terms of morality, it seems to me; the Protestants did more of it, and often more gruesomely (if it’s possible to choose between being burnt at the stake and being hanged, drawn and quartered), but that was because they were on the winning side (and I do put cause and effect that way round). Looking at the list of Catholic martyrs, none appears to have been executed after 1690. (One died in jail in 1692.) So by the time the penal laws proper were enacted post-Revolution, the serious struggle was over. We can perhaps discuss the rights and wrongs of the earlier period separately, but I don’t think you can seriously argue that in England after 1689 the anti-Catholic laws amounted to anything more than petty harassment of an already defeated minority.
I write these words from the village where William III camped with his army from 14 to 25 June 1690, prior to marching down to the river Boyne for the battle which took place on 1 July (not 12 July). We can’t avoid the fact that history stays with us, but we can at least try to get it right, especially if we’re then trying to generalise to the present day.
(Ken will now post a one-line riposte to the effect that he was Only Joking. If so, I fell for it, hook line and sinker!)
Frederic Whyte (1867-1941): A long-lost relative
Going through the family archives I came across several bits of information that suddenly came together. My grandfather’s cousin, Frederic Whyte, appears to have been a writer of some note. His books include:
Actors of the Century: a Play-Lover’s Gleanings From Theatrical Annals (1898):
The Life of W.T. Stead (1925, two volumes) – was reprinted as recently as 1971, a much-cited biography of the crusading English journalist who was drowned on the Titanic
William Heinemann: A Memoir (1928) – also seems to be fairly well known by those studying the publisher and his circle
A Wayfarer in Sweden (1930): “Travellers in Sweden will find this a useful reference book with aninteresting look at various areas of the country. It has hints, tips for travelling, and some history and information about the different areas that can be visited”
[with A. Hilliard Atteridge and Harold Wesley Hall] A history of the Queen’s Bays (The 2nd Dragoon Guards), 1685-1929 (1930)
A Bachelor’s London: Memories of the Day Before Yesterday 1889-1914 (1931): “Memories of literary London – stories of publishers and authors before the first world war”; “A wonderful evocation of literary London at the turn of the century”
He also translated and edited:
The English Stage: Being an Account of the Victorian Drama, by Augustin Filon (1898)
Flashlights in the Jungle A Record of Hunting Adventures and of Studies in Wild Life in Equatorial East Africa, by C.G. Schillings (1906) (vt In Wildest Africa, With Flashlight and Rifle)
Grip and I: Our Adventures in Nigeria, by Count Crondstedt (1924)
A Field-Marshal’s Memoirs: From the Diary, Correspondence and Reminiscences of Alfred, Count Von Waldersee, Moltke’s Successor as Chief of the General Staff of the German Army, 1888-1891; Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Forces in China, 1900-1901. (1924)
The Life of Benito Mussolini, by Margherita Grassini Sarfatti (1925)
Letters of Prince Von Bulow – a Selection from Prince Von Bulow’s Official Correspondence as Imperial Chancellor during the Years 1903 – 1909, Including Many Confidential Letters Between Him and the emperor (c. 1930)
These Moderns: Some Parisian Close-Ups, by F. Ribadeau Dumas (1932)
Sport & Exploration in the Far East – a Naturalists Experiences in & Around the Kurile Islands, by Sten Bergman (1933)
His papers can be found in Newcastle University Library.
Frederic’s precise relationship with my family is a bit complex. His father, Henry Whyte, was the son of an Edward Whyte who was the brother of my great-great-grandfather, Nicholas Whyte. So that would make him (clickety-click) my second cousin, twice removed. But his aunt Catherine Whyte married a bloke called George Ryan, and their daughter Caroline then married my great-grandfather, Nicholas Whyte’s son John Joseph Whyte, and became my great-grandmother. So by that route, he was my first cousin three times removed.
Judging from my grandmother’s diary, our branch of the family was on good terms with Frederic’s elder brother Jack, who had no children. Frederic married a woman from Jonköping and moved to Sweden (several of his books are translations from the Swedish); his son Henry was born in 1917 and died in the early 1990s, and we stayed very vaguely in touch through Henry’s wife Ingrid – indeed my sister and I actually met up with her in Stockholm in the summer of 1990, with no idea of her father-in-law’s literary career (she and Henry had no children, so that is the end of that branch of the family). I shall keep an eye out for Frederic’s books now.
50 things I am not allowed to do at Hogwarts
I’m not a hardcore Harry Potter fan, but some of these were quite funny.
[Edited to add: Of course, the original is The 213 things “Skippy” Schwartz is not allowed to do in the army.]
August Books 11) City
11) City, by Clifford D Simak
One of those classics of SF that I’d never actually read (also I’m gradually working up a piece on Simak’s Hugo/Nebula winning story “Grotto of the Dancing Deer”). A set of eight stories chronicling the disappearance of humanity to new states of mental and physical being, while the Earth is taken over first by dogs and then by ants, all set in a framing narrative presenting the material as fragments being analysed in the far future by canine scholars, slightly reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale and Arthur C Clarke’s “The Fires Within” (I’m sure there are other examples but that’s what comes to mind). I had read one story from this collection a few months ago, but it turns out to be atypical, set on the planet Jupiter rather than the small-town American setting shared by all the other stories. The tone is elegiac and regretful, and the conclusion is that humanity cannot be saved in its current form; but there are better beings, and better worlds, to come.
Jules Verne’s Three Laws of Automata
A homunculus, automaton or other artificial being:
- shall not serve a human red wine with fish,
- must always alert a human to shortfallings in the quality of his cuisine with a mechanical cry of ‘sacré bleu’, and
- shall not (through inaction) allow a human to be seen in public with mismatching gaiters and cravat.
Full text here (hat-tip
August Books 10) Peace Without Politics?
10) Peace Without Politics? Ten Years of International State-Bulding in Bosnia, International Peacekeeping vol 12, no 3, Autumn 2005; ed. David Chandler.
A collection of eleven essays on the intervention of the international community in Bosnia, by some of the leading writers in the field; papers produced my my own employers in the days when we concentrated much more on Bosnia are cited extensively, and I know several of the authors personally. Very thought-provoking, and also mercifully brief (170 pages, fairly large type).
There is an opening debate in the form of an introduction by Chandler arguing that the international community’s efforts in Bosnia since 1995 should be seen as largely self-serving and ineffective, an article by Sumantra Bose making the opposite argument, and a full article by Chandler restating his position in greater detail. Even though Chandler thus gets two bites at the cherry, I find his arguments totally unconvincing – he really doesn’t understand the EU, which from his description appears to be a power-hungry monster straight from the pages of the Daily Mail – and Chandler is supposedly a leftie! I agree with almost everything Bose says about the international intervention’s sucesses and failures; he also has some trenchant criticisms of my own employers’ output from the period before I worked for them.
The next section includes a very good article by Dominik Zaum on how the payment bureaux were abolished; a sightly too short assessment by Gemma Collantes Celador about police reform; and a rather too long piece by Daniela Heimerl on refugee return, which didn’t advance my knowledge beyond when I last looked at the issue in December 2002.
Then a rather fascinating bunch of four papers. The first, by Vanessa Pupavac, looked at international gender policies in Bosnia – normally a topic that doesn’t excite me much, but she had some very interesting analysis of two very specific and rather different sub-topics, the gender provisions in the electoral law and the provision of micro-financial assistance to female entrepreneurs. Unfortunately her conclusion was basically just to say that it’s all very complicated, but it was interesting to get there. The next, by Adam Fagan, was even more interesting, challenging received wisdom on NGOs and civil society development in general and in the Bosnian context in particular; again, I could have wished for more meat in the conclusion, but I liked it.
Then Florian Bieber has a compare and contrast exercise on Brčko and Mostar, given the heightened but different levels of international engagement in both towns. I agree with his conclusion that the more intrusive regime in Brčko, rather than the policy followed in Mostar of well-meaning rhetoric followed by humiliating concessions to local warlords, was more successful for precisely that reason, but blinked a bit at one or two inaccuracies. Even more so with Roberto Belloni’s article on refugee return in Prijedor, a place I used to know pretty well, where I found myself alternately nodding firmly in agreement and wincing at misprints – the letters č and š written as c and s, but ć remaining ć, and Kozarac, the small town at the centre of the narrative, acquiring an extra diacritical mark to become Kožarac. I’d still like to know more about the precise circumstances in the local political micro-climate of Prijedor that made it such a success – obviously the former local police chief getting shot dead while resisting arrest by British troops in July 1997 improved matters immensely (not a statement I make lightly), but there must have been more to it than that.
Michael Pugh’s article on the political economy of Bosnia was so full of jargon that it became utterly incomprehensible, and I skipped it. The final essay, by Richard Caplan, takes a fair look at the international actors present in Bosnia and their relative lack of accountability, and then actually makes policy recommendations. Most of these are fair enough, though I would have a minor concern that creating new mechanisms for accountability might actually entrench the international actors who should be planning for their own withering away.
Didn’t have to pay for this – it arrived somehow on my desk at work – but I think it’s pretty good.
August Books 9) The Last Journey of William Huskisson
9) The Last Journey of William Huskisson, by Simon Garfield
It is a story that most people in England (but very few elsewhere) have vaguely heard of – on 15 September 1830, at the opening ceremonies for the world’s first ever passenger steam railway (between Liverpool and Manchester), a leading politician was run over and killed by Stephenson’s Rocket because he had not taken sufficient care before crossing the track to start a conversation with the Duke of Wellington. This little book (which I got remaindered at £3.99 from the original £14.99) tells the story both of the earliest development of the railways, and of the unfortunate Rt Hon William Huskisson MP.
Huskisson seems to have been very accident-prone, politically and physically.
[H]e had drifted into the realm of the unwell not long after his birth. As a child he was malnourished and frequently laid up with chest complaints. Once, rising from his bed to do schoolwork, he fractured his arm. He was flattened by the pole of a carriage at the entrance to the Horse Guards. When once in Scotland at the residence of the Duke of Athol, he tried to leap the moat but missed, savagely spraining his ankle and lacerating the tendons of his foot, the wrench of both permanently altering his gait and ensuring it would be many weeks before he could travel back to England. A while later he fell from a horse, and again broke his arm. He snapped it again not long after, this time by falling from a carriage… In 1827, Huskisson received what he called a “decided attack of imflamnmation of the trachea”, a condition that rendered his voice permanently raspy. His recovery period in France did not begin well: at Calais he tripped on a cable and lacerated his foot.
It is shamefully difficult not to giggle at this catalogue of disasters.
The story is told well but not superbly. Garfield does manage to bring to life the sources he has found, in particular the actress Fanny Kemble, one of the many witnesses of the accident (few such industrial accidents, as the author points out, have taken place in the full view of dozens of the ruling classes) who sounds like a very interesting character indeed. I wished for a little more on a couple of occasions: Huskisson’s resignation speech to the House of Commons in 1828 is said to have been pretty disastrous, but Garfield doesn’t appear to have read it. All the boards of enquiry and contemporary accounts quoted seem to have come suspiciously rapidly to the conclusion that the only person to blame for the accident was Huskisson himself, for failing to take due care. I wonder if there was anyone who expressed an alternative view, and indeed if there is any evidence for it. The illustrations are OK but again I would have liked more, say a contemporary picture of the scene or a photograph of the monument now on the spot.
There are also more misprints than I would expect from a publisher with Faber’s reputation – several uses of “canon” instead of “cannon”, a “principle” instead of “principal”, an incorrect reference to “Lord Wellington”, and the 1889 railway disaster at “Armargh” – I know that’s how English journalists pronounce it, but it’s not how locals say it and it’s certainly not the right spelling. (Also he gives the wrong number of fatalities, 78 rather than 88.)
So, all in all, an interesting little book, but not one I would urge people to rush out and buy.
[Edited to add: here’s the plaque on the site of the accident:]
The Chase
Bought this 1965 Doctor Who series on video at Worldcon, along with Remembrance of the Daleks. My hopes were not especially high, as I knew that the Empire State Building, the Mary Celeste and Dracula’s castle are settings for parts of the story. But I didn’t really know quite what to expect – the only other William Hartnell series I’ve seen is An Unearthly Child, way back in 1983 when it was repeated for the 20th anniversary. It’s also the first time I’ve watched any entire series of the “old” Doctor Who since the new one started.
Before I put the lengthy comments behind the cut tag, let us just all agree that it is a real shame that Brian Epstein vetoed the idea of the Beatles appearing as themselves but much older, playing at a fiftieth anniversary concert set in, I suppose, 2013. Apparently the Fab Four were on for it but their manager was not impressed, so at least we get a rare studio clip of them playing “Ticket to Ride”. This also gives us a couple of good lines, as the Doctor complains when the machine is switched off that “You’ve squashed my favourite Beatles”, and Vicki tells us that she has “been to their memorial theatre in Liverpool… but I didn’t know they played classical music!” (But how does Ian know the words to “Ticket to Ride”? After all, he left Earth the day after President Kennedy was assassinated…)
Well, to my surprise there were some more tolerably good bits. The Mechanoid city was great. The Dalek/Mechanoid battles were fun. The rapidly rotating planet Aridius was well done. The Dalek’s emergence from the sand dune at the end of the first episode is pretty good. To my surprise, I even quite liked the Mary Celeste bit, though my wife and mother-in-law snorted with giggles, and the final shots of the deserted ship with the last view of the name plate was quite effective. And there was a real feeling of time passing for the characters, not just the rapid rotation of Aridius but also the meals, the Doctor and companions sleeping, things we don’t often see happening.
Other good bits: The location scenes on the planet Aridius (though it also appears to be the setting for the Gettysburg Address). the scene where the other three think they’ve lost Vicki, and her attempts to contact them from the Daleks’ time machine. Peter Purves’ performance as Steven Taylor, stranded rocket pilot and Ben Gunn lookalike. Indeed all three companions are on form throughout, even Barbara playing machine guns with the Doctor’s Dalek-killing device. Hartnell, when he’s awake, is good, but he fluffs a number of lines and was perhaps personally upset at the departure of William Russell and Jacqueline Hill, leaving him the sole survivor of the original cast. And their departure is a rather moving moment as well.
My one complaint of Vicki/Maureen O’Brien isn’t really her fault, but has to do with the crapness of three of the monsters. On four occasions she is attacked – by a Mire Beast, an Aridian, and two Fungoids – and more or less has to walk into them – I think she actually has to wind the Mire Beast’s tentacle around her own neck. She pulls it off well, but the only monsters that are any good in this story are the Mechanoids, and that’s not saying a lot.
Oh yeah, and the Daleks. Can’t count, fall off boats, can’t kill Frankenstein’s monster or Dracula, easily confused by Barbara’s cardigan. But this is because they are being funny, which is sort of OK but you don’t want it every time. The robot Doctor I didn’t mind too much, but he fluffed the crucial line which was supposed to let the companions know he was the fake – the script says he addresses Vicki as “Susan”, but I missed it.
The first two episodes, on Aridius, have good settings and filming – had Dune already been published before this story was written? In magazine form, surely, but maybe not yet as a novel. But the Aridians and Mire Beasts are ludicrous. The Empire State Building scene was simply pointless. The Mary Celeste, as I said earlier, I rather liked.
The Hammer House of Horrors sequence worked rather better if the Doctor’s theory was right – “we were lodged for a period in an area of human thought” – rather than it being a festival sideshow in a 1996 where the Chinese rule Ghana. But maybe that, too, is but an area of human thought. (At the very beginning Ian is reading a book called “Monsters from Outer Space – Science Fiction”. The ISFDB doesn’t seem to have heard of this one, so presumably it has yet to be published in Our Time Line, or else is imported from the one where the Chinese rule Ghana.)
I really hated a) the jazzy intro music, b) the time vortex shots and c) the Shakespeare meets Elizabeth I scene.
Sorry this is a bit disjointed. Lots more in-depth analysis of The Chase by Alan Stevens and Fiona Moore here, by Paul Clarke here, by Cameron Mason here, and by numerous reviewers here.
Le Sars, continued (but not concluded)
Last month I posted about the name of the house where I grew up. A little research in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland yesterday produced some interesting data on the block now known as 209-231 Upper Lisburn Road, Belfast 10, from the successive Belfast street directories which simply list who lived at each house in the city.
- unnamed house [Mrs England, chemist – she was still there when I was a child, and died only in the late 1970s]
- second unnamed house [Mr England, dentist – presumably husband or brother-in-law]
- GARTHOWEN
- LE-SARS [sic]
- MARADA
- COLLON
- CULMORE
- STEVLIN
- CLANRYE
- GLENBURN
- THE BUNGALOWS (1 & 2)
The chemist’s and dentist’s are adjoining buildings; all the others are semi-detached two-storey, three-bedroom houses – Garthowen/Le-sars, Marada/Collon, Culmore/Stevlin, and Clanrye/Glenburn – and the bungalows are also semi-detached, but obviously only one storey.
Garthowen, as well as being a large town in Australia, is a small town in Wales and a Welsh hymn tune.
Le Sars, as previously reported, was a battlefield near the Somme in 1914.
Marada was the name given to a set of Christian warrior statelets in what is now the Lebanon in the middle ages (also one of the militias in the more recent civil war). It is also a town in Libya which was a battleground in the second world war (so too late to be relevant here). It was also a rare but not unknown woman’s name in the late 19th century, I guess derived from some Spanish or Portuguese adjective. Most intriguingly, I find it used in connection with tribal facemasks made on one of the islands off Papua New Guinea – intriguing, because the island in question is called New Ireland.
Collon is a town in County Meath, and probably we need look no further.
Culmore is a suburb of Derry, and again that is probably all the explanation we need.
Stevlin is a townland in Donegal, though not particularly near Derry.
Clanrye is the river that flows through Newry in County Down.
Glenburn is striking rather close to home, in that there was (and still is) a Glenburn House in Dunmurry, the next village to the southwest.
So, five of the eight house names in the block are identifiably Irish, indeed counting “Garthowen” six are Celtic. Le Sars sticks out like a sore thumb as the only French name of the lot. (I do wonder about “Marada” – could just as easily be a contraction for Martin, Raymond and David as the architects.) Next time I have a chance to do research on this, I’ll have to take it a step further and go through the property (ie real estate) advertisements in the Belfast newspapers for 1936, to find out if the names of the houses were chosen by the property developer who built them, or if it’s possible that the first owner of the house, a Mr William Stevenson, overseer, may have had some input. But “William Stevenson” is such a common name that I don’t think he will take me any further.
Omagh
My one vaguely work-related commitment during this holiday has been to drive to Omagh, 85 km away, and talk to a group of local community activists who are involved in post-conflict reconciliation issues in County Fermanagh and western Tyrone, and are planning a fact-finding trip to Bosnia to see what future there might be for cooperation between the two areas. They wheeled me in to do a quick briefing on Bosnian history, politics and culture for the trip participants.
Bosnia is no longer a country I do much work on, but I did live there from January 1997 to May 1998, with Anne and the infant B joining me half way through. And since it’s where my career really picked up, and since I got that job largely on the strength of what I learnt from Northern Ireland politics, it seemed right to try and repay some of my debts to this part of the world.
My presentation went well, but at the end when I was giving the statistics of the Bosnian war, hundreds of thousands killed, over half the population displaced, thousands of rapes, one of my audience sighed and said, “It puts our problems into perspective, doesn’t it?” I couldn’t think of a response. On the one hand, of course it does; but on the other, by talking about Bosnia I don’t think we are saying that what happened in Omagh doesn’t matter.
Peace mural
On the long and thoughtful drive home, I came across this little bit of cultural inventiveness:
If you find your own history difficult to deal with, hey, why not borrow someone else’s?
Dream
I dreamt that one of my colleagues at work had suddenly moved to Northern Ireland and was fighting a hopeless local council by-election for my old party, and I was organising the campaign.
Then I dreamt that I woke up, realised it was all a dream, and called her in the middle of the night to tell her about, much to the annoyance of her husband.
Then I really did wake up. Reality is better.
Looks like this was the only panel I was on where people took pictures
[Edited to add: No it wasn’t. Thanks to
Speaking purely hypothetically, of course…
…if someone were to ask you what extras should be included on the box set of DVD’s for this year’s Doctor Who, such as “deleted scenes? alternative endings? blooper reel? storyboards? monsters?” – what would you recommend?
Myself I’d want interviews with the stars and with anyone interesting out of the production crew. I’m not a big connoisseur of DVD’s and so have little experience of extras, but I didn’t feel the blooper reel for the last series of Buffy added a huge amount to my enjoyment, whereas the interviews with Joss Whedon and Marti Noxon did. And from the LotR DVD’s, the stuff on how the scenery and monsters were actually filmed were fascinating.
But what do others think?
August Books 8) Imperial Earth
8) Imperial Earth: A Fantasy of Love and Discord, by Arthur C. Clarke
I got this post-Worldcon in a second-hand bookshop, prompted partly by my current run of re-reading novels I enjoyed as a teenager and partly also by a discussion provoked by
Also – paragraph added after first posting this – Clarke’s vision of the MiniSec units is not at all distant from where it looks like we will be in a very few years when Blackberrys, PDAs and PCs all merge into a single hand-held unit – I’m aware that such things exist already, but Clarke’s prediction that they would be practically universal by the early 21st century, and would then stay pretty stable in shape and function for hundreds of years, may well be proved right. What he missed of course was the easy access to information stored elsewhere that we now accept as automatic.
This was about the time that Robert Silverberg and Ursula Le Guin were writing some of their best work portraying the future of human sexuality, and I think that Clarke, in this book, responded to their challenge much better than Asimov (in, say, his vastly over-rated The Gods Themselves) or Heinlein (who may have set the ball rolling with Stranger in a Strange Land, but whose later works leave me with a strange urge to wash my hands after reading – his book that year was the icky Time Enough for Love). Clarke never rose the challenge as successfully again, and I think Imperial Earth is underappreciated in this regard.
That’s not to say that it is without flaws. All the characters seem to be the kind of people you would meet at scientific conferences (or the better class of science fiction convention [whatever that is]). The mystery of What Karl Is Up To has a rather underwhelming explanation – somehow Clarke didn’t manage to pull off the sensawunda for me here; the end of the book feels a little rushed by deadline pressure, perhaps. And right at the beginning, the explanation of the Makenzies’ genetic problems is clearly wrong – if Malcolm had really suffered radiation damage, it could not have been transmitted to his clone Colin let alone Duncan. But I still like this book a lot.
Seen in passing
Wanna be in a book by Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, John Grisham or Lemony Snicket? Details here. (Hat tip:
A very specific job advertisement. (Hat tip:
The impending Bush indictment. (Hat tip:
The Doctor Dances
Well, this was really really good. My only complaint is
Lots of good moments – “Those would have been terrible last words”; the interchange about the sonic screwdriver; Rose getting to grips with Jack’s bisexuality; the drama of Nancy’s true relationship with Joey; “Just this once, everybody lives!” I missed the “Bad Wolf” reference but accept other people’s word for it. I was pretty sure I caught a small hommage to Douglas Adams – did anyone else think so?
So, going back to the earlier discussion about next year’s Hugos, I think I’ll be nominating the two parter of The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances for Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form), and Dalek for Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form), if that is allowed in the rules.
(Sorry folks, I’m not a huge fan of Father’s Day, which had its good lines but really not an impressive plot. But if it gets nominated, I’ll vote for it!)
From Evelyn C Leeper
Description: “UK politics and race, class, geography, and changing political alignments.”
Whyte said he was from Belfast, lives in Brussels, and works on Balkans and the former USSR. MacLeod said his book THE HOUSE OF STORMS is an alternate England. Lovegrove said it should be called the “Untied Kingdom” because of the fractured society. And MacDonald said he was Irish.
Whyte started by saying, “The United Kingdom is dead; it is fractured.” Scotland has its own Parliament, and people are not thinking about the nature of Britishness. The only people who think of themselves as British first are the Scots, and there is even more English nationalism now in England. MacLeod said that he had a Scots background, but grew up in Birmingham, and thought of himself as English. Now it is a militant sort of Englishness that one sees; when one sees the flag of St. George now, he expects trouble. On the other hand, people do not worry when they see the Scottish flag. Whyte mentioned that the Cross of St. George was adopted by Georgia (the country, not the state).
Lovegrove is one-quarter Cornish, and says that Cornwall has some notion of separateness as well. Britishness seems a loose coalition of states. Old movies and Richard Curtis movies bear no resemblance to any notion of real Britishness.
MacLeod observed that frequently “England” is used to refer to all of the United Kingdom. MacDonald said that one of the problems of being from Northern Ireland is what do you call yourself? It is not Britain. “You are UKian [‘you-kay-ee-an’],” he suggested.
Whyte pointed out that a “Yugoslav” identity was invented, but when people could check off “Serb” or some other choice in Montenegro (in addition to “Yugoslav”), the term “Yugoslav” disappeared.
On Englishness, MacDonald quoted Victor Hugo who said, “It’s perfectly easy to eat well in England. Just have breakfast three times a day.” MacDonald added that a Scottish breakfast is an English breakfast with haggis. To his company, he said, everything outside the M-25 is a separate nation or region, so even Brighton is a separate nation or region. He also said that is was “ironic that the first region to have a devolved government [Irish Free State in 1921] may be the last region to have a devolved government.”
MacLeod said that divisions now seem more local (by street rather than large areas), and that fundamentalism (Protestantism in the case of Northern Ireland, Islam in other areas) is claiming allegiance to other areas that do not actually care about them. MacDonald said that in Northern Ireland the Loyalists (primarily Protestants) fly Israeli flags, while the Republicans (primarily Catholics) fly Palestinian flags. And everyone says, “We are the oppressed.”
Lovegrove said that what used to define politics in the United Kingdom was the class system, but now “we have a right-wing Labour government, and a left-wing Tory opposition.” And MacLeod said that people are now making a selective choice as to what they are, rather than following expectations according to class or income. Even in sports, people no longer automatically support the local team, they choose which to support. Beliefs, ethnicity, etc., are the factors now.
(Whyte said that when the split between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland happened, Northern Ireland football survived very well, but the Irish part somewhat collapsed.)
MacDonald talked about “me-too politics” and “identity politics.” There is apparently a lot of money for Irish-language education, etc., so the Unionists invented “Ulster Scots” as their own language for which they want equal education and so on. MacDonald said, “Anyone who had drunk six pints of Guinness and fallen over on their face could speak perfect Ulster Scots,” but it is now one of the official languages, so everything has to be translated into it. “This linguistic emperor has no clothes,” he declared. Lovegrove said that most Welshmen he has talked to want to speak English, but there is still a lot of education being done using the Welsh language.
MacDonald cited recent statistics that 500,000 Britons have moved to Spain, and another 500,000 to France. MacLeod said that there is now an idea that the British (and other nationalities) should all think of themselves as European. Whyte thought this was good if it was as an additional identity. In the 1980s the Irish realized you could be Irish and European, not just Irish and not British, he said. (Someone in the audience said that he had lost the feeling of being British but did not feel particularly European either.)
MacDonald threw in the idea of an Indian living in Britain saying, “Let’s go out for an English. Can you make it a bit more bland?”
I asked about the parts of the British Isles I have trouble understanding: the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man, the Shetlands, and the Orkneys. First they said that the Isle of Man is separate, but then it turned out that was not quite true. Maybe it is like Puerto Rico. I did not get an answer on the rest.
MacDonald talked about learning the “Orangeman’s Toast”, and Lovegrove said that it was interesting that we can laugh about these things. [Note: I am unable to find anything called the “Orangemen’s Toast” through Google.] He said that once a year in his home town they burn an effigy of the Pope, and no one thinks of this as anti-Catholic. (It is really an effigy of Pope Urban something-or-other (VIII?). I still think there is an anti-Catholic element here.)
MacDonald said that Tony Blair was attempting to use the Spanish model of strong regionalism, and MacLeod made reference to regional assemblies. The problem then is the people who regard that as “being ruled by Birmingham” rather than by London, which is least far enough away to take no notice of them. Whyte said that Belgium has only the army and the king in common, but otherwise is divided in two, and MacDonald cited Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Divorce”.
MacDonald said that neither the Labour nor the Conservative party can get established in Northern Ireland because it is all identity politics: you are either Unionist or Republican. Lovegrove said a big problem was that Muslim youth find no identity in mainstream politics at all.
Someone asked about the effect of the possible dissolution of the monarchy. MacLeod said that would hasten the dissolution of the United Kingdom. However, there is usually more fragmentation when a country is not under threat, but there is less now because Britain is under threat.
It was pointed that the government structure is not necessarily the determining factor: India is very fragmented even though it uses the British voting system.
Whyte said when the Norwegians gained independence from Sweden in 1905, they picked a new king to establish an identity. Asked how, he said, “I think it was the usual method that there was a spare German prince floating around,” but someone pointed out that Haakon VII was actually Danish.
(By the way, in Britain, “Red” (Labour) and “Blue” (Conservative) are flipped from United States.)