4) Fun Home: a family tragicomedy, by Alison Bechdel

recommended this to me a while back, and it was one of the 20 listed by Nerve, so ended up on my birthday list – thanks, Caroline! Also has just read it.

This is a tremendous piece of work; beautifully drawn, beautifully scripted. One takes it as autobiography, but in a sense it doesn’t really matter, it’s a superb literary achievement whether you treat it as fact or fiction. Alison Bechdel shows and tells the story of her father, whose homosexuality she discovered shortly after herself coming out as a lesbian, and shortly before his mysterious death. In life, he was obsessed with restoring their family home, with a level of effort that he never really put into maintaining the family. The “fun home” of the title is not in fact the family house, but the father’s day job – a funeral home, “fun home” for short.

Lots of references to literature, carefully woven into the text. In years to come, people will give course on the layers of text in this book. One line that really hit home for me was “It’s said, after all, that people reach middle age the day they realize they’re never going to read Remembrance of Things Past.” I know what I’m bringing on the plane tomorrow.

This is really really good. Go and read it.

Top UnSuggestions for this book:

1. The Testament by John Grisham
2. The street lawyer by John Grisham
3. The brethren by John Grisham

Yep, Alison Bechdel is the anti-John Grisham. Oddly enough it is the third on the list, The Brethren, which returns the favour.

Poor Martha, all in lurve and the Doctor doesn’t see it.

Reference to Mr Saxon already!

Big reception reminiscent of that scene in the Eighth Doctor movie.

Martha’s mother has the Doctor beaten!

Lots of flashing lights and switches, even smoke rising, great stuff!

And the man in the box is… Mark Gatiss!

“What it means to be human” – echoes of last week’s plot, such as it was. (Also dodgy DNA science.)

Ah, he’s got the munchies and the Doctor knows why…

Smart Martha, picking up DNA samples!

Hmm, old woman not attractive to newly young man. Not sure if I approve. But he’s going to die, I bet; and her too.

Martha and Doctor in the lab, very sweet.

Yep, Dr Lazarus is going to die.

Oh, I didn’t expect that! Cool!!!

Now he’s back again, right as rain, having had his snack. And Tish is next on the menu…

Sinister waiter! Who is he? A minion of Mr Saxon?

Yay, a monster that doesn’t look crap!

And escaping down a tall building – like last week, only better.

Doctor shouting at the monster – great!

Running down the corridor – great!

Martha has the sonic screwdriver – cool!

Doctor blows up the lab.

Martha’s mother and the sinister waiter again. Can’t lip-read but did he say “he’s not human”?

Yep switching the machine on – will we get Chris Ecclestone back? No, but we get a “reverse the polarity” phrase. Good.

Dead Mark Gatiss. But for how long?

Martha’s mother unable to articulate her feelings.

Yes, with a name like Lazarus of course he is going to come back from the dead.

Much better lines in this episode. Doctor v Lazarus on death and immortality. “No such thing as an ordinary human.” “If you live long enough, the only certainty is that you’ll end up alone.”

Martha and sister up the tower. Very hunchback. And the organ as well! Fantastic!

Killed by a discord. (And a long drop.)

Martha saved not quite by the bell, but by her sister.

Goodbye scene again? Surely not.

“One more trip?” But she puts it well. Doesn’t want to be an extra. Not really “just a passenger” – so what, then?

Oooh. Shiny trailer!

Anne points out that for once it was just a mad human scientist, no aliens for a change. (Though Mr Saxon…)

I’m travelling next week, so I’m glad it’s postponed to the week after.

3) The Life of W.T. Stead, by Frederic Whyte

This is the end of a reading project that has kept me going for just over a year: the works of my distant relative Frederic Whyte (1867-1940). Having spent most of his career as an editor, reviewer and translator, he married a Swedish woman and moved to Sweden some time around the first world war, and in 1925 published the first of a succession of four books over the next six years – two biographical (this and one on William Heinemann) and then two autobiographical (one on Sweden and one on England), each book containing more of Whyte than the previous ones.

I confess I didn’t know a lot about Stead before I read this. He was born in 1849 and famously died in 1912. From 1871 he began to make a career as a crusading journalist on the Northern Echo (which is of course still going); in 1880 he moved from Darlington to London to join the staff of the daily Pall Mall Gazette, and became its editor in 1883. He fell out with the P.M.G. in 1889 and in 1890 started his own monthly, The Review of Reviews which he kept up until he died. In 1904 he tried to start a daily paper (called, with startling originality, The Daily Paper) and hired Frederic Whyte as the book review editor, but it folded in weeks. Twenty years earlier he had been the first – but far from the last – editor to commission a theatre review from George Bernard Shaw.

Anyone interested in the late Victorian and Edwardian history of any of the subjects which Stead campaigned on – child prostitution (against); sending General Gordon to Khartoum (in favour); Cecil Rhodes (mixed); the Boer War (against); Irish Home Rule (in favour); religion (in favour); spiritualism (in favour); world peace (also in favour) – will find much in terms of primary source material here. This is a book much more about trees than about the forest; for each of the memorable events in Stead’s career, we get substantial excerpts from Stead’s own correspondence, both incoming and outgoing, plus where possible the reminiscences of other protagonists (Whyte was writing in 1925, but had obviously started a few years before).

Stead comes across as opinionated, eloquent, persuasive, and fundamentally good at heart, but very poor at acquiring and managing allies, and much better at making enemies through his writing, both through actual hostility and through journalistic indiscretion. His enthusiasm for spiritualism must strike most of us now as pretty barmy, and Whyte doesn’t pull his punches on that score. But on the other big issues he was more right (Boer War, Ireland, prostitution) than wrong (General Gordon).

His death came about as a result of accepting an invitation to speak on the same platform as President Taft at a meeting in New York on the topic of “World Peace”, as part of a new American movement to encourage men and boys to participate more in the Church. His last editorial in the Review of Reviews explains the whole scheme (which seems well-meaning but also wacky) in great detail, and signs off confidently,

I expect to leave by the Titanic on April 10th, and hope I shall be back in London in May.

Of course, he never made it to New York.

Lots more about Stead on this website. Whyte’s biography, two volumes of smallish type-face totalling over 700 pages, is fairly widely available, though I was fortunate to pick mine up for a mere $16.50 – the going rate seems to be about three times that.

2) Barchester Towers, by Anthony Trollope

Having read and enjoyed The Warden last summer, I asked for and got this as a birthday present. Hmm, not really sure what I think. I found the politics rather more objectionable than in the previous book – most of the central characters just want to do nothing in particular and get rewarded for it by the state, and there seemed a lot of casual anti-semitism which put me off. But this is slightly off-set by the glamorous Signora Neroni, a woman with a Past who nonetheless seems to me to be portrayed positively and sympathetically. And the unexpected beneficiary of her schemes turns out to be the quiet character who has just turned 40, obviously a theme that appeals to me right now (and indeed Trollope himself turned 40 while writing this book). But Obadiah Slope is such a cardboard cut-out of a villain that I suspect Alan Rickman’s brilliant portrayal of him in 1982 was better-rounded. And I didn’t like the author’s occasional interventions to remind you that he is writing a novel and has to fill up the pages somehow. I’ll look out for the other volumes in the series as I see them, but won’t bother putting them on my wishlist in future.

Top UnSuggestions for this book:

1. Stranger than fiction: true stories by Chuck Palahniuk
2. Dead as a doornail by Charlaine Harris
3. Girls in pants: the third summer of the Sisterhood by Ann Brashares

1) Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the year 2660, by Hugo Gernsback

Brian Aldiss blames Gernsback for taking sf away from the literary tradition established by Mary Shelley, and reading this, the Luxembourg-born author’s only well-known work of fiction, I can see why Aldiss accuses Gernsback of “a deadening literalism”; and yet I can also understand why the Worldcon hands out Hugos rather than Shelleys.

This fairly short novel was written in 1911, and concerns Ralph 124C 41+, the greatest inventor of his age, who one day meets the beautiful Alice as a result of a crossed videophone conversation, and saves her from an avalanche in distant Switzerland by remote control. He takes her on a tour of 27th century New York and rescues her from abduction and certain death in space at the hands of his rivals for her affections.

Of course the narrative (such as it is) is interrupted frequently by breathless descriptions of the technical advances of the year 2660. Some of these (e.g. radar and solar panels) are now familiar to us in 2007, while in some cases one wonders why he didn’t take the idea a step further (you can watch live broadcasts from Europe, and phone calls use video as a matter of course, but no mention of video recording of any kind – and this was written several years after the dawn of cinema).

No robots (still nine years before Čapek invented them in R.U.R.), and perhaps more unexpectedly no rockets – space flight happens via antigravity. (Robert Goddard only began his rocket experiments that same year, 1911; Tsiolkovsky had been writing on the subject for decades, but I don’t know how well know his work was in the English-speaking world.)

Yet Gernsback’s most spectacular miss is in his failure to understand how technology would revolutionise society. Ralph’s sleep is enlivened by a recording of Homer’s Odyssey; his manservant puts it on for him. Ralph’s dictation machine means that his secretary can devote her time to other things, not that he can dispense with her services. As noted above, we hear a lot about live entertainment, but not much about other forms of literature. The technicalities of how the newspaper of 2660 is produced and read are described in detail; its contents are not.

(And Gernsbach’s asteroids have atmospheres.)

Still, I can find a lot more forgiveness for him than Brian Aldiss did: for me, Gernsbach’s enthusiasm makes up for his desperately clunky prose. And I love the line, “Martians in New York were not sufficiently rare to excite any particular comment.”

(NB: got this as an ebook from Renaissance ebooks.)

Edited to add: At least he tried harder to have an actual plot than Edward Bellamy.

A fascinating 10-page paper from www.brusselsstudies.be on linguistic diversity in Europe and especially in Brussels.

In particular, check out this graph from page 6:

English is more widely spoken than Dutch in both Wallonia and Brussels, and almost as widely spoken as French in Flanders. The paper then gives 1999 figures, and reasonably extrapolates from them to conclude that fewer than half of Brussels residents are now native French speakers (fewer than 10% native Dutch speakers, and very few indeed native English speakers). The author is upbeat:

…the spectacular spread of English is not only inevitable but also desirable, especially in Brussels. In Europe and the rest of the world we absolutely need a common language, one that is not monopolized by a small elite but is widely spread amongst all sections of the population. Through accidents of history this role has fallen to English. For us Belgians, what a stroke of luck! Whether our mother tongue is French or Dutch, of the 6000 languages spoken in the world today, English is one of the 10 to 15 languages that lie closest to our own. Even better: if there is one language in the world that can claim to lie precisely midway between French and Dutch, it is English and only English, which is after all but a dialect very similar to Frisian, which the Angles took with them when they crossed the Channel in the fifth century and which was later made unrecognisable by some Vikings who, after a few centuries of French lessons in Normandy, crossed the channel in turn to simplify its grammar and graft 10,000 French words onto it. Some inveterate narcissists will perhaps still manage to complain about the fact that the chosen language is not precisely the same as the one in which they were rocked by their mum. But this should not stop us rejoicing at our incredible luck.

Worth reading the whole thing.

I bought this CD of three radio plays related to Doctor Who when in Forbidden Planet in London last month. Two of the three are very good indeed, and I guess I can ignore the third.

In Regenerations, Daragh Carville brings together two of my personal obsessions: Doctor Who and Northern Ireland. I thought it was very good indeed. There are three main plot strands – the local lad with his relatively newly acquired English girlfriend, introducing her to his mates (I’ve never been there, oh no, not at all); the gay couple not sure if their relationship still exists; and the unfortunate organiser of the local Doctor Who convention trying to keep it on the road while his friends’ relationships, and the city around them, descend into chaos.

At the same time, Carville examines three different levels of reality: the diehard Doctor Who fan, of course, insisting that it is all in some way real (the play was written in 2001 and set in 2002, so before the BBC Wales revival was on); the surrealism of Northern Irish politics (at one point Rachel is teasing Ciaran about dressing up as a Cyberman, and the music of a Loyalist marching band, presumably also bizarrely dressed, comes through clearly in the background); and the peculiarities of being gay in Northern Ireland.

All the cast give of their best, including (portraying themselves) Sophie Aldred and Tom Baker. There are some beautifully chosen audio clips from the classic series, tying in perfectly with the themes and plot. I love this play to bits.

You can buy it on the CD, and of course I urge you to do so, or you may find this link helpful. You can also find more reviews of it here and here (also reviews the other two plays on the CD collection).

Blue Veils and Golden Sands, by Martyn Wade, is a biographical sketch of Delia Derbyshire, who was basically into weird sounds and generated the first and still the best version of the Doctor Who theme tune – Ron Grainer, who had written the original sketch of it, requested unsuccessfully that she be co-credited with him as composer. I must say that the life story of someone who is famous for making wacky noises is absolutely made for a radio play, and this is good, though I felt I would have liked to know a bit more; I’m glad to discover from Derbyshire’s obituary in the Guardian that her personal life was not quite as bleak as is portrayed in Wade’s play.

Alas, the set of two CDs also includes Colin Sharpe’s Dalek, I Love You. Apparently Doctor Who fans live with their mothers, are mildly autistic and get swept off their feet by mysterious females. Nigel Kneale did this better with Kinvig twenty-five years ago; and that wasn’t very good in the first place. At least the other two plays are worth the price on the box.

Liveblogging the presidential debate, though my French is far from perfect:

Did Segolène Royal just say that if she is elected president, every policewoman will be walked safely home after work?

Did Nicolas Sarkozy just say both that there are too many civil servants in France and too few?

Did Royal just say that she will bring in conscription for young offenders?

Now Sarkozy is accusing Royal’s boyfriend of proposing a new CSG. What is a CSG?

“Je rédeployerai!” Not one of the great slogans of our time.

I haven’t seen the female moderator say anything so far; her male colleague seems to be doing it all.

I don’t like Sarkozy or his body language at all, but I think he has her on the run on the economic arguments.

No I don’t, not any more. Apparently if he is president, no unemployed person will be allowed to turn down more than two job offers, because this works so well in the UK.

Nice strike back by Royal, “if the 35-hour week is such a bad thing, how come you haven’t repealed it?” It’s a good debating point.

And did Sarkozy just say he wouldn’t change the 35-hour week, “Je n’y toucherai pas”? After appearing to have argued precisely the opposite earlier?

Royal is grinning now as she says that the whole problem is that, compared with the dynamic social partnership economies of Scandinavia, there are not enough French trade union members.

F has just come downstairs although it is long past his bedtime. We explained that what we were watching was a kind of argument between two people who want to be President of France. He said firmly, “I hate squabbles!” And stomped back upstairs.

Royal looks bad at the end by interrupting Sarkozy when it was his turn to speak. But since he appears to be promising to revitalise France through early retirement, and refunding the costs of false teeth, maybe she was right. And now he is interrupting her even more grumpily that she did him a few minutes earlier.

F is absolutely right, that’s enough listening to people arguing in French for one night. No mention of Europe or foreign policy as far as I could tell. I’m going to bed.

Those interested in Torchwood and those who are related to one of the panellists (and the small minority who like me are in both categories) may be interested in this podcast from Cult TV Insider featuring Brian Minchin, Torchwood’s script editor, and Cath Treganna, who wrote two of the better episodes (the one with the timeslip aeroplane, and the second last one with the other Captain Jack); with a contribution also from Lindsay Alford who is the script editor for the most recently shown episodes of Doctor Who and for the Sarah Jane Adventures. 45 mins, listened to it on the way to work this morning. Some interesting hints also for those of you who may want to break into writing for the Beeb.

(On the emancipation of Jews in Britain, but much more widely applicable):

If there be any proposition universally true in politics it is this, that foreign attachments are the fruit of domestic misrule. It has always been the trick of bigots to make their subjects miserable at home, and then complain that they look for relief abroad; to divide society, and then to wonder that it is not united; to govern as if a section of the State were the whole, and to censure the other sections of the state for their want of patriotic spirit. If the Jews have not felt towards England like children, it is because she has treated them like a step-mother.

(As quoted in W.T. Stead’s 1886 pamphlet on Irish Home Rule, For Home and Gladstone, quoted in turn in Frederic Whyte’s 1925 biography of Stead.) It is not difficult to think of contemporary examples which can be substituted for “Jews” and/or “England” in the last sentence.

Although I have no idea of the context Macaulay was writing about, I find this an astonishingly clear statement from a writer who I don’t normally regard as a source of inspiration.

links to my earlier posts, and describes young F’s artwork in glowing terms!

has a typically impassioned defence of New (and Old) Who

Ten Years On

Three Hundred Years On

My son F’s portrayal of the “10th Docter or Docter for the 3rd season”: