“Have you seen a Kroton come this way?” the Doctor asked, somewhat urgently.
“Don’t know. Is a Kroton a big silvery-white thing that looks like it came out of a fondue set?”
The Doctor looked surprised. “Yes, I suppose it is.”
Sam jerked her thumb. “It went that way.”
September Books 10) Richard III
10) The Tragedy of King Richard the Third, by William Shakespeare
So I reach the end of the first block of Shakespeare plays, the quartet covering the reigns of Henry VI, Edwards IV and V and of course Richard III. This is definitely the best of the four plays. Like the previous three, it is the story arc of a single character, in this case Richard himself; the first act sees him knock off his brother Clarence, the second act has his other brother die of dissipation, the third act has Richard dispossess his nephews and seize the throne, the fourth act has the young princes and various others, mostly former allies, slaughtered, and the fifth act has Richard himself overthrown and killed by the Duke of Richmond, who becomes Henry VII.
Richard is a fascinating character – as I commented with regard to the previous play, his taking the audience into his confidence is a strong part of his charm, and although we see him deceive and seduce the other characters, we don’t ever feel he is deceiving us. Richard gets the two best-known lines of the play – the opening “Now is the winter of our discontent” speech, and his despairing final “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” – and if a scene doesn’t have him in it you feel there is something missing (certainly the other characters are always talking about him).
Richard’s mistake of leadership is quite different from Henry VI and Edward IV, both of whom prove in different ways too lightweight for the burdens of office. He is less subtle than his father, who held back in Ireland and let his rivals for power and his proxies eliminate each other. His mistake is that once he has achieved his originally quite limited agenda – to get rid of Henry, Edward, Clarence and the princes – and reached the throne, he just can’t stop killing people. His public and hypocritical piety contrasts nicely with Richmond’s more modest and circumspect approach. His gradual disintegration into a haunted wreck of a man is chilling, and reminded me of Bruno Ganz in Der Untergang. David Troughton does a good job of it in the Arkangel production I’ve been listening to, but I’m sure any actor would love to play this.
The other character whose role is particularly interesting is Margaret of Anjou, Henry VI’s widow and the only living character in all four plays (Henry himself gets a few lines as a ghost haunting Richard at Bosworth field). She haunts a couple of scenes as a vengeful visitor from the past – if I was staging this I think I’d present her as a ghost, rather than a live person (indeed, historically, she was dead by the time Richard took over). Apparently some productions drop her completely because it takes too long to explain who she is. I think that is a real shame – she is an Awful Warning to Richard, and to us, of what happens when you claw your way to the top by violence; yet she seems to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
It’s a play with more women in general. (Again, I had a thought that if I were staging it, I’d make the Citizens of Act 3 Scene 3 women.) A couple of them are rather surprisingly taken in by Richard’s charms after he has killed their close relatives, and also it is never quite explained who the unseen Mrs Shore is. But their presence is part of a more general sense that dynastic conflict is something that happens to real people, rather than to names in history books (the first two parts of Henry VI were a bit too much in the other direction). Fails the Bechdel test, I’m afraid; although there are plenty of scenes with women talking to each other, it is usually about Richard or his (male) victims. The on-stage death count is noticeable lower than in the previous three plays, which actually works rather better.
There are several remarkable scenes. The killings in the Tower, of Clarence and the Princes, stand out as points of no return in Richard’s rise and fall respectively. (I note for future use that this play was probably first performed in 1592, the year my ancestor Sir Nicholas Whyte also snuffed it in the tower, though as far as we know he died of relatively natural causes.) The Bosworth field hauntings and subsequent battle are a great climax to the play.
The most intriguing scene for me, however, was Act 4 Scene 4, which starts with Queen Margaret getting a decent soliloquy (“So, now prosperity begins to mellow, / And drop into the rotten mouth of death”); she then confronts Queen Elizabeth (Edward IV’s widow) and the Duchess of York (Edward IV and Richard III’s mother); she buggers off to France, but the other two women get a chance to confront Richard; his mother leaves, and he astonishingly persuades Queen Elizabeth to let him marry her daughter (his own niece, after having murdered her father and his own first wife); and then a series of nobles and messengers come with confusing news of Richmond’s arrival and rebellions around the land. I’d find this scene particularly difficult to stage and would be tempted to split it up a bit if I were directing. It does, however, show Richard still capable of his old persuasive powers yet vulnerable to meltdown.
I found this really compelling – the Henry VI/Richard III quartet improve as they go on, and I found myself wondering what was going to happen next to Richard (even though of course I knew perfectly well). Also, unlike the other three plays of the cycle, I frequently found myself thinking how I would stage it if I ever had the chance. Shakespeare’s first really good play, I suppose.
Anyway, it’s rather lighter stuff next, with A Comedy of Errors which I must say will be rather a relief after all this historical mayhem.
Henry VI, Part I | Henry VI, Part II | Henry VI, Part III | Richard III / Richard III | Comedy of Errors | Titus Andronicus | Taming of the Shrew | Two Gentlemen of Verona | Love’s Labour’s Lost | Romeo and Juliet | Richard II / Richard II | A Midsummer Night’s Dream | King John | The Merchant of Venice | Henry IV, Part 1 / Henry IV, Part I | Henry IV, Part II | Henry V | Julius Caesar | Much Ado About Nothing | As You Like It | Merry Wives of Windsor | Hamlet / Hamlet | Twelfth Night | Troilus and Cressida | All’s Well That Ends Well | Measure for Measure | Othello | King Lear | Macbeth | Antony and Cleopatra | Coriolanus / Coriolanus | Timon of Athens | Pericles | Cymbeline | The Winter’s Tale / The Winter’s Tale | The Tempest | Henry VIII | The Two Noble Kinsmen | Edward III | Sir Thomas More (fragment) | Double Falshood/Cardenio
Jeepers
Best wishes to
И сонцето е ѕвезда
“И сонцето е ѕвезда” is one of my favourite slogans. It is both easy and difficult to translate. The literal meaning is clear enough: “The sun, too, is a star”. But to the average non-Macedonian, that is almost incomprehensible. It is in fact the slogan of the Macedonian government’s Secretariat for European Affairs (see the Macedonian original and English translation).
The clue is in two flags. The Macedonian flag, to the left, commemorates the Vergina Sun, an archaeological relic which is linked to the ancient Macedonian race. The original flag of independent Macedonia had to be changed after Greek pressure, because it looked too much like the real thing, but they stayed with the sun motif.
The EU flag, of course, has 12 stars (and has had since Spain and Portugal joined; they decided they weren’t going to add more for each new country). The Macedonian slogan, therefore, means that the Macedonians are asserting their ambition and right to become one of the EU member states in due course. The sun is a star; Macedonia is European. It’s very neat.
Those of you who read Cyrillic but are not familiar with Macedonian may be a bit baffled by the letter ѕ at the start of ѕвезда. It is now used only in Macedonian, and pronounced /dz/; thought to come from the obsolete Greek letter stigma (Ϛ/ϛ) which of course is pronounced /st/ rather than /dz/, so it’s coincidental that it looks like the Latin s. It does sometimes pop up in Old Church Slavonic.
The word ѕвезда /dzvezda/ meaning star is a common Slavic word – звезда in Bulgarian, Serbian and Russian, ѕвѣзда (using the letter ѕ) in Old Church Slavonic, зьвязда in Belarusian, zvijezda in Croatian and Bosnian, zvezda in Slovenian, hvězda in Czech, hviezda in Slovak, gwiazda in Polish. It also has leaked into the Baltic languages – zvaigzne in Latvian, žvaigždė in Lithuanian. Even though it doesn’t seem to have other cognates in Indo-European languages, there are links of varying levels of credibility with other groups.
If you are familiar with Slavic languages other than Bulgarian and Macedonian you may wonder where the -то and the end of сонцето comes from. It means “the”, which otherwise you don’t get in Slavic languages (though the neighbouring non-Slavic Albanian and Romanian also use a suffix to form the definite article). The Macedonian word сонце /sontse/ is a good Slavic word – the Slovenian sonce is the same as Macedonian, as is Ukrainian сонце, then there is Belarussian сонца, Serbo-Croato-Bosnian sunce/сунце, Bulgarian слънце, Old Church Slavonic слъньце, Czech slunce, Polish słońce, Russian солнце, Slovak slnko. Not surprisingly, it is widespread in Indo-European languages and is related to our words “sun” and “south” as well as Latin “sol” and Greek ήλιος (ancient Greek ἥλιος, the initial /s/ turning into a /h/ sound). Indeed, the wisdom seems to be that the word has a much wider reach, including Japanese 空 (sora, meaning “sky”) and Korean 해 (hae, meaning “day” or “sun”).
So as well as tying in rather nicely with national and international iconography, the slogan uses two ancient nouns that demonstrate the linguistic heritage of the Macedonian language. Apparently the Macedonian government officials concerned thought it up one day over a cup of coffee. From such moments of inspiration…
One Day More
I just love this YouTube video featuring a (fictional) Obama campaign team singing “One Day More” from Les Miserables.
I’m a huge fan of both the book and the musical, but I picked this up from someone on my f-list who knew nothing of Les Miserables but still enjoyed it. The song is the closing number of the first act of the show, in which a) Valjean, the tragic hero of the story, decides to flee to England; b) Marius, the romantic hero of the story, decides to fight alongside the revolutionaries since he cannot stay with Valjean’s [adopted] daughter Cosette, his love interest; c) Eponine, in love with Marius, decides to fight alongside the revolutionaries since he’s there even though he doesn’t love her; d) Enjolras, the revolutionary leader, decides to revolt; e) Javert, the secret policeman, decides to pass himself off as a revolutionary; f) Eponine’s parents, the disreputable Thenardiers, decide to wait until everyone is dead and rob the corpses and g) everyone sings about it, summing up the first 80% of the novel in three and a half minutes. Les Miserables is full of good songs, but this is probably the best of them.
Les Miserables is much better known than the abortive 5 June 1832 revolution which it chronicles. Historians of mathematics may derive some satisfaction from the fact that, though it was the death of General Lamarque which caused the outbreak of revolt, tension had already been raised by the murky death of the revolutionary mathematician Évariste Galois a few days earlier.
Because it’s a stage show which hasn’t been filmed, it’s surprisingly difficult to find YouTube videos which give the true feeling of watching it as it should be (and don’t have the appalling Michael Ball). This is the quasi-canonical version from the Anniversary concert, but of course it’s just people singing into microphones (even if appropriately costumed, and including the brilliant Lea Salonga as Eponine, though sadly also the said M Ball). The Lego version is surprisingly true to the spirit of the stage show. You might also want to check out two German versions here and here.
The vid linking the Obama campaign to the song is uplifting and hugely enjoyable, but I do wish they had picked a literary parallel where more of the characters avoid untimely deaths. As I recall, only Marius, Cosette and the Thenardiers survive to the end of stage the show (and in the book I think Madame Thenardier snuffs it too). Let us hope for a better survival ratio among the Obama campaign, whatever the result.
The Internets
Three stories that have hit my radar screen in the last few days about the rights and obligations of internet users.
1)
I’ve discussed three other cases of this before. La Petite Anglaise stayed scrupulously the right sight of professional behaviour, never identifying her employers or herself by name; and indeed, the worst thing she ever wrote about them was that they were a bit old-fashioned (which is perhaps what you actually want in an accountant). Not surprisingly she won her employment tribunal case and got thousands of euros. (And a book contract.)
Joe Gordon worked for Waterstone’s and occasionally blogged his frustrations in the workplace. He shouldn’t have done it in the terms he did, but as he was an established employee I think Waterstone’s should have asked – or better, Joe Gordon should have offered – to amend or delete the relevant entries. However, he got sacked as well.
Jan Pronk, the UN Envoy to Sudan, got into trouble for publishing his political views on his website. Here I think the situation is a little murkier, but if (as he claims) Pronk was only saying in public on his site what he was telling everyone else in private, and as long as he didn’t publish any privileged information, I think he was on the right side of the line. He too was sacked, but this was part of a wider picture of international chaos and ineptitude in the face of genocide.
2) The Torchwoodgate kerfuffle. Stephen James Walker has published (via Telos, which he co-owns) an unofficial guide to Series Two of Torchwood called Something in the Darkness. As part of his review of each episode he has copied large chunks of fannish Livejournal postings, without seeking permission from the writers. Walker has expressed bafflement that anyone could be upset by this.
My understanding of copyright is that your words are copyrighted to you the moment they leave your brain and are down on paper or electrons or whatever. Just because they are available for free on the internet doesn’t reduce your rights in them. The copied material is apparently a good third of the episode guide portion of the book. Walker is clearly making money from other people’s words which he has not paid for, and fans are right to be annoyed. What legal redress is available, I don’t know.
I have to say I have been very unimpressed on occasion by Telos’ discharge of its editorial responsibilities even to authors who don’t own the company. (See in particular my review of George Mann’s The Human Abstract.) They have published some good stuff as well, but there is an underlying current of a lack of professionalism.
3) Jonathan Fryer reports that a friend of his has been kicked off Facebook for acquiring too many friends too quickly. Well, I’ve managed to get up to 1016 Facebook friends by dint of careful management of my networks of professional contacts, sf fans and LJers, relatives and friends from school and college and elsewhere, since I joined it in February 2007. Occasionally I go through the list with the intention of deleting any who I don’t really know and added by mistake, but there are actually fairly few of these.
One of my friends joined Facebook less than a month ago, and her friends list is already at 1066. She is the leader of the main opposition party in her country, which may account for it. Nick Clegg is at 3395. You expect that people in the public eye will develop substantial numbers of contacts, and I suspect that Facebook did not query either Radmila Šekerinska or Nick Clegg when their lists suddenly expanded.
I bet that Jonathan’s friend, the publisher Gary Pulsifer, has like me a carefully managed contacts list, and is paying the price for using it on Facebook. The two crucial differences between him on the one hand and Šekerinska and Clegg on the other are 1) he is not as famous as they are and (related) 2) I imagine that he made most of the outward friend requests himself, whereas Šekerinska and Clegg are doubtless responding to friend requests from people who know them through their public activities.
Facebook are, I suspect, being unfair to Pulsifer. It is the recipient of the friend request who determines if it is valid, and has the option to block that user. It would be reasonable to restrict someone for sending “too many” friend requests, if they are spewing out invitations at random; but we are told that Pulsifer was “acquiring too many friends too quickly”, which implies that the people he was contacting actually wanted to add him back. There may be more to this story than I am aware of, but Facebook don’t do themselves any favours with this sort of behaviour.
Having said which, Facebook of course belongs not to its users but to Facebook, and they get to make the rules, and even change them arbitrarily without telling us if they want; that’s just the way life is. I’m sorry that Pulsifer has been booted, but it’s not going to stop me using the site.
The Dukes of Clarence
As I read Richard III, it occurs to me that the Dukes of Clarence were not lucky:
1) Lionel, Duke of Clarence, (1338-1368), son of Edward III, poisoned while visiting Italy.
2) Thomas, Duke of Clarence, (1388-1421), son of Henry IV, killed stupidly leading his troops in battle against the French (the archers hadn’t arrived but he ordered the attack anyway).
3) George, Duke of Clarence, (1449-1478), younger brother of Edward IV, supposedly drowned in a butt of malmsey wine on his brother’s orders.
5) Albert, Duke of Clarence, (1864-1892), the future George V’s elder brother, regarded by his family as feeble-minded and not excessively mourned when he died early.
Also there is the Duke of Clarence who never was, Lord Guilford Dudley (1536-1544) who was married to Lady Jane Grey, briefly queen of England in 1543. They were both executed the following year, but the original plan was for him to be made Duke of Clarence if she had managed to hang onto the throne.
The only slightly successful one was 4) William, Duke of Clarence, (1765-1837) who lived longer than any two of the others put together and ended up as King William IV; probably the least memorable of the Hanoverian kings. But sometimes obscurity is a blessing.
Social networking
So, is anyone else (apart from
Not quite…
I’m at a breakfast debate on Cyprus in Brussels, and one of the well-meaning attendees (introducing himself as Belgian, Swiss and European) asks if the negotiators plan to enlist the healing and positive forces of religious leaders in their quest for a solution?
I’m at the same table as a senior Greek Cypriot politician and the Turkish Cypriot presidential advisers, and they all crease up in scornful and disbelieving laughter.
A Quaker asks about scrapping the British bases, and the Cypriots on both sides at my table erupt in applause.
Nice to see unity across the line…
A welcome sight
They’re handing out free yogurt in the foyer of the Central Station!
September Books 9) Henry VI Part 3
9) The Third Part of King Henry the Sixth, by William Shakespeare
This is the least-owned individual Shakespeare play among LibraryThing users, which is a bit surprising since it is the best of the three parts of Henry VI, and is surely important background for Richard III (which comes next).
The title character gets a lot more prominence here than in the previous parts – where Part 1 was Talbot’s story, and Part 2 York’s, this is much more Henry’s. He gets by far the best scene almost to himself – Act 2 Scene 5, a meditation on the awfulness of war and the nature of kingship. Also, where the supernatural forces of the first two parts were the witchcraft practiced by Joan La Pucelle and the Duchess of Gloucester, here it is Henry himself who prophesies that Richmond will succeed him and that Gloucester will cause further deaths and misery (the latter, of course, not a terribly tough call as Gloucester is busy killing him at the time). Henry is a very sympathetic character here – he realises he is unfit to rule and hands over power (under constraint) to York and then (more willingly) to his former enemies Warwick and Clarence. His death, the last in a long series of horrible deaths throughout the play, is a fitting climax to the trilogy.
The other two leading characters (once York has been hacked to bits at the end of Act 1) are Henry’s wife, Queen Margaret, and Richard of Gloucester. Margaret is an established character from the first two plays, but here she comes into her own, essentially providing the leadership for the Lancastrians that Henry is not able to. She is the first really memorable female character who is not a witch. Those characters who complain about female leadership are shown up as mistaken; perhaps this is partly an implicit defence of Elizabeth I? She viciously tortures and kills York in the first act, but then sees her own son given the same treatment by York’s sons at the end; her zeal for the cause is manic rather than admirable, but at least she never changes sides.
Gloucester is of course shaping up to be a super-villain, and I guess I’ll have more to say about him in the next play. Sure, his villainy is a bit one-dimensional, but his asides to the audience explaining what he is up to are tremendously effective in drawing us into his confidence. David Troughton, in the version I have been listening to, makes him entirely fascinating. He is a much more interesting character than his brothers – in particular, Clarence’s motivation for ratting and (even more) re-ratting is pretty cardboardy.
The other two characters worthy of note are Warwick and Edward IV. But neither of them quite came alive for me; I felt Shakespeare was too burdened by the historical record to do a good job – Warwick especially is more acted upon than acting, and the capture and release of Edward by the Lancastrians just seemed a bit pointless. Warwick’s change of allegiance is directly motivated by Edward’s error of judgement in what is practically the only important decision we see him make as King – his pathetic attempt at seduction of Lady Grey in Act 3 Scene 2. I really wasn’t sure how to take that scene; I’ve seen some suggestions that it is meant to be comedy, but it didn’t make me laugh. The interesting echo from Henry VI Part 1, of course, is that we see Edward marrying for physical rather than political attraction, and in both cases this turns out to be a Bad Idea. (Again, I wonder if this was in some way commentary on current affairs?)
A final point is that, apart from the first act which tells of York’s rise and fall, I felt this play was less easily segmented than the other two; where Part 1 had a succession of emsembles doing different bits of the tail end of the Hundred Years War, and Part 2 told different bits of York’s story in each act, here the narrative seemed a bit more seamless.
Fails the Bechdel test dismally. The only point at which two women talk to each other is a very short conversation between Queen Margaret and King Lewis’s sister, Bona, about Edward IV.
Henry VI, Part I | Henry VI, Part II | Henry VI, Part III | Richard III / Richard III | Comedy of Errors | Titus Andronicus | Taming of the Shrew | Two Gentlemen of Verona | Love’s Labour’s Lost | Romeo and Juliet | Richard II / Richard II | A Midsummer Night’s Dream | King John | The Merchant of Venice | Henry IV, Part 1 / Henry IV, Part I | Henry IV, Part II | Henry V | Julius Caesar | Much Ado About Nothing | As You Like It | Merry Wives of Windsor | Hamlet / Hamlet | Twelfth Night | Troilus and Cressida | All’s Well That Ends Well | Measure for Measure | Othello | King Lear | Macbeth | Antony and Cleopatra | Coriolanus / Coriolanus | Timon of Athens | Pericles | Cymbeline | The Winter’s Tale / The Winter’s Tale | The Tempest | Henry VIII | The Two Noble Kinsmen | Edward III | Sir Thomas More (fragment) | Double Falshood/Cardenio
Ooogh
This train is running 40 minutes late.
Just as well I had allowed an hour’s turnaround in Munich; but I think I’ll be getting a taxi to the airport rather than the local train.
Eating meat
Ian is sceptical about the prospects that people might choose to have a vegetarian meal once a week for the sake of fighting global warming. I am not so sure. I first heard this idea a few months ago from the former Dutch liberal party leader Lousewies van der Laan, who is now a UN consultant on environmental issues. Then last weekend in Bled I was slightly stunned to hear it recommended emphatically by Wolfgang Schüssel, the former Chancellor of Austria. I basically agree with Ian that few people will change their lifestyles on the say-so of a UN official. But when political leaders (especially senior conservative politicians in countries famous for their meat dishes) start saying so too, then I reckon it may catch on.
September Books 8) Peter Abelard
8) Peter Abelard, by Helen Waddell
It’s not as good as it should be. Good points about the book include that she has not blandly adhered to the historical chronology of events, and she is quite charmingly discreet yet clear about such crucial events as sex in the convent refectory and the mutilation of Abelard by Héloïse’s uncle’s men. She also gives us a very good idea of where the two protagonists come from, with excellent sketches of Abelard’s family back in Brittany and Héloïse’s loyalty to the convent in Argenteuil (thanks to which the book sails through the Bechdel test), and the background scenery in Paris is also very convincingly sketched.
But while we have a good idea of where they come from, I wasn’t so convinced about where they go to during the book, particularly in the case of Héloïse – this is her story as much as Abelard’s, and it is quite unjust that she does not get equal billing in the title. History remembers her (and Waddell characterises her) from her later correspondence with Abelard, where one might get the impression that her relationship with him was the only interesting thing that ever happened to her – a twelfth-century version of the Sarah Jane Smith we met in School Reunion, perhaps. (This thought may require a separate post, or at least discussion in comments.) But I don’t think that the historical Héloïse of the 1130s is a reliable witness to her own state of mind of 1116-18, when you take into account who she was writing to and the passage of time. In particular I was struck that their baby son drops out of Waddell’s narrative without a trace, which can hardly have happened in real life. Perhaps also a reader today is less satisfied with the narrative of Heloise sacrificing all for her lover than the reader of 1933 would have been.
With Abelard, as you might expect given Waddell’s other work, she portrays him much more convincingly as a poet and lyricist than as a scholar – indeed, the scholarly scenes are the least convincing in the book, probably because she has taken fewest liberties with the historical facts. Rather bizarrely, one of Abelard’s friends ends the book by prophesying him as the John the Baptist-like fore-runner to Thomas Aquinas, which is really a bit absurd but is placed in such a way that you get the impression Waddell thinks this is the whole point of the story.
Anyway, it’s an interesting effort, but more that it was tried at all than that it is particularly good.
Uptalking
Language Log takes a letter from a parent worried about the way their child talks and ends up discussing the origins of the Belfast accent.
September Books 7) The Infinity Doctors
7) The Infinity Doctors, by Lance Parkin
While I liked the overall idea, and numerous details of the scenery, I wasn’t so sure about some of the plot. I felt that the Gallifrey audios managed to balance the idea of competing factions in Gallifrey, powerful external forces and rogue Time Lords rather better, and without having to invent a whole new continuity. One crucial point is that the Gallifreyan security system really is unrealistically poor, even for the sclerotic Time Lord society: there is little sense of urgency from the President and High Council as the body count rises in the corridors of the citadel, or when important visitors start going astray, and the Watch’s investigations are astonishingly incompetent.
However, the interactions between Time Lords and the rest of Gallifreyan society are well done, and so is the depiction of Omega’s universe and its limitations. There are also some intriguing hints about the Doctor’s own lost past, and his capacity for loving women of his own race. (And of course it’s impossible to know which Doctor we are dealing with here – Paul McGann without the wig, perhaps?)
Fails the Bechdel test, I’m afraid. There are few women characters – Omega’s unnamed wife, Larna who is the Doctor’s quasi-companion, and Larna’s maidservant; the first of these never meets the other two, and the only direct speech interchange between Larna and her maid is about a male visitor.
Otherwise, not bad, but not a classic either.
Three meals, six languages
Just reflecting back on my recent travels: on Monday evening last week, I was in Slovenia, and went out for dinner with a journalist friend. We ordered the meal in a mixture of pointing to the Slovenian menu and my tourist-level Serbo-Croat – which is similar to Slovenian, but sufficiently distinct in various ways to easily qualify as a separate language. I skipped breakfast on Tuesday as I was coming back to Brussels, but met a couple of people for lunch at one of the cafes near my office. As is standard in that part of town, we ordered in French but there was a strong undercurrent of Italian to the conversation, especially when difficulties arose. Then in the evening, finally at home, I took Anne out for dinner to one of the local places. Since we live in Flanders, we ordered in Dutch. It became clear that the staff also spoke English, but by that point I had almost forgotten how to do that in a restaurant.
And it’s German for the next two days.
It’s not the late nights, it’s the early mornings
Up early to go to Salzburg (flying to Munich, then taking the train). On Tuesday I will get up early to come back, and on Wednesday I have a breakfast meeting in Brussels which will make the third early morning in four days. I know some of you are natural larks, or have small and active children, but I am an old owl of 41 and it goes against the grain!
Since I’ve been travelling both last Sunday and today, I am going to take next Friday off to watch my (American) assistant getting married in Antwerp. While she has been doing wedding preparations, I have had a temporary replacement in the office; she is from Montenegro, which explains the strange accent of the person answering the phone in the unlikely event that you call me at work.
I hope they do something resembling breakfast on this flight.
September Books 6) How Proust Can Change Your Life
6) How Proust Can Change Your Life, by Alain de Botton
Random query
From time to time I get random queries about one or other aspect of my website; I’m going to start posting a few of them here, suitably anonymised.
Hello. While going through the estate of my grandfather in New England, I’ve come across a copy of “In Starry Realms” which is signed inside by the author “[E A], August ’96, from R.S. Ball Jr.” [E A] is my great grandmother. I wondered if there would be any interest in this book, perhaps among fans, from the academic personnel at Cambridge or elsewhere, or in the realm of book collectors in general. I thought I’d write and ask your opinion.
My reply:
R.S. Ball jr will certainly be Robert Steele Ball, born 1869, the son of the astronomer (they are buried in the same grave), who was a successful engineer in his own right, and studied for a while in Boston which might explain his acquaintance with your great-grandmother. It’s a nice touch to have his signature in the book, and it may add a dollar or two to the sale value, but to be honest I expect a dealer will be much more interested in its overall condition. It’s not a particularly rare book, first published in 1892 so a copy bought in 1896 is unlikely to be a first edition.
September Books 5) The Stone Rose
5) The Stone Rose, by Jacqueline Rayner
September Books 4) The Ill-Made Mute
4) The Ill-Made Mute, by Cecilia Dart-Thornton
Presidential election
Is Lembit Öpik actually going to stand in the Lib Dem presidential election? Ros Scott’s campaign site went live earlier this week; but there’s no mention of Lembit’s candidacy on the Montgomery Lib Dems site (perhaps that’s not allowed); nor, rather more surprisingly, on what appears to be his “official” site at ePolitix. (Indeed, the latter spells his surname “�pik” and appears not to have been updated for some time – the latest engagement marked in Lembit’s diary is for Saturday 12 June, which last fell in 2004.) The http://www.lembit4president.co.uk/ site is completely blank. Like anyone who reads the papers I know Lembit has not had an easy time in his personal life over the last few months; it would not astonish me if he decided that he didn’t need the hassle of the internal party election at this stage.
(Edited to add – I see James Graham asking the same question.)
September Books 3) Uit het Verleden van de Gemeente Oud-Heverlee
3) Uit het Verleden van de Gemeente Oud-Heverlee, by Erik Martens
I was interested to read of the original settlement of the area by Germanic-speaking tribesmen penetrating the forests from the north after the fall of the Roman empire. We are jammed right up against the taalgrens/frontière linguistique here, and this read to me as a suspiciously convenient proof that the Flemish are of different racial origin from the Walloons. By Martens’ own account, there are remains from the Roman period in the commune, mainly to do with early industry (iron-smelting and charcoal-burning); are we meant to think that their descendants just fled south to speak proto-French when the barbarians came? I expect that the truth, if we could ever find it, would be much more complicated. Throughout the book I was struck that Martens uses sources from the commune itself, and from neighbouring Flemish towns, but much less so from our Walloon neighbours to the south.
Anyway, I’m willing to give the Franks credit for settling the villages per se in the 5th or 6th century. Our own village, Oud-Heverlee, is not actually any older than Heverlee (now a suburb of Leuven to the north); the “Oud” is reckoned to be a corruption of “Hout” meaning “wood”. Certainly it lay deeper in the forest. Interesting that Christianity arrived only a century or so after the Frankish settlers, my occasional cracks about ancient rituals notwithstanding. Our local church dates from the eleventh century, and is therefore three times older than the oldest building in my native city, Belfast.
By various means four of the five villages became part of the estates of the Dukes of Arenberg during the middle ages (Vaalbeek, which is geographically in the middle, was an ecclesiastical possession). The book has various documents to illustrate this – I was struck by how similar 14th-century Dutch is to today’s language, certainly compared with the difference between Chaucer and us. The noted anatomist Andreas Vesalius came from the de Wesele family which owned the local castle (though he himself didn’t inherit as his father was illegitimate).
But the general story of the more recent centuries is one of terrible conflicts and partial recovery. The 1480s and 1740s seem to have been the worst, as the villages were devastated by other people’s wars, though the 1570s and 1690s were bad too. I understood why Belgium was called the “cockpit of Europe”, and why any Belgian with an understanding of history is vehemently in favour of European integration.
The revolution against the Arenbergs in these parts was motivated partly by wild boar. The Dukes kept the forest well stocked with them, but of course they much preferred to root around in the farms and gardens of the villagers (and there were a lot more of them by now; the human population of the area almost doubled in the decades after the end of the French occupation in 1749). The villagers appealed to Emperor Joseph II, who found in their favour and ordered that all boar should either be killed or kept in enclosed spaces. When the revolution finally came, the only recorded military engagement of the local revolutionary militia here is the brave slaughter of the duke’s remaining boar, which were shut up in a disused convent.
The book ends, rather disappointingly, in around 1800. I wonder why? Is it because after that date, it becomes too difficult to disentangle our local affairs from those of Leuven? Or are there skeletons in the closet from the last two centuries which the mayor and the author deemed better left to rest? Perhaps I shall find out some day.
September Books 2) Henry VI Part 2
2) The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth, by William Shakespeare
Where Part 1 is really the story of Talbot, Part 2 is much more about Richard, Duke of York as he rises to power. I actually felt it wasn’t as successful as a play as Part 1, though the narrative is at least closed a bit more clearly; there are too many characters who are introduced just in order to be killed off for historical accuracy (Lord Say being the most heinous, but there are a lot of others too).
I’ve settled into a pattern of reading each Act and then listening to it before going on to the next, so as to appreciate what was presumably the original structure. Two of the five acts here stand out as particularly self-contained. Act 1 has the mini-plot of the Duchess of Gloucester rivalling the Queen for influence (in a scene which scrapes through the Bechdel test by the smallest margin imaginable, the two squabble over a dropped fan). The Duchess is then expelled from political life when she is found to be consorting with necromancers. I thought it was rather bold of Shakespeare to insert this into what is after all supposed to be a history play, but found to my surprise that it is perfectly true.
In the second and third acts, Henry VI’s key advisers remove each other from the scene by various sinister means, and York is sent off to Ireland to quell the natives. He is therefore absent from the fourth act, which is entirely about the rise and fall of Jack Cade’s rebellion. It’s a rather fascinating sequence of ten scenes (none of the other acts has more than four); I wasn’t sure whether to read it as biting social commentary of slapstick satire, and no doubt both were in the author’s mind as he wrote. (The only well-known line from this play – “Let’s kill all the lawyers!” – is certainly in the slapstick category.) Cade is certainly a fraud, but a convincing one whose social theory is not far from much later discourse including the Diggers and Karl Marx, and he meets his doom with a certain gutsy pride.
And in the last act, York returns from Ireland and wins the Battle of St Albans. Obviously one of the things that interests me is the portrayal of Ireland as a place of strife where a bright English lordling might yet make a name for himself. (York was certainly not the first to do so; the last was probably Arthur James Balfour. Or possibly Winston Churchill if we stretch the definition a bit. But definitely not Michael Ancram.) We are told pretty clearly that York owes his victory to the Irish mercenaries, but they get no voice (unlike the various members of Cade’s London mob).
More crucially, we don’t get a terribly good sense of why overthrowing King Henry is a Good Idea. It’s a bit odd that York only decides to make a fuss about his superior genealogical claim in the second act of the second play of this sequence; and then it is only mentioned once afterwards. The disastrous losses of territory in France happen off-scene and are referred to only briefly. Henry (again David Tennant, in the Arkadin version) is clearly a poor leader, torn between his own deeply-felt ethics and bowing to the loudest voice in the court, but that is never explicitly given as a reason to oppose him. And although Shakespeare obviously wants York to be the hero, it’s a bit nasty of him to sit back and let his rivals destroy each other in the first half of the play. So I guess I find myself more sympathetic to the notion that this was the first of the three Henry VI’s to be adapted from Holinshed, as the narrative and characterisation are forced to accommodate the historical data.
Henry VI, Part I | Henry VI, Part II | Henry VI, Part III | Richard III / Richard III | Comedy of Errors | Titus Andronicus | Taming of the Shrew | Two Gentlemen of Verona | Love’s Labour’s Lost | Romeo and Juliet | Richard II / Richard II | A Midsummer Night’s Dream | King John | The Merchant of Venice | Henry IV, Part 1 / Henry IV, Part I | Henry IV, Part II | Henry V | Julius Caesar | Much Ado About Nothing | As You Like It | Merry Wives of Windsor | Hamlet / Hamlet | Twelfth Night | Troilus and Cressida | All’s Well That Ends Well | Measure for Measure | Othello | King Lear | Macbeth | Antony and Cleopatra | Coriolanus / Coriolanus | Timon of Athens | Pericles | Cymbeline | The Winter’s Tale / The Winter’s Tale | The Tempest | Henry VIII | The Two Noble Kinsmen | Edward III | Sir Thomas More (fragment) | Double Falshood/Cardenio
The election again – psephological/geographical anorakery
Actually the most interesting bit of psephological anorakery about this year’s election so far is Crooked Timber’s piece on the time zone biases of the candidates. The only Democratic candidate for either President or Vice-President who was living outside the Central or Eastern time zones (or at least the territory which now forms them) when nominated was Senator Joseph Lane of Oregon (who???), and he doesn’t really count. Meanwhile the Republicans have had a more westerly candidate on the ticket two times out of three (and this year of course that goes for both of them).
It’s probably not that significant, of course. But NB that while the Republicans won nine of the fourteen elections where they had a Western candidate, they won only one of the six where neither of their candidates was a Westerner (1988; losses in 1936, 1944, 1976, 1992 and 1996).
Get a grip!
The Sarah Palin nomination looks to me like a stroke of genius. She actually looks like a normal person; I can’t remember the last candidate for either President or Vice-President who did. (Possibly Jimmy Carter.) There is a romantic streak in all of us that would like to see the outsider defeat the establishment, in any country, and the spirit of Jackson’s victory in 1828 (and to a much lesser extent Harrison’s in 1840) lives on. McCain sees himself in that mould, but has had difficulty conveying that message – candidates of the incumbent party will always find it particularly difficult to look like a new broom (the only example I can think of off-hand is Sarkozy in France last year, and look how quickly that went wrong). Palin however is clearly an outsider, a competent speaker, and as I said looks like a normal person. Whether or not Americans are really prepared to vote for someone who doesn’t look like a politician remains to be seen.
The response from the Left is helping, if anything. Yes, she is inexperienced, but the Republicans obviously realised that that wasn’t working as a charge against Obama, and decided to roll with it; and Obama’s supporters now cannot really use Palin’s inexperience against her without inviting the obvious counterattack – so what if Palin has only run a very small town and a very small state; that is still more than Obama has ever run (or, for that matter, McCain).
The news about her daughter is also a complete winner, in my view. Before it broke,
There are good reasons to attack Palin’s judgement – her definition of clean government seems flexible enough to allow her to pursue family vendettas from the Governor’s office. There are plenty of good reasons to worry about the McCain-Palin ticket; in my own area of particular interest, foreign policy, I confess I don’t have a terribly clear image of what Obama’s line actually is, but I have a good understanding of McCain’s line – and it frightens me – and I know and respect a lot of Obama’s people, which reassures me. So let’s stay with the sensible stuff, OK?
More EU telecoms
Sinn Féin’s Bairbre de Brún (who actually taught me French at school for a year) has sent me her speech on the telecomms package, translated from the original Irish. The money quote:
The European Parliament must act to delete the most regressive elements it has introduced into this directive. As it currently stands this directive opens the door for further involvement by businesses and state organs into the private use of communications networks by individuals. The protection of intellectual property rights must not be used as an excuse to allow personal and private data to be accessed by unaccountable bodies.
Previous responses logged from Saïd El-Khadroui here, and Heide Rühle, Gisela Kallenbach, Bart Staes and Chris Davies here and here.
September Books 1) Mystic River
1) Mystic River, by Dennis Lehane
Picked this up on a friend’s recommendation of the author last month, and I must say I was really impressed. Superficially it’s the story of a murder, and the links between the victim’s father, the investigating detective and the chief suspect, who were childhood friends; but it’s also a story of a Boston community, of families, of deep secrets and love and hate, with fascinating characters and a twist or two in the tail. Excellent stuff, and I will look out for more from Lehane.
Just about passes the Bechdel test, as we follow the victim’s final evening with her friends.