So, as Fianna Fáil abandoned the ragbag of right-wingers with whom they sat in the European Parliament in order to join a major group, the British Conservatives are doing the opposite. (Hat-tip to Tim Roll-Pickering, who unlike most Tories actually understands Europe and thinks, in my opinion a bit wishfully, that this won’t last.)
Monthly Archives: March 2009
March Books 9) The Shadow of Weng-Chiang, by David A. McIntee
I was unimpressed with the last Doctor Who story I read with a Chinese setting, but David McIntee has done a lot better here, with the Doctor and Romana I drawn aside from their quest for the Key to Time to deal with the legacy of the Doctor’s Victorian theatrical adventures in 1937 Shanghai, where Chinese and Japanese factions and agents are competing over various assets which turn out to include Mr Sin, a nuclear reactor and an attempt to divert Magnus Greel from his fate. Several pleasing nods to continuity, and I think he captures the Baker / Tamm / Leeson dynamic rather nicely as well. One of the better Missing Adventures.
Things that caught my eye
Doug Muir at A Fistful of Euros informs us that Yunus-Bek Yevkirov, the new President of Ingushetia, was also the leader of the March on Pristina in 1999.
One can lead a column to Pristina every day, but of course here in the republic, things are far more difficult.
Alexandra Bell and Ben Loehrke on Democracy Arsenal compare missile defence to snake oil (which I think is a bit unfair on snake oil):
… technology that does not work against a threat that does not exist…
Henry Farrell on Crooked Timber defends the European Parliament:
…complaints about the self-importance and amour-propre of MEPs seem to me to really miss the point.
On a lighter note, Maria Farrell, also on Crooked Timber, muses on kissing:
I do a fair bit of cheek-kissing and hugging, both socially and at work, probably more than most but not unusually so (I haven’t had any complaints yet).
Finally, back to Henry again who has advice for prospective graduate students.
Bernice Summerfield, Series 4
I’m running out of actual BF Who audios to listen to, but there are still a few spinoff series to get through.
So in summary, The Draconian Rage is recommended for those with strong stomachs; Death and the Daleks for those who don’t mind catching up with a bit of continuity; and the other two not really recommended at all.
March Books 8) Macbeth, by William Shakespeare
Macbeth is the last of the Shakespeare plays that I know well. It really is a good one: actually rather tightly plotted, with both lead roles undergoing transitions of character, in Macbeth’s case egged on by the witches (who are memorable but a bit superfluous). The pivotal moments are in Act 3, where Macbeth thinks he is securng his rule by Banquo’s murder but in fact finds his ability to operate as a king destroyed by Banquo’s ghost. It’s as if Shakespeare is returning to the themes of the first quadrilogy, but fictionally this time, and perhaps with a perspective of the reign of King James rather than Queen Elizabeth.
Lots of good lines – the reason they stick in the mind is that they are actually memorable images or juxtapositions of words, like the seeds of time, the milk of human kindness, screwing one’s courage to the sticking-place, Out, Damned Spot! and Lay On, Macduff!
Arkangel have done very well here, by taking the rare but very obvious course of setting the play in, er, Scotland, with appropriate accents and skirling of bagpipes; this gives the whole play an extra edge that I had never really considered properly before. Hugh Ross is OK in the title role, but Harriet Walter is absolutely superb as Lady Macbeth and really carries the rest; I was not surprised to discover that she had played the part memorably for the RSC a few years before.. (David Tennant looks in as the Porter.) It’s not quite as stellar as some of the best Arkangel productions, but it’s certainly good enough for me.
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
Gibbon on the younger Gordian
Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations, and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than ostentation.
(Decline and Fall, chapter VII)
I know these are petty points, but…
…about two thirds of you who answered the previous poll didn’t have the faintest notion what I was on about.
A relatively sympathetic article revealing the answer is here. The Guardian, God bless them, are spinning this story as the British rightwing press being outraged for the sake of outrage.
But I’m afraid this is part of a pattern in the last few days: Hillary Clinton presented her Russian opposite number, Sergei Lavrov, with a gag “Reset” button which had the word “reset” in both English and Russian. Except that the Russian for “reset” was a) spelt wrong and b) in the wrong alphabet anyway.
Come on guys. I was overjoyed when you won; please pay attention to the tiny details. They matter.
Following the Wall
I was in Berlin earlier in the week, and decided to
Almost everywhere it’s pretty easy to follow. This is from near the start of the trail on the Zimmerstraße, looking west:
And this is at the end of that leg, looking east along the Niederkirchnerstraße from the Stresemannstraße:
Here it is snaking across the Potsdamer Platz (strictly speaking this may be the nearby Fontane Platz):
Here’s the view north along the Ebertstraße to the Brandenburg Gate (the sun had come out by now):
Here it is snaking around the Brandenburg Gate (off this line of vision to the right; the Reichstag in the background):
And here we are looking south from the Reichstag to the Brandenburg Gate (the sun having gone in again):
And you can just see it here in the road in front of the Gate:
From these lines in the road, which cars casually park on and drive over, it is almost impossible to imagine what the wall meant to those of us who are old enough to remember the Cold War. What seemed then an immovable barrier has been reduced to a few bricks at street level. It still seems incredible to me.
There is one short stretch still standing on the Niederkirchnerstraße, here looking “West” (actually south-west from this angle) to the Martin Gropius Building, museum and exhibition hall whose entrance was basically blocked by the Wall for many years. (NB the graffiti is post-’89: this was the “Eastern” side of the wall.)
And this is the same stretch looking “East” (really northwest) to the new Berlin parliament building. (Notice absence of graffiti, no doubt all chipped off by souvenir hunters in 1989 or shortly thereafter.) Here it forms part of a permanent open-air exhibition called “The Topography of Terror” to mark the site of the SS and Gestapo headquarters. Hitler’s bunker was a few blocks further north.
The wall skirts a number of other interesting structures. Here is what is left of Checkpoint Charlie, looking southeast past the old US guard post to the Checkpoint Charlie museum (which I went to a few years back; it’s pretty impressive).
The old sign is still there too:
Up near the Reichstag is this little memorial to those who were killed trying to cross the Wall.
The restored Reichstag is remarkable:
The new Chancellery building less so:
Everything in Berlin is well sign-posted – this was the end of my walk:
The most impressive of the memorials occupies a full block between the Potsdamer Platz and the Brandenburg Gate, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
I recommend you go and see for yourself.
Which of these films have you seen?
March Books 7) The Power of Speech, by Graham Watson
This is a collection of sixty or so speeches made by Graham Watson MEP since he became leader of the Liberal group of members of the European Parliament. I know the author, and inevitably – especially given that it’s a book of speeches – I hear his gentle Rothesay accent in my head as I read the words. (Although he is a Scot, he actually represents South-Western England. And Gibraltar.)
Speeches are odd: on the one hand, they can be pretty ephemeral, on the other hand, they can be tremendously difficult to prepare. I did one in Berlin myself yesterday, addressing diplomats and academics from Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, South Africa, India, China and Indonesia. The topic was one that I have thought about quite often, and talked about occasionally, but had never had to marshall my thoughts on before, let alone present them before an audience of complete strangers. I had a sleepless night on Saturday, dreaming that I would miss my plane, and a sleepless night on Sunday, dreaming that the speech would go badly. In the end I think it went OK – it was in the German foreign ministry, where you can easily work up the last-minute adrenalin by leaping in and out of the paternosters. I’ll probably write it up here eventually – I took the precaution of recording myself on my MP3 player. (And it was tighter than I had anticipated to catch my plane this morning as I caught up on lost sleep from the two previous nights. I was in no danger of missing the flight, but did miss breakfast.)
Graham Watson’s speeches are all much shorter – the longest of these can’t be more than a quarter of an hour, the shortest are parliamentary interventions where MEPs are speaking against the clock. Some are very specific – Russia, Gibraltar, Cyprus, the poor management of his own election campaign in 1999. Others are broader. I don’t think anyone could read the collection and come away from it with the feeling that they didn’t know what Graham Watson stands for; he’s pretty clear on his concept of liberalism, and he has obviously managed to make it appealing to large numbers of MEPs (and, hopefully, their voters); the size of the Liberal group has doubled under his leadership, without his dialling down his own rhetoric in any way, and continues to pull in recruits.
Graham has announced that while he is running for re-election to the European Parliament, he will stand down as leader of the Liberal group after seven years and will instead pitch for the position of President (ie Speaker) of the parliament as a whole. It’s a bit of a long shot, but I would like to see him get it.
March Books 6) Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, by J.K. Rowling
I thought on first reading it that this was one of the less successful of the Harry Potter books, and my prejudices were confirmed re-reading it now. It’s rather marking time between the scene-setting of volume 1 and the big reveals of volume 3. It’s also marred by the poor world-building of the politics of wizardry – the nature of the power relationships between the Minister for Magic, Lucius Malfoy, Dumbledore and the Weasleys’ father is never made very clear or credible. It seems extraordinary that no action beyond sidelining Dumbledore is taken after the outbreak of petrifactions, and even more extraordinary that the fraudulent Gilderoy Lockhart is allowed to remain in his job for a week, never mind three terms. Do the parents of Hogwarts pupils not care about their children being turned to stone, or set exam questions on their teachers’ autobiographies?
(One other niggle: given that Harry is so rich, why doesn’t he upgrade the Gryffindor Quidditch team’s broomsticks and get Ron a new wand?)
There are two saving graces to the book, though. The first is the diary – an artifact that seduces poor Ginny to do evil, that maintains Voldemort’s secret original identity. It’s a very creepy betrayal of intimacy. (Of course, if your diary is a Livejournal, it talks back to you in many voices…)
The other is the key moral message of the book that bigotry is wrong. It’s not only the nastiness of cheap insults like “Mudblood” and “Squib” and the consciousness of wizardly privilege; there’s also the moment when Harry inadvertently exposes himself as a Parseltongue, and his reputation plummets. It’s character-building for him, and hopefully thought-provoking for those readers who may not previously have had to think much about prejudice and privilege.
Anyway, Azkaban next, which is my favourite of the series.
< Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone | Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets | Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban | Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire | Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix | Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince | Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows | The Tales of Beedle the Bard >
Masters of War (and Sympathy for the Devil)
Masters of War is the latest in the BF Doctor Who Unbound series of audios, featuring David Warner as an alternate Third Doctor. I decided that before listening to it I would give the first Warner!Doctor story, Sympathy for the Devil, another go. I must say I appreciated its strengths even more two years on, with the Warner!Doctor / Gatiss!Master relationship sonewhat eerily mirrored by that between Nicholas Courtney’s failed Brigadier and his arrogant successor (played by David Tennant).
Unfortunately I didn’t think Masters of War matched up. There are some excellent performances – Terry Molloy as Davros, Courtney as the Brigadier, Briggs as the Daleks, Amy Pemberton as one of the Thals – but there’s a bit of a gap at the centre as Warner doesn’t quite seem to know what hs Doctor is really doing. The plot, too, disappointed
Facebook update doubling as a statement of foreign policy
“Carl is nervously waiting for the result of the North Korean parliamentary election today…”
(“Carl” is the Swedish foreign minister. It is genuinely his facebook account.)
March Books 5) Persepolis 2: the Story of a Return, by Marjane Satrapi
I’m startled to see that it is four and a half years since I read (and greatly enjoyed) the first volume of Satrapi’s autobiography. At the end of the previous book she had managed to get out of the Islamic Republic of Iran to Austria. Persepolis 2 falls into two halves: her Austrian experience, and then her return to Iran, at the end of which she emigrates again to France. In both Vienna and Tehran, she is in a relationship whose breakdown is a key factor in her decision to leave. But the narrative similarities between the two halves of the book actually help to contrast the huge differences between the two. In Vienna, she is an immigrant, sworn at by old men on buses, bereft of family links, ending up sleeping on the streets in the middle of winter. In Tehran she is spoiled by her experience of the outside world, picks fights with the religious authorities, has difficulty fitting back in. (In both cases, though this is not quite how she puts it, she struggles with substance abuse and depression.)
The story of the education of Marjane is told with detachment, and occasional amusement and shame at the actions of her younger self. As with the first volume, however, the real strength of the book is her depiction of life in the Islamic Republic of Iran, where few actually support the principles of the revolution, but all must pay lip service to it, and all women must obey the dress code. (She also answers a question I almost asked a few weeks back.) As an art student, she has the bizarre experience of trying to draw a female model whose body is completely covered; the girls solve this by modelling for each other at home. She successfully challenges the college to change the uniform for female students, and ends up designing it herself. Finally, at the end of the book, she and her husband embark on a grand project exploring Iranian culture and mythology; but in the end it turns out to be incompatible with the principles of the Islamic Revolution, and their marriage ends, and Marjane leaves for France.
It’s all in black and white: on the surface there appear to be no shades of grey in Satrapi’s world. But if you look closely you can see that they are there.
My review of Angels and Demons…
…is far and away the top-rated review of the book on Library Thing!
If you voted for it, thank you!
March Books 4) Search for a New Somali Identity, by Hussein Ali Dualeh
Dualeh is a senior Somali political figure, currently Somaliland’s Minister of Finance. In this 2002 book he reminisces about his own life and reflects on the future of the Somali people.
The other particularly fascinating chapter is his account of being Somalia’s ambassador to Uganda during the reign of Idi Amin, who he got to know rather well (and chided directly for being too ostentatiously public in his mosque attendance). There is an extraordinary anecdote of his amost walking in on a meeting between Amin and the Minister of Finance, where Amin demanded that, if the country was running out of money, they should just print more. The minister refused, and fled Uganda that evening, probably wisely.
It’s a bit frustrating that the chapters are arranged in slightly haphazard order: we have the story of the author’s failed 1961 coup after the story of his subsequent trial, and the account of the 1990s collapse of Somalia comes before the account of the misrule of the 1970s and 1980s which caused it. And I found myself wondering for several chapters why it was that the international community failed to mediate when the 1960 arrangements broke down (cf Cyprus where they didn’t do much but at least did something); and eventually the answer appeared – Somalia was a Soviet client state, so nobody was much interested in helping sort out its internal governance problems.
Dualeh makes a very clear case for Somaliland’s recognition as an independent state. It easily clears the hurdle of the Montevideo criteria
Doctor Who in Shakespeare
Looking the other way round from a previous post, this is a list of Doctor Who actors who have appeared in Shakespeare.
Jacqueline Hill was Lady Capulet in the 1978 BBC Romeo and Juliet.
Early in his career, Patrick Troughton did several Shakespeares, two of which were Hamlet – he was Horatio in a 1947 production, and rather more famously the Player King in Olivier’s 1948 version. In the latter year he was also Edmund in a TV King Lear. A few years later he was back with Olivier to be the murderous Tyrell in the 1955 Richard III.
The closest I can get to a Shakespeare connection for Jon Pertwee is his appearance as the Soothsayer in Carry on Cleo.
Caroline John was Hero in a 1967 BBC production of Much Ado About Nothing.
Tom Baker‘s film debut was in a 1968 release of The Winter’s Tale, as the Bear, which seems a bit inglorious.
Lalla Ward was Ophelia to Derek Jacobi’s Hamlet in the 1980 BBC production.
Peter Davison has published commentaries on a number of Shakespeare plays, including the First Quarto version of Richard III, Henry IV Parts I and II, Othello, Richard II and Henry V, though he is better known as a scholar of George Orwell. I refer of course to the former Professor of English at De Montfort University in Leicester, not to the actor whose real name is Peter Moffatt and who doesn’t appear to have any Shakespearean credits.
Colin Baker has done a fair amount of stage Shakespeare but nothing on screen.
Sylvester McCoy plays the Fool (so not much new there) in the recent Trevor Nunn / Ian McKellen King Lear.
In the same year as he became the Eighth Doctor, Paul McGann was Bassanio in Channel 4’s The Merchant of Venice.
Christopher Eccleston was Ben Jago in Andrew Davies’ 2002 update of Othello.
Billie Piper was Hero in David Nicholls’ 2005 update of Much Ado About Nothing.
David Tennant has done a lot of Shakespeare on stage, and I’ve been enjoying his performances on the Arkangel series of audios as well – Henry VI, Antipholus of Syracuse, Laucelot Gobbo, Edgar, Mercutio, and I’m looking forward to him as the Porter in Macbeth which is next on my list. Apparently his Hamlet is coming out on DVD; I can’t wait.
Not aware of any Shakespeare action from Matt Smith
This is all leading somewhere, just not quite sure where at the moment…
It’s a shame that Marco Polo was wiped…
…but if you get hold of “It’s Your Funeral”, the 11th episode of The Prisoner, you can see Mark Eden (Marco Polo) as Number 100, Derren Nesbitt (Tegana) as the incoming Number Two, and Martin Miller (Kublai Khan) as the watch-maker. Nesbitt is in a strange blond wig and thick glasses, but Eden looks just like in the surviving pics from his Doctor Who appearance three years before. Miller’s hair is a bit shorter but it’s a surprisingly similar character.
Also Wanda Ventham, who is in The Faceless Ones, Time and the Rani and most memorably Thea Ransome in Image of the Fendahl, is here briefly as a computer attendant, and Angelo Muscat, the recurring Butler, was a Chumbley in Galaxy 4. And for a different cult TV link, Annette Andre, who is the main female character in this story, Number 50, is Mrs Hopkirk in Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased).
Edited to add: see pics from “It’s your funeral” here and here.
March Books 3) King Lear, by William Shakespeare
This is another one of the great Shakespeare plays which I did not know at all before starting this project. (I thought I might have seen a school production but must have been mistaken.) It’s a bleak piece of work, two dysfunctional families (Lear and his daughters, Gloster and his sons) who are each capable of private disaster and combine to make public catastrophe. Lear in particular is a walking emotional trainwreck. Shakespeare’s triumph here is that although Lear behaves incredibly badly in the very first scene, we still sympathise enough to want to know what happens to him. Edmuind is a much smoother baddie, who is worthy of a play of his own. The plot is a wee bit wobbly at the edges, but that’s not the point: this is a play about strong characters and their families.
The bit with Gloster’s eyes being pulled out and jumped on is pretty repulsive – I don’t recall anything this gruesome in Shakespeare since Titus Andronicus; perhaps the audience was demanding more gore? Arkangel have two excellent actors paying Lear and Edgar in Trevor Peacock (who I’m ashamed to say I knew only from The Vicar of Dibley before I started this project) and David Tennant (whoever he is). Along with the Fool (John Rogan) they rather overshadow the rest of the cast – I particularly wished that Gerry Murphy as Edmund had found a little more oomph. But basically the quality of the script carries even average performances from the others to make it a pretty good listen.
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
What’s going on
To change the subject back to where it ought to have been, in the spirit of
2004 (3/146 books total, 2.1%)
Fermat’s Last Theorem
Persepolis I
Wild Seed
2005 (4/137 books total, 2.9%)
Babel-17
A Personal Matter
The Jewel-Hinged Jaw
Macedonia: The Bradt Travel Guide
2006 (8/207 books total, 3.9%)
The Kite Runner
Beloved
The God of Small Things
Things Fall Apart
The Color Purple
Never Let Me Go
The Einstein Intersection
Kapilavastu
2007 (6/235 books total, 2.6%)
The Art of War
The Satanic Verses
Wild Swans
Dhalgren
Palace Walk
Mindscape
2008 (5/363 books total, 1.4%)
A House for Mr Biswas
A History of the Arab Peoples
Freedom From Fear
The River of Lost Footsteps
Contested Lands
2009
none so far (of 52).
I should be able to do better than that. At present I have the following on my unread list:
Non-fiction:
- Reading Lolita in Tehran (Nafisi)
- A Universal History of Numbers (Ifrah)
- Search for a New Somali Identity (Hussein Ali Dualeh)
- Kindred (Butler)
- Black Juice (Lanagan)
- Cities of Salt (Munif)
- So Long Been Dreaming (Hopkinson)
- Persepolis II (Satrapi)
- With The Light (Tobe)
Comments disabled; this is more in the nature of a public note to myself.
Culture Minister FAIL
http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/main/news/17179/
As a matter of interest…
Has any non-white writer written for Doctor Who?
(Noel Clarke of course has written for Torchwood.)
The Eighth Doctor / Lucie stories: first series
I was not so sure about Lucie Miller. This is not a criticism of Sheridan Smith’s portrayal – as a northern lass reacting to the Eighth Doctor’s airs, she is rather good and builds up a memorable presence very quickly. But her back story is much less credible: snatched from (where?) by the Time Lords, and then the Doctor wilfully failing to interrogate her fully. This story came out at the same time as The Runaway Bride, which also had a companion mysteriously manifesting in the Tardis, but dealt with that rather better, I thought.
Good stuff from Anita Dobson as the civilian leader and Hayley Attwell (who was the Duchess’s husband’s lover in The Duchess); also Kenneth Cranham was new to me, and I thought must be Bill Oddie at first, though a glance at the credits put me right.
Basically, all of these (apart from No More Lies) are decent fare, but none really blew me away with their brilliance. I’m only listening to them now because I’m running out of BF audios to listen to. Perhaps the second series will have higher peaks.
March Books 2) Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown
You are the Director of CERN, and one of your senior colleagues is killed in his room with a peculiar word branded on his chest. Do you:
1) inform the authorities
2) google the word branded on the dead man’s chest and then phone the first Harvard professor whose name appears in the search results
3) have a nice cup of tea?
You are the head of the Swiss Guard, responsible for the security of the Vatican during the conclave which will elect the next Pope. You receive reliable information that an explosive of unimaginable power has been hidden somewhere in the Vatican and will detonate in a few hours. Incidentally, four senior cardinals have also disappeared. Do you:
1) evacuate everyone, including the cardinals and most of the population of Rome
2) lock the cardinals into the Sistine Chapel and hope that the explosive device will be found by the Harvard professor and the cute physicist who have just turned up
3) have a nice cup of tea?
What was the fate of Copernicus?
1) executed by the church for heresy
2) died in his bed after a lifetime as a priest and senior government official in a church-run statelet
3) he had a nice cup of tea
How likely is it that a Catholic priest would be allowed to adopt a daughter?
1) if they are both interested in physics and she looks good in shorts, I can’t see why anyone would find it unusual
2) you must be joking
3) perhaps they could have a nice cup of tea together
Was Winston Churchill a Catholic? Are only cardinals eligible to be elected Pope by ballot?
1) Boring technicalities!
2) A poor excuse for research
3) I’ve put the kettle on
Who do you trust most for good information on the historical relationship between religion and science?
1) Dan Brown
2) Richard Dawkins
3) Stephen Jay Gould
My grandmother’s home
My grandmother grew up in Plainfield, New Jersey, and on the last day of my recent trip to the States I rented a car and drove the 28 miles there from New York to see what I could find. Rather to my surprise and delight the house she had spent most of her childhood in, 144 East 7th St, is still standing, the only older house in its block; it is derelict, with tarpaulins rather than curtains shading the downstairs windows and no sign of occupancy, but at least it is still there.
It was from here that one afternoon in 1906 family friends suddenly and frenziedly swept her away to go and play with their own children. She was not immediately told why, but her mother had just died in childbirth (the baby died too). My grandmother writes about it as if it was her first clear memory; it’s rather weird to see the doorstep from which she was swept away that summer day over a hundred years ago.
My great-grandparents had moved to the much larger house on East 7th Street in 1902; originally their Plainfield home was a block away on 115 East 6th Street, which is also still standing though in worse shape than their later residence:
After her mother’s death, her father married Sallie Brooks, a widow who lived across the road in 147 East 7th St. Unfortunately that house has been demolished and the site is a car park.
However, Sallie Brooks had first lived some way to the south in Plainfield; she had two sons, one of whom, Van Wyck Brooks, grew up to be a Pulitzer Prize-winning literary critic. He described Plainfield as “a suburb of Wall Street”. I tracked down the house the he had grown up in, 563 West 8th Street, still on record in the Plainfield archives as the “Van Wyck Brooks House”:
The surrounding area is now called the “Van Wyck Brooks Historic District” and has many houses in it much more interesting than any of the ones to which I have a family connection. I liked this one most:
March Books 1) Jennie, by Paul Gallico
Gallico wrote a number of sentimental novels about cute animals, and this is one of them: a young boy is turned into a cat, and gets to know the feline world of London (and Glasgow) under the loving tutelage of fellow cat Jennie. It’s sweet and even moving in places. Also not very long.
Identity
I’ve been musing on a couple of posts elsewhere about on-line anonymity and its virtues or vices. This reflection is not especially explicitly related to those posts.
I am also restricted what I can say in a public forum even on non-pornographic topics. By the nature of my work, I am privy to a lot of stuff that needs to stay off-line. I have professional relationships which I cannot put at risk by posting about them here. Though I have to say that I think most people with jobs are in a similar position, including, say, the guy who blogged about how crap his temping job was at company X (and named the company), or the barmaid who blogged about how badly her celebrity customer behaved. That strikes me as stupid behaviour, and the fact that they both got sacked is pretty inevitable.
There are ways around it. Livejournal’s locking and filtering can be a useful mechanism for venting about the shitty day you’ve had at work (which in my case, I’m glad to say, are not very frequent.) La Petite Anglaise famously got sacked although she had discreetly maintained her own anonymity and that of her employer; she won substantial compensation for unfair dismissal. Others seem to get away with more.
One of the reasons I keep adding to my own on-line presence in my own name is to try and drown out the occasional hostile commentary I have picked up (and which I also link to in embittered, locked, filtered entries) by ensuring that most of the stuff that comes up when you google me is stuff I’ve written or consented to.
I have of course set up google alerts on myself; the other week an Irish blogger completely misquoted me on a sensitive issue, and I picked it up and demanded (successfully) that he delete the inaccurate paragraph. I was probably the only person who actually read the entry in question, but I felt it worth putting energy into; once it’s online it’s in the public domain.
Online anonymity is going to become increasingly difficult to maintain. I routinely google shortlisted candidates whose CVs hit my desk, looking for evidence of political activism (which, from where I’m sitting, is a Good Thing). Is that an invasion of privacy? I think it’s due diligence, as long as you treat the results of your googling with a serious reliability filter. If a candidate isn’t on Facebook these days, I tend to wonder why not – indicates a lack of interest in new technology and networking which is rather surprising for someone looking for a job in my line of work. (There is a Facebook group for my growing number of ex-interns.)
But I entirely understand why many people whose personal or professional circumstances are less favourable than my own choose to try and maintain on-line anonymity. (And, as stated above, I recognise that my own choice cuts me off from certain topics, at least using the identity of
We all have choices to make; and they are new choices that previous generations did not have to make.
Fianna Fáil and the liberals
It’s been brewing for a while, but it now looks like Fianna Fáil are going to join the European Liberals.
The European political parties are essentially vehicles to enable MEPs to operate procedurally in the European Parliament, only loosely held together by ideology. (The most ideological MEPs – the Euro-sceptic far right – tend to find it the most difficult to form lasting alliances.) We should not be terribly surprised by this. Political parties, in the end, are tactical alliances of individual party members who want to see the world changed in a particular way. They often like to behave as if they are monolithic bodies, but this is rarely the case. In the European Parliament, given the vastly different political bases from which its member sderive support, it is almost surprising that ideology plays as big a role as it does.
There have historically been about half a dozen party groups in the European Parliament: the two big ones are the centre-left Social Democrats, and the centre-right European Peoples Party (Christian Democrats for the most part). Next in size, at present, are the Liberals, and some way behind them are the Communists, the Greens, and a couple of other right-wing groups, plus some MEPs who cannot or will not join larger groups.
Non-Irish readers (if any have got this far) may need reminding that Fianna Fáil, founded in 1926 by Éamon de Valera, has been the largest party in every Irish election since 1932 and indeed has been in government for 59 of the subsequent 79 years (winning again in 2007). They are in trouble at the moment, though, with latest polls putting them not just in second place to Fine Gael but within striking distance of the third-placed Labour Party.
The natural European partnership for Fianna Fáil was and probably still is with the largest block of centre-right political parties, the European People’s Party. But Fine Gael managed to get membership in that grouping at an early stage, and (as the PD’s later did with the liberals) were able to prevent Fianna Fáil from joining. Fianna Fáil’s participation in Europe-wide politics then became to an extent a hostage of the internal politics of the Right in France and later Italy.
We have to backtrack a bit here. Originally, the French Gaullists had sat with the Liberal Group in the old unelected European Parliament. They split off to form their own faction, the European Democratic Union, in 1965, roughly at the time of the Empty Chair crisis. (Meanwhile, Alain Poher’s Republicans were firmly integrated into the European People’s Party, Poher himself being leader of both at the time, and they were able to block the Gaullists from membership just as FG have subsequently done with FF). The arrival of FF in the then unelected European Parliament in 1973 supplied the Gaullists with potential allies, and together they created a block called (with eerie prophetic resonance) the European Progressive Democrats.
After the first elections to the European Parliament in 1979, they were joined by Winnie Ewing of the Scottish Nationalist Party, and by a random Dane. In the 1984 elections, they lost the Dane but gained a few more French MEPs, and renamed themselves the European Democratic Alliance. In 1989 they picked up a splitter from the Greek Νέα Δημοκρατία, but lost Winnie Ewing (the SNP having jumped ship to the Rainbow Group / European Free Alliance which represented various regional parties). By 1995 they had absorbed Berlusconi’s Forza Italia MEPs, two from a smaller Portuguese party (Partido Popular), and the nutcase Samaras Πολιτική Άνοιξη from Greece, and renamed themselves the Union for Europe.
But this was the height of their strength: Berlusconi took his lads to the European People’s Party in 1998, having managed to persuade the other Italians already there not to block his membership. After the 1999 elections, the Gaullists followed Berlusconi into the EPP, having managed to smooth the way with their fellow French right-wingers. Again, because of Fine Gael, they could not bring FF with them.
FF and the Portuguese PP then formed another new group, the Union for a Europe of the Nations, and were joined by the post-fascist Alleanza Nazionale from Italy, and another random Dane (Samaras’ nutcases having been meantime rejected by the Greek voters, though unfortunately Samaras himself has since returned to the European Parliament for Νέα Δημοκρατία).They didn’t do too badly in the scramble for new members in 2004 – picking up two small Lithuanian parties, one larger Latvian one, and most importantly the Kaczyński twins’ Prawo i Sprawiedliwość in Poland. Since then they have acquired three more Polish parties and two more Italian groups (the Lega Nord and a random Sicilian).
But it cannot be comfortable company for Fianna Fáil. It was all very well to be in with the Gaullists, but times have changed; when the two largest delegations in your group are the Italian post-fascists and the Kaczyński twins, you may want to start thinking about moving. In any case the alliance with the Gaullists and Berlusconi was really more a matter of style than of substance: these were strong right-wing parties with impeccable nationalist credentials set up by powerful leaders, and yet they felt that the Christian Democrats would suit them best.
In addition, the growing importance of the pan-European parties as political vehicles is starting to rub. At the height of his powers, Bertie Ahern was being talked about for one of the top EU jobs. Although that prospect seems much less likely today, the fact is that the internal dynamics of EU politics meant that no FF candidate could ever be a serious runner in the first place. FF’s current political grouping is fourth in the pecking order, a long way behind the Liberals, who themselves are not exactly snapping at the heels of the Socialists or the EPP. Given that the Christian Democrats and Socialists are blocked for FF, the Liberals are the obvious next choice.
The Liberal group includes not only parties of the vaguely left-of-centre orientation of the British Lib Dems, but also numerous parties with their roots in free-market ideology such as the German FDP, and some other interesting minorities – Swedish-speaking Finns, the ethnic Turks of Bulgaria, the Catalonians. They also at present include independent Irish MEP Marian Harkin, a small-town politics candidate from Sligo. On FF’s economic record, good and bad, they would fit as well with the Liberals as with the Christian Democrats (some of whose members are avowedly centrist rather than right-wing in orientation). In the European Parliament, if you want to be effective, it is easier to be a smaller fish in a bigger pond rather than a big fish in a small pond.
I referred earlier to the possible particular concerns of Alliance and Lib Dem members about FF’s membership of ELDR. A few years ago I would have shared them. Fianna Fáil’s traditional attitude to the Northern Ireland problem was not a liberal one. It was based firmly on Irish nationalism, as one would expect from a party with its origins. The Progressive Democrats, now defunct, split from Fianna Fáil at least partly on the Northern Ireland issue. But here again times have changed. The 1998 Agreement, negotiated by Fianna Fáil on the Irish government side, has punted the Northern Ireland problem into the long grass; Fianna Fáil successfully urged the replacement of Articles 2 and 3 of the constitution by referendum. While I still wouldn’t vote for FF, it is clear that they have moved on from the days of Haughey. (And even in the old days, one would have to reflect that if the Ulster Unionists and British Conservatives can sit in the same group as Fine Gael, perhaps liberals can be as flexible.)
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t for a moment think that Fianna Fáil can reasonably be described as a liberal party as matters stand at the moment. Indeed, I think it’s very likely that Fine Gael at some (probably rather distant) future date will drop their opposition and allow them to join the EPP – ELDR have suffered defections in that direction before, most notably the Portuguese PSD and Hungarian FIDESz. On the other hand, I can live with three or four or five FF MEPs swelling the Liberal ranks in the European Parliament; and who knows, the ideology may rub off on them?
The Key 2 Time (first three)
Big Finish have returned to an old theme in Who: the search for the Key to Time, as originally carried out by the Fourth Doctor and his Time Lady companion Romana in 1978.
It works also because of the cast. Ciara Janson again is good as Amy, backed by comedienne Jess Robinson as slave girl Nesrin; and Will Barton, who played Midge in Survival, gets to show off his fluent Farsi (not very accurate for the Sudan, but few will worry about that). But most of all, we have Peter Davison and David Troughton as the Doctor and the Black Guardian – not exactly a reprise of Daker v Buzzard in A Very Peculiar Practice (though I harboured a secret hope for an appearance by the High Priest Soldeed from The Horns of Nimon) but in one scene in particular gloriously picking up on each other. Each of them also gets some separately very funny moments: Davison with an exchange about the way in which “blue man” actually means “black man”, except, er, when it doesn’t; and Troughton in a brilliant gag from Oscar Wilde. Troughton also gets Jason Watkins, playing the White Guardian, to argue with.
Indeed, one of the other successes of the play is that it takes the concept of the Guardians and goes somewhere completely new with them, really cutting them down to size. And I must say I cheered. There are a few too many beings or entities with ultimate power over all life and matter in the Whoniverse, and it’s good to see that writers can demote them as well as create them. So, Destroyer of Delights is my favourite BF release this year. Admittedly, that’s from a field of, er, two.
This also marks the moment when I have actually listened to every single one of the 118 Big Finish regular releases to date. I’m not going to do a big assessment post now – that can wait until the tenth anniversary of The Sirens of Time in a few months, and in the meantime I can catch up with the other BFs I haven’t otherwise got to. I’ll just say, listen to The Kingmaker and also Spare Parts (both starring Davison’s Doctor, but at opposite ends of the emotional spectrum) and that will probably decide whether Big Finish is for you.