- Rob Portman and the politics of narcissism.
The great challenge for a senator isn’t to go to Washington and represent the problems of his own family. It’s to try to obtain the intellectual and moral perspective necessary to represent the problems of the people who don’t have direct access to the corridors of power. Senators basically never have poor kids. That’s something members of Congress should think about.
- Bigger Than You Think: the Vatican and its Annexes
Strange Maps untangles the pontifical cartography.
Monthly Archives: March 2013
March Books 4) Berlin – A City Divided: Chronicles, by Susanne Buddenberg and Thomas Henseler
I am personally fascinated by Berlin, and by the Wall which I saw in 1986 – I took pictures, which must be in a box somewhere, of the Brandenburg Gate both from the same position as the Holzapfel family in the extract to the right and from the other side. This book, produced by the Federal Foundation for the Reassessment of the SED Dictatorship (ie the East German regime), tells very simply five stories of people affected by the Wall – the teenage student who flees west as it is being built in order to complete her exams; the nurse at the hospital beside the Wall treating casualties (and sometimes unable to); the government official who zooms across to freedom on a rainy night with his family; the amateur photographer who gets into trouble because of his fascination with the Wall; and another teenager who gets an unexpected 18th birthday present on 9 November 1989. All, we are told, are based as closely as possible on real stories (the contemporary newspaper article about the Holzapfel family's escape is reproduced).
The relativist in me is a little troubled by the one-sided presentation of the historical narrative. I guess that for someone my age or older, it’s uncomfortably reminiscent of the hard-line Cold War rhetoric of the hawks of both sides, a division which was crystallised in Berlin. Also, my own personal experience is that one can usually resolve conflicts more effectively by trying to listen to and comprehend both sides; that was true in Northern Ireland, and in the conflicts I have worked on professionally.
But I suspect I am wrong to feel that. The East German dictatorship started life as a puppet regime, imposed by external force, and it maintained order for four decades by imprisoning its people in its own borders, before it collapsed almost accidentally; there was no residual conflict to resolve, just complete defeat. There are limits to the value of trying to understand the other fella’s point of view, and this is probably one of those cases. I wasn’t there myself, apart from a couple of hours one June day in 1986, and books like this can give one a much better feeling of what it was like to be there at the time; and even more, what it felt like to get away.
March Books 3) The Unfree French, by Richard Vinen
The first and simplest conclusion of this book is that life for most French people between 1940 and 1944 was miserable.
This is a terrifically well-researched and fluently written account of occupied France during the second world war. It is a subject where of which my previous knowledge could probably have fitted on the back of a postcard – collapse in 1940, Pétain and Laval, resistance, D-Day, don't take 'Allo! 'Allo! seriously. I had never considered the impact on France of the continuing imprisonment of the two million – two million! – soldiers captured in 1940, plus the hundreds of thousands more subsequently conscripted for forced labour in Germany even as the Nazi regime was collapsing. It was also interesting to learn about the internal ideological manœuvres of the Pétain regime, building a cult of personality as a replacement for actually exercising power and delivering services. And he reports humanely and fairly neutrally on the épuration, the retaliation by both state structures and people taking the law into their own hands, against collaborators after the Liberation.
Vinen also illustrates well a point that I often consider in my professional work – that people rarely know the full picture of what is going on, and definitely don't know the future; in the summer of 1940, it seemed entirely probable that the war might be over in a few months with a German victory; in 1944, we tend to remember Operation Overlord as the successful sweep from Normandy to Belgium that it became, forgetting that to those on the ground, the winner did not seem at all clear, and in any case pockets of Germans were left behind as the invasion swept past.
But much the most interesting parts of the book deal with the effect of the occupation on women, looking especially at those on the margins – those who fell in love with Germans, or became prostitutes, or were successful entrepreneurs in the black market, or found some other nonconformist means of survival in miserable circumstances; and they of course were most likely to be targeted in the épuration. He makes the point that we have very few first-person accounts from these sources; the odd iconic photograph which represents only one story of the many. All of it is fascinating, but some of those accounts are heart-breaking.
March Books 2) Intrusion, by Ken MacLeod
As he whizzed along Camden’s back streets and canal banks and along the edge of Regent’s Park he sometimes glimpsed the whole scene as a vast, broken woodland, the forest of London. It was like when as a lad he’d seen from the hilltop how the landscape of Lewis wasn’t moor and field and bog with outcrops of rock, but a gnarly mass of rock with a thin overlay of peaty soil. The vision of the city as a forest uplifted him. It was almost utopian, and within it he felt the bike’s smooth engineered wooden frame and handlebars as an extension of himself.
A near-future Britain, where the state’s control of ordinary citizen’s lives, extrapolated from the surveillance state and the war on terror of today, has become appallingly intrusive, with the police perpetrating acts of torture on arbitrarily chosen citizens; and the Morrison family, mulling only minor disobedience over a matter of health care, find that they must flee to Scotland where the hereditary propensity to second sight seems to take on a more robust significance.
As ever with Ken MacLeod, it’s intense and passionate, and given the society he has set up, the Morrisons’ dilemmas feel very realistic. (Though I’m enough of an idealist to feel that the UK is in fact unlikely to slip too far towards vindictively nasty totalitarianism in the way depicted here.) My biggest problem with the book is that the two most interesting things in it happen off stage at the end – the revelation of the plan of the mysterious Naxals, who are a background presence throughout the book and don’t make a direct appearance, and the epic years-long mission of Hugh Morrison’s father, about which all we discover is that it happened and succeeded. So it’s a little disappointing – a good read in general, but tantalising us with mind-blowing stuff happening elsewhere and elsewhen.
Links I found interesting for 16-03-2013
- How real is the danger of an EU collapse? My verdict: It’s receding, but the UK is the wild card
John Bruton: ‘the EU is still regarded by many in the UK as a homogeneous foreign country, not a highly diverse Union. Britain’s membership is seen more as a disposable convenience than as a long-term commitment."
- Britain’s potential exit from the EU
French, Polish and German authors reflect.
- Hostile platitudes
On dealing with the loss of an online friendship.
Can Pi3D run on anything other than Raspbian?
Answers very welcome.
Links I found interesting for 15-03-2013
- Phew
(Memo to self: avoid gym during papal conclaves)
- Twitter / thetimes: Clarification
Frank Pope ≠ Pope Francis.
- Overheard at Cambridge
Rowan Williams prefers GRRM to JRRT.
Links I found interesting for 14-03-2013
- A sinister conspiracy to inform
Yet more utter nonsense from the UK eurosceptic media.
- CHART: How many popes are alive at any given time?
Misses out the Copts, and various schismatic interludes.
- The troubling things I learned when I re-reported Bob Woodward’s book on John Belushii
The strengths and weaknesses of a famous journalist.
- Google Reader closing down
My brother looks at alternatives.
- Making a difference
Reacting to a racist joke sent by a friend.
Links I found interesting for 13-03-2013
- The longer the conclave lasts, the bigger the surprise is likely to be | CatholicHer
But I’d bet on Scola myself.
- The Papal Conclave May Be the Most Hack-Proof Election on the Planet
Limited electorate, deliberately low-tech voting…
- The US Senate: Where Democracy Goes to Die
Excellent piece, as is the NYT article it links to.
- What are the best body hacks that people should know about?
Not sure if I believe all of these!
- NI Conservatives face humiliation
Links I found interesting for 12-03-2013
- Review: Trillion Year Spree
Perhaps the most important place for the history of a genre to begin is with defining its topic.
- Under the Influence: Doctor Who
Ryk E. Spoor explains it all.
- The Straight Dope: Did Renaldus Columbus discover the clitoris in 1559?
In brief: no.
- Harry Weathersby Stamps
A great obituary.
- It’s Still A Bad Idea To Sell Arms To Somalia
Yes.
Links I found interesting for 11-03-2013
- The Smartest Guy in the Room
"No one, it turns out, can ever really be the smartest guy in the room. For two reasons. First, to make sure that everyone keeps fighting to get in, and stay in. Second, to make sure that everyone who doesn’t get in is kept out."
- JN-T: The Life And Scandalous Times Of John Nathan-Turner (review)
"Scrupulously researched… strives for fairness and balance… Yet it’s also a book one hesitates to recommend – you may feel this is one scab you’d prefer not to pick, one car crash you choose not to rubberneck at."
- Wealth Inequality in America – YouTube
Everyone’s linking to this, but it is really worth watching if you haven’t already.
- “Palaeofantasy”: Stone Age delusions
"It is striking how fixated on the alleged behavior of our hunting-and-foraging forbearers some educated inhabitants of the developed world have become."
March Books 1) The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula Le Guin
When you meet a Gethenian you cannot and must not do what a bisexual naturally does, which is to cast him in the role of Man or Woman, while adopting towards him a corresponding role dependent on your expectations of the patterned or possible interactions between persons of the same or opposite sex. Our entire pattern of socio-sexual interaction is nonexistent here. They cannot play the game. They do not see one another as men or women. This is almost impossible for our imagination to accept.
I had of course read this before, long ago, and you probably have too, as it came joint top of this poll (with Rendezvous with Rama), so this isn’t a review, more a list of things I spotted this time round:
- The passage quoted above comes just before the paragraph justifying the author’s use of “he” for the Gethenians. I go back and forth on this myself. She uses “she” in the version of “Winter’s King” in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters
- Actually the Gethenian sexuality is rather simple; apart from normal Gethenians there are only “perverts” who are those stuck in one gender. All Gethenian ἔρως appears to be between those taking different gender roles; there is no same-gender sex, and no playing around at the margins. OK, we are getting this from the viewpoint of an outside observer who may not have sought or been given full information, but this time round I found it paradoxically heteronormative. (Presumably Genly Ai has LGBT friends and colleagues, out there in the Ekumen?)
- One mustn’t only think about sex. There’s quite an intricate political plot, about industrialisation, developing economies getting hold of new technologies, constitutional monarchies vs authoritarian oligarchies, and the impact of a single outsider whose mission is to transform the world. At first it looks like Le Guin is trying to replay the Cold War on a cold planet, but that is (perhaps deliberately) quite misleading.
- And speaking of cold, the most effective passages for me are still the chapters covering the epic arctic journey, where Le Guin’s sparse prose style is perfectly suited to the bleak setting, and vividly conveys the intense intimacy that you get between two people thrown together in isolation with a shared task, with the added factor of kemmer.
Anyway, a brilliant book which I was glad to read again.
Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.
January Books 10) TARDIS Eruditorum, volume 2: Patrick Troughton, by Phil Sandifer
I occasionally go and dip into Phil Sandifer’s excellent blog, but have not read as much of it as I would like to. I find the individual essays fascinating, but in the whole just a little too long for my preferred reading time; and more worryingly, they tend to leave me simultaneously wanting to read more and wishing there was better internal navigation to the blog than simply following Sandifer’s stream of consciousness (even though that is largely aligned with the broadcast order of the series, subject to diversions).The Space Pirates is missing. But in a way, it has to be. These gaps are as much a part of what Doctor Who is as the TARDIS or the Daleks – something that is not just a DVD set for obsessive 21st century fans, but that has been a living, breathing part of every year since 1963. Without stories like The Space Pirates that flicker on in an imagined 1969 we can never reach, a vital part of the show’s magic would be lost.
These problems are largely resolved by packaging the posts in book form, so that you can leaf back and forth at will, making annotations if you feel like it, but also with all the advantages of traditional dead tree reading rather than squinting at the screen. It is also nicely packaged, with a lovely mosaic cover picture of Patrick Troughton playing the recorder. And the content is of course still excellent.
The core of the book is the series of essays on each of the 21 Second Doctor TV stories (with extras at the end including The Two Doctors and also The Massacre, left out of Volume One). These add to the standard vade mecum approach some hard data on what was in the charts and in the news at the time each story was originally broadcast, and also Sandifer’s own personal opinions, particularly where he diverges from fandom. I often found myself wishing I could have expressed my own views as eloquently where we agree, for instance on why The Power of the Daleks is a better story than Evil of the Daleks, or why The Dominators is so very bad. But I also found our points of divergence interesting – why The Enemy of the World is a classic, or why it may not be such a bad thing that The Space Pirates is lost, both perhaps cases where I would probably have argued the opposite but can now see Sandifer’s point.
The story-by-story write-ups are leavened with another dozen or so essays roughly equally divided between other Whovian topics (spinoff literature, UNIT dating, racism) and other media of the same era (Cathy Come Home, The Prisoner, the moon landings). I found the latter on the whole more interesting than the former, since in general I knew much less about the topics, though I agree with Sandifer’s disgust at The Prison in Space and Big Finish’s reconstruction of it. Sandifer’s style is engaging, and for someone who has lived mostly in the USA and was born after all of these stories were broadcast, he has done a remarkable job of contextualising these stories. Now I must go and get the first volume.
Incidentally Sandifer lives in Newtown, Connecticut, and wrote this in December last year.
Links I found interesting for 09-03-2013
- Iraq war anniversary: What went wrong reconsidered, 10 years later
Carne reminisces about paths not taken.
Links I found interesting for 08-03-2013
- Morocco refuses entry to 4 EU lawmakers on trip to Western Sahara
"It was humiliating. It was absolutely unacceptable. It was a demonstration of totalitarian disregard of decency and democratic standards."
Something for everyone in Mid Ulster by-election
The results (hat-tip to Alan on Slugger, previous results here)
Francie Molloy (Sinn Féin) 17,462 (46.9%, -5.1%)
Nigel Lutton (Independent) 12,781 (34.4%, +1.7%)
Patsy McGlone (SDLP) 6,478 (17.4%, +3.1%)
Eric Bullick (Alliance) 487 (1.3%, +0.3%)
Turnout 37208; Spoilt 223 (0.6%)
There is not much to be said. Everyone has reason to celebrate.
Molloy was always going to win, and his problem was to get voters who already knew that to turn out in bad weather; 46.9% is at the lower end of SF expectations, but it’s on rather than off the scale (in fact, only a hair lower than Martin McGuinness got here in 2005).
The united Unionist vote is above my expectations. I was fooled by Lutton’s apparent weakness as a candidate, but of course not being on the ground I could not see how he was doing on doorsteps. I also could not see how effective the combined Unionist ground game was.
At any rate, the proposition that a united Unionist candidate will always get a lower vote share has now been disproved. But a 1.3% increase is not exactly seismic, and as with the Shinners, the result is much the same as DUP and UUP combined in 2005.
McGlone’s vote share is exactly what he got in 2005. The SDLP’s direction of travel from recent nadirs appears to be upwards, but there is still quite a long way to go.
When I was involved with Alliance in the mid-90s, the party had but a handful of members in Magherafelt and none at all in Cookstown. Again, a percentage increase – indeed, an actual increase in real votes, from 395 to 487 – is cause for celebration but doesn’t signify much else.
These results, if replicated in an Assembly election, would deliver three seats for SF, two Unionists and one SDLP, just like every other election since 1998.
As with the West Belfast by-election in 2011, SF hold one of their safest seats with a reduced majority and lower turnout, and there are no surprising shifts in popular support. (Actually, West Belfast was more interesting last time because of the performance of the People Before Profit candidate.)
Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.
My moment of fame on the Big Finish podcast
Here, from 23:56 to 24:20.
Links I found interesting for 07-03-2013
- How we made the Rocky Horror Picture Show
Richard O’Brien and Richard Hartley reminisce.
- The tragic story you may have never heard of
Christiane Amanpour on #WesternSahara
- Morocco bars four MEPs
…because they intended to travel to the Western Sahara.
February Books
Fiction (non-sf) 1 (YTD 2)
The Red and the Black, by Stendhal
sf (non-Who) 5 (YTD 8)
Matilda, by Roald Dahl
Dark Eden, by Chris Beckett
London Falling, by Paul Cornell
Empty Space: A Haunting, by M. John Harrison
Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, by Lois McMaster Bujold
Doctor Who 6 (YTD 12)
The Menagerie, by Martin Day
Original Sin, by Andy Lane
The Turing Test, by Paul Leonard
Snake Bite, by Scott Handcock
The Silurian Gift, by Mike Tucker
The Nameless City, by Michael Scott
Comics 1 (YTD 2)
Slaapkoppen, by Randall C.
~3,400 pages (YTD 7,600)
1/13 (YTD 5/29) by women (Bujold)
0/13 (YTD 0/29) by PoC
Rereads: 0 (YTD 2)
Acquired 2011 or before: 5 (The Red and the Black, Matilda, The Menagerie, Original Sin, The Turing Test) – YTD 9
Acquired 2012: 3 (Dark Eden, London Falling, Captain Vorpatril's Alliance) – YTD 10
Acquired 2013: 5 (Empty Space: A Haunting, Snake Bite, The Silurian Gift, The Nameless City, Slaapkoppen) – YTD 10
Also started:
The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin
Intrusion, by Ken MacLeod
The Unfree French, by Richard Vinen
Coming next (perhaps):
The Castle, by Franz Kafka
The Lady and the Unicorn, by Tracy Chevalier
Swallows And Amazons, by Arthur Ransome
1632, by Eric Flint
The Quantum Thief, by Hannu Rajaniemi
Doors Open, by Ian Rankin
The Last Mughal, by William Dalrymple
A History of the World in 100 Objects, by Neil MacGregor
The Peoples of Middle-Earth, by Christopher Tolkien
Toward the End of Time, by John Updike
Daystar and Shadow, by James Weldon Johnson
The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century, by Brendan Bradshaw
Starship Fall, by Eric Brown
Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury
The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss
The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco
Danny the Champion of the World, by Roald Dahl
Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury
The Jagged Orbit, by John Brunner
World Game, by Terrance Dicks
Sky Pirates!, by Dave Stone
Endgame, by Terrance Dicks
Fugitive, by Tony Lee
Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel
2312, by Kim Stanley Robinson
Links I found interesting for 06-03-2013
- What was the Leaning Tower of Pisa for?
We all know the answer, but worth reading for the joke at the end.
- Giant camel fossil found in Arctic
Just one of those classic headlines.
- Why US foreign policy keeps failing
Summary of what sounds like an interesting lecture by Stephen Walt.
February Books 13) Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, by Lois McMaster Bujold
Ivan drew a long breath. “Tej. Will you marry me?”
“What?” she said. It wasn’t a thrilled sort of what? either, that ought to greet such a proposal, more of a have-you-lost-your-mind? what. Ivan cringed.
This is a very welcome return to familiar territory for Bujold, as the bumbling cousin Ivan Vorpatril of the Vorkosigan sequence of stories finally gets his own narrative, one that includes lots of nods to the books’ internal continuity though with new twists to Barrayar’s history, perhaps because of the different viewpoint character. It starts off as a damsel-in-distress tale and then turns into a heist story; it’s all done tremendously vigorously, and the image of a large building sinking gracefully into the ground will stay with me for a while. I think this would be a good starter book for those have not yet read any Bujold, and as a convinced fan, I loved it.
Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.
Doctor Who Season 3 (2007), first half
I am behind with posting these – actually up to first series of SJA now.
Points that I noted particularly from Smith and Jones this time: i) Martha’s leitmotif is a bit overdone, I think, for a first outing. ii) Martha is very brainy, the brainiest companion since Nyssa (yeah, I know Mel was computery but it never seemed to make much difference). iii) Having said that, Martha screams in one of her earliest scenes; I can’t remember Rose ever screaming at all (though perhaps my memory is at fault).
The Doctor is consciously auditioning for a new companion here without wanting to admit that that is what he wants. Actually this plot line didn’t work first time round for us fans who knew that Martha was staying through to the end of the season. But for the not-we viewers it maybe works better. (Big Finish did the auditioning-for-a-companion quite explicitly in Situation Vacant, which I didn’t like much on first listening but then realised fitted beautifully with a much longer story arc.)
It is also nice that Martha has a family, even though Adjoa Andoh, certainly the best known of this season’s semi-regulars, is criminally underused. And it should be noted that the Judoon, introduced here, is among the most successful of the New Who monsters. (Plus the Haemophile – gratifying nasty!)
I had not re-watched The Shakespeare Code since its first broadcast, which was before I did a marathon listen-through of the Arkangel series of Shakespeare audios (which incidentally feature one David Tennant in the title role of all three parts of Henry VI). Now, I got a lot of the Shakespeare in-jokes – in particular the references to Love’s Labour’s Lost, a slightly odd play which indeed calls out for a sequel, and the various other references to how time-travellers might interact with Shakespeare – a comedy trope with a venerable history and well executed here. I am not so sure about the aliens, but Dean Lennox Kelly is very good as Shakespeare, and it is fun. (Apart from the Bedlam scene, which is not fun but is effective.)
This is an episode where the core narrative is perfectly decent if a little implausible, and a fannish box is unexpectedly ticked by bringing back the Macra (now much larger than in 1967), but the most important bits are actually the development of the story arc for the season and for the Doctor’s mythos. The Face of Boe’s peculiar statement is obviously a set-up for future stories; but the brilliant bit is the Doctor finally telling Martha about Gallifrey, a conversation he never had with Rose as far as we know. New Who is gradually getting more comfortable about looking back. In the first season, continuity was basically Daleks, Autons and the Tardis; the second season brought back Sarah Jane Smith, Cybermen, and referred at least to UNIT; and now the Doctor is not just a lonely hero coming out of nowhere, but someone with a rich personal history only gradually being unveiled.
A somewhat mixed start to Season Three, then, with a couple of rather duff stories and a not paricularly charming dynamic between oblivious, grieving Doctor and besotted, disempowered companion. But there is better to come.
< The Curse of Fatal Death | The Webcasts | Rose – Dalek | The Long Game – The Parting of the Ways | Comic Relief 2006 – The Girl in the Fireplace | Rise of the Cybermen – Doomsday | Everything Changes – They Keep Killing Suzie | Random Shoes – End of Days | Smith and Jones – 42 | Human Nature / The Family of Blood – Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords & The Infinite Quest | Revenge of the Slitheen – The Lost Boy & Time Crash | Voyage of the Damned – Adam | Reset – Exit Wounds
Links I found interesting for 04-03-2013
- Obama’s ‘Jedi mind meld’ reference ridiculed by sci-fi fans
President mixes up Star Trek and Star Wars, losing geek credibility.
- Athelas
On choosing rulers. (Also, must see that film – loved the book.)
- “Why are there so many songs about rainbows[,] and what’s on the other side?”
What do these words actually mean?
- What would happen if the UK withdrew from the European Court of Human Rights?
"Politically, the UK would be sending a clear signal to states which lose far more cases in Strasbourg, such as Russia and Turkey, that it no longer had confidence in the ECHR system. Whether you think that is a bad thing probably depends on your underlying theory of international relations and whether you think international institutions work in regulating the behaviour of states."
- How to live through hives/urticaria
Dealing with illness.
Links I found interesting for 01-03-2013
- A Marta to the cause
Andriessen vs UKIP. (I sort of hope they will both lose.)