Monthly Archives: January 2015

The Grass is Singing, by Doris May Lessing

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A short but rather depressing book by Nobel laureate Lessing, about a disastrous marriage between two white colonists in the future Zimbabwe; a vivid pair of psychological portraits, though the motivation for the crime that starts and ends the book seemed a bit obscure to me and rather played into rather than against racist stereotypes.

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My tweets

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Links I found interesting for 11-01-2015

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The Inking of Edward Heath

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A few weeks ago, Lieven Smits reminded me of the incident on 22 January 1972, when Edward Heath, the British Prime Minister, was spattered with ink on arriving at the Egmont palace in Brussels to sign the treaty admitting the UK to the European Communities. It's a striking moment and the press photographers were well placed:
heath Heath Ink
I have attended at least a dozen events in the Egmont Palace since moving to Brussels in 1999, so I know the scene of the event very well; and I will smirk next time I wander up to the foot of the grand staircase in the entrance lobby.

But, I wondered, what this all about?The ink-thrower had registered as a photographer from a non-existent newspaper, the England-Sweden Times, which is how she managed to be in the press scrum, conveniently placed for both ink-throwing and photography. She gave the name Karen Cooper, but it turned out that her name was really Marie Louise Kwiatkowski, born in Murnau, Germany (presumably the Murnau near Oberammergau, just north of the Austrian border) on 8 January 1941, a registered resident of Sweden but living in London.

And her protest was not, in fact, an anti-European one. There were anti-European protesters outside the palace, led by Christopher Frere-Smith, who was arrested, but she was not one of them. Instead, and this is where it gets a bit weird – well, here's the Glasgow Herald's version:
herald

So, she was protesting that the gummint had personally stolen her plans for the redevelopment of Covent Market into a conference centre – in other words, not actually a protest against government policy, but a gripe that the government had agreed with her preferred outcome without giving her credit. Here is the transcript of ITN's News at Ten coverage of her eventual conviction and sentence:

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"Andrew" here is presumably Andrew Gardnerfuture author of Harry's Gamehere (note future MEP Lord Dartmouth, Princess Diana's step-brother, hiding behind his mother in one of the photographs) and also here, the massive redevelopment plans for Covent Garden had been agreed in 1968, before the government came to office; but by early 1972, all concerned were preparing the ground for dignified retreat, paving the way for the creation of the streetscape that we know today. It would have made more sense (admittedly, only a little more) if Kwiatkowski had protested Heath's likely dumping of the plans rather than his supposed "theft" of them.

And what of her employer, George Martin, who appears to have escaped any punishment for helping her to forge her press pass? I think we can be fairly certain that it wasn't this chap. But could it have been Basil Brush's scriptwriter? Or the Beatles' manager? Neither appears to have had a particularly strong Swedish connection, so it was probably someone else entirely.

There are various other bits of mythology. Was Heath's replacement suit supplied by Michael Palliser, or by Sir John Beith? Walter Scheel, the German foreign minster, quipped that all future German ambassadors should be chosen for their physical similarity to the foreign minister of the day, in case this should happen to him or his successors. (Scheel also suggested that they try and pass off the incident as honoring an ancient Norwegian custom of throwing ink at people to whom you wish the best of luck.)

See also the legal analysis (in French) here, pp, 321-323, which asserts that Kwiatkowski was not prosecuted under the 1852 law against attacking foreign heads of government because Heath himself did not wish to press charges, and not (as another bit of Belgian mythology has it) because the law applied only to Heads of State and Heath was not the Queen (it seems clear that the law would have applied to him as well).

As for Marie-Louise Kwiatkowski, here's a photograph from June 1972 found on eBay:

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[eBay description] This is an original press photo. The Girl who threw ink over Mr.Heath is thrown out of Britain: German-born- Marie-Louise Kwiatkowski, 31, the girl who threw ink over Premier Edward Heath in Brussels five months ago, and was three times refused entry into Britain, sneaked back here at her fourth attempt wearing a dark wig to fool the immigration officials, Karen Cooper, the name she used, arrived back in this country aboard a passenger ship from Ansterdam and then hitched several lifts to London five days ago. Yesterday the Special Branch moved into the London hotel, where she was escorted to Heathrow Airport and put on a flight to Frankfurt. Photo shows Karen Cooper (real name Marie Louise Kwiatkowski) is pictured in these two photos at her London Hotel yesterday. On the left she is seen wearing the clothes and wig she wore to cover her long fair hair when she entered the country five days ago, and on right as she really is.

The taking of the photograph is the subject of a somewhat incomprehensible article in Der Spiegel, which may intermingle a different story entirely involving nude photography and the Norwegian artist Gerd Tinglum

If Marie-Louise Kwiatkowski is still around, she turned 74 last Thursday. I wonder if she got anywhere with her political novel.

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Links I found interesting for 10-01-2015

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Links I found interesting for 09-01-2015

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Thursday Reading

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Current
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
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Turner’s Taoisigh, by Martin Turner
Are You My Mother?, by Alison Bechdel

Last books finished
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Circe’s Cup, by Clare Carroll
The Ultimate Treasure, by Christopher Bulis
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The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, by Claire Tomalin

Last week’s audios
Welcome to Night Vale Eps 43-49A

Next books
Domino Effect, by David Bishop
Getting the Buggers to Behave, by Sue Cowley

Books acquired in last week
A Sunless Sea, by Anne Perry
So, Anyway…, by John Cleese
The Very Pointless Quiz Book, by Alexander Armstrong and Richard Osman
The Etymologicon, by Mark Forsyth

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The Fat Years, by Chan Koonchung

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This is a fascinating book, by a writer who was born in Shanghai, educated in Hong Kong and now lives in Beijing. The book itself has been published in Hong Kong and Taiwan, but is not officially available on the mainland (though a fascinating foreword by Julia Lovell refers to Beijing’s “chic party-hostesses slipp[ing] copies of the book into guests’ take-home bags”). It came out in 2009 and is set in the very near future of 2013, after a further financial crisis has wrecked the world economy apart from China, which has now become Top Nation, and yet everyone – or all but a very few – appears to have completely forgotten the crucial month of February 2011, in which the world changed. 

There’s a lot in here, including Christianity as a weird foreign religion, state drugging of the population a la Blake’s 7, and using sfnal themes as a metaphor for the erasure of June 1989 from official memory; I can see why official China may feel it cuts a bit close to the bone – the protagonist, contrasting the West and China, suggests that:

The only disparity is that, theoretically, the power of Western governments is given to them by the people, while in China the people’s freedom is given to them by the government. Is this distinction really that important?

Readers may give their own answer to the question, taking into account when and where the book was written and published.

Anyway, I now appreciate the depth of my own ignorance about China even more.

You can get it here.

Links I found interesting for 06-01-2015

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2015 films 1) The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

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Having gone to The Hobbit 3 last week, at F’s request we watched the 2005 movie of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy last night. It held up much better than I remembered; Martin Freeman is given rather more of an emotional arc for Arthur Dent than he gets for either John Watson or Bilbo Baggins, climaxing with the deployment of the Point-Of-View Gun. Zooey Deschanel is super as well, and Bill Nighy is the definitive Slartibartfast. I also felt certain that the animations for the Book were a deliberate homage to the 1981 TV series (though perhaps there are only so many ways to show an electronic book on the screen). Most of the changes to the radio/tv/novel story for the film were apparently by Adams himself. The film has a disputed place in canon, but I found it very enjoyable second time round.

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Links I found interesting for 05-01-2015

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Sterrenrood, by “Willy Vandersteen” [Peter De Gucht]

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The latest of the long-running Belgian Suske en Wiske comic strip series, in this case largely told as a flashback to an Antwerp emigrant ship sailing for America in what may be the 1930s (though there is one piece of evidence that it is set in 1893), whose passengers and crew include some characters who look amazingly similar to our contemporary heroes. It’s not bad at all, actually; the 1930s Suske is an Eastern European migrant, and there is some realistic social commentary on the hard times of the 1930s. There is, however, only one black person on the ship, a jazz musician; and the plot of recovering a stolen diamond is fairly standard, if with a couple of nice tweaks. The new Red Star Line Museum in Antwerp have got their money’s worth.

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Links I found interesting for 04-01-2015

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Literary anniversaries

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Yes, it's yet another book poll!

Incidentally, the best-selling book in the USA in 1915 was The Turmoil, by Booth Tarkington, which has been almost completely forgotten. In 1965 it was The Source, which does seem to have had more staying power (it also topped the NYT Best Sellers list from July 1965 until the end of the year). I would like to bring in other countries’ best-seller lists for comparison, but can’t find any online.

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I Will Fear No Evil: A novel that isn’t set in 2015

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A few weeks back, I was browsing Wikipedia for literary anniversaries, and came across this page of fiction set in 2015:
2015in fiction

My eye was caught by the presence of Heinlein's notorious 1971 novel, I Will Fear No Evil, which I had read as a teenager. Its protagonist is the aged billionaire Johann Sebastian Bach Smith, whose brain is transplanted from his own aging body into that of his beautiful secretary; her soul remains in place, cohabitating with her former boss, and they go on to have sex with everyone in sight. Why not, I thought, do a blog post comparing Heinlein's view of the world in 2015 with two other stories on that list, Arthur C. Clarke's "Earthlight" (the original 1951 story, not the 1955 novel which is set several centuries later) and Isaac Asimov's 1941 "Runaround" (the story in which the Three Laws of Robotics were first stated)?

Well, there are a couple of good reasons why not. The first is that "Runaround" has almost no background colour for the year 2015, except that there are two blokes and a bunch of robots stuck together on Mercury harvesting liquid metal from the pools on the perpetually sunward-facing side of the planet (Mercury's rotation period was not discovered until 1965). Apart from that it's not really very interesting.

The second is that the Heinlein novel is not actually set in 2015 at all, despite what Wikipedia says.

The evidence for this is pretty clear. Johann Sebastian Bach Smith is "nearly nintey-five" (up to p, 367) and then "ninety five years old" (from p. 398 onwards). If the book were set in 2015, that would mean that he had been born in 1920. But his grand-daughter – by his second marriage, no less – celebrated her eighth birthday in May 1960 (p. 188). Even by Heinlein's standards, that is improbably quick work. More concretely, Smith's elderly sidekick, Jake Solomon, finds that "Seventy-two is staring me in the face" (p.99) and also admits that "In nineteen-thirty-four I was barely out of diapers" (p. 363). By a process of simple addition, it seems likely that Heinlein thought of the book as being set in the first few years of this century rather than this year; someone who turns 72 in 2015 would have been born in 1943, with no memory of 1934.

Over on the Heinlein Society's site, David M. Silver has an essay on the book, pointing out the numerous resonances between the life of Johann Sebastian Bach Smith and that of his creator, who was born on 7 July 1907. I think that Silver is right and I hope I have added another resonance to his list: had Heinlein lived, he would have turned 95 in 2002. The intended setting of I Will Fear No Evil is not 2015, but thirteen years earlier. (This also fits Jake Solomon's statements, allowing for some poetic licence – he would have been born in 1930, and turned 4 in 1934.) I won't amend the Wikipedia page, because that would be Original Research, which is apparently Naughty. (Any Wikipedia user reading this should feel free to make the change, citing this blog post.)

I must add that I simply couldn't finish the book. It is too dreadfully bad. Just before the half-way point, I realised that I couldn't take any more, and used the Kindle search function to track down all the references to years and dates after page 250; and then I went on to read something else. (Clarke's "Earthlight" does have a bit more on the world of 2015, but you can't do a comparative article with only one point to compare.)

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A modest ambition: finding the planet Mercury

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I don’t think I have ever seen the planet Mercury. (It is said that Copernicus never saw it either, in the 70 years of his life, but this is disputed.) We in the northern hemisphere have a good chance of catching it in the next week or so: it is very close to Venus (which is much brighter and easier to spot) and sets about an hour after the sun, and should be visible enough even without binoculars. If you have an unimpeded view of the southwestern horizon, have a look for it from about 40 minutes after sunset.

This is the year that we will get our first ever close looks at Ceres and Pluto

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