Non-fiction: 4 (YTD 38)
Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman A Short Guide to Irish Science Fiction, by Jack Fennell Peoplewatching, by Desmond Morris Space Helmet for a Cow, vol 2, by Paul Kirkley
sf (non-Who): 4 (YTD 60) Synners, by Pat Cadigan Press Cuttings, by George Bernard Shaw The Red Leaguers, by Shan F. Bullock The Famished Road, by Ben Okri
Doctor Who, etc: 3 (YTD 42) How The Doctor Changed My Life, ed. Simon Guerrier Life During Wartime, ed. Paul Cornell Diamond Dogs, by Mike Tucker
Comics: 4 (YTD 21) Antarès, Épisode 2, by Leo Onthuld, by Kristof Spaey and Bart Vaessens Antarès, Épisode 3, by Leo Antarès, Épisode 4, by Leo
3,600 pages (YTD 44,000)
1/15 (YTD 48/178) by women (Cadigan)
1/15 (YTD 16/178) by PoC (Okri)
Reread: 0 (YTD 8)
Reading now Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (a chapter a month)
Coming soon (perhaps): The Dancers at the End of Time, by Michael Moorcock Alexander the Corrector: The Tormented Genius Whose Cruden's Concordance Unwrote the Bible, by Julia Keay The Past Through Tomorrow, by Robert A. Heinlein Caprice and Rondo, by Dorothy Dunnett The Last Castle, by Jack Vance Thorns, by Robert Silverberg A Man of Parts, by David Lodge A Crocodile in the Fernery: An A-Z of Animals in the Garden, by Twigs Way Wild Life, by Molly Gloss Virginia Woolf, by Hermione Lee Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl Dear Old Dead, by Jane Haddam Corum: The Prince in the Scarlet Robe, by Michael Moorcock Wolf in White Van, by John Darnielle Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons: Notes on Science Fiction and Culture in the Year of Angry Dogs, by Philip Sandifer Everfair, by Nisi Shawl The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses, by Kevin Birmingham The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig Brave New Worlds: Dystopian Stories, ed. John Joseph Adams The Autumnlands, Vol. 1: Tooth and Claw, by Kurt Busiek The Fall of Hyperion, by Dan Simmons It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis Short Trips: Christmas Around the World, ed. Xanna Eve Chown The Big Hunt, by Lance Parkin Plague City, by Jonathan Morris
I was a bit surprised by the number of people who pushed back against my plan to watch all the winners of the Oscar for Best Picture from beginning to the present day. Sure, I take the point that the Oscars have not always got it right. I also take the much more serious point that they are heavily slanted towards Hollywood with very little input from the world outside the United States (and certain gaps within it). If I wanted to watch the 90 or 100 best movies ever, there are a large number of potentially better sources to go to than the list of Oscar winners.
And yet, it’s always going to be a bit arbitrary, isn’t it? And I have to be honest and say that my interest isn’t (or isn’t only) in the potential of cinema as a medium. I am also interested in the history of culture in the Anglosphere, and in the Oscars as a political process. Any set of Best Films that I choose to pursue is going to be someone else’s choice; I choose the Academy Awards, not because I expect them all to be good but because I expect them to be interesting.
So, having got my throat-clearing out of the way, on with The Broadway Melody, which won the Academy Award for Outstanding Picture presented in 1930. There were seven awards in total that year, and every one went to a different film, the first and last time that has ever happened; this also means that The Broadway Melody was the first of three films to win Best Picture (or equivalent) and no other award on the night. For context I will note that the other films in contention that year were Alibi, In Old Arizona, The Hollywood Revue (which featured the first performance of “Singin’ In the Rain”) and The Patriot. None of the other Outstanding Picture nominees places higher than 30th on IMDB’s ranking of the 1929 films. The IMDB ratesThe Broadway Melody as the second most popular feature film of 1929 after Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail (which was presumably too British to get nominated for the Academy Awards) or possibly third after Pandora’s Box (presumably too German). I have not seen, or even heard of, any of the above.
The Broadway Melody was apparently the first real musical film, with both a plot and songs that made sense in the context of that plot, taking advantage of the brand new talkie technology. Apparently it was also the first to use sound dubbing and had a brief colour segment (which does not survive); more on that later. So my expectations are somewhat shaped by nine decades of subsequent Hollywood musicals, of which the most recent one I have seen is Les Miserables, or maybe The LEGO Movie. Even so, it holds up pretty well – sometimes ground-breaking stuff loses because of subsequent treading on that ground, but this is not one of those cases.
As before I’ll run through the bits that struck me in reverse order of favourability.
Whiteness: This is a film set in the musical world of New York. Not a single black face to be seen, not even among hotel attendants.
Comic disability: A character with a speech impediment which is awfully funny.
Plot and script: Boy is engaged to girl; boy meets girl’s pretty young sister and instant spark ensues; pretty young sister allows herself to be distracted by a cad but ends up with boy. Meanwhile they are all on stage, or trying to get there, apart from the cad who picks up stage girls as a hobby. Characters all speak in grating Twenties slang which must have sounded cool at the time. There are no particularly memorable lines.
Acting: This is a mixed bag. Bessie Love is really really good as the older of the two sisters, who eventually accepts with fairly good grace that her man has fallen for her sibling. I was really surprised that I had never heard of her before. (Also striking that this is two films out of two where I felt the female lead was by far the strongest of the performers.) Anita Page as the younger sister has a really rocky start – in her first couple of scenes I wondered if she was even awake – but livens up considerably as it goes on. Unfortunately she can’t dance, mostly but not completely disguised by cunning direction. Charles King as the chap they both love is a good singer and plausible heart-throb. Kenneth Thomson as the cad is a bit flat.
Music: With the exception of “Love Boat”, whose words I simply couldn’t make out, the songs are an excellent combination of talents by Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed. (And one by Willard Robison). The title number is ridiculously catchy.
Several references suggest that the same song is used again in Singin’ in the Rain, but as far as I can tell the music for that film’s amazing “Broadway Melody” dance sequence is quite different. Singin’ in the Rain does however recycle a lot of the Brown and Freed tunes (as noted above, the title song was used in another 1930 film) and perhaps the best is You Were Meant For Me. (Edited to add: As pointed out in comments, Gene Kelly does sing the “Broadway Melody” 75 minutes into Singin’ in the Rain, but it’s really a case of blink and you miss it, as I did.)
Cinematography: After Wings, I thought this was another well-made and beautifully shot film. The opening sequence, set in the office of Mr Zanfield (a thinly disguised Ziegfield) is particularly good with different groups of musicians in different corners rehearsing:
The stage shows are well done, but in particular the director pulls off the feat of reminding us that there are human beings involved with putting on these spectacles, without breaking the mood created.
The Wedding of the Painted Doll: This deserves its own note, as the high point of the film. Apparently this stage sequence was originally filmed and shown in Technicolor, unlike the rest of the film which was monochrome. It must have been spectacular; sadly most of the original colour sequence has been lost. Also apparently when they had to remount it, rather than pay the orchestra to play the music again live, they played back the previous recording, thus originating the practice of soundtrack dubbing. I can’t find an embeddable link but here’s Turner Classic Movies’ presentation, with subtitles:
Apart from the excellent choreography, I think it has a fascinating hint of subversion. The song is in fact in a minor key, rather than celebratory. The lyrics are about people being pushed into marriage by the expectations of society, without much hope for success. It’s a very downbeat note in the story, which casts the rest of it in quite a different light.
Anyway, that’s two films in a row which were more enjoyable than I had expected; rather encouraging for the long term prospects of this project.
Next up is a film I have actually seen before, on TV when I was a teenager: All Quiet on the Western Front.
Sat, 10:39: RT @jk_rowling: We bought it without seeing it, we don’t know how much it will cost and the renovators have never done this before. What co…
Second paragraph of third story (“Triumph”, by Robin Hobb):
The dust-laden wind was drying his bared eyes, and his vision was dwindling. Tears, the tears of his body rather than the tears of his heart, ran unchecked down his cheeks. The severed muscles that had once worked his eyelids twitched in helpless reflex; they could not moisten his eyeballs and renew his vision. Just as well; there was little out there he wished to see.
Ages since I read this, I have to admit, but looking back three stories stood out – two which both look at the Rome/Carthage conflicts from different perspectives, Robin Hobb’s “Triumph” and Steven Saylor’s “Eagle and the Rabbit”; and Carrie Vaughan’s “Girls from Avenger” about women pilots in the second world war. There were a load of other stories tying into series, some of which I know and some of which I don’t, but those made less of an impact on me.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2011. Next in that list is 1434: The Year a Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance, by Gavin Menzies.
Is your mother going on the road much these days?’ they would ask me, and I would say no, oh no, she isn’t going out much anymore, but I knew they knew I lied. “Not much time for ironing,” they might continue compassionately, examining the sleeve of my blouse. “Not much time for ironing when she has to go out on the road.”
I’ve become a huge fan of Alice Munro’s short fiction over the last few years, and so I approached this, marketed as her only novel, with anticipation but also trepidation; would she be able to bring her particular genius to the longer form?
In fact, it turns out to be more of a sequence of linked short stories in the life of the same character than a novel per se – a format Munro also uses in The Beggar Maid – so we are on safe territory. Not that Munro’s writing is safe; her protagonist, Del Jordan, a gifted, geeky girl from a rural Ontario background, who knows she is looking for something more than is on offer in her home town but struggles against the oppression of conformity, is presumably autobiographical in large part. Having said that, almost all of the characters are drawn with sympathy and understanding, despite the gentle shades of alienation that suffuse Munro’s writing. I think that her short fiction tends to deliver more bang per wordcount, but this is still a good read.
This was both my top unread non-genre fiction book and the top book in that category recommended by you. Next in those lists respectively are The Angel Makers by Stefan Brijs (already read), and A Man of Parts by David Lodge.
Wed, 12:41: RT @BootstrapCook: People snarking at the Laura K bodyguard story should remember that last year a female MP was murdered by a political ex…
Wed, 15:23: Just to finish the story: I asked for my article to be deleted from the book, and the publishers have duly done so. https://t.co/bfgjV5gvgl
Thu, 08:00: RT @2001_italia: Great find from Joe R. Frinzi: The aliens in ‘2001: a space odyssey’ decorated the Hotel Room with paintings from 007’s ‘A…
Thu, 10:45: Pathetic Motorways: The M3 in Belfast https://t.co/Hbg7oOH7Yd This is a great site, and this is a great page on the site.
Second paragraph of third chapter [context: it is May/June 1945]:
For Henry St John, working a few days later in Midsomer Norton, there was as ever only frustration — 'I tried in vain to buy some Ovaltine, this being the 11th successive shop at which I failed to get it, although it continues to be widely advertised' — but there was some compensation when, on the train back to Bristol, an American soldier gave him a Camel cigarette. The American influence, and indeed anything that smacked of the modern, did not play well with Ernest Loftus in Essex. `Mrs Williams [the French mistress] and I are taking joint action to stop our scholars attending Youth Clubs or, as I call them, Child Night Clubs,' noted Barking Abbey School's head in early June. 'So far as our type of school is concerned they are a menace. The world is sex-mad & they are the outcome of the sex-urge + the war + the cinema + evil books + a debased art & music + an uneducated parentage."
I read an greatly enjoyed the second book of this series a couple of years ago; I'm glad to say that the first is just as good, a detailed internal history of England (with a bit of Wales, less Scotland and no Northern Ireland) during basically the term of Attlee's Labour government. Kynaston's sympathy for the detail is tremendously engaging, and humanises a surprisingly alien place and time. There are some imporessive recurrent themes: rationing remained a constant reality (and of course enabled the black market to flourish), with most food remaining rationed until after the period covered in this book. Despite the Labour victory, government remained firmly in the hands of the civil service whose upper ranks shared a deep Establishment background – it was the 60s before anyone really challenged this. This was true also of the fledgling BBC, which did not even cover the 1950 World Cup (in which England was famously defeated by the Unites States). Some interesting people pop up again and again – Glenda Jackson and Pete Wyman, promising teenagers; the diarists both obscure (Henry St.John); and well-known (Molly Panter-Downs).
In contrast to the second book in the series, there is plenty of party politics here. The Labour Party, having won power (on the ideas framed by Michael Young, a figure I had forgotten about), successfully created the National Health Service and nationalised the coal mines, and crucially threw its lot in with Truman rather than Stalin. But I was unaware of the role that sudden death played in the politics of the day – Ellen Wilkinson, the Minister of Education, died in 1947, and Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary and the Lord Privy Seal, in 1951. (This just doesn't happen any more. The last British cabinet minister to die in office, of this writing, was Lord Williams of Mostyn in 2003; the last of the same weight as Wilkinson or Bevin was Anthony Crosland in 1977.)
The Labour government's reputation for competence was hit early on by an event for which it bore no responsibility and whose consequences it would have been very difficult for any government to mitigate: the exceptionally cold winter of 1946/47. Six weeks of very cold weather from late January to early March were followed by heavy rain, which added to the thaw to flood towns and countryside. The winter of 1962-63 was colder, but I guess that the country's infrastructure was better able to cope (and it was not immediately followed by heavy rain, as had happened in 1947). The bad weather hit industrial and agricultural productivity very hard, and certainly prolonged rationing and post-war hardship. Kynaston describes all of this vividly but unsentimentally, possibly the best passage of the book.
In summary, well worth reading. I'll look out for the third volume, and the others when they come out.
This bubbled to the top of my unread books from your recommendations of last year. next in that list is Guided by the Beauty of their Weapons, by Philip Sandifer.
Wed, 10:45: An Oxford student stabbed her boyfriend with a bread knife. So why was she not jailed? https://t.co/zx9Aj19Rrq Good read.
Wed, 11:25: RT @ChukaUmunna: So May, Fox &co look to the US for a trade deal to make up for Brexit; US responds with a 220% tariff on a UK product http…
Wed, 11:28: “the fundamental difference between being a fully-fledged member of an internal market and a junior partner in a fr… https://t.co/THisfEgH0N
Sam hadn’t really expected anyone to bother her about the insulin pump hanging on her side. The most attention anyone had given it was to screen it for off-color blips, and the security guard at the Bay jumper hadn’t even done that. He’d just grinned at her, displayed his own pump, and said, ‘Pray for better tissue matching, eh, sister?’ Airport security was interested only in weapons and explosives, not unlicensed or bootlegged computer equipment. Besides, it really had been an insulin pump once, before she’d gone to work on it.
I have to admit that cyberpunk has never really been my thing, and I rather bounced off Synners (short for "synthesisers", people who have allowed their brains to be surgically augmented with devices that allow them to interface directly with computers. It was written in 1991 so the tech has dated rather badly; and I found the proliferation of characters and scene setting, and the fact the the plot doesn't really start until half way through, difficult to engage with. I've greatly enjoyed Pat Cadigan's recent short fiction, but this didn't work for me.
It obviously did work for the 1991 Clarke Award judges since they picked it ahead of Eternal Light by Paul J. McAuley (runner-up), The Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons, Raft by Stephen Baxter, Subterranean Gallery by Richard Paul Russo and White Queen by Gwyneth Jones. As previously noted, White Queen was a joint winner of the first Tiptree Award that year, the second Hyperion book won the BSFA (for which Eternal Light was also shortlisted). Synners was on the Nebula shortlist (the winner was Stations of the Tide by Michael SwanwickBujold's Barrayar). I am not sure if I have read Raft
So, a couple of months ago I wrote a short article for a book edited by a chap I know, for free.
Now I discover that the book is for sale for €690. No, there is no missing decimal point. That’s the discount rate for early orders. The full price is €890.
As originally published, Robinson Crusoe has no chapters. One later edition has the following as the second paragraph of the third chapter:
When I had passed this resolution about ten days longer, as I have said, I began to see that the land was inhabited; and in two or three places, as we sailed by, we saw people stand upon the shore to look at us; we could also perceive that they were quite black, and stark naked. I was once inclined to have gone on shore to them; but Xury was my better counsellor, and said to me, "No go, no go." However, I hauled in nearer the shore that I might talk to them, and I found they run along the shore by me a good way: I observed they had no weapons in their hands, except one, who had a long slender stick, which Xury said was a lance, and that they would throw, them a great way with good aim; so I kept at a distance, but talked with them by signs as well as I could; and particularly made signs for something to eat; they beckoned to me to stop my boat, and they would fetch me some meat. Upon this I lowered the top of my sail, and lay by, and two of them ran up into the country, and in less than half an hour came back, and brought with them two pieces of dry flesh and some corn, such as is the produce of their country; but we neither knew what the one nor the other was: however, we were willing to accept it, but how to come at it was our next dispute, for I was not for venturing on shore to them, and they were as much afraid of us: but they took a safe way for us all, for they brought it to the shore and laid it down, and went and stood a great way off till we fetched it on board, and then came close to us again.
OK, who remembers this?
Those of you who are not around my age or not from the same country as me may not be aware that during the UK school holidays in the early 1970s, the BBC would show episodes of a long long French dramatisation of Robinson Crusoe, rather vaguely following the plot of the book. It was all a bit above my five-year-old appreciation, but it meant that a generation who might have never read the book became familiar with the bare bones of the story. And it's a good story, after all – self-sufficiency in desperate circumstances strikes a chord with a lot of us. It's interesting that two of the three questions that OKCupid found are the best predictors of a relationship's long-term potential speak to this – "Have you ever traveled around another country alone?" and "Wouldn’t it be fun to chuck it all and go live on a sailboat?"
The book itself is a bit more rambling than I had remembered. The core part is Crusoe's isolation on the island, in my edition from the shipwreck on page 64 until he starts to rescue Friday on page 205, just about half of the book (text runs from page 18 to page 310). But the part with Crusoe and Friday alone together (mainly having religious debates, all of which Crusoe wins) is actually rather short – by page 231 they are rescuing other prisoners (creating what he himself calls a colony, with himself as king/governor) and Crusoe leaves the island on page 274 with thirty pages of international financial wrangling still to go.
Probably most readers completely forget about that last part, but Angus Ross in the introduction to my Penguin edition points out that the economics of the situation, even for the lengthy period without any actual money, are really important to Defoe; Crusoe is always counting up his resources and working out what he can do with them. It's only reasonable that there is a theoretical Robinson Crusoe economy with no trade and a single economic agent. The economics of the book have stood the test of time better than its theology.
This was the most popular book on my shelves that I had not reviewed online. Next in that list is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, bu Roald Dahl.
Sun, 18:14: RT @anthonyzach: I used to be mildly anti but after (a) student numbers cock-up, (b) general immigration paranoia & (c) experiencing Belgia…
First off, I'd never actually been to the V&A before in all my years of visiting London. It is pretty extraordinary and would clearly well repay another visit. The Pink Floyd exhibition is very popular – I missed the window for buying tickets online, and turning up at opening time on Saturday morning at 10 am, the earliest available slot was 1215, and it was really crowded inside. Weekdays are probably easier. It was a nice day so we were able to enjoy both elevenses beforehand and lunch afterwards in the V&A courtyard.
The exhibition itself is total audio immersion (as you would hope and expect) with different corners of different rooms featuring interviews with the band members and those who knew them. The first display was a map of Cambridge which evoked nostalgia for me and S (we served a term togerther on CUSU together long ago), marking out important places for the band (though of course they actually met and started playing together in London). The Syd Barrett material was rather moving, and suspended above the first exhibition room was purportedly the original Bike.
I had not known that Pink Floyd did some incidental music for late 1960s films, and also performed a piece for the BBC coverage of the first moon landing (this video isn't in the exhibition, I dug it out later):
A lot of the exhibition is about the cover art, and here S got some very good pictures:
There is a great interview with the stuntman who is on fire on the front cover of "Wish You Were Here":
I completely failed to get a decent selfie of us in front of the Monosee picture from the inside cover:
Current Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (a chapter a month) The Famished Road, by Ben Okri Peoplewatching, by Desmond Morris Space Helmet for a Cow, vol 2, by Paul Kirklees
Last books finished A Short Guide to Irish Science Fiction, by Jack Fennell Press Cuttings, by George Bernard Shaw
Next books The Dancers at the End of Time, by Michael Moorcock Alexander the Corrector: The Tormented Genius Whose Cruden's Concordance Unwrote the Bible, by Julia Keay 1434: The Year a Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance, by Gavin Menzies
Sat, 15:07: RT @StephenFarryMLA: As UK Brexits, not tenable to argue RoI shd unpick its EU relationship. UK-RoI relations best in 100 yrs pre Brexit. h…
Sun, 07:16: RT @IanDunt: From Moody’s report downgrading UK credit rating. Perhaps a Brexiter would like to explain which part of this is wrong. https:…
Girl: "I'm afraid his hard disk is crashing."
Lars: [My hard disk? / What? Wait… /
I'm not really… Does she mean… /
No, that can't be. Unless… / Oh shit. /
I'm even stammering in my own thoughts. /
This is worse than – ]
Boy: "Well, you'll just have to reboot it."
Second frame of third page of vol 2:
Matthias: "What? He was going to serve Ella up to you with a pretty bow on top?"
Lars: "Just banter. / He just wanted to have fun with his mates. /
And what's more fun than making a weirdo look stupid in a trendy club?"
I enjoyed Kristof Spaey's art in the Misschien / Nooit / Ooit trilogy with script by Marc Legendre, and picked these two albums up at Brussels Comic Con earlier this year, where he has joined forces with Flemish TV script writer Bart Vaessens to tell what at first sight appears to be a story of student love and drama in my local university city, Leuven. So far two volumes have appeared of what was originally planned to be a an ongoing series (though as the first appeared in 2014 and the second in 2015, and it's now 2017, I wonder if we'll see any more). The title Anders basically means Different.
The first volume, Lars, sets up our eponymous hero as an insecure chap who is trying to work up the confidence to get together with the lovely Ella. It plays out as a standard story of student shenanigans – up until the last few pages when suddenly one of their friends turns out to have supernatural powers which help Lars and Ella out of a fix, but are not such good news for one of their fellow students. The second volume, Onthuld (Revealed) tracks Lars, Ella and their friend Alix dealing with the consequent investigation by the police and by others. It also ends on a cliff-hanger.
It's very readable, if full of Flemish student slang which I don't usually hear much (though I may be hearing more, given that young F is about to start at Leuven where the comic is set). I hope that the creators do come back to Anders and give us some more.
Fri, 14:53: RT @JenniferMerode: Same Liam Fox who called Malmstrom’s comments “bizarre, stupid, preposterous and ridiculous” when she said no trade ta…
Fri, 18:42: RT @MichelBarnier: Constructive #FlorenceSpeech by PM May; must be translated into negotiating positions to make meaningful progress https:…
Midway through the afternoon we turned onto another trail. It led north into an area of low hills. The soil was sandy. The trees were small and scrubby. Here and there we came upon outcroppings of a sandy rock, yellow or dull orange. The trail was barely visible: a faint line that wound among the rocks and trees. It led finally—in the late afternoon—to a shack, made of long branches leaning against rock. Skins were stretched over the branches. Smoke came out of a hole. What a sad little dwelling place!
I enjoyed A Woman of the Iron People a lot. It’s a great piece of speculative anthropological writing, about vulnerable Earth people exploring a planet where gender roles are very different from ours (men live solitary hunting lives, and possibly are not all that bright; women run all the settlements and technology). The tensions in the human starship crew and among the locals are sharply defined. It’s in the shadow of The Left Hand of Darkness, obviously, but I thought Arnason managed the exceptionally difficult feat of creating an alien society and then concentrating on those who are deviant within that society’s own constraints – by contrast, Gethen seems to be full of “straight” Gethenians.
This won the very first Tiptree Award back in 1992, along with White Queen by Gwyneth Jones, which failed to grab me. This is part of my ongoing series of reading Tiptree, Clarke and BSFA winners in chronological order, except where I’ve already written them up recently, so it follows from the winners of the BSFA 1988 Lavondyss and Clarke 1989 Unquenchable Fire, skipping the BSFA 1989 Pyramids and Clarke 1990 The Child Garden, and also the winner of both 1990 BSFA and 1991 Clarke Take Back Plenty. Next up is Synners by Pat Cadigan.
Thu, 17:53: RT @davidallengreen: The test for Theresa May’s speech is whether it engages with serious and detailed points in Barnier’s speech today: ht…
Fri, 10:03: RT @JenniferMerode: Council of Europe defers decision on legal action against Azerbaijan over refusal to release Ilgar Mammadov https://t.c…
Take generous: the word originally meant well-born, and because it was obvious that well-bred people were magnanious and peasants were stingy, it came to mean munificent. Indeed, the well-bred gentleman established such a reputation for himself that the word gentle, meaning soft, was named after him. In fact, some gentlemen that the gin in gingerly is probably just another gen lurking in our language. Gingerly certainly has nothing to do with ginger.
A somewhat rambly book of etymologies, with some interesting nuggets (eg usages from Coverdale's Bible) but priding itself on having no real overall structure. Probably better for dipping into than trying to read as a single work.
This was the top unread book I acquired in 2015. Next on that list is Wolf in White Van, by John Darnielle.
Wed, 12:08: RT @KenRoth: Nobel Prize for Feigned Ignorance: Aung San Suu Kyi pretends not to know why Rohingya Muslims are fleeing homes. https://t.co/…
Wed, 18:56: Intellectual life in my grandmother’s home town in the Gilded Age. Sanitary Plumbing, Evolution, Socialism and Wome… https://t.co/NsyXXO0Mno
Wed, 19:35: RT @Catilinarian: Actually really curious whether Sanitary Plumbing was linked to women having more freedom the way it is in many countries…
Wed, 21:58: RT @AlbertoNardelli: OECD 2018 GDP forecasts: USA 2.4% Canada 2.3% Germany 2.1% Euro area 1.9% France 1.6% Italy 1.2% Japan 1.2% UK 1% ht…
Wed, 22:03: RT @NualaMcAllister: Thanks @100ResCities for confidence to help build resilience in Belfast. Great to catch up & strategise in NYC. Look f…
My mother’s parents – my ‘Nanny’ and ‘Grampy’ – were not individuals but a relationship. Their Christian names were irrelevant. They were ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’ to each other, and even my mother had to think twice before she could confirm that her dad was known, very occasionally, by his second name of ‘George’. Utterly familiar, they were also remote figures. I was one of a tribe of grandchildren who came and went in their house, played outside in their backyard, or fidgeted indoors while the grown-ups talked and laughed. Our illnesses mattered, and making sure that we survived, but otherwise, unless we were troublesome, we were a herd –‘the kids’. Before my teenage years I seldom held a conversation alone with either grandparent, and then only a few awkward sentences. I never stayed overnight in their house: why would I want to when my own was just up the road? I never went upstairs. Most of their house was out of bounds to me. Yet I must have been in the front room, a sanctum kept for visitors, bespeaking my grandfather’s status as a tradesman, for I remember the gleaming lacquered piano with its lid shut, and that I lifted the heavy receiver of the black Bakelite telephone, cradling it against my ear, listening in awe to the dialling tone as if to the distant sea.
This is a great work of social and personal history. Light has taken her four grandparents and traced the genealogy of each as far back as she can go. None of them were from the well-chronicled upper or middle classes; she remarks that if anywhere can claim to be her ancestral home, it is the workhouse, as someone from every generation ended up there. She gradually zooms in on Portsmouth as the focal point of the story, but not before travelling around the middle and south of England in general. Where there may be personal data lacking, she diverges into intense history of the disruptive effect of the Industrial Revolution on society, the precise details of needle-making, the life prospects of the building labourer, the reality of the Navy in the tweentieth century; and she humanises these sweeping sources of data with moving empathy for her own ancestors and their fellow citizens. It's a tremendous piece of work, both sad and uplifting, demonstrating that historical writing can almost completely avoid the great and the good and still be really memorable. Strongly recommended.
This was at the top of my list of non-fiction recommended by you. Next up was The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, by Erving Goffman, which I have read but not yet reviewed.
Tue, 18:40: RT @SJAMcBride: Lord Maginnis has used a House of Lords question to ask the Government how many times the Secretary of State has met him. h…
Tue, 21:19: RT @JolyonMaugham: Liam Fox’s department just deleted last night’s tweet about all the wonderful stuff the EU was getting for us and we’d l…
Second paragraph of third chapter (counting the introduction as the first chapter):
Then they all tried to talk at once, and Scooper banged the table with a maller to bring the meetings to order. Unfortunately his banging upset a bottle of water which fell right into Doughnut’s lap.
My long term reader will remember that I wrote up the 17 episodes of classic children’s TV show Here Come The Double Deckers last year. Here is the one and only book of the show, by script editor Glyn Jones, transforming to print two of the episodes that he wrote or co-wrote, first Barney, the 13th episode in broadcast order, and then Tiger Takes Off, the very first episode ever shown. It has lots of lovely colour photographs from the show, and is only 64 pages. The introduction has pictures of everyone including Albert as played by Melvyn Hayes.
The two episodes are rather odd choices, neither of them particularly plot-heavy even by Double Deckers standards; I wonder if it was just the two scripts Jones happened to have handy on a wet weekend in 1971 when he needed to write the book? It has to be admitted that Barney comes off rather better on the page than it does on the screen, with a bit more characterisation given to both Barney and the policeman (here named as PC Hastings). The core of Tiger Takes Off is the hovercraft chase, a long purely visual sequence which Jones wisely doesn’t attempt to transfer to the page; most of the excellent dialogue is kept, and I can imagine kids reading this out loud to each other, each taking different parts.
This isn’t the only Double Deckers book – there was a 1972 annual as well. Must look out for that.
All on a sudden a lady stood before me; how she came in, I do not know. I took her for my friend, Sister Sara.
সহসা আমার পার্শ্বে একটি ইউরোপীয় রমণীকে দণ্ডায়মানা দেখিয়া বিস্মিত হইলাম। তিনি কী প্রকারে আসিলেন, বুঝিতে পারিলাম না। তাঁহাকে আমার পরিচিতা ‘ভগিনী সারা’।
I spotted this as an interesting feminist story from India in 1905 – in fact, it was originally published in English, in the Indian Ladies' Magazine, but I've put the standard Bengali translation next to it because I am intrigued that the English "lady" is translated into "ইউরোপীয় রমণীকে", "i'urōpīẏa ramaṇīkē," "European woman". I wonder if that is how the author intended it to be understood? (Of course she was probably more comfortable in Urdu than Bengali.)
It's a very short story in which Sultana finds herself in a world where men suffer the same discrimination that women suffer in our world, and as a result things run much better. Solar-powered technology has enabled Ladyland to repel male invaders and establish a new way of life, with decent showers and flying cars. Then, alas, Sultana wakes up; for it was all a dream. Begum Rokeya was a leading Islamic feminist writer, and the story is basically a thought-provoking vignette, with some shafts of wit – the fact that men's brains are bigger does not show that they are superior, because elephants have bigger brains than men. Great fun, but very short.
Current Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (a chapter a month) The Famished Road, by Ben Okri Peoplewatching, by Desmond Morris
Last books finished Life During Wartime, ed. Paul Cornell Synners, by Pat Cadigan Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman Diamond Dogs, by Mike Tucker Antarès, Épisode 2, by Leo Onthuld, by Kristof Spaey and Bart Vaessens Antarès, Épisode 3, by Leo
Next books The Dancers at the End of Time, by Michael Moorcock Alexander the Corrector: The Tormented Genius Whose Cruden's Concordance Unwrote the Bible, by Julia Keay 1434: The Year a Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance, by Gavin Menzies
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