Monthly Archives: November 2017

Thorns, by Robert Silverberg

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

“Nix.” Nikolaides drew the final consonant out luxuriously. “Chalk gave her to me, him to you. She’s a bore, anyway. Why switch?”

Classic sf which was beaten by Lord of Light and The Einstein Intersection for the Hugo and Nebula respectively; I thought I had read it before but in fact it seems I hadn’t.

It’s a short but pretty powerful book. The central characters are a media mogul who is also a psychic vampire who draws sustenance from other people’s pain, and the two people who he brings together purely for entertainment, an astronaut who has been horribly mutilated by aliens and a young woman who has been at the centre of a media storm after allowing a hundred of her eggs to be fertilised for donor pregnancies. The notion that a senior media figure is obscenely benefiting from causing people pain remains horribly valid today; now that it’s possible, egg donation seems much less scandalous than Silverberg anticipated, as far as I can tell. (And while we don’t yet have aliens mutilating astronoauts, we have plenty of unwilling celebrities who have been horribly injured in public.)

I’ve seen this described as Silverberg’s first good novel, and while I’m not familiar enough with his early work to pass judgement, it is pretty good (even if deservingly beaten by Lord of Light for the Hugo). The set-up is all too plausibly done in the context of the story’s future technology, and the payoff delivered in due course after some grim sidetracks. Well worth getting hold of.

This was my top book acquired in 2010. Next in that pile is Michael Ignatieff’s biography of Isaiah Berlin.

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The Udvar-Hazy Center of the National Air and Space Museum

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Thanks very much to C for ferrying me around northern Virginia at the weekend to see a couple of things that had long been on my list: the Udvar-Hazy Center of the National Air and Space Museum, and the battlefield at Manassas/Bull Run.

At the Udvar-Hazy Center, obviously the standout exhibit is the space shuttle Discovery, which flew 39 missions from 1984 to 2011, more than any other spacecraft. It was amazinfg to stand in front of it. It dominates but does not fill the McDonnell Hall, and is well positioned so that you can photograph it from all angles.



For scale, some of the earlier manned capsules – a couple of Mercury backups and the real Gemini 7.


Many more satellites.

And more.

The Mars Rover.

In contrast to the Space Shuttle, it's very difficult to take a picture of Concorde – it is so big!

The Enola Gay has also been preserved:


Cabin of a Goodyear blimp, made in 1934 and in service until very recently.


A German WW2 rocket plane.


I knew it was there but it still gave me a shock of recognition – Willy Ley's 1956 Hugo Award. (Smaller than today's trophies.) 1956 was only the third time the Hugos were awarded. (Willy Ley also won one of the first ones, in 1953.)

Earlier in the day we looked at the museum of the two Battles of Manasses at Henry Hill, 20 km south of Dulles. As with most battlefields, not all that much to see apart from a film about the battles.
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This is where Confederate General Thomas J. Jackson acquired his nickname "Stonewall" for standing firm in the face of Union fire. It was much quieter on Saturday.

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Sunday reading

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Current
Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (a chapter a month)
Virginia Woolf, by Hermione Lee

Last books finished
A Life Worth Living ed. Simon Guerrier
The Deepest Sea, by Charles Barnitz
Doctor Who: The American Adventures, by Justin Richards
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl

Next books
Dear Old Dead, by Jane Haddam
Corum: The Prince in the Scarlet Robe, by Michael Moorcock
Wolf in White Van, by John Darnielle

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The invisible creek in the heart of Washington DC

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I'm in D.C. for a few days, and have been musing on the geography of the city – how the familiar grid of streets attempts to drown out the underlying landscape, and sometimes succeeds.

Googling around historical maps, I discovered Don Lockwood’s fascinating 1990 reconstruction of the topography of the Federal City as it would have been in 1791, before the building started. Here’s the central stretch:

Isn’t it interesting that the old shoreline path (the Ferry Road) was not all that far from the later route of Pennsylvania avenue?

And my attention was caught by the clustering of contour lines, with a spring emerging from them, to the northeast of the future site of the White House. The spring – two springs, in fact – fed a creek that flows southeast and then south, before joining the Tiber Creek estuary. The heads of the spring seemed roughly to be in the location of today’s Franklin Square. Was there any historical record of it, I wondered?

And actually, yes there is. This map from Thomas, Cowperthwait & Co's 1850 Atlas gives the creek a slightly different but recognisable course (and let’s bear in mind that Lockwood possibly used this map, or a version of it, as the basis for his imagined 1791 topography):

There are two springs marked in Franklin Square, with streams joining in its southeast corner; the creek is shown flowing south along 13th Street for a block, then heading east between G and H Streets, then directly south between 9th and 10th Streets, past the Patent Office (now the National Portrait Gallery) before flowing into the canal opposite the Smithsonian. A rather odd street, G Place, now runs east-west between 9th and 10th Streets, bisecting the block where the map shows the creek turning the corner.

The creek would have flowed through the backyard of Ford’s Theatre (which is labelled 33 on the map, then the First Baptist Church), where John Wilkes Booth had his getaway horse waiting after his fatal attack on President Abraham Lincoln. The last two blocks of its course are now occupied by FBI headquarters and the Department of Justice. (That first part of Louisiana Avenue, part of the infamous Murder Bay in the old days, has been obliterated by the DoJ, and the rest of that end of it is now Indiana Avenue.)

It's also marked, with much the same route, on Faehtz and Pratt's 1874 reconstruction of the pre-development landholdings of the site of the city, rising on the land of John Davidson and flowing through the land of David Burnes.

Here's my attempt to draw it onto the map of downlown DC today (click to embiggen).

There’s no trace of it in later nineteenth century maps, and I think the depiction of the creek may already have been out of date by 1850. According to this site, water from the springs in Franklin Square was piped to the White House along 14th St and F Street from 1816 until 1832, which presumably means the creek ran dry. According to this site, more underground pipes ran from the Franklin Square springs after 1832. In the 1880s the hotels around Franklin Square were built and the springs dried up entirely.

But I think you can detect its legacy in some of the building plots and shapes that survive to the present day. I find the gap to the west of the Martin Luther King Memorial Library particularly suggestive.

We're used to the mildly hidden histories of great (and also small) European cities. But the newer cities of America have their own hidden depths as well. 

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Running Through Corridors 2, by Toby Hadoke and Robert Shearman

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Second para of discussion of third episode of Spearhead from Space:

This is what makes Spearhead from Space frightening. It doesn’t play fair. It lulls you into a false sense of security, saving a lot of its chills for long sequences of tension — then turns about and shouts “boo”! You can’t relax with it, because it’ll slow down, then speed up, then slow down again, all the best to create its scare moments. It’s extremely clever.

This is the much-delayed second volume of commentary between Shearman and Hadoke; I read and enjoyed the first back in 2011, and look forward now to the third when it comes out. It’s now several years since I completed my own rewatch of Old Who, so this was a nice return to that exercise for me, especially since (like the authors) this is the period of the show that I remember most vividly from my own childhood. And there was one surprise – I had forgotten Tom Baker’s appearance in character on Animal Magic, which I think I must have missed when it was shown in 1979:

The two don’t deviate much from the received wisdom (or my own views) of the high and low points of the show – in particular, the later parts of both Season Nine and Season Fifteen, where they struggle in their mission to say only nice things about each episode. In fact, they are much harsher on The Claws of Axos than I would be. But it’s interesting to consider that one of my recurrent complaints about New Who – that the punch of the season finale has often been pulled – was often just as true of Old Who during the Pertwee and Baker years.

The write-ups of each episode, presented as correspondence between Rob Shearman and Toby Hadoke, are very specifically tied to May-August 2009, a period when both writers went on various travels and Hadoke embarked on what turned out to be a short-lived marriage; but the seven-year gap has meant some occasionally poignant endnotes noting the subsequent passing of key figures in the making of the programme (notably Barry Letts).

This is also a milestone in that I have now finished my 50th birthday present books – I read most of them in the month or so after my birthday, but then spent some Amazon tokens in the summer and got another six, of which this was the last. Thanks, everyone!

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The Past Through Tomorrow, by Robert A. Heinlein

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Second paragraph of third story (“Blowups Happen”):

The man addressed turned slowly around and faced the speaker. His expression was hidden by a grotesque helmet, part of a heavy, leaden armor which shielded his entire body, but the tone of voice in which he answered showed nervous exasperation.

Heinlein’s mammoth future history, some of which I had re-read recently; 21 stories published as a collection in 1967, though in fact all but two originally came out between 1939 and 1949, outlining the future development of humanity through the coming centuries. The 1941 stories alone provided four of Heinlein’s five final ballot spots in last year’s Retro Hugos for Best Novella and Best Novelette.

Heinlein misses a lot of things – notably the rise of information technology; his 23rd century spaceships are still running with slide rules. Some of these are a bit too sentimental, some based on concepts that don’t really resonate today, and the last, “Methuselah’s Children”, is pretty weak – 100,000 people surviving on a spaceship built for a much smaller number??? But the idea of framing a future history based on technological advance rather than, say, the mysticism of Olaf Stapedon remains engaging. In particular, the theocratic America of If This Goes On- is rather closer to the bone now than it was in the 1940s. The whole collection is one of those taproot texts of the genre that remains well worth reading.

This reached the top of three unread piles simultaneously; it was my top book acquired in 2016, my top unread sf book, and my top remaining book from your recommendations. Next in those lists respectively are The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig, The Island of Dr Moreau by H.G. Wells, and Hardwired by Walter Jon Williams.

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The Last Castle, by Jack Vance

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

A hundred such cases were known, and while the hardheaded scoffed, none needlessly traveled the countryside by night. Indeed, if ghosts truly haunt the scenes of tragedy and heartbreak, then the landscape of Old Earth must be home to ghosts and specters beyond all numbering – especially that region across which Xanten rolled in the power-wagon, where every rock, every meadow, every vale and swale was crusted thick with human experience.

The Last Castle won the Nebula for Best Novella and the Hugo for Best Novelette. For the Nebula, it beat Avram Davidson’s Clash of Star-Kings and Charles L. Harness’ “The Alchemist”; for the Hugo, it beat Gordon R. Dickson’s “Call Him Lord”; Robert M., Green, Jr.’s “Apology to Inky”; Charles L. Harness’s “The Alchemist” (again); Charles L. Harness’s “An Ornament to His Profession”; Hayden Howard’s “The Eskimo Invasion”; Thomas Burnett Swann’s “The Manor of Roses”; Roger Zelazny’s “For a Breath I Tarry”; and Roger Zelazny’s “This Moment of the Storm”. I think I’ve read the Dickson; I know I’ve read and love both the Zelazny stories, which I think have stood the test of time a bit better.

The Hugo for Best Novel went to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein, which however lost out to both Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes and Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany for the Nebula. The Hugo for Best Short Story went to “Neutron Star” by Larry Niven; the Nebula for Best Novelette went to “Call Him Lord” by Gordon R. Dickson, and the Nebula for Best Short Story went to “The Secret Place” by Richard McKenna. I must say this was a tremendous year. Bob Shaw’s heartbreaking “Light of Other Days” was a finalist for both Best Short Story categories.

I don’t think The Last Castle has aged particularly well. The story is about a decadent aristocratic race of humans at the end of time, whose oppressed non-human slaves have risen and destroyed all but one of the humans’ castles. Our hero (there are no notable female characters) makes an alliance with the barbarian humans outside the castle gates, crushes the slave revolt and sends them back where they came from. The racial undertones are rather difficult to ignore.

On the other hand, it’s a triumph of world-building, even if the world is an unequal and racist one. The social order of the aristocrats is mapped out in loving detail, perhaps far too much of it, and the descriptions of the different environments of the far-future earth are vivid and distinct.

However, it’s not really Vance at his best; apart from anything else, it isn’t very funny.

The next in my chronological run of joint winners is “Gonna Roll the Bones”, by Fritz Leiber.

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From Bed to Bed, by Catullus, trans. James Michie

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Third poem in the book (actually Catullus 5):

My Lesbia, let us live and love
And not care tuppence for old men
Who sermonise and disapprove.
Suns when they sink can rise again,
But we, when our brief light has shone,
Must sleep the long night on and on.
Kiss me: a thousand kisses, then
A hundred more, and now a second
Thousand and hundred, and now still
Hundreds and thousands more, until
The thousand thousands can’t be reckoned
And we’ve lost track of the amount
And nobody can work us ill
With the evil eye by keeping count.		 Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,
rumoresque senum severiorum
omnes unius aestimemus assis.
soles occidere et redire possunt:
nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux,
nox est perpetua una dormienda.
da mi basia mille, deinde centum,
dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,
deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum,
dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,
conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,
aut ne quis malus invidere possit,
cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

Language nerdery alert: This is the first ever recorded use of the word bāsium to mean a kiss; most Latin-derived languages have kept it (French baiser, Italian bacio, Spanish beso) whereas the Latin synonyms ōsculum and suāvium have vanished from the lexicon.

Many many years ago, two friends who were getting married had the nice idea of giving everyone at the wedding one of the Phoenix paperbacks then produced by Orion, and this was one of the two we got. (No idea now what the other one was.) I've dipped into it from time to time, and finally decided to read it through. Less than 120 poems by Catullus survive, all presumed to have been written around 60 BC, and 57 of them are presented in this book (omitting I think the longer and less romantic ones).

It's difficult to sum up poetry, especially translated from a foreign language; I must say the ones that grabbed me most were not the poltiical references (though it’s interesting to see disparaging remarks about Julius Caesar from someone who knew him) but the short narrative poems about some particular incident, and the passionate ones like no 5 above, whose first half Sir Walter Ralegh translated thus:

The sun may set and rise,
But we, contrariwise,
Sleep, after our short light,
One everlasting night.

And there’s the well known 85:

I hate and love. If you ask me to explain
        The contradiction,
I can’t, but I can feel it, and the pain
        Is crucifixion.		 Odi et amo. quare id faciam fortasse requiris.
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

James Michie’s translations seem to me to catch both humour and passion, from a writer of over 2000 years ago who still catches our humanity.

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Antarès, Épisodes 2-6, by Leo

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Second frame of third page of each book:

Épisode 2

Kim: "You called me?"
Ashley: "Come in, Miss Keller."

Épisode 3

Maï Lan:"What? You arrive on an unknown planet after a long journey, and instead of sharing in the exploration, breathing fresh air, looking at the sky and feeling the wind, you let yourself get shut in a dungeon and you don't care? I don't get it!"
Lorna:"You don't get it because you have privilege. You can't understand how it feels to be like me, with my father a total asshole and my mother a moron!"

Épisode 4


Ashley: "Can you smell something burning?"

Épisode 5

Kim: "No sign of alien presence, no radar aimed at us during the whole landing, and there, the antennae aren't picking up any kind of radiation for thousands of kilometres around…"
Alexa: "It's strange…"
Épisode 6

Kim: "Good… Let's not waste time."
(and in next frame she says "Wish us luck, we'll need it.")

I got properly hooked by this after reading Épisode 1, and ploughed enthusiastically through the rest of the sequence. I felt that Leo is on top of his game here, balancing the travails of the exploration party (led of course by Kim, who is the heroine of the entire story) with the story of the evil fundamentalist cultists who are trying to assert control over the entire colony and put women like Kim in their place. At the same time the sensawunda is maintained, with the last volume knitting together strands from the Aldébaran and Bételgeuse cycles to reach a pretty satisfying conclusion to Kim’s story, all as ever gorgeously illustrated. But I see there is a five-volume spinoff cycle, Survivants, which was completed earlier this year; I guess I’m going to have to read that too.

Incidentally I had not realised that the English translation has some bizarre censorship. As so often, better to read the original if you can.

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Sunday reading

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Current
Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (a chapter a month)
The Deepest Sea, by Charles Barnitz
A Life Worth Living ed. Simon Guerrier
Virginia Woolf, by Hermione Lee

Last books finished
Cavalcade, by Noël Coward
A Man of Parts, by David Lodge
Isaiah Berlin, by Michaël Ignatieff
Short Trips: Indefinable Magic, ed. Neil Corry

Next books
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl
Dear Old Dead, by Jane Haddam
Doctor Who: The American Adventures, by Justin Richards

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Grand Hotel (1932 film and 1930 book)

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Grand Hotel won the Academy Award for Outstanding Picture in 1932, beating seven films I have never heard of: Arrowsmith, Bad Girl, The Champ, Five Star Final, One Hour with You, Shanghai Express and The Smiling Lieutenant. It did not win any other Oscars, though one of the stars won Best Actor that year for his role in another film. The standout films for the period of eligibility (LA release between August 1931 and July 1932) are surely the Boris Karloff Frankenstein and the Bela Lugosi Dracula, both of which I’m pretty sure I have seen.

It’s an ensemble piece showcasing the talents of MGM’s biggest stars – Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Lionel Barrymore, a couple of others – as residents of a Berlin hotel over a couple of days when their lives all change, narratives intersecting. It’s based on a play which was a massive Broadway hit, in turn based on a book which was a best-seller. I liked it a lot more than I liked Cimarron. It was the second Best Picture (or equivalent) win for MGM Studios and producer Irving Thalberg after Broadway Melody. Here’s a short trailer:

To go back to my previous practice of starting from what I didn’t like and moving forward:

Whiteness: I am sorry to say that yet again there is blatant whitewashing. There is not a single non-white face to be seen on screen. In the book, based on the author’s experiences of working in Berlin’s Hotel Bristol in the 1920s, the Grand Hotel barman is black (though does not speak and is not named) and there is also a jazz band (googling reveals a fair number of black musicians in 1920s German jazz bands). Now that I have started looking for it, I am finding the whiteness of this era of Hollywood increasingly annoying.

Staginess: The film opens with a couple of the important characters info-dumping their plot lines by way of very highly staged phone calls. In fairness, this also gives an excuse for some very nice cinematography of the phone exchange. Some may feel that John Barrymore’s Baron changes his affections awfully fast for the sake of packing a lot of plot into two days of story time, but great stories often involve unusual happenings (and this particular plotline is even more unusual in the book).

It’s all good from here. In particular I’m going to call out the music: there is a certain amount of Strauss, a little Grieg, a little jazz, but most strikingly Rachmaninoff’s piano concerto becomes the Leitmotiv of Garbo’s Grusinskaya, years before Brief Encounter. It’s not intrusive and always works to enhance the action.

Cinematography: The use of the hotel set as performance space is really impressive. I’ve mentioned the phones; the revolving doors, the stairs, the corridors (galleries overlooking the central atrium, handy for filming), the round reception desk. There is lots going on but it feels busy rather than cluttered. The Baron’s climb across the balconies is well done.

Writing: Some great lines, one of which defined the career of the actor who delivered it. Here are some more.

Baron Felix von Geigern: [looking down from the sixth-floor balcony over the front desk] You know, I’ve often wondered what’d happen to that old porter if somebody jumped on him from here.
Flaemmchen: I’m sure I don’t know. Why don’t you try it and find out?

Preysing: I don’t know much about women. I’ve been married for 28 years, you know.

Dr. Otternschlag: And what do you do in the Grand Hotel? Eat. Sleep. Loaf around. Flirt a little, dance a little. A hundred doors leading to one hall. No one knows anything about the person next to them. And when you leave, someone occupies your room, lies in your bed… that’s the end.

Also I love the way that at the end, after the action is over for our central characters, a newly-wed couple are checking in for more adventures.

The Acting: I confess that the only three stars of the six who I’d heard of were Greta Garbo, John Barrymore and Joan Crawford, and the only one I’d actually seen was Garbo (in Ninotchka). But this is the first Oscar winner in this sequence I have seen that gets more than one really good performance; for my money, all six are pretty good, with perhaps a mild reservation for Lewis Shine, who as Dr Otternschlag doesn’t get as much of a story arc as the other five, but is very watchable when he gets his lines (which tend to be vivid).

Both Lionel Barrymore, as the dying accountant Kringelein, and Wallace Beery, as his bullying (but secretly failing) boss Preysing, were pleasant discoveries. Both get quite a lot to do – Lionel Barrymore in particular takes his character from scary whimpering to a place of much greater serenity.

Greta Garbo is indeed very watchable as fading ballerina Grusinskaya, and one sees why she got top billing, combining pathos and passion with a little bit of comedy. This is the film where she says “I want to be alone.” (NB contrary to legend “want”is pronounced with a “w”, not a “v”.)

Joan Crawford is even better as stenographer and woman of the world Flämmchen. She gets to spark with all of the men, and conveys both self-interest and sexiness without ever taking off a rather unsexy outfit.

But the absolute revelation for me was John Barrymore as the Baron. Terrifically suave and sexy (possibly bisexual – look at the way he chats up Kringelein), yet hiding a facade of impoverished criminality. The most memorable visual scenes are his – climbing across the balconies, the love scene with Grusinskaya, the business with Kringelein’s wallet, the assault by telephone at the end. I’d watch another film with him in it.

Next in this sequence is Cavalcade, based on a Noël Coward play, which has the second lowest rating of Best Picture Oscar winners on IMDB (beating only Cimarron), so I’m not holding my breath.

The original book was a best-seller in the USA in 1931 though it did not top the list (that honour went to The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck). Because the author, Vicki Baum, was Jewish, it was among the books burned on the Opernplatz in Berlin in May 1933 and subsequently banned by the Nazis. As well as initiating women’s boxing in Germany, with Marlene Dietrich, she published a novel or two every year from 1919 to 1957 (this was her tenth), but the only other well known one is Life and Death in Bali/A Tale from Bali, which was also filmed. Baum moved to the USA to write the script for the Broadway adaptation and then screenplay for this film, and understandably stayed there rather than move back to Germany.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Nimmt man beispielsweise Herrn Generaldirektor Preysing von der Saxonia Baumwoll A.-G., nimmt man diesen braven, durchschnittsmäßigen Geschäftsmann als Muster, dann ersieht man bald, was die Männer seiner Kaste zwischen acht und zehn im Grand Hôtel treiben.Take, for example, General Manager Preysing of the Saxonia Cotton Company. Let us take this excellent and thoroughly average businessman as an example, and then we shall see what men of his class do between eight and ten in the morning at the Grand Hotel.

The film does not in fact stray very far from the book. Small differences: in the book, Flämmchen doesn’t appear until a quarter of the way through. We get much more insight into Preysing’s and Kringelein’s marriages. The brutal murder is carried out with a heavy ashtray rather than a telephone handset. The action does move outside the hotel now and then, notably to Grusinskaya’s theatre.

Big differences: the ages of several of the main characters. Grusinskaya, played by 27-year-old Greta Garbo on screen, is old enough to have an eight-year-old grandson in the book. The baron, played by 50-year-old John Barrymore, is in his twenties in the book. (As I said, their love affair is more unusual in the book than on screen; but great stories often involve unusual happenings.) 26-year-old Joan Crawford plays Flämmchen, who is explicitly nineteen in the book, though a very worldly wise nineteen:

Flämmchen had no exaggerated opinion of herself. She knew her price. Twenty marks for a photograph in the nude. A hundred and forty marks for a month’s office work. Fifteen pfennig per page for typing with one carbon copy. A little fur coat costing two hundred and forty marks for a week as somebody’s mistress.

The other change that was inevitable for a Hollywood film is to the appearance of Dr Otternschlag, played with mild scarring by Lewis Shine; compare the book’s chilling description:

His face, it must be said, consisted of one half only, in which the sharp and ascetic profile of a Jesuit was completed by an unusually well-shaped ear beneath the sparse gray hair on his temples. The other half of his face was not there. In place of it was a confused medley of seams and scars, crossing and overlapping, and among them was set a glass eye. “A souvenir from Flanders,” Doctor Otternschlag was accustomed to calling it when talking to himself.

Otternschlag gets more to do in the book, and Flämmchen arrives late as noted above, but otherwise the main characters balance out much as they do on screen.

And it’s a good readable story, the first “hotel novel”; apparently a massive hit during its original serialisation (to the point that readers wrote in to protest the killing off of one character in a reaction reminiscent of Torchwood fans’ reaction to the death of Ianto), very firmly moored in the context of late 1920s Berlin, grappling with modernity, with unforeseen and unspeakable horror yet to come (for those of us who know the city now, it’s a bit chilling to have the still intact Gedächtniskirche as a major landmark). Everyone has their arc, and we like and sympathise with all of them, even Preysing to an extent. It’s not deep and meaningful, but it’s well done and very entertaining; and the film does it justice. My edition has a very good introduction by Noah Isenberg which added to my enjoyment.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) | Oppenheimer (2023)

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Caprice and Rondo, by Dorothy Dunnett

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Because the Mission travelled by road and arrived, by intent, on the Sabbath, its ears and eyes were spared the immediate impact. It heard, in the clear, biting air, only the battling clangour of church bells and the crackling tread of the welcoming cortege, followed, as they entered the city, by the dutiful salutes of the citizens. Only when riding down the wide street to their lodging did Kathi glimpse through the portals ahead the wharves of the little Mottlau, Danzig’s river, and the second, watery city that dwelled there.

Seventh volume in the series of eight about the life of medieval merchant Nicolas de Fleury (who has many other names), this one set in Poland, the Crimea, Moscow, Flanders and a brutal climax at the Battle of Nancy, and tying up some loose ends which had been dangling since the very first book. There is a pretty chilling scene with Nicholas and his estranged wife held prisoner together on a barge in the Flemish fog, threatened by an enemy who has only been recently revealed to the reader as such; the Genoese colony on the Crimea is vividly portrayed in its last days. Less hard work than some of the earlier books; I read it slowly because I did not want to put it down.

This was my top unread non-genre fiction book. Next in that list is Julian, by Gore Vidal.

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Plague City, by Jonathan Morris

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

‘I thought I told you to split up,’ said the Doctor. ‘Why are you still with me?’

The only Who novel this year to feature Nardole as well as Bill, here we are in Edinburgh in 1645, with plague stalking the streets, the dead not staying dead, and horrors lurking in the night, while the authorities (led by the provost, the historical Sir John Smith) are deeply suspicious of strangers in strange clothes. The claustrophobia and horror of the plague-run capital is well conveyed, though of course the core plot concept was done very early in New Who with The Unquiet Dead. The banter between the Doctor and Nardole is caught well, and Bill also gets plenty to do. Solid stuff.

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An American in Paris

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I broke my sequence of films that won the Oscar for Best Picture to leap forward to 1951 and an old favourite. An American in Paris beat four other films – Decision Before Dawn, A Place in the Sun, Quo Vadis and A Streetcar Named DesireQuo Vadis is the only other one that I was really aware of. IMDB rates the Disney Alice in Wonderland as the top film of 1951, with A Streetcar Named Desire second and An American in Paris eighth. I think the only films from that year that I have seen are An American in Paris, Alice in Wonderland and The Day The Earth Stood Still. Apart from Best Picture, An American in Paris won five other Oscars: Best Art – Set Decoration, Best Cinematography, Color Best Costume Design, Color, Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture and Best Writing, Story and Screenplay. Here’s the trailer:

The film is basically a rather skimpy romance plot, knitting together Gene Kelly as dancing and singing Jerry, Oscar Levant as pianist Adam, Leslie Caron as young dancer Lise, and support from Georges Guétary as French singer Henri, to showcase some of George and Ira Gershwin’s best music, including the title piece (which famously includes taxi horns in the orchestra).

I love this film very much, but I am still going to start by listing some of the bits of it I don’t love so much. My usual complaint: almost complete whitewashing, apart from a male dancer in West African costume during the ballet scene. Apart from that, the ballet itself maybe goes on a little too long. Jerry’s behaviour to Lise when they first meet is pretty stalkerish (though I would argue this is somewhat redeemed in that she rapidly becomes an equal in the relationship, and he gets the same treatment in reverse from Nina Foch’s Milo). The implication is that Henri is too old for Lise, and Jerry is not, but in fact Gene Kelly was three years older than Georges Guétary. The supposedly French kids in the “I Got Rhythm” scene are rather obviously American.

But I must say I can forgive almost all of this for the gorgeous cinematography, the energy and the music. Gene Kelly is at the height of his powers here, a year before Singin’ in the Rain (which incidentally got only two Oscar nominations and no wins; but has aged much better.) Here’s his hilarious opening sequence:

Leslie Caron was only 19 when this was made, and is a superb performer – she is in her mid-80s now and still at it, having umpired a cricket match on Corfu in The Durrells earlier this year.

Back in 1951, her choreography is at least as demanding as Kelly’s. As mentioned above, I very much like the way she becomes his equal in “Our Love is Here to Stay”:

I don’t know any of Oscar Levant’s other work, but it’s noteworthy that he actually knew and had worked with George Gershwin; it must have been eerie to be performing his long-dead friend’s music for what is essentially a comedy film. There is an interesting darkness in his perfomance as the soloist, conductor, orchestra and entire audience for Gershwin’s Concerto in F:

Well, it was great to revisit this. I would have eventually got to it again, between All About Eve and The Greatest Show on Earth, neither of which I know anything about. Meanwhile I’ve set my post on Grand Hotel to go live on Saturday.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) | Oppenheimer (2023)

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October Books

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Non-fiction: 6 (YTD 44)
What Made Now In Northern Ireland, ed. Maurna Crozier
1434: The Year a Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance, by Gavin Menzies (not finished) (tempted to put this in the fiction category)
Memoir of the Queen of Etruria, Written by Herself / an Authentic Narrative of the Seizure and Removal of Pope Pius VII, with Genuine Memoirs of His Journey Written by One of His Attendants
An Assessment of the Economic Impact of Brexit on the EU27, by Michael Emerson, Matthias Busse, Mattia Di Salvo, Daniel Gros, and Jacques Pelkmans
Running Through Corridors 2: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who, the 70s, by Toby Hadoke and Robert Shearman
A Crocodile in the Fernery: An A-Z of Animals in the Garden, by Twigs Way

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Poetry: 1 (YTD 2)

From Bed to Bed, by Catullus, trans. James Michie
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Fiction (non-sf): 5 (YTD 20)

All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque
Cimarron, by Edna Ferber
Grand Hotel, by Vicki Baum
Caprice and Rondo, by Dorothy Dunnett
Cavalcade, by Noël Coward (theatre play)

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sf (non-Who): 4 (YTD 64)
The Dancers at the End of Time, by Michael Moorcock (not finished)
The Last Castle, by Jack Vance
The Past Through Tomorrow, by Robert A. Heinlein
Thorns, by Robert Silverberg

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Doctor Who, etc: 3 (YTD 45)
Short Trips: Christmas Around the World, by Xanna Eve Chown
The Big Hunt, by Lance Parkin
Plague City, by Jonathan Morris

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Comics: 2 (YTD 23)
Antarès, Épisode 5, by Leo
Antarès, Épisode 6, by Leo

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4,700 pages (YTD 48,700)
7/21 (YTD 55/198) by women (Crozier, Queen Maria Luisa of Etruria, Way, Ferber, Baum, Dunnett, Chown)
0/21 (YTD 16/198) by PoC

Reread: 3 (YTD 11): The Dancers at the End of Time, The Last Castle, and The Past Through Tomorrow

Reading now
Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (a chapter a month)
A Man of Parts, by David Lodge

Coming soon (perhaps):
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
Alexander the Corrector: The Tormented Genius Whose Cruden's Concordance Unwrote the Bible by Julia Keay
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
Het genootschap van Socrates by Yves Leclercq
It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis
The Story of English in 100 Words, by David Crystal
Julian, by Gore Vidal
"Gonna Roll the Bones" by Fritz Leiber
The Island Of Doctor Moreau, by H.G. Wells
Hardwired, by Walter Jon Williams
Le Mariage de Figaro by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
Planesrunner by Ian McDonald
Daystar and Shadow, by James B. Johnson
The Universe Between, by Alan E Nourse
Short Trips: Indefinable Magic, ed. Neil Corry
A Life Worth Living ed. Simon Guerrier

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