Eamon Donleavy had the newspapers spread out across his desk: the Post, the Daily News, even the Times. The only paper that hadn’t played up the story of Michael’s arrest was the Sentinel, and that was Charles van Straadt shielding his personal saint. Eamon did’t know how long the Sentinel’s silence could possibly last. He didn’t know what was going to happen next, either. The centre couldn’t operate without Michael. The center was Michael. Eamon didn’t think that Michael could operate without the center. It was getting as crazy as Michael’s personal life.
Frankierecommended Jane Haddam to me several years ago, and I acquired a few of her books then, and am now getting round to reading them. This is a murder mystery set in a New York private charitable hospital, set in the present day, ie 1994 (Trump Tower is referenced on the second page). The hospital’s founder is gay; his sponsors are a combination of a dynastic millionaire and the Catholic Church. The Church calls in Haddam’s detective, Gregor Demarkian, to investigate the millionaire’s murder. It’s pretty clear that the murderer must be one of a very few characters, and I found it a bit implausible that neither the police nor Demarkian approached it in that way, instead waiting for the clues to line up and point in the right direction; and I wasn’t totally convinced about the motivation of the murderer, though the means of the crime were resolved rather satisfactorily. However, I really enjoyed the portrayal of the hospital as a social space, the complex interaction between Michael Pride and the Church, and Demarkian’s exploration of parts of New York that I myself rarely get to see.
This was the non-genre fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that list is Quoth The Raven, by the same author.
Thu, 08:40: RT @KeohaneDan: “We would like to remind listerners that the EU accepted the UK’s proposals to move onto trade talks, but the UK is current…
Thu, 10:47: RT @fotoole: The Border problem is simple: Ireland is being asked to take on trust reassurances about a hard border from people who have sh…
Second paragraph of third chapter (practically a short story in its own right):
I'd harbored the Trace concept for a long time – I think I was inspired by a commercial for an old board game called Stay Alive. It starred a bunch of kids playing on a beach; there were no adults around, and waves crashed angrily against rock cliffs nearby. The children pushed or pulled levers on a play-field, opening holes in the board as they did so; eventually all marbles on the board except one would drop out of play, and then the winner would announce, in a breathless voice that suggested he couldn't believe his luck: "I'm the sole survivor!" It held my attention. As a child I wanted everything to be in some way concerned with endings. The end of the world. The last Neanderthal. The final victim. The stroke of midnight. So children playing a game called Stay Alive on a beach with nobody else around, that spoke to something in me, something I'd maybe been born with. Of the many logos for imaginary products I would come to design throughout high school, Trace Italian was the first. I'd gotten the name from dry days in history class during a lesson on medieval fortifications: anything that involved the word star always sounded like it was speaking directly to me. The trace italienne involved triangular defensive barricades branching around all sides of a fort: stars within stars within stars, visible from space, one layer of protection i, front of another for miles. The World Book preferred the term star fort, which I also liked, but in idly guessworking trace italienne into English I'd stumbled across a phrase that had, for me, an autohypnotic effect. TRACE ITALIAN. I would spend hours writing and rewriting the name in stylised block capitals, reticulated line segments forming letters like the readout on a calculator. On notebook paper rubbed raw with erasures, the evolving logo resembled a department store's name spelled out in dots and dashes on cash register tape: RILEYS UNIVERSITY SQUARE. The driving image for my game involved people running for shelter across a scorched planet. There was something on fire in the near distance behind them. Their faces looked out from the page toward their goal. The Trace Italian represented shelter, and it was shaped like a star. That was all I had.
This was one of the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award submissions that I put aside to come back to later (coded ν4 at the time). It's not actually science fiction, so wasn't really a runner for the award; the protagonist runs a play-by-mail role-paying game, and is dealing with both the death of one of the players who was attempting to LARP part of the adventure, and his own disfiguring injury caused by a domestic gunshot wound. To be honest I was underwhelmed; the book is essentially an extended character study of a character who is not actually all that interesting or engaging, despite the dramatic events that are being explained. I was also a bit squicked by the rather coyly expressed implication that the self-inflicted gunshot wound which resonates through the narrative was prompted by the narrator’s self-loathing after losing his virginity. Yuck.
This was the most popular unread book I had acquired in 2015. Next on that list is So, Anyway…, by John Cleese.
Tue, 17:56: RT @Five_Rights: We’re taking questions from the floor, and a great point: ‘Make sure the Five Rights are accessible to everybody, includin…
Tue, 18:04: RT @Five_Rights: .@SteveHopgood: ‘The key question is what informed people in liberal democracies are willing to do on human rights’
Wed, 09:18: RT @earlymodernjohn: In the Brexit debate, and around the Irish border question, it’s honestly impressive how keen some British pols are to…
I spent last weekend in Amsterdam at the Congress of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), the European-wide federation of liberal parties. It was a great opportunity to meet up with old friends, and hear some pretty inspiring speakers – the prime ministers of the Netherands, Belgium, Estonia, Slovenia and Luxembourg were all present and spoke.
As an elections nerd, the most interesting bit for me was the conference's choice of six Vice-Presidents from a field of seven. (The President of ALDE, Hans van Baalen, a Dutch MEP fromPM Rutte's VVD party, was also up for re-election, but had no opponent and scored more than 90% of the vote.)
I wasn't heavily involved with the campaigning, and as a mere observer didn't have a vote myself, but I knew four of the candidates personally – Timmy Dooley, the Fianna Fáil TD for County Clare (I was very grudgingly positive about FF joining the liberals in 2009; it has worked out much better than I expected); Ilhan Kyuchyuk, a Bulgarian MEP from the Movement for Rights and Freedoms; Markus Löning, a former German MP and former German Federal Commissioner for Human Rights; and Baroness Ros Scott, a former President of the UK Liberal Democrats. I like and respect them all. I didn't know the other three candidates, Frederick Federley, a Swedish MEP; Joanna Schmidt of the Polish party Nowoczesna; and Annelou van Egmond of the Dutch D66 party (more lefty than prime minister Rutte's VVD).
Had I had a vote, I would have been inclined to vote for the Bulgarian, Polish and Irish candidates, in that their parties are more recent arrivals in the Liberal family and it makes sense tactically to moor them more closely to the group. I'd probably then have thrown in votes for Ros Scott and Markus Löning, since I know and like them; and the D66 crowd grabbed me early on in the Congress and actually got me to wear an Annelou van Egmond sticker, so I would probably have given her my sixth vote. (The system was simply to place up to six X's by the names of the candidates you preferred.)
The actual result reflected the first part of my own thinking, in that the Bulgarian, Polish and Irish candidates topped the poll. But I was dismayed that Ros Scott finished in last place, by a significant margin. (She was 29 votes behind Annelou van Egmond, the sixth-placed candidate, who was only 31 votes behind Timmy Dooley, the third-placed candidate.)
I was surprised, and I wasn't alone. Ros Scott is not disliked by anyone, and had by all accounts worked hard as a Vice-President in the previous term. I had heard that two of the other candidates had performed poorly at hustings; I suspected there might be resistance to having a second person at senior level from the Netherlands, after Hans van Baalen. But other factors prevailed.
My suspicion is that for the ALDE voters, boosting individual party profiles for the 2019 European elections was pretty important. In the 2014 elections, ALDE came narrowly fourth in terms of votes (the far-left GUE group came third, after the mainstream centre-left PES and the centre-right EPP) and also fourth in terms of seats (the conservative ECR managed to scrape together a few more MEPs, including Brian Crowley, formerly of Fianna Fail). A very strong third place is a reasonable and credible target for ALDE in the 2019 elections. (There was some crazy talk of coming second; ALDE is doing well in terms of prime ministers at present, but mainly of smaller countries.)
And, sadly, the Lib Dems are very unlikely to be a factor in the 2019 European Parliament elections, because of Brexit. For the average ALDE voter in Amsterdam, it therefore made more sense to help the parties who will actually be contesting those elections, rather than those who won't.
On the positive side, it's nice to see that a candidate from a Muslim background can top the poll in an internal European liberal election.
Mon, 23:05: RT @kevinhorourke: 2 thoughts on today. 1. HMG must be terrified of what the New Year will bring in terms of job losses if they were prepa…
Tue, 09:36: RT @catherinemep: Ah, so Arlene Foster is so keen that NI has the same regulatory system as the rest of UK, we can only presume she’ll now…
Tue, 10:28: RT @conbrunstrom: The sorry truth is that the people in the UK who were screaming loudest about “taking back our borders” had not the first…
Sun, 14:09: RT @po8crg: @pnh I’ve just written and sent these questions to SMOFcon for the Fannish Inquisition. The USA is not the only country with t…
Sun, 16:42: RT @GuitarMoog: As predicted, the seven new red lines from the Brexit Ultras are a mix of the impossible, fantasies, and embarrassing stupi…
Sun, 20:55: RT @KeohaneDan: My in-1-tweet guess on Irish Brexit border compromise: preserving all aspects of the GFA, linked to a “new customs arrangem…
Current The Bounty Trilogy, by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons: Notes on Science Fiction and Culture in the Year of Angry Dogs, by Philip Sandifer Re: Collections, ed. Xanna Eve Chown
Last books finished Brexit and Ireland: The Dangers, the Opportunities, and the Inside Story of the Irish Response, by Tony Connelly Everfair, by Nisi Shawl The Lies Of Fair Ladies, by Jonathan Gash Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
Audios And You Will Obey Me, by Alan Barnes Vampires of the Mind, by Justin Richards
Next books 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 A Life in Pieces, by Dave Stone, Paul Sutton & Joseph Lidster
Sat, 14:09: RT @Five_Rights: Slovenian PM @MiroCerar: ‘There be no freedom without security.’ The right to personal safety is vital for a free society…
Sat, 16:04: RT @PeterKGeoghegan: Ill-informed, jingoistic British political and media response to Ireland has made a difficult situation for UK much, m…
Sun, 11:07: RT @davidschneider: The Irish are using Brexit to reunite Ireland by stealth which is why they called a referendum in the UK in June 2016 t…
Mutiny on the Bounty won the Academy Award for Outstanding Production in 1936, the first year in which the trophies were officially called the Oscars. There were eleven other nominees, and again I’m not going to bother to list them. It got nominations in five other categories but did not win any, making it the third and so far last film to win the equivalent of Best Picture and nothing else – the other two were Broadway Melody and Grand Hotel. In four of the other categories it was beaten by The Informer, which sounds like it’s right up my street. IMDB users rate several other films of 1935 more highly, in particular A Midsummer Night’s Dream starring James Cagney.
I had never seen either this film or the 1962 remake with Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard, but I was of course familiar with the story – as a child I read R.M. Ballantyne’s heavily sanitised 1880 children’s novel The Lonely Island, and more recently Trevor Lummis’ 1997 historical account Life and Death in Eden (and I have a feeling I read David Silverman’s 1967 Pitcairn Island too). It’s a historical film, though based on novels by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, so the first to win the Oscar which was set outside the lifetime of any of the audience. The story, as you surely already know, is of the revolt of the sailors on the Bounty, a British exploration ship in the Pacific in 1787, against the tyrannical captain William Bligh; the mutineers set the captain adrift (and, against the odds, he survived), and settled briefly in Tahiti; some of them then fled much further afield, to Pitcairn Island, where their descendants still live, while the rest were arrested by the next British ship to pass Tahiti, and tried and convicted for mutiny back in London. Here’s the trailer:
Oh look, that’s Clark Gable again, this time as the mutineers’ leader Fletcher Christian – he’s the first actor to be in the Best Picture/Outstanding Production two years running, after last year’s It Happened One Night (which he himself also won an Oscar for). Another returning face is Herbert Mundin, who played Alfred Bridges in Cavalcade the previous year, and here plays seaman Smith (who in real life was the last surviving of the mutineers on Pitcairn after the others all died horribly; he changed his name to John Adams and gave his name to Adamstown, the only settlement on Pitcairn; in the film however his character doesn’t seem to be one of those that go to the island). Here they both are with Charles Laughton as Captain Bligh:
Frank Lloyd, the director, also directed Cavalcade; Irving Thalberg, the producer, was also the producer of Broadway Melody (and died, aged 37, in 1936).
I have to say that overall, I found the film moving me rather less than some of the others I’ve watched. Having said that, once again I’ll start with the bits I liked least and work up.
LGBT erasure: No evidence that this is true, but IMDB say that according to Hollywood legend, a shot of one of the sailors pairing off with a Tahitian boy as the other men are enjoying the company of the women was cut by censors. Seems entirely plausible to me.
Charles Laughton: All three of the leading men – Charles Laughton as Bligh, Clark Gable as Christian, and Franchot Tone as the fictional midshipman Byam – were nominated for the Best Actor award, leading directly to the establishment of the Best Supporting Actor category. I was not at all impressed by Laughton here, though in fairness the script gave him little to work with. Captain Bligh is a one-note tyrant, who is given the merest smidgeon of come-uppance at the end. Laughton conveys this with a fixed scowl and carpet-chewing. It would be quite fun for a supporting character but I prefer villains with more depth.
More Act-ING: The first few scenes, set in Portsmouth with a press-gang (anachronistic) and farewells to the female relatives, feel super awkward. Everyone gets into their roles in the end (apart from those we don’t see again) but it takes them a few scenes to settle in.
Sing-ING: We keep hearing lusty choruses of sailors singing in the background, but when we see them on screen it’s clear that singing is the last thing on their minds.
Script-ING: Now that I have read the book, the script sticks rather too closely to the written dialogue, and often sounds forced.
Gender: This is a manly film about manly men, with the few speaking women as love interests, mothers or sisters. (Though there are one or two comic pedlars in port.) There is little romantic tension – Christian and Byam pretty much fall straight into the arms of their Tahitian lovers. Byam then abandons his Tahitian partner to go back and face the music in England, and we never see what happened to her. However, the film scores rather better on…
Race:Cimarron was the only film so far in this series that credited non-white actors, and that in a way that was super-problematic. (Ira “Buck” Woods did not get a screen credit for It Happened One Night.) Here we have hundreds of Tahitians playing Tahitians, with Bill Bambridge, Hollywood’s leading Tahitian actor (though there can’t have been many) playing Hitihiti, the chieftain, and leading role credits given to two women of colour, Movita (a Mexican-American, who much later married Marlon Brando, and died only in 2015) and Mamo (not Tahitian either but at least Hawaiian). The Tahitians are a complex and real society, and it’s made clear that the British agenda is ultimately one of exploitation and betrayal. It’s not massive progress, but it’s the best we’ve seen so far.
The original novel is anti-Semitic; the Jewish character doesn’t make it to the screen version.
Liberty: I’m trying to decide whether the film is slightly subversive or just anti-British (after all, it’s set less than a decade after American independence). I lean to the first option; King George III at the end grants clemency to Byams, rather than reinforcing the authority of Bligh and the judicial system; Christian goes to set up a new Utopian society on Pitcairn (where of course in reality he was killed within four years). It’s a rather manly vision of liberty, but I think it’s there if you squint. Again according to IMDB, the film was banned in the Empire of Japan as it was feared it promoted revolution. Note particularly Byams’ speech to the court (actually the only memorable dialogue in the film):
I don’t try to justify his crime, his mutiny, but I condemn the tyranny that drove him to it. I don’t speak here for myself alone or for these men you condemn. I speak in their names, in Fletcher Christian’s name, for all men at sea. These men don’t ask for comfort. They don’t ask for safety. If they could speak to you they’d say, “Let us choose to do our duty willingly, not the choice of a slave, but the choice of free Englishmen.” They ask only the freedom that England expects for every man. If one man among you believe that – *one man* – he could command the fleets of England, He could sweep the seas for England. If he called his men to their duty not by flaying their backs, but by lifting their hearts… their… That’s all.
The other actors: And that brings me to the rest of the cast, who are much less annoying than Laughton as Bligh, even though the script is not terribly exciting. Clark Gable in particular is tremendously watchable.
Cinematography: But let’s face it, the spectacular thing about the film is that they built a replica of the Bounty, filmed on board including hurricanes, sailed it to the South Pacific, got 2,500 locals to perform for the camera, and it all looks really fantastic. The stars were shipped only as far as Catalina Island, where a replica Tahitian village was built; you would hardly notice, apart from the angle of the sun. (There’s a nice bit of evasion of the new Hays Code by cutting between Fletcher Christian and Maimiti sneaking off for some alone time in the trees, then villagers dancing vigorously, then back to the couple postcoitally snuggling.) At a cost of $2 million, it was MGM’s most expensive production to date, and the money thrown at it does show on the screen. (Including canoes shipped to Tahiti from Hollywood because the local ones didn’t look authentic enough.) Whatever my complaints about the acting and politics, it looks fantastic.
I am reading the books on which the film was based, and will report back when I have finished them.
The next in this series is The Great Ziegfeld, of which I have no expectations at all except that I suppose it is about Broadway musicals, so probably has some singing and dancing.
Fri, 12:56: Progress of the UK’s negotiations on EU withdrawal report released https://t.co/n9qKWp3HGj Parliamentary report realistic on Border.
Fri, 15:28: RT @BradStaples: A public affairs mindset is the best navigator in today’s shifting global business landscape. It was a great session talki…
Fri, 17:56: RT @karmel80: World is becoming digital. But very few Europeans trust digital companies will respect their personal data. @vestager#ALDECo…
Sat, 10:24: RT @Five_Rights: .@VeraJourova: ‘We must reject fear and isolationism – many fear technological changes.’ Important rights implications her…
Sat, 10:24: RT @ALDEParty: .@VeraJourova: “I strongly believe that the role of politicians is to embrace change & to reject those who spread fear and i…
Sat, 10:25: RT @Five_Rights: .@VeraJourova: We must use technology to advance freedom. But concerns over digital platforms in electoral politics.#ALDEC…
Sat, 11:04: RT @Five_Rights: .@debackerphil: In a democracy, you have to have conversations with people you don’t like. The internet has a big role in…
Sat, 11:06: RT @Five_Rights: #AldeCongress discussion on rights and democracy in the digital age has been encouraging. Vital we protect our rights to a…
Sat, 11:36: RT @Five_Rights: .@debackerphil: ‘We must have a debate about regulation and free speech online’. Crucial we defend right to a free press #…
Second paragraph of third chapter of The Knight of the Swords:
Corum frowned and went to the cool water of the river to wash his face and hands. He paused, listening again. A thump. A rattle. A clank. He thought he heard a voice shouting further down the valley and he peered in that direction and thought he saw something moving.
Second paragraph of third chapter of The Queen of the Swords:
Just recently a small, trim schooner had beached on the sand and out of it had emerged a bright company, leading horses down makeshift gangplanks. Silks and steel flashed in the sunlight as the whole complement abandoned the craft, mounted its steeds and began to move inland.
Second paragraph of third chapter of The King of the Swords:
Corum felt the anger rising in his own head, shaking his body with its intensity. It was a relief at last to be able to vent it. With a chilling yell he rushed down the hill towards the attackers, his bright sword raised, Jhary behind him.
This trilogy, first published in 1971, is the first of two trilogies featuring Corum Jhaelen Irsei, one of the incarnations of Moorcock’s Eternal Champion; the first and third volumes won the first two August Derleth Awards. I’m not super familiar with Moorcock’s heroic fantasies; I did find it striking that he successfully takes the traditional storyline of chivalry, questing and manly derring-do, and underpins it with lashings of melancholy, destiny, and cosmic balance. Corum’s own hand and eye are replaced by magical substitutes belonging to supernatural beings at an early stage, and this physical change also resonates through the three books. Also, unusually for Moorcock, he rooted a lot of the vocabulary in a real language, Cornish, which I felt gave it a bit more sub-surface coherence. I can’t argue that it’s terribly profound, but I did think it was well done.
This was the most popular unread book I had acquired in 2014. Next on that list is Toast, by Charles Stross.
