June Books

Non-fiction: 2 (YTD 27)
Virgins, Weeders and Queens, by Twigs Way
Brexit and the Future of Ireland: Uniting Ireland & Its People in Peace & Prosperity, by Senator Mark Daly

Fiction non-sf): 2 (YTD 16)
Gemini, by Dorothy Dunnett
Ghana Must Go, by Taiye Selasi

Theatre: 2 (YTD 3)
Everybody Comes to Rick's, by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison
Le Mariage de Figaro, by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais

sf (non-Who): 12 (YTD 61)
The Collapsing Empire, by John Scalzi
Raven Stratagem, by Yoon Ha Lee
Penric’s Fox, by Lois McMaster Bujold
Stories of the Raksura vol. 2, by Martha Wells
Six Wakes, by Mur Lafferty
Introduction to the Stormlight Archive for Hugo Voters, by Brandon Sanderson
The Art of Starving, by Sam J. Miller
Dark Matter, by Blake Crouch
City of Stairs, by Robert Jackson Bennett
Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, by James Finn Garner
Moominvalley in November, by Tove Jansson
Heroine Complex, by Sarah Kuhn

Doctor Who, etc: 1 (YTD 18)
Old Friends, by Jonathan Clements, Marc Platt and Pete Kempshall

Comics: 1 (YTD 16)
Rose de Paris, by Gilles Schlesser and Eric Puech

~6,200 pages (YTD ~39,200)
9/20 (YTD 62/141) by non-male writers (Way, Dunnett, Selasi, Alison, Bujold, Wells, Lafferty, Jansson, Kuhn)
3/20 (YTD 18/141) by PoC (Selasi, Lee, Kuhn)
0/20 (YTD 6/141) reread

Reading now
Discount Armageddon, by Seanan McGuire
Robot Visions, by Isaac Asimov
The Complete Ice Age: How Climate Change Shaped the World, ed. Brian Fagan

Coming soon (perhaps):
Your Code Name is Jonah, by Edward Packard
Anno Mortis, by Rebecca Levene
“Slow Sculpture”, by Theodore Sturgeon
The Aeneid, by Virgil
Weapons of Mass Diplomacy, by Abel Lanzac
Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters
The Man Within My Head, by Pico Iyer
Maigret Loses His Temper, by Georges Simenon
Up Jim River, by Michael Flynn
The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England, by Ian Mortimer
Aztec Century, by Christopher Evans

Anno Dracula – Dracula Cha Cha Cha, by Kim Newman

The Supernatural Enhancements, by Edgar Cantero
The Martian Inca, by Ian Watson

High-Rise, by J. G. Ballard
Politics of Climate Change, by Anthony Giddens
Aliénor, la Légende noire, tome 5, by Arnaud Delalande, Simona Mogavino and Carlos Gomez
The Way of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson
Welcome to Night Vale, by Joseph Fink
The Flood, by Scott Gray and Gareth Roberts
The Two Jasons, by Dave Stone
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The Fifth Doctor Box Set: Psychodrome by Jonathan Morris, Iterations of I by John Dorney

This is a set of two Big Finish plays released in 2014, featuring the full early Fifth Doctor line-up – Peter Davison, Sara Sutton, Janet Fielding and for the first time Matthew Waterhouse.

The first story, Psychodrome by Jonathan Morris, is explicitly set immediately after Castrovalva, and features a complex narrative of the Tardis crew dealing with their own images of each other. The guest cast are put through their paces, each of them having to play three different roles – particularly Robert Whitelock, who does three different Doctor-substitutes as perceived by the others. As Peter Davison points out in the extras, it's good to have a bridging narrative from the uneasy relationships at the end of Castrovalva to the relative comfort of later stories.

I spotted Iterations of I in my St Patrick's Day post of Doctor Who stories set in Ireland, of which the vast majority are Big Finish audios. It's set between Black Orchid and Earthshock, Adric in his hubris attempting to pilot the Tardis and ending up on an island off the Irish coast where the crew become involved with a missing person investigation, a strange cult and the awful prospect of sentient numbers, a gonzo concept which is well-used by not being too deeply explored. The wonderful Sinead Keenan is the lead female guest, sadly not depicted on the cover. There's no particular reason for this story to be set in Ireland, but there's no reason why not either.

You can get them both here.

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World Cup, Second Round, Day One


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Yesterday nobody called all four matches correctly. and I failed to foresee Poland's victory, but got the other three right, whereas and hoped in vain for England not to lose against Belgium, but predicted the other three results.

The state of play after the first round is as follows:

N %
27 48 56%
20 42 48%
19 42 45%
16 34 47%
16 34 47%
11 18 61%
10 24 42%
8 13 62%
8 16 50%
8 18 44%
7 13 54%
pseudomantid 6 9 67%
5 6 83%
3 3 100%
3 9 33%
3 13 23%
2 3 67%
2 4 50%
1 1 100%
1 3 33%
1 3 33%
1 3 33%
1 4 25%
0 1 0%
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Dark Matter, by Blake Crouch

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Daniela will help me make sense of whatever’s happening.

I picked this up early last year when it seemed to have some buzz behind it, but have only now got round to reading it. It’s a rather impressively done multiple time-line story. Our protagonist gave up a potentially brilliant academic career for the sake of his relationship with his partner; fifteen years on, his alter ego from a different fork comes to displace him. The parallel universe science is a bit wobbly, and the writing a bit staccato in places, but the central question is well put, of to what extent each of us is the sum of our own experiences. There is a thrilling denouement where the narrator turns out to be literally his own worst enemy, many times over; I felt it was generally well executed. You can get it here.

This was the top unread book that I acquired last year. Next on that list is High-Rise, by J.G. Ballard.

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World Cup, Day Sixteen

No matches tomorrow, so no poll today. Yesterday was another day of surprises, with nobody expecting South Korea to beat Germany. Most people expected Brazil to beat Serbia; but of those, only expected Sweden to beat Mexico, and only forecast the Costa Rica-Switzerland draw.

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Old Friends, by Jonathan Clements, Marc Platt and Pete Kempshall

Second paragraph of third chapter of “Cheating the Reaper”, by Jonathan Clements:

The roar of the engines increased drastically, telling Benny that they were blowing their little hearts out, cancelling the weight of the dropship, cushioning it as it settled on its legs. And then, with a cavalier flick of a switch, Vyshinsky killed most of the power.

Second paragraph of third chapter of “The Ship of Painted Shadows”, by Marc Platt:

‘Just keep your nose out of other people’s business,’ she heard her father say in his familiar, controlled, yet exasperated tone. It was a lesson she had wilfully ignored ever since.

Second paragraph of third chapter of “The Soul’s Prism”, by Pete Kempshall:

It was obvious now why Simon had discounted Caroline Dadd from the list of suspects. There was no way in the galaxy that the skinny cow could have thrown Ivo as far as the killer had, not without serious bionic enhancement. Benny could see no evidence of that on Dadd’s trim physique. She should probably ask Jason to double check – he was sure to have looked more closely than Benny had. Then again, knowing her ex-husband’s current stand on cybernetic adaptation, if he had spotted anything of that kind on the captain he probably wouldn’t be flirting with her quite so keenly.

Another collection of Bernice Summerfield novellas, this time a linked narrative by three different authors, involving a figure (half-human, half-lemur) from Benny’s pre-Doctor past emerging to cause difficulty by dying unexpectedly. I thought this was a particularly good effort, Marc Platt scoring particularly for atmospherics in his flashback story of Young Benny, but Clements and Kempshall doing a good job of setup and resolution. Not particularly penetrable for those who are not already Benny fans – the unresolved Jason relationship is a big part of the story. Get it here.

Next up: The Two Jasons, by Dave Stone.

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World Cup, Day Fifteen


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Nobody called all four of yesterday’s matches; , and I got three each, missing Peru/Australia, France/Denmark and Nigeria/Argentina respectively.

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Ghana Must Go, by Taiye Selasi

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Dewdrops on grass blades like diamonds flung freely from the pouch of some sprite-god who’d just happened by, stepping lightly and lithely through Kweku Sai’s garden just moments before Kweku appeared there himself. Now the whole garden glittering, winking and tittering like schoolgirls who hush themselves, blushing, as their beloveds approach: glittering mango tree, monarch, teeming being at center with her thick bright green leaves and her bright yellow eggs; glittering fountain full of cracks now and weeds with white blossoms, but the statue still standing, the “mother of twins,” iya-ibeji, once a gift for his ex-wife Folasadé, now abandoned in the fountain with her hand-carved stone twins; glittering flowers Folasadé could name by their faces, the English names, Latin names, a million shades of pink; glowing sky the soft gray of the South without sunlight, glittering clouds at its edges.

I see a lot of “meh” reviews of this book online, but actually I rather liked it; it’s the story of a family patriarch, who dies in the first chapter, and his two wives and four children in Ghana, Nigeria and the USA, with some fairly grim family secrets coming to the surface as the relatives gather for the funeral in a series of extended flashbacks. I felt it said interesting things about migration, culture and families in a vivid and lyrical way. Worth a look.

That was my top unread book by a non-white author. Next on that list is The Man Within My Head, by Pico Iyer.

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World Cup, Day Fourteen


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Yesterday was a real massacre of expertise, with nobody at all foreseeing the Saudi victory over Egypt, or Spain failing to beat Morocco. Only four people out of nine got even one of the four matches right, with forecasting the Portugal-Iran draw, and , and me predicting that Uruguay would beat Russia.

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Monday reading

Current
Le Mariage de Figaro, by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
Robot Visions, by Isaac Asimov

Last books finished
Old Friends, by Jonathan Clements, Marc Platt and Pete Kempshall
Dark Matter, by Blake Crouch
City of Stairs, by Robert Jackson Bennett
Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, by James Finn Garner
Virgins, Weeders and Queens, by Twigs Way
Moominvalley in November, by Tove Jansson
Brexit and the Future of Ireland: Uniting Ireland & Its People in Peace & Prosperity, by Senator Mark Daly
Heroine Complex, by Sarah Kuhn

Next books
Your Code Name is Jonah, by Edward Packard
Rose de Paris, by Gilles Schlesser

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World Cup, Day Thirteen


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I'm glad to say that I managed to call all three results yesterday; nobody else got more than two.

Some people (well, one person) asked about the standings so far. By dint of answering my own questions diligently, I am currently in the lead after the first 32 matches; but it's all to play for. 128 out of 212 predictions have been correct so far, just over 60%. Congrats to for his hat-trick, and thanks to all who have participated so far.

N %
19 32 59%
17 26 65%
14 22 64%
14 26 54%
10 18 56%
8 13 62%
7 12 58%
6 8 75%
pseudomantid 6 9 67%
5 6 83%
5 6 83%
4 6 67%
3 3 100%
3 9 33%
2 3 67%
1 1 100%
1 1 100%
1 3 33%
1 3 33%
1 3 33%
0 1 0%
0 1 0%
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Opinion polls, the Daly Report, and prospects for a United Ireland

The prospect of Brexit is changing the dynamic on the ground in Northern Ireland. Whitehall's failure to come up with a way of keeping its promises on both Brexit and the Good Friday Agreement is causing huge problems for the UK in negotiations, to the extent that yet another deadline will be missed at next week's summit. But it's clearly impacting the mood in Northern Ireland as well. How much, though, is another matter.

Opinion polls

There has been a flurry of opinion polls recently indicating that support for a United Ireland is up from a few years ago. But the data vary considerably. To go through the most recent polls individually (and they all have much more data, much of it very interesting):

Lord Ashcroft's poll, published 17 June, is the most recent. He found less than half of respondents, 49%, in favour of remaining in the UK, 44% in favour of a United Ireland, and 7% don't knows. The survey was carried out in late May.

The annual Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey, released on 13 June, found 55% favouring the UK, 22% a United Ireland, 10% don't knows and 12% who wouldn't vote (an option not offered by Lord Ashcroft). The survey had been carried out over the winter months.

A poll carried out for the BBC by Lucid Talk, published on 6 June, found only 45% who would vote for Northern Ireland to stay in the UK, 42.1% who would vote for a United Ireland, 12.7% undecided and a mere 0.1% who would not vote. The survey was carried out in early May.

An Ipsos Mori poll published on 9 June and carried out for a QUB research project put the question a bit differently, looking not at how people would vote now but how they think they might vote post-Brexit. Asked "When the UK leaves the EU, if there was a referendum in Northern Ireland asking people whether they want Northern Ireland to remain in the United Kingdom or to re-unify with the rest of Ireland, how would you vote in that referendum?", the results were 50.3% to remain in the UK, 21.1% for a United Ireland, 18.9% don't knows and 9.7% who would not vote. The survey was carried out in February and March, ie after the NILT survey.

Even more theoretically, an earlier Lucid Talk poll from last December, carried out for the GUE/NGL Group of the European Parliament (of which Sinn Féin's MEPs are members) asked the question, "In the context of a 'Hard Brexit' and Northern Ireland leaving the EU with no deal on the border, the Good Friday Agreement or citizen's rights; if the question used in a NI Border Poll Referendum was: Should Northern Ireland REMAIN in the European Union through joining the Republic of Ireland or LEAVE the European Union by staying in the United Kingdom? If a NI Border Poll Referendum was held tomorrow (using this question) which way would you vote?" the results were 47.9% to remain in the EU by joining a United Ireland and only 45.4% for staying in the UK and leaving the EU, with 6.0% don't knows and 0.7% wouldn't votes.

I have to say that from a purely technical point of view I don't find the wording of the question very satisfactory – respondents are asked to consider a rather specific (and I think unlikely) scenario as if it had already happened last week with the referendum tomorrow.

Leaving that aside, it's clear that of the four polls published in the last five weeks, two (the academic ones for NILT and QUB, carried out earlier) found more than 50% in favour of staying with the UK and only 21%/22% favouring a United Ireland; whereas Lord Ashcroft and Lucid Talk (who did their surveys more recently) both found a much narrower gap, with the UK still the more preferred option but below 50%, and supporters of a United Ireland in the lower 40s.

I do not believe that public sentiment shifted much between February and May. To me the most obvious conclusion to be drawn is that at least two of these polls, and perhaps all four, have seriously messed up their methodology. Having dabbled in this a bit myself, I'm very aware that an awful lot can depend on the training of the people with the flipcharts and the accuracy of sampling and weighting; not to mention how the questions are sequenced with other questions in the poll. The numbers suggest that there is a group of 10-12% who told IPSOS Mori/QUB and NILT that they would not vote at all, and then told Ashcroft and Lucid Talk that they would vote for a United Ireland, but that does not explain all of the difference.

I'm sure that public opinion is shifting. Gerry Lynch has a great piece up on Slugger about the revolutionary times that we are in. But it's not clear where we are, let alone where we are going.

The Daly Report

A news item during the week flagged up to me the 452-page report by Senator Mark Daly, with the title Brexit and the Future of Ireland: Uniting Ireland & Its People in Peace & Prosperity, published by the Oireachtas Joint Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement last summer. I am sorry to say that it is a poor piece of work on an important subject. Almost all of the good bits are blatantly cut and pasted from the 2009 book Countdown to Unity by Richard Humphreys, an Irish judge. Almost all of the rest is cut and pasted from various other sources. The text has many spelling errors – "Hungry" for "Hungary", the border described as "preamble" rather than "permeable", and the gorgeous prospect of a "lassie faire approach". The internal presentation is very confusing. In a twopart review, John Barry says he'd have given it a high 2.2 if it was submitted by a student; I am not sure that I would be so generous.

Having said that, there are some particular points of interest. One chapter deals with the EU approach to reunifying Germany and the prospects for reuniting Cyprus, and also points out the precedents of Saarland (which I knew about) and St Pierre and Miquelon (which was new to me); there's a lot of good material there from experts. There's some very interesting reflection (mostly cut and pasted from Richard Humphreys) about how the Irish constitution would need to adapt to absorb Northern Ireland, possibly to the point that it would need to be completely rewritten (and that is with the very large assumption that Unionists accept an eventual referendum result gracefully).

It's good that some people in the Republic are now starting to think seriously about the implications for their own state of a United ireland, but I hope that the next stage in the process is better prepared than this.

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World Cup, Day Twelve


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Yesterday was a rare day when all three matches were won by the favourites. For some bizarre reason I ticked the Sweden-beats-Germany box; otherwise I would have joined and in calling all three correctly.

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Casablanca, and Everybody Comes to Rick’s

Hooray! My run through the winners of the Oscar for Best Picture has brought me to what was already a favourite, Casablanca. It won the Oscar for Outstanding Motion Picture of 1943 (despite December 1942 general release). It got a total of eight Oscar nominations, winning also Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, a total of three.

Both IMDB ratings have Casablanca as the top film of 1942 (here and here), with Bambi second. For the Oscars, it was in contention with 1943 releases, for which IMDB voters rank Hitchcok’s Shadow of a Doubt top under both systems. I don’t recall seeing a single other 1943 film. (I guess I’ll be fixing that when it comes time to watch next year’s Retro Hugo nominations.)

Here’s an original trailer:

You’ve probably seen it already, and if not, you really should.

I’m not going to run through my usual litany of things I liked and didn’t like (well, OK – one rather negative point is that for a film set in Africa, there are not a lot of actual Africans visible). I think it’s terrific in portraying a mood of desperation in Europe at the brink of totalitarian domination; of course by the time the film came out, the war had reached a turning point with the Allied conquest of North Africa, Guadalcanal, and the beginning of the slow agonising crumbling of the Eastern Front, and the story is one of maintaining morale for a long fight that is at least going in the right direction. It’s still brilliantly set up as good vs evil, with only Major Strasser firmly on the evil side; Renault is a bad man, but opts for good in the end.

Ingrid Bergman really glows. Part of the reason for this, I realised from TV Tropes (which is an excellent resource) is that she is often slightly out of focus, which makes her seem more luminous and attractive. I think that hers is the standout performance.

Bogart of course dominates the film, and has a much more credible character arc from defeated cynicism to newly rediscovered idealism than most movie protagonists do.

And the script! I’ll have more to say about this below, but it’s not surprising that this film got more coverage than any other in the American Film Institute’s list of the hundred most memorable lines in cinema. (It got six: “Here’s looking at you, kid”; “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”; “Play it, Sam. Play ‘As Time Goes By'”; “Round up the usual suspects”; “We’ll always have Paris”; and “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”) And there are some memorable exchanges as well.

Captain Renault: By the way, last night you evinced an interest in Señor Ugarte.
Victor Laszlo: Yes.
Captain Renault: I believe you have a message for him?
Victor Laszlo: Nothing important, but may I speak to him now?
Major Heinrich Strasser: You would find the conversation a trifle one-sided. Señor Ugarte is dead.
Ilsa: Oh.
Captain Renault: I am making out the report now. We haven’t quite decided yet whether he committed suicide or died trying to escape.
Captain Renault: I’ve often speculated why you don’t return to America. Did you abscond with the church funds? Run off with a senator’s wife? I like to think you killed a man. It’s the Romantic in me.
Rick: It was a combination of all three.

Rick: How can you close me up? On what grounds?
Captain Renault: I’m shocked! Shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.
[a croupier hands Renault a pile of money]
Croupier: Your winnings, sir.
Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much.
[aloud]
Captain Renault: Everybody out at once.

I could go on, but I won’t.

The scene that always gets me is the battle of the anthems, when Laszlo interrupts Die Wacht Am Rhein with the Marseillaise; I can’t watch it without sobbing. The emotional charge no doubt comes from the fact that at least ten of the speaking characters actually were played by refugees.

Peter Lorre Conrad Veidt
Peter Lorre (Ugarte): born László Löwenstein, in what is now Slovakia; became a film star in 1920s Berlin; being a Jew, moved to America in 1933 after Nazis took power. Conrad Veidt (Strasser) – started acting in films 1916, married a Jew and moved to America in 1933 after Nazis took power.
Paul Henreid Curt Bois
Paul Henreid (Laszlo) – left Austria for England in 1935 after Dollfuss/Schuschnigg regime came to power; left England for USA to avoid detention as enemy alien in England (though Conrad Veidt spoke out for him). Curt Bois (Pickpocket) – Jewish, left Germany in 1934 after Nazis took power.
Madeleine LeBeau Marcel Dalio
Madeleine LeBeau and Marcel Dalio (Yvonne and Emil the croupier) – married in 1940 and fled Paris after the German invasion; Dalio was Jewish. He filed for divorce during the filming of Casablanca. She was the last surviving member of the cast until she died in 2016.
S.Z. Sakall Helmut Dantine
S.Z. Sakall (Carl the head waiter) – born a Hungarian Jew, became a Berlin film star in the 1920s, returned to Hungary in 1933 after Nazis took power, moved to America in 1940 after Hungary joined the Axis. All three of his sisters and his niece, as well as his wife’s brother and sister, died in concentration camps. Helmut Dantine (Jan the Bulgarian roulette player) – Austrian anti-Nazi activist who was imprisoned in a concentration camp after the Anschluss in 1938; his parents got him released and sent to America, but they themselves died in concentration camps. I saw him a few weeks ago as the crashed German pilot in Mrs Miniver.
Leonid Kinskey Gregory Gaye
Leonid Kinskey (Sascha) and Gregory Gaye (banker) – both born in St Petersburg, and fled the Russian revolution.

This all may help explain why it is quite so powerful:

Well, this is going right to the top of my list of Oscar winners. I don’t know if anything will come close.

Now, it’s generally forgotten that Casablanca was actually based on a play, Everybody Comes to Rick’s, by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison. The play had not been produced before the studio bought it, but it has been staged a couple of times in recent years. Here is the opening of the third scene (Act 2 Scene 2):

Place: The bar of Rick’s Cafe.
Time: That evening.
Once again we see Rick’s as it was in Act 1, Scene 1.
The room is brilliantly lit. There is laughter and chatter, but it is earlier in the evening than in the first act, and tho place is not so crowded.
The RABBIT is sitting at the piano, attired as he was in the first act, playing and singing softly. Rick’s table is unoccupied, but there is a reserved sign on the other left front table as usual. The RABBIT is obviously nervous and distrait. He continually glances at the door, and then mops his head with a handkerchief. Shortly after the CURTAIN RISES, the door opens and RICK, haggard and worn, enters. He is dressed as we last saw him, and his costume is incongruous in this gathering. The RABBIT immediately leaves the piano and goes to Rick, RICK pats him on the shoulder, and takes a drink at the bar. The RABBIT evidently wants to talk but RICK shoves him toward to piano, and climbs the stairs behind the bar. The RABBIT shakes his head worriedly, and returns to the piano. Shortly after RINALDO, also attired as he was in Act One, Scene One, enters. He glances around, openly searching for Rick, but upon failing to find him, goes to the piano and the RABBIT stops playing.

Rinaldo: Good evening, Rabbit.
Rabbit: Evening, Captain Rinaldo.

The similarities, especially near the beginning, jump out at any reader who knows Casablanca – some of Burnett and Alison’s lines survived unchanged to filming, which makes it a bit rough that they did not share in the Oscar for the screenplay. “As Time Goes By” was theirs. So were “Play it, Sam”; “We’ll always have Paris” and “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world…” At the same time, the film is a considerable improvement on the original. The battle of the anthems is there, but on stage the Germans are allowed to finish singing rather than be interrupted.

The character of Sam is crucially upgraded in the film as well. It’s odd, because of all characters his lines are possibly least changed (well, him and Ugarte); but the fact that he is just called “the Rabbit” in the theatre script and speaks in dialect is pretty demeaning. Dooley Wilson invests the part with considerable dignity, but so do the other actors.

Even more crucially, the female lead of the play is not a twenty-something Scandinavian but a thirty-something American, Lois Meredith, who got to know Rick in Paris in 1937 when both were cheating on their respective spouses; she has now ended up with Laszlo, and explicitly sleeps with Rick to try and get the letters (whereas we are left wondering a bit about Ilsa in Casablanca). Laszlo too is less heroic, his dispute with the Germans being about money as much as politics. Luis Rinaldo (rather than Louis Renault) and Rick himself are also much less attractive characters; it’s difficult to care as much about what happens to them as to their film counterparts. Also – complete spoiler – at the end, though Lois and Laszlo make their getaway, Strasser is not shot but instead arrests Rick for helping them escape, which makes one wonder what the point was.

It’s a bit cruel to say (as one critic did) that Everybody Comes to Rick’s is the worst play ever written, but it certainly isn’t up to the mark of its descendant. If you want to judge for yourself, you can download it from here.

My next Oscar-winner is Going My Way, of which I know nothing more than that it is a musical starring Bing Crosby.

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 Eighty 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)

World Cup, Day Eleven

You should be able to vote using your Facebook or Twitter account, even if you aren’t on Livejournal.

Yesterday, everyone expected Brazil to win, but only pseudomantid expected Nigeria to beat Iceland, and only called Switzerland’s victory over Serbia.

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Gemini, by Dorothy Dunnett

Second paragraph of third chapter:

As they progressed, Nicholas kept seeing faces he knew. A goldsmith. A shipmaster. A chorister from Trinity College. A man who sold fish-hooks. A man who made traps for devils. As with a person drowning, he appeared to be compulsorily reviewing his past, while all the time attending to Albany’s disjointed discourse.

So, it’s taken me not quite seven years to read the House of Niccolò books by Dorothy Dunnett; thanks very much to for introducing me to them in the first place. Looking back, I feel that there was a dip immediately after the halfway point, but the pace then picked up again, and I was thoroughly satisfied with the climax, set mostly in Scotland, over a longer period than any of the previous books. This novel is particularly tightly crafted into the historical events of the reign of James III, and occasionally it creaks with effort, but generally the personal drama of Nicholas and his extended household and possible family meshes pretty seamlessly with the Scottish court politics of the time. There are, as I expected, some pretty brutal deaths of leading figures from the previous books, hidden secrets involving the twins of the title, and a major betrayal which I should have seen coming after the events of Caprice and Rondo. Some day I shall sit down and read the whole sequence of 8 books and 6,000 pages in one go. I’m not especially tempted to commit to the Lymond series (set later though written earlier); however I do think I’ll try and track down Dunnett’s Macbeth novel King Hereafter, which I read as a teenager. Meanwhile you can get Gemini here.

This was my top unread non-genre fiction book. Next on that pile is Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters.

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World Cup, Day Ten


You should be able to vote using your Facebook or Twitter account, even if you aren’t on Livejournal.

As for yesterday, although most of us expected France to beat Peru, only and also foresaw the Denmark/Australia draw, and only also foresaw Croatia’s stunning victory over Argentina. FiveThirtyEight now gives Argentina only a 33% chance of joining Croatia in qualifying from Group D, with Nigeria not far behind on 21%. A lot hangs on the Iceland/Nigeria match today.

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Mind Over Ship, by David Marusek

Second paragraph of Part 3:

Sometime during the night, Meewee was awakened by the shaking of his bed. His first thought was — Earthquake! He opened his eyes to unfamiliar predawn walls. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember where he was, and this alarmed his half-asleep brain. The bed shook again. Not an earthquake but a gentle swaying, like the old-fashioned railway cars he’d traveled in as a boy.

I first encountered David Marusek as the author of the haunting short story “The Wedding Album”, shortlisted for the Nebula in 2000 (when it was beaten by Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life”, which later became the film Arrival). Fate then threw us together as room-mates at the 2005 Glasgow Worldcon, for which he arrived 24 hours late on the Friday morning after a series of flight problems. “Have you slept?” I asked him in our first conversation. “Not since Wednesday,” he replied. I then got and enjoyed his first novel, Counting Heads, to which Mind Over Ship is a sequel.

I shouldn’t really have left it so long between reading the two. Mind Over Ship is quite closely linked to the first book – the combined sequence of events takes place over a short period of time, and the reader is banged right into the action. But if you can catch your breath, there are a lot of great ideas here – the collective and individual politics of clones, the manipulation of the launch of generation starships, the character whose severed head is attached to a slowly growing new body, another character whose consciousness has been transferred to a swarm of fish. And yet the plot doesn’t quite resolve, and some years later we are still waiting for the third volume of what feels like a trilogy. Maybe when that emerges we’ll see the form of the whole more clearly. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2010. Next on that pile is The Martian Inca, by Ian Watson.

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World Cup, Day Nine


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Yesterday was a rare day when nine out of ten people called all three matches correctly. The lucky nine were , , pseudomantid, , , , , and me.

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