Monthly Archives: June 2019

June Books

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Non-fiction: 1 (YTD 19)
Robert Holmes: a Life in Words, by Richard Molesworth
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Fiction (non-sf): 3 (YTD 16)
Five Women Who Loved Love, by Ihara Saikaku
The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters
In Another Light, by Andrew Greig
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sf (non-Who): 16 (YTD 51)
Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach, by Kelly Robson
Sovereign by R.M. Meluch
The Belles, by Dhonielle Clayton
Binti: The Night Masquerade, by Nnedi Okorafor
Perelandra, by C.S. Lewis
Artificial Condition, by Martha Wells
Beneath the Sugar Sky, by Seanan McGuire
The Weapon Makers, by A.E. van Vogt
Earth’s Last Citadel, by C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner
The Black God’s Drums, by P. Djèlí Clark
The Tea Master and the Detective, by Aliette de Bodard
Bedknobs and Broomsticks, by Mary Norton
The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, by H.P. Lovecraft
“Goat Song”, by Poul Anderson
The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame
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Doctor Who, etc: 3 (YTD 13)
The Secret Lives of Monsters, by Justin Richards
Filthy Lucre, by James Parsons and Andrew Sterling-Brown
Moon Blink, by Sadie Miller
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Comics 6 (YTD 12)
Will Supervillains Be On The Final?, by Naomi Novik, art by Yishan Li
Monstress, Volume 3: Haven, written by Marjorie Liu, art by Sana Takeda
Black Panther: Long Live the King, written by Nnedi Okorafor and Aaron Covington, art by André Lima Araújo, Mario Del Pennino and Tana Ford
Abbott, written by Saladin Ahmed, art by Sami Kivelä, colours by Jason Wordie, letters by Jim Campbell
Paper Girls, Volume 4, written by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Cliff Chiang, colours by Matt Wilson, letters by Jared K. Fletcher
Amazing, Fantastic, Incredible, by Stan Lee, Peter David and Colleen Doran
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6,300 pages (YTD 31,500)
15/29 (YTD 51/112) by non-male writers (Waters, Robson, Meluch, Clayton, Okorafor x2, Wells, McGuire, Moore, de Bodard, Norton, Miller, Novik/Li, Liu/Takeda, Doran)
10/29 (YTD 18/112) by PoC (Saikaku, Clayton, Okorafor x2, Clark, de Bodard, Novik/Li, Liu/Takeda, Ahmed, Chiang)
6/29 (YTD 12/112) rereads (Perelandra, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, The Little Prince, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, “Goat Song”, The Wind in the Willows)

Reading now
Becoming, by Michelle Obama
The Poppy War, by R. F Kuang
Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, by Dennis O'Driscoll
Gateways, ed. Elizabeth Anne Hull

Coming soon (perhaps):
1913: The World before the Great War, by Charles Emmerson
The Making and Remaking of the Good Friday Agreement, by Paul Bew
Better Than Sex, by Hunter S. Thompson
Het Amusement, by Brecht Evens
The Ghosts of Heaven, by Marcus Sedgwick
For the Love of a Mother: The Black Children of Ulster, by Annie Yellowe Palma
Small Wonder, by Barbara Kingsolver
Grimm Tales, by Philip Pullman
The Time Ships, by Stephen Baxter
The Dispossessed, by Ursula Le Guin
Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Kate Bush: Under the Ivy, by Graeme Thompson
Berlin Book Three: City of Light, by Jason Lutes
Smallworld, by Dominic Green
Alina, by Jason Johnson
Anthropological Studies of Religion: An Introductory Text, by Brian Morris
David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens
Be My Enemy, by Ian McDonald
Lightning Days, by Colin Harvey
Adorable Illusion, by Gary Russell

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My tweets

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My tweets

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My top tweets, first half of 2019

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I'm hoping to raise my Twitter profile to a bit better than my 2018 ranking of 39th of the 40 top EU influencers (or even 37th as I managed in 2017). These are my top 25 tweets so far in 2019 (from various rankings extracted from Twitter analytics):

25

A visceral reaction to a Boris Johnson piece about Bloody Sunday.

24

First of many tweets from the European Parliament election count for Northern Ireland, this one sent just after I had arrived.

23

A sensible contribution to the culture wars; at least, I thought so, and felt it deserved wider dissemination.

22

One of two particularly well-performing tweets from the Northern Ireland local elections count at the start of May. I think this did well because it was fairly early in the afternoon of the results, and a lot of people gloated about the TUV.

21

Also from the local election results. Not sure why this one did particularly well, but I guess there were several points of interest.

20

This really did upset me – scandalously, it took Karen Bradley several days to walk back this disastrous statement, culminating in the classic line, "It is factually wrong. It is not what I believe." The perception of callous incompetence remains

19

End of one of my twitter threads about Brexit, which was picked up by a couple of more visible Tweeters.

18

My quick summary of one of the turning points in the Brexit process.

17

Preparations for the 2019 Hugos, explained at greater length here.

16

Flagging up my local elections broadcasts.

15

I've found Peter Foster (@PMDFoster) of the Telegraph to be the most lucid British journalist covering Brexit. The best journalist of all is Tony Connelly (@TConnellyRTE).

14

My pessimistic take from January. Although the 29 March no-deal Brexit which I then gloomily expected did not happen, I still think a 31 October no-deal Brexit is the most likely outcome.

13

BBC interview from April, in which I actually called it right.

12

Can't claim the credit for this, though I am glad to have helped disseminate it.

11

Start of the Brexit thread whose end I've already listed. I've found it quite a successful format.

10

Another tweet from the count in Magherafelt, this time from the end.

9

Am rather proud of this brief thread about the failures of the British diplomatic system.

8

I should have credited this excellent piece to @tomgauld.

7

Another tweet from the count in Magherafelt, from an earlier stage.

6

This jumped right off the newspaper page and into my brain, and resonated with a lot of other people too.

5

Yet another tweet from the count in Magherafelt, from the penultimate stage.

4

I'm not generally in favour of point-and-laugh tweets. I should have been a bit more generous here, and said that I don't share the enthusiasm of many of my friends for Fintan O'Toole's writing, and that in fact the central paragraph describing the UK government's mistakes is well-founded. But the overall thesis is completely wrong; Boris Johnson's approach to Ireland as foreign secretary was so crass that British diplomats warned Irish officials not to pay any attention to anything he said.

3

Another of my longer Twitter threads.

2

I think my best ever performing tweet with original content, this time from just after the end of the count in Magherafelt. I actually took two pictures – in the first one, only Martina Anderson was looking at me; she said my name in acknowledgement, and Diane Dodds and Naomi Long then both turned their heads to catch my eye, so that was the moment I captured with my second take.

1

Again, I'm not generally in favour of point-and-laugh tweets. But sometimes your restraint gives way.

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  • Fri, 11:23: RT @SexWorkHive: Home Office is quick to invoke “anti-trafficking” to justify its violent raids and crackdowns but will do anything it can…

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Filthy Lucre, by James Parsons and Alexander Stirling-Brown

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

‘Pardon. Sorry.’ Ruth sniffed.

Another short and digestible Bernice Summerfield novel, with two nicely intertwined timelines about a crashed spaceship and a randy corporate sponsor, it only becoming clear at the end of a short book how the two are related to each other. Minor but enjoyable. You can get it here.

Next in the Bernice Summerfield series: Adorable Illusion, by Gary Russell.

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In Another Light, by Andrew Greig

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

I had never even seen a photograph of him from before he met my mother, and she has none. Apparently he had never been young.

My father was born in Penang, now in Malaysia, in 1928, and this book is about a middle-aged Scotsman tracing the history of his own father’s time in Penang at almost exactly the same time. So there was a lot of personal interest in it for me. The narrative cuts back and forth between 2004 Britain (mostly Orkney with bits of London and elsewhere) and 1930s Malaya, both of them vividly portrayed – one certainly gets a sense of Penang as a colonial outpost with much restrained ferment (and Orkney as a much more unbuttoned island community). Both father and son have romantic intrigues and dilemmas, and several plot strands are brought together very satisfactorily at the end. All the characters are Scottish, English or local to Penang (so no Irish like my grandfather or Americans like my grandmother), but on the other hand the narrator’s father’s specialisation is obstetrics, which is rather relevant for my family in this case. I really enjoyed this. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2011, and the non-genre fictyion book that had lingered longest on my unread shelves. Next in those piles respectively are Anthropological Studies of Religion: An Introductory Text, by Brian Morris, and Alina, by Jason Johnston.

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Tuesday reading

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Current
Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, by Dennis O'Driscoll
Becoming, by Michelle Obama

Last books finished
The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters
The Secret Lives of Monsters, by Justin Richards
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, by H.P. Lovecraft
In Another Light, by Andrew Greig
Filthy Lucre, by James Parsons
Moon Blink, by Sadie Miller

Next books
“Goat Song”, by Poul Anderson
The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Graham

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My tweets

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  • Mon, 12:56: RT @Quibilah1: Does any rational person really believe the trope that, all over the English-speaking world, lesbians are being forced to ha…
  • Mon, 13:43: RT @AndrewDuffEU: @nwbrux Well, the Spitz thing will be revived once – but not until – we get transnational lists. It’s odd how @ManfredWeb…
  • Mon, 14:36: RT @AlynSmith: Excellent thread from Nicholas on how the Spitzenkandidat process ain’t doing what it says on the tin and why. Well worth yo…
  • Mon, 15:38: RT @friggieri_david: Interesting thread on that very Germanically-named concept. More broadly, interesting in context of increasingly commo…
  • Mon, 16:05: RT @BadWilf: Keanu Reeves is the age Richard Wilson was, when One foot in the grave started. 54.
  • Mon, 17:11: T� ceithre leabhar is fiche l�ite agam go dt� seo an mh� seo. (Agus inniu � 24 Meitheamh.) Bh� an chuid is m� acu gearr go leor, �fach.
  • Mon, 18:34: Doctor Who: The Secret Lives of Monsters, by Justin Richards https://t.co/0aekFPSM8T
  • Mon, 20:48: RT @davidallengreen: ‘The judge said the father regarded registering a birth as the equivalent of making an entry on to a ship’s manifest’…
  • Mon, 21:27: RT @APHClarkson: The Irish state is so focused on securing a backstop for the Irish border because it has lost all trust in the British sta…
  • Tue, 08:14: RT @EdLlewellynFCO: Huge congratulations to Sir @eltonofficial on being award the Legion d’Honneur by President @EmmanuelMacron for a lif…

  • Tue, 09:02: RT @mcgee_gorgo: I just saw the contrarian tweet about how people were “bummed” out by Batman ’89. I am old as hell and here to tell you no…
  • Tue, 09:58: RT @CoppetainPU: ICYMI. We don’t usually argue about what a law means. Somehow this WTO rule has found its way into British political deba…
  • Tue, 10:45: RT @Freight_NI: Brexit No Deal Alert 1/11 – I had a really useful informative meeting with the NI Fisheries Brexit team at @daera_ni…

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Doctor Who: The Secret Lives of Monsters, by Justin Richards

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Stung by the criticism and scepticism of his colleagues and peers, Travers accepted Walters’ challenge. Together with John Mackay, he went in search of the Abominable Snowman – the fabled Yeti. And in the foothills of the Himalaya Mountains in Tibet, he found it.

I grumble sometimes that Justin Richards is either rather good or rather average in his Who writing. This is a good one. Published in 2014 (so covering the first Capaldi season), it looks at the classic and new monsters of Who, with chapters on the Cybermen, the Daleks, the Great Intelligence, the Ice Warriors, the Judoon, the Krillitanes, the Nestenes & Autons, the ood, the Silence, the Silurians & Sea Devils, the Slitheen, the Sontarans, the Weeping Angels and the Zygons. Most of each chapter is an in-universe account of the history of each alien and their televised encounters with the Doctor (all spinoffs are excluded, which is a bit of a missed opportunity for cross-marketing), finishing with a few pages from the real-world perspective about how the monsters were actually made and brought to the screen. It’s well-written and gorgeously produced. There wasn’t a lot that I didn’t already know, but I enjoyed looking at it. You can get it here.

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The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

An hour or so later, Frances left the house herself: she went to the florist’s to fetch the wreath for her father’s grave. And as soon as she and her mother had had their lunch, they set off for the cemetery.

Sarah Waters is a recent discovery for me, and I hugely enjoyed Fingersmith (but rather less The Little Stranger) when I read them last year. What she did really well in both books was to convey a sense of what it was like to live in a particular historical era, especially if one was a not terribly remarkable person (and perhaps also a lesbian).

The Paying Guests really blew me away. It’s 1922. Frances and her mother, having lost Frances’ brothers in the war and her father soon after, are in reduced circumstances and need to take lodgers. Lilian and Leonard are of a less genteel social background and there is a restrained clash of cultures – and then romance, and then murder. The sense of a society where many of the young men have been killed but the old men are still in control is conveyed very effectively, and Frances as the viewpoint character is tremendously sympathetic even when she does things that are fundamentally not very nice. Waters claims to have researched the legal process around murder trials pretty intensely, but the book wears that fairly lightly. Really strongly recommended. You can get it here.

This was my top unread non-genre fiction book, my top unread book acquired in 2018 and my top unread book by a woman. Next on the first of those piles is Small Wonder, by Barbara Kingsolver; next on the other two piles is Becoming, by Michelle Obama.

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Astronomy and Rome

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Anne and I were in Rome last weekend, and saw a lot of lovely things. Some of them were astronomical, and rather caught my eye as a lapsed historian of science.

The first was in the Galleria Spada, which we got a tour of on out first evening. It's an art museum most of whose collection was acquired by Cardinal Spada himself back in the 17th century. What caught my eye here was a gorgeous painting called "The Astronomers", by the sixteenth-century artist Niccolò Tornioli, dating from the 1640s. Because of the way oil paintings and photography don;'t really mix, I'm going to give you two different images of it, the first from Wikipedia user Never covered and the second from David Macchi.


It's very interesting. The topic is generally interpreted as Ptolemy and Copernicus disputing the nature of the solar system. Ptolemy is the chap with the helmet on the left, Aristotle is next with beard and red cloak, and I don't know who the woman with her hand on the globe is. A youngish Copernicus himself is in the middle, giving Aristole the brush-off and pointing to the phases of the moon with his other hand, and the woman next to him with the headgear is allegedly the personification of Astronomy. I don't know who the chap with the telescope is, or the other two behind him, and the grumpy chap on the far right is supposed to be Galileo.

So it's interesting that as early as 1645 (only a few years after Galileo's death in 1642) it was acceptable for a senior cardinal to commission a painting in which advocates of the heliocentric system clearly win the argument.

The other thing that you can't avoid in the Palazzo Spada is the trompe l'œil by Borromini in which the false perspective makes a shrinking corridor look longer than it really is, as the attendant regularly demonstrates:

On our last day, we went to the Vatican and had a great tour of the museums inclduing the Pinacotheca. It was pretty crowded, of course, but well worth the visit. What caught my eye here was a series of paintings called “Astronomical Observations”, painted by Donato Creti in 1711. They show the planets as they were then known (and a comet in the last frame) with people on the ground observing them. Jupiter has a red spot and three visible moons. Most of the observers seem to be men, though the frame with the comet features a woman in the foreground and several ambiguous figures behind her. (Pictures from herehere.)


In the Vatican we also saw an armillary sphere showing the planets up to Uranus and I think also the first four asteroids, which were discovered in 1801-1807, which gives a reasonably precise date (the fifth asteroid was discovered in 1845, and Neptune in 1846).

I was not quite sure what these are – possibly for making spherical calculations?

Many more pictures to come, but those were the ones that tickled my former academic discipline!

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My tweets

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My tweets

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  • Thu, 12:56: RT @BortolettoMD: No joke – in the 16th edition of Williams Obstetrics “Chauvinism, male, voluminous amounts pg 1 – 1102” Bravo to the f…
  • Thu, 13:30: RT @astroehlein: Dear journalist friends: I’m doing some thinking (again) on media releases. Who does them well? What’s better: a quick lis…
  • Thu, 13:30: RT @damonwake: @astroehlein 1. Get to the point. Immediately. in the body of the email. 2. Include a PHONE NUMBER. 3. For the love of Jesus…
  • Thu, 13:30: RT @DaveClark_AFP: @astroehlein * Don’t use “press release” as a subject line nor call your address “press account”. * Don’t send attachm…
  • Thu, 13:30: RT @KonsiczkyZ: @astroehlein No bullet points. Complete, concise sentences with precise phrasing that make up coherent paragraphs. Say no m…
  • Thu, 14:06: RT @BethRigby: BREAK: Round 4 Results Johnson 157 Hunt 59 Gove 61 Javid 34 JAVID OUT
  • Thu, 15:51: RT @eucopresident: Last round of consultations on appointments before the start of #EUCO. Yesterday I was cautiously optimistic. Today I’m…
  • Thu, 16:05: “I’m pregnant and forced to choose between being an MP and a mum” https://t.co/RAOmz5GDEn Important.
  • Thu, 16:49: RT @hhesterm: There has been a lot of irritation by Brexit party MEPs that their new workplace provides them with computers and staff. Quit…
  • Thu, 17:01: RT @stellacreasy: Screw you, you terrible people. If you think my personal condition will make me give up fighting for every woman to have…

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The Incredible Shrinking Man

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Retro Hugos have been awarded for earlier years, but this was the first film to win a Hugo – for Outstanding Movie (which ever since has been Best Dramatic Presentation). History doesn't seem to record which other films were in contention, but let's face it, today's voters would probably give a Retro Hugo for 1958 to The Seventh Seal. (Others in play: The Curse of Frankenstein, Night of the Demon.) I can't really judge as the only other 1957 film I have ever seen is Bridge on the River Kwai.

Our hero, played by Grant Williams, finds after exposure to chemicals and radioactivity, or something, that he is starting to grow smaller. This strains his relationship with his wife (his manhood is shrinking in more ways than one) and even a brief close friendship with a midget ends as he gets smaller again. He narrowly escapes an encounter with a cat, after which his family presume that he is dead. Most of the second half of the film has him in a battle of survival across his own cellar floor, threatened by a huge spider and other perils. At the end he simply merges with the subatomic world.





The effects are very well done, the model shots being particularly spectacular though the back-projection is also pretty good. The ending is bleak but perhaps in tune with the times. It's only 80 minutes which is mercifully short. You can get it here.

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  • Thu, 10:02: RT @TimKingBru: N-VA’s take on alliances in the European Parlt…Lorin Parys: ‘Europese fractievorming komt neer op “kies uw miserie” en di…
  • Thu, 10:04: Thread. https://t.co/WZuDFcRW0W
  • Thu, 10:45: RT @KeohaneDan: Things one never hears about backstop in UK: 1) Major UK diplomatic success to get UK-wide customs 2) Access to EU marke…
  • Thu, 10:50: RT @PWLEurocomment: Most important and contentious item on EuCo’s agenda is the choice of the EU’s new leaders. The total news blackout by…

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B turns 22

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Happy birthday, B – you are 22 today. Your brother and I took you out for a walk on Sunday to one of your favourite places, the ruined Paterskerk in Tienen (named appropriately enough for Father’s Day).

You love the weird geometry of the church walls, and you enjoyed the sunshine and our company. As usual, it wasn’t easy to catch your smile, but I managed it a couple of times.

We can’t do much for you, but we do what we can, and we are lucky to live in a country that makes it possible for you to live somewhere you are cared for, and for us to get on with our lives, knowing that you are safe and happy.

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  • Wed, 10:45: RT @hayward_katy: How to mitigate #NoDeal for the Irish border? I’ve now read the report top EU customs experts Pickett & Lux wrote for NI…

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Tuesday reading

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Current
The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters
In Another Light, by Andrew Greig
The Secret Lives of Monsters, by Justin Richards

Last books finished
Monstress, Volume 3: Haven, written by Marjorie Liu, art by Sana Takeda
The Weapon Makers, by A.E. van Vogt
Robert Holmes: a Life in Words, by Richard Molesworth
Black Panther: Long Live the King, written by Nnedi Okorafor and Aaron Covington, art by André Lima Araújo, Mario Del Pennino and Tana Ford (Marvel)
Abbott, written by Saladin Ahmed, art by Sami Kivelä, colours by Jason Wordie, letters by Jim Campbell
Earth’s Last Citadel, by C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner
Paper Girls, Volume 4, written by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Cliff Chiang, colours by Matt Wilson, letters by Jared K. Fletcher
The Black God’s Drums, by P. Djèlí Clark
The Tea Master and the Detective, by Aliette de Bodard
Bedknobs and Broomsticks, by Mary Norton

Next books
Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, by Dennis O'Driscoll
Becoming, by Michelle Obama

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My tweets

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  • Tue, 07:52: RT @lowflyingrocks: 2019 LU4, 13m-30m in diameter, just passed the Earth at 8km/s, missing by 756,000km. https://t.co/H7zlahPpGV
  • Tue, 08:23: RT @MRitchieSD: Thinking of those who lost their lives in the Loughinisland tragedy 25 years ago. Also remembering the injured and all the…
  • Tue, 08:25: RT @NickCohen4: I remember when the Daily Telegraph was against men who abandoned their children and in favour of the intelligence services…
  • Tue, 09:14: RT @AndersFoghR: N Macedonia overcame what seemed an insurmountable obstacle in changing its name. It did so because of the prospect of a b…
  • Tue, 10:45: The EU Had to Plan for Worst When Greece Almost Ran Out of Money https://t.co/9jTUbxG6B3

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Robert Holmes: A Life in Words, by Richard Molesworth

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

On Friday 31 January 1964, Bob sent Donald Bull an outline for an episode entitled ‘The Hallelujah Chorus’, which was quickly re-titled ‘The Hallelujah Favourite’ before becoming ‘The Hallelujah Stakes’. Bull liked the story, made a few structural alterations to the storyline, and then commissioned Bob to write the script. The resultant episode of Dr Finlay’s Casebook – which was Bob’s first paid work for the BBC to make it onto screen – was shown on BBC1 on Sunday 10 May 1964.

This is a nice chunky biography of the greatest of the writers for Old Who. I don’t say that lightly. If you check the Doctor Who Dynamic Rankings site, you will see that no other Old Who writer comes close to his record of classics: credited writer of The Caves of Androzani, Talons of Weng-Chiang, The Deadly Assassin, The Ark in Space, etc etc; script editor (and sometimes more than that) for the great Tom Baker years, including Genesis of the Daleks, Pyramids of Mars, The Robots of Death, The Seeds of Doom, Horror of Fang Rock, Terror of the Zygons… Molesworth clearly writes as a fan, but as one who has done immense due diligence, watching all of the surviving Robert Holmes episodes of this, that and the other (in fact he is credited as author of more episodes of Emergency Ward 10 than of Doctor Who) and tracking down interviews, convention appearances and correspondence as well as talking to the many surviving members of the production team who worked with him. (He doesn’t seem to have got much out of any members of the cast.)

I have read autobiographies of two other Old Who script editors, and this is better than either. Derrick Sherwin’s Who’s Next is a rushed pot-boiler, and Andrew Cartmel’s Script Doctor is an excellent micro-study of the last three years of Old Who but has little to say about anything else. Holmes was a young officer in Burma (again!) in the second world war, and then tried his hand as a policeman and a journalist before becoming a full-time television writer. His first Doctor Who story was The Krotons, which is actually quite a good idea let down by the poor production values of Patrick Troughton’s last season, and his second was The Space Pirates, a rollicking space opera which might have a better reputation if more than one of its six episodes had survived. He bonded with Terrance Dicks, the new-ish script editor, who commissioned him for the opening story of three of Jon Pertwee’s five seasons, introducing the Sontarans, the Autons, Sarah Jane Smith, Jo Grant, Mike Yates, Liz Shaw, the Master and the Third Doctor himself. He was then prevailed upon to take on the script editor’s role with the arrival of Tom Baker as the lead actor, working with Philip Hinchcliffe as producer in a combination of talents that was never surpassed in Old Who, and perhaps not in New Who either. He stayed on for a few more stories after Hinchcliffe’s departure, and wrote several other things that I remember vividly – as script editor of Shoestring, he wrote the 1980 episode “Mockingbird” which sticks in my mind after 39 years; there was the 1981 series The Nightmare Man; and “Orbit“, the third-last episode of Blake’s 7 and one of the absolute best. (Avon: “Dammit, what weighs seventy kilos?” Orac: “Vila weighs seventy-three kilos.”) I must hunt down the 1965 series Undermind, for which he wrote the last two episodes.

Holmes’ life ended sadly early. He died aged only 60 in 1986, half-way through writing the final story of that year’s Doctor Who season. This was the much contested Trial of a Time Lord arc, for which Holmes had contributed the first four episodes and was due to write the final two (but died before starting the last one). A higher-up at the BBC had sent round a brutal deconstruction of the flaws of the first four episodes (generally now referred to as The Mysterious Planet), which clearly deeply wounded Holmes and possibly even contributed to his illness and death. In a career of a quarter of a century, nobody before had been quite so brutal about his writing. It’s painful reading, and the one positive thing I will say is that the account here raises Eric Saward’s reputation in my view, as he attempted (but failed) to shield Holmes and also keep the show on the road. But between the lines it’s clear that Holmes no longer had what he had once had had. Between 1982 and his death in 1986, literally the only non-Who scripts he sold were three episodes of Bergerac and five for a short-lived drama series set in a Citizens Advice Bureau. Brutal though it is, the BBC higher-up’s criticism of The Mysterious Planet is mostly pretty well-founded.

This is good material for a wider study of how the BBC (and indeed British television) changed in the Thatcher era (1981 is the point at which it all seems to go wrong). But it’s an engaging book in its own right, illustrated with treatments and out-takes from Holmes’ writing. It’s also striking how few people seem to have a bad word for him (cf John Nathan-Turner). It would be interesting to know a bit more about his war record and early journalism, but otherwise this is a pretty decent example of biography of an important figure in cult sf. You can get it here.

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Giselle in Bratislava

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So, I did a thing last weekend that I've never done before: I went to the ballet. In Bratislava. Here's a short promotional video:

What happened was that I had planned to be in town anyway over the previous few days, to attend the annual GlobSec conference, and then learned from my good friend H that she was planning to come to town to see Giselle the evening the conference finished with her friend A. It seemed like a nice way to round off my own trip, and the tickets were a ludicrous €10. I was staying very close to the new Opera House, but in fact the show was on at the old Slovak National Theatre.

Giselle is the story of a young peasant woman who falls in love with the charming Albrecht, much to the frustration of Hilarion who loves her from afar. Albrecht, alas, is secretly the son of a nobleman (which slightly resonated with my memories of a recently departed friend) and Hilarion exposes him to Giselle, along with the fact that he is really betrothed to the socially appropriate Bathilde. Giselle dies of a broken heart and the first act ends.

In the second act, Giselle's spirit is raised from the grave by the spectral Wilis, the spirits of women who have died of broken hearts, and their queen Myrthe leads her to take revenge on first Hilarion and then Albrecht by forcing them to dance themselves to death. (A concept used by other creators too, in another franchise where the heroine comes back from the dead.) Giselle spares Albrecht and is allowed to take her eternal rest.

The music is by Adolphe Adam, of whom I had not otherwise heard (he also composed the Christmas carol Oh, Holy Night). The choreography we saw was based very closely on the original 1841 choreography by Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot, again their best known work. In Bratislava it was directed by Rafael Annikjan, an Armenian ballet specialist who was educated in Tbilisi. (Doctor Who fans will recall that Terry Nation was inspired by the Georgian State Ballet to invent aliens that moved across the ground with no visible feet or wheels, ie the Daleks.)

Several things struck me. The first is that of all the theatrical arts, ballet must be one of the most physically taxing. There is immense physical exertion in moving yourself and often a dancing partner around the stage. Both acts of Giselle are an hour long, with a half hour break in the middle; I am sure that the performers needed every minute of the break to gather their strength.

The second is that the Dance of the Wilis, mid-way through the second act, is truly impressive as a case for why you should take ballet seriously. Music and stage action need to match perfectly, and despite being a huge fan of Hamilton, I think that ballet marries the two rather better. (Of course, not having words means you don't have that distraction.)

Note also that men are outnumbered by at least two to one on stage, and the subtitle of the ballet is the Wilis; it's created by men, but it's a story about women.

Thirdly, I learned something about Russian geography. The day we saw it, Giselle herself was performed by Olga Chelpanova and Albrecht by Konstantin Korotkov. They are both just past 30, and are both Honoured Performers of the Republic of Mari El. I had not heard of the Republic of Mari El before. Its capital is Yoshkar-Ola, which means "Red City" in the Mari language, and it is about 150 km northwest of Kazan, 750 km due east of Moscow. I felt that Chepanova was technically brilliant, but Korotkov put a bit more emotion into it. Hilarion was played by 25-year-old Andrej Szábo, which therefore made him the most senior Slovakian artiste on stage (though obviously he's an ethnic Hungarian); it was interesting to see the local chap playing a part which required him to be aggressive and hostile to the slightly older Russian leads. I'm sure they all get on famously behind the scenes.

(I did feel for Adrain Szelle, aged 24, who was given the male part of the pas de deux in Act 1 and missed two of his four tours en l'air.)

Giselle is normally performed traditionally but has scope for modern adaptation – in 1984 the Dance Theatre of Harlem moved it to 1840s LouisianaAkram Khan's revisionist staging comes to Belgium this autumn. I might go and see it again.

And it was lovely to see it in good company.

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Five Women Who Loved Love (好色五人女) by Ihara Saikaku (井原 西鶴)

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Second paragraph of third story ("What the Seasons Brought the Almanac Maker"):

爰に大經師の美婦とて浮名の立つゞき。
都に情の山をうごかし祇薗會の月鉾かつらの眉をあらそひ。
姿は清水の初櫻いまだ咲かゝる風情。
口びるのうるはしきは高尾の木末色の盛と詠めし。
すみ所は室町通。
仕出し衣しやうの物好み當世女の只中廣京にも又有へからず。		 In Kyoto lived a lady known as the Almanac-Maker’s Beautiful Spouse, who stirred up a mountain of passion in the capital and figured again and again in notorious romances. Her moon-shaped eyebrows rivaled in beauty the crescent borne aloft during the Gion Festival parade; her figure suggested the cherry buds, not yet blossoms, of Kiyomizu, and her lovely lips looked like the topmost leaves of the maples at Takao in their full autumnal glory. She lived in Muro-machi-dori, the style center for women of discriminating taste in clothes, the most fashionable district in all Kyoto.

Note: tracking down the text, and then being sure I had the right sentences to match the English paragraphing, was rather a challenge. In the end I found the full Japanese text here, and five different translation engines here (all of which gave completely different results).

I was moved to get this after reading John Wills' 1688, though in fact it was published a couple of years earlier, in 1685. It's a set of five love stories set in contemporary 1680s Japan – in fact, all based more or less on real life, where those who loved outside their social class would often face the death penalty (in four of the five stories, one or both of the protagonists is executed). I found it a really easy quick read, markedly more realistic than, say, Pilgrim's Progress (which was published the previous year). The last of the five stories is particularly interesting – Gengobei, a monk, is heartbroken by the deaths of two young boyfriends in quick succession; Oman, a young girl, falls in love with him and disguises herself as a boy to get into his bed; Gengobei discovers he likes her too, and they live happily ever after (after certain dramatic tribulations). It's the only story of the five with a happy ending. Sex is a universal, and probably tales of doomed love have fascinated humans since we were first able to gossip about how Ugg and Obba wanted to get together despite being from different caves, but here we have a fascinating snapshot of a changing Japan, a growing bourgeoisie not entirely happy at the policing of sexuality by the authorities. The translation by Wm. Theodore de Bary is maybe a bit old-fashioned and a twenty-first century treatment would be fun to read. You can get it here.

This was the top unread book by a non-white author on my shelves. Next up is For the Love of a Mother: The Black Children of Ulster
by Annie Yellowe Palma.

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