Thu, 14:00: RT @tnielsenhayden: This year’s worldcon publications All refer to it as Dublin 2019; but in accordance with local naming conventions, I pr…
Thu, 22:30: RT @Dublin2019: The winner of the 1944 Retro Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form is Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, writt…
Thu, 22:33: RT @Dublin2019: The winner of the 1944 Retro Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form is Heaven Can Wait, written by Samson Rap…
Thu, 22:35: RT @Dublin2019: The winner of the 1944 Retro Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story is Wonder Woman #5: Battle for Womanhood, written by William…
Thu, 22:40: RT @Dublin2019: The winner of the 1944 Retro Hugo Award for Best Short Story is King of the Gray Spaces (R is for Rocket) by Ray Bradbury (…
Thu, 22:42: RT @Dublin2019: The winner of the 1944 Retro Hugo Award for Best Novelette is Mimsy Were the Borogoves by Lewis Padgett (C.L. Moore & Henry…
Thu, 22:44: RT @Dublin2019: The winner of the 1944 Retro Hugo Award for Best Novella is The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Renal & Hitchcoc…
Thu, 22:48: RT @Dublin2019: The winner of the 1944 Retro Hugo Award for Best Novel is Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber, Jr. (Unknown Worlds, April 1943). #…
Fri, 11:18: Eleanor Wheeler’s van, full of Hugos, on Wednesday morning. Unfortunately the van broke down on her way back home;… https://t.co/v549yukSJj
Fri, 11:48: RT @davidallengreen: This is spot-on “Corbyn is leader of the opposition and, in accordance with our [uncodified] constitution, the first…
834 votes cast on final ballot – more than for the 1943 Retro Hugos in 2018, but fewer than for the 1941 Retro Hugos in 2016 or the 1939 Retro Hugos in 2014.
217 nominating ballots received. Again, more than the 1943 Retro Hugos in 2018, but fewer than for the 1941 Retro Hugos in 2016 or the 1939 Retro Hugos in 2014.
All but one of the winners had the most first preferences in their categories. The exception: Virgil Finlay had the second highest number of first preferences in the Best Professional Artist category, but gained enough transfers to beat Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
Most decisive result was in the Best Editor, Short Form category, where John W. Campbell won on the first count with 56.8% of first preferences. The second place count in this category was almost as decisive, with Donald A. Wollheim getting 55.7% of first preferences.
Closest results: Best Fan Writer, where Forrest J. Ackerman beat Wilson “Bob” Tucker by 18 votes. Best Fanzine, where Le Zombie beat Futurian War Digest by 23 votes, after several rounds of very close eliminations. Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form, where Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman beat I Walked With a Zombie by 25 votes
At lower rankings, there were two ties: Best Novel:Earth’s Last Citadel and Perelandra tied for 4th place
Best Fanzine: Futurian War Digest and Voice of the Imagi-Nation tied for 3rd place.
Ineligible:
Best Graphic Story:Nelvana of the Northern Lights and the Ice-Beam, first published 1941–1942.
Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: Only the first two episodes of The Phantom were broadcast in 1943, and their combined length is much less than 90 minutes.
Best Fanzine:Fantasy News initially announced as a finalist, due to incorrect tallying; Guteto was entitled to that slot.
Best Series:Mary Poppins, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser and C.S. Lewis’ Cosmic Trilogy all ineligible, which left the category unviable.
More detail:
Best Novel:Conjure Wife beat The Weapon Makers by 38 votes; Gather, Darkness! then also beat The Weapon Makers by 3 votes for 2nd place. The Weapon Makers beat Perelandra for 2rd place, and Earth’s Last Citadel and Perelandra tied for 4th place, The Glass Bead Game coming in 6th.
At nominations, Perelandra and Conjure Wife were well ahead of the field, and Judgement Night by C.L. Moore missed getting on the ballot by two votes (it would have displaced either The Weapon Makers or Gather, Darkness! depending). This category had the most nominating votes, 155.
Best Novella: This category had the highest number of final ballot votes. The Little Prince handily beat The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath and "Attitude", 372 to 150 and 138. The Magic Bedknob rose to take 2nd place by 3 votes, ahead of Unknown Kadath, which took 3rd place 29 votes ahead of “Attitude”. “Attitude” came 4th, “We Print the Truth” 5th, “Clash by Night” 6th.
The Little Prince was also way ahead at nominations. “Opposites-React” by Jack Williamson and “One-Way Trip” by Anthony Boucher would have needed five or six more votes to qualify (each got only six), displacing either “We Print the Truth” and possibly “Attitude”.
Best Novelette: This category saw the worst performance for No Award. “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” won convincingly, 260 votes to 115 for “Thieves’ House”, 84 for “Citadel of Lost Ships”, 54 for “The Halfling”. “Thieves’ House” finished 5 votes ahead of “Citadel of Lost Ships” for 2nd place. “Citadel of Lost Ships” 3rd, “The Halfling” 4th, “The Proud Robot” 5th, “Symbiotica” 6th.
“Mimsy Were the Borogoves” topped the poll at nominations as well. “Daymare”, by Fredric Brown, needed two more votes worth at least 0.45 points to displace “Symbiotica”.
Best Short Story: “King of the Grey Spaces” won by 263 to 196 for “Doorway into Time”. “Death Sentence” also beat “Doorway into Time” for 2nd place. “Doorway into Time” 3rd, “Yours Truly – Jack the Ripper” a convincing 4th, “Exile” 5th, “Q.U.R.” 6th.
A closely matched set of nominations, with “Yours Truly – Jack the Ripper” coming top with 26 votes and “Exile” 6th with 17. The next nominee in line was The Gremlins by Roald Dahl, but it would not have been eligible due to 1942 original publication. “The Iron Standard” by Lewis Padgett would have qualified with three more bullet votes.
Best Graphic Story:Wonder Woman won by 208 to 127 for The Secret of the Unicorn and 76 for Flash Gordon. The Secret of the Unicorn 2nd; Flash Gordon 3rd; Buck Rogers 4th; Plastic Man 5th; Garth 6th.
Wonder Woman also topped the poll at nominations. EPH wrought havoc at the lower end of the table, with Tintin: Red Rackham’s Treasure and Donald Duck: The Mummy’s Ring both eliminated despite having more votes than Garth, which qualified only because of the disqualification of Nelvana. Le Rayon U would have also qualified with one more vote.
Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form:Heaven Can Wait beat Phantom of the Opera by 221 to 177. Phantom of the Opera 2nd, Münchhausen 3rd, Batman 4th, Cabin in the Sky 5th, A Guy Named Joe 6th.
Oddly enough that was exactly the same as the finishing order at nominations stage, A Guy Named Joe making the ballot because of the elimination of The Phantom. The Tin Men would have qualified with one more bullet vote.
Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form:Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man beat I Walked with a Zombie by 156 to 131. I Walked With A Zombie beat Super-Rabbit by 16 votes for 2nd place, Super-Rabbit beat The Seventh Victim by 17 votes for 3rd place, The Seventh Victim beat Der Fuehrer’s Face by 4 votes for 4th place, Der Fuehrer’s Face 5th, The Ape Man 6th.
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and I Walked with a Zombie were both ahead on nominations. The Ape Man and The Seventh Victim scraped in ahead of Son of Dracula and The Underground World.
Best Editor, Short Form: As noted above, John W. Campbell crushed the competition to win, and Donald A. Wollheim had a similarly strong 2nd place. Dorothy McIlwraith 3rd, Mary Gnaedinger 4th, Raymond A. Palmer 5th, Oscar J. Friend 6th.
Campbell was also far ahead on nominations. Frederik Pohl was seventh, with 3 votes to 7 for Oscar J. Friend, but could still have made the final ballot with two more bullet votes.
Best Professional Artist: Virgil Finlay beat Antoine de Saint-Exupéry by 206 to 164, having started behind on first preferences. Margaret Brundage then beat de Saint-Exupéry by 3 votes for 2nd place, also having started behind on first preferences, and de Saint-Exupéry beat Hannes Bok by 3 votes for 3rd. Hannes Bok 4th, J. Allen St. John 5th, William Timmins 6th.
Margaret Brundage topped the poll at nominations. Earle Bergey would have qualified with two more bullet votes.
Best Fanzine: This category had the lowest number of final ballot votes, the winner with the lowest number of votes and share of votes, and the best performance for No Award.
Le Zombie beat Futurian War Digest by 101 to 78. The Phantagraph also beat Futurian War Digest by 20 votes for 2nd place, and Futurian War Digest tied with Voice of the Imagi-Nation for 3rd. YHOS beat Guteto for 5th place by 3 votes, and Guteto came 6th. No Award beat the disqualified Fantasy News for 7th.
Le Zombie also topped the poll at nominations. Competition was tight at the lower end, with Nebula missing by two votes (if worth 1 point or more).
Best Fan Writer: Forrest J. Ackerman beat Wilson “Bob” Tucker by 142 to 124, the closest win of the night. Tucker 2nd, Donald A. Wollheim 3rd, Morojo 4th, Jack Speer 5th, Art Widner 6th.
Tucker got the most votes at nominations, though Morojo topped the poll under EPH. Harry Warner Jr needed 1.43 more points to qualify. This category had the fewest nominating votes, 25.
Wed, 14:18: RT @nick_gutteridge: 9/ An EU source says that if the UK goes down the path of threatening to walk away ‘the EU will just watch them choose…
Wed, 16:05: RT @MeAndVan: This is Egbert. He’s been helping refugees since the 90s. He was so happy to see me. He was proud that I’d become a strong an…
Wed, 16:06: RT @nick_gutteridge: 1/ So the new UK Govt’s negotiating tactic, as revealed by @tnewtondunn, is that the EU will have to ‘give us a better…
Thu, 07:29: RT @davidallengreen: Thinking about this the next morning If your absolute political priority is either to stop Brexit or to stop a No Dea…
Thu, 09:15: RT @justsnoozing: To put this into context 10k lorries enter UK thru Dover alone every day, that would require 2k Boeing 747s everyday whic…
Thu, 11:16: RT @law_and_policy: “Mr Corbyn writes a letter” Why opponents of a No Deal Brexit and to Brexit should support the Corbyn approach – at le…
Thu, 11:33: RT @jonlis1: Another excellent point. It’s time for the Lib Dems to ask themselves, and then tell the country, what actually is their great…
‘I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both hands, and went off with a thud. The laboratory got hazy and went dark. Mrs. Watchett came in and walked, apparently without seeing me, towards the garden door. I suppose it took her a minute or so to traverse the place, but to me she seemed to shoot across the room like a rocket. I pressed the lever over to its extreme position. The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came to-morrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter. To-morrow night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and faster still. An eddying murmur filled my ears, and a strange, dumb confusedness descended on my mind.[’]
Nest on my list of SF award winners was Stephen Baxter’s The Time Ships, but I thought I might as well go back and re-read the original book to which this is a sequel. I first became familiar with the story from TV showings of the 1960 movie:
The book is very short, and it’s actually a bit unpolished – it was Wells’ first published fiction, so it’s written with passion and energy, but not a lot of reflection. It’s a bit weird, for instance, that some of the Time Traveller’s friends are identified by name – Filby, Blank, Dash, Chose – and others by profession – the Provincial Mayor, the Psychologist, the Very Young Man, the Medical Man, the Journalist, the Editor of a well-known daily paper – actually two of the latter are Dash and Chose, and the editor may be Blank, but “Blank” and “Dash” are essentially the same as “_____________” which is all we are given of the Time Traveller’s own name. (Wells does something similar in The War of the Worlds.)
But then we get into the voyage through time part of the story, and this is simply splendid – both the future of the year 802,701 with Eloi vs Morlocks, and the far future of the dying Earth millions of years away. (It’s a shame that a big chunk of Chapter XI was excised for book publication – it makes the far future section even more powerful.) The Edenic life of the Eloi, contrasted with the demonic Morlocks, is a very powerful dichotomy, especially when set against the Time Traveller’s communication difficulties; though it’s more than a little creepy that the Time Traveller decides that the Eloi are basically the evolved middle and upper classes and the Morlocks the degenerated proletariat. It’s also fairly clear what’s going on with Weena, and that’s also more than a little creepy (in real life, Wells was living with his 22-year-old girlfriend who he would marry later that year after the divorce from his first wife came through).
However, sometimes the function of literature is to raise questions rather than answer them, and The Time Machine certainly does that. It’s a pretty powerful debut, and it remains Wells’ top novel (as measured by LibraryThing and Goodreads). You can get it here. Now for Stephen Baxter’s sequel…
Tue, 12:56: RT @simongerman600: Want to go road tripping around the US but always want mild climate of 70F (21C)? This map is for you! Source: https://…
Tue, 13:55: RT @redhistorian: This is excellent by @alexvtunzelmann, on how myths of exceptionalism stop Britain learning from its mistakes. “Britain’s…
Tue, 16:05: RT @MeAndVan: WE FOUND HIM!! A thread After 3000 RTs, 3 news articles, 1 video and thousands of wonderful messages from around the wor…
Tue, 17:11: RT @APHClarkson: UK courtier journalism has shifted from “Boris Johnson is ready for No Deal because the EU won’t give him what he wants” t…
Tue, 18:56: RT @StefaanDeRynck: Should newspapers not vet Op-eds for factual errors (e.g. nature of Political Declaration; UK “obligation” on alignment…
Tue, 19:18: RT @CER_Grant: l also told @BBCWorld that Bolton hates the EU, the WTO and the UN in equal measure; so he will not be bothered that his pro…
Current De Bourgondiërs, by Bart Van Loo Alina, by Jason Johnson The Dispossessed, by Ursula Le Guin
Last books finished John De Courcy, Prince of Ulster, by Steve Flanders Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory, by Deborah M. Withers Doctor Who: Scratchman, by Tom Baker with James Goss The Time Ships, by Stephen Baxter Second Generations, by Mary Tamm
Next books Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Berlin Book Three: City of Light, by Jason Lutes
Mon, 12:56: Another good thread on the backstop, from s writer who previously argued for more flexibility from the Irish govt,… https://t.co/mDKLOqkcEq
Mon, 16:05: RT @GuitarMoog: Brilliant exchange! Backstop=UK locked in “indefinite” CU(1) – So tech won’t quickly solve it?(2) No, we totally think…
Mon, 20:22: RT @GeorginaEWright: .@guardian reporting that British diplomats based in Brussels will pull out from EU meetings within days. While this s…
Mon, 20:23: RT @AtlanticBooks: ‘I can’t accept the idea that the Troubles defined Northern Ireland’ Malachi O’Doherty discusses his new book #FiftyYea…
Tue, 06:44: RT @GuitarMoog: It is indeed epic stupidity. It would be the Govt acting directly against the UK’s interests for the sole purpose of politi…
Tue, 10:20: RT @MeAndVan: Hi internet, this is a longshot BUT I was a refugee for 5 yrs in the 90s and this man, who worked at a refugee camp near Zwol…
Tue, 11:22: RT @davidallengreen: Yesterday I had a Twitter exchange with @StevePeers that did not go as well as either of us would have liked And I am…
Tue, 11:27: RT @davidallengreen: @StevePeers And although it was not intended to be a sub-tweet, I can confirm I am the tweeter to whom he is referring…
Tue, 11:31: RT @DmitryOpines: No-Deal does however massively, even fatally for some businesses, increase the paperwork and administration required to t…
One is a log cabin in a deep, wooded hollow at the end of Walker Mountain. This stoic little log house leans noticeably uphill, just as half the tobacco barns do in this rural part of southern Appalachia, where even gravity seems to have fled for better work in the city. Our cabin was built of chestnut logs in the late 1930s, when the American chestnut blight ran roughshod through every forest from Maine to Alabama, felling mammoth trees more extravagantly than the crosscut saw. Those of us who’ll never get to see the spreading crown of an American chestnut have come to understand this blight as one of the great natural tragedies in our continent’s his tory. But the pragmatic homesteaders who lived in this hollow at that time simply looked up and saw a godsend. They harnessed their mule and dragged the fallen soldiers down off the mountain to build their home.
I’ve very much enjoyed Kingsolver’s fiction; this is a collection of essays, some co-written with her husband, on various issues. As with her fiction, she is on very solid ground when writing about family life and about the places where she lives or has lived. A recurrent theme is finding harmony with the environment, both locally and globally. There is a memorable clash of cultures with a visiting journalist in the last chapter, who “went back to the big city and reported that I am not very open with strangers, have quaint ideas, and pay too much attention to my kids.” There are a lot of good insights into the human condition here. She is on less firm ground with political commentary; I am pretty aligned with her instincts, but her pieces are emotional reportage rather than the analysis which I find more interesting. Anyway, it’s an interesting insight into the daily preoccupations of an author whose work I like. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2018, my top unread book by a woman, and my top unread non-fiction book. Next respectively on each of those piles are Grimm Tales by Philip Pullman, Pigs In Heaven by the same Barbara Kingsolver, and The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard.
Sun, 14:09: Excellent thread. Though personally I think Boris Johnson is already committed to no-deal Brexit and the rest is pl… https://t.co/VXapqVBFhu
Sun, 14:48: Great thread as ever on why Ireland should not and will not back down on backstop, of which this is the key point. https://t.co/HYtKaw2I0Y
Mon, 10:45: RT @GeorgePeretzQC: It’s tempting for those of us who are interested in the mechanics of the UK constitution to spend lots of time gaming h…
Mon, 11:03: RT @ProfMarkElliott: I am grateful to The Times for publishing a letter from me today. In it, I argue that there are several significant le…
Nevertheless, to judge from the abstract in the Calendar, six months later he was still on the job, coaxing along one of Mary’s correspondents in London. It emerged from the letter itself that Williams was not doing quite what one had supposed. It had no address, but had evidently not been written to Mary: nobody, in August 1583, was likely to write to her about the peace and quiet of her present state and kingdom. The ‘sovereign lady’ addressed was Elizabeth, and the person to whom the queen had written the letter it mentioned was or hoped to be serving her, not Mary. The letter to the unnamed ‘party’ must have been delivered by Williams himself, and he was reporting a conversation he had had with him after delivering it. The party, when he had read the letter, was not enthusiastic; he said it was not in the queen’s handwriting, with which he was familiar. He was in a panic: the queen was asking him to do ‘a thing wheron his life dependeth’. He was also very nervous that others than those originally acquainted with the matter had been let into the secret; he would not continue if anybody else was brought in.
The late greatJohn Bossy was a family friend, and my sister’s godfather; his best book is still Christianity in the West, 1400-1700, but towards the end of his career he achieved a remarkable coup of winning both the Wolfson History Prize and the Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction for Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair, which examined the connections between the Renaissance philosopher and the murky world of espionage in Elizabethan London. This short, dense book concerns one particular wrinkle of the wider story of which Giordano Bruno was also part – identifying the individual who at a crucial moment stole the French ambassador’s correspondence and passed it to the agents of Queen Elizabeth.
I came to this soon after reading the story of Alexander Wilson, and it is salutary to reflect on how much intelligence-gathering had changed across the centuries. What we can see of the Elizabethan world is based very much on the transmission of written records; the nascent bureaucracy of the state required hard copies, as it were. Obviously the whispered conversations do not survive, but Bossy feels pretty confident that by putting all the pieces together – and allowing for various mis-dating of key documents over time – he is able to give us a picture of what was happening in and around the French embassy in London in the 1580s, and who it was that exposed the ambassador’s secrets.
Having said that, this is a book where the trees are more important than the forest, and I’d have liked a few more signposts along the way to remind us of why the story is important. It’s all there, but one has to dig for it a bit, and I think the book needs to be taken as a close sequel to Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair, which I read a very long time ago. You can get it here.
Sat, 12:56: RT @AodhBC: The banks in England are now expected to close from 1 to 11 November (inclusive), as part of government efforts to stabilise th…
Sat, 16:05: RT @petertimmins3: Hey #Brexiters, just think of the UK had adopted the Euro 20 years ago your weekly wages would now be 40% higher.
Sat, 20:00: My week on Twitter : 52 Mentions, 3.91K Mention Reach, 146 Likes, 39 Retweets, 161K Retweet Reach. See yours with… https://t.co/Y72sR89zgT
Sat, 20:48: RT @ProfMarkElliott: In a piece I wrote yesterday, I challenged various suggestions made by Vernon Bogdanor in a Guardian article. He has n…
Sat, 23:21: RT @lionelbarber: A much needed perspective from Dublin on Brexit fantasies: “Why didn’t the British focus on the fact that they had an ext…
Ben-Hur won the Oscar for Best Motion Picture of 1959, one of 11 Oscars in total, the others being Best Director (William Wyler), Best Actor (Charlton Heston), Best Supporting Actor (Hugh Griffith), Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Special Effects, Best Film Editing, Best Music – Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture (Miklós Rózsa) and Best Sound Recording. That remains a record, equalled only twice since (by Titanic and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King). It lost in only one category, Best Adapted Screenplay (to Room at the Top). It was the third film to win both Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, after Going My Way and The Best Years of Our Lives.
The other contenders for Best Motion Picture were Anatomy of a Murder, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Nun’s Story and Room at the Top, none of which I have seen. On the IMDB rankings, Ben-Hur places 7th and 3rd, with North by Northwest and Some Like It Hot ahead on both tables. Unusually, I have seen both of them, and I have to say that on reflection I liked both more. I have also seen the first part of Plan 9 from Outer Space, though I could not bear to finish watching it. That year’s Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation wen to the first series of The Twilight Zone. Here’s a trailer for Ben-Hur.
It’s an epic film set in Rome and Judæa at the time of Christ, who makes a couple of appearances in the film. The core plot is about a young Jewish nobleman who is unjustly condemned to the galleys, but makes a comeback as a champion chariot racer and defeats the Roman who betrayed his friendship. It’s based on a novel published in 1880, which was a best-seller in its day. The film was also a huge hit. My mother-in-law, a teenager when it came out, recalls a local cinema showing it on continuous loop, with the time that the chariot race would start on prominent display. She went with her friends to celebrate the end of their exams and claims that she can remember nothing about it except the chariot race.
She is the same age as the younger members of Monty Python, who were surely inspired by memories of their own teenage viewings of Ben-Hur when writing Life of Brian, though I guess Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth was fresher in their memories and also there are probably only so many ways you can do a film set in first-century Palestine. Here’s Pontius Pilate as portrayed by Frank Thring and Michael Palin in 1959 and 1979 (Thring’s version also has a slight speech impediment):
Before I get onto the things I liked and didn’t like about the film, I’m struck by the number of key players who have already appeared in Oscar-winning films. I have not been keeping count of others, but I think that the tally of six is the highest so far for actors playing a significant part. (I have completely missed Franklyn Furman, who was an extra in seven Oscar-winning films from 1937 to 1952.) Let’s start with the star himself, Charlton Heston, who was also the male lead seven years ago in The Greatest Show on Earth:
Heston preparing for the other circus
We have two repeats from two years ago, Jack Hawkins and Andre Morell, who both played British officers in The Bridge on the River Kwai and Roman noblemen here:
Jack Hawkins in The Bridge on the River Kwaiand as Quintus ArriusAndre Morell in The Bridge on the River Kwaiand as Sextus
Going back a year, one of the gentlemen of the Reform Club in Around the World in Eighty Days becomes one of the Three Wise Men (with a rather striking resemblance to Ken Stott’s Balin in the Hobbit films):
Finlay Currie in Around the World in Eighty Daysand as Balthasar
Going back some more years, Sam Jaffe, who played the Einstein-lookalike character in Gentleman’s Agreement, is one of the few Jews actually playing a Jewish character in Ben-Hur (see below for the other one):
Sam Jaffe in Gentleman’s Agreementand as Simonides
And Cathy O’Donnell, the youngest of the leading ladies in The Best Years of Our Lives thirteen years ago, comes back as Ben-Hur’s sister, in what was her last ever film role (though she did a few more TV appearances). Her brother-in-law, William Wyler, was the director. Now that she’s in colour, we can appreciate her lovely auburn hair.
Cathy O’Donnell in The Best Years of Our Livesand as Tirzah
We are also getting to the point where some of these actors also had Doctor Who roles. Andre Morell, mentioned above, is best remembered in sf as Professor Quatermass in Quatermass and the Pit (made between Bridge on the River Kwai and Ben-Hur), but he also played Marshall Tavannes in the 1966 Doctor Who story The Massacre, of which sadly no footage survives, not even screenshots or the equivalent.
More usefully, Laurence Payne has an uncredited, non-speaking part here as Joseph, the father of Jesus Christ:
As usual (Bridge on the River Kwai aside), non-white people are marginalised, but in this case not completely absent. There’s one African galley-slave:
Hugh Griffiths blacks up as Sheikh Ilderim, because that’s what Arabs look like (it won him an Oscar):
And much more impressively, Les Ballets Africains, the national dance group of Guinea-Conakry, perform at the banquet in Rome.
So we are a smidgeon of a step above the total invisibility of a lot of Oscar winners, but with points deducted for blackface.
The women characters are particularly poorly served; the most interesting woman in the book, Balthasar’s daughter Iras, is simply omitted. Haya Harareet (not only a rare Jewish actor playing a Jewish part, but actually Israeli) puts in a great debut performance as Esther, Simonides’ daughter and Ben-Hur’s love interest, but I cannot quite believe the chemistry between her and Charlton Heston:
Let alone between Ben-Hur and his unnamed, silent date at the Roman banquet, played by the uncredited Marina Berti:
The other two credited women characters are Ben-Hur’s mother (Martha Scott, only 11 years older than Heston) and sister (Cathy O’Donnell, as noted), who get afflicted with leprosy, cured and rescued.
On the flip side, this is the queerest film I have seen among Oscar-winners so far. The only one that comes close is the very first, Wings. Charlton Heston supposedly was never told that any homo-eroticism was intended in the relationship between Ben-Hur and Stephen Boyd’s Messala; I find that very difficult to believe. (NB Boyd, a Glengormley man, wearing brown contact lenses.)
And of course there isn’t the slightest hint of it elsewhere:
Heston’s own Oscar-winning performance carries the film, of course. He smoulders, suffers and learns.
It’s very much supported by the music of Miklós Rózsa, who we have encountered before in The Lost Weekend; it’s an extraordinary, expressive, convincing symphonic sweep which actually isn’t all that intrusive except when it’s diegetic.
And the whole thing looks very good. Supposedly the most expensive film ever made at that time, you can really feel the resources put into it with 10,000 extras, and the Italian studios at Cinecittà put to exceptionally good use. I have to say I was not overwhelmed by the sea battle scene (filmed in California), but the chariot race was every bit as good as advertised, and I can see why my mother-in-law’s local cinema featured it as the main attraction. This is only half of it – it’s well worth watching the whole ten-minute sequence if you see no other part of the film.
Next in my sequence is The Apartment, of which I know nothing.
I had read the book back when I was a student, over thirty years ago; I re-read it after watching the film. Here’s the second paragraph of the third chapter:
“To a wayfarer in a strange land nothing is so sweet as to hear his name on the tongue of a friend,” said the Egyptian, who assumed to be president of the repast. “Before us lie many days of companionship. It is time we knew each other. So, if it be agreeable, he who came last shall be first to speak.”
The film improved massively on the book, which is rare but not unique. My biggest regret about the adaptation is that the most interesting character, Balthasar’s daughter Iras, who is Ben-Hur’s alternate love interest (the Naughty Girl to Esther’s Good Girl), is dropped from the film (as she is apparently from all the screen adaptations). But apart from that, the book is much more of a Shaggy God story, with Jesus healing Miriam and Tirzah (after a dramatic rescue from prison) much earlier, and Ben-Hur and Balthasar becoming active disciples of Christ in the years before the crucifixion (and it is Ben-Hur who gives the dying Christ his last drink via a sponge). The chariot race and downfall of Messala are also also much earlier in the book, and even if you haven’t seen the film you get a sense that it’s running out of steam in the last third or so, where Ben-Hur recruits an army of rebels who we don’t hear any more of after he throws in his lot with Jesus, and then the biblical stuff is reiterated in some detail. Gone With The Wind would have been a much better film if it had been as ruthless with its source material.
It’s interesting to note that Lew Wallace had not himself been to Palestine at that point in his life (he did go later, when he was American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire), so the very convincing descriptions of Palestinian landscapes and peoples are a combination of wide reading in the Library of Congress and observing the horse-crazy ethnically mixed environment of Santa Fe and New Mexico generally, where he was Governor while finishing the book. Indeed, I wonder if the relatively sympathetic treatment of Pilate comes directly of empathy from one colonial governor to another. New Mexico had been under US rule only a little longer in 1880 than Judæa had been under Roman rule at the time of Pilate.
Incidentally, Mary is explicitly fifteen years old at the time of the birth of Jesus in Wallace’s novel.
It’s not a bad book, it just takes itself a bit too seriously and goes on a bit too long. You can get it here.
Fri, 12:02: Very sad news: Fabrizio Saccomani has died aged 76. One of the great Italians who was too modest to make internatio… https://t.co/7IWrcQP9iL
Fri, 13:08: RT @pmdfoster: Thread – the EU is digesting what @BorisJohnson means for Brexit. They solve the Irish trilemma by resiling from Joint Repor…
Fri, 18:29: RT @aljwhite: Thread – I have now read most of Dominic Cummings’ blogs (for my sins) and think this: Probably the most important thing he w…
Fri, 22:59: Why are there so many new books about time-travelling lesbians? https://t.co/tjFF7BJUS8 One of those fundamental questions.
Sat, 08:38: RT @davidallengreen: Arsonists complaining about the terms of an insurance policy should be asked about the arson rather than the insurance…
Sat, 10:45: RT @davidallengreen: The backstop: a gentle reminder It is a default, an insurance against there being no future UK/EU relationship agreem…
Verity’s, to the south and the east. Between our two rooms is a third smaller bedroom with an easterly view which I will use as my study, and where I am writing now. I will put my desk in here when it arrives from New York. Otherwise all we have is a pair of suitcases each that made the journey with us. The Long Island Rail Road sped us as far as Greenport so that after these weeks of planning and letters to and fro, it is strange to arrive here so suddenly. Of course, from Greenport we still had some few miles out here, but Doctor Phillips had sent a man to meet us with a horse and buggy. Verity loved that, and I couldn’t help smiling seeing her so happy. In New York we might just have climbed into a taxi, and though we are only a few hours away, it was a good reminder that things here are somewhat different.
This was one of the Clarke Award nominees which I put aside for later enjoyment. It’s a set of four loosely connected stories, a girl in prehistoric times, a medieval young woman accused of witchcraft, a doctor in a nineteenth-century asylum, and a generation starship where the cold-sleep passengers start dying. They are all well written, especially the first which is more or less in verse form, with the recurring theme of a spiral echoing across the centuries. The author’s foreword suggests that the four stories can be read in any order, but I don’t think that’s really true. I see that it was shortlisted for the Carnegie medal – and am interested that I didn’t pick up on it being intended for a younger audience, if indeed it was. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2015. Next on that pile is A Close Run Thing, by Allan Mallinson.
Fri, 10:10: RT @mwfamhist: Now I feel confused. Raab says the EU should take responsibility for the consequences of a no deal Brexit. But, according t…
Fri, 10:16: RT @combeferal: my (60M) daughter (17F) has fallen in love with a guy she saw in the park (21M). he’s at a barricade with 9 of his homosoci…
Fri, 10:16: RT @ClaireRousseau: @combeferal Hey maybe just like, move out of the one town where the cop that’s hunted you across the years is the chief…
Fri, 10:31: RT @aScottyMr: I’m fucking furious to only find out today that the Dayton shooter murdered his trans brother, NOT his sister
Fri, 10:31: RT @transscribe: The sibling of the Dayton shooter was a trans man who went by the name Jordan Cofer, according to friends and social media…
Fri, 10:45: RT @tconnellyRTE: To add to the numerous threads out there on Brexit, Dublin’s reading of the UK positioning is as follows:
"I'll call you and wake you in the morning. And I can't wait to see you, darling."
"Me neither, sweetie!"*
"Till tomorrow. Sleep well!"
"See you tomorrow, sweetie!"
(ring tone)
Impossible to translate the "Ik zie je graag"/"Ik zie je graager" exchange accurately. And the pet names are much more bokeworthy than my translation.
I was blown away by Evens’ previous book, Ergens waar je niet wil zijn (The Wrong Place), and grabbed this as well; it won the Fauve d’Angoulême: Prix Spécial du Jury at the Angoulême International Comic Book Festival. Here’s a (wordless) trailer for it:
Before I get into substance, I’m really intrigued by the three different titles in three languages of publication. The Dutch original can be translated as “The Entertainment” though the connotation is of a particular event rather than an ongoing activity. In French, the book’s title is “Les Rigoles”, which literally means “The Gutters” but more slangily could be “The Laughs” or perhaps “The Larfs”, close to the sense of the Dutch (if plural rather than singular); but “Les Rigoles” is also the name of the author’s favourite cafe in Paris. The English title, “The City of Belgium”, weirdly contradicts the spirit of the story which is that the events (and the gutters) could be set in any western European large city that isn’t Berlin, and the setting nods to Paris, Antwerp and Brussels (as well as being closer to the beach than any of those three cities actually is). So there’s a strange ambiguity about what story is really being told here.
Anyway. As with Ergens waar je niet wil zijn, we have a story with three main characters, Jona, Victoria and Rodolphe, who meander across their unnamed city finding (or avoiding) deeper truths about their lives, with again the vortex of carnality and enjoyment that is Disco Harem providing a geographical anchor for the narrative strands. Robbie from Ergens waar je niet wil zijn puts in a guest appearance at one point. Evens’ watercolour style is arresting and intriguing, and his gimmick of giving each of his protagonists a primary colour (Jona blue, Victoria yellow and Rodolphe red) works well to convey their very different perspectives. He gives his minor characters more of a voice here too, each of the three protagonists acquiring a strange sidekick, and also each getting rides with the same mysterious taxi driver, who tells each of them different stories. I enjoyed most of it; I felt that the three stories did not all end equally satisfactorily – in particular the last 40 pages (of 300) follow just one of the three protagonists on his personal path to enlightenment, which felt unbalanced. But in general it’s pretty good. You can get the Dutch original here and the English translation here.
This was my top unread non-English comic. Next on that list is Oyasumi, by Renee Rienties.
Wed, 13:08: RT @damonwake: Unsurprisingly, @OborneTweets has no time for your Dominic Cummingses and their apparent hold over your Boris Johnsons. Abso…
Wed, 17:11: RT @EU_Commission: -“Do you feel you are a citizen of the EU?” -“Yes” (% by country) 93 88 87 85 85 84 84 84 83 82…
Wed, 17:41: RT @gerrylynch: Until arriving here, I must admit I hadn’t quite processed the complexity of the not-quite-quadpoint of Zambia, Zimbabwe, B…
Wed, 21:12: RT @faisalislam: Another No Deal story on #bbcnewssix We reveal the rather recent changes to the secret “reasonable worst case scenario”…
Thu, 08:15: Really surprised to see Jason Lutes’ Berlin on the ballot for the Dragon Awards. I love it, but it has no sfnal or… https://t.co/OAedmjXYwS
Thu, 10:00: RT @Glasgowin2024: Here’s a lovely picture of the Scottish Event Campus (SEC), which is where we hope to hold Worldcon. (Credit: Andy Yong…
Thu, 10:45: RT @Mij_Europe: Back to Bxl today (so much for August holiday). *IF* successful, what’s most likely way Commons blocks no-deal #Brexit? My…
Thu, 11:02: RT @StefaanDeRynck: @pmdfoster Can I quote from the report: “important not make any immediate conclusions regarding timing at this stage. D…
There was also a Professor of English Literature on board with the address, The Bungalow, Colbury, Southampton. His name was Alexander Wilson. He had just turned 32. The single-funnelled City of Nagpur with its red and black livery had a passenger list of 34 men and 55 women who in the quaint language of the time were ‘not accompanied by husband or wife.’
Last year we were hugely entertained by the TV series Mrs Wilson, based on the same history as this book. Here’s the trailer for it.
The story is one of fundamental deceit; Alexander Wilson had four wives at the same time, and children with each of them, but managed to keep this more or less secret from all concerned. He was a British spy, and published author of a score of spy novels, but got sacked from the secret service in murky circumstances. He died suddenly in his third wife’s home in 1963; it was not until 2007 that his various families found out about each other, largely thanks to the writer of this book, who is a professor of media studies at Goldsmiths in London.
The story is a fascinating one. Wilson managed to lead parallel lives for decades. His first two wives did at least realise that their relationships were over (divorce, however, was not an option); but the third and fourth wives were living not far apart, and Wilson managed to flit between households without being found out. He was in love with all of the women he married, and loved his children by their account, though he ran out of money pretty fast due to not having a job and indeed served prison time for small-scale financial fiddling. His habitual fantasising in real life clearly also fed into his writing, which was reasonably successful in the 1930s – he published 24 books between 1928 and 1940. I was rather reminded of Patrick Troughton, also a man of simultaneous relationships, who was a professional pretender by trade (also felled by a heart attack in his 60s). Troughton at least seems to have been more honest with his wives and girlfriends about his emotional commitments.
This extraordinary sequence of events is not served well by Crook. Rather than take us through Wilson’s life chronologically, he has instead taken each of the women’s stories and recounted them in separate chapters, in reminiscence style, followed by two chapters each on his secret service career and his literary career. This means that we are jerked about the timeline mercilessly. It would have been very interesting to match the chronology of Wilson’s books directly with the documentary evidence about his second marriage, and essential to match the records of his petty crime convictions against the memories of his third wife. But the sources are treated as separate boxes telling separate stories, rather as Wilson in life kept his families from knowing about each other. The style is breathless and unreflective.
There are some annoying formatting issues as well – the entire book is in plain text with, for instance, extended extracts from Wilson’s novels formatted exactly the same as the rest of the book; there are a decent number of photographs, all shoved at the end in apparently random order. It is a rare case where the fictionalised screen version, which stars Wilson’s granddaughter as her own grandmother, does the facts more justice than this non-fiction version. I found the book surprisingly poor for an author who holds a professorship in journalism. It reads more like a sequence of newspaper feature articles stitched together. Maybe that’s what it originally was. Anyway, you can get it here.
Tue, 13:18: TIL that Kate Bush’s first idea for the father in Cloudbusting was Patrick Troughton, before she thought of Donald… https://t.co/oWlETmHS8B
Tue, 17:53: RT @GeorginaEWright: Michael Gove says that EU is ‘refusing to negotiate’. But there is more nuance to EU’s approach (short thread): https…
Tue, 17:54: RT @stephenkb: We laugh at the 30-50 feral hogs guy, but at the moment the plan to stop no deal is that the Labour leadership, the parliame…
Tue, 18:13: RT @HardingMike: @andrew_lilico Dear Turnip. You left the party. Took your bottle of Blue Nun out of the pile in the kitchen. Told everybod…
Wed, 10:36: RT @pmdfoster: Smart take as ever from @lewis_goodall . “No dealers are winning because they want it more” – the 2016 referendum dynamic…
Wed, 10:45: RT @sturdyAlex: A summary of so many exchanges with a Brexiter. – I don’t believe it. You made that up. – Here’s the source. – Then they m…
Mon, 21:19: Is it too late to stop a no deal Brexit? My old friend, former MP David Howarth, thinks Parliament can still act, t… https://t.co/ccSEaQkz4y
Tue, 10:45: RT @DPhinnemore: “[Johnson] has long maintained that the EU will “blink”… The worry, for all but the true disciples, is that the EU sees…
Second paragraph of third chapter (apologies for the scatological content):
“Get me the soap,” mum would squeal if we dared mention constipation. We would then be made to squat over the toilet whilst she softened the soap in warm water and rubbed it on your arse. To much relief, the old bowels would immediately open up and let loose the last ten days of gunge. My mother would look on triumphantly as if she had waved a magic wand or plunger. There wasn’t much time to contemplate dignity, the remedial soap was just accepted as was the fact that your brothers watched on huddled together and in stitches at the sight of your arse up in the air with bubbles floating out of it.
A few years back I read the autobiography of Jayne Olorunda, child of a Nigerian father and a Strabane woman, which was a tough read. Annie Yellowe also grew up in difficult circumstances, but in Portadown; her mother went to Liverpool as a young woman, and came back with no husband and no money, but three mixed-race children. Her Protestant relatives provided a certain amount of support, but her mother was an alcoholic who abused her children and also allowed her rotating succession of boyfriends to exploit her. Reading through, it is frankly astonishing that social services, even at the limited extent that they were operating in the 1970s, did not step in and move the children into foster care (also something that one notices by its absence from Jayne Olorunda’s story); there seems to have been a certain amount of collusion between extended family and authorities to prevent state meddling. In the end, Annie did OK at school, and finally went to London to start her new life (where she is now a social worker and published poet). Her elder brother, who gets a good write-up here, is a well-known Northern Irish footballer.
I have to say that this is not a particularly well-written book – the author’s style is rather breathless and stream-of-consciousness. But it comes from the heart. You can get it here.
This was my top book by a non-white writer. Next on that list is Cat Country, by Lao She.
Sun, 14:48: RT @JohnGPeet: I find this new epithet bizarre. The European Council (elected heads), including UK, unanimously approved the backstop in De…
Sun, 14:52: DUP’s Foster backs ‘patriotic list’ of ways to prevent break-up of UK – Scots and Irish Nats’ ideology fatally erod… https://t.co/MIeL51F9Is
Mon, 08:32: RT @jediknight1985: If my math is correct 45 isn’t even the full GOP contingent in the Senate. So I presume the other 8 GOP Senators declin…
Mon, 10:23: Fascinating new Scottish opinion poll from Lord Ashcroft. Headline: there is a majority for independence. To say… https://t.co/FFXcC6RmZS
Mon, 10:45: RT @MarietjeSchaake: ‘The gamification of massacring innocents.’ Important breakdown of the online and ideological context around the horri…
During my weeks there I had only two bad nights. Once when I dreamed that the tower was crumpling and, once, sliding forward into machine-gun fire and no pit to creep into, slithering on through mud to mutilating death. And then my screams too joined with the night creatures. Well, there was a third sleepless night but that came much later and for a different reason.
I saw the film with Kenneth Branagh and Colin Firth when it came out in 1987, and greatly enjoyed it; the original book is very short, but very intense. It’s the story of two shell-shocked veterans in an isolated English village in the early 1920s, one restoring a medieval wall painting of the Last Judgement, the other on a single-handed archæological dig, both confronting and to an extent exorcising their demons. The place and time are very convincingly invoked; there’s a lovely contrast between the unwelcoming established church (apart from the vicar’s wife who is a bit more welcoming) and the warm communality of the local Methodists; the climactic moment (spoilers, sorry) is when the narrator finds himself giving an impromptu sermon. The final twist, which I didn’t think the film handled very well, is much better in the original. You can get it here.
Sat, 16:56: This from the same genius of legal analysis who argued a month ago that Brexit had already legally happened on 31 M… https://t.co/lNNNGyYXs0
Sat, 20:00: My week on Twitter : 88 Mentions, 27.9K Mention Reach, 328 Likes, 171 Retweets, 3.14M Retweet Reach. See yours wit… https://t.co/40rHwhNPOe
Sun, 07:46: RT @mpcorr: Can we please acknowledge Lord Hayward who is walking with him, who was instrumental in the marriage equality successes at West…
Sun, 08:22: RT @NewtonEmerson: Why are SF supporters taking the piss out of @fotoole‘s anti-Brexit electoral pact idea? SF proposed much the same in th…
Sun, 10:45: RT @nicktolhurst: 3 things you should know about the free ports the UK can have now that the “EU can no longer stop it”. 1. The EU has nev…
Sun, 11:40: RT @TravelTipsterGo: I was just assaulted by a man who first told me to go back to my own country, at Banff National park. Please share.…
Perhaps he’d have time this afternoon to devote some thought to it, though it was already approaching 11am and the stacks of paperwork Corporal Wright had sent over, accompanied by a sweet yet scathing note detailing the dangers of not returning them promptly, had not even been depleted by a fraction. Lethbridge-Stewart sighed. He didn’t expect the duties of a colonel to be wholly blood and thunder, but he hadn’t expected the rot of bureaucracy to set in quite so quickly either.
Sixth book in the Candy Jar Lethbridge-Stewart sequence, second of the second series, this sees the future Brigadier, Ann Travers and journalist Harold Chorley investigating a mysterious TV spy show in which almost all the characters are played by the same actor, who is also the show-runner – the concept of Dr Strangelove, but taken to a new extreme. I had not come across the author before, though he’s written a couple of Space: 1889 books. It’s very nicely done – a novel that is a spinoff from a TV series whose hero changes faces from time to time, about a TV series which features an actor of many faces; Cooper balances the absurdity of the set-up nicely with the tension of how-the-heck-will-they-get-out-of-this. There are a couple of lovely moments of fan-service, but nothing too intrusive. A new (and black) regular character is introduced to the Lethbridge-Stewart universe. Basically, I am enjoying this series. You can get this one here.
Fri, 12:29: RT @DmitryOpines: Perhaps the time to hear from an expert commission on whether Free Ports are a good idea was before: – The Prime Ministe…
Sat, 11:31: RT @DarranMarshall: #Brexit: Northern Ireland business, farming & trade union bodies unite against no deal. 27 bodies issued the statement…
Visitors to Berlin, over a million of them in 1913, found a city full of nervous, unchannelled energy; a city that wrapped itself in the mantle of the German Reich but which was, inside, still the provincial capital of Prussia; a city which was reckoned the most modern in Europe, an industrial powerhouse and a capital of science; a city on parade. Their reactions were mixed. Some saw a metropolis more suggestive of the future than any other, more urban and more modern, the very expression of the global economic force which the German Empire had become. But other visitors found a parvenu, blaring its new-found prosperity but with no finer sensibilities, an ugly and uncouth city. Many found both.
The author worked alongside me in the International Crisis Group back in the early years of this century, and went on to greater thinktanky things; in this book, he looks at 1913, the last year before the first world war, from the perspective of twenty-three great cities, starting and ending with London, but visiting the Americas, Asia, Africa, Australia and the rest of Europe en route. It’s a masterly synthesis of what was going on in global politics, pulling together loads of primary sources – newspapers, diaries, etc – to build a clear picture of human politics as it was experienced by the people of the day. It was particularly interesting to get the perspective of cities from outside the European cultural space, such as Bombay, Peking, Shanghai, Tokyo, Tehran. It’s quite a long book but a refreshingly quick read.
The concentration on individual cities does mean that two aspects of the world in 1913 are underplayed. First, most obviously, the countryside is seen only in relation to the city. Sure, the cities were where change was taking pace most quickly, but the politics of land ownership and agricultural technology are also fairly crucial drivers and are largely not included. Second, of course you can only pick so many cities; Brussels is not listed in the index, though there are a couple of paragraphs on the World’s Fair in Ghent; Ireland’s impact on England is described, but not from Ireland’s point of view; we hear from Algiers and Durban, but little from the continent between. And third, there is little space for transnational phenomena – for instance, there is a throwaway remark about the meeting of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance in Budapest, which the Persian delegation was unable to attend; Lenin and Stalin pop up very briefly in the chapter on Vienna, as does Adolf Hitler.
But I guess you have to take your framing devices where you can find them, and I must admit I liked this a lot more than the last such book I read (1688, not counting 1434). It’s fluent and engaging. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2014. Next on that pile is Two Brothers, by Ben Elton.
Thu, 12:56: RT @EtheHerring: The top image is a fictitious weather report imagining what the weather would be like in 2050 for a 2014 French TV documen…
Thu, 18:01: RT @FabianZuleeg: Again Brexit debate in UK completely divorced from EU realities. EU not changing its mind on backstop/anything else. EU w…
Fri, 08:55: RT @sylviademars: Hi, still on holiday, but accidentally saw news this morning and thought I’d point out that free ports *add* further inte…
Fri, 10:45: RT @DenisMacShane: Trying to read EU major paper and the self-obsession in London about show-downs or blinking first has no echo on contine…
Fri, 11:36: RT @crashwong: Hey folks, I’ve been seeing some tweets circulating that are falsely attributed to me. Those are not my words. I have enormo…
On some days you wonder what it all means. And on some days you find out. It’s like suddenly seeing a huge black pig in your headlights when you’re running 80 miles an hour on ice. Boom. Total clarity. No more gray area.
One of the classic accounts of American politics, not quite as remarkable as Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 because the election of 1992 was much less remarkable, and also frankly because Thompson’s own style was becoming much more self-indulgent. Thompson’s drug-fuelled raging stream of consciousness writing comes over now as rather white and male. He picks up on the importance of Hillary Clinton, but fails to really interview her. The one African-American who is mentioned in passing is Roosevelt Grier, who he utterly unfairly blames for the death of Robert F. Kennedy. He fumes about the fundamental evil of George H.W. Bush without really proving the case.
And yet there are moments of sheer genius. It starts with a flashback to the failed McGovern campaign which is basically the set-up for a punchline:
Another thing I still remember from that horrible day in November of ’72 was that some dingbat named Clinton was said to be almost single-handedly responsible for losing 222 counties in Texas—including Waco, where he was McGovern’s regional coordinator—and was “terminated without pay, with prejudice,” and sent back home to Arkansas “with his tail between his legs,” as an aide put it.
“We’ll never see that stupid bastard again,” one McGovern aide muttered. “Clinton—Bill Clinton. Yeah. Let’s remember that name. He’ll never work again, not in Washington.”
Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.
There is a hilarious passage describing Bill Clinton’s supposedly odd behaviour at his first interview with Thompson, later explained by a mutual friend as the effect of Thompson’s eerie resemblance to Clinton’s childhood nemesis (way too good to be true, alas). I had also completely forgotten that Ross Perot’s excuse for dropping out of the 1992 presidential election was that the Republicans were planning to spoil his daughter’s wedding by distributing fake compromising photographs of her. Yes, really.
The book ends with a postscript written after the death of Richard Nixon, Thompson’s old nemesis, in 1994. For all that Thompson says he hated him, there is evidence of some respect between the two:
Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.
Nixon laughed when I told him this. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you.”
Anyway, I should get hold of the better, earlier books of the Gonzo Papers. It’s a little sad to get the sense from reading that Thompson’s powers were waning, and that he knew it. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2016 (cheating slightly because I had in fact read it years ago). Next in that list is The Computer Connection, by Alfred Bester.
