17 October 1936: birth of Timothy Combes, director of Doctor Who and the Silurians (Third Doctor, 1970) and The Mind of Evil (Third Doctor, 1971).
17 October 1966: birth of Mark Gatiss, author of eight New Who TV stories, An Adventure in Space and Time (First Doctor dramadoc, 2013), four novels and two Big Finish audios, and also plays the eponymous scientist in The Lazarus Experiment (2007) and the Captain in Twice Upon A Time (Twelfth Doctor, 2017; incidentally the only televised Who set in Belgium, though some of The War Games is set in a depraved alien simulation of the landscape).
17 October 1971: birth of Patrick Ness, show-runner for Class (2016).
17 October 2018: death of Derrick Sherwin. On paper, he was producer of Doctor Who for only two stories and 14 episodes, the shortest tenure of anyone in the old regime. In fact he was the man who rescued the programme from collapse in Seasons 5 and 6 (as script editor and de facto assistant producer), invented UNIT and the Time Lords, and successfully rebooted the show in colour with a new Doctor in 1970. He also wrote, uncredited, one of the best single episodes of the entire original run, the first part of The Mind Robber.
ii) publication and broadcast anniversaries
17 October 1979: cover date of first issue of Doctor Who Weekly, now of course Doctor Who Magazine.
17 October 1996: publication of New Adventures novel Damaged Goods, by one Russell T. Davies. I wonder if he kept up his interest in Doctor Who?
17 October 2011: broadcast of first episode of The Man Who Never Was (SJA). Awkward meeting between Clyde and Rani; meanwhile tech guru Joseph Serf has invented a new computer, the Serfboard.
17 October 2015: broadcast of The Girl Who Died. The Doctor and Clara are kidnapped by Vikings who are also having trouble with alines; one of the Vikings will be very familiar to Game of Thrones fans.
Men do fall into insanity in such places, but much as vengeful right-wingers might celebrate such mental decay, some among them would be dismayed to learn that Moussaoui will lose his mind for Darwinian reasons. Guy the Gorilla, star of London Zoo in the 1950s, was admired for his solemn disposition. In fact the animal was deeply depressed, kept as he was for years alone in a small cage. Homo sapiens is a social primate, descended, like gorillas or chimpanzees, from an ancestor with the same habits. Had our fore-fathers been more solitary beasts like the orangutan (which spends much of the year alone), the worst of all punishments would not be solitary confinement but an endless dinner party. The constant exchange of subtle emotional cues around the table would drive those present to their wits' end.
An interesting book by geneticist Steve Jones. It's the fourth in a series about Darwin, reflecting his interests and updating them to the present day (which I think is about 2005); I haven't read the others, so I was missing some of the context. However, Darwin's thoughts on worms, barnacles, insects, insectivore plants, sexual selection and our facial expressions are interesting in themselves, and Jones' updating to current research is also pretty fascinating. I felt however that it lacked an overarching structure; the book is fairly granular, each chapter taking one (or more) of Darwin's publications on a particular subject, and linked to the others only in that Darwin cared about the topic. The title is provocative, making the point that the island that really mattered to Darwin was not one of the Galapagos archipelago but the one he was born, married and died on; but we don't get any corresponding exploration of Darwin's Englishness or Britishness. (I'd love to know where he stood on Irish issues, for instance.) It's also just a little out of date – Jones proclaims firmly that modern humans have no Neanderthal DNA, a view that was overturned in 2005. However, the writing is good and engaging, and I might look out for some of the earlier books in this series. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2015. Next on that pile is After Me Comes The Flood, by Sarah Perry.
Thu, 17:57: RT @HeleneBismarck: It really is unbelievable that the chance to extend transition was passed up in the summer. Everyone knew a second wave…
Thu, 21:04: RT @EwartBiggsPrize: We are pleased to announce that the winner of the 26th Christopher Ewart-Biggs Literary Prize is Anna Burns for her no…
16 October 1965: broadcast of "Temple of Secrets", the first episode of the story we now call The Myth Makers. Achilles slays Hector (who was distracted by the Tardis appearing) and decides that the Doctor is Zeus. Steven is captured by Odysseus, and the Tardis stolen.
16 October 1976: broadcast of third episode of The Hand of Fear. The RAF fail to destroy the reactor; but the hand regenerates into Eldrad the Kastrian. The Doctor agrees to take her home, but she is impaled by a booby-trap.
16 October 2009: broadcast of second episode of Prisoner of the Judoon (SJA). Luke stops the countdown; more Judoon arrive, and terrify Rani's parents, but leave with their prisoner and without causing further damage.
I'm going to admit it. When I am awake in the wee small hours of the night, or need to fill in five minutes of time between tasks, I often turn to the moral dilemmas presented on Reddit's "Am I The Asshole" subreddit, to deliver quick anonymous drive-by judgements of other people's deepest problems. I've always been darkly fascinated by advice columns; AITA offers you the opportunity to participate for yourself. The format constrains you to make one of four possible calls on a story of interpersonal conflict: YTA (you're the asshole), NTA (you're not the asshole and the other person is), NAH (no assholes here) and ESH (everybody suck here). Like rating books on Goodreads or LibraryThing, this reductive approach concentrates the mind.
To give some examples, the top three posts on AITA at the moment are:
daisynet911 was told not to try and contact her sister who was in an addiction clinic. When she next got together with her sister and the rest of the family, she was made to listen to a litany of complaints about the sisterly relationship over the years, starting with her failure to contact her sister, and blocked from replying. A pretty clear consensus in the responses, turning into therapy-by-internet, with an update.
gay-girl-throwaway was insulted about her sexuality by someone in her friends group, swore back at him and was kicked out of the group. She wonders if she was in fact in the wrong? Again, pretty clear consensus in the responses.
But the fascinatingly awful posts on AITA are those from people who actually are in the wrong and do not recognise it. The saddest one of these that I've seen is from dadosashes, a dying man who had a chance to reconcile with his estranged daughter and screwed it up. "She just hung up on me without even letting me explain and blocked us everywhere again. I am feeling like shit, my wife has not stopped crying. I feel like I lost my last chance of having my daughter back." Although the narrator is going through a truly horrible time (that is, if it's all true), by his own account he and his wife are very clearly in the wrong.
And there are thrilling moments of catharsis. This extraordinary story starts off with what sounds like a fairly standard family wedding row about nothing very important, and escalates beyond all expectation. There's a sad update as well.
I admit that part of my attracion to it is performative. Good comments get upvoted and give you karma. (My own top comment, supporting a poster over a row at a funeral, got 20,000 upvotes.) You also get bragging points every time your comment ends up as the top one on a particular post. (I'm on over 50, after a year.)
Tove Danovitch asks if AITA can actually make people better. It can, of course; but I think more importantly it makes us wiser. Human nature is fascinating. Almost all of these posts are a short story in themselves. (The wedding one involving the demented sister is a novel.) And it's all, or mostly, true.
Current Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake This Must be the Place, by Maggie O'Farrell
Last books finished Survivants, Tome 4, by Leo Survivants, Tome 5, by Leo To Be Taught, if Fortunate, by Becky Chambers Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, by M. Mitchell Waldrop Secret Army, by John Brason Helen Waddell, by Felicitas Corrigan
Next books The Tropic of Serpents, by Marie Brennan Wild Life, by Molly Gloss
Wed, 15:52: Apart from the big one, I just want to give shout-outs to a few other 2 November races that I’m personally invested in. Wishing @RepLindaSanchez the best of luck in California 38th. We had a great chat at a conference in Oxford last December. She is fairly safe for re-election.
Wed, 16:05: RT @SFischer_EU: Some of the „forgotten“ (and lonely) pictures in the former UK delegation office at the EU Council building in #Luxembourg…
Wed, 16:22: Congratulations to Melita! Though to describe this as the “most prominent” EU diplomatic appointment for a Slovenian is a bit unfair to Slovenian ex-foreign minister @Samuel_Zbogar, former EUSR and ambassador in Kosovo, just finished as EUSR and ambassador in North Macedonia!!! https://t.co/NLuIMzuaBr
Wed, 17:11: Can “Am I the Asshole?” Actually Help Make People Better? https://t.co/Dnfpdn8ARi Great piece by @TKDano, linking the subreddit with The Good Place. I am addicted, I must admit.
Thu, 08:32: RT @evropaelire: Serbia nuk ka alternativë tjetër pos pranimit të pavarësisë së Kosovës, por edhe kjo e fundit duhet të ofrojë garanci shte…
Thu, 10:43: RT @youngvulgarian: meanwhile, French people are complaining that they’re turning English because they can’t kiss each other on the cheek a…
15 October 1966: broadcast of second episode of The Tenth Planet. The Cybermen take over the base. "Our scientists and doctors devised spare parts for our bodies until we could be almost completely replaced."
15 October 1977: broadcast of third episode of The Invisible Enemy. Leela and K9 defend the laboratory while the cloned Doctor and Leela explore the real Doctor's brain. And what is that giant prawn thing at the end?
15 October 2007: broadcast of first episode of Warriors of Kudlak (SJA). Children who play Combat 3000 are going missing; Luke and Clyde investigate and get teleported away…
15 October 2009: broadcast of first episode of Prisoner of the Judoon (SJA) starting the third season of SJA. A Judoon spaceship crashes and the evil Androvax escapes; it possesses poor old Sarah and prepares to destroy Bannerman Road.
Second paragraph of third story (“N” by Majd Kayyal, translated by Thoraya El-Rayyes)
N’s response today surprised me. I asked him: ‘Is it cold over there?’ He fidgeted, contemplating the question. When ideas move through his head, his mouth twists up along with his cheek and shoulders and he shifts around in his seat. He replied: ‘People move around at night… a lot…” He swallowed the rest of the sentence and awaited my reaction to the truth he’d just divulged.
It's fair to say that there is not a lot of Palestinian science fiction out there (NB I have previously written up anthologies of Jewish sf, not the same as Israeli sf of course, here and here). Here, Twelve Palestinian writers were asked to imagine life in their country in 2048, a hundred years after the displacement of half of their population. They are not very cheerful stories, some imagining a sclerotic peace process agreed between now and then that fails to deliver much improvement in the lives of those affected, but most expecting continued stalemate and corrosion. “N” by Majd Kayyal imagines parallel worlds, one Palestinian, one Israeli, controlling the same territory in adjacent universes. The black humour of “Application 39” by Ahmed Masoud sees the Olympic Games brought to Gaza. Sad and effective. You can get it here.
This was next in my pile of unread books by non-white authors. Next on that list is Painless, by Rich Larson.
Tue, 14:23: RT @LaurenceBroers: Monday’s ceasefire document refers to the Basic Principles (BP), under discussion within the Minsk Group. Conflict part…
Tue, 16:05: RT @RobDotHutton: Reading @katyballs in the Standard, am stuck by this complaint from No10 aides, who may be too young to remember 9/11, bu…
Tue, 19:24: RT @nicupopescu: my piece on how the EU tried and failed to play a role in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict settlement process. https://t.co/A…
Tue, 19:30: RT @Tom_deWaal: 1 Please read, take note and share this @ICRC statement: “Today we are more than two weeks into a period of intense violenc…
Tue, 22:56: Researchers At Large Hadron Collider Are Confident To Make Contact With Parallel Universe In Days What could possibly go wrong? https://t.co/CUrS1H4htV
Wed, 08:33: RT @Gilesyb: In policy terms I’m pretty negative, really prone to pointing out stupid or unoriginal ideas But most ideas *are* bad. I g…
Wed, 10:45: RT @LaurenceBroers: There are voices rightly highlighting relentless focus on geopolitics in the tragedy in + around #Karabakh. Geopolitics…
Wed, 11:01: RT @bbcdoctorwho: “I’m your new assistant…” and what an incredible journey! ✨ A very happy birthday to Katy Manning, who played Jo Jones…
Wed, 11:33: Alas, this turns out to be satire (at best). Leaving my original tweet up, though, because it was funny. https://t.co/EUfdN7w8kA
14 October 1919: birth of Shaun Sutton, BBC executive who had a key role in casting Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker.
14 October 1949: birth of Katy Manning, who played Jo Grant from 1971 to 1973, does both Jo and Iris Wildthyme for Big Finish, was also in SJA as Jo.
ii) broadcast and production anniversaries
14 October 1963: rehearsals began for the first episode of Doctor Who actually shown on TV (as opposed to the unshown pilot episode).
14 October 1967: broadcast of third episode of The Abominable Snowmen. Khrisong decides to trust the Doctor, but the dormant Yeti is animated by the mising sphere…
14 October 1978: broadcast of third episode of The Pirate Planet. The Doctor hears the story of Queen Xanxia and sees the crushed remains of plundered planets, and is thrown off the bridge.
14 October 2018: broadcast of The Ghost Monument. The new TARDIS crew have lost the TARDIS, but get caught up in the final stage of the Rally of the Twelve Galaxies.
This week, for example, I visited Peru for the first time (one stop on the metro) courtesy of the Cebichería-Marisqueria restaurant. Luckily, I was with friends who were regular customers (he Catalan, she Peruvian) because although the menu was written in Spanish, it was a Spanish liquidised over the centuries with Quechua (now the fifth most spoken language in Catalonia), not to mention Aymara and the numerous tongues of the Amazon. Not understanding a word, I stared, nonplussed, at dishes such as cebiche, chicharrón, and papa a la huancaina until my friends did the ordering for me and I discovered that huancaina was a yellow sauce served on baked potato, that chicharrón was fish (or octopus) fried in bread crumbs, and that cebiche—the Peruvian national dish—was one of the most delicious things I’d eaten for years: raw fish marinated in lime juice and served with chili, tomato, and thinly sliced onion. In the restaurant they had local Estrella beer, but I decided to stay in Peru and ordered Cristal, a fine, mild lager brewed in Lima. The Cebichería-Marisquería is on Rosselló, 530. As you can see, I’m plugging it for all it’s worth, and it’s worth plenty, and costs little, and it’s like travelling without the jet lag. Go!
A collection of pieces by Matthew Tree, a British writer who moved to Barcelona many years ago and has gone thoroughly native, being now more pro-independence than a large proportion of the Catalan population. The essays are a mixture of personal reflection on age and relationships, advocacy for the Catalan cause, advocacy of Catalan literature, and restaurant reviews. It's fronted by a strong piece on the independence issue, but the rest is fairly light. You can get it here.
This was the shorter of the two remaining books on my shelves acquired in 2013. Next, and last, on that list is Felicitas Corrigan's biography of Helen Waddell.
Mon, 19:06: RT @AndrewPRLevi: .@AlokSharma_RDG the panic in this message is unhelpful. No one knows what the UK-EU relationship will be. That’s on yo…
Mon, 20:07: This is hugely entertaining. @GregHands in fluent German, he and @DavidMcAllister using “du” to each other. I hope that the Youtube channel has English subtitles/translation for those who can’t follow the original. https://t.co/aHxJiirABG
Mon, 21:33: In general I will cheer the Cambridge team against the Oxford team – but there are exceptions!
Mon, 22:03: RT @GregHands: That’s because we know each other well. Going back more than 10 years. A pleasure to work with @davidmcallister
Tue, 10:45: RT @Tom_deWaal: In 2013 I wrote this essay on how I came to write my book Black Garden. I felt that the Karabakh conflict needed a differen…
13 October 1923: birth of Cyril Shaps, who played Viner in The Tomb of the Cybermen (Second Doctor, 1967), Lennox in The Ambassadors of Death (Third Doctor, 1970), Professor Clegg in Planet of the Spiders (Third Doctor, 1974) and the Archimandrite in The Androids of Tara (Fourth Doctor, 1978).
13 October 1997: death of Ian Stuart Black, author of The Savages (First Doctor, 1966), The War Machines (First Doctor, 1966) and The Macra Terror (Second Doctor, 1967).
ii) broadcast anniversaries
13 October 1979: broadcast of third episode of City of Death. The Doctor goes back to Leonardo's studio; and poor old professor Kerensky meets his end.
13 October 2008: broadcast of second episode of Day of the Clown. Clyde defeats the bad guy by telling jokes (great scene with a sea of red balloons being released), and Rani accepts Sarah's invitation to join her team.
We celebrated the summer solstice by having a party in our back garden – something we have done very rarely, in fact. Some nice pictures, though a lot of friends have since moved away. I wish I had taken more. (I also wish I had had my eyes open in the only one taken of me.)
Unfortunately eating leftovers I cracked a tooth on an olive stone, and the following week I had a brief visit to the hospital for a vasectomy; this was not brilliant timing for reasons I'll explain in the July write-up.
I don't seem to have travelled, so with the regular commute I read no less than 49 books, many of them short and easily digestible Doctor Who novels.
12 October 1965: birth of Dan Abnett, author of among others Big Finish audios The Harvest (2004) and Nocturne (2007), Tenth Doctor audio stories The Forever Trap (2008) and The Last Voyage (2010), Torchwood audio Everyone Says Hello (2008), most of the Tenth Doctor book The Story of Martha (2008), and Torchwood novel Border Princes (2007) plus various other comics and short stories.
ii) broadcast anniversaries
12 October 1968: broadcast of episode 5 of The Mind Robber. A grand battle of fictional characters allied to either the Doctor or the Master ends with the destruction of the Land of Fiction and the restoration of the Tardis.
12 October 1987: broadcast of episode 2 of Paradise Towers. The Doctor escapes the caretakers, seeks the Great Architect and is captured by the Red Kangs; meanwhile Mel is captured by Tibby and Tabby.
12 October 1988: broadcast of episode 2 of Remembrance of the Daleks. The Doctor retrieves the Hand of Omega; Ace finds herself surrounded by Daleks.
12 October 2010: broadcast of episode 2 of The Nightmare Man (Sarah Jane Adventures). And it's farewell to Luke, after much exploration of nightmares and dark places; if there had been more episodes of SJA, there was going to be a story where he turned out to be gay.
iii) dates specified in canon
12 October 1979: Beep the Meep pursues the Eighth Doctor to the BBC Television Centre in an alternate universe where they encounter an actor called Tom Baker who is starring in this show… (in "TV Action!" by Alan Barnes, published in DWM in 1999)
12 October 1998: birth of Thomas Hector Schofield, later to become known as the Seventh Doctor audio companion Hex; he shares a birthday with his creator Dan Abnett (see above).
12 October 2021: Hex's 23rd birthday celebrations are interrupted by Cybermen in The Harvest (2004).
12 October 2025: Hex returns home in Project: Destiny (2010).
Sun, 14:48: Without Russian Aid to Armenia, Azerbaijan Has the Upper Hand in Nagorno-Karabakh https://t.co/c6dNH1fx2l @RobertMCutler suggests that Russia will wait until Pashinyan is critically weakened before intervening.
Sun, 19:25: RT @gerrylynch: This @Guardian map shows how #COVID19 case numbers have *changed* in the past week. N Ireland has seen cases more than doub…
Sun, 20:48: RT @hunnunuh: Recently I found out a male equal at my company makes 21k more than I do. I just finished a meeting where I confronted my man…
Sun, 21:11: I just revealed to my beloved that the reason Yoda sounds like Fozzie Bear is that they were both played by the same actor. Life will never be the same. https://t.co/WZkUP7pIOR
Mon, 11:48: RT @NobelPrize: BREAKING NEWS: The 2020 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded to Paul R.…
Barahir is driven into hiding, his hiding betrayed, and Barahir slain; his son Beren after a life outlawed flees south, crosses the Shadowy Mountains, and after grievous hardships comes to Doriath. Of this and his other adventures is told in The Lay of Leithian. He gains the love of Tinúviel 'the nightingale' — his own name for Lúthien — the daughter of Thingol. To win her Thingol, in mockery, requires a Silmaril from the crown of Morgoth. Beren sets out to achieve this, is captured, and set in dungeon in Angband, but conceals his real identity and is given as a slave to Thû the hunter. Lúthien is imprisoned by Thingol, but escapes and goes in search of Beren. With the aid of Huan lord of dogs she rescues Beren, and gains entrance to Angband where Morgoth is enchanted and finally wrapped in slumber by her dancing. They get a Silmaril and escape, but are barred at gates of Angband by Carcaras the Wolf-ward. He bites off Beren's hand which holds the Silmaril, and goes mad with the anguish of its burning within him.
Christopher Tolkien, who died at the start of this crazy crazy year, published this when he was 92. To be honest, I don't think there was much new here – most of the material is in The Book of Lost Tales vol 2 and The Lays of Beleriand, published in 1984 and 1985 and which I read in 2011. The Beren and Lúthien story was of huge personal significance to his father – it's interesting to me that Tolkien, whose name had seven letters ending with -ien, found forbidden love with Edith Bratt, whose name had five letters starting with B. And as presented here, we see Tolkien's story-telling skills mature in the different versions of the tale. In the final version, in fact, Lúthien ends up as rather a kick-ass character who rescues Beren and challenges both Morgoth and her father. (This was largely edited out for The Silmarillionyou can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2018. Next on that list is Greybeard, by Brian W. Aldiss.
Sat, 20:07: RT @TownsendMark: EXCLUSIVE: Priti Patel was told last month her anti-immigration lawyer rhetoric had led to a far-right knife attack in wh…
Sun, 11:49: Donald Trump (house of wings)… https://t.co/6LZKjd2LPb via @YouTube Once seen, cannot be unseen. (Context: Trump was hosting an edition of Saturday Night Live in 2004 and this was one of the sketches.)
11 October 1986: death of John Crockett, who directed "Wall of Lies", the fourth episode of the story we now call Marco Polo (First Doctor, 1964) and all four episodes of the story we now call The Aztecs.
11 October 1988: death of Roy Herrick, who was the counter-revolutionary Jean in the story we now call The Reign of Terror (First Doctor, 1964) and Parsons, a space medic in The Invisible Enemy (Fourth Doctor, 1977)
11 October 1960: birth of Nicola Bryant, who played the Fifth/Sixth Doctor companion Peri (Perpugilliam Brown) from 1984 to 1986 and continues to appear in (and also direct) Big Finish audios.
ii) broadcast anniversaries
11 October 1975: broadcast of episode 3 of Planet of Evil. The Morestran ship cannot escape from Zeta Minor; Salamar prepares to eject the Doctor and Sarah into space…
11 October 1980: broadcast of episode 3 of Meglos. Much confusion of identity, and the Doctor is prepared for sacrifice to the Dodecahedron…
11 October 1986: broadcast of episode 2 of Mindwarp (ToaTL 6). Confusing stuff about Peri being captured by the Mentors; the Doctor thinks it is not true.
11 October 1989: broadcast of episode 2 of Ghost Light. The Doctor finds Control; Control releases Light.
11 October 2010: broadcast of episode 1 of The Nightmare Man (Sarah Jane Adventures), the first story of the fourth and penultimate series of the show. Luke, setting off to Oxford, is haunted by the Nightmare Man…
11 October 2011: broadcast of episode 2 of The Curse of Clyde Langer (Sarah Jane Adventures). After some pretty gut-wrenching drama, the curse is lifted. One of the great stories.
11 October 2014: broadcast of Mummy on the Orient Express. The Doctor and Clara investigate the deaths of passengers on board a space-bound train, who claim to have seen a mummy that is not visible to others prior to their deaths.
Kramer vs. Kramer won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1979, and won four others, Best Director (Robert Benton), Best Actor (Dustin Hoffman), Best Supporting Actress (Meryl Streep) and Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium (Robert Benton again). Justin Henry, god bless him, remains the youngest ever Oscar nominee at the age of 8.
The other Oscar-nominated films were Breaking Away, which I have seen, and All That Jazz, Apocalypse Now, and Norma Rae, which I haven’t. IMDB users rank Kramer vs. Kramer 6th on one list and 7th on the other. Alien, which won the Hugo Award, tops both lists, and Apocalypse Now and Mad Max are also ahead of it on both. Apart from Alien and Breaking Away, I’ve seen seven other films made that year: Monty Python’s Life of Brian, Moonraker, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, The Muppet Movie, Zulu Dawn, The Prisoner of Zenda (the Peter Sellers version) and The Warriors. To be honest I would put Kramer vs. Kramer in the lower half of that pack. Here’s a trailer.
It’s the story of a New York advertising guy whose wife leaves him, with the result that he needs to develop hitherto unused childcare skills; and then she demands custody of their son in a bruising courtroom battle. She wins, but then in a twist ending decides he can keep the kid after all. The script is by Robert Benton who also got a credit for Superman last year.
We’ve seen a few faces here before starting with the two leads. Dustin Hoffman is Ted Kramer here, and was Ratso in Midnight Cowboy ten years ago.
Meryl Streep is Joanne Kramer here, and was Linda in The Deer Hunter last year.
Going back a good deal further, Howland Chamberlain is the divorce court judge here, and way back in 1946 was the department store owner Mr Thorpe in The Best Years of Our Lives. (Born in 1911, he was only 35 then, but played it older.)
Incidentally, one of the child actor extras grew up to be a TV editor and worked on Heroes, The Vampire Diaries and Lovecraft Country.
OK, so, our usual suspects: not a single black speaking part, in a film set in New York (the 16th of 52 Oscar-winning films set there). And in these days of Men’s Rights Activism, the plot is basically a dramatisation of their raison d’être. Ted and Louise are not terribly nice people; but we get much more of Ted’s viewpoint and we are clearly meant to sympathise with him. I didn’t find the music or the cinematography terribly exciting. There is of course a real drama to the courtroom sequence, and Streep in particular is very impressive here, but I can’t really be bothered to write much more about it. MAD Magazine, as so often, had a better ending.
I’ve thought long and hard about where to put it on my personal ranking. In the end it’s going three quarters of the way down, below Gentleman’s Agreement, also a New York drama about real issues but whose heart is in the right place, and above Gone With the Wind, which is also a family drama but with overt rather than covert racism.
The original novel by Avery Corman is actually somewhat better. (Incidentally, this is the first Oscar-winning film based on a novel since The Godfather in 1972.) The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
Billy was two. Joanna’s mother would have said he wasn’t any trouble. He was sometimes stubborn or slow, but he was emerging as a person, moving from the primitive state of sticking cottage cheese into his ears into a semi-civilized being you could take to a Chinese restaurant on a Sunday.
It scores over the film by taking us into Joanna’s mind and showing us the reasons for her actions; there’s also some good colourful incidental detail which is missing from the film (the housekeeper, the grandparents, Ted’s love life). We have the same twist ending though.
Right. Next up is Ordinary People, of which I know nothing at all. But first, The Empire Strikes Back.
Fri, 16:05: Pippi and the Moomins served as a social antidote to fascism https://t.co/Oq2ukXZSAR The political context of Astrid Lindgren and Tove Jansson.
Fri, 19:14: RT @Tom_deWaal: Strong statement from UN human rights commissioner @mbachelet calling out violations of international humanitarian law, att…
Fri, 20:48: RT @FiveThirtyEight: The nightmare scenario for 2020 would be vaguely familiar to those that remember 2000. But it could be way worse. ht…
Fri, 20:55: Jack Ransom: It’s always weird revisiting planets from the TOS era. Carol Freeman: TOS? Jack Ransom: It’s what I call the 2260s. Stands for ‘those old scientists’ – You know, Spock, Scotty, those guys. Seems like they were stumbling on crazy new aliens every week back then.
Sat, 08:35: RT @tconnellyRTE: Are we close to a Brexit deal? Here’s my take on another week of intense activity… Brexit talks: Glimmer of light, or…
Sat, 10:25: RT @LaurenceBroers: After 2 weeks of war, Russia brokers a humanitarian ceasefire (CF) following 10 hours of talks between FMs Bayramov and…
I seem to have skipped this date when I first did these posts in 2010. At that point there were no broadcast anniversaries (since then there have been two), but I'm surprised I missed a fairly significant birthday
i) births and deaths
10 October 1937: birth of Victor Pemberton, the first person to have both written a Doctor Who story and also acted in one. He was also script editor of the show in 1967. He wrote Fury from the Deep (Second Doctor, 1968) and Doctor Who and the Pescatons (Fourth Doctor audio, 1976), and appeared as the minor character Jules Faure, a crewman who gets converted into a Cyberman, in The Moonbase (Second Doctor, 1967).
ii) broadcast anniversaries
10 October 2011: broadcast of the first episode of The Curse of Clyde Langer, the best story of the final series of the Sarah Jane Adventures. Clyde gets, guess what, cursed; an ancient artifact seems to turn everyone against him.
10 October 2015: broadcast of Before the Flood. A twisted and vile survival plan is pieced together by an alien warlord called the Fisher King. The universe will feel the consequence. Can these events be stopped? Can the Doctor ensure the future's coming and do the impossible? And the Doctor can play a familiar tune.
I travelled with my mother (sceptical. anxious), my widowed aunt Annie, who had been married to my mother’s brother (calm), and my fifteen-year-old son (curious). In Vienna we boarded a smaller plane for the 650-kilometre trip east, across the invisible line that once marked the Iron Curtain. To the north of Budapest, the plane descended over the Ukrainian spa town of Truskavets, through a cloudless sky, so we could see the Carpathian Mountains and, in the distance, Romania. The landscape around Lviv — the ‘bloodlands’ described by one historian in his book on the terrors visited upon the area by Stalin and Hitler — was flat, wooded and agricultural, a scattering of fields pockmarked with villages and smallholdings, human habitations in red, brown and white. We must have passed directly over the small town of Zhovkva as Lviv came into sight, a distant sprawl of an ex-Soviet metropolis, and then the centre of the city, the spires and domes that jumped ‘out of the undulating greenery, one after another’, the towers of places I would come to know, ‘of St George's, St Elizabeth's, the Town Hall, the Cathedral, the Korniakt and the Bernardine’ that were so dear to Wittlin's heart. I saw without knowing them the cupolas of the Dominican church, the City Theatre, the Union of Lublin Mound and the bald, sandy Piaskowa Hill, which ‘soaked up the blood of thousands of martyrs’ during the German occupation. I would grow familiar with all these places.
A great book by international human rights lawyer Philippe Sands, which looks at his own family history and the background of two hugely significant international lawyers, Hersch Lauterpacht, who successfully promoted human rights as an international responsibility, and Raphael Lemkin, who developed the legal concept of genocide, and how they intertwined in the city of Lviv (as it now is) and the nearby town of Zhovka/Żółkiew. He also throws into the mix Hans Frank, the Nazi ruler of Poland, and his sidekick Otto von Wächter, both of whom have surviving sons whose takes on their fathers' careers are grimly different from each other. Carefully reconstructed from letters, photographs, documentation and memories, and framed by the Nuremberg trial of Hans Frank for crimes against humanity, it's a superb account of how ordinary enough circumstances can transform into horror and also generate genius. You can get it here.
I've never been to Lviv, but it always fascinated me as the capital of the province of Galicia on the Diplomacy board (Lemberg in those days). I'm even more fascinated now.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2017 (actually on loan from my father-in-law). Next on that list is Borderline, by Mishell Baker.
Thu, 12:56: Time seems to move at a different pace in rural Northern Ireland – and even the cats seem to sense it https://t.co/nKfXos91pP Lovely post. “Before August, I thought it odd that my boyfriend’s family have a caravan an hour’s drive from their house.”
Thu, 13:01: RT @NobelPrize: BREAKING NEWS: The 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to the American poet Louise Glück “for her unmistakable poeti…
Thu, 16:05: RT @_F_B_G_: At least when the Roman Empire collapsed into decadence they got all fountains of wine and blood sports and orgies and that- w…
Thu, 16:58: Almost out of office message https://t.co/nsoWi52jVW Lovely valedictory piece from @markdevenport, who it’s been my pleasure to banter with over election results since 2010. Best of luck to him (and other departing colleagues).
Thu, 19:46: Jean Mayn� (1854-1924) and his daughter Berthe Flamin� Mayn�: a thread. At the @M_useumLeuven last weekend my eye was caught by Jean Mayn�’s Sacramental Procession, painted while he was still a student at @ArBA_EsA in 1878. Vivid and realistic; you can almost smell the incense. https://t.co/xU95aiQXFb
Thu, 19:49: RT @EdwardGLuce: “Trump has built himself a maze. He wants Americans to fear something that does not seem particularly lethal — the radical…
Fri, 11:01: RT @NobelPrize: BREAKING NEWS: The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize to the World Food Programme (…
9 October 1912: birth of Seymour Green who played two villainous sidekicks, Hargreaves the butler in The Seeds of Doom (Fourth Doctor, 1976) and Mestor's chamerlain, Slarn, in The Twin Dilemma (Sixth Doctor, 1984).
9 October 1937: birth of Fiona Cumming, director of four Fifth Doctor stories and variously involved in other ways too.
9 October 2009: death of Barry Letts, producer of Who from Doctor Who and the Silurians (Third Doctor, 1970) to Robot (Fourth Doctor, 1974-75), director of Enemy of the World (Second Doctor, 1967-68) and The Android Invasion (Fourth Doctor, 1975), writer of The Dæmons (Third Doctor, 1972).
ii) broadcast and production anniversaries
9 October 1963: filming starts on the eventually broadcast version of the first ever episode, "An Unearthly Child".
9 October 1965: broadcast of Mission to the Unknown, the only episode of Who where no member of the regular cast appears; Marc Cory discovers the Daleks' plan and tries to send a message back to Earth before he is killed. Thsi still isn't from the episode (which is lost) but shows producer Verity Lambert, who was on her way out at this point, being menaced by the alien delegates who are the Daleks' allies.
9 October 1976: broadcast of episode 2 of The Hand of Fear. Sarah is rescued from the nuclear reactor, but the mysterious stone hand has other people it can control…
Current Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, by M. Mitchell Waldrop Helen Waddell, by Felicitas Corrigan
Last books finished Darwin's Island: The Galapagos in the Garden of England, by Steve Jones Gateway, by Frederik Pohl Carmilla, by J. Sheridan Le Fanu The Knight, the Fool and the Dead, by Steve Cole Defender of the Daleks, #1, by Jody Houser and Roberta Ingranata Survivants, Tome 3, by Leo Kramer vs. Kramer, by Avery Corman Defender of the Daleks, #2, by Jody Houser and Roberta Ingranata
Next books This Must be the Place, by Maggie O'Farrell The Tropic of Serpents, by Marie Brennan
We went to the M Museum in Leuven at the weekend, and found a carefully pared down collection on display, concentrating more than usually on religiously inspired art. The piece that really caught my attention was this depiction of a sacramental procession in Brussels by Jean Mayné (1854-1924); gorgeous sunshine on the faithful, lots of movement captured by the artist, you can practically smell the incense, all on a huge canvas 4.3 metres long and 2.1 high. Mayné painted it while still a student, in 1878, at the Brussels Academy (where he graduated one place ahead of the now much better known James Ensor). He held onto it for 13 years, and sold it for 2000 francs (can't find exchange rates, but that must have been a tidy sum) to Leuven city council in 1891.
It's a lovely piece of work, and I wondered why the artist is not better known. Neither English nor French Wikipedia has a page about him; Dutch Wikipedia does, but lists none of his works (it mentions that he was one of the contributors to the massive Panorama of Cairo, mainly attributed to Émile Wauters, now scandalously lost). It mentions that his work can also be found in the municipal museum of Ixelles, in Etterbeek town hall, and in the church of St Boniface which is across the square from one of my favourite Thai restaurants. I'll have a look next time I'm down that way.
Looking around, a lot of his work that comes on the market seems to be wistful women of various ages. Perhaps that's where the money was. None of these seems to me to catch the energy of the "Sacramental Procession".
His landscapes and townscapes are not a lot better, though I do like the "Blessing of the Sea" which catches some of the spirit of the earlier procession.
But it's really his urban scenes with people in them which have the most life. Apart from the procession where we started, three of his other paintings grabbed me: "Dressmaker with Children and Dolls", "The Ball" from 1903 and best of all "The Big Snowball", also fronm 1903, in which you can practically hear the little boys swearing. Some of their fathers and uncles may have been in the "Sacramental Procession", 25 years before.
I can see why he hung onto the "Sacramental Procession" until 1891; he must have known that it was one of his best works, and been sorry to part with it. But Leuven city council made a smart choice.
His daughter Berthe Flaminé Mayné became an artist too. A woman with almost the same name, Berthe Antonine Mayné, romantically set off to Canada with her rich lover in 1912 and survived the sinking of Titanic, but I am sure that they are different people. Berthe Flaminé Mayné seems to have specialised in painting women, who generally have more character than her father's. I have not found much else out about her, except that her husband was called Adhémar Flaminé and their war-time passports survive.
8 October 1966: broadcast of first episode of The Tenth Planet. The Tardis lands at the South Pole and the Doctor, Ben and Polly are apprehended by the staff of the base; and the Cybermen arrive.
also 8 October 1966: the very first regeneration sequence was filmed, for broadcast three weeks later, as William Hartnell transformed into Patrick Troughton; Hartnell's last filming in the lead role just a day under three years since his first.
Lovingly reconstructed in 2013:
8 October 1977: broadcast of second episode of The Invisible Enemy. First appearance of K-9!!! The Doctor and Leela travel to the Bi-Al research centre in the asteroid belt, get themselves cloned, miniaturised and injected into the Doctor's brain.
8 October 2007: broadcast of second episode of Eye of the Gorgon. Much running around with secret corridors and finally using a mirror to turn the Gorgon's power on itself, and transform Maria's father back to his usual self.
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