Tue, 17:56: RT @Five_Rights: We’re taking questions from the floor, and a great point: ‘Make sure the Five Rights are accessible to everybody, includin…
Tue, 18:04: RT @Five_Rights: .@SteveHopgood: ‘The key question is what informed people in liberal democracies are willing to do on human rights’
Wed, 09:18: RT @earlymodernjohn: In the Brexit debate, and around the Irish border question, it’s honestly impressive how keen some British pols are to…
I spent last weekend in Amsterdam at the Congress of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), the European-wide federation of liberal parties. It was a great opportunity to meet up with old friends, and hear some pretty inspiring speakers – the prime ministers of the Netherands, Belgium, Estonia, Slovenia and Luxembourg were all present and spoke.
As an elections nerd, the most interesting bit for me was the conference's choice of six Vice-Presidents from a field of seven. (The President of ALDE, Hans van Baalen, a Dutch MEP fromPM Rutte's VVD party, was also up for re-election, but had no opponent and scored more than 90% of the vote.)
I wasn't heavily involved with the campaigning, and as a mere observer didn't have a vote myself, but I knew four of the candidates personally – Timmy Dooley, the Fianna Fáil TD for County Clare (I was very grudgingly positive about FF joining the liberals in 2009; it has worked out much better than I expected); Ilhan Kyuchyuk, a Bulgarian MEP from the Movement for Rights and Freedoms; Markus Löning, a former German MP and former German Federal Commissioner for Human Rights; and Baroness Ros Scott, a former President of the UK Liberal Democrats. I like and respect them all. I didn't know the other three candidates, Frederick Federley, a Swedish MEP; Joanna Schmidt of the Polish party Nowoczesna; and Annelou van Egmond of the Dutch D66 party (more lefty than prime minister Rutte's VVD).
Had I had a vote, I would have been inclined to vote for the Bulgarian, Polish and Irish candidates, in that their parties are more recent arrivals in the Liberal family and it makes sense tactically to moor them more closely to the group. I'd probably then have thrown in votes for Ros Scott and Markus Löning, since I know and like them; and the D66 crowd grabbed me early on in the Congress and actually got me to wear an Annelou van Egmond sticker, so I would probably have given her my sixth vote. (The system was simply to place up to six X's by the names of the candidates you preferred.)
The actual result reflected the first part of my own thinking, in that the Bulgarian, Polish and Irish candidates topped the poll. But I was dismayed that Ros Scott finished in last place, by a significant margin. (She was 29 votes behind Annelou van Egmond, the sixth-placed candidate, who was only 31 votes behind Timmy Dooley, the third-placed candidate.)
I was surprised, and I wasn't alone. Ros Scott is not disliked by anyone, and had by all accounts worked hard as a Vice-President in the previous term. I had heard that two of the other candidates had performed poorly at hustings; I suspected there might be resistance to having a second person at senior level from the Netherlands, after Hans van Baalen. But other factors prevailed.
My suspicion is that for the ALDE voters, boosting individual party profiles for the 2019 European elections was pretty important. In the 2014 elections, ALDE came narrowly fourth in terms of votes (the far-left GUE group came third, after the mainstream centre-left PES and the centre-right EPP) and also fourth in terms of seats (the conservative ECR managed to scrape together a few more MEPs, including Brian Crowley, formerly of Fianna Fail). A very strong third place is a reasonable and credible target for ALDE in the 2019 elections. (There was some crazy talk of coming second; ALDE is doing well in terms of prime ministers at present, but mainly of smaller countries.)
And, sadly, the Lib Dems are very unlikely to be a factor in the 2019 European Parliament elections, because of Brexit. For the average ALDE voter in Amsterdam, it therefore made more sense to help the parties who will actually be contesting those elections, rather than those who won't.
On the positive side, it's nice to see that a candidate from a Muslim background can top the poll in an internal European liberal election.
Mon, 23:05: RT @kevinhorourke: 2 thoughts on today. 1. HMG must be terrified of what the New Year will bring in terms of job losses if they were prepa…
Tue, 09:36: RT @catherinemep: Ah, so Arlene Foster is so keen that NI has the same regulatory system as the rest of UK, we can only presume she’ll now…
Tue, 10:28: RT @conbrunstrom: The sorry truth is that the people in the UK who were screaming loudest about “taking back our borders” had not the first…
Sun, 14:09: RT @po8crg: @pnh I’ve just written and sent these questions to SMOFcon for the Fannish Inquisition. The USA is not the only country with t…
Sun, 16:42: RT @GuitarMoog: As predicted, the seven new red lines from the Brexit Ultras are a mix of the impossible, fantasies, and embarrassing stupi…
Sun, 20:55: RT @KeohaneDan: My in-1-tweet guess on Irish Brexit border compromise: preserving all aspects of the GFA, linked to a “new customs arrangem…
Current The Bounty Trilogy, by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons: Notes on Science Fiction and Culture in the Year of Angry Dogs, by Philip Sandifer Re: Collections, ed. Xanna Eve Chown
Last books finished Brexit and Ireland: The Dangers, the Opportunities, and the Inside Story of the Irish Response, by Tony Connelly Everfair, by Nisi Shawl The Lies Of Fair Ladies, by Jonathan Gash Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
Audios And You Will Obey Me, by Alan Barnes Vampires of the Mind, by Justin Richards
Next books The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses, by Kevin Birmingham Alexander the Corrector: The Tormented Genius Whose Cruden’s Concordance Unwrote the Bible by Julia Keay A Life in Pieces, by Dave Stone, Paul Sutton & Joseph Lidster
Sat, 14:09: RT @Five_Rights: Slovenian PM @MiroCerar: ‘There be no freedom without security.’ The right to personal safety is vital for a free society…
Sat, 16:04: RT @PeterKGeoghegan: Ill-informed, jingoistic British political and media response to Ireland has made a difficult situation for UK much, m…
Sun, 11:07: RT @davidschneider: The Irish are using Brexit to reunite Ireland by stealth which is why they called a referendum in the UK in June 2016 t…
Mutiny on the Bounty won the Academy Award for Outstanding Production in 1936, the first year in which the trophies were officially called the Oscars. There were eleven other nominees, and again I’m not going to bother to list them. It got nominations in five other categories but did not win any, making it the third and so far last film to win the equivalent of Best Picture and nothing else – the other two were Broadway Melody and Grand Hotel. In four of the other categories it was beaten by The Informer, which sounds like it’s right up my street. IMDB users rate several other films of 1935 more highly, in particular A Midsummer Night’s Dream starring James Cagney.
I had never seen either this film or the 1962 remake with Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard, but I was of course familiar with the story – as a child I read R.M. Ballantyne’s heavily sanitised 1880 children’s novel The Lonely Island, and more recently Trevor Lummis’ 1997 historical account Life and Death in Eden (and I have a feeling I read David Silverman’s 1967 Pitcairn Island too). It’s a historical film, though based on novels by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, so the first to win the Oscar which was set outside the lifetime of any of the audience. The story, as you surely already know, is of the revolt of the sailors on the Bounty, a British exploration ship in the Pacific in 1787, against the tyrannical captain William Bligh; the mutineers set the captain adrift (and, against the odds, he survived), and settled briefly in Tahiti; some of them then fled much further afield, to Pitcairn Island, where their descendants still live, while the rest were arrested by the next British ship to pass Tahiti, and tried and convicted for mutiny back in London. Here’s the trailer:
Oh look, that’s Clark Gable again, this time as the mutineers’ leader Fletcher Christian – he’s the first actor to be in the Best Picture/Outstanding Production two years running, after last year’s It Happened One Night (which he himself also won an Oscar for). Another returning face is Herbert Mundin, who played Alfred Bridges in Cavalcade the previous year, and here plays seaman Smith (who in real life was the last surviving of the mutineers on Pitcairn after the others all died horribly; he changed his name to John Adams and gave his name to Adamstown, the only settlement on Pitcairn; in the film however his character doesn’t seem to be one of those that go to the island). Here they both are with Charles Laughton as Captain Bligh:
Frank Lloyd, the director, also directed Cavalcade; Irving Thalberg, the producer, was also the producer of Broadway Melody (and died, aged 37, in 1936).
I have to say that overall, I found the film moving me rather less than some of the others I’ve watched. Having said that, once again I’ll start with the bits I liked least and work up.
LGBT erasure: No evidence that this is true, but IMDB say that according to Hollywood legend, a shot of one of the sailors pairing off with a Tahitian boy as the other men are enjoying the company of the women was cut by censors. Seems entirely plausible to me.
Charles Laughton: All three of the leading men – Charles Laughton as Bligh, Clark Gable as Christian, and Franchot Tone as the fictional midshipman Byam – were nominated for the Best Actor award, leading directly to the establishment of the Best Supporting Actor category. I was not at all impressed by Laughton here, though in fairness the script gave him little to work with. Captain Bligh is a one-note tyrant, who is given the merest smidgeon of come-uppance at the end. Laughton conveys this with a fixed scowl and carpet-chewing. It would be quite fun for a supporting character but I prefer villains with more depth.
More Act-ING: The first few scenes, set in Portsmouth with a press-gang (anachronistic) and farewells to the female relatives, feel super awkward. Everyone gets into their roles in the end (apart from those we don’t see again) but it takes them a few scenes to settle in.
Sing-ING: We keep hearing lusty choruses of sailors singing in the background, but when we see them on screen it’s clear that singing is the last thing on their minds.
Script-ING: Now that I have read the book, the script sticks rather too closely to the written dialogue, and often sounds forced.
Gender: This is a manly film about manly men, with the few speaking women as love interests, mothers or sisters. (Though there are one or two comic pedlars in port.) There is little romantic tension – Christian and Byam pretty much fall straight into the arms of their Tahitian lovers. Byam then abandons his Tahitian partner to go back and face the music in England, and we never see what happened to her. However, the film scores rather better on…
Race:Cimarron was the only film so far in this series that credited non-white actors, and that in a way that was super-problematic. (Ira “Buck” Woods did not get a screen credit for It Happened One Night.) Here we have hundreds of Tahitians playing Tahitians, with Bill Bambridge, Hollywood’s leading Tahitian actor (though there can’t have been many) playing Hitihiti, the chieftain, and leading role credits given to two women of colour, Movita (a Mexican-American, who much later married Marlon Brando, and died only in 2015) and Mamo (not Tahitian either but at least Hawaiian). The Tahitians are a complex and real society, and it’s made clear that the British agenda is ultimately one of exploitation and betrayal. It’s not massive progress, but it’s the best we’ve seen so far.
The original novel is anti-Semitic; the Jewish character doesn’t make it to the screen version.
Liberty: I’m trying to decide whether the film is slightly subversive or just anti-British (after all, it’s set less than a decade after American independence). I lean to the first option; King George III at the end grants clemency to Byams, rather than reinforcing the authority of Bligh and the judicial system; Christian goes to set up a new Utopian society on Pitcairn (where of course in reality he was killed within four years). It’s a rather manly vision of liberty, but I think it’s there if you squint. Again according to IMDB, the film was banned in the Empire of Japan as it was feared it promoted revolution. Note particularly Byams’ speech to the court (actually the only memorable dialogue in the film):
I don’t try to justify his crime, his mutiny, but I condemn the tyranny that drove him to it. I don’t speak here for myself alone or for these men you condemn. I speak in their names, in Fletcher Christian’s name, for all men at sea. These men don’t ask for comfort. They don’t ask for safety. If they could speak to you they’d say, “Let us choose to do our duty willingly, not the choice of a slave, but the choice of free Englishmen.” They ask only the freedom that England expects for every man. If one man among you believe that – *one man* – he could command the fleets of England, He could sweep the seas for England. If he called his men to their duty not by flaying their backs, but by lifting their hearts… their… That’s all.
The other actors: And that brings me to the rest of the cast, who are much less annoying than Laughton as Bligh, even though the script is not terribly exciting. Clark Gable in particular is tremendously watchable.
Cinematography: But let’s face it, the spectacular thing about the film is that they built a replica of the Bounty, filmed on board including hurricanes, sailed it to the South Pacific, got 2,500 locals to perform for the camera, and it all looks really fantastic. The stars were shipped only as far as Catalina Island, where a replica Tahitian village was built; you would hardly notice, apart from the angle of the sun. (There’s a nice bit of evasion of the new Hays Code by cutting between Fletcher Christian and Maimiti sneaking off for some alone time in the trees, then villagers dancing vigorously, then back to the couple postcoitally snuggling.) At a cost of $2 million, it was MGM’s most expensive production to date, and the money thrown at it does show on the screen. (Including canoes shipped to Tahiti from Hollywood because the local ones didn’t look authentic enough.) Whatever my complaints about the acting and politics, it looks fantastic.
I am reading the books on which the film was based, and will report back when I have finished them.
The next in this series is The Great Ziegfeld, of which I have no expectations at all except that I suppose it is about Broadway musicals, so probably has some singing and dancing.
Fri, 12:56: Progress of the UK’s negotiations on EU withdrawal report released https://t.co/n9qKWp3HGj Parliamentary report realistic on Border.
Fri, 15:28: RT @BradStaples: A public affairs mindset is the best navigator in today’s shifting global business landscape. It was a great session talki…
Fri, 17:56: RT @karmel80: World is becoming digital. But very few Europeans trust digital companies will respect their personal data. @vestager#ALDECo…
Sat, 10:24: RT @Five_Rights: .@VeraJourova: ‘We must reject fear and isolationism – many fear technological changes.’ Important rights implications her…
Sat, 10:24: RT @ALDEParty: .@VeraJourova: “I strongly believe that the role of politicians is to embrace change & to reject those who spread fear and i…
Sat, 10:25: RT @Five_Rights: .@VeraJourova: We must use technology to advance freedom. But concerns over digital platforms in electoral politics.#ALDEC…
Sat, 11:04: RT @Five_Rights: .@debackerphil: In a democracy, you have to have conversations with people you don’t like. The internet has a big role in…
Sat, 11:06: RT @Five_Rights: #AldeCongress discussion on rights and democracy in the digital age has been encouraging. Vital we protect our rights to a…
Sat, 11:36: RT @Five_Rights: .@debackerphil: ‘We must have a debate about regulation and free speech online’. Crucial we defend right to a free press #…
Second paragraph of third chapter of The Knight of the Swords:
Corum frowned and went to the cool water of the river to wash his face and hands. He paused, listening again. A thump. A rattle. A clank. He thought he heard a voice shouting further down the valley and he peered in that direction and thought he saw something moving.
Second paragraph of third chapter of The Queen of the Swords:
Just recently a small, trim schooner had beached on the sand and out of it had emerged a bright company, leading horses down makeshift gangplanks. Silks and steel flashed in the sunlight as the whole complement abandoned the craft, mounted its steeds and began to move inland.
Second paragraph of third chapter of The King of the Swords:
Corum felt the anger rising in his own head, shaking his body with its intensity. It was a relief at last to be able to vent it. With a chilling yell he rushed down the hill towards the attackers, his bright sword raised, Jhary behind him.
This trilogy, first published in 1971, is the first of two trilogies featuring Corum Jhaelen Irsei, one of the incarnations of Moorcock’s Eternal Champion; the first and third volumes won the first two August Derleth Awards. I’m not super familiar with Moorcock’s heroic fantasies; I did find it striking that he successfully takes the traditional storyline of chivalry, questing and manly derring-do, and underpins it with lashings of melancholy, destiny, and cosmic balance. Corum’s own hand and eye are replaced by magical substitutes belonging to supernatural beings at an early stage, and this physical change also resonates through the three books. Also, unusually for Moorcock, he rooted a lot of the vocabulary in a real language, Cornish, which I felt gave it a bit more sub-surface coherence. I can’t argue that it’s terribly profound, but I did think it was well done.
This was the most popular unread book I had acquired in 2014. Next on that list is Toast, by Charles Stross.
Non-fiction: 4 (YTD 48) Isaiah Berlin, by Michael Ignatieff Washington, D.C.’s Vanishing Springs and Waterways, by Garnett P. Williams Virginia Woolf, by Hermione Lee Brexit and Ireland: The Dangers, the Opportunities, and the Inside Story of the Irish Response, by Tony Connelly
Fiction (non-sf): 4 (YTD 24) A Man of Parts, by David Lodge Dear Old Dead, by Jane Haddam Wolf in White Van, by John Darnielle Mutiny on the Bounty, by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall
sf (non-Who): 5 (YTD 69) The Deepest Sea, by Charles Barnitz Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl The Knight of the Swords, by Michael Moorcock The Queen of the Swords, by Michael Moorcock The King of the Swords, by Michael Moorcock
Doctor Who, etc: 3 (YTD 48) Short Trips: Indefinable Magic, ed. Neil Corry A Life Worth Living ed. Simon Guerrier Doctor Who: The American Adventures, by Justin Richards
4,900 pages (YTD 53,600)
2/16 (YTD 57/214) by women (Lee, Haddam)
0/16 (YTD 16/214) by PoC
Reread: 1 (YTD 12): Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Reading now Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (a chapter a month) Everfair, by Nisi Shawl Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons: Notes on Science Fiction and Culture in the Year of Angry Dogs, by Philip Sandifer
Coming soon (perhaps): The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses, by Kevin Birmingham Alexander the Corrector: The Tormented Genius Whose Cruden's Concordance Unwrote the Bible by Julia Keay The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig Brave New Worlds: Dystopian Stories, ed. John Joseph Adams The Autumnlands, Vol. 1: Tooth and Claw, by Kurt Busiek The Fall of Hyperion, by Dan Simmons Het genootschap van Socrates by Yves Leclercq It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis The Story of English in 100 Words, by David Crystal Julian, by Gore Vidal Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, by Jane Hirshfield
"Gonna Roll the Bones" by Fritz Leiber Hardwired, by Walter Jon Williams Quoth the Raven, by Jane Haddam Looking For JJ, by Anne Cassidy The Island Of Doctor Moreau, by H.G. Wells Daystar and Shadow, by James B. Johnson Planesrunner by Ian McDonald Le Mariage de Figaro by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais The Universe Between, by Alan E Nourse Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift So, Anyway…, by John Cleese Toast, by Charles Stross Tangle Of Fates, by Leslie Ann Moore Spirit, by Gwyneth Jones Re:Collections, ed. Xanna Eve Chown A Life in Pieces, by Dave Stone (2005)
Thu, 09:56: RT @JenniferMerode: Cautious optimism on Irish border phase one deal. But difficulties of final deal can’t be underestimated. https://t.co/…
Orlando’s history plays with the notion that genetic inheritance can be pooled (just as sexual orientations can be crossed) in the identity of one person. So, after living for generations, Orlando is both an exceptional individual, and the summation of her whole family’s history. But the inheritance is not usually as joyously resolved. In the novel of her family, To The Lighthouse – a novel split down the middle – the splits between husband and wife, parents and children, past and presaent, generate a violent sense of conflict and a painful desire for resolution: ‘For what happened to her, especially staying with the Ramsays, was to be made to feel violently two opposite things at the same time; that’s what you feel, was one; that’s what I feel was the other; and then they fought together in her mind, as now.’ This ‘violent’ conflict of feelings is given to the modern, post-war artist, trying to make her peace with her Victorian inheritance by turning it into her material. It is also the conflict of the twentieth-century daughter, torn between the sympathies she feels arising from ‘the mysterious kinship of blood’, and the quarrel of the generations: ‘that’s what you feel … that’s what I feel.’
I’m a late convert to Virginia Woolf. Since I started bookblogging I have read Mrs Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, A Room of One’s Own, The Waves, Selected Essays and Between the Acts, and I have enjoyed them all. There is something about the Modernists that really ticks my boxes (as opposed to the nineteenth-century Romantics who I often find impenetrable). I guess I should look out for Orlando next.
Lee’s biography of Woolf was published in 1996, and I see there have been a couple more since; but this is pretty comprehensive, covering 59 years in 770 pages. Woolf bitterly regretted not having had a formal education, but maybe her more chaotic intellectual upbringing was a necessary precursor for her genius to take the shape that it did. Certainly being brought up with and mixing with writers gave her a keen understanding for the writer’s life. Lee does a really good job of mapping the literary interactions between Woolf and her family, friends and lovers, from the day she was born to the day she died. I learned a lot about the micro-geography of Bloomsbury and its satellite territories, and it was all very interesting.
Lee devotes appropriate but not obsessional attention to Virginia’s half-brother’s sexual abuse of her and her sister; she rightly puts more time into elucidating Woolf’s experience of mental illness, which hit her repeatedly as an adult and prompted her suicide at the fear of yet another debilitating breakdown. I feel a lot of Woolf’s work is translucently teetering on the edge of experience, and this was a good explanation of how that came to be. Though of course, a lot of other people have similar experiences and do not achieve the same fame; it doesn’t explain how she became a great writer, but it does I think help explain why she became the great writer that she did.
My one minor disappointment with Lee’s book is that I didn’t feel Woolf’s feminism was really put into context, apart from her fleeting engagement with the suffragettes and her later entanglement with Dame Ethel Smyth. Did she interact with or influence other feminist writings of the day? Were her friends and lovers (other than Ethel Smyth) also feminists? She is portrayed here as rather a lone voice in the wilderness.
However, otherwise this was a very satisfying read about someone I had wished I knew more about, and whose books I will now read with greater understanding and even more enthusiasm.
This was the top unread book by a woman on my shelves. Next on that list is Looking For JJ, by Anne Cassidy.
Tue, 14:41: RT @StephenFarryMLA: Alliance proposals for NI in EU Single Market. EU & UK Single Markets not mutually exclusive. EU market vital to futur…
Tue, 16:05: To Sound Like a Leader, Think About What You Say, and How and When You Say It https://t.co/ty7c570bh1 Interesting piece.
Tue, 21:58: RT @fotoole: Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Just heard Iain Duncan Smith on @Channel4News saying Ireland is taking a hard line on the border becau…
Wed, 08:04: RT @HenryJFoy: Boris, Fox and Davis huffed & puffed, called the EU names, wrapped themselves in the flag & sung the national anthem, and ba…
I have both Irish and Belgian citizenship, and as luck would have it there are two recent publications examining how both countries are dealing with Brexit.
Brexit and Ireland: The Dangers, the Opportunities, and the Inside Story of the Irish Response, by Tony Connelly
Second paragraph of third chapter:
The essential problem is this. Since Ireland and the UK joined the EEC together in 1973, all trade between both countries has come to be governed by shared membership of the single market and customs union. There are no barriers to that trade. Exports and imports flow back and forth across the Irish Sea, and back and forth over the land border. Britain has said it wants to leave the single market but still access it, or to have the closest possible trading relationship with it. Norway is not a member of the EU, but it is a member of the European Economic Area, an organization that brings together the EU and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). That means it is regarded as part of the EU single market and as such enjoys full free-trade access and participates in areas such as research and development, education, social policy, the environment, consumer protection, tourism and culture (though it does not participate in the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)). In return, Norway must accept the four freedoms (free movement of people, goods, capital and services); it must pay into the EU budget; and it must accept the body of EU law without having a seat at the table. These are things that the UK has so far refused to countenance.
Reviewing an earlier book by the same author ten years ago, I concluded:
If Connelly’s journalism is as good as this, then RTÉ have an important asset – not just for the domestic Irish audience, but for explaining Europe better to the English-speaking world (a job which the British media dismally fails to do).
My confidence was justified; this is an excellent read. There are two distinct strands of analysis, each done in satisfying detail: i) the inside baseball story of how Irish, British and EU officials dealt with the problems thrown up by Brexit, particularly those relating to Ireland; and ii) an examination of how different Irish economic sectors are affected by Brexit.
I learned much more from the second of these strands. I had no idea that the ducks farmed on the Monaghan/Tyrone border are so dominant in the Asian market. I had no idea of the Irishness of most Cheddar cheese, or that nobody outside the UK and Ireland buys Cheddar. I had no idea about the deep resentment of the Irish fishing industry over the Common Fisheries Policy. I had some idea of the complexities of the cross-border and croos-Irish Sea livestock trade, and of the intricate history of the Common Travel Area, but Connelly’s book enlightened me still further. Put simply, Brexit is a massively disrupting factor for the Irish economy, and the Irish government is right to demand more than magical thinking about the border from London before moving to discussion of the future trade relationship. (NB that what is required for now is not a complete solution, but an outline which goes further than the magical thinking on offer so far.)
However, I was more interested in the first strand, not least because I know several of the protagonists. I had been wondering if there was ever a serious possibility that Ireland might be tempted to align with the UK against the rest of the EU, to enable a better deal for the departing Brits. The answer is pretty clear: Dublin had gamed out the consequences of a Brexit vote long in advance (unlike London) and came to the conclusion that their negotiating power would be better aligned with the other 26 member states rather than the UK; the rest of the EU would be more likely to offer solidarity than the British. This was not without its challenges – the rest of the EU needed educating and convincing about the specifics of the Irish situation; some Irish officials did start to look at ways of managing the border, but were reined in by a government anxious not to surrender its negotiating capital; EU Commissioner Phil Hogan, though no longer an Irish government official, emerges as a key figure stiffening spines in both Dublin and Brussels.
The other reason that there was no prospect of Ireland aligning with the UK against the rest is that the British government at central level has absolutely no clue about either part of Ireland. (The DUP deal is less important here than the absence of an Executive in Northern Ireland.) The British Embassy in Dublin is mentioned precisely once, which indicates the value placed on the FCO by Whitehall today. One anecdote, already much-quoted but I’ll quote it again, is especially cringeworthy:
In July [2016], an official in the Department of the Taoiseach received a curious email. It came from the diary secretary of David Davis, the Secretary of State for DexEU – aka ‘Minister for Brexit’. The email read: ‘The Secretary of State has told me he wants to meet Kenny. Please let us know if Kenny is available.’ A senior diplomat immediately wrote to a British official further up the Whitehall food chain. ‘The message was sent [back],’ recalls the diplomat, ‘(a), the Taoiseach is not Davis’s interlocutor and (b), you don’t refer to the Prime Minister of a country by his surname.’
In recent weeks British commentators have been reacting with fury to their discovery that Ireland is an independent country which will pursue its own self-interest. So much for that special relationship. This is an excellent book, and fairly short too.
Towards a Belgian Position on Brexit: Actively Reconciling National and European Interests, by Alexander Mattelaer
Even shorter is a 20-page paper from the Egmont Institute, released only today, about the Belgian approach to Brexit. Here is the second paragraph of the third section:
This section disentangles the complex debate about how to approach Brexit from a Belgian perspective into three distinct conceptual approaches. Firstly, the Belgian government can use its voice in the European Council debate on Article 50 to relentlessly pursue its national interests. Alternatively, it can set its national interests aside in favour of the greater European good. Or thirdly, it can choose to keep a low profile and let the European institutions and other EU member states determine the Article 50 agenda. All three options have their own merits and drawbacks. Of course, these different ways of approaching Brexit are but caricatures for describing a reality that is always infinitely more complex. Yet as the diplomatic challenge for Belgium boils down to an exercise in balancing different impulses, it is enlightening to discuss these options as distinct ideal-types.
It’s a much more academic and theoretical piece than Connelly’s book, but it addresses the same question that I found so interesting in the Irish case: given Belgium’s huge exposure to the UK on trade, and its historical dependence on the UK for security, was there ever any chance of Belgium allying with the British (and perhaps the Irish, in this scenario) against the rest? Mattelaar doesn’t examine the history of any particular approach along these lines by the British (probably because there wasn’t one) but does look at the tension between the self-interest of an EU member state and the policy of supporting the EU as a bloc in the Brexit negotiations. Having more or less admitted up front that this is a straw-man dichotomy, it does not take him long to conclude that these two things are pretty much aligned in the case of Belgium, and that the government’s policy therefore makes sense. (No political actor in Belgium, as far as I am aware, has suggested otherwise.) He does also look at the exposure of different parts of Belgium (Flanders/Wallonia; textiles; fisheries) to Brexit, before concluding that actually the differences are not all that great. The meat of the paper is on pages 8 to 11, immediately following the paragraph I quoted above. It’s very much worth reading to understand the Belgian approach to Brexit.
I have not yet found anything that explains the British approach to Brexit. I will keep looking.
Mon, 12:40: RT @Anderssd85: This is superb and reflects a frightening reality in equal measure, take 5 minutes and give this a read. https://t.co/mtY0M…
Mon, 16:05: What do Moomins have to do with the horrors of war? https://t.co/jMfNFjZSV0 Look forward to seeing this exhibition in January.
Mon, 18:47: Very sad to read that Loïc Bouvard died earlier today, aged 88. I met him at a conference in Moldova in 2006 – an i… https://t.co/2mfnNR4qBN
Mon, 19:08: RT @jonworth: If you’re not in some way touched by a small French town naming a street after assassinated British politician Jo Cox you hav…
Tue, 09:30: RT @tconnellyRTE: Here’s my piece in today’s FT on Brexit and Ireland: “Brexit: Britain and Ireland talk at cross purposes on the border” v…
When I first read this book, aged 7 or so, I was expecting horror – good old Puffin Post had published an excised chapter, “Spotty Powder”, back in 1973, concerning the fate of another obnoxious child visitor, Miranda Piker, and it is much darker than any of the bits that made it into the final book. The chill that went down my back as I read it has stayed with me for 43 years:
There was a moment’s silence. Then, far off in the distance, from somewhere deep underground, there came a fearful scream.
“That’s my husband!” cried Mrs Piker, going blue in the face. There was another scream.
“And that’s Miranda!” yelled Mrs Piker, beginning to hop around in circles. “What’s happening to them? What have you got down there, you dreadful beast?”
“Oh, nothing much,” Mr Wonka answered. “Just a lot of cogs and wheels and chains and things like that, all going round and round and round.”
“You villain!” she screamed. “I know your tricks! You’re grinding them into powder! In two minutes my darling Miranda will come pouring out of one of those dreadful pipes, and so will my husband!”
“Of course,” said Mr Wonka. “That’s part of the recipe.”
You can read it here (NB although that page claims the chapter was only rediscovered in 2005, I have very vivid memories of reading it in 1973).
In fact I was both relieved and slightly disappointed that none of the four nasty children in the published text suffers quite as horrible a fate, and they all get out alive at the end (whereas one gets the distinct sense that Miranda and her father won’t).
It’s really difficult to read the original novel now without seeing clashing visions of Gene Wilder and Johnny Depp being Willy Wonka, and of the 1971 Oompa-Loompas vs Deep Roy. It’s a story where the grotesque, benevolent but also threatening Wonka uses the Oompa-Loompas as agents of moral justice, bringing about the downfall of evil (gluttony, parental indulgence, excessive use of chewing gum and too much television) and the triumph of impoverished virtue (Charlie and his family, who are otherwise not all that interesting). But this is in the context of a dystopian consumerist society, whose tastes Wonka is pandering to, a course that he expects Charlie to take up in due course; and a close examination of how Wonka runs his factory is also rather uncomfortable.
So, like most of Dahl’s better stories, it’s a fairy tale with a troubling core.
The is the most popular book in my library that I had not yet reviewed on line. Next in that pile is Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift.
Sun, 12:56: The hard-won kinship between Britain and Ireland is threatened by Brexit idiocy https://t.co/BvzqF9aGwa Fintan O’Toole explains just how b…
Sun, 17:44: RT @mwarne: This photo was posted in a Facebook group I belong to. It’s in Morlande, a district of Avallon, Burgundy, France. #JoCox https:…
Current Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (a chapter a month) The Bounty Trilogy, by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall Everfair, by Nisi Shawl Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons: Notes on Science Fiction and Culture in the Year of Angry Dogs, by Philip Sandifer
Last books finished Virginia Woolf, by Hermione Lee Wolf in White Van, by John Darnielle Corum: The Prince in the Scarlet Robe, by Michael Moorcock
Next books The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses, by Kevin Birmingham Alexander the Corrector: The Tormented Genius Whose Cruden’s Concordance Unwrote the Bible by Julia Keay Re: Collections, ed. Xanna Eve Chown
Sat, 18:46: RT @SkyJohnnyNelson: My 68yr old brother has been in the UK for 53yrs. He has received a letter stating he has 10days to leave or appeal. H…
Sun, 10:45: The inside story of how David Cameron drove Britain to Brexit https://t.co/tnzVzqijBg Sir Ivan Rogers puts Cameron in his historical place.
I’m just starting Nisi Shawl’s Everfair, which made the Nebula finalists this year (but missed the Hugos, finishing 8th on the Best Novel ballot). The frontispiece is this map, which I found a little confusing:
The book is an alternate history where the Fabians create an idealistic colony in the Congo, and the map shows the different stages of its territorial expansion.
The problem is that the map legend has four colours, but the map itself seems to have only three.
My best guess is that the south-eastern corner is the 1893 first buy, the 1897 second buy is missing (I don’t see anywhere on the map coloured that dark), the north-east is the bit conquered by 1904, and the western spur the land offered in 1914.
It Happened One Night won the Oscar for Outstanding Production in 1935. Eleven other films were in contention; I won’t bother listing them. Frank Capra also won the Oscar for Best Director, Clark Gable for Best Actor, Claudette Colbert for Best Actress and Robert Riskin for Best Adaptation (now Best Adapted Screenplay), a sweep which has been repeated only twice since (by One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and The Silence of the Lambs). It ranks top of the films of 1934 on IMDB. I cannot recall ever having heard of it before starting this project.
I really enjoyed it. This was the first Oscar-winning film that I felt I could inflict on my wife without having to make too many excuses for it being a creation of its own times. As usual, I’m going to take the bits I liked least first.
Alcohol: It’s rather extraordiary to today’s sensibilities to see Peter Warne very drunk on his first appearance, and both he and Andrews père get drunk, on their own, in later scenes. In a film made in 2017, these would be clear signals of alcoholism. It’s very difficult to comprehend how alcohol abuse could ever have been portrayed as a heroic characteristic to the extent that it is here. Daniel Grossvogel has an interesting comment on this in his book Marianne and the Puritan: Transformations of the Couple in French and American Films (p. 32 if you want to check):
[Peter] is also granted the generic masculine resort to drink: Hollywood long accepted as an unvarying semiotic that the male’s hard drinking was an instance of manliness – a tough remedy used as a form of valiant concealment. But whereas the manly hero remains sober even as he drinks, comedy makes Peter truculently tipsy rather than sorrowful.
Whitewashing:The story takes us from Miami to New York, ie through the heart of the Old South, and we see precisely one black character, a cook at the first stop played by Ira “Buck” Woods, in his first (uncredited) screen role; he went on to be a leading man in black cinema in the 1940s, though his most durable work is probably the vocals for Tom’s performance of “Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby” in the 1946 Tom and Jerry short Solid Serenade.
Landscape: California does not look much like the East Coast. There are mountains in the establishing scene with the yacht supposedly in Miami (which has no mountains). The roads are Western rather than Eastern. The railway train is branded “Southern Pacific”. Note how even the scenes supposedly set in New York do not use establishing shots of famous landmarks.
The Battle of the Sexes: I thought I really wasn’t going to like this aspect of the film at first. Ellie escapes the physical control of her father in the first scene, and almost immediately slips involutarily into Peter’s guardianship. But actually her plot line turns out to be one of emancipation and personal choice, ultimately supported by her father, ending with (very tastefully implied offscreen) glorious sex with Peter. The turning point in a way is when after Peter, having bragged about his hitch-hiking skills, fails to get them a lift, she succeeds immediately by showing her leg to the next driver.
Ellie: I proved once and for all that the limb is mightier than the thumb. Peter: Why didn’t you take off all your clothes? You could have stopped forty cars. Ellie: Well, ooo, I’ll remember that when we need forty cars.
I once hitch-hiked across a medium-seized country (Heilbronn to Berlin, and back) with a woman called Ellen with whom I had a slightly spiky relationship, but I hope I was less smug (I was only 19).
The Inspiration for Bugs Bunny: Yes, really. Clark Gable with the carrots.
The Contemporary Technology: The bus itself is rather a star – brilliant early twentieth-century creaky technology. I watched the film on a transatlantic flight where I had three seats to myself – United Airlines not being so popular these days – but I bantered a bit with the chap across the aisle about how British Airways (or basically any other airline) are much better. Back in the old days if you wanted to travel from Miami to New York you became part of a community for the day and a half (maybe two days, in the 1930s) of the trip. That little social laboratory is conveyed very well.
While we’re on the technology, let’s shout out for the autogyro in which Ellie’s imminently spurned lover arrived at their wedding. They were used a lot in the 1930s before helicopters overtook them. I remember one being featured on Blue Peter in the 1970s.
There’s a scene with Ellie’s father on a plane as well, and the use of telegraph and the print media to carry the news of her disappearance. (It was obviously a slow news week that week, if she made the front pages.)
The Music: Unless I missed something, the sound apart from the opening titles is entirely diegetic. Clark Gable mockingly sings “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf”, which had only come out the previous year. A group of passengers on the coach sing “The Daring Young Man On The Flying Trapeze” rather wonderfully. (Wikipedia says that Walter O’Keefe made the song popular in 1934, which would make it tricky to explain why it’s sung in a film largely made in 1933; Wikipedia is however wrong, as O’Keefe actually released it in 1928 and again in 1932. I can’t be bothered to correct Wikipedia; feel free to do so yourself.) Most joyfully, Frank Capra the director provides the third verse of “Flying Trapeze” in a cameo.
The Comedy: Once Gable and Colbert have got over the setup, they are a great double-act, the best scene perhaps being where they are interrogated by detectives looking for her and put on a convincing performance of being a squabbling married couple. There are some other great sparking moments, including Peter’s threat to undress in front of Ellie (apparently sales of undershirts in America plummeted as a result), and this exchange:
Ellie: Would you believe it? This is the first time I’ve ever been alone with a man! Peter: Yeah? Ellie: It’s a wonder I’m not panic-stricken. Peter: You’re doing alright. Ellie: Thanks. Nurses, governesses, chaperones, even bodyguards. Oh, it’s been a lot of fun.
I’m also going to shout out to Roscoe Karns, as creepy fellow-passenger Shapeley, who was also a senior officer in Wings and therefore (I think; I haven’t been keeping track) is the first actor to appear in two winners of the Best Picture Oscar or equivalent.
Basically this was a lot of fun, more than I expected it to be from the first fifteen minutes. Next up is Mutiny on the Bounty.
I tracked down the original story, “Night Bus”, in the anthology No, But I Saw The Movie, edited by David Wheeler. The original author was Samuel Hopkins Adams, and it was originally published in Cosmopolitan, though Dell then brought it out as a standalone a year later. He made his name thirty years before as a young journalist investigating patent medicine scams, and also wrote risqué novels in the 1920s. None of his work is in print but some of the stories (not this one) are available electronically through various means.
The film sticks surprisingly closely to the 50 pages, the biggest deviations being i) Peter is a chemist, not a journalist, with a new process that will make him rich and turns out to be a college friend of Ellie’s cousin; i) the bus passengers are stranded on an island when the river floods and Peter steals a boat to get himself and Ellie away, rather than driving across country; and ii) modern technology resolves the story when Andrews père records his conversation with Peter on a dictaphone and plays it back to Ellie to convince her of Peter’s character – no autogyro here. But the “walls of Jericho” punchline is in the original. Two weak points in the film script are explained better in the story – Ellie goes to the Windsor Hotel in Jacksonville to take a bath (also she owns the hotel), which is why they miss the bus; and the larcenous driver Danker is portrayed more as knave than fool. Also interesting to note that “Ellie” is short for “Elspeth” not “Ellen” in the original story, and her father has two very Scottish middle names. Was their Scottishness too difficult for Hollywood to handle in the 1930s?
Fri, 20:48: RT @sturdyAlex: So many people are sharing this completely brilliant cartoon, so I thought you might like to know that it was created by Br…
Fri, 22:01: Just watched the first episode of Borgen. Wow. Why did you guys not tell me? (OK, some of you did.)
It had been a terrible accident: a whole section of the tunnel roof had collapsed suddenly, without any warning. Diggin a new subway under New York City was always going to be dangerous, but Pete never expected it to be this dangerous. He never expected three of his fellow workers to be killed in the process – and he certainly never expected to see one of them again, just a couple of months later.
A collection of six short stories featuring a companionless Twelfth Doctor visiting the USA at different points in history from 1815 to the present day. I’m afraid this is definitely at the potboiler end of Richards’ range (which is considerable: I think he overtook Terrance Dicks as the writer with most Doctor Who books to his credit some time ago). The Doctor has very little of Capaldi’s characterisation, and a couple of the stories are very weak plot-wise. Younger American fans will be please to have the Doctor visit their country, but there’s not much here for the rest of us.
Thu, 12:00: RT @apcoworldwide: What challenges does the Irish border present to #Brexit? @nwbrux explains and looks at the latest developments https://…
Thu, 17:50: RT @georgeeaton: The most remarkable #Budget2017 stats. – Deficit not due to be eliminated until 2031 (16 years late). – Growth below 2%…
Thu, 19:03: RT @nicktolhurst: My timeline is filling up with #brexit folk absolutely enraged that UK no longer allowed to compete for “European capital…
Thu, 20:48: RT @JenniferMerode: British conservative MEP Rupert Matthews who campaigned for Brexit shocked to discover that Brexit means Brexit on Euro…
Fri, 09:07: RT @epc_eu: .@m_panayotova: “We will also focus on #lowcarbon transition, as it creates opportunities and jobs, and let EU citizens live in…
Fri, 09:07: RT @epc_eu: @m_panayotova “We are hopeful that the channels of communication between #EU and #Turkey will remain open. Stop to accession pr…
Fri, 09:23: RT @Sol_Met: “We want to help build a Union which protects its #citizens and their #security. A Union which is still seen as a reference in…
Sygtrygg was glad to be getting back to what he understood best: the organisation of a vik. The like of his mood hadn’t been seen since before Orm’s death. With the responsibilities of lord had come the grim business of settling troubke instead of starting it, and Sygtrygg has never been stellar in that role. Now that he was busy outfitting the ships, he made jokes, displayed unaccustomed largesse to his thanes and thralls, and once burst into song in the hall, startling everyone into a silence so awful you could hear the thatch mice moving in the roof.
This had been on my list of science fiction and fantasy books set in Ireland for a very long time, and I must admit I've found so many of those books to be stereotypical Celtic misht rubbish that I was reluctant to pick this one off the shelf. My heart sank further when I was confronted with the maps at the front of the book:
Uí Naíll? Ernhaim Macha? An umlaut in Eöganachta?? Where is Drogheda?
Meanwhile, in the English Kindgoms (sic) Jarrow has mutated to Yarrow and moved to the wrong Newcastle. And I don't think Northumbria was exactly there.
But in fact it's much much better than I expected after this unpromising start. Barnitz has done a good job of a light-hearted historical fantasy novel set around the archipelago, with lots of different eight-century tribes and customs, which actually seemed to me to be straight historical fiction until the dragon came into the story about half way through. It’s a coming of age novel that doesn’t take itself too seriously but is nonetheless a fun read. I’d read more by this author.
This was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that list is The Universe Between, by Alan Nourse.
By May 1915 the Baltic was under German naval blockade and the timber trade was at a standstill. Mendel [Isaiah Berlin’s father] had managed to re-orient the business away from export to supplying the Russian railroads, but still a large portion of his timber was sitting in local yards. When a fire wiped out his stock, Mendel accused the German owner of the yard of setting it deliberately; the German retaliated by denouncing Berlin to the police, for setting it to claim the insurance. By then imperial Russia was in full retreat along the eastern front and the German armies were within twenty-five miles of the city.
This biography was published in 1998, the year after Berlin’s death, many years before Ignatieff took the Canadian Liberal Party to their worst result ever. I confess that although I have been involved with politics for most of my adult life, I’ve had very little time for political philosophy. After reading this biography, I’m willing to concede that I may have missed out. Berlin’s work on liberal political philosophy in an age of political extremes was of crucial importance to steer between different brands of totalitarianism in the years leading up to the Second World War, and to give the West friendly criticism during the Cold War. His life as an academic was not particularly interesting, but his life as a Russian emigrant who became a loyal British subject (yet always conscious of his origins) it fascinating. The relationship he had with Russian literature was crucial to his philosophy, and his most famous phrase, “The Hedgehog and the Fox” comes from an essay on Tolstoy. His November 1945 meeting with Anna Akhmatova in Moscow had profound effects on them both. Ignatieff clearly admired and loved Berlin, but is not uncritical of his political philosophy which he says looked more at the negative case of illiberalism than the positive case for liberalism; I don’t feel qualified to judge.
There is one truly hilarious anecdote which I had not heard before. In the later stages of the Second World War, Berlin was posted to the British Embassy in Washington D.C. and wrote detailed and insightful reports back to Whitehall. Winston Churchill, hearing that Mr Berlin was in London for a few days, invited him for lunch with the Chief of the General Staff and others. But the lunch guest, surprisingly to Churchill, had a strong American accent and yet was only able to give vague and disappointing answers to Churchill’s questions about the political and economic situation across the Atlantic. It turned out that there had been a mistake; Churchill had invited not Isaiah Berlin, but the composer Irving Berlin, author of “White Christmas”. It seems too good to be true, but it’s well documented.
This was my top book acquired in 2010. next on that list is Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, by Jane Hirshfield.
Tue, 13:47: RT @milann_sk: @SlovakiaMFA is dissapointed that yday vote did not consider geographic criteria. But before fuelling anti-W.Europe bashing…
Wed, 10:45: RT @ToreKeller: Dear UK, We can read your language. Don’t put your cutting edge strategy in your newspapers. Now this geniously thought ou…
The best of his novels about men seeking to understand what was wrong with contemporary society, and to find some useful role for themselves in it, was Tono-Bungay, published in 1909; in fact he regards it as his best novel of any kind, judged by normal literary criteria. The novels that followed were more polemical and discursive, and, with the exception of Ann Veronica, which was centred on its heroine, their heroes were so humourlessly high-minded that he privately referred to these books as his ‘prig’ novels. The New Machiavelli, Marriage, The Passionate Friends, The Research Magnificent were some of their titles, all about men progressing from youth to maturity who were to some extent idealised versions of himself: taller, more handsome, from a higher social class, and considerably more punctilious in their relations with the opposite sex. These men invariably experienced a conflict between their personal sense of mission, whether intellectual or political, and their desire for union with a particular woman. Usually the woman proved to be an obstacle to the fulfilment of the mission, which could only be overcome by her being converted to it or by dying or by some act of renunciation by the hero.
This is a fictional biography of H.G. Wells, by David Lodge, many of whose novels I read in my early 20s and none since. Wells comes across as a well-meaning and very intelligent chap, not very self-aware, committed to his writing, to his politics, and to liberating women from the shackles of conventional sexuality; this last activity left several of them pregnant. Since it’s a novel rather than a biography, it’s a bit difficult to judge by the standards of biographies: all I can say is that I was entertained by it, I learned a lot about Wells’ life and work from it, and I hope that most of what I learned was true.
This had bubbled to the top of my lists of books acquired in 2013 and non-genre fiction recommended by you. Next respectively on those lists are Planesrunner, by Ian McDonald, and Le Mariage de Figaro, by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. (I may have to read the latter in English when I get to it, but I’ll try the French version first.)
