- Tell voters the full story about migration and keep hysteria out of the debate
A Tory MEP writes.
- Immigration: Could we – should we – stop migrants coming to Britain?
Short answer: No. (Observer.)
- Migration myths, reality and public opinion – key figures
Report from July. (Warning – contains facts.)
- Barroso warns Cameron that arbitrary migration cap would breach EU law
Also inconsistent with UK’s Gibraltar policy!
Links I found interesting for 19-10-2014
- Cambridge Sights
Ah, nostalgia!
- Gamergate Is Running Out of Heroes
…and much else.
- Basic Northern Ireland vocabulary
…more nostalgia!
- Our Lives are Hell
What’s wrong with the U.S. congress – according to its own members.
- Average number of languages spoken by the EU population
With pretty maps.
Links I found interesting for 18-10-2014
- The Liberal Democrat approach to campaigning: a history
Article endorsed by Chris Rennard!
Links I found interesting for 17-10-2014
- Ukip to lose funding worth £1m as Farage’s European group collapses
ohdearwhatapitynevermind.
- How to mark the 20th anniversary of the Netscape Navigator?
When did you last hear static? Does 7-year-old know what it means?
Links I found interesting for 16-10-2014
- Survival! Belated Valedictory Musings
Conrad on Perivale and 1989.
Wednesday reading
I have taken a bit of a reading holiday over the last week – I went to Budapest on Thursday, came back Friday, was rather unwell on Saturday (a lingering minor but irritating infection which is only now starting to clear up), quit the old job on Monday and have been enjoying temporary unemployment yesterday and today in advance of starting the new job on Monday. This means that my usual reading lists haven't actually moved since last Wednesday, though I did read one True Confession for brain candy and have started another book related to New Work which I am coding for now. Normal service will be resumed with another trip to Central Europe over the weekend followed by a return to the Brussels commute on Monday.
On the other hand I'm now up to date with Big Finish audios, I think.
Current
Wool, by Hugh Howey
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
The Room with No Doors, by Kate Orman
Up the Walls of the World, by James Tiptree
δ2
ℵ1
Last books finished
Some Girls: My Life in a Harem, by Jillian Lauren
Last week's audios
The Reesinger Process, by Justin Richards
The Screaming Skull, by Jonathan Morris
Second Sight, by Nick Wallace and Justin Richards (actually listened to this twice, because my player irritatingly ran it immediately after the first of the series of four stories)
Domain of the Voord, by Andrew Smith
Next books
Edward Gibbon and Empire, ed. Rosamond McKitterick
Angela's Ashes, by Frank McCourt
Camera Obscura, by Lloyd Rose
Links I found interesting for 15-10-2014
- Dublin historic Maps
Glorious.
- Hiroshima
At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6th, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department at the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.
- How many seats will Ukip win at the general election?
5-10 by my count.
- Leyla Yunus and the heirs of Sakharov
Tom de Waal writes.
- We have just experienced the warmest half-year ever recorded.
according to NASA.
The Pointless app is sometimes a bit ungenerous
A human quizmaster would have been a bit more flexible!
Links I found interesting for 14-10-2014
- Labour and immigration: Whatever the truth
Nailing the lies (other British parties equally bad of course).
Links I found interesting for 13-10-2014
- What It’s Like to Carry Your Nobel Prize through Airport Security
“Who gave it to you?” “The King of Sweden.”
- Azerbaijan: New Effort to Crush Independent Groups
Getting worse.
- Azerbaijan: Journalist and political analyst Arzu Geybullayeva threatened
Another friend threatened.
The legacy of Neerwinden
Your honour remembers with concern, said the corporal, the total rout and confusion of our camp and army at the affair of LandenWyndham, Lumley, and Galway, which covered the retreat over the bridge Neerspeeken, the king himself could scarce have gained it—he was press'd hard, as your honour knows, on every side of him—
So Corporal Trim begins one of the many rambling episodes of Tristram Shandy, which is framed by how he fell in love and diverts into whether groin or knee injuries are worse. But the Battle of Landen was no laughing matter; when the French defeated William III's army on 29 July 1693, and cam close to killing King Billy himself, around 27,000 soldiers were killed, which made it the bloodiest battle of the entire War of the League of Augsburg – which on a moderately generous reading includes both the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and the fall of Barcelona in 1714.
In fact the battle happened not in Landen but at the nearby village of Neerwinden, which happens to be very close to where my daughter B lives, so I took her there this afternoon to have a look at it. And in a classic two-for-the-price-of-one deal, at Neerwinden you can inspect not only the site of the Battle of Neerwinden in 1693, but also the site of the Battle of Neerwinden on 18 March 1793, where the Austrians crushed a demoralised French force with the result that the defeated French commander unsuccessfully attempted a coup in Paris, and then (along with the future King Louis Philippe) defected to the Austrians who he had just been fighting. It was a smaller affair, though, with 7-8,000 casualties, less than a third of the death toll of a century earlier.
I found it really very difficult to translate the available maps of the two battles onto today's geography. These are my attempts to do so, maps found from the internet on the left, my attempts to interpret them on the right, French in blue and their opponents in red in both my maps, and in the orignal 1693 map (confusingly, the French are red and the Austrians yellow in the 1793 map):
| 1693 | |
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| 1793 | |
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The shaded contours on the older maps bear very little relevance to what's on the ground. What does become clear is that the triangular plateau to the north of Neerwinden, with the town at its apex, is the strategically important target; it was the territory that William III and his allies were defending in 1693, and was the contested ground between the French and Austrians a century later. At the same time it's interesting to see how the tides of history wash in different directions at different times – from south to north in 1693, from east to west in 1793.
It is a typically flat Flemish landscape ("mijn vlakke land") with a very few gentle rises. The only thing really worth photographing is the Chapel of the Holy Cross, on the eastern edge of the plateau.
 |
 |
There is a sheltered grove around the chapel demarcated by the Stations of the Cross, with a park bench in which B (who likes to wear her hood up in all weathers) sat happily, refusing to move.
Within the chapel (which I'm sorry to say has been repeatedly vandalised), worshippers have left votive offerings and intentions.
In the summer of 1694, Lord Perth travelled across the scene of the battle, and in a letter to his sister – later quoted by Macaulay – was the first person that I know of to use a simile that has become very familiar, 220 years before John McCrae:
In Neerwinden itself, an ancient standing stone has been moved to the front of the modern 1950s church, and although there is also an official somewhat brutal war memorial, it is the older obelisk that the locals have chosen to place their poppies at; perhaps because, here of all places, it was not only the wars of the twentieth century that marked the people and the land, and a monument without a date, which was erected by people long forgotten except in their attempt to express the inexpressible, is more appropriate to commemorate the trauma of past conflict than one whose initial reference point is 1914.
Refugees of Casablanca
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 |
| Peter Lorre (Ugarte): born László Löwenstein, in what is now Slovakia; became a film star in 1920s Berlin; being a Jew, moved to America in 1933 after Nazis took power. | Conrad Veidt (Strasser) – started acting in films 1916, married a Jew and moved to America in 1933 after Nazis took power. |
 |
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| Paul Henreid (Laszlo) – left Austria for England in 1935 after Dollfuss/Schuschnigg regime came to power; left England for USA to avoid detention as enemy alien in England (though Conrad Veidt spoke out for him). | Curt Bois (Pickpocket) – Jewish, left Germany in 1934 after Nazis took power. |
 |
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| Madeleine LeBeau and Marcel Dalio (Yvonne and Emil the croupier) – married in 1940 and fled Paris after the German invasion; Dalio was Jewish. He filed for divorce during the filming of Casablanca. She is the only surviving member of the cast. | |
 |
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| S.Z. Sakall (Carl the head waiter) – born a Hungarian Jew, became a Berlin film star in the 1920s, returned to Hungary in 1933 after Nazis took power, moved to America in 1940 after Hungary joined the Axis. All three of his sisters and his niece, as well as his wife's brother and sister, died in concentration camps. | Helmut Dantine (Jan the Bulgarian roulette player) – Austrian anti-Nazi activist who was imprisoned in a concentration camp after the Anschluss in 1938; his parents got him released and sent to America, but they themselves died in concentration camps. |
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| Leonid Kinskey (Sascha) and Gregory Gaye (banker) – both born in St Petersburg, and fled the Russian revolution. | |
This all may help explain why this scene is quite so powerful:
(Incidentally, there is no truth whatsoever in the story that Ronald Reagan might have played the lead role.)
Links I found interesting for 12-10-2014
- 57% of Languages Do Not Have Gendered Pronouns
Fascinating!
Thoughts after an insomniac rewatch of the Twin Peaks pilot
This story would look very different today. Smartphones and email have completely changed how we communicate. The scene where Laura’s parents are talking to each other, and Sherriff Truman arrves to tell Leland what has happened, is the most memorable of many framings which depend on land lines being the only method of telecommunication available. And the film of Donna and Laura dancing would now be recorded on one of their phones.
The sequence of the news of Laura’s death spreading in the schoolis very effective – the empty chair, the howls of anguish, the principal’s voice choking with emotion. It is then undermined in plot terms when we discover that Ronnette had also gone missing without the same fuss being made.
They are all rather beautiful, aren’t they! And the air crackles with sexual tension – Andy and Lucy appear to be the only couple with nothing to hide. But Audrey is surprisingly unlikeable at this early stage. And the bloke who plays Leo can’t act for toffee.
Best quote for me:
Agent Cooper: Who’s the lady with the log?
Sheriff Truman: We call her the log lady.
Wednesday reading
Current
Wool, by Hugh Howey
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
The Room with No Doors, by Kate Orman
Up the Walls of the World, by James Tiptree
δ2
Last books finished
β2
Divided Loyalties, by Gary Russell
The Strangest Man, by Graham Farmelo
The Professor, by Charlotte Brontë
γ2
Last week’s audios
Tom Baker at 80, interviewed by Nicholas Briggs
Mind Games, by Justin Richards
Next books
Edward Gibbon and Empire, ed. Rosamond McKitterick
Angela’s Ashes, by Frank McCourt
Camera Obscura, by Lloyd Rose
Links I found interesting for 07-10-2014
- Same-Sex Marriage Is Now Legal For A Majority Of The U.S. Population!
Slowly catching up with Belgium!
Links I found interesting for 06-10-2014
- What to read on the Tory proposals for a “Bill of Rights”
A handy guide.
September Books 18) Harlequin, by Bernard Cornwell
Picked this up ages ago under the impression that it was a first installment of a fantasy epic series. No such luck; it’s a gritty account of the 1340s war between England and France, with our dashing hero, whose humble birth belies his noble blood; the women who love him; the bad guy who attempts to thwart him at every stage; and his quest for a sacred relic which
Links I found interesting for 05-10-2014
- Five potential futures for Northern Ireland
as revealed in science fiction.
September Books 17) Eva, by Peter Dickinson
I was moved to get this by Jo Walton’s review on Tor.com, five years ago I now realise; I had no idea that it was one of Dickinson’s best known books *“80% of my mail, almost all of it from the USA, is about this one book”The Green Gene and Annerton Pit and Tulku and King and Joker and The Changes (of which I saw the first episode again at Worldcon).
It is a good take on a familiar sfnal theme, of a human mind transplanted into another body – H.L. Gold had his hero transplanted into a dog in 1939, and there’s always I Will Fear No Evil, in which a rich man’s brain is transplanted into his secretary’s body and hilarity ensues. Dickinson’s teenage protagonist wakes up to find that to save her life, her parents have transplanted her mind into the body of one of her father’s experimental chimpanzees, in a near future world which is facing environmental disaster. She is caught up in the wider politics of what has happened to her, the actual ethics of the operation (and of repeating it) and the intersection of financial and political interests in what happens to the chimpanzees as the research money runs out, and has to find her own way between asserting her humanity and embracing her new chimpanzee nature, including sex and death. Some of it, of course, is a metaphor for growing up, but all of it is rather good, and I’m glad I followed up on this recommendation.
Links I found interesting for 03-10-2014
- A coup in North Korea
A defector tells all.
- An Occasional Guide to EU Politics: The Surprised Commissioner.
Satire, of course. (An MEP in Brussels on Sunday??)
- Defending the unjustly persecuted
Former Soviet dissidents speak out for Leyla Yunus.
- The Guardian view on scrapping the Human Rights Act
Stupid populist pandering.
- The Revelations of Marilynne Robinson – NYTimes.com
Interview with the writer.
- IRA tried to kidnap the Prince of Wales
(In 1922.)
Links I found interesting for 02-10-2014
- “…Baby One More Time”
“a song of self-negating regret performed and choreographed as a statement of total confidence.”
- Flights re-routed to avoid walrus stampede on Alaska beach
…as the ice melts…
Wednesday reading
Current
The Strangest Man, by Graham Farmelo
β2
The Professor, by Charlotte Brontë
Wool, by Hugh Howey
Divided Loyalties, by Gary Russell
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
Last books finished
ψ1
ω1
Eva, by Peter Dickinson
Harlequin, by Bernard Cornwell
α2
Last week’s audios
Mask of Tragedy, by James Goss
Next books
Up the Walls of the World, by James Tiptree
Edward Gibbon and Empire, ed. Rosamond McKitterick
The Room with No Doors, by Kate Orman
Books acquired in last week
Bételgeuse, Tome 2 : Les survivants, by Léo
Expo 58, by Jonathan Coe
Links I found interesting for 01-10-2014
- Congress (rightly) grills the Secret Service
Serious problems brought to light by congressional scrutiny.
- What It’s like to Fly the $23,000 Singapore Airlines Suites Class
“As we finally landed at New York, a huge problem presented itself — I didn’t want to leave the plane.”
Think of the Children! Reading Anna Karenina in translation
Some chums and I have got together on Facebook to read Anna Karenina over the next few months, at a chapter a day (they are mostly quite short chapters, so this will take us a while). We are doing it in English, as not enough of us are sufficiently fluent i Russian to tackle the original. This useful page gives various different translations of the first chapter to compare, and I think it’s very helpful. For instance, the famous opening sentence, “Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему”, is done by the different versions as follows:
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
(Constance Garnett, 1901)All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
(Louise and Aylmer Maude, 1918)All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion.
(Rosemary Edmonds, 1949-50)All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
(The Maude translation revised)All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
(Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 2008)All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
(Kyril Zinovieff and Jenny Hughes, 2008)
No huge difference between any of those; the sentiment is pretty clear, and the fact that there are no actual verbs in the Russian sentence means that it cannot be translated with quite the same ring into languages that do use verbs in sentences like this.
But I was struck by the weirdness of my cheap Constance Garnett translation’s version of a phrase in the middle of the next paragraph, which describes what is happening in the Oblonsky household as a result of Dolly discovering Stiva’s affair, and comparison with other translations indicated that she had got it wrong:
Дети бегали по всему дому, как потерянные
The children ran wild all over the house
(Constance Garnett, 1901)the children ran about all over the house uneasily
(Louise and Aylmer Maude, 1918)The children strayed all over the house, not knowing what to do with themselves.
(Rosemary Edmonds, 1949-50)the children ran restlessly about the house
(The Maude translation revised)The children were running all over the house as if lost
(Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 2008)The children were wandering about the house like lost souls
(Kyril Zinovieff and Jenny Hughes, 2008)
There’s a tension here between бегать, imperfective of “to run”, and потерянный, “lost”, which goes back to the original text. (And also по всему дому, “through the whole house”, which shows that they are not lost but know where they are.) I think I end up with an image of the kids, both energised and emotionally uprooted by their parents’ row, running around the house as if they didn’t know where they were. I like Zinovieff and Hughes’ “lost souls”, but it maybe pushes it a bit far and they have toned down “running” to “wandering”. Edmonds goes in the same direction but not so far, and helpfully unpacks “lost”. Garnett’s “ran wild” is clearly much further from the original sense, though – “wild” brings in a whole new idea which simply isn’t in Tolstoy.
So I think I will switch to one of the more recent translations, though not quite sure which.
September Books
Who's There?, by Jessica Carney
King's Inns and the Kingdom of Ireland, by Colum Kenny
Fiction (non-sf) 6 (YTD 36)
The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene
A Sentimental Education, by Gustave Flaubert
Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar
Rob Roy, by Sir Walter Scott
Race of Scorpions, by Dorothy Dunnett
Harlequin, by Bernard Cornwell
SF (non-Who) 12 (YTD 85)
ο1
π
ρ1
σ1
τ1
υ1
φ1
χ1
Moxyland, by Lauren Beukes
ψ1
ω1
Eva, by Peter Dickinson
α2
Doctor Who 5 (YTD 47)
The English Way of Death, by Gareth Roberts
Eternity Weeps, by Jim Mortimore
History 101, by Mags L. Halliday
The Blood Cell, by James Goss
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Time Traveller, by Joanne Harris
Comics 3 (YTD 17)
De Scepter van Ottakar, by Hergé
La Galère d'Obélix, by Albert Uderzo
Lost At Sea, by Bryan Lee O'Malley
~8,400 pages (YTD ~64,900)
9/28 (YTD 58/225) by women (Carney, Yourcenar, Dunnett, ο1, τ1, φ1, Beukes, Halliday, Harris)
1/28 (YTD 16/225) by PoC (O'Malley)
Reread: 1/28 – De Scepter van Ottakar (YTD 9/225)
Reading now:
The Strangest Man, by Graham Farmelo
β2
The Professor, by Charlotte Brontë
Wool, by Hugh Howey
Coming soon (perhaps):
Up the Walls of the World, by James Tiptree
Edward Gibbon and Empire, ed. Rosamund McKitterick
Angela's Ashes, by Frank McCourt
Beach Music, by Pat Conroy
Home, by Marilynne Robinson
Rules, by Cynthia Lord
Shades of Milk and Honey, by Mary Robinette Kowal
The Grass is Singing, by Doris May Lessing
Liberal Language, by Graham Watson
The Fat Years, by Chan Koonchung
Elizabeth's Bedfellows, by Anna Whitelock
Earth Girl, by Janet Edwards
The Jonah Kit, by Ian Watson
Tree and Leaf, by J R R Tolkien
Wages of Sin, by Andrew M. Greeley
The Balkans, by Misha Glenny
The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Een geweer in het water, by Hermann
The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon
The Painted Man, by Peter V. Brett
Kushiel's Justice, by Jacqueline Carey
The True Deceiver, by Tove Jansson
Divided Loyalties, by Gary Russell
The Room with No Doors, by Kate Orman
Camera Obscura, by Lloyd Rose
Silhouette, by Justin Richards
September Books 16) Moxyland, by Lauren Beukes
I got this after tremendously enjoying Zoo City when it was nominated for the BSFA Award a few years ago. I’m afraid this left me rather colder; on the whole I enjoy urban fantasy (which Zoo City is) and I don’t much enjoy cyberpunk (which Moxyland is), so I guess it’s the specifics of the subgenre. There’s deft interweaving of four different narrative strands with on-line gaming and the digital divide, all set in the near future of 2018; people with more of an affinity for Neuromancer than I have will enjoy this more than I did.
Links I found interesting for 29-09-2014
- Was the Sunday Mirror’s sting of Brookes Newmark criminal?
Quite possibly.
September Books 15) King’s Inns and the Kingdom of Ireland, by Colum Kenny
A history of the King’s Inns, the professional society for Irish lawyers, starting in 1541 and taking us up to 1800 and the Act of Union. For most of that period, the King’s Inns were located on the north side of the Liffey, immediately to the east of where the Four Courts are now – the Four Courts themselves were based in the grounds of Christchurch Cathedral for most of that time.
My biggest take from this is that it cannot have been hugely convenient for lawyers to oscillate back and forth across the river between the Inns and the cathedral, especially considering that the bridge was a toll bridge. Still, the building had a strategic location. It was where senior Irish judges plotted the return of Charles II at a time when Ireland was being ruled by Oliver Cromwell’s younger brother. Thirty years on, Charles II’s younger brother James II chose it as the location of the 1689 Patriot Parliament, which was of course expunged from history after he lost the war.
I still think that location is the biggest reason why the organisation had difficulty finding its feet. In addition, Irish lawyers were expected to have attended the Inns in London before they were allowed to join the Dublinn body and practice their profession. Also of course in areas less under central control it was difficult to enforce the principle that lawyers had to be members of the King’s Inns. And it would have helped if there had been some educational function – indeed, I wasn’t left very clear as to what the function of King’s Inns actually was, other than providing office space for lawyers.
I didn’t get much of what I wanted from this book – I was hoping to find lots more about my ancestor Sir Nicholas White, who was one of the early members. But there was enough interesting material to keep me engaged.
September Books 14) Lost At Sea, by Bryan Lee O’Malley
Published (and presumably writtem) before O’Malley’s success with Scott Pilgrim, this is pretty good in its own right; a fairly short graphic novel about a teenager on an accidental road trip from California to Vancouver with three schoolmates who she barely knows, and her inner conviction that her soul has been sold by her mother and currently resides in a cat. O’Malley’s very simple drawing style is surprisingly effective at drawing out emotional depth and also illustraing the freewayscape of the Pacific coast.