What’s so difficult about rollerblading anyway?
It’s just like riding a bicycle.
Well, like walking with a bicycle under each foot.
Well, like walking with two little bicycles under each foot.
You know, there is no shame at all in admitting that your wife and son are better at some things than you are.
Hello ground.
(Bump.)
Realised I had missed this out somehow as I worked through the Hugo winners, so went back to find it. History does not record what other works were in the frame, though other classic sf from 1957 which I have read includes The Door into Summer, The Black Cloud, Citizen of the Galaxy and The Midwich Cuckoos (and On the Beach is on my shelf, recently acquired but as yet unread). I would rate The Midwich Cuckoos more highly than The Big Time, but it was probably too British to be considered by whatever mechanism the Worldcon was using that year.
I’ve always liked this one, apart from one silly moment at the end – the psychological drama is resolved when two male characters decide to trust each other because they attended the same Cambridge college, several centuries apart. I hereby give notice that if the Right Honorable Peter Lilley MP, let alone some time-travelling avatar of Lord Cornwallis, both of whom are fellow Clare graduates, should ever try this on me they will get a rude response.
Apart from that, I love the setting – an enclosed space beyond space and time, a rest station in the ongoing Change Wars between Snakes and Spiders, two time-travelling factions changing the history of Earth (and, we understand, of many other worlds) for thei own ends, with little regard to the human and other lives that are put at stake. The story is rather theatrical in presentation, and one can easily imagine it being put on stage. Not as mature as his other Hugo-winning novel, The Wanderer, and with as I said a somewhat silly ending, but very entertaining all the same.
Hugo Awards
1950s: The Demolished Man (1953) | The Forever Machine (1955) | Double Star (1956) | The Big Time (1958); The Incredible Shrinking Man (1958) | A Case of Conscience (1959)
What is the Irish for “political consultant”? (If possible implying that the politics in question are international?)
Latest in my set of Hugo nominees for this year (and Anathem is sitting accusingly on the bookshelf, while I’ve ordered the paperback of Zoe’s Tale for when it comes out later this month). Lots of good stuff here, with the setting a solar system where the robots have taken over after the extinction of humanity, and our narrator a sexbot designed to pleasure a race which no longer exists, dragged into espionage. Charlie gets significant points for insisting on the vast distances within the solar system, especially once you get out as far as Jupiter, never mind the Kuiper Belt.
He even came close to over-riding my general distaste for stories about cute (indeed, in this case, very sexy) anthropomorphic robots, with a decent ratiionalisation for their shape – the robots here are actually designed for functionality rather than anthropomorphism, and with sexbots the one implies the other. The prose is typically fastpaced and I’m afraid lost me a couple of times. Still, great fun as ever.
We’re not quite sure how this novel made it onto our shelves; it won the Whitbread Prize in 1999 and is set largely in the royal court of Denmark in 1629 and 1630, where a young English musician falls in love with one of the king’s estranged wife’s maidservants. There’s a lot of long lingering flashback to the earlier lives of the lovers, their respective bosses, and extended families; from my own interest, there’s a child with an Asperger’s-ish disorder; but I wasn’t quite sure what it all amounted to. Still, it was a picturesque ride.
I first read this the year it was nominated for the Hugo, and don’t have a lot to add to what I wrote then, except that for some reaon I didn’t enjoy it as much the second time round. Perhaps it is because I now know how the Sirius Black storyline ends?
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This is the only Shakespeare play I have yet encountered which deals with the vicissitudes of electoral politics (though really only in a couple of scenes in the second act). Caius Marcius, a Roman general in the early years of the Republic, is given the surname Coriolanus after leading a successful military campaign against the neighbouring Volscii (and capturing the town of Corioli). Back in Rome, he is persuaded by his family to enter politics, but can barely endure the humiliation of asking the common people for their votes. They vote for him anyway, but are easily persuaded not only to change their minds but to exile him from Rome because of his arrogant behaviour.
Coriolanus throws his lot in with his former enemies, the Volsci, and leads them in turn to military success against his home city. He appears implacable in his new allegiance, until his family again appear and persuade him to work for peace instead. He returns to Antium, the Volsci capital, with a peace treaty; the Volsci general Aufidius, unimpressed by this latest shift of allegiance, has him killed on the spot, and the play ends.
Coriolanus is not a very likeable hero, and unlike some of Shakespeare’s other problematic heroes, there’s not a lot of mystery or suspense about his actions. He is arrogant and proud, and prefers fighting battles to fighting elections. At the same time he is a sucker for the wishes of his wife and mother, who talk him into politics in the first place, and then talk him out of attacking Rome at the end. An inspired director and actor could no doubt make something memorable of it, but it’s tough material to work with.
Shakespeare doesn’t seem to be a big fan of electoral democracy. The voters are shown as fickle, agreeing with the person who last shouted at them, easily manipulated by Coriolanus’ enemies, who have deliberately set him up for failure, humiliation and exile (and then get their just deserts in terms of military disaster and civil chaos). Coriolanus however is not a good man struggling with an evil system; he is a vain man who is easily outmanœuvred by the leaders of the democratc faction.
The most interesting of the other characters are Aufidius, the Volscian general, Menenius, Coriolanus’ friend in Rome, and Volumnia, his mother. Arkangel has decently solid performances in all four main parts (Paul Jesson, Martin Marquez, Ewan Hooper, Marjorie Yates). Clive Brill, the director, has had a good idea for the soundscape which doesn’t quite work: the Volsci are Yorkshiremen, and the incidental music is therefore all in colliery brass band style. The resonances would have been better if Rome had sounded musically distinct from the Volscian territories; also I think the Westminster/Yorkshire split is a poor parallel for the Roman/Volscian of the story – English/Welsh might have been better. (And the minor characters have accents from all over the place: Aufidius has two very camp servants, one from the Home Counties and the other from Scotland.) He’s limited, of course, by the audio format: on the stage you could have a dozen different ways of distinguishing between them visually, and let them talk however they liked.
I shouldn’t complain too much. Apart from Troilus and Cressida, the last dozen or so plays have been pretty solid. (Though I understand there are a couple more duds on the list.)
Henry VI, Part I | Henry VI, Part II | Henry VI, Part III | Richard III / Richard III | Comedy of Errors | Titus Andronicus | Taming of the Shrew | Two Gentlemen of Verona | Love’s Labour’s Lost | Romeo and Juliet | Richard II / Richard II | A Midsummer Night’s Dream | King John | The Merchant of Venice | Henry IV, Part 1 / Henry IV, Part I | Henry IV, Part II | Henry V | Julius Caesar | Much Ado About Nothing | As You Like It | Merry Wives of Windsor | Hamlet / Hamlet | Twelfth Night | Troilus and Cressida | All’s Well That Ends Well | Measure for Measure | Othello | King Lear | Macbeth | Antony and Cleopatra | Coriolanus / Coriolanus | Timon of Athens | Pericles | Cymbeline | The Winter’s Tale / The Winter’s Tale | The Tempest | Henry VIII | The Two Noble Kinsmen | Edward III | Sir Thomas More (fragment) | Double Falshood/Cardenio
Stratfor have published a “Red Alert” about a potential revolution brewing in Georgia. (The former Soviet republic, not the U.S. state.) I’m a bit sceptical. It’s clear that Saakashvili is not as strong as he was a year ago, but neither is his popularity at the single-figure depths plumbed by Eduard Shevardnadze toward the end of his rule. The opposition has yet to demonstrate that it has a critical mass.
I’m also a bit sceptical about Stratfor’s speculations regarding the south of the country. Adjara is more firmly under Tbilisi’s control than Stratfor seems to think. Samtskhe-Javakhetia will take its lead from Yerevan rather than Moscow (if anywhere), and Armenia does not want its only land route to the outside world blocked (yet again) by crisis in Georgia.
Still, I agree with Stratfor that this is one to watch.
This was a recommendation from some time ago by
It reinforces just how revolutionary the discovery of the concept of zero was – a lot of cultures had groped toward a place value notation system, ie writing 429 instead of (400) (20). (9), but this falls down when you try and write 409 unless you have something signifyng nothing. It is pretty clear that our use of it stems from Indian mathematicians of around 800 AD.
A lot of the book is simply well-illustrated cataloguing, but there were a few other points of analysis that jumped out at me. Ifrah lays out several proposed explanations for the origin of Roman numerals, before coming down with an interpretation where they came from notches on tally sticks. His description of the destruction of Mayan civilisation is intriguing and awful – is it really true that only three Mayan manuscripts survived the Spanish conquest? And of course I was interested to see how the medieval numbers that I was once familiar with fit into the longer tradition of the Hindu-Arabic numerals.
Solid stuff.
This excellent book has already won the Newbery Medal and is up for the Hugo this year. Bod Owens (the “Bod” is short for “Nobody”) is adopted by ghosts and brought up in a graveyard after his family are murdered by the sinister man Jack. His attempts to attend school and befriend a normal girl become entangled with Jack’s continued pursuit.
Gaiman fans will recognise a few things here: in particular, the split between the real world and the supernatural world of the graveyard, and the single-minded hunting of Bod by the man Jack, are respectively reminiscent of London Below, and Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar, from Neverwhere. I think that both are done better in The Graveyard Book – I rewatched Neverwhere quite recently and was a bit underwhelmed. The most obvious creative debt here, however, is not to Gaiman’s own previous work but to H.P. Lovecraft: in one memorable chapter, Bod is captured by ghouls and brought to a subterranean world very similar to that of the Kadath stories. Again, I think Gaiman has improved on the original – it is less whimsical, and fits better with the overall worldview of the story.
Diana Wynne Jones blurbs the book as the best Gaiman has ever written, though we must bear in mind that she is occasionally guilty of hyperbole (Coraline does not appear yet to have displaced Alice). While I agree that it has few of the flaws that bothered me about American Gods and Coraline, I still prefer Anansi Boys (which Gaiman withdrew from the Hugo shortlist the year it was up for the award); it is both deeper and funnier. But The Graveyard Book must stand a good chance of winning this year (though I haven’t yet tackled Anathem).
I’ve been watching The Prisoner over the last few months (having bought a complete set of videos at auction from the estate of the much-missed David Stewart) and reached the end this evening, treating myself to a double bill of Once Upon a Time and Fallout.
There are those who say that Fallout, the final episode is a true work of genius, and those who say that it is total nonsense. (I suppose there may be some who maintain both points of view.) Myself, I love it to bits. IMHO the only moment where it falters is where Number Six, The Kid and The Former Number Two are shooting down the bad guys to “All You Need Is Love” – I think that is in somewhat poor taste. But all the rest is brilliant: a triumph of showing rather than telling, leaving the viewer to put together his or her own interpretation. (Even if that interpretation may be “What a load of rubbish!”)
My favourite moments: are: 1) when the Controller puts on his mask and robe and goes to join the other masked, robed guys; 2) when they all echo Number Six’s first person pronoun to the point of drowning out what he is saying; and 3) at the end when Number Six and the Butler cross the road together. But I think it is almost all sheer genius.
What about you?
And what reference book about The Prisoner should I get?
I took B to the nature reserve at Het Vinne today, not too far from where she now lives. Part of the plan was to try and get decent pictures of her for friends and family. I think I succeeded. Her hair has gone very curly.
If you consider the square numbers in base 10, very few of them end in repeated digits, apart from the trivial case of all squares of multiples of 10 ending in multiple 0’s.
Square numbers which end in 1 or 9 always have an even number in the 10s column. (01, 09, 49, 81, 121, 169…) Square number which end in 6 always have an odd number in the 10s column. (16, 36, 196, 256…) Square numbers which end in 5 always in fact end with 25, so never with 55.
Square numbers which end in 4, however, always have an even number in the 10s column (04, 64) and so we get plenty ending in ..-44 (starting with 144 which is 12 squared) and even …444 (starting with 1444 which is 38 squared). But there it stops. If the last three digits are 4’s, the number in the thousands column is odd: 462 squared is 213444, 538 squared is 289444, etc.
What about other bases? Well, in binary, every even number’s square ends with at least two zeros (because they are all multiples of four), and every odd number’s square ends in …001 (because they are always one more than a multiple of eight).
In hexadecimal we start off promisingly:
91204 (302 squared) is 16444 in hex
Now we have to go up considerably in scale, and there aren’t any squares ending in more than five repeated 4’s, as the sixth last digit is always odd (1’s and 9’s, however, continue)
48209289910681 (6943291 squared) in base 10 is 2BD899999999 in hex (I haven’t found any smaller squares ending with seven repeated digits)
And I guess that we can keep going with steadily increasing numbers of 1’s and 9’s (this is probably trivial enough to prove).
Counting in an odd-numbered base, it is also pretty easy to build up repeated digits as the distinction between odd and even numbers no longer applies.
I was very amused to come across þis essay, advocating þe return of þe old letter þorn, instead of “th”.
In fact, “th” represents two different sounds in English, a voiced and an unvoiced consonant. (Þink of þe difference between “them” and “thick”.) But we never really notice þe distinction; þey operate as one phoneme in English. Þe only modern language þat uses þe letter is Icelandic, but in þeir spelling “þ” is always “thick”; þe softer, voiced consonant is spelt ð.
Apparently þe reason þat “þ” was dropped from English is þat when printing began, þe font sets arriving from France and Germany had all þe oþer letters except þis one, so we slipped into þe situation of spelling þe sound “th”. (For þe same reason, we dropped þe old letters wynn – ƿ – and yogh – ȝ – þough þe latter survives in þe name of Sir Menȝies Campbell.) Þis process has left English as a language using very few diacritical marks in its version of þe alphabet, which I have always felt is raþer dull.
Þere are a number of oþer languages which also have þe “th” spelling mainly for þe unvoiced version – Welsh and Albanian are þe two I am most familiar wiþ – þough in Castilian Spanish, “c” and “z” are often used for it, and in Turkmen, oddly enough, it is represented by þe Latin letter “s”. In a number of languages (including again Castilian Spanish) “d” generally represents þe voiced sound; in Albanian it is spelt “dh” and in Welsh “dd” (and in Fijian, apparently, “c”).
I am not committing to write all my future livejournal entries using þis neglected letter. But I am not going to ignore it eiþer!
My grandfather and Charlie Haughey
My quote on the 1996 elections
Doctor Who
Wendy Padbury brings Daleks to Dublin, 1968
Introducing Tom Baker
Doctor and monsters apply for US visas
Irish Times anticipates New Who, 1996
Irish Times anticipates New Who, 2005
The day I was born (of course, the news is published the following day):
Stormont minister sacked, cont page 7
Greek King appeals for return to normality; cosmonaut buried in state funeral
Michael Foot speaks at TCD, Stalin’s daughter speaks in New York
Why is Kindred such a good book?
It has some noticeable problems. We never find out exactly how or why our narrator gets repeatedly yanked back in time from contemporary California to early 19th-century Maryland. She and her husband accommodate themselves to their peculiar situation remarkably quickly. The end of the book is abrupt and jars with what we have learnt about Dana over the previous 250 pages.
And yet, it is a really good book.
I’ve written before about Butler’s take on gender and race, in her most famous short story. I’ve also written before about antebellum slavery, on a plantation owned by a family whose name, oddly enough, was Butler. In Kindred, Octavia Butler takes her narrator back to the early nineteenth century, but she also brings slavery forward to our own time, both the physical marks of it in the scars on Dana’s back and her missing arm, and the changes it makes to her mental map of her past and present, and it’s that jarring disconnect/connect which makes the book so memorable and thought-provoking.
Also, Butler’s writing style is memorably sparse. She shows rather than tells; sometimes I wish she would even show a bit more of her characters’ emotional reactions to what happens to them. But it’s not always a bad thing to make the reader work a bit to grasp what is going on. And the brutal facts of slavery and of the human spirit’s adaptation to it pretty much speak for themselves; at least, they do when Butler is describing them. Although the brutality of her fictional Maryland slaveholding is actually not as bad as the real Carolinas plantation described by Fanny Kemble a little later in time, it seems more shocking to have it witnessed by someone who is a contemporary of ours.
I read this book for the
Shakespeare: 3 (YTD 10)
Fiction (non-sf): 5 (YTD 11)
SF (non-Who, but including Homer): 8 (YTD 20)
Who: 2 (YTD 10)
Comics: 1 (YTD 3)
4/24 (YTD 14/75) by women (Picard, Rowling, Atwood, Satrapi)
2/24 (YTD 3/75) by PoC (Dualeh, Satrapi)
Total page count ~7,600 (YTD ~22,500)
Owned for more than one year: 6 (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets [reread], The New Penguin Russian Course, Jennie, Resurrection, The Power of Speech, A Million Open Doors)
Also re-read: The War of the Worlds, Stranger in a Strange Land, Macbeth (for a total of 4, YTD 12).
I’m a die-hard Zelazny fan, and when I heard that this book – written in the early 1970s, at about the same time as Today We Choose Faces and My Name Is Legion – had finally been published, I was delighted but also a little worried. Even we die-hard Zelazny fans would have to admit that his later novels from the 1990s were not really of the same quality, though his short fiction was still consistent with his earlier output. Also, of course, it’s not that long since I read Variable Star, and concluded that Heinlein had probably had the right idea when he locked away its manuscript for the rest of his life.
The Dead Man’s Brother is a much better book than Variable Star. It is a more or less non-sfnal thriller (I say “more or less” because it is hinted that the narrator, being of course a Zelazny hero, has special abilities) set in contemporary (ie early 70s) Rome and Brazil. The Zelazny hard-bitten writing style is gloriously there. His narrator is more misogynistic than most Zelazny characters, but matures a bit in the course of the story. The cover is rather gloriously tacky, featuring our hero cradling the heroine while clutching a ridiculously phallic machete. In short, I enjoyed it, and would even recommend it as a gateway book for non-Zelazny fans.
Long, long ago, I remember reading a mocking article in The Bulletin (the English-language weekly for expats in Belgium, which I haven’t myself picked up for years) about the Belvue Museum in Brussels: who, it asked, really wants to pay €15 to look at the genuine spectacles of the late King Baudouin? I sniggered and marked it down as one of those things I would never willingly visit.
Then about a year ago, I was invited to a reception by the King Baudouin Foundation held in the museum foyer. (As well as running the museum, the KBF funds a number of projects in the Balkans which I have been loosely involved with.) I teased our hosts about the €15 to see the king’s possessions, and they pointed out to me the (relatively) new admission rates: €5 for adults, €4 for pensioners, €3 for students and free for under-18s. Duly humbled, I apologised to the representatives of King Baudouin, and made a mental note that I should go and look at the museum properly some time.
Last week I noticed that it has an exhibition on about gender roles throughout the history of Belgium, set up by the Women’s History Archive Centre (of whom I know nothing more than that they set up the exhibition). It had a nice poster which looked as if there would be fun and consciousness-raising things to look at: I showed it to young F on the website and he agreed to give it a try. It’s conveniently located on the same block as the Royal Palace (where the King, of course, does not live, this being Belgium) just where the Rue Royale / Koningstraat doglegs into the Place Royale / Koningsplein.
Well, it wasn’t quite as gripping as I expected. The main bit of the museum has some nice artifacts – and I admit that after reading a bit more of the history, I found the sight of the late King Baudouin’s spectacles oddly moving – but it is a bit cluttered, and the narratives about Leopold II and III are rather airbrushed. The exhibition on gender history was a bit above the nine-year-old audience I had brought, and had fewer interesting exhibits than I had expected. (Though I did have to explain to my son what a typewriter was.)
However, the unexpected hit of the day was the Coudenberg ruins, also attached to the BELvue museum (as it prefers to be spelt). This is basically the excavated foundations of the old Coudenberg palace, burnt down in 1731 and buried by urban redevelopment thereafter: a lovely set of underground chambers, including most amazingly of all the subterranean Rue Isabelle, now a road to nowhere, an empty pathway covered by a concrete roof that was open to the sky three centuries ago.
I remembered having visited the Coudenberg cellars twice before many years ago, once with Anne to see a small exhibition, and once for yet another reception (this time for the European Liberals); the acoustics for speeches, especially with a large crowd, are terrible but that may have been just as well. On a quiet Sunday morning, just a few weeks after it was reopened and with our audio guidebooks in hand, it was enchanting.
They are still getting their act together – the Wikipedia entry has more information than the official site. But I strongly recommend it for those of you with an hour or so to spare in the middle of Brussels.
This was a long-ago recommendation from
Here’s an international story that caught my eye this week, concerning a place I know very little about: Britain is about to revoke the democratically elected institutions of the Turks and Caicos Islands and give the London-appointed Governor power to rule directly in consultation with an appointed Council.
The reasons why the British are taking this pretty massive step are not as yet being made fully public. A retired judge, Sir Robin Auld, has published an interim report, after being asked to investigate “whether there is information that corruption or other serious dishonesty in relation to past and present elected members of the House of Assembly (previously known as the Legislative Council) may have taken place in recent years”. This is a pretty broad remit: as Sir Robin puts it, his tasks “could not sensibly have been expressed with lower thresholds”.
The interim report proposes suspending the entire constitution and removing trial by jury, for at least a year, starting probably early next week. Almost no evidence is given in the report as to why these steps should be taken. Browsing through press reports, though, one finds references to the outgoing prime minister’s millionaire lifestyle and lavish expenditure, and to the climate of fear that prevented locals from speaking out. It should also be noted that this is the second time round: the TCI constitution was previously suspended for two years in 1986, for what appear to have been similar reasons. I note with some amusement that there has been a proposal to do a Newfoundland on the TCI and unite them with Canada, though we haven’t seen much of it recently.
One debating point I often encounter (as someone who has been professionally involved with issues like the independence of Montenegro, Kosovo, the Western Sahara and Somaliland) is the question of whether small new states can be “viable”. It has always seemed to me a bogus point; international law rightly gives priority on these matters to the wishes of the people concerned, without imposing our external judgements as to whether they are right. The only example I can think of in the last century where an independent state actually gave up its sovereignty because the economics were not working out is Newfoundland in 1934. The best example of a failed state today is surely Somalia, whose population is about ten million, and whose problems include the fact that it was bolted together from two separate colonial units, precisely because the “viability” argument was used against the separate independence of the former British Somaliland (which has since de facto reclaimed it and seems entirely viable in its own right).
The basic problem is that the TCI are a poor state which has become rich quicker than its institutions can properly manage. There are plenty of independent countries with similar problems, where the option of the colonial masters reimposing their authority does not apply (and a fair number of non-independent countries where for one reason or another it’s not an option). The international community’s response in such situations is not often very robust: it consists of supporting the development of adequate local institutions and (at the smarter end) conditioning aid and political status on the local government’s ability to comply. Unfortunately, for a lot of places, corruption pays better than honesty.
I’m adding the TCI to my monitoring list for now.
An unexceptional sf adventure involving space pirates and anthropomorphic robots. This must have been one of the first Tenth Doctor books – his character seems very Nine-ish in places. Also he is rather too eager to kill off the baddies.
The Hugo shortlist is off to a good start for me: Doctorow’s teen hero is unfairly arrested by the Department of Homeland Security after a terrorist attack on San Francisco. He then devotes his energies to fighting the system, and also negotiating other hurdles like school and girls. Marcus is rather fortunate in being in the right place at the right time with the right skills, and I felt that the end of the story in real life would certainly have been more ambiguous; also, since the purpose of the book is partly didactic, we get a number of mini-essays on various matters (including the Beat poets) inserted into the text. But it’s a good, thrilling read and certainly grist to the mill for any of us worried about the surveillance society.
(Pedantic point: I was puzzled by a reference to the “British High Commission” which clearly should have been to the “British consulate”, but my copy is an uncorrected proof so this may have been picked up before publication. Doctorow is Canadian so may not have been aware that most countries don’t have High Commissions, just embassies.)
I came to this with somewhat low expectations, but actually found it a pretty gripping, if sombre, tale of near-future apocaplyse. The viewpoint character, Johnny / Snowman, reminisces about how his friend Crake destroyed humanity in order to replace us with his own genetically engineered version (Oryx being their love). It’s a fairly basic sfnal plot, and Atwood does it competently and coherently; not as good a book as he own The Handmaid’s Tale (nor as brilliant a treatment of the theme as this), but I found it engaging, if somewhat grim.
I admit it: I’m not going to finish this one. Self-study is difficult when learning languages, and for me it has to fit decently into my commuting or other spare time. I have not found it possible to sit down and do the written exercises from this book, and there is no audio component which means I lose the pull effect of the MP3 player summoning you to play the next section.
I think it is not a bad course. It alerted me to a number of tricky exceptions to the general rules which my previous textbook had rather glossed over (eg the irregular prepositional в Крыму, “in the Crimea”). But I would have neede regular human lessons as well to get me through to the end, so I’m leaving it here, and switching to a quite different Indo-European language. I will come back to Russian again, and am glad I’ve made a start, but that’s it for now.
This is a grim tale: a neatly observed set of dysfunctional relationships, primarily that between the title characters, full of both passion and insecurity, but also [Octavian] Cæsar’s with them both – Cleopatra is in a sense his stepmother, thanks to the dead Julius, and he also tries to bind Antony to him as brother-in-law. I guess the trick in this production is to make the human failings of these people appear interesting enough to hold the attention. Antony and Cleopatra are both seething bags of neuroses, and don’t immediately engage one’s sympathy on the page.
The Arkangel production, however, manages it, particularly with Estelle Kohler’s Cleopatra, with Ciaran Hinds’ Anthony nearly as good. The non-human soundscape of the production is very impressive, with scenes in Egypt or in Rome introduced by appropriately different music, and sounds of chirping crickets in the background at night.
The human soundscape is a bit odd, though. Enobarbus, who has all the best lines in the play, is played by David Burke, who is from Liverpool, with a strong and mostly convincing Ulster accent; while Ciaran Hinds, who actually is from Belfast, plays Anthony as a gritty English soldier. Other minor characters have a hodge-podge of different regional vowels. It’s frankly confusing, and an opportunity uncharacteristically missed by Arkangel, who previously delivered an all-Scottish Macbeth and a Comedy of Errors with Irish Ephesians and English Syracusans – given the fact that there’s a similar binary divide between Egyptians and Romans here, it’s just frankly peculiar that Clive Brill and co didn’t try and make something more structured out of the accent choices available. I imagine this bothers me more than it would most listeners.
One other problem with the play – and this is Shakespeare rather than Arkangel – is that there are too many minor characters. In fact I think the original script may have mixed up Proculeius and Dolatella at the end, unless Anthony is misinformed about Cæsar’s team, or just being mean to Cleopatra for tricking him into suicide. If I were producing it I’d want to trim and combine a few of the dramatis personæ.
Henry VI, Part I | Henry VI, Part II | Henry VI, Part III | Richard III / Richard III | Comedy of Errors | Titus Andronicus | Taming of the Shrew | Two Gentlemen of Verona | Love’s Labour’s Lost | Romeo and Juliet | Richard II / Richard II | A Midsummer Night’s Dream | King John | The Merchant of Venice | Henry IV, Part 1 / Henry IV, Part I | Henry IV, Part II | Henry V | Julius Caesar | Much Ado About Nothing | As You Like It | Merry Wives of Windsor | Hamlet / Hamlet | Twelfth Night | Troilus and Cressida | All’s Well That Ends Well | Measure for Measure | Othello | King Lear | Macbeth | Antony and Cleopatra | Coriolanus / Coriolanus | Timon of Athens | Pericles | Cymbeline | The Winter’s Tale / The Winter’s Tale | The Tempest | Henry VIII | The Two Noble Kinsmen | Edward III | Sir Thomas More (fragment) | Double Falshood/Cardenio
Chief Executive Officer and President
Belgacom
Boulevard du Roi Albert II, 27
B-1030 Brussels
26 March 2009
Dear Mr Bellens,
I am writing because I am very disappointed with Belgacom’s communication with its customers.
I have two very simple complaints.
1) In January I discovered that my phone line (02 230 0650) was not working. I checked by phone with the customer service line, who kindly offered to forward all calls to my GSM while the technical problems were sorted out. But when I went to my nearest Belgacom shop, it turned out the technical problem was that you had cut off my phone line, because my bills had not been paid. I had not paid the bill because you were sending it to the wrong address. I paid, and corrected the address in your records.
When my next bill arrived, I discovered that you want to charge me €120 for reconnecting the phone lines. I am not going to pay €120 for your mistake. If you had sent the phone bills to the correct address in the first place, I would have paid and there would have been no need to reconnect.
2) I discovered on 25 March that my internet speed had become very slow. It turns out that this is because I had exceeded my bandwidth allocation (there were a couple of unusually large downloads during the month). I was very surprised that I had not received any notification of the potential problem before you cut off my internet speed. It turned out that an email had been sent to inform me of this, but to a skynet.be address which I did not know existed and which I had never used.
I found this out from your customer service line, who were unable to help me further. I went again to the Belgacom shop, who offered to double my bandwidth allocation for €9.99 per month, though this would take effect only at midnight. I accepted this deal, though it meant I lost the rest of the working day today.
Later this afternoon, I was able to check on-line and discovered that you offer a different solution, the i-Office Volume Pack, costing €5 and which takes only 30 minutes to activate. I do not know why your staff in your shop on Avenue de Tongres could not tell me about this.
I am not going to pay the €9.99 for a slower solution which I do not need.
And I do not know who is going to pay for my lost time and energy in sorting out the mistakes that you have made in delivering your service to me.
Sincerely,
They are bloody lucky that the only other telcom provider in Brussels, Tele2, actually has even worse customer service, if such a thing were possible.
The one amusing thing is that in my wrangling with their so-called customer service phoneline this afternoon I was asked to take part in a survey of customer satisfaction. You can guess what option I chose (between 1 for completely unsatisfied and 5 for completely satisfied).
