They are handing out more free yoghurt in the Metro stations!
Picture meme
Take a picture of yourself right now. Don’t change your clothes. Don’t fix your hair. Just take a picture. Post that picture with no editing. (Except maybe to get the image size down to something reasonable. Don’t go posting an eight megapixel image.) Include these instructions.
The sound of internal government communication
I was in a small country’s embassy in Brussels earlier this week, meeting with their Minister for European Affairs (who I knew personally long before he became a minister, but this was a professional meeting). It was a slightly rushed affair because he was being lined up by his ambassador to do the airport run, and also he kept on being interrupted by phone calls. I wondered vaguely why he didn’t just turn his phone off (especially since he answered every call with a terse “I’m in a meeting, call me back later” in either English or his own language), and then it occurred to me that he might be waiting for one particular call.
And then his phone rang again – not with its usual shrill ring tone but with the music of the March of the Imperial Storm Troopers from Star Wars – “POM POM POM pa-pa-POM pa-pa-POM”. The minister looked relieved and took the call. It was the Prime Minister.
I was deeply amused by this. The Prime Minister is a rather short, jolly but sharp guy, who really does not look like a storm trooper of any kind, imperial or otherwise. So perhaps I was getting an insight into the real dynamics of internal government communication. Or perhaps just into the sense of humour of the Minister for European Affairs.
September Books 12) A Comedy of Errors
12) A Comedy of Errors, by William Shakespeare
I dimly remember the Rowan Atkinson sketch where he is a schoolmaster trying to beat respect for English literature into the heads of a host of invisible and improbably named schoolboys. One of the great lines is when he insists that there is only one joke in Shakespeare, and it is in A Comedy of Errors, when “Two people look like each other. Twice.” Pause. “It’s not that funny!”
Well, actually, it is that funny. It’s a much shorter play than the histories I’ve read/listened to so far; it’s a bit more original, in that Shakespeare has boiled together bits of Plautus (who was also pretty funny in his day) to produce a mock-classical, proto-pantomime slapstick piece.
The only time I ever saw it staged was a student production in Cambridge, with the twins played by two rather than four actors, simply reversing their neckties to show if they were Syracusan or Ephesian, the whole thing done with excellent jazz in the background, I think in Christ’s College (somewhere over there anyway, maybe Sidney Sussex or Emmanuel). The bloke who played the two Antipholuses was excellent; I wonder what he is doing now?
Anyway, the play itself relies on the stable foundation of farce, where we the audience know what is going on but the characters don’t; two visitors to Ephesus get mistaken for their long-lost twin brothers who are local residents, and hilarity ensues. The key to the mystery is held by their father, who appears only in the first scene and the last, to set the scene for us and then to help resolve matters. Shakespeare himself was the father of twins, born in 1585, though they were not identical, being a boy and a girl. Still, I imagine it gave him a certain inspiration as he wrote this play in the early to mid 1590s.
The key drama in the play is the story of the visiting Antipholus of Syracuse, who finds that though a complete stranger, Adriana, incomprehensibly claims him as her husband, he is much more attracted to her sister Luciana. (His twin, the local Antipholus of Ephesus, seems to be much more of a bastard; and their servants, the two Dromios, are basically clowns.) There are other bits of tension, mainly to do with arbitrary justice and summary execution, but that is the main plot. With the right people, it can work very well.
In the Arkangel version I’ve been listening to, David Tennant turns in yet another great performance as Antipholus of Syracuse, doing his English accent. The Ephesians are all Irish – Adriana and Luciana played by two of the Cusack sisters (Niamh and Sorcha), and a generally well-chosen run of accents populating the town – Pauline McLynn, for instance, is the Courtesan. Most gloriously, the sorcerous Dr Pinch is played with an Ulster accent, clearly intended to be reminiscent of Ian Paisley. It’s almost worth listening to for his brief scenes alone.
Anyway, it’s short but sweet, and reminds me that I’m listening to these plays not just because they are classics but because most of them are very good.
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
Not very exclusive
Amused to find that in July a Moroccan front website “revealed” that my employers have a contract with the Polisario Front. This information is not exactly secret; you can see senior Polisario officials pictured with us in an issue of Time from April this year, Al-Jazeera also doing a mini-documentary about it in January, and my boss flagging it up in his book published last year and in a Slate article from March 2006. If that’s the sort of investigative journalism the Moroccans are paying their fake bloggers for, I don’t think they are spending their taxpayers’ money very wisely.
September Books 11) Alien Bodies
11) Alien Bodies, by Lawrence Miles
But as so often, I stumbled on the means and motivation of the villains – in this case the Celestis, with quasi-magical powers including over the afterlife, squabbling with an unlikely assortment of bidders over the Doctor’s corpse (from way ahead in his own timeline). I understand that this book is the basis for Miles’ own run of spinoff Faction Paradox, so I understand why he was trying to do this, but didn’t quite get what he was trying to do.
Sam Jones is the initial companion in the Eighth Doctor Adventures, and this is the third novel I’ve read featuring her. Miles strives to inject her with some extra background and cosmic significance, rather as the Old Who writers did with Ace in the last season in 1989 (the parallel is made explicit). This looked at one point like it was going somewhere interesting, but wasn’t really resolved; I hope it will be in one of the other novels.
In summary, doesn’t really seem like essential reading to me, but maybe its significance will become more obvious as I work through the series.
Lost Souls
Most Torchwood fans will (and should) love this – written by Joe Lidster, bringing the surviving members of the team together with Martha Jones to face an alien threat. Lots about dealing with the deaths of Owen and Toshiko, and (in a nod to series 1 continuity) Lisa the Cyberwoman. The plot is fairly standard, and certainly I worked out what was going on long before the characters did, but it is nice to hear our old friends again doing what they do best.
I was amused by a couple of environments referenced in the play which would be alien to many listeners but with which I am actually very familiar – the aeroplane flying to Geneva, and the ambassadorial reception. Who has a long history of association with Geneva, going back to The Tenth Planet, and later as the global headquarters of UNIT (oddly not mentioned as such here; one gets the impression that Martha and her boss have come into CERN from elsewhere). But this is the first Whoniverse story to be substantially set in Switzerland.
The ambassadorial reception scene was basically there for a couple of funny lines. I attend them once or twice a month, on average; Brussels is well supplied with such events, since many countries have separate missions to Belgium, NATO and the EU. In Geneva I should think things are more complex, since most countries will have relatively small missions to cover a vast range of activities – ranging from the World Trade and Health Organisation to the UN High Commissioners for Refugees and Human Rights, to the little-known disarmament conferences. I imagine the Geneva diplomatic corps gets to cover CERN too.
SPOILERY SCIENCE BITS
As more than one person has noted, the two key science points of the play are total rubbish. If you remove neutrons from an atom (let alone a person), it will disintegrate catastophically rather than just glow in the dark (Isaac Asimov tries a similar line in The Gods Themselves, but with slightly better handwaving). And ramming a beam of anti-protons into a beam of protons isn’t exactly the opposite of ramming two proton beams into each other. But since the story basically revolves around these two crucial bogus scientific points, I think the sane and sensible thing to do is treat them along the lines of the Rocky Horror Picture Show’s “laser capable of emitting a beam of pure anti-matter”. And anyway this is a tale of evil cross-dimensional beings pretending to be the souls of the recently departed, so insistence on scientific accuracy isn’t a very sensible starting point.
Anyway, it livened up my commute this morning.
Quote
“Have you seen a Kroton come this way?” the Doctor asked, somewhat urgently.
“Don’t know. Is a Kroton a big silvery-white thing that looks like it came out of a fondue set?”
The Doctor looked surprised. “Yes, I suppose it is.”
Sam jerked her thumb. “It went that way.”
Lawrence Miles, Alien Bodies
September Books 10) Richard III
10) The Tragedy of King Richard the Third, by William Shakespeare
So I reach the end of the first block of Shakespeare plays, the quartet covering the reigns of Henry VI, Edwards IV and V and of course Richard III. This is definitely the best of the four plays. Like the previous three, it is the story arc of a single character, in this case Richard himself; the first act sees him knock off his brother Clarence, the second act has his other brother die of dissipation, the third act has Richard dispossess his nephews and seize the throne, the fourth act has the young princes and various others, mostly former allies, slaughtered, and the fifth act has Richard himself overthrown and killed by the Duke of Richmond, who becomes Henry VII.
Richard is a fascinating character – as I commented with regard to the previous play, his taking the audience into his confidence is a strong part of his charm, and although we see him deceive and seduce the other characters, we don’t ever feel he is deceiving us. Richard gets the two best-known lines of the play – the opening “Now is the winter of our discontent” speech, and his despairing final “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” – and if a scene doesn’t have him in it you feel there is something missing (certainly the other characters are always talking about him).
Richard’s mistake of leadership is quite different from Henry VI and Edward IV, both of whom prove in different ways too lightweight for the burdens of office. He is less subtle than his father, who held back in Ireland and let his rivals for power and his proxies eliminate each other. His mistake is that once he has achieved his originally quite limited agenda – to get rid of Henry, Edward, Clarence and the princes – and reached the throne, he just can’t stop killing people. His public and hypocritical piety contrasts nicely with Richmond’s more modest and circumspect approach. His gradual disintegration into a haunted wreck of a man is chilling, and reminded me of Bruno Ganz in Der Untergang. David Troughton does a good job of it in the Arkangel production I’ve been listening to, but I’m sure any actor would love to play this.
The other character whose role is particularly interesting is Margaret of Anjou, Henry VI’s widow and the only living character in all four plays (Henry himself gets a few lines as a ghost haunting Richard at Bosworth field). She haunts a couple of scenes as a vengeful visitor from the past – if I was staging this I think I’d present her as a ghost, rather than a live person (indeed, historically, she was dead by the time Richard took over). Apparently some productions drop her completely because it takes too long to explain who she is. I think that is a real shame – she is an Awful Warning to Richard, and to us, of what happens when you claw your way to the top by violence; yet she seems to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
It’s a play with more women in general. (Again, I had a thought that if I were staging it, I’d make the Citizens of Act 3 Scene 3 women.) A couple of them are rather surprisingly taken in by Richard’s charms after he has killed their close relatives, and also it is never quite explained who the unseen Mrs Shore is. But their presence is part of a more general sense that dynastic conflict is something that happens to real people, rather than to names in history books (the first two parts of Henry VI were a bit too much in the other direction). Fails the Bechdel test, I’m afraid; although there are plenty of scenes with women talking to each other, it is usually about Richard or his (male) victims. The on-stage death count is noticeable lower than in the previous three plays, which actually works rather better.
There are several remarkable scenes. The killings in the Tower, of Clarence and the Princes, stand out as points of no return in Richard’s rise and fall respectively. (I note for future use that this play was probably first performed in 1592, the year my ancestor Sir Nicholas Whyte also snuffed it in the tower, though as far as we know he died of relatively natural causes.) The Bosworth field hauntings and subsequent battle are a great climax to the play.
The most intriguing scene for me, however, was Act 4 Scene 4, which starts with Queen Margaret getting a decent soliloquy (“So, now prosperity begins to mellow, / And drop into the rotten mouth of death”); she then confronts Queen Elizabeth (Edward IV’s widow) and the Duchess of York (Edward IV and Richard III’s mother); she buggers off to France, but the other two women get a chance to confront Richard; his mother leaves, and he astonishingly persuades Queen Elizabeth to let him marry her daughter (his own niece, after having murdered her father and his own first wife); and then a series of nobles and messengers come with confusing news of Richmond’s arrival and rebellions around the land. I’d find this scene particularly difficult to stage and would be tempted to split it up a bit if I were directing. It does, however, show Richard still capable of his old persuasive powers yet vulnerable to meltdown.
I found this really compelling – the Henry VI/Richard III quartet improve as they go on, and I found myself wondering what was going to happen next to Richard (even though of course I knew perfectly well). Also, unlike the other three plays of the cycle, I frequently found myself thinking how I would stage it if I ever had the chance. Shakespeare’s first really good play, I suppose.
Anyway, it’s rather lighter stuff next, with A Comedy of Errors which I must say will be rather a relief after all this historical mayhem.
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
Jeepers
Best wishes to
И сонцето е ѕвезда
“И сонцето е ѕвезда” is one of my favourite slogans. It is both easy and difficult to translate. The literal meaning is clear enough: “The sun, too, is a star”. But to the average non-Macedonian, that is almost incomprehensible. It is in fact the slogan of the Macedonian government’s Secretariat for European Affairs (see the Macedonian original and English translation).
The clue is in two flags. The Macedonian flag, to the left, commemorates the Vergina Sun, an archaeological relic which is linked to the ancient Macedonian race. The original flag of independent Macedonia had to be changed after Greek pressure, because it looked too much like the real thing, but they stayed with the sun motif.
The EU flag, of course, has 12 stars (and has had since Spain and Portugal joined; they decided they weren’t going to add more for each new country). The Macedonian slogan, therefore, means that the Macedonians are asserting their ambition and right to become one of the EU member states in due course. The sun is a star; Macedonia is European. It’s very neat.
Those of you who read Cyrillic but are not familiar with Macedonian may be a bit baffled by the letter ѕ at the start of ѕвезда. It is now used only in Macedonian, and pronounced /dz/; thought to come from the obsolete Greek letter stigma (Ϛ/ϛ) which of course is pronounced /st/ rather than /dz/, so it’s coincidental that it looks like the Latin s. It does sometimes pop up in Old Church Slavonic.
The word ѕвезда /dzvezda/ meaning star is a common Slavic word – звезда in Bulgarian, Serbian and Russian, ѕвѣзда (using the letter ѕ) in Old Church Slavonic, зьвязда in Belarusian, zvijezda in Croatian and Bosnian, zvezda in Slovenian, hvězda in Czech, hviezda in Slovak, gwiazda in Polish. It also has leaked into the Baltic languages – zvaigzne in Latvian, žvaigždė in Lithuanian. Even though it doesn’t seem to have other cognates in Indo-European languages, there are links of varying levels of credibility with other groups.
If you are familiar with Slavic languages other than Bulgarian and Macedonian you may wonder where the -то and the end of сонцето comes from. It means “the”, which otherwise you don’t get in Slavic languages (though the neighbouring non-Slavic Albanian and Romanian also use a suffix to form the definite article). The Macedonian word сонце /sontse/ is a good Slavic word – the Slovenian sonce is the same as Macedonian, as is Ukrainian сонце, then there is Belarussian сонца, Serbo-Croato-Bosnian sunce/сунце, Bulgarian слънце, Old Church Slavonic слъньце, Czech slunce, Polish słońce, Russian солнце, Slovak slnko. Not surprisingly, it is widespread in Indo-European languages and is related to our words “sun” and “south” as well as Latin “sol” and Greek ήλιος (ancient Greek ἥλιος, the initial /s/ turning into a /h/ sound). Indeed, the wisdom seems to be that the word has a much wider reach, including Japanese 空 (sora, meaning “sky”) and Korean 해 (hae, meaning “day” or “sun”).
So as well as tying in rather nicely with national and international iconography, the slogan uses two ancient nouns that demonstrate the linguistic heritage of the Macedonian language. Apparently the Macedonian government officials concerned thought it up one day over a cup of coffee. From such moments of inspiration…
One Day More
I just love this YouTube video featuring a (fictional) Obama campaign team singing “One Day More” from Les Miserables.
I’m a huge fan of both the book and the musical, but I picked this up from someone on my f-list who knew nothing of Les Miserables but still enjoyed it. The song is the closing number of the first act of the show, in which a) Valjean, the tragic hero of the story, decides to flee to England; b) Marius, the romantic hero of the story, decides to fight alongside the revolutionaries since he cannot stay with Valjean’s [adopted] daughter Cosette, his love interest; c) Eponine, in love with Marius, decides to fight alongside the revolutionaries since he’s there even though he doesn’t love her; d) Enjolras, the revolutionary leader, decides to revolt; e) Javert, the secret policeman, decides to pass himself off as a revolutionary; f) Eponine’s parents, the disreputable Thenardiers, decide to wait until everyone is dead and rob the corpses and g) everyone sings about it, summing up the first 80% of the novel in three and a half minutes. Les Miserables is full of good songs, but this is probably the best of them.
Les Miserables is much better known than the abortive 5 June 1832 revolution which it chronicles. Historians of mathematics may derive some satisfaction from the fact that, though it was the death of General Lamarque which caused the outbreak of revolt, tension had already been raised by the murky death of the revolutionary mathematician Évariste Galois a few days earlier.
Because it’s a stage show which hasn’t been filmed, it’s surprisingly difficult to find YouTube videos which give the true feeling of watching it as it should be (and don’t have the appalling Michael Ball). This is the quasi-canonical version from the Anniversary concert, but of course it’s just people singing into microphones (even if appropriately costumed, and including the brilliant Lea Salonga as Eponine, though sadly also the said M Ball). The Lego version is surprisingly true to the spirit of the stage show. You might also want to check out two German versions here and here.
The vid linking the Obama campaign to the song is uplifting and hugely enjoyable, but I do wish they had picked a literary parallel where more of the characters avoid untimely deaths. As I recall, only Marius, Cosette and the Thenardiers survive to the end of stage the show (and in the book I think Madame Thenardier snuffs it too). Let us hope for a better survival ratio among the Obama campaign, whatever the result.
The Internets
Three stories that have hit my radar screen in the last few days about the rights and obligations of internet users.
1)
I’ve discussed three other cases of this before. La Petite Anglaise stayed scrupulously the right sight of professional behaviour, never identifying her employers or herself by name; and indeed, the worst thing she ever wrote about them was that they were a bit old-fashioned (which is perhaps what you actually want in an accountant). Not surprisingly she won her employment tribunal case and got thousands of euros. (And a book contract.)
Joe Gordon worked for Waterstone’s and occasionally blogged his frustrations in the workplace. He shouldn’t have done it in the terms he did, but as he was an established employee I think Waterstone’s should have asked – or better, Joe Gordon should have offered – to amend or delete the relevant entries. However, he got sacked as well.
Jan Pronk, the UN Envoy to Sudan, got into trouble for publishing his political views on his website. Here I think the situation is a little murkier, but if (as he claims) Pronk was only saying in public on his site what he was telling everyone else in private, and as long as he didn’t publish any privileged information, I think he was on the right side of the line. He too was sacked, but this was part of a wider picture of international chaos and ineptitude in the face of genocide.
2) The Torchwoodgate kerfuffle. Stephen James Walker has published (via Telos, which he co-owns) an unofficial guide to Series Two of Torchwood called Something in the Darkness. As part of his review of each episode he has copied large chunks of fannish Livejournal postings, without seeking permission from the writers. Walker has expressed bafflement that anyone could be upset by this.
My understanding of copyright is that your words are copyrighted to you the moment they leave your brain and are down on paper or electrons or whatever. Just because they are available for free on the internet doesn’t reduce your rights in them. The copied material is apparently a good third of the episode guide portion of the book. Walker is clearly making money from other people’s words which he has not paid for, and fans are right to be annoyed. What legal redress is available, I don’t know.
I have to say I have been very unimpressed on occasion by Telos’ discharge of its editorial responsibilities even to authors who don’t own the company. (See in particular my review of George Mann’s The Human Abstract.) They have published some good stuff as well, but there is an underlying current of a lack of professionalism.
3) Jonathan Fryer reports that a friend of his has been kicked off Facebook for acquiring too many friends too quickly. Well, I’ve managed to get up to 1016 Facebook friends by dint of careful management of my networks of professional contacts, sf fans and LJers, relatives and friends from school and college and elsewhere, since I joined it in February 2007. Occasionally I go through the list with the intention of deleting any who I don’t really know and added by mistake, but there are actually fairly few of these.
One of my friends joined Facebook less than a month ago, and her friends list is already at 1066. She is the leader of the main opposition party in her country, which may account for it. Nick Clegg is at 3395. You expect that people in the public eye will develop substantial numbers of contacts, and I suspect that Facebook did not query either Radmila Šekerinska or Nick Clegg when their lists suddenly expanded.
I bet that Jonathan’s friend, the publisher Gary Pulsifer, has like me a carefully managed contacts list, and is paying the price for using it on Facebook. The two crucial differences between him on the one hand and Šekerinska and Clegg on the other are 1) he is not as famous as they are and (related) 2) I imagine that he made most of the outward friend requests himself, whereas Šekerinska and Clegg are doubtless responding to friend requests from people who know them through their public activities.
Facebook are, I suspect, being unfair to Pulsifer. It is the recipient of the friend request who determines if it is valid, and has the option to block that user. It would be reasonable to restrict someone for sending “too many” friend requests, if they are spewing out invitations at random; but we are told that Pulsifer was “acquiring too many friends too quickly”, which implies that the people he was contacting actually wanted to add him back. There may be more to this story than I am aware of, but Facebook don’t do themselves any favours with this sort of behaviour.
Having said which, Facebook of course belongs not to its users but to Facebook, and they get to make the rules, and even change them arbitrarily without telling us if they want; that’s just the way life is. I’m sorry that Pulsifer has been booted, but it’s not going to stop me using the site.
The Dukes of Clarence
As I read Richard III, it occurs to me that the Dukes of Clarence were not lucky:
1) Lionel, Duke of Clarence, (1338-1368), son of Edward III, poisoned while visiting Italy.
2) Thomas, Duke of Clarence, (1388-1421), son of Henry IV, killed stupidly leading his troops in battle against the French (the archers hadn’t arrived but he ordered the attack anyway).
3) George, Duke of Clarence, (1449-1478), younger brother of Edward IV, supposedly drowned in a butt of malmsey wine on his brother’s orders.
5) Albert, Duke of Clarence, (1864-1892), the future George V’s elder brother, regarded by his family as feeble-minded and not excessively mourned when he died early.
Also there is the Duke of Clarence who never was, Lord Guilford Dudley (1536-1544) who was married to Lady Jane Grey, briefly queen of England in 1543. They were both executed the following year, but the original plan was for him to be made Duke of Clarence if she had managed to hang onto the throne.
The only slightly successful one was 4) William, Duke of Clarence, (1765-1837) who lived longer than any two of the others put together and ended up as King William IV; probably the least memorable of the Hanoverian kings. But sometimes obscurity is a blessing.
Social networking
So, is anyone else (apart from
Not quite…
I’m at a breakfast debate on Cyprus in Brussels, and one of the well-meaning attendees (introducing himself as Belgian, Swiss and European) asks if the negotiators plan to enlist the healing and positive forces of religious leaders in their quest for a solution?
I’m at the same table as a senior Greek Cypriot politician and the Turkish Cypriot presidential advisers, and they all crease up in scornful and disbelieving laughter.
A Quaker asks about scrapping the British bases, and the Cypriots on both sides at my table erupt in applause.
Nice to see unity across the line…
A welcome sight
They’re handing out free yogurt in the foyer of the Central Station!
September Books 9) Henry VI Part 3
9) The Third Part of King Henry the Sixth, by William Shakespeare
This is the least-owned individual Shakespeare play among LibraryThing users, which is a bit surprising since it is the best of the three parts of Henry VI, and is surely important background for Richard III (which comes next).
The title character gets a lot more prominence here than in the previous parts – where Part 1 was Talbot’s story, and Part 2 York’s, this is much more Henry’s. He gets by far the best scene almost to himself – Act 2 Scene 5, a meditation on the awfulness of war and the nature of kingship. Also, where the supernatural forces of the first two parts were the witchcraft practiced by Joan La Pucelle and the Duchess of Gloucester, here it is Henry himself who prophesies that Richmond will succeed him and that Gloucester will cause further deaths and misery (the latter, of course, not a terribly tough call as Gloucester is busy killing him at the time). Henry is a very sympathetic character here – he realises he is unfit to rule and hands over power (under constraint) to York and then (more willingly) to his former enemies Warwick and Clarence. His death, the last in a long series of horrible deaths throughout the play, is a fitting climax to the trilogy.
The other two leading characters (once York has been hacked to bits at the end of Act 1) are Henry’s wife, Queen Margaret, and Richard of Gloucester. Margaret is an established character from the first two plays, but here she comes into her own, essentially providing the leadership for the Lancastrians that Henry is not able to. She is the first really memorable female character who is not a witch. Those characters who complain about female leadership are shown up as mistaken; perhaps this is partly an implicit defence of Elizabeth I? She viciously tortures and kills York in the first act, but then sees her own son given the same treatment by York’s sons at the end; her zeal for the cause is manic rather than admirable, but at least she never changes sides.
Gloucester is of course shaping up to be a super-villain, and I guess I’ll have more to say about him in the next play. Sure, his villainy is a bit one-dimensional, but his asides to the audience explaining what he is up to are tremendously effective in drawing us into his confidence. David Troughton, in the version I have been listening to, makes him entirely fascinating. He is a much more interesting character than his brothers – in particular, Clarence’s motivation for ratting and (even more) re-ratting is pretty cardboardy.
The other two characters worthy of note are Warwick and Edward IV. But neither of them quite came alive for me; I felt Shakespeare was too burdened by the historical record to do a good job – Warwick especially is more acted upon than acting, and the capture and release of Edward by the Lancastrians just seemed a bit pointless. Warwick’s change of allegiance is directly motivated by Edward’s error of judgement in what is practically the only important decision we see him make as King – his pathetic attempt at seduction of Lady Grey in Act 3 Scene 2. I really wasn’t sure how to take that scene; I’ve seen some suggestions that it is meant to be comedy, but it didn’t make me laugh. The interesting echo from Henry VI Part 1, of course, is that we see Edward marrying for physical rather than political attraction, and in both cases this turns out to be a Bad Idea. (Again, I wonder if this was in some way commentary on current affairs?)
A final point is that, apart from the first act which tells of York’s rise and fall, I felt this play was less easily segmented than the other two; where Part 1 had a succession of emsembles doing different bits of the tail end of the Hundred Years War, and Part 2 told different bits of York’s story in each act, here the narrative seemed a bit more seamless.
Fails the Bechdel test dismally. The only point at which two women talk to each other is a very short conversation between Queen Margaret and King Lewis’s sister, Bona, about Edward IV.
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
Ooogh
This train is running 40 minutes late.
Just as well I had allowed an hour’s turnaround in Munich; but I think I’ll be getting a taxi to the airport rather than the local train.
Eating meat
Ian is sceptical about the prospects that people might choose to have a vegetarian meal once a week for the sake of fighting global warming. I am not so sure. I first heard this idea a few months ago from the former Dutch liberal party leader Lousewies van der Laan, who is now a UN consultant on environmental issues. Then last weekend in Bled I was slightly stunned to hear it recommended emphatically by Wolfgang Schüssel, the former Chancellor of Austria. I basically agree with Ian that few people will change their lifestyles on the say-so of a UN official. But when political leaders (especially senior conservative politicians in countries famous for their meat dishes) start saying so too, then I reckon it may catch on.
September Books 8) Peter Abelard
8) Peter Abelard, by Helen Waddell
It’s not as good as it should be. Good points about the book include that she has not blandly adhered to the historical chronology of events, and she is quite charmingly discreet yet clear about such crucial events as sex in the convent refectory and the mutilation of Abelard by Héloïse’s uncle’s men. She also gives us a very good idea of where the two protagonists come from, with excellent sketches of Abelard’s family back in Brittany and Héloïse’s loyalty to the convent in Argenteuil (thanks to which the book sails through the Bechdel test), and the background scenery in Paris is also very convincingly sketched.
But while we have a good idea of where they come from, I wasn’t so convinced about where they go to during the book, particularly in the case of Héloïse – this is her story as much as Abelard’s, and it is quite unjust that she does not get equal billing in the title. History remembers her (and Waddell characterises her) from her later correspondence with Abelard, where one might get the impression that her relationship with him was the only interesting thing that ever happened to her – a twelfth-century version of the Sarah Jane Smith we met in School Reunion, perhaps. (This thought may require a separate post, or at least discussion in comments.) But I don’t think that the historical Héloïse of the 1130s is a reliable witness to her own state of mind of 1116-18, when you take into account who she was writing to and the passage of time. In particular I was struck that their baby son drops out of Waddell’s narrative without a trace, which can hardly have happened in real life. Perhaps also a reader today is less satisfied with the narrative of Heloise sacrificing all for her lover than the reader of 1933 would have been.
With Abelard, as you might expect given Waddell’s other work, she portrays him much more convincingly as a poet and lyricist than as a scholar – indeed, the scholarly scenes are the least convincing in the book, probably because she has taken fewest liberties with the historical facts. Rather bizarrely, one of Abelard’s friends ends the book by prophesying him as the John the Baptist-like fore-runner to Thomas Aquinas, which is really a bit absurd but is placed in such a way that you get the impression Waddell thinks this is the whole point of the story.
Anyway, it’s an interesting effort, but more that it was tried at all than that it is particularly good.
Uptalking
Language Log takes a letter from a parent worried about the way their child talks and ends up discussing the origins of the Belfast accent.
September Books 7) The Infinity Doctors
7) The Infinity Doctors, by Lance Parkin
While I liked the overall idea, and numerous details of the scenery, I wasn’t so sure about some of the plot. I felt that the Gallifrey audios managed to balance the idea of competing factions in Gallifrey, powerful external forces and rogue Time Lords rather better, and without having to invent a whole new continuity. One crucial point is that the Gallifreyan security system really is unrealistically poor, even for the sclerotic Time Lord society: there is little sense of urgency from the President and High Council as the body count rises in the corridors of the citadel, or when important visitors start going astray, and the Watch’s investigations are astonishingly incompetent.
However, the interactions between Time Lords and the rest of Gallifreyan society are well done, and so is the depiction of Omega’s universe and its limitations. There are also some intriguing hints about the Doctor’s own lost past, and his capacity for loving women of his own race. (And of course it’s impossible to know which Doctor we are dealing with here – Paul McGann without the wig, perhaps?)
Fails the Bechdel test, I’m afraid. There are few women characters – Omega’s unnamed wife, Larna who is the Doctor’s quasi-companion, and Larna’s maidservant; the first of these never meets the other two, and the only direct speech interchange between Larna and her maid is about a male visitor.
Otherwise, not bad, but not a classic either.
Three meals, six languages
Just reflecting back on my recent travels: on Monday evening last week, I was in Slovenia, and went out for dinner with a journalist friend. We ordered the meal in a mixture of pointing to the Slovenian menu and my tourist-level Serbo-Croat – which is similar to Slovenian, but sufficiently distinct in various ways to easily qualify as a separate language. I skipped breakfast on Tuesday as I was coming back to Brussels, but met a couple of people for lunch at one of the cafes near my office. As is standard in that part of town, we ordered in French but there was a strong undercurrent of Italian to the conversation, especially when difficulties arose. Then in the evening, finally at home, I took Anne out for dinner to one of the local places. Since we live in Flanders, we ordered in Dutch. It became clear that the staff also spoke English, but by that point I had almost forgotten how to do that in a restaurant.
And it’s German for the next two days.
It’s not the late nights, it’s the early mornings
Up early to go to Salzburg (flying to Munich, then taking the train). On Tuesday I will get up early to come back, and on Wednesday I have a breakfast meeting in Brussels which will make the third early morning in four days. I know some of you are natural larks, or have small and active children, but I am an old owl of 41 and it goes against the grain!
Since I’ve been travelling both last Sunday and today, I am going to take next Friday off to watch my (American) assistant getting married in Antwerp. While she has been doing wedding preparations, I have had a temporary replacement in the office; she is from Montenegro, which explains the strange accent of the person answering the phone in the unlikely event that you call me at work.
I hope they do something resembling breakfast on this flight.
September Books 6) How Proust Can Change Your Life
6) How Proust Can Change Your Life, by Alain de Botton
Random query
From time to time I get random queries about one or other aspect of my website; I’m going to start posting a few of them here, suitably anonymised.
Hello. While going through the estate of my grandfather in New England, I’ve come across a copy of “In Starry Realms” which is signed inside by the author “[E A], August ’96, from R.S. Ball Jr.” [E A] is my great grandmother. I wondered if there would be any interest in this book, perhaps among fans, from the academic personnel at Cambridge or elsewhere, or in the realm of book collectors in general. I thought I’d write and ask your opinion.
My reply:
R.S. Ball jr will certainly be Robert Steele Ball, born 1869, the son of the astronomer (they are buried in the same grave), who was a successful engineer in his own right, and studied for a while in Boston which might explain his acquaintance with your great-grandmother. It’s a nice touch to have his signature in the book, and it may add a dollar or two to the sale value, but to be honest I expect a dealer will be much more interested in its overall condition. It’s not a particularly rare book, first published in 1892 so a copy bought in 1896 is unlikely to be a first edition.
September Books 5) The Stone Rose
5) The Stone Rose, by Jacqueline Rayner
September Books 4) The Ill-Made Mute
4) The Ill-Made Mute, by Cecilia Dart-Thornton
Presidential election
Is Lembit Öpik actually going to stand in the Lib Dem presidential election? Ros Scott’s campaign site went live earlier this week; but there’s no mention of Lembit’s candidacy on the Montgomery Lib Dems site (perhaps that’s not allowed); nor, rather more surprisingly, on what appears to be his “official” site at ePolitix. (Indeed, the latter spells his surname “�pik” and appears not to have been updated for some time – the latest engagement marked in Lembit’s diary is for Saturday 12 June, which last fell in 2004.) The http://www.lembit4president.co.uk/ site is completely blank. Like anyone who reads the papers I know Lembit has not had an easy time in his personal life over the last few months; it would not astonish me if he decided that he didn’t need the hassle of the internal party election at this stage.
(Edited to add – I see James Graham asking the same question.)