3) Tropic of Capricorn, by Henry Miller
Jeepers, this must have seemed awfully intelligent and hip in 1938; but the anti-semitism, misogyny, and total lack of any actual plot have not aged this book well. I did struggle through to the end, just about.
Jolly good fun. Much thanks due to
I went to about five panels in all (which is probably more than I went to at WorldCon last year, apart from the ones I was actually on), including two on Doctor Who, where the charming
I showed my face much more briefly today, though was able to give Ken MacLeod a printout of the Celebrity Deathmatch Hugo commentary. Also very good to see
I also managed to get into town and buy:
Comics
Ghost World by Daniel Clowes
Preacher: Gone to Texas by Garth Ennis
Books
Sixteenth Century Ireland, by Colm Lennon
Year’s Best SF 11, ed. Hartwell/Cramer
Epic, by Conor Kostick
McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, ed. Michael Chabon
Doctor Who: Short Trips: Past Tense, ed. Ian Farrington
Vellum, by Hal Duncan, who was actually there at MeCon but I forgot to ask him to sign it
Winter Moon – in fact not bought in town but kindly given by
DVDs
Chronicles of Narnia boxed set of the four stories done by the BBC in the 1980s
Doctor Who: Lost in Time assorted episodes from the First and Second Doctors where the rest of the story has been deleted
Doctor Who: The Caves of Androzani – possibly the Fifth Doctor’s best story, certainly (sadly) his last
Doctor Who: The Curse of Fenric – I’ve been told that the Seventh Doctor’s last season is actually rather good, well, now I’ll find out if it’s true!
Anyway, great to see you all there. Next year, perhaps?
From my grandmother’s notes:
I haven’t his military diaries here [NW: wonder where they ended up?], so I have no idea of exact dates and so on, but after Gallipoli there was the Serbian campaign, where a mixed force of French and British got as far as Lake Doiran, but then had to fall back. The Dublins had the honour of forming the rearguard. While they had been at Lake Doiran they had been on one hill with the Bulgarians across the valley on another. In the valley between there were some ruined cottage[s]. Each night a few of the Dublins would quietly work their way down to the cottages and light fires there, and each succeeding morning the Bulgarians would solemnly shell the cottages for some time – of course by then the Dublins were safe back on their hill, well out of range; no living thing was near the cottages.
When the time came to withdraw, Billy arranged it so that his men went diagonally down the hill. When the Bulgarians realised that they had gone, they raced up the hill and fired straight ahead down it; as the Dublins had gone off to the side there were no casualties among them.
The Serbian government sent a number of decorations, the White Eagle, to be distributed among the British and French; three British officers were named specially to receive them, and Billy was one of those three. It is a most attractive decoration.
From Serbia they went to Salonika and later to Palestine. The at last Billy got some home leave and was actually in France when the war ended.
2) The Healer’s War, by Elizabeth Anne Scarborough
Only four Nebula winners left to read now, Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin, A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg, Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick, and The Terminal Experiment by Robert J Sawyer. I checked the 1989 shortlist to see what this book beat: I must have read both Prentice Alvin and Ivory shortly after they were published, and remember the latter as particularly engaging, though I think that The Healer’s War is better. (The others were Boat of a Million Years by Poul Anderson, Good News From Outer Space by John Kessel and Sister Light, Sister Dark by Jane Yolen; this was the equivalent year that Hyperion won the Hugo for Best novel, with the Card and Anderson books on both shortlists.)
This was one of those years when the Nebula system managed to recognise an exceptional novel that would never win a Hugo. The Healer’s War is a somewhat autobiographical account of the Vietnam war as seen by an American military nurse, with precisely one sfnal element: a magic amulet, with slightly healing powers, which gives the narrator the power of empathy with the Vietnamese of all sides and of none (and indeed with her fellow Americans as well). It is a fair comment that the magic amulet is a literary device that enables the author to tell the story she wants (Scarborough herself says so in an afterword). But I think it’s still entirely legitimate to count the book within the genre, and to acknowledge its merits accordingly.
It’s a stark contrast with other war stories I have read, which tend to concentrate on the view of the individual soldier (eg, Catch-22 and War and Peace; see also my reviews here, here, here and rather notoriously here). The Healer’s War concentrates on the non-soldiers involved in war, and indeed its military characters tend to be pretty unpleasant, whether Americans or Vietnamese of either side. But I felt that none of them slipped into caricature; the narrator’s commitment to empathy helped to avoid that trap. It was a gripping and moving read.
Vietnam is coming somewhat indirectly into my life at the moment in a way I had never expected. I hadn’t expected it in this book either – it arrived from a second hand dealer the day before we left on holiday, and I packed it without looking at it beyond checking that the title and author were correct. I shall be learning a lot more about Vietnam in years to come, but this was a surprisingly thought-provoking starting point.
Into the heart of County Down today, to visit an old favourite and a new attraction.
On the slopes of Slieve Croob, it has a fine view of the Mountains of Mourne:
You have to bring your own child, though.
Since it’s halfway up a mountain and underground, an imaginative solution for giving visitors adequate illumination was needed. In this picture of the entrance you can see on the right the solar panels which power the lights:
Inside it’s about 30 metres long, but only 1.5 metres high at the highest point. This makes it a little uncomfortable for those of average size and above, but smaller people will have an enjoyable visit:
Will bring a torch next time to peek into inaccessible corners.
I’d thought for some reason that this was another six-parter, and settled down to watch episode four this morning, only to realise to my disappointment that it was all over. Well, having had a rather unsatisfactory run of Second Doctor stories, I am relieved to say that I very much enjoyed this. Certainly falls into the category of Doctor Who that you can safely show non-fans without fear of embarrassment.
I complained that it is sometimes difficult to tell Patrick Troughton apart from the other actors on the audio tapes. There is no problem at all when you are watching the programme; he is at the centre of every scene he is in. And this is not just the natural effect of the director concentrating on the central character: Troughton is simply fascinating to look at – such an expressive face.
The story is of course a classic. The Cybermen – or rather, the Cyber-controller, who is the only one who gets significant airtime, with Peter Hawkins’ superbly chilling voicing of the lines – are worthy adversaries, assisted by their human dupes (vaguely foreign and therefore sinister, unlike the spaceship captain who is American and therefore clearly a Good Guy). The Cybermats could very nearly have been awful, but carry it off well. There are certain implausibilities in the set-up – why do the Cybermen limit themselves to a single means of egress after they have been woken, with the revitaliser on the other side of the hatch? Why does the Doctor allow the Cyber-controller to recharge himself? – but you can overlook them in the fun of the ride.
There are some nice little touches as well: Victoria’s reaction to the Tardis; the Doctor and Victoria about their families; the Doctor telling Klieg just how insane he is; Toberman cradling his dead mistress. I even quite liked the special effects of the Cybermen doing mind-zinging things – would look very silly now but fitted the 1960s feel of the series.
The DVD has a couple of great extras as well: director Morris Barry’s brief introduction to the original video release, excerpts from a panel discussion in 1992 which brought together the surviving actors and crew from the series, and slightly to my surprise but much to my delight a very brief video of the Dalek civil war from the end of the previous series, The Evil of the Daleks.
In summary, this is a DVD well worth getting hold of.
Just for completeness – as I guess the voting deadline has now passed – but Aaron Hughes has notified me of his reviews of the novella, novelette and short story categories. See also Tim Walters on all the fiction categories.
Christian Sauvé has done much the same, with one post calmly and soberly discussing the merits or otherwise of the short fiction nominees, and a second the recasting this year’s contest for Best Novel as if it were an episode of Celebrity Deathmatch whose climax may not satisfy everyone but would certainly be most gratifying to
Will add both of these to my master list but probably not until much later in the month.
This weekend. Will be there. Am looking forward to it.
In fact, it’s an occasion of double nostalgia. MeCon V, in 2002, was the first sf con I had ever paid membership for (not quite the first I had ever attended – I was invited by
But the nostalgia is doubled because I spent a year living at the top of one of the student tower-blocks on the Queen’s Elms complex, where MeCon is to be held this year. Very few people have dared tell the truth about what living in this pace is like in term-time (the only on-line source I can find is in German, but they have got the idea – “es ist manchmal unerträglich, dort zu wohnen”). I had the joyful task of being the sub-warden responsible for 120 students for the academic year 1992/93.
The management sucked. That’s not quite fair – the bloke who I answered to, who was warden to my sub-warden, was great, and tolerant of my occasional lapses from full enthusiasm for the job; but there was an ongoing power struggle between the university administration and the wardens of the halls, exacerbated by each side blaming the other for a tragic accident the year before I lived there, when a student had fallen down a lift shaft and died. I had to patrol the corridors twice a night, once at half past midnight and again an hour later, and in addition there was the Thursday night vigil as students staggered back from the late disco. At least the weekends were quiet because the vast majority of the residents (and almost all the noisy ones) went home to their parents, in far-flung Lisburn or Larne (or, in fairness, Enniskillen or Derry).
The culmination in a way was the Boat Club dinner, as booze-fuelled as any of its Cambridge equivalents (I was one of the 10% minority in Cambridge who never set hand to an oar the whole time I was there). The dinner itself was in the hallowed precincts of the main university building, but several of its participants ended up in my tower block and decided to have a laugh by throwing the refrigerator in the communal kitchen on my floor out the window, without opening said window first. I did mention that I lived on the top floor, didn’t I? We tracked down the perpetrators pretty rapidly, but I was disgusted with the lenient treatment they then got from the university, which seemed to be a particularly stupid by-product of the general management problems. (Don’t ask for details.)
That was a contributing factor to my decision not to do it for another year. More important, however, was the fact that Anne and I decided to get married. (The fact that I had a visiting girlfriend was a source of fascination for horny and frustrated male students. One snowy evening I was happily watching TV and heard a subtle knock on the door accompanied by male giggles, receding rapidly. When I opened it I found a lovely snow sculpture of a phallus and matching testicles. As I was loosely attached to the anthropology department at the time I decided I should take it as a votive offering to my virility. If you have another theory, I don’t want to hear about it! The story of how I got the nickname “Big Snaker” will have to wait for another time.)
Anyway, it seems peculiarly appropriate that the first event of MeCon will be a quiz; I organised one for the weekend students (mainly overseas) as my main contribution to communal life in the halls. I suspect I’ll enjoy the one on Friday more…
The First Doctor brings a very useful tool to the planet of the Savages.
More seriously, see Fiona Moore’s essay on this story, though she misses what was for me the most obvious source – the future society of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. I rather enjoyed reading it, I think the first story I read/heard/watched with Dodo, and also the departure of Steven. Will look out for the soundtrack.
1) Lost Railways of Co. Down and Co. Armagh, by Stephen Johnson
In Northern Ireland there’s a big market for books on local history and nostalgia, part of the dinnsenchas phenomenon I’ve written about before. This is just a collection of photographs of old trains and old stations, almost all gone for half a century now. While most enthusiasts are interested in the physical manifestations of old railways – the specifics of the engines, the design of the paraphernalia – what gets me is the geographical impact – the extent to which the railways opened up the countryside before roads were really good.
But in Counties Down and Armagh, it really was far past the point of saturation. From a human point of view I sympathise with the nostalgia for the old days; but really, there were far too many railway lines and stations for the level of the population even then, never mind now. This map doesn’t even show most of the lines in the north and east of County Down as they were run by a different company:
(Map from here, part of an excellent site on County Down history)
To pick but one example, the stops of Ashfield and Mullaghfernaghan, between Banbridge and Dromore, serviced communities which are otherwise unknown to the map-maker, then or now. These days it takes less than ten minutes to drive from Dromore to Banbridge (and I doubt that it took a lot longer a hundred years ago).
Still, I would like some day to spend some time finding the places where some of these photographs were taken and seeing if I can reproduce the scene from fifty years later.
24) Mr Belloc Objects To “The Outline Of History”, by H.G. Wells
Reading this is a bit like reading someone’s livejournal entry when you have only one person’s side of the story. H.G. Wells published his Outline of History in 1920; Hilaire Belloc published a series of articleds castigating it as anti-Christian and immoral over the next few years; and Wells published this 54-page riposte to Belloc in 1926. (Belloc followed up that same year with Mr Belloc Still Objects, but I haven’t seen that.)
Wells argues his case very well, pointing out Belloc’s rhetorical excesses, and giving numerous examples where Belloc has misinterpreted or twisted his words. He also, admirably (and entirely unlike the tiresome Richard Dawkins) rests his case completely on what science has to say about nature and invites the religious reader first, to accept that Wells’ views on science and natural history are entirely reasonable, and secondly that Belloc’s are absurd.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all. I would add, however, that I suspect Belloc’s views were unrepresentative of Catholic scientists of his time. My PhD was on the history of science in Ireland, and one of the hypotheses I was examining was the idea (proposed in particular by Gordon Herries Davies and Roy Johnston) that Irish nationalism in general and the Catholic Church in particular had had an ideologically chilling effect on scientific research in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
I was surprised to discover how little evidence there was for this. There was precisely one example of a Catholic scholar writing on science who was told to shut up by Church authorities: he was a theologian rather than a physicist, and his ideas were pretty absurd (and irrelevant to the contemporary scientific debate). Otherwise, there were as many Catholic scientists as one might have expected, given the general level of discrimination and gate-keeping, and some of them (like maths professor Eamon de Valera) went into Nationalist politics.
There was, of course, some controversy over evolution. I was very fortunate in that my supervisor is probably the world’s leading writer on the history of Darwinism, and thanks to him I realised that the articles about Darwinism and evolution in the Irish theological journals were more reflections of the wider debate in the English-speaking world than evidence of any particular local bias. (The real Irish story here was the Ulster Protestant reaction to John Tyndall’s address to the Belfast meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1874.)
But the evolution question, for Irish Catholics at least, had been closed a few years before the Belloc/Wells controversy, with the convincing arguments of a geological theologian from the University of Louvain (as it then was) that there was no contradiction between Darwinism and Catholic teaching. Belloc, at least judging by Wells’ account, had not got the message.
23) The Man With Two Left Feet, and Other Stories, by P.G. Wodehouse
Harmless, funny stories. Actually read it at the end of last month but only just remembered. Will redate this entry to 31 July.
This was occasional soundtrack while driving from Belgium to Ireland (in between various favourite music CDs). Perhaps it was not the ideal story with which to introduce my wife to the delights of the Troughton Era. It was not long before she started to mime the evil mutant seaweed, causing me some slight distraction and no doubt alarming passing drivers who saw her doing it. She also developed an animus against Victoria (“She’s so wet!”) from a very early stage in the plot, and started making “bang bang” gestures at the stereo speakers every time Deborah Watling’s voice was heard. The punchline – that the evil mutant seaweed is killed off precisely by Victoria’s screaming – made her incoherent with laughter. I do have the DVD of Tomb of the Cybermen with us, but persuading her to watch it may be a tough sell.
However I found it grew on me. There was a lot of padding (helicopters for the sake of helicopters, for instance), and the whole plot would barely have filled 45 minutes of New Who. But it picked up once
Victoria’s departure – the Victoria/Jamie relationship was an opportunity never taken up by the programme’s writers (or, interestingly, by fanfic writers). Jamie clearly fancies her rotten in The Power of the Daleks, and at the end of the first episode of The Ice Warriors he is trying to persuade her to wear the more revealing fashions of the locals (when their conversation is interrupted by the waking monster). But nothing more seems to have ever been made of it. NB that the next two female companions (Zoe and Liz Shaw) were both brainy. Then back to screaming, with Jo Grant.
As Anne said as the title music faded at the end, “So the evil seaweed menace that was threatening to take over the world was defeated by a few loud noises? Not awfully threatening then, was it?”
…better known to me as ‘The Star of the County Down’.
22) The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, by Douglas Adams
Ah, much more fun. For me, the original radio series remains the one and only canonical version of the story, so it’s interesting to review how different bits of it were cut up and pasted together for the novelisation. One bit of good writing that is strikingly out of place is the introduction of Max Quordlepleen, the compère at Milliways: an unusual piece of character-sketching from Adams, which is original to the book, and then doesn’t really go anywhere. (But the Disaster Area section is also original, and delightful.) Interesting that here Zarniwoop is left alone with the ruler of the universe by Zaphod and Trillian, his offence being, as far as I can tell, that he was being a boring git – rather different from the radio version’s dramatic denouement of Arthur abandoning everyone else after he discovers who really was responsible for the destruction of the Earth.
Anyway. Reading the final sections I begin to inderstand why some people are drawn to Ford/Arthur slash, a concept I don’t think I could have imagined until I got to know
21) Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow
Read this as part of my effort to improve my knowledge of Nobel Prize-winning literature. My penguin edition described the book as “a comic novel…a hilarious, often ribald story”. I confess I missed the joke; there didn’t seem to me a sinlge laugh-out-loud moment in this first-person narrative of an American who atempts to go native in Africa. Plenty of food for thought on the human condition; Henderson’s moral decay is contrasted with his physical vigour, and his unflitered deliberations on the meaning of life in general, and his own in particular, added up to a much more convincing portrait than the central character in The Red Badge of Courage. I enjoyed the book. But I remain worried, not for the first time, that I have failed to grasp American humour.
Actually finished listening to this mid-week, but due to pressure of other things have been only slowly catching up with reviews. Four out of six episodes survive, and perhaps I should give it another chance by watching them (I may even spend some time on the BBC’s photonovelParanoia role-playing game. And the technobabble and had-waving science was pleasingly incomprehensible, thus not getting in the way of enjoying the show.
So, willing to be convinced about this one, but not yet convinced I’m afraid. We are listening to “Fury From The Deep” while driving at the moment. Irritatingly my car stereo doesn’t play my MP3 CDs of the two Yeti stories. Are they reasonably easy to convert into ordinary CD format and re-burn? Or should I just listen to them on the computer?
It is childishly amusing to find this phrase in the Declaration of Independence.
The only time I have ever been to Israel was for a conference on European foreign policy, in Caesarea five years ago. The only other participant with Balkan expertise was a Serbian journalist based in Berlin (who I last saw in Strasbourg a few years later) who stunned me by describing a novel by Bram Stoker set not in the eastern Balkan environment of Dracula but in the western Balkans, in what was then the future Yugoslavia (and is now, of course, the former Yugoslavia). I spotted and bought the book, The Lady of the Shroud, just over a year ago in Hampshire, and read it last weekend.
At least, I thought I had read it; and then, as I was preparing to write it up here on Sunday night, checking out the on-line text on Project Gutenberg, I discovered that there was a whole chunk of the book missing – the Arrow edition of 1962, whose 1974 version (with cover shown to the right) was the one I had bought, had hacked off the last quarter of the text, without explanation! Extraordinary. I don’t mind buying an abridged version if it’s marked as such, but it was a shock to discover I had been cheated of such a substantial amount of the content. (Though since I only paid £1.60 I can’t complain too much.)
Anyway. The book is set in the present day (ie 1907). It is about a Rupert St Leger, an Irishman who has become a citizen of the world, who unexpectedly finds himself a major landowner in a fictional Adriatic territory, the Land of the Blue Mountains, which should not be confused with any country named after mountains of some other colour with which I might be familiar. He gets entangled with a mysterious and chilly lady who appears wearing only a shroud (the exciting cover – wonder who the artist was? – shows her standing up in a water-borne coffin, in what is in fact the book’s very first scene). The plot is complex and exciting, but is resolved with his rescuing her father from captivity using an aeroplane (which is pretty bloody advanced for 1907) and it turns out that the only element of the supernatural not otherwise explained away is Celtic rather than Balkan, in that Rupert’s aged Scottish aunt has the Second Sight.
At least, that’s where I thought the book ended. However, in the substantial section censored from the 1962/1974 edition, the story continues directly into the political rather than the supernatural (perhaps the reader of the 1960s was deemed by the publishers to be more interested in the horror elements than the politics). Rupert uses his vast fortune, and the mineral wealth of the Land of the Blue Mountains, to unite the entire Balkan peninsula under his moderate and constitutional rule, defended by a fleet of – get this – radium-powered aeroplanes.
Yes, the author of Dracula wrote a book with nuclear fuelled aircraft. Set in the Balkans. In 1907.
Digging around the internet a bit, I was thrilled to discover that there is a respectable school of thought suggesting that when Stoker wrote about the Balkans, he was really writing about,er, the Balkans, rather than whatever other undercurrents of sexuality, Irishness, etc may be attributed to him. (See especially essays on Dracula here, here and here, with the middle essay looking also at The Lady of the Shroud.) His younger brother George served in the Red Crescent in Bulgaria, and wrote a book about it (With “The Unspeakables”: or, Two Years’ Campaigning in European and Asiatic Turkey, published in 1878). There are several substantive monographs and essay collections on Stoker’s sources for Dracula. I may have to start reading some of them.
I must say I had not expected this book to be quite so intriguing. I certainly got more than my money’s worth anyway.
I have never done this before, but
1. Are you named after anyone? If so, explain.
Yes. There were a large number of Nicholases in the Whyte family tree, going back to Sir Nicholas Whyte/White, an Irish judge in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, who died while a prisoner in the Tower of London.
2. Do you have your children’s names picked out already? If so, is there any significance?
B’s name was chosen originally because it was original, and Irish, and we didn’t actually know anyone with that name.
F was also chosen as an Irish name, and because we didn’t know anyone else with that name, but this time there was a deliberate reference to an eighth century Irish saint, a bishop of Salzburg, who famously believed that the world was round.
U was named after a favourite aunt, who died in 1998. My aunt, oddly enough, had been named after the wife of an earlier Nicholas Whyte (not the Elizabethan judge, but his grandson).
3. If you were born a member of the opposite sex what would your name have been?
Don’t know.
4. If you could re-name yourself what name would you pick and why?
I have occasionally toyed with rechristening myself with my middle name, which is Henry, but it doesn’t really work. I think I would choose something unabbreviatable and difficult to mis-spell (see next question).
5. Are there any mispronunciations/typos that people do with your name constantly?
Absolutely. People call me “Nick” even though I always introduce myself and refer to mjyself as “Nicholas”; in writing, the “h” disappears from my first name, the “y” turns to “i” in my surname, occasionally if I’m spelling it down the phone to someone who is only half listening the “h” disappears from my surname as well. And because I work in a slightly multi-alphabet environment, my surname can be either Γουάιτ or Ουάιτ in Greek, and in Cyrillic it can be Уайт (Russian) or Вајт (Balkan). And I’ve seen an Albanian interview where I was “Nikolas Uajt” – even though it is theoretically the same alphabet.
Still, it could be worse. At least I’m not like the guy from “The Hunting of the Snark”, who had “wholly forgotten his name”:
He would answer to “Hi!” or to any loud cry,
Such as “Fry me!” or “Fritter my wig!”
To “What-you-may-call-um!” or “What-was-his-name!”
But especially “Thing-um-a jig!”
19) The Mark of Ran, by Paul Kearney
Paul was good enough to send me this after a brief encounter at P-Con earlier this year. I very much enjoyed it. It’s the first in a series, so includes a certain amount of coming-of-age narrative: our hero, Rol, sees his family massacred, gets trained as an assassin, and becomes a successful naval warrior. The contrasting environments – especially the city where he gets his training, and a long desert interlude in the middle of the naval section – are very vividly realised. Possibly this demonstrates my own ignorance, but I felt no particular problems with a 17th-century-at-latest-plus-magic urban environment coexisting with 18th-century-at-earliest naval warfare in the same world. Will look out for later books in this series.
I see Jerry Ford has been ill again, though sounds like he is getting better.
Similarly best wishes to
Spent most of this afternoon driving to the Ardennes and back, so finished listening to The Evil of the Daleks, the last story of Patrick Troughton’s first season as the Doctor, and the one voted the Best Ever Doctor Who Story by readers of Dreamwatch in 1993. Only one episode out of seven survives on video, and I haven’t seen it (yet).
I have to say that I was very unsatisfied with the plot of this classic story. The Daleks’ plan to manipulate the Doctor, and the Doctor’s attempts to manipulate Jamie, are both unrealistically convoluted as well as being very out of character. We never find out how the Daleks got photographs of the Second Doctor, whom they otherwise met only on the planet Vulcan, and of Jamie, whom they did not otherwise meet at all (unless you believe the Season 6B theory). (We also know that the first two episodes of Evil of the Daleks are contemporaneous with The War Machines, so the Daleks would have been better off trying to grab the First Doctor who was elsewhere in London at the same time.) When we hit the nineteenth century, Arthur Terrall’s presence is not very satisfactorily explained, and the fact that he is a robot is just left hanging (or rather, Ruth is told to take him as far away as possible, as if this will somehow cure him of being mechanical). And it seems difficult to imagine that the Daleks are so bad at keeping track of individual units, however de-personalised they may be, that they simply lose track of the first three humanised Daleks. (The Discontinuity Guide further asks, “Why not just kidnap the Doctor and Jamie? Why does Terrall get Toby to kidnap Jamie? Since Jamie is so essential to Dalek plans, why are the traps set for him so lethal?”)
Having said that, the acting is great, and it’s clear from the BBC photosnaps that the series looked fantastic (Maxtable’s beard!!!!!). It’s also a really great idea to return to the Dalek City on Skaro (apparently the first time the Doctor had ever been seen to return to any planet except Earth). And I loved the Victoriana; I especially liked Waterfield’s horror-filled explanation, “We had opened the way for them with our experiments. They forced me into the horror of time travel, Doctor” – sounded very HP Lovecraft! And the references to Poe were clear (and even at one point explicit). And Troughton is great, dominating every scene (and this partly accounts for the flagging pace of episode 4 when he was on holiday).
So anyway, more good than bad, but I’m very sorry not to have actually seen any of it.
I’m sure those of you who care about such things will be aware of the travails of La Petite Anglaise, the blogger sacked by her employers (the Paris branch of British accountancy firm Dixon Wilson) for, well, blogging. Most commentators have been pretty sympathetic, and so am I. She had never once identified herself or her employers on the blog, and never ever referred to the substance of her work (though did refer to two or three humorous work incidents, this supposedly being the cause of her dismissal). Most of her blog entries concerned life as an expatriate single mother, her relationships, and the usual stuff, told in a very human way. I am not a regular reader, but have skimmed from time to time.
There are lines between professional and unprofessional conduct that can be (and sometimes are) crossed by bloggers, and La Petite in my view stayed scrupulously on the right side of them. I’m delighted to read the analysis of French legal blogger Eolas (here and in more detail here) who reckons that Dixon Wilson don’t have a hope in hell of winning the employment tribunal case she has taken out against them. The ironic thing is that she was sacked for bringing the firm into disrepute through her blog; in fact their sacking her has resulted in far more negative publicity, with articles in all the main British papers, than the blog on its own would ever have achieved no matter how vitriolic she had chosen to be.
One cannot help but feel, as Eolas put it (and I translate freely), that Dixon Wilson panicked at the discovery that a member of their secretarial staff had a) a private life and b) a brain.
There are better ways of dealing with this than Dixon Wilson’s approach. About a year ago I disovered a blog written by an intern in a politically sensitive line of work, which talked perhaps a little more freely about the office environment than was wise. The line manager of the intern happened to be a friend of mine, so I took it on myself to mention the matter over drinks one evening; the relevant blog entries have now disappeared, but the intern got a full-time contract, so I assume that a request to take down the relevant entries was made and acceded to. That is what Dixon Wilson should have done; requested that the relevant entries be removed, and let her off with a caution. (Having said that, she might well have been within her rights in French employment law to refuse such a request, but it would have been a more sensible approach.)
And my advice for bloggers – switch to a system where you can post but lock your entries, such as livejournal. Though even then (as a recent incident on my f-list confirms) you have to take sensible precautions…
The Guardian has an article today taking the first steps in “constructing a true record of Britain’s ignored, decaying and under-resourced radical heritage … to celebrate the insurrectionary meeting places, non-conformist chapels and martyrs’ memorials of the people’s history”. The places/events he suggests commemorating (subject to future reader input) are:
It strikes me that there is a part of the UK – at least, as the UK was in 1819, 1848, 1913 and 1919 – which is completely missing from this list. I’ve posted about this kind of thing before, but perhaps the Guardian could remember also that things happened outside England, Scotland and Wales as part of the United Kingdom’s political history?
One nice souvenir I picked up while in Montenegro, which I can now share with you all thanks to the new scanner:
13 July being independence day, celebrating the recognition of the country by the Great Powers in 1878, and the start of the resistance against the Nazis in 1941.
Inside was this envelope:
“nezavisnost” means (not surprisingly) “independence”; “prvi dan” means “first day”.
All is explained on the back of the envelope:
The latter two images are a little bigger than the original – the first one, about the same size.
Took the camera with me, but the batteries were flat, so these are tourist website photos.
I determined to strike east and then south from our village, but realised that I had got confused in the woods and gone more southeast than I intended when I emerged in Vaalbeek, right beside the Chapel of St Mary Magdalene:
Its oldest parts and decorations are 16th century, but it was extended in the 18th and again in the 19th centuries. There were people inside preparing for the annual open-air religious rites on the fourth Sunday of July. (Why that date? 22 July is the feast of St Mary Magdalene.)
That was probably a shortcut: I pressed on along the main road, passing a monument to some Belgian sappers killed while clearing unexploded German mines in 1946, and reached my goal, the Chapel of St Theresa in the middle of the woods:
This rather intriguing shrine dates from the 1930s, built in gratitude for the miraculous healing of a boy from the village of Nodebais a few km to the south. I know no more details than that. It was, sadly, closed up.
I came back through the forest, fidning it surprisingly easy going, and before I had expected to reached the Chapel of Our Lady of Steenbergen:
Built in 1652, protected by a local fraternity and by the state: they are gearing up for the candle-lit procession around the pools of Zoetwater (sweet water) on August 15th – this is also where the Beltane ceremonies took place.
And so back home. About 13 km, I reckon, and surprised by how well my body seemed to take it. Though I still needed a nap after lunch!
Actually, before I get into my own listening/viewing, go and read
Funnily enough both the stories I got through recently were landmarks in the history of the series. The Rescue, a two-parter, was the first introduction of a new companion – followed immediately after The Dalek Invasion of Earth. I know I said I wasn’t going to watch any more Hartnell, but it was only two episodes, so surely it doesn’t really count. More significantly, The Power of the Daleks was the first introduction of a new Doctor, as Patrick Troughton took over from William Hartnell.
The Rescue is pretty light stuff, but fortunately survives in its entirety on video (if rather poor quality). The Tardis crew find a crashed spaceship on the planet Dido with only two survivors, apparently menaced by two peculiar monsters, neither of which turns out to be quite what it seems. One of the survivors is killed off, the other becomes the new companion, Vicki. What I liked about it most was the Doctor’s knowledge of the planet as it had been on a previous visit – and then he finds that it’s all changed as the natives have been (almost) wiped out. Also, of course, the travellers’ adapting to Susan’s absence at the beginning, and the confrontation scene between the Doctor and the main villain at the end. The monsters, I’m afraid, were a bit silly, and there were a couple of implausibilities in the plot.
I loved The Power of the Daleks, sadly available on audio only (or BBC photonovel here). I was busily spotting foreshadowings in the first couple of episodes – Lesterson, the scientist who has recovered a crashed Dalek spaceship, is a combination of Henry Van Statten (from the Ninth Doctor story, Dalek) and Davros (from Genesis of the Daleks, not the later inferior versions), and some lines seemed to me to have been lifted direct from here to the later stories.
The suspicion of Ben and Polly as to the credentials of the new man in the Tardis are entirely understandable, particularly given his habit of referring to “the Doctor” in the third person. But confusion of identity is rather a theme in the story anyway: the Doctor is immediately taken by the colonists of Vulcan to be the Examiner from Earth; the Daleks are pretending to be helping the humans (few more chilling lines than the mendacious “I am your servant!” chant which ends episode 2); the humans themselves are so factionalised that nobody seems entirely sure who is on which side.
Robert James as Lesterson was particularly good, undergoing transition from blinkered scientist, to seeing the error of his ways, to breaking down completely. I was also impressed by Pamela Ann Davey as Janley, an actual serious role for a female character. Polly does not appear in epsiode 4 (presumably Anneke Wills was taking the week off? Obviously anticipated since she is kidnapped half way through the previous episode); Ben, irritatingly, keeps wanting to go back to the Tardis and get out of the place. But Patrick Troughton’s Doctor, perhaps a little uncertain at first (and hiding behind that annoying habit of playing the recorder) comes into his own pretty quickly, and by the end of the story you know who’s Who.
Apart from book reviews, reviews of old Doctor Who series, and the odd meme, this lj has been a bit quiet of late. This basically reflects the fact that it has been so sweltering hot recently that apart from work and commuting (in the blessedly air-conditioned office and car) I have only had the energy to read books and write about them, and have been deliberately choosing short books at that.
Anyway, I went out and bought a new TV today. The old one had never had great picture quality, and then the remote control packed it in a few weeks back; it was still within a few weeks of the two year guarantee, so I brought it back to the shop this morning. They promised to fix it, but mentioned a minimum repair period of three weeks. Thinking of my poor square-eyed children, unable to feed their addiction, I consulted with Anne by phone and decided to buy a new one – we can always sell on (or indeed give away) the old one to a good cause.
I immediately spotted the ideal new LCD TV in Fnac, but they refused to sell it to me as the one on display was their only one in stock. I bought a scanner off them anyway, and went exploring. Krëaut were ruled out due to having no staff presence and no serious explanation of which models were best. Vanden Borre got my custom due to very good customer service, both from staff and in terms of explaining what features each model had on the labels attached. Not that it really mattered, as they had the model I had already decided on in Fnac.
So, bought it, brought it home, plugged it in. I was slightly surprised to hear that both daughters had been waiting eagerly for this – I knew that U is a total addict to Fimbles and Miffy DVDs, but one never knows exactly what B is taking in. We were all rather more concerned to find that the new LCD TV was having problems settling in – colour faded within minutes to black and white if you were lucky, then various screen glitches began to manifest until you turned it off in disgust; when turned on again it functioned perfectly well for a minute or so and then the old problems resumed.
Much anxious fiddling with cables and scanning of the internet ensued, with the only plausible solution apparently to unplug it for an hour or so. So I did.
And now it works perfectly.
In the meantime I had bollocksed up the internet connection for the home computer and spent another frustrated hour tinkering with that before it too came right. And then I installed the scanner successfully. So I am feeling like I am Super Tech Man right now.
Plus I bought a headset so I can Skype from home. F now wants a demonstration tomorrow morning. I hope it is a bit cooler.
