Fri, 12:07: Many congrats to the new German Minister of Agriculture, @Cem_Oezdemir – was tremendously helpful back when he was first an MEP. Wishing him every success.
Fri, 17:09: RT @JamesKAArcher: @NickFletcherMP “The nuanced point made in the actual exact words I chose were not interpreted correctly by those using…
Current The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien Shanghai Sparrow, by Gaie Sebold Beautiful World, Where Are You, by Sally Rooney The Last Defender of Camelot, by Roger Zelazny (the 2002 collection, not the 1980s one of the same name)
Last books finished Exploding School to Pieces: Growing Up With Pop Culture In the 1970s, by Mick Deal – did not finish Mortal Engines, by Philip Reeve The Story of Sex: From Apes to Robots, by Philippe Brenot and Laetitia Coryn River of Gods, by Ian McDonald The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun, by J R R Tolkien, ed. Verlyn Flieger Waste Tide, by Qiufan Chen Iron Council, by China Miéville – did not finish One Bright Star to Guide Them, by John C. Wright The Last Witness, by K. J. Parker
Next books Le dernier Atlas, Tome 3, by Fabien Vehlmann Lying Under the Apple Tree, by Alice Munro
(This was the last review I had written before I went down with COVID. if you have been wondering how I kept up my daily book posts for the last week, it's because they had all been written some time before…)
Second paragraph of third story ("Eve of the Fomorians", by Robert Mammone):
All Danny saw was the faintest edge of the moon: pale and ghostly and sickle sharp, sailing dreamily through the gathering clouds. The faint hiss of waves running onto the shingle beach reached him, as did the lonely clanging of the buoy in the harbour, nodding and bowing with the tide.
Another collection of really strong short stories in the Lethbridge-Stewart continuity. I think my pick would be the first, "The Bledoe Cadets and the Bald Man of Pengriffen", by Tim Gambrell, a tale from the Brigadier's childhood with, as it turns out, no sfnal elements, but they are all good, requiring not too much familiarity with the surrounding novels. You can get it here.
Well, I am very glad to say that I feel a bit better today, and spent most of the afternoon downstairs. F ventured forth to the supermarket, armed only with a long shopping list, but seems to have survived the experience.
I did some mild blogging and even cleared this morning’s work emails, though that still leaves me more than a week in arrears. I generally write my book posts a couple of weeks in advance; tonight’s is the last that was written before I got the bug. But I expect to be able to do some catching up at the weekend, and the odds are that I will be fit for work on Monday.
Thu, 16:55: RT @EmporersNewC: It’s not just that he said it. He wrote it down. This was a considered argument. This ludicrous statement is an example o…
Thu, 16:56: RT @daraobriain: Seriously, ladies, stop with all the crime. You’ve got Jodie Whittaker, at least leave us crime.
Thu, 18:20: RT @davidallengreen: This letter only makes things worse There was no misconstruction: we heard exactly what you said from your own prepar…
Fri, 10:45: RT @DavidHenigUK: The UK-France story migration story as close to comprehensive as we’re likely to see. Why UK insults are counter-producti…
Nothing drastic to report, after yesterday’s exciting adventure. I am 54 years old, and have not had to spend a night in hospital since my parents brought me home from the maternity ward. That record still stands, just.
The good news is that my appetite has returned – I had the same dinner as the rest of the family, for the first time in a week – and without going into detail, my digestive system seems to be back on track as well. These are the first real upticks I have had since I went down with the bug, but I am still very tired and again spent the day in bed.
A couple of people have asked what medication I am taking. Very little, is the answer. Belgian clinical guidance is to take the maximum safe level of paracetamol (four grammes a day), and I have combined that with advice from my old friend Emma in Stroud to take an aspirin daily to deter clotting. (And that may have worked.) Otherwise, a cup of coffee in the morning, herbal tea through the day, and most crucial of all, a hot water bottle to keep me warm in bed. I also have a TENS machine for micro massage. (Thanks to Esther for letting me try hers out when we were in Buxton.)
And I have been lucky, I know. Another old friend in Antwerp, a year and a half younger than me, is in intensive care with COVID. We had a damn good lunch together just six weeks ago. Wishing him well.
Full title: Building Healthy Boundaries: An Over-giver’s Guide to Knowing When to Say ‘Yes’ and How to Say ‘No’ in Relationships.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
The one topic that I get asked about time and time again from my clients is how to set boundaries and how to say 'No'. My dearest wish is that you will read this book and it will give you both hope that you too can set healthy boundaries and it will give you practical steps to take to help you achieve that.
A very succinct (28 pages) self-help book for people who have difficulty with boundaries in their relationships, and who as a result become vulnerable to abusive partners. The author (who is known to me personally) endured an abusive marriage for many years, and eventually realised that she had to get out for her own mental survival; and she has converted that awful personal experience into a new career as a coach and counsellor. She particularly concentrates on the problem of asserting yourself and your own interests in the face of a spouse who has no interest in your own welfare. It's not a situation I have directly experienced myself, but this is a useful little text that I might share with people who I suspect might need it. (And do contact me if you think you might know such a person.) You can get it for free here.
I am fine (ish). I spent five hours last night in the local hospital, but they released me without immediate need for further treatment, so I am back at home again.
Late yesterday evening, my pulse oximeter was giving a reading of 92%, which is below ideal, and I had a fever. Anne is a doctor’s daughter, checked the official Belgian clinical guidance, and got me to call the duty doctor who recommended that we go straight to hospital. So I had five somewhat dazed hours on a comfortable enough bed, being prodded, pricked and scanned; blood tests, EKG, lung scans.
The lung scans were particularly aimed at checking my vulnerability to a pulmonary embolism. I take a rather keen interest in this for three reasons:
Embolism and thrombosis are the biggest killers of COVID patients in hospitals, because the virus makes your blood more likely to clot unhelpfully. In normal times, they are usually caused by blood clots from elsewhere in the body making it to the lungs; with COVID, the clots are already there.
More personally, last year I was (successfully) advising the International Society on Thrombosis and Haemostasis on how to get the World Health Organisation to recommend thrombosis risk screening in global clinical guidance for all new COVID patients in hospitals (I did not mention it at the time, but this was part of my motivation for going to Geneva in July 2020, where I directly lobbied ambassadors on the issue).
Even more personally, my grandmother died of a pulmonary embolism at 31 in 1946, more than twenty years before I was born, leaving four small children, one a new baby. (My great-aunt, at 105, says that my son F has a real look of his great-grandmother, her sister who has been dead now for 75 years.)
So I was perfectly happy for them to take all the time they needed to assess the risks. In the end though, while my lungs are indeed speckled with COVID (and I didn’t need a scan to tell me that) the risk of clots seems to be low, which is a relief.
The other significant extra risk is of secondary infection, but they ruled that out with the first set of blood tests. Again, a relief.
So I was sent home at 2.30 am, with instructions to come straight back if I experience serious breathing difficulties, and/or if the oximeter reading drops below 90%. And I have just woken up.
There really isn’t much new to say today. I am still feeling pretty much the same, horizontal most of the time and sleeping a lot. We have been regularly checking in with the oximeter which shows my oxygen levels just in the not-too-worrying zone. The first measurement I took this morning was definitely on the low side, but after my first cup of coffee it went back into the safe zone, and has stayed there.
The Belgian numbers are very bad. As of this morning the infection rate is a hair below the peak of last October/November, but increasing at 54% a week, so will certainly blow through that record tomorrow or Friday. More than 1% of the Belgian population has had a positive diagnosis in the last seven days reported. The health services are officially overwhelmed. F had his latest test today and had to queue for half an hour. I will be cautious of course, but I’m also not going to put the system under further strain unnecessarily.
Second paragraph of first entry under C ("Caldera"):
In itself the caldera wouldn't appear to be a remarkable site. Though now covered over, at first glance it would seem to be little more than an absence, where the Yssgaroth incursion ate away all local matter and the Houses later surrounded the area with defences and utilities of their own devising. But its position is key. Anything exert-ing an influence on the site of the caldera will, by definition, affect the rest of history. It's the focal point not just of time but of the Houses' culture: as the Protocols of the Great Houses are worked into the very nature of history, coded into every one of the "threads" which criss-cross the Spiral Politic, then more than any other location the caldera is the centre-point of all that the Houses know and all that the Houses are. Theoretically, from here everything about the Houses – their past, their future, their collective memory, even their language – could be manipulated. The Houses themselves have never risked any significant experimentation, but during the War Era at least one abortive attempt was made to introduce foreign matter to this empty space at the heart of the oldest civilisation. That the site might be vulnerable is a constant worry to the ruling Houses, something which may have been a factor in the decision to construct the Nine Homeworlds shortly before the War began.
The first in the series of Faction Paradox Doctor Who spinoff books, this is supposedly an encyclopedia of things in the Faction Paradox world which sort of comes together to make a story or several stories (an approach also used by Christopher Priest in The Islanders). I admit I did find it all pretty confusing, but it was engaging enough that I've got hold of the next few volumes in the series and will start getting through them at the rate of one a month for the next while. This is not easy to get hold of.
Tue, 12:56: RT @alexhallhall: This week I shall try to give more substance to my thread last week about US views on Brexit. But first, some background…
Tue, 14:09: RT @DaveKeating: The vaccines may not be as good at preventing infections as we were hoping, but the data shows they are clearly very good…
Wed, 11:07: The Wombles at Eurovision Song Contest 1974 https://t.co/wPy7HDOmFi This interval act must have really baffled other Europeans. (Presenter Katie Boyle was born Caterina Irene Elena Maria Imperiali dei Principi di Francavilla; not surprised that she used a shorter stage name.)
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging which will fall in 2023 Every six-ish days, I've been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I've found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
A month when I don't appear to have travelled outside Belgium. A work trip to Barcelona was cancelled at the last moment. (Work continued to be pretty grim.) I attended the showdown between Olli Rehn and Guy Verhofstadt, which ended with sweetness and light.
I read 21 books in January 2014. From this month on I started to post the covers of (most of) the books Iread in my monthly roundups, so I'm keeping them for the reprises.
~6,500 pages
9/21 by women (Ohlmeyer, Grenville, Rendell, 2xCharnas, Ohlmeyer, Hale, Kennedy, Tobe)
1/21 by PoC (Tobe, though possibly I should count Sfarr too)
No particularly awful books this month, and four good ones:
About Time: The Unauthorized Guide to Doctor Who, 2005-2006; Series 1 & 2, which you can get here
Not much change today – still horizontal, still on tea and painkillers, still not much appetite (or sense of taste or smell). But a couple of things to cheer me up.
First off, we got an oximeter from the local pharmacy, and it’s very reassuring to have a device you can stick your finger in to find out if you are just sick or Very Sick. Belgian advice is that you seek further medical help if the oxidation number is consistently at or below 93%. I’m just above that, consistently at around 94%. Which is not great, but could be worse. (I am not really interested in hearing if your local guidance is different.)
Second, I am glad to say that I checked with London colleagues, after my two days in the office there last week, including two working lunches, and nobody else has had a positive diagnosis. (Nor has my dinner date on Monday night.) So it looks like the only other person I have infected is Anne. Which sucks for both of us, but again, it could have been worse.
But I don’t think I will be up and about again before the weekend, and I don’t think I will be up for a planned trip to Portugal for SMOFCon at the end of next week, so alas will have to cancel that.
Meanwhile our Brussels office has gone to teleworking four days a week, in line with the latest restrictions, which obviously makes no difference to me this week anyway. Supposedly this is just for the next three weeks. We’ll see…
Mon, 17:11: RT @David_K_Clark: Much anguished talk from unionists in recent days about how Scottish politics has become trapped by the national questio…
Mon, 17:45: RT @RobotArchie: I agree with most of this. Specifically the “Best Series” Hugo does not seem to be working so I don’t think we should mak…
Mon, 21:59: RT @BriannaWu: Just my opinion, but as someone who has had bricks thrown through her window – I think doxing and making someone feel unsafe…
Tue, 10:45: RT @PajamaStew: I may regret sharing this, but I have a very personal story I would like to tell. I hope it doesn’t get too long… Anyway.…
As we shall see later, Paul is writing this [Galatians 1:15-17] in his own defense. He has apparently been accused of getting his "gospel" secondhand from the Jerusalem apostles. His opponents are therefore going over his head and appealing to Peter, James, and the rest, like someone objecting to the way a band was playing a cover from an old Beatles song and phoning up Paul McCartney himself to check on how it should really be played. Paul is therefore insisting that his message was his own; he had gotten it from Jesus himself, not from other members of the movement. It had come, he says, "through an unveiling of Jesus the Messiah."2 "The message" in question was not, after all, a theory, a new bit of teaching, or even details of how someone might be "saved." "The message" was the news about Jesus himself: he was raised from the dead, he was therefore Israel's Messiah, he was the Lord of the world. All of that was "given" to Paul on the road to Damascus. Knowing Israel's scriptures as he did, he didn't need anybody else to explain what it all meant. Start with the scriptural story, place the crucified and risen Jesus at the climax of the story, and the meaning, though unexpected and shocking, is not in doubt. That is the point he is making. 2 Gal. 1:12
This book by the former Bishop of Durham is meant to be a popular biography of the Apostle Paul, tracing his voyages, both intellectual and across the Eastern Mediterranean, in the middle part of the first century AD. St Paul is probably the most important historical figure in Christianity apart from Jesus Christ, and it's therefore of interest to get a better understanding of what he was actually trying to do. We are impeded by the fact that there is no contemporary record of his existence outside the New Testament, where he is a key character in the Acts of the Apostles and traditionally regarded as the author of a dozen or so of the Epistles, with most modern scholars agreeing that he really did write more than half of them. We are also impeded by the fact that while a lot of his surviving writing seems to be arguing against other lines of thought inside and outside the early Christian community, we barely know what the other side really said because only Paul's side of the argument survives.
Faced with all of this, it's a difficult task to make sense of the story for the non-specialist reader, and for this non-specialist reader, it didn't quite come together. I got that Paul's particular innovations were to cast Jesus as a fulfiller of Jewish tradition, and to embrace non-Jews in Christianity. I didn't really get the basics of what Paul thought the faith basis of Christianity is – I felt that Wright was striving to avoid being trapped in the traditional Protestant v Catholic debate here and ended up not saying all that much. I think there is probably more to be said about Paul's views on women, especially women in ministry, which I suspect were more modern than most people like to believe. I did like the nitty-gritty (if largely imagined) detail of Paul continuing to ply his trade as a maker and repairer of tents while also evangelising the Levant. I was frustrated that Wright presents very little of other scholars' views, and gives no recommendations for further reading.
The single most interesting thing about St Paul is that he had a sudden conversion experience one day while travelling to Damascus, probably in the mid-30s, only a few years after the Crucifixion. Until then, he had been colluding in the persecution of Christians (not yet called that of course) by Jewish and Roman authorities. But in that moment on the road, he experienced the direct presence of Jesus, was struck blind for several days, and then felt compelled to preach Christianity for the rest of his life (probably about thirty years). It's pretty difficult to explain, let alone explain away, and Wright doesn't really try. Of course it comes near the very start of the story, and we don't know a lot about the end (though apparently his remains have recently been identified).
This was my top unread non-fiction book, and my top unread book acquired in 2020. Next on those piles respectively are The 48 Laws of Power, by Robert Greene, and Summer, by Ali Smith.
Well, yesterday was gruesome. Horrible gastric symptoms in the evening; I am a little better today but my appetite has completely disappeared and I have not yet got out of bed.
It has also become clear how I got infected last weekend. No blame at all to the person who I caught it from; we took all sensible precautions, but in the end it’s risk reduction and not elimination.
Anne is a lot better than me, but still very far from 100%. We are both better off then the husband of a friend who died of Covid, aged 62, in just five days earlier this year. But it’s going to be another few days before I’m fit to work again.
Sun, 15:37: “He doesn’t have MPs who are devoted to him because they admire the calibre and consistency of his character because you can’t esteem what doesn’t exist. He hasn’t got loyalists, only lackeys. He inspires no true believers, he simply attracts hangers-on.” https://t.co/TrudB1IQPA
Sun, 19:13: RT @bwalsh: @nwbrux It is by no means her strongest (“Once Upon a River” or “Bellman & Black” for me), but I prefer Diane Setterfield on a…
Mon, 10:45: RT @Life_Disrupted: Lord Frost is complaining that the two parts of Ireland are trading with each other. Why are they not trading with New…
Woke up this morning with bad headache and cough. Anne’s positive results came through, and indeed I found mine on the mijngezondheid.be website. She thinks she is improving; I am definitely not – very bad gastric symptoms this evening. When this is all over my weight will have improved!
A.1.1: Mark Protection Committee – I would like to be a candidate for the Mark Protection Committee, which will elect six members in DC, three for two-year terms and three for three-year terms. I like to think that my professional experience in public affairs could be an asset to the MPC. I would need a proposer and seconder who will (unlike me) be present in DC. Expressions of interest welcome. Edited to add: Apparently only a proposer is necessary.
A.2.1: Nitpicking & Flyspecking Committee – appears to be doing an excellent job. Commentary on individual proposals below.
A.2.2: Worldcon Runners Guide Editorial Committee – This body has never approached me for input. The Hugos section of its WSFS page is very out of date.
A.3.1: Formalization of Long List Entries (FOLLE) Committee – no comment.
A.3.2: Hugo Awards Study Committee – I was one of the original proposers of this committee. I am very disappointed with the results. The only concrete output that it has achieved in four years of existence is the addition of the words “or Comic” to the category title of “Best Graphic Story”. In the meantime other proposed changes have been killed off by referring them to this committee, which has then failed to consider them. I would not support the continuation of this committee’s mandate. I do not blame anyone, especially in the circumstances of the last two years, but I think we have proved that this is not a format that will deliver change.
On the other hand, if it is renewed, I would prefer to continue as a member, and I strongly urge (yet again!) that it takes the reform of the Best Artist categories as a priority. This was the main motivation for my proposing the committee in the first place. It is the single issue that has caused most headaches in my four years of Hugo administration. The Artist category definitions are very out of date, and present a risk to the future reputation of the awards because it would be very easy to make a public and embarrassing mistake. A bit more on this further down.
B: Financial statements – no comment.
C: Standing Rule changes – as yet, nothing to comment on.
D1-D4: extension of eligibility requests – provided these are technically correct I would be inclined to generosity.
D5: swapping the order of “Best Related Work” and “Best Graphic Story or Comic” in the list of Hugo categories – good idea, from the Nitpicking & Flyspecking Committee.
E: Business Passed On – mostly stuff that was passed in Dublin in 2019 and rejected but re-proposed in New Zealand last year, needing ratification in DC to become part of the rules. The first two however are votes on sunset clauses.
E1: making Best Series permanent – as my regular reader knows, I'm not a fan of the Best Series category. I feel it's important that the Hugo Awards represent the best in the genre of the previous year. With the Best Series final ballot, we are being asked to judge between a series that started in 2009, four recent trilogies (one of which has some associated short fiction) and a series of novellas capped by a novel. I don't think it's really comparing like with like, and we're certainly not comparing 2020 with 2020.
In addition, as a conscientious Hugo voter I generally try to read every work on the final ballot every year I have a vote. That's completely impossible with Best Series.
The four winners of Best Series so far have been worthy victors, but I can't see that level of quality being continued indefinitely. No winner can be eligible again; no finalist can be eligible again until another two volumes with 250,000 words have been produced. I think we are already starting to see the well of plausible nominees run dry.
I expect that the Business Meeting, which cares little for the concerns of Hugo administrators, will vote to make it permanent anyway, but I would oppose it if I were there.
E2: making the Lodestar Award permanent – here I go the other way. I was very dubious about introducing yet another category to the burden of administration, but I have to admit that the finalists and winners so far have really added to the quality of the awards. So I’d vote to keep it.
The next five are outputs from the Nitpicking & Flyspecking Committee.
E3: Clarification of Worldcon Powers – simply makes it clear that a Worldcon cannot revoke a previous year’s Hugo Award. I support this clarification.
E4: Disposition of NASFiC Ballot – a technical tidying up of site selection rules which looks OK, but I have no strong feeling about it.
E5: A Problem of Numbers – a welcome update clarifying an apparent discrepancy between a strict reading of the rules and the realities of online Hugo voting. I support this clarification.
E6: The Needs of the One – again clarifies part of the counting rules and codifies existing practice. I support.
E7: That Ticket Has Been Punched – tidies up part of the eligibility requirements for Best Series. As noted above, I would prefer not to have the category anyway, and I don’t have a strong opinion on this amendment.
E8: Keeping Five and Six – this directly reverses a proposal I made in 2019, to return to five finalists per category given that the Puppy emergency is now long over. Oppose.
E9: No Deadline for Nominations Eligibility – this again directly reverses a proposal I made in 2019. If passed, it will also be a big change to voter eligibility for nominating in the 2022 Hugos just two weeks before nominations open. Oppose.
E10: Preserving Supporting Membership Sales for Site Selection – No strong feeling either way. Not sure that this is a problem requiring a solution.
E11: Clear Up the Definition of Public in the Artist Categories Forever – a tweak to the Best Fan Artist definition which I respect because it comes from the community of artists who are directly concerned, but it barely scratches the surface of the bigger problems with the Artist categories. Support faute de mieux.
F: new constitutional amendments
F.1: One Episode Per Series – would restrict TV series to only one episode (rather than the current maximum of two) on the ballot for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. I am very opposed. This would be the Business Meeting going way beyond previous practice in telling voters what they can have on the ballot. It will increase the burden on administrators who will have to contact confused TV executives and acquaint them with the technicalities of Hugo rules. It’s also not clear if a two-episode story (such as the She-Ra story nominated this year) would fall foul of this rule. And basically I don’t see any demand for it; on the contrary, I suspect that most voters think it’s cool that a popular show should have more than one bite of the cherry.
There seems to be no F.2!
F.3-6: more sensible proposals from the Nitpicking & Flyspecking Committee which should go through without dissent. F.4 and F.5 are particularly important to keep Worldcon GDPR-compliant.
F.7: Non-transferability of Voting Rights – I have read this several times and I still do not really understand it, even though it is supposedly making life easier for Hugo administrators.
F.8: Best Audiobook – a proposed new Hugo category. I think it is clear that in general I oppose category inflation. For any new Hugo category proposal, I would like to see evidence 1) that it’s responding to the demands of a significant market share of fandom, 2) that it’s redressing an injustice in the current set-up for works which are not getting on the ballot in existing categories, and 3) that it would be an appropriate thing for Hugo voters to vote on. I don’t see a problem here with the third of these criteria (unlike, say, the Best Translation proposals), but not much evidence is presented on the first point, and mere hand-waving on the second.
Again, as my regular reader knows, I’m a huge fan of Big Finish’s output myself, but I have long since reconciled myself to the fact that Big Finish is not getting Hugo nominations because its overlap with Hugo fandom is minimal, and not because it needs its own category. So I would oppose this amendment (or refer it to the Hugo Awards Study Committee, which comes to the same thing). If it were to be taken forward, it would require a lot of definitional tweaking.
I opened the drawer of my desk and pulled out a small mirror. A woman with somewhat ordinary features stared back at me. Her hair was a plain mousy color and of medium length, tied up rather hastily in a ponytail at the back. She had no cheekbones to speak of and her face, I noticed, had just started to show some rather obvious lines. I thought of my mother, who had looked as wrinkled as a walnut by the time she was forty-five. I shuddered, placed the mirror back in the drawer and took out a faded and slightly dog-eared photograph. It was a photo of myself with a group of friends taken in the Crimea when I had been simply Corporal T. E. Next, 33550336, Driver: APC, Light Armored Brigade. I had served my country diligently, been involved in a military disaster and then honorably discharged with a gong to prove it. They had expected me to give talks about recruitment and valor but I had disappointed them. I attended one regimental reunion but that was it; I had found myself looking for the faces that I knew weren't there.
I had read this ages ago, probably soon after it came out in 2001 (and before I started bookblogging in late 2003). It didn't hold up quite as well as I had hoped. It's still funny to have an alternate version of England where literature is to an extent real, and people are annoyed by the way Jane Eyre ends with the title character going to India with her cousin, with lots of throwaway lines about culture and memory in Fforde's parallel world. But (not Fforde's fault) war in the Crimea is a lot less funny now than it was then; and (more his fault) the book now seems very white and the humour a bit more laboured in general. So I'm revising my opinion of it downwards, alas.
This was the most popular book on my shelves not yet reviewed online. Next up is The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury.
The first leg of my ill-fatedtrip to Buxton last weekend was an early flight to Manchester, and I decided I should take the opportunity to sample its cultural delights. There is a lot to see in Manchester but I rapidly zeroed in on two particular possibilities: the John Rylands Library in the middle of the city, and the Imperial War Museum North, out at Old Trafford.
The John Rylands Library was a bit of a bust, frankly. I really wanted to see Papyrus 52, the oldest surviving fragment of the New Testament in the world (be honest – how many of you knew that was in Manchester?) but it turned out that the papyrus gallery is not being reopened to the public until December; I was three weeks early. In any case, I got there at 11.15 to discover that it closes for a long lunch break at 12. Luckily my lunch date, Lee Berridge, was able to move his schedule around and meet me a bit earlier, and then kindly drove me out to the IWMN after a very nice meal.
This was a lot more satisfying. I am only mildly fascinated by collections of military memorabilia, but I am still a little fascinated, and there is plenty of that at the Imperial War Museum North. It also tries to look at the bigger picture of the impact of military service and war on families and civilians. It's not completely successful – there is one embarrassing dead-end gallery about the contributions of eastern Europeans to the second world war effort for instance – but it's not completely uncritical either.
What made the museum for me was the art collection. My attention was grabbed by the very first painting I saw as I came in the door, which seemed an eerily familiar landscape.
Gash’s painting reflects on the First World War Battle of Kosturino as it impacted on the landscape and communities at the Balkans Front. More than 100 years on, the conflict continues to shape and score the physical and social character of the region.
During the Battle of Kosturino, the inexperienced 10th (Irish) Division faced an invading Bulgarian Army, resulting in heavy losses. Hard pressed by disease and the enemy, they fought over treacherous and often impossible terrain. Their defeat led to the complete withdrawal of allied forces from Serbia. This battle is a forgotten story of the conflict and the experiences of soldiers on the Balkans front are not well remembered.
I'm going to single out just a few of the other art works that struck me.
This is a 1918 painting by Flora Lion of the women’s canteen at the Phoenix Works in Bradford. It captures a moment when, because of the war, new social roles were opening up for women, especially perhaps young women. I love the dynamic of the two women whose arms are linked, and the other with a dangling teacup looking wistfully away.
This grim picture shows the Death Cart in the Jewish ghetto of Łódź in Nazi-occupied Poland. The artist Edith Birkin, then a teenager, lived there from 1941 until 1944, and then survived both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. She painted this in the early 1980s. It leaves little to the imagination.
As sadly could have been predicted, the Imperial War Museum has very little to say about Ireland. It does have a couple of interesting paintings.
“Street Incident, Londonderry [sic]”, a 1973 painting by Gladys Maccabe, captures well how squaddies in Northern Ireland seemed to exist in some parallel time stream. I remember Anne, on an early visit to me in Belfast, commenting that it was very weird to see soldiers in jungle camouflage patrolling the streets – but it obviously worked, because everyone was ignoring them as if they were not there. The IWM says that Maccabe “maintained a deliberately balanced, unpartisan viewpoint”. Hmm, just check out the title of the painting again for a sec…
Keane’s art really struck me. The IWM doesn’t go into his (lefty) politics in depth, but his work speaks for itself. Here to finish with is his “Scenes on the Road to Hell”, painted in 1991, showing Kuwaiti children celebrating victory and a burnt out Iraqi tank. A picture really can be worth a thousand words.
Sat, 13:20: RT @Mico_Vlahovic: Translation: Somewhere in Montenegro, 1968, communist party meeting: “But comrade secretary, what shall we do if the tro…
Well, feeling no worse today, if also no better; sniffly and sneezy. I have had much worse flu than this. (But it would certainly have hit me much harder without the vaccinations.)
Anne had her test today, and we expect it will be positive. F’s test was negative, as anticipated, but now he has gone into the same isolation at home as when he was the only one infected, a few weeks back. U shows no signs of being affected; we have not yet been able to sign her up for a test – since she doesn’t have a phone, the tracing system doesn’t spot her immediately.
Lots of fluids and painkillers. And we just got a massive grocery delivery of oven-ready meals for F and U – Anne and I have largely lost our appetite, and I proved yesterday that I am not really up to cooking
And I am certainly not up to much else, for the time being. We had originally scheduled to visit my relatives near Aalst tomorrow – they called and cancelled while I was in London because they had non-COVID colds; we’d certainly have had to cancel anyway. (They have recovered well, apparently.)
A Beautiful Mind won the Oscar for Best Picture of 2001, and three others: Best Director (Ron Howard), Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress (Jennifer Connelly as Alicia) It lost in four categories, two of them to that year’s Hugo and Nebula winner, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which also won four Oscars that year.
The other four Oscar nominees were The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which I have of course seen, and Gosford Park, In the Bedroom and Moulin Rouge!, which I haven’t. The other 2002 films I have seen are Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone, Donnie Darko, Monsters Inc, Not Another Teen Movie and Storytelling. I love FOTR, have affection for Not Another Teen Movie, but am not especially wowed by any of the others, including A Beautiful Mind. IMDB users rank A Beautiful Mind2nd on one ranking and 11th on the other, behind FOTR both times. Here’s a trailer.
We have no actors here who have appeared in Doctor Who, but several returnees from previous Oscar and Hugo/Nebula winners, most notably Russell Crowe, the central character John Nash here, and also the title character of last year’s winner Gladiator.
There’s been a somewhat longer gap since we last saw Christopher Plummer, here psychiatrist Dr Rosen, as Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music – 36 years, which is the longest interval I’ve so far seen between top billed roles.
Ed Harris, the sinister Parcher who is the product of Nash’s delusions here, was the equally sinister Cristof in The Truman Show two years ago.
Judd Hirsch, mathematician Helinger here, was the psychiatrist in Ordinary People, 21 years ago.
Victor Steinbach is Professor Horner here and was Mikolaj Ternovsky in 2010, but you know what, I have COVID and I’m not able to find pics of him in either role quickly.
I confess that I was not hugely impressed by A Beautiful Mind. It is a biopic of mathematician John Nash, who suffered from schizophrenia for much of his life; a story of romance triumphing over adversity, but you won’t learn much from it, or indeed you may learn the wrong things from it, about mental illness, mathematics, John Nash, or Alicia Nash. Film makers, even makers of biopics, are not obliged to stick rigidly to the historical record. But a lot of Truth here has been sacrificed for Art, leaving only a basic glurge plot about love triumphing over health issues, with some special effects for the central character’s delusions.
As so often, my biggest problems with the film include race and gender, combined in the depiction of Alicia Nash. Jennifer Connolly certainly deserved her Oscar as the only interesting character in the film. But the fact is that in real life Alicia Nash was from El Salvador, and spoke English with a Latin American accent. There is no hint in the film whatsoever that she was anything other than a WASP. We have not had such an egregious example of white-washing in an Oscar winner since All the King’s Men eliminated the entire African-American population of the state in which it was set. And Alicia was herself a gifted mathematics student, but we see nothing of that here.
(And I don’t think there is a single non-white speaking part; Princeton has had at least a handful of black students from the 1940s onwards.)
The real John Nash’s love life was just a little more complicated than is depicted on screen. He had long running affairs with several other men, and had a child by another woman before he met Alicia. He was once arrested for indecent exposure. He and Alicia formally divorced before getting back together again. Apparently the film makers felt that it would be too difficult to depict his bisexuality without implying that it was linked to his mental illness (a link which was mistakenly made by many of those who treated him). They certainly did not even try to do so.
It’s difficult to put mathematics into a mainstream drama. But again, the film-makers did not try very hard. There are a couple of mutterings about game theory, but otherwise it’s an activity done by white men behind the scenes, except when Nash starts writing on windows. I think that A Theory of Everything did it rather better, though I will also admit that perhaps Stephen Hawking’s theories are more telegenic than Nash’s.
Schizophrenia cannot in general be cured by the treatment portrayed in the film. Nash struggled with it for decades. He himself felt that the natural hormonal changes of aging eventually enabled him to reject his delusions; be that as it may, a recovery such as his is unusual. And while the manifestation of those delusions in the personalities of the sinister Parcher, friendly English Charles and Charles’ niece Marcee is compelling cinema and well executed, it really isn’t the lived experience of most people with schizophrenia and wasn’t the lived experience of Nash himself.
Nash’s hallucinations were much more of voices and weird ideas about politics, which is fairly “normal” for his condition. Rain Man wobbled a bit on the reality of autism, but was basically honest about it. A Beautiful Mind, again, went for Art rather than Truth, leading to heaven knows how many ignorant and stressful conversations between well-meaning people who think they know all about schizophrenia from having seen the film, and desperate people who are actually trying to manage its effects in their own lives.
I am not going to totally dump on the film. The acting is good, the music is good, and the cinematography is great – in particular Princeton emerges as something of a character in its own right. (Though again, Nash’s professional life included many stops other than Princeton – but not the Pentagon.)
The film is based on a prize-winning biography with the same title by Sylvia Nasar, the second paragraph of whose third chapter is:
What he saw was a genteel, prerevolutionary village surrounded by gently rolling woodlands, lazy streams, and a patchwork of cornfields.2 Settled by Quakers toward the end of the seventeenth century, Princeton was the site of a famous Washington victory over the British and, for a brief six-month interlude in 1783, the de facto capital of the new republic. With its college-Gothic buildings nestled among lordly trees, stone churches, and dignified old houses, the town looked every inch the wealthy, manicured exurb of New York and Philadelphia that, in fact, it was. Nassau Street, the town’s sleepy main drag, featured a row of “better” men’s clothing shops, a couple of taverns, a drugstore, and a bank. It had been paved before the war, but bicycles and pedestrians still accounted for most of the traffic. In This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald had described Princeton circa World War I as “the pleasantest country club in America.”3 Einstein called it “a quaint, ceremonious village” in the 1930s.4 Depression and wars had scarcely changed the place. May Veblen, the wife of a wealthy Princeton mathematician, Oswald Veblen, could still identify by name every single family, white and black, well-to-do and of modest means, in every single house in town.5 Newcomers invariably felt intimidated by its gentility. One mathematician from the West recalled, “I always felt like my fly was open.”6 2 See, for example, Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem (New York: Penguin, 1993); Ed Regis, Who Got Einstein’s Office? (Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley, 1987); and recollections of Nash’s contemporaries, including interviews with Harold Kuhn and Harley Rogers and letter from George Mowbry, 4.5.95. 3 F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (New York: Scribner, 1920). 4 Albert Einstein, quoted in Goldstein, op. cit. 5 As recalled by her niece Gillian Richardson, interview, 12.14.95. 6 Donald Spencer, professor of mathematics, Princeton University, interview, Durango, Colorado, 11.18.95.
I got a lot more out of the book than the film. It is honest where the film is not about Alicia’s origins, John Nash’s sexuality and the nature and course of his illness and career. It goes a bit into the mathematics without trying too hard; in the end, the non-specialist has to take the word of the specialist that this was all Really Important Stuff.
But where the book excels is in its examination of the social and political construction of the environment where Nash worked. It had not occurred to me that the Princeton of Einstein (and Nash) was very different from the Princeton of Woodrow Wilson, just a few decades before. Nasar maps out very carefully how the decision of a few intellectual centres of excellence to invest in mathematics – or rather, in mathematicians – was driven by wider political and social currents, including McCarthyism and antisemitism (Nash himself also lurched into antisemitism, and not only when deluded). Her behind-the-scenes account of how Nash almost didn’t get the 1994 Nobel Prize is one of the most gripping things I’ve ever read in a scientific biography. (Yeah, I know it’s not technically a Nobel Prize. Sue me.)
Some of Nash’s friends queried whether the biography was ethical, given that it was written without his consent or cooperation. In fact his attitude was studiedly neutral, and Nasar clearly had full cooperation from his colleagues and lovers, which he could presumably have deterred if he had really wanted to. He was apparently pleased enough with it in the end, and enjoyed the film too, though he commented (rightly enough) that it wasn’t really about him.
Fri, 16:05: On a happier note, here is my segment of the 2019 Hugo Awards ceremony in Dublin. https://t.co/DHAnIlWxkT (Voting for this year’s Hugos ends tonight – get on with it!)
Sat, 10:45: “Don’t Call Me Junior”: Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade (1989) https://t.co/VVodOXIDih Great piece, which however fails to mention Tom Stoppard.
I’m not going to do tediously long updates but it’s maybe useful just to keep track. Did not feel any worse for most of today, and felt up to making my own beans-on-toast dinner – but doing that really wiped me out. I put curry powder in the beans but was not able to really taste it, which is a telling symptom. Poor Anne has a cough too now and will get a test tomorrow. F had his this afternoon and seems fine, as does U.
I am a bit puzzled about how the tracking system actually works. My Coronalert app reset itself completely yesterday afternoon, which apparently happened last time too, when F got his diagnosis. It took with it the only record I had of my positive test apart from an ambiguously worded text message. Presumably there is some record somewhere in the system, but I don’t have it.
(It says to stay in isolation for 10 days if you had a positive diagnosis, not because, as I would have expected.)
Second frame of third section ("Holly's Story", by Holly Gaiman and Michael Zulli):
Another of the Gaiman rarities that I got in a Humble Bundle years ago, and am rapidly clearing from the electronic unread shelves. This has three and a half sections, all illustrated by Michael Zulli:
0) an introduction to the historiography of Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street;
1) the best bit, where Neil Gaiman and artist Dave McKean go looking for the original Temple Bar structure, then located in the grounds of Theobalds Park in Hertfordshire (since then, it has been moved back to London and reassembled near St Paul's Cathedral);
2) "Babycakes", a brief but effective polemic about animal testing;
3) "Holly's Story", text from a dream shared by Gaiman's then five-year-old daughter, which is about as coherent as you would expect (ie not very).
I don't think I'd have paid much money for a paper copy of this, and I don't think I paid much for the electronic copy either. It doesn't seem to be more widely available.
This was the shortest book on my shelves acquired in 2015. Next is (gulp) John L. Wright's Hugo finalist story, One Bright Star to Guide Them.
Thu, 12:28: RT @xhacka_olta: Same old fake news this time in the front page of a respected paper as The Times! And btw I am not a “he” but a “she” who…
Thu, 12:56: RT @AdamBienkov: Just the Culture Secretary there, trying to police what the BBC’s political editor should and shouldn’t be tweeting. https…
Thu, 16:05: RT @mercedeslackey: Before all else: trans women are women, and trans men are men. This is something I fiercely believe, and will always su…
Thu, 18:00: RT @Berlaymonster: There’s going round the bucket to kick it. Then there’s going endlessly around the bucket without a plan to kick it. T…
Thu, 18:20: RT @Mij_Europe: Last plug for my @FT piece on EU side of NIP debate. Interestingly, EU discussion on options for short-term retaliation h…
Thu, 18:35: Voters for the @BSFA Awards – please do consider this wonderful book for the Best Non-Fiction category. (More than half of it is non-fiction!) https://t.co/8qOb0JMQkF
Thu, 19:38: RT @StephenFarryMP: Serious discussions are happening with European Commission and European Parliament as to how to give NI a voice re fort…
Thu, 20:48: Novacon 50 Review Palace Hotel Buxton Derbyshire 12-14th November 2021 https://t.co/ipIfNhRNxP The bad as well as the good.
Fri, 09:22: RT @TomMcTague: Time to pay attention. It is now more than possible, even likely, that by 2025 Sinn Fein will lead the govt in Belfast *&*…
Fri, 10:45: RT @J2onyabike: THE LITTLE WHITE ENVELOPE: “It’s just a small, white envelope stuck among the branches of our Christmas tree. No name, no i…
It lost in four categories, two of them to that year’s Hugo and Nebula winner, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which also won four Oscars that year.